Lifeboat Foundation

The U.S. Space Development Agency has five satellites riding on SpaceX’s Transporter-2 mission scheduled to launch June 25.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Development Agency has five satellites riding on SpaceX’s Transporter-2 rideshare mission scheduled to launch June 25.

“There’s nothing in the space business that gets your blood pumping like the idea of a launch, especially if you’ve got multiple satellites,” a senior Space Development Agency (SDA) official told reporters June 22. “We’re really excited about what’s going to happen.”

Continue reading “Space Development Agency to launch five satellites aboard SpaceX rideshare” »

Fast transport of equipment and personnel using rockets similar to that of SpaceX.

Travelling through space will be far faster than atmospheric flight.

Continue reading “The Pentagon Just COPIED SpaceX and Elon Musk” »

Russia is planning to send a nuclear-powered spacecraft to the grand gas giant of the Solar System, Jupiter, in 2030.

Roscosmos, Russia’s federal space agency, announced the plan for the mammoth 50-month journey last week. The journey will take it on a mini tour of the Solar System, taking pit stops around the Moon and Venus, dropping off spacecraft along its way, before heading on to Jupiter.

More specifically, a “space tug” with a nuclear-based transport and energy module dubbed Zeus will head towards the Moon where a spacecraft will separate from it. It will then pass by Venus to perform a gravity assist maneuver and drop off another spacecraft, before venturing towards Jupiter and one of its satellites.

SYDNEY, June 22 (Reuters) — Starlink, the satellite internet unit of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, expects to be able to provide continuous global coverage by around September but will then need to seek regulatory approvals, its president Gwynne Shotwel said on Tuesday.

“We’ve successfully deployed 1800 or so satellites and once all those satellites reach their operational orbit, we will have continuous global coverage, so that should be like September timeframe,” she told a Macquarie Group (MQG.AX) technology conference via webcast.

“But then we have regulatory work to go into every country and get approved to provide telecoms services.”

The Export-Import Bank of the U.S. has arranged financing for the SpaceX launch of a Hispasat satellite, the first space deal it has done in six years.

WASHINGTON — The Export-Import Bank of the United States has arranged financing for the SpaceX launch of a Hispasat satellite, the first space deal the bank has done in six years.

Ex-Im announced June 21 that it approved $80.7 million in financing for a Falcon 9 launch of a Hispasat satellite, Amazonas Nexus, as well as launch and initial in-orbit insurance. The bank said the financing will be in the form of either a direct loan or a loan guarantee.

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The RavnX is the world’s biggest drone and the company behind it hopes this massive UAV will change the way satellites get to space.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory engineers have designed a new kind of laser-driven semiconductor switch that can theoretically achieve higher speeds at higher voltages than existing photoconductive devices. If the device could be realized, it could be miniaturized and incorporated into satellites to enable communication systems beyond 5G, potentially transferring more data at a faster rate and over longer distances, according to researchers. Credit: LLNL

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) engineers have designed a new kind of laser-driven semiconductor switch that can theoretically achieve higher speeds at higher voltages than existing photoconductive devices. The development of such a device could enable next-generation satellite communication systems capable of transferring more data at a faster rate, and over longer distances, according to the research team.

Scientists at LLNL and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) reported on the design and simulation of the novel photoconductive device in a paper published in the IEEE Journal of the Electron Devices Society. The device utilizes a high-powered laser to generate an electron charge cloud in the base material gallium nitride while under extreme electric fields.

A few days ago, millions of tons of super-heated gas shot off from the surface of the sun and hurtled 90 million miles toward Earth.

The eruption, called a coronal mass ejection, wasn’t particularly powerful on the space-weather scale, but when it hit the Earth’s magnetic field it triggered the strongest geomagnetic storm seen for years. There wasn’t much disruption this time—few people probably even knew it happened—but it served as a reminder the sun has woken from a yearslong slumber.

While invisible and harmless to anyone on the Earth’s surface, the geomagnetic waves unleashed by solar storms can cripple power grids, jam radio communications, bathe airline crews in dangerous levels of radiation and knock critical satellites off kilter. The sun began a new 11-year cycle last year and as it reaches its peak in 2025 the specter of powerful space weather creating havoc for humans grows, threatening chaos in a world that has become ever more reliant on technology since the last big storms hit 17 years ago. A recent study suggested hardening the grid could lead to $27 billion worth of benefits to the U.S. power industry.

It’s SpaceX’s 19th rocket launch (and landing) of the year.

All of this is great news for SpaceX, as the company has been relying heavily on its fleet of veteran rockets, with many Falcon 9 first stages having racked up five or more flights each.

Out of 19 missions so far this year, only one has featured a brand new Falcon 9; the rest were on flight-proven boosters.

Continue reading “SpaceX launches advanced GPS satellite for US Space Force, sticks rocket landing at sea” »