Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: space travel – Page 97

Welcome to Edition 5.36 of the Rocket Report! A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the space media were given a May 4 launch date for United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket. Alas, May the 4th, in 2023, wasn’t meant to be. In this week’s report, I explain why.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Electron to serve as a hypersonics test bed. Rocket Lab’s small booster will use essentially the same first and second stages for hypersonic test flights, but it will have a modified kick stage that will allow Electron to deploy payloads with a mass of up to 600 kg into trajectories five times greater than the speed of sound, Ars reports. The Army, Navy, and Air Force are all developing hypersonic missiles to provide a fast-moving, maneuverable capability for striking targets quickly from thousands of kilometers away. Among the research problems the military likely wants to test is managing the extreme heat that hypersonic missiles are exposed to by traveling at high speeds in the atmosphere for most of their flight.

Read more | >

iSpace, a private space company based in Japan, lost contact with its Hakuto-R spacecraft as it attempted to become the first private mission to land on the moon this morning. “We have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface,” iSpace CEO and founder Takeshi Hakamada said during a livestream. “Our engineers will continue to investigate the situation, and we will update you with further information when we finish the investigation.”

Hakuto-R launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket last December. It took a long but efficient route, looping way out past the moon before using several orbital adjustments and the gravity of the Earth, moon, and sun to enter lunar orbit last month. On April 13, after a few more final adjustments, it locked into a circular orbit 100 kilometers above the lunar surface.

Early in its landing attempt, the spacecraft dipped behind the moon making communications impossible. The team reestablished contact as it rounded the lunar horizon and began its descent. During the livestream, iSpace showed a simulation of the landing. The ride to the surface began with a deceleration burn and a series of attitude adjustments, bending the spacecraft’s trajectory toward the surface and flipping its orientation.

Read more | >

The launch pad could be repaired within two months, Musk said, though the FAA countered that “safety will dictate the timeline.”

The full Starship and Super Heavy launch system soared into the skies for the first time on April 20.

Since that time, SpaceX, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), and environmentalists have been hard at work trying to understand the aftermath of the first launch of the world’s most powerful rocket.

Read more | >

The Galaxy is approximately 13 billion years old, which makes one wonder — just how many civilizations could have come and gone across that ocean of time? Today, we try something a little bit different for this channel, and imagine when and how the first civilization could have lived. The story is a fiction, but it provides a narrative around which we can more viscerally experience the conditions of the early cosmos, and the fragility of life itself.

Written & presented by Prof David Kipping.

→ Support our research program: https://www.coolworldslab.com/support.
→ Get Stash here! https://teespring.com/stores/cool-worlds-store.

I’ll be speaking at RAND in Santa Monica, March 7th, on the future of space exploration, registration link here: https://www.rand.org/events/2022/03/7-8.html.

Continue reading “The First Civilization to Emerge in the Galaxy” | >

Humanity has had a sustained human presence in space for decades now. Traveling the world can be done in mere hours, and each of us carries within our pockets a supercomputer that is linked to all of human knowledge. Our fingertips are now more powerful than the kings or queens of centuries past. For all of our flaws and challenges, we live in the protopia today.

Not dystopia, not utopia, but something else.

Read more | >

Cryptocurrency mining is only accessible to those with access to highly discounted energy. The newly-developed low-energy chips will make it possible for everyone to participate in mining profitably.

If you were to ask anyone their feelings about cryptocurrency in 2020, chances are they would respond along the lines of “to the moon”(Crypto investors often use the phrase when they believe that certain cryptocurrencies will rise significantly in price). However, a year later, those sentiments seemed to have jaded. A sense of negativity — FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt), as crypto-sympathizers would call it — seemed rife.

Stanford University.

A primary reason behind the fading support of the public, besides bad actors flooding the market with ponzi-like schemes and scams, seemed to be massive numbers of energy consumption floated by crypto and blockchain critics. The biggest question was “How is the world supposed to go greener and rely on these energy-hogging, power-hungry technologies?”

Continue reading “Stanford team shines light on cryptocurrency, designs photonic circuits to save energy” | >

A Japanese startup attempting the first private landing on the Moon said Wednesday it had lost communication with its spacecraft and assumed the lunar mission had failed.

Ispace said that it could not establish communication with the unmanned Hakuto-R after its expected landing time, a frustrating end to a mission that began with a launch from the United States over four months ago.

“We have not confirmed communication with the lander,” a company official told reporters about 25 minutes after the expected landing.

Read more | >

Japan’s ispace could become the world’s first private company to perform a successful lunar landing.

Japan’s Hakuto-R lander, developed by private space firm ispace, will soon attempt a Moon landing. Last month, ispace announced that Hakuto-R successfully performed a lunar insertion maneuver. That was a crucial step ahead of its historic lunar landing attempt.

Now, the time is near. A private space company could land a spacecraft on the Moon for the very first time.

Continue reading “Japanese private space company to attempt historic Moon landing today” | >