For more than 60 years, nearly every large rocket used some combination of the same liquid and solid propellants. Refined kerosene was favored for its easy handling and non-toxicity, hydrazine for its storability and simplicity, hydrogen for its efficiency, and solid fuels for their long shelf life and rapid launch capability. About 15 years ago, ..
Tag : space
A little more than a month ago, SpaceX founder Elon Musk put down a marker of his intent to saturate low-Earth orbit with up to 1 million satellites. Its purpose? Provide always-on data center services around the planet. Now, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos has done something similar with a filing to the ..
Artemis II rocket to roll back out to the pad. Engineers are targeting 8 pm EDT on Thursday, March 19, to start rolling the Artemis II SLS (Space Launch System) rocket and Orion spacecraft to Launch Pad 39B at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the US space agency said. NASA’s crawler-transporter 2 will ..
There was no commercial application for the P-51. The P-51 was there to be a fighter escort and sweep asset for air superiority missions. As operational concepts mature for space superiority, those operational concepts will drive a performance envelope for warfare that will be mutually exclusive of commercial applications. Not in all cases. There are ..
It may sound fanciful, but a Los Angeles-based company says it has conceived of a plan to fly out to a smallish, near-Earth asteroid, throw a large bag around it, and bring the body back to a “safe” gathering point near our planet. The company, TransAstra, said Wednesday that an unnamed customer has agreed to ..
Robert Goddard, a Massachusetts-born physicist, launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket on this date 100 years ago. It was not an overly impressive flight. The rocket, fueled by gasoline and liquid oxygen, rose just 41 feet into the air, and the flight lasted 2.5 seconds before it struck ice and snow. Nevertheless, this rocket, named ..
NASA assessed 1-in-276 odds for loss of crew on the first flight of astronauts aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon in 2020. For Boeing’s Starliner in 2024, the probability was 1 in 295. You wouldn’t be wrong to question those numbers given the proven performance of Dragon and Starliner. This chart from NASA’s Office of Safety and ..
Welcome to Edition 8.33 of the Rocket Report! NASA officials seem optimistic about launching the Artemis II mission next month, so confident that they will forgo another fueling test on the Space Launch System rocket to check the integrity of fickle seals in a liquid hydrogen loading line. The rocket will return to the launch ..
In addition to parrying with SpaceX over its proposed, vastly larger orbital data center constellation, Amazon is seeking some regulatory relief of its own. Most pressing for Amazon is a deadline to deploy half of its Amazon Leo constellation, intended to ultimately comprise 3,236 satellites, by July 30. The company will not meet this deadline, ..
No one on the ground has ever been injured by falling space junk, but there are examples of space debris causing property damage. NASA’s two Van Allen Probes launched into elliptical orbits ranging from a few hundred miles above Earth up to an apogee, or high point, of nearly 20,000 miles. The orbits are inclined ..
