SpaceX and the state of Louisiana are close to finalizing a deal for the launch company to acquire about 130,000 acres along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico. There have been persistent rumors about such an agreement for months, but now The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate reports that Louisiana Gov. Jeff ..
Tag : space
One week ago, more than 200 miles above the Earth, a refrigerator-size satellite making its way toward an attempted rescue of NASA’s $500 million Swift gamma-ray observatory suddenly spun out of control. It didn’t look good. The spacecraft, named Link, was rotating on multiple axes, rendering it unable to maintain a reliable communications link with ..
A NASA website providing status updates on each DSN complex showed no activity at the Madrid site Friday afternoon, while antennas at the California and Australia locations were communicating with several NASA spacecraft, such as Voyager 2 and Juno, exploring interstellar space and Jupiter, respectively. No activity at the Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex on ..
The modern rise of commercial satellite imagery and free public resources such as Europe’s Copernicus satellite imagery has also enabled news agencies and open source intelligence researchers to provide additional transparency on conflicts around the world. But US satellite firms such as Planet Labs and Vantor have largely restricted imagery related to the ongoing Iran ..
The Space Force originally estimated the Lane 1 launch providers would compete for at least 30 task orders over a five-year period. Officials put a ceiling of $5.6 billion on the Lane 1 contract to cover these 30 missions. The Space Force capped the Lane 2 contract at $13.7 billion last year, a number officials ..
This view of the payload deck of the Vikram-1 rocket’s upper stage was captured moments after orbital insertion Saturday. The rocket deployed two small CubeSats and hosted several more payloads that remained attached to the upper stage. Credit: Skyroot Aerospace This view of the payload deck of the Vikram-1 rocket’s upper stage was captured moments ..
How many launches to build a data center megaconstellation? In a new feature, Ars looks into the technical challenges of building orbital data centers and assesses what it might take to build SpaceX’s proposed 1 million satellite megaconstellation. The key to all of this is not radiation or the need to cool data centers in ..
SpaceX called off a test flight of its powerful Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster as the countdown clock reached zero Thursday at the company’s spaceport in South Texas. The launch team at Starbase, Texas, just north of the US-Mexico border, aimed to launch the more than 400-foot-tall rocket at 5:45 pm local time (6:45 pm ..
Anil Menon, a NASA flight surgeon, felt crushed nine years ago as his hopes and aspirations collapsed around him. For the fourth time, he had diligently applied to become an astronaut at the US space agency, seeking to fulfill a lifelong dream. Although he made it to the final round, NASA had once again rejected ..
Editor’s note: This is the second of three feature articles Ars is publishing to explore the financial, technical, and competitive dimensions of orbital data centers. Although the idea of putting data centers into space has long been discussed on a theoretical basis, the technology has rapidly become a red-hot topic. This series attempts to ground-truth ..
