Russia’s space agency isn’t the only team having some trouble these days — just ask Amazon CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos about the difficulties of getting into space.
An unmanned spacecraft financed by Bezos’ spaceflight company Blue Origin crashed last week during a test flight in Texas, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The rocket experienced problems shortly after reaching an altitude of 45,000 feet and a speed of 1.2 times the speed of sound.
Bezos posted a statement about the crash on the company’s website:
Three months ago, we successfully flew our second test vehicle in a short hop mission, and then last week we lost the vehicle during a developmental test at Mach 1.2 and an altitude of 45,000 feet. A flight instability drove an angle of attack that triggered our range safety system to terminate thrust on the vehicle. Not the outcome any of us wanted, but we’re signed up for this to be hard, and the Blue Origin team is doing an outstanding job. We’re already working on our next development vehicle.
Blue Origin is one of seven private-sector companies receiving funding from NASA as part of the U.S. space agency’s Flight Opportunities Program, which aims to develop new methods of sending research payloads into space on manned and unmanned missions.
The suborbital spacecraft currently being developed by Blue Origin is called New Shepard (pictured in concept designs above), and is intended to take off and land vertically, and carry people to the edge of space. The company first got a test vehicle off the ground in 2006, and reportedly conducted a successful “short hop” earlier this year.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.