Folks who don’t follow the new space race may be surprised to find that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is giving Elon Musk a run for his money on a couple of fronts. In fact, Bezos’s Blue Origin beat SpaceX by a few weeks when it launched and landed a reusable rocket in November. But, where SpaceX tends to be relatively communicative and transparent about its developments, Blue Origin has – until now – stayed pretty damn secretive about its launches.
Thankfully, that’s all about to change. On Sunday, Blue Origin will air its rocket launch on a live webcast for the first time. Bezos tweeted the announcement Monday, noting that the launch will be Blue Origin’s fourth since its historic landing last year.
In the future, Bezos wants to transport tourists into space, strapped into a crew capsule at the top of Blue Origin’s reusable rockets. Though the rocket itself is designed to return to Earth and land vertically, the crew capsule is designed to decouple and float carefully back to land under the aid of three parachutes.
Sunday’s launch will test what happens when the crew capsule decouples but two of it’s parachutes fail. “Flight to test one-chute-out failure scenario & push envelope on booster maneuvers,” Bezos tweeted in a follow-up.
Meanwhile, SpaceX’s successful landing streak crashed to an end yesterday when the Falcon 9 first stage rocket failed to land safely on the “Of Course I Still Love You” landing ship. There was a bit of chaos as the rock came in for an intense landing, shook the ship and cut the cameras out. When the smoke cleared, SpaceX reported that the rocket was lost. Despite the failed landing, the company did deliver its payload of two satellites into geostationary transfer orbit.
Details about Blue Origin’s launch tomorrow are scarce but you can follow and watch the event at blueorigin.com.
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.