J.J. Abrams has taken moviegoers to a galaxy far, far away as the director of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but one of his upcoming projects focuses on a journey only as far as the moon. The filmmaker serves as executive producer on Google’s upcoming series of digital documentaries, Moon Shot, which will premiere this month. The series is set to debut on Google Play on March 15 and on YouTube on March 17, according to a post on the Google blog.
Moon Shot centers on the Google Lunar XPRIZE (GLXP), a competition that launched in 2007 and has pitted 16 private teams against one another in a race to the moon. On top of massive bragging rights, there’s $30 million at stake. The teams have to design and build a rover that can travel to the moon, land, drive 500 meters across the lunar surface, and then send HD video and photos back to Earth. They have until the end of 2017 to accomplish this gigantic feat.
Over the course of nine digital documentaries, the series will follow the GLXP teams. The competitors are diverse, ranging from a father-son team based in Vancouver to Silicon Valley tech experts to Indian IT specialists. They will discuss the obstacles they face, what they’ve given up for this competition, the importance of the project, and more.
“It’s not really just going to the moon,” says one man during the documentary series’ trailer. “Going to the moon is symbolic. It is about showing what is possible.”
The series is directed by Academy Award nominated director Orlando von Einsiedel (Virunga) and also comes from Google, Epic Digital, and Abrams’ production company, Bad Robot.
Moon Shot will be available for free when it premieres on Google Play on March 15 and YouTube on March 17.
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.