Now that a solar-powered plane has successfully made its way around the globe, Swiss engineering firm SolarStratos wants to take things to the next level. Sometime in the next couple years, the company wants to use solar power to take you to the edge of space.
Surrounded by a crowd eager to penetrate the stratosphere, Raphael Domjan, SolarStratos pilot and creator of solar powered boat PlanetSolar, unveiled the plane that’s expected to have the environmental footprint of an electric car.
“Our goal is to demonstrate that current technology offers us the possibility to achieve above and beyond what fossil fuels offer,” Domjan said in a press release. “Electric and solar vehicles are amongst the major challenges of the 21st century.”
The SolarStratos team expects the commercial, two-seater plane to hit the skies in 2018 without the use of “large quantities of energy or helium” it’d usually take to reach space. “Our aircraft can fly at an altitude of 25,000 meters,” Donjam added, “open[ing] the door to the possibility of electric and solar commercial aviation, close to space.”
Until it’s journey, the SolarStratos will continue to live in its hangar at the Payerne airport Aeropole site in Switzerland. Over the past few months, the team in Switzerland has been readying the plane, which has a length of 8.5 meters and a wingspan of 24.9 meters. It’s faced a number of tests during development, including stress, heat, and electronics run-throughs.
The initial mission piloted by Domjan will be five hours in length, with two hours to ascend into space, fifteen minutes of enjoying the stars, and three hours to get back. He’ll use an astronaut’s pressurized suit while traveling, as the aircraft is not pressurized — that’d make it too heavy. Domjan’s 2018 journey will be a first for solar powered aircrafts.
With today’s unveiling of the SolarStratos itself, Domjan and his crew are one step closer toward touching the stars.
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.