Blasting people up into space is a dangerous endeavor, but early Wednesday morning, SpaceX took a big step toward making it safer. Just after 9am ET, at SpaceX’s Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) in Cape Canaveral, the company successfully completed the first test of its Pad Abort system — an emergency bailout system designed to get astronauts out of harm’s way in the event of a launch accident.
In a worst-case scenario — like, say, a booster failure — the Pad Abort system would work like a jet pilot’s ejection seat, allowing the rocket’s passengers to quickly propel themselves up and away from danger in a small pod. The goal is to avoid tragedies like the 1986 Challenger explosion.
SpaceX’s launch lasted about 90 seconds. The Dragon 2 capsule fired its eight SuperDraco engines for about six seconds, boosting the spacecraft about a mile above the surface before it fell back to Earth on a set of three large parachutes. The capsule was unmanned during that test, but SpaceX has plans to use it for manned missions in the future.
But it’s not ready for primetime quite yet. There’s still a lot of testing that needs to be done before SpaceX starts launching actual astronauts into orbit in 2017. The company has scheduled a second test flight for a yet-to-be-announced date later this year — and it’ll be much tougher than this first one. In the next trial, the spacecraft will have to successfully separate from a Falcon 9 rocket while in flight, which is a slightly more complicated task than Wednesday’s ground launch.
Check out the video above to see the full launch and landing. We highly recommend skipping forward a bit though — the good stuff doesn’t start until about 15:50.
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.