The purchase of land by SpaceX in the Brownsville, Texas area might have revealed the name the company is considering giving to its spaceport there.
It appears they have combined the various plots of land that they have purchased and named that development “Mars Crossing.”
The competition heats up: The next Falcon 9/Dragon launch to ISS will include the first test of legs on the rocket’s first stage, as well as an attempt to complete a soft touchdown on water of that first stage.
The article is chock full of interesting details about SpaceX’s effort to make the first stage of the Falcon 9 reusable.
Posted from Garden City, New York.
A ruling by “a fatwa committee” in the United Arab Emirates now forbids Muslims from going on a one way mission to Mars.
“Such a one-way journey poses a real risk to life, and that can never be justified in Islam,” the committee said. “There is a possibility that an individual who travels to planet Mars may not be able to remain alive there, and is more vulnerable to death.” Whoever opts for this “hazardous trip”, the committee said, is likely to perish for no “righteous reason”, and thus will be liable to a “punishment similar to that of suicide in the Hereafter”.
Suicide and martyrdom in the name of Islam, however, is perfectly all right.
The competition heats up: Russia on track to test launch its new Angara rocket before June.
A full-scale mockup of the rocket was rolled out to a launch pad earlier this week to check ground support systems. The Angara is planned to launch from both Plesetsk and the new Vostochny space center in Russia’s Far East that is being built to reduce reliance on the Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan. The modular launcher will have a variety of configurations to cover a wide range of payload weights, from two to 24.5 metric tons. They are currently served by several different rockets, including the Proton, Russia’s largest booster.
That first test launch will be a revealing event, as this is the first completely new Russian rocket in almost a half century. The last time they built a new rocket stage, the Briz-M upper stage for the Proton rocket, they had several significant failures before they worked out all the kinks.
And in a related story, Russia’s deputy prime minister made it clear on Wednesday that his country’s spacecraft manufacturers will face stiffer penalties for any failure to meet production deadlines.
An Audit Chamber report in July last year concluded that the country’s space industry was ineffective and plagued by poor management and misuse of funds. It said Russia had only launched 47 percent of the required number of satellites between 2010 and 2012.
Both stories are revealing by their emphasis on keeping Russia commercially competitive. Note however that Russia recently consolidated its entire space industry into a single entity run by the government. Though I doubt it, we shall find out if this Soviet-style strategy can compete with American-style competition and private enterprise.
The competition heats up: More evidence that Brownsville, Texas, has won the competition to become the location of SpaceX’s private commercial spaceport.
The Google Lunar X-Prize has chosen 5 finalists of the 18 teams remaining in the private competition to land a rover on the Moon by 2015.
Astrobotic, Moon Express and Team Indus are finalists for prizes of $1 million per team for achievement in hardware and software systems to enable a soft landing on the Moon. Astrobotic, Moon Express, Hakuto and Part-Time Scientists are finalists for prizes of $500,000 per team related to the mobility systems that allow a team’s lunar craft to travel 500 meters across the lunar surface after landing. Astrobotic, Moon Express, Part-Time Scientists and Team Indus are finalists for prizes of $250,000 per team for technology designed to produce high-quality images and video on the Moon.
The first team to land before the end of 2015 will win $20 million.
Posted from Tucson International Airport.
Is Yutu alive or dead? Only the Chinese know for sure.
The competition heats up: Kate Upton and Sports Illustrated have completed a swimsuit photo shoot on the vomit comet.
More here, with pictures.
Cygnus has departed ISS after successfully bring its cargo to the station.
The competition heats up: Is Google planning to launch a constellation of 1600 satellites?
The competition heats up: Russia’s Proton rocket successfully put a commercial Turkish communications satellite into orbit on Saturday.
The competition heats up: India unveils its first test manned capsule.
There was an earlier story about this that was very vague. This one is only somewhat more informative (the test flight could happen as early as May), but it also includes a picture of the capsule, which is essentially only the structural hull.
