Category: Space

After several failed attempts over the last year or so, SpaceX has successfully landed the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on an at-sea drone ship.

Falcon 9 first stage on our droneship in the Atlantic after propelling the Dragon spacecraft to the @Space_Station pic.twitter.com/Cnnej7zEnt

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 8, 2016

While this isn’t the first time the company has landed a spent rocket stage, doing it at sea (as opposed to at Cape Canaveral in Florida) should work in SpaceX’s favor in their quest to lessen the cost of future flights by reusing these vehicles. Landing at sea also means the company should be able to recover rockets from a wider range of mission types and launch locations.

SpaceX isn’t the only company racing to build a reusable rocket. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin just flew the same rocket for the third time. That is an impressive feat, but it’s important to remember that Blue Origin’s flights are suborbital And squarely within the confines of R&D. SpaceX’s primary objective today was to fly supplies to the International Space Station; the test landing was secondary to the paying work of taking equipment and food to low-Earth orbit.

Differences aside, both companies are well on their way to reusable rockets, which will allow for cheaper and safer travel to space. The future is here, and it’s on the back of rockets that can be used, refurbished and launched again.

On this week’s episode of the best space podcast on Relay FM:

This fortnight, Jason and Stephen travel the length of the Solar System to catch up on the news.

Get it while the MP3 is still hot.

Right, American astronaut Scott Kelly is on his way back to Earth after 340 days on the International Space Station. NASA’s put together a list of 10 things you should know about the mission. It’s one hell of an achievement.

Dennis Overbye:

A team of physicists who can now count themselves as astronomers announced on Thursday that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prophecy of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

That faint rising tone, physicists say, is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago. And it is a ringing (pun intended) confirmation of the nature of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits from which not even light can escape, which were the most foreboding (and unwelcome) part of his theory.

Don’t miss the video explaining how this all works.

Jason Snell, writing for Yahoo Tech:

While the give and take between NASA and Congress is sure to go on — with the election of a new president later this year as a complicating factor — the fact is that NASA has a $19 billion budget for 2016 and a $19 billion budget proposed for 2017. Here’s some of what the agency is planning on doing with that money.

A heart-breaking oral history of the Challenger disaster.

Today, on the 30th anniversary of the Challenger disaster, NASA is remembering its fallen astronauts.

Sadly, 1986 doesn’t mark the only tragedy in the agency’s history. On January 27, 1967 the crew of Apollo 1 was killed during a test on the launchpad. A year earlier, on February 28, 1966 two Gemini astronauts were killed in a flight in St. Louis, Missouri.

On February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry, killing all seven crew members.

There’s a saying that “space is hard.” It gets thrown around when things like unmanned rockets explode. The phrase, however, lacks the gravitas that should be used on days like today. America, Russia and Israel have lost men and women during missions and training exercises. It’s dangerous, envelope-pushing work, and in this age of renewed progress, it’s something that we should not forget.

Kimm Fesenmaier, writing for the California Institute of Technology:

Caltech researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. The object, which the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles). In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the sun.

The researchers, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, discovered the planet’s existence through mathematical modeling and computer simulations but have not yet observed the object directly.

This is obviously very exciting news. Batygin and Brown worked for over a year, trying to understand why certain objects in the far outer solar system are positioned where they are. The answer? A giant, yet-to-be-seen planet. Amazing stuff.

In its return to flight mission after losing a vehicle in June, Elon Musk’s SpaceX not only launched 11 satellites into orbit, but successfully landed the stage one of its Falcon 9 rocket safely at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

This is a big deal because the majority of the cost of flying a mission to space is associated with the rocket itself. SpaceX has commented that each Falcon 9 vehicle costs around $16 million to manufacture, but the fuel costs just $200,000 or so. Of course, there’s a cost to rehabbing the rocket and launching, but having a vehicle that can be reused should bring the cost down for future missions significantly. This particular rocket probably won’t fly again, but it’s still an exciting step.

This should be fun to watch:

Assuming SpaceX’s plans come to fruition, a Falcon 9 flight from Cape Canaveral on Sunday will end with a vertical rocket-assisted landing at an abandoned Cold War-era launch facility a few miles away.

SpaceX confirmed the rocket’s first stage, a slender cylindrical kerosene-fed rocket body standing 156 feet tall, will aim for a controlled touchdown at a landing pad the company rented from the U.S. Air Force less than six miles south of the Falcon 9’s Complex 40 launch pad.

Update: The launch is now scheduled for Monday, December 21.

This amount is not only more than what the space agency got last year, but more than the Obama administration asked for. This is big news, as Loren Grush explains:

With the budget, NASA scores a big win for its commercial crew program — the initiative that tasks private companies with building and operating spacecraft to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The legislation provides $1.24 billion for commercial crew, the same amount requested by the Obama administration. That makes this the first time that Congress has matched the administration’s requests for the program.

With these funds, it’s possible that the first launches under the commercial crew program could actually take place in 2017 as intended.

The commercial crew program will take astronauts to the low-Earth orbit and the International Space Station in vehicles built and launched by companies like Space X.

The budget will also keep the Space Launch System (SLS) funded. SLS is the vehicle NASA is building to take astronauts into deep space and Mars.

The spending bill will be voted on Friday.

I’ll be filling out this paperwork for an upcoming epsiode of Liftoff.