This week at Starbase Ship 25 goes through another round of cryo testing, work continues on Booster 11, Ship 29 and the new mega bay, and crews begin working on new pilings for the water deluge system, while over at Cape Canaveral SpaceX continues their rapid pace of launch and recovery operations.
Kathy Lueders, the most recent top human spaceflight official at NASA, has joined Elon Musk’s SpaceX after retiring from the agency a couple of weeks ago, CNBC has learned.
Lueders’ role will be general manager, and she will work out of the company’s “Starbase” facility in Texas, reporting directly to SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell, people familiar with the matter told CNBC.
It’s a key hire for SpaceX as the company aims to make its massive Starship rocket safe to fly people in the coming years. Lueders, a respected expert in the sector, is already familiar with the company’s human spaceflight work to date.
A commercial space station called Orbital Reef may be deployed this decade, one of many planned for low-Earth orbit.
In Part 1 looking at LEO space station deployment we focus on two front runners: the Axiom Space Station and Blue Origin’s Orbital Reef.
Space startup Vast has announced that it intends to launch what it calls the world’s first commercial space station, Haven-1, sometime after August 2025 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as the first element of a 100-m (330 ft) rotating station.
With its increasing emphasis on lunar and deep-space missions, NASA has decided to leave low-Earth orbit to private companies when it comes to human spaceflight. The idea is that when the International Space Station (ISS) is retired in 2030, the space agency will buy time on some of the commercial stations currently on the drawing board.
A new contender in this is Vast, which says it is developing a self-contained habitat module with a large viewing port that can fit in the payload section of a Falcon 9. It’s capable of docking with a SpaceX Dragon and can accommodate up to four people aboard for up to 30 days. Also planned is a much larger module that can fit inside a SpaceX Starship.
Rumor has it that NBC Universal executive Linda Yaccarino is lined up to take the role.
Elon Musk is finally ready to let go of the CEO role at Twitter as he announced the appointment of a new CEO at the company. Musk will take on the role of the CTO and oversee product, software, and sysops, he said in a tweet.
Musk, who is also the CEO of other companies such as Tesla and SpaceX, has been under pressure to dedicate more time to these companies. The Tesla stock price dropped significantly after Musk took over Twitter in a $44 billion purchase last year.
A crucial radar antenna on a European spacecraft bound for Jupiter is no longer jammed.
Flight controllers in Germany freed the 52-foot (16-meter) antenna Friday after nearly a month of effort.
The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, nicknamed Juice, blasted off in April on a decade-long voyage. Soon after launch, a tiny pin refused to budge and prevented the antenna from fully opening.
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Companies are sending their products into orbit and plastering their logos on spacecraft. Will space ads dull our sense of wonder about the universe?
Axiom Space’s second private crewed mission to the International Space Station is now scheduled to launch in just ten days, with the four-person crew preparing to conduct more than 20 scientific experiments while in space.
The Ax-2 mission will now launch no earlier than 5:37 p.m. EDT on May 21 from SpaceX’s Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The crew will travel to the station onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule, where they’ll remain for a roughly 10-day stint. This will mark the second fully private crew to visit the ISS; the first mission, also operated by Axiom Space, took place in April 2022.
The crew includes Peggy Whitson, the mission commander and Axiom’s director of human spaceflight; John Shoffner, the pilot; Ali Alqarni, mission specialist; and Rayyanah Barnawi, also a mission specialist. Alqarni and Barnawi are both members of Saudi Arabia’s first astronaut class and will be the first people from that country to visit the ISS. Shoffner, an Axiom investor, is the only paying customer on the crew.
Proponents of Direct Fusion Drive (DFD) propulsion system say the drive could send us to Saturn’s moon, Titan, in just 2 years. Here’s how it works.
Haven-1 is scheduled to reach low-Earth orbit aboard a Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than August 2025, and will initially act as an independent crewed station, before connecting to a larger Vast base, currently in development. If all goes well, the Vast-1 mission will then send a four-person crew via SpaceX Dragon to dock with Haven-1 for up to 30 days.
While the International Space Station has at least another seven years of life, plans for Haven-1 represent “the first steps in Vast’s long-term vision of launching much larger, artificial gravity space stations in Earth orbit and beyond,” says Vast CEO Jed McCaleb.
Eventually, Vast plans to develop a 328-foot-long multi-module spinning artificial gravity space station, delivered by SpaceX’s Starship transportation system.
