SpaceX’s second, unpiloted Starship test flight of the year ended in yet another fiery inferno on November 18. This time, the sudden end arrived roughly 8 minutes into its 90-minute scheduled mission. But although its Super Heavy first stage booster suffered a fatal “rapid unscheduled disassembly” in the Caribbean, the world’s most powerful rocket almost doubled its previous lifespan and passed multiple other crucial milestones.

Starship launched once again from its test site near Boca Chica, Texas, at 8:03am ET on Saturday, with all 39 of the Super Heavy booster’s Raptor engines remaining lit during the mission—a first for the spacecraft intended to eventually deliver humans to Mars. At two minutes and 41 seconds following liftoff, Starship’s hot-staging sequence—in which upper stage engines ignite and separate from the booster—also proceeded successfully, clearing yet another hurdle for SpaceX engineers. The reusable booster then performed its flip maneuver en route towards an intended safe return back to Earth, but exploded only a few seconds later. The booster’s fate wasn’t a huge surprise, however, as SpaceX mission control operators already suspected such a dramatic event could occur due to the immense “load on top of the booster.”

Meanwhile, the Starship upper stage continued to soar for another few minutes to roughly 92 miles above the Earth’s surface—well above the Kármán Line, an internationally recognized demarcation between the planet’s atmosphere and outer space. Moments before its scheduled Second Engine Cut Off, or SECO, the upper stage met its own explosive demise. Space X representatives cited a delay in Starship’s automated flight termination system, but do not yet know the exact cause for its malfunction. If successful, Starship would have circumnavigated Earth before performing a hard landing near Hawaii.

The results of April’s Starship test received considerable criticism from both Boca Chica locals and the Federal Aviation Administration for surrounding environmental damage sustained during launch. Starship’s Raptor engines burn approximately 40,000 pounds of fuel per second to reach 17 million pounds of thrust. Nearby Texan residents described the blowback as resembling a “mini earthquake” at the time, with at least one business owner’s store window shattering. The April 20 test flight blasted a 25-feet deep crater, ejecting clouds of dirt, dust, and debris into the air while smashing a bowling ball-sized fragment into a nearby NASA Spaceflight van. Much of the area near Starship’s launch site includes protected ecosystems, as well as land considered sacred by local Indigenous communities. The FAA soon issued 63 corrective actions needed before SpaceX could legally attempt another Starship test.

[Related: SpaceX’s Starship launch caused a ‘mini earthquake’ and left a giant mess.]

Unlike SpaceX’s outing, Starship’s upgraded launch mount reportedly better mitigated the resulting blowback—at least according to Elon Musk’s company assessment. The FAA, meanwhile, wasted no time in issuing its own statement on Saturday’s event.

“A mishap occurred during the [SpaceX] Starship OFT-2 launch from Boca Chica, Texas, on Saturday, Nov. 18,” the administration posted to X over the weekend. Although no injuries or public property damage was reported this time, the FAA promised to oversee the “SpaceX-led mishap investigation” to ensure the company will comply with “regulatory requirements.”

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On April 20, the most powerful rocket ever flown stood on a launch pad in Boca Chica, Texas, its stainless steel skin gleaming in the sun. Moments later, rocket and launch pad would become fiery debris. It was the first, disastrous orbital test launch of the SpaceX Starship.

Within seconds of launching, the rocket’s ferocious thrust shattered the concrete pad at SpaceX’s Texas Starbase facility, sending debris flying as far as Port Isabel, a city six miles away. The rocket caught fire. Less than four minutes after launch, it began to tumble across the sky, and then it exploded.

The Federal Aviation Administration grounded Starship, pending an investigation into the explosion, but the rocket may soon fly again. On September 8, the FAA closed its inquiry, citing 63 corrective actions SpaceX would need to take before its second attempt to send Starship to orbit. 

“The FAA has approval authority on all commercial launches, and so they are the ones who grant companies launch licenses,” says Wendy Whitman Cobb, a space policy expert and instructor at the US Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. “Any time something blows up, they want to know why. Because they want to make sure that it’s safe not only to go up, but that it’s not going to harm anybody on the ground.”

SpaceX will have to demonstrate to the FAA that the company has successfully completed those 63 corrective actions and then apply for a modified launch license. “Once that is granted, they theoretically can go up whenever they want,” Whitman Cobb says. Neither FAA nor SpaceX have publicly said what those fixes are. But the actions presumably address the failures of the April launch.

There’s a lot riding on Starship’s success. It’s key to expanding SpaceX’s launch and Starlink satellite businesses. NASA plans to return humans to the moon in 2025 with a modified Starship as the lunar landing vehicle on the Artemis III mission. If SpaceX can fix the problems—and Whitman Cobb and other experts believe that’s likely—the company may put its rocket program and NASA’s moon program back on track. This investigation might also provide insights into launch pad construction that could one day help astronauts traveling to and from the moon. 

Failures to launch

Starship, despite not yet reaching orbit, holds the title for most powerful rocket ever launched—a superlative it took from the Soviet N1 rocket. Meant to power Soviet cosmonauts to the moon, the N1 first stage produced 10.2 million pounds of thrust. Starship has two stages in its “stack;” the first stage alone, the Super Heavy Booster, produces 16.7 million pounds of thrust. 

That record-breaking power is why it was bizarre that SpaceX chose to launch Starship from a concrete launch pad without features such as flame trenches. Those grooves are designed to divert a rocket’s plume away from the pad and the vehicle itself. SpaceX could have also used a water deluge system to flood the pad to help mitigate the rocket engines’ heat and acoustic shockwaves. 

[Related: SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launches have been a slow burn—for an interesting reason]

“You would never normally launch a rocket with that much thrust without having a better designed active mitigation of the plume in the launch environment. Because you worry about the heat and the dynamic forces of the plume breaking materials and creating ejecta,” says University of Central Florida physicist Philip Metzger. ”If the ejecta had hit the launch vehicle in a way that caused the rocket to explode while it was still near the tower, it could have destroyed a lot of infrastructure that would have taken a very long time to rebuild.”

As it was, the April launch blew the launch pad apart and dug a crater “about as deep as a house,” he says. 

Lessons for the moon

Metzger has been studying the Starship launch and is currently writing a paper about the results. He wants to understand what went wrong—because the way things failed is important for the design of future rockets and landing pads on the moon or other celestial bodies. 

Most concepts for a lunar landing pad simply use flat concrete. “There’s no flame diverter, no flame trench, no water,” Metzger says. “I decided just because of the pure fun of solving the physics, and also because of what we might learn about lunar landing pads, that I was going to take this seriously.”

What he found was that chunks of concrete from the Boca Chica pad were flung away at more than 200 miles per hour. A cloud of hot water vapor and carbon dioxide, created by Starship’s methane- and liquid oxygen-burning Raptor engines, heaved sand skyward and carried it to Port Isobel. Metgzer realized the process must have been similar to the way pressure builds in a volcano before an eruption. 

“The only explanation we could come up with was that the landing pad cracked and the high pressure of the thrust drove gas through the cracks,” he says. This increased pressure beneath the pad until it erupted. Lunar landing pads must be designed to avoid this problem, he says, by adding vents for gases to escape or by constructing stronger pads that resist fracture. 

[Related: DOJ is suing SpaceX for years of workplace discrimination]

That could be difficult on the moon, where heavy construction will be hindered by a lack of resources, machinery, and an atmosphere. But on Earth, SpaceX may have a solution—a steel plate that is actively cooled with water to keep it from melting during a rocket launch. 

”That’s really a great idea,” Metzger says. “If their engineers did it correctly, it should be a complete solution to the problem.”

As for keeping the next Starship from blowing up in the sky, SpaceX says it found that leaked fuel had ignited inside the Super Heavy Booster. The resulting fires cut the booster off from the computer guiding its flight, which caused the rocket to tumble and then explode, according to an update on its website. The company has “significantly expanded Super Heavy’s pre-existing fire suppression system in order to mitigate against future engine bay fires,” the company says. 

Next moves

While neither the FAA nor SpaceX have said where the two are in the process, SpaceX Founder Elon Musk has suggested that his company has completed the corrective tasks, tweeting on September 5, before the FAA announcement, that ”Starship is ready to launch, awaiting FAA license approval.”

If the ball is truly in the FAA’s court and the regulator is simply reviewing the work SpaceX has done, “I don’t think it will take more than a few weeks,” Whitman Cobbs says. “That would be my best guess.” If that’s the case, she notes, then SpaceX and the FAA have moved with exceptional speed to get Starship ready for another launch attempt. Whitman Cobb contrasted SpaceX with its competitor Blue Origin, whose New Shepard rocket remains grounded more than a year after a failed launch on September 12, 2022. Blue Origin is “still in the FAA investigation mode, and have not been able to launch,” she says. “They’ve yet to apply for a modified launch license.”

Rapidly reworking Starship and its launch pad, though, doesn’t guarantee the next launch attempt will go flawlessly. But Whitman Cobb notes that SpaceX has been more willing than NASA or other rocket makers to test new spacecraft, watch them fail, and rapidly make changes. The eighth Starship prototype was destroyed in a fiery belly flop during a high-altitude test in December 2020, for instance, but the company pressed on. 

“Given the ability of SpaceX to succeed and prove its critics wrong in the past few years, I have no evidence to believe they wouldn’t be able to make this work,” she says. 

Metzger also notes that the person in charge of getting Starship ready to fly again is William Gerstenmaier, who, before joining SpaceX in 2020, was the former associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations at NASA. “Gerstenmaier is a legend in the space community,” Metzger says. ”It’s in really good hands. I don’t know if there’s anybody better in the world than Bill Gerstenmaier to manage that sort of a project.”

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The US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against SpaceX on Thursday for allegedly refusing to consider hiring asylum seekers and refugees. According to a DOJ statement, Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite company “routinely discouraged” applicants because of their citizenship status from at least September 2018 to May 2022, thus violating the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

The DOJ argues SpaceX, in multiple job postings and public statements, “wrongly claimed” that federal “export control law” regulations forced the company to only hire US citizens and green card holders. The allegedly willful misinterpretation of the law was repeatedly and publicly echoed by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. In June 2020, for example, Musk posted to X (formerly Twitter) that “U.S. law requires at least a green card to be hired at SpaceX, as rockets are advanced weapons technology.”

But as the DOJ’s announcement notes, the jobs in question weren’t only advanced engineering and tech roles, but a “variety of other positions, including welders, cooks, crane operators, baristas, software engineers, marketing professionals, and more.” According to the DOJ, SpaceX falsely claimed to be legally prohibited from hiring refugees in a total of 14 job postings, public announcements, and other online recruiting communications.

According to the INA, employers cannot discriminate against hiring asylees or refugees unless a specific executive order, government contract, law, or other federal regulation prevents them. “In this instance no [such situation] required or permitted SpaceX to engage in the widespread discrimination,” argues DOJ representatives.

[Related: SpaceX’s Starship launch caused a ‘mini earthquake’ and left a giant mess.]

Musk, however, has already doubled down on his and fellow employees’ previous assertions via an August 24 post to X, claiming SpaceX was “told repeatedly” that hiring non-permanent US residents would violate international arms trafficking laws. “This is yet another case of weaponization of the DOJ for political purposes,” added Musk, who purchased the social media platform formerly known as Twitter in October 2022. Lawyers like Rebecca Bernhard, a partner at Dorsey & Whitney specializing in employment-related issues involving work visas and immigration challenges, doubt the validity of Musk’s defense.

“While it is lawful for an employer to refuse to provide employer-sponsorship to a potential employee (for example, by not sponsoring the individual for an H-1B), it is not lawful to require that the employee be a US citizen,” she explains via email. Bernhard argues that while, “There are other classes of immigrants who have work authorization in the US and do not need employer sponsorship… To require someone be a US citizen would discriminate against these individuals.”

One potential exception, however, are employers subject to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) or the Export Administration Regulations (EAR). Bernhard notes that, “it appears the DOJ is claiming SpaceX fraudulently relied on this exception.” 

“While I cannot comment on whether SpaceX is subject to ITAR or EAR, I can state that the DOJ takes the anti-discrimination provisions of the INA very seriously, aggressively enforces them, and interprets the ITAR and EAR exceptions very narrowly,” adds Bernhard.

The DOJ filing seeks fair consideration and back pay for those affected by the alleged discriminatory practices.

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It’s an exhilarating and sobering thought: All the planets, galaxies, starlight, and other objects that we can see and measure in the universe make up just 5 percent of existence. The other 95 percent are eaten up by two enigmas, dark matter and dark energy, known to scientists by their apparent gravitational effects on the surrounding universe, but not directly detectible.

On July 1, however, a new European Space Agency mission could help scientists get a little closer to solving the twin mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. The Euclid space telescope will take flight from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station no earlier than 11:11 a.m. EDT atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. NASA will live stream the launch beginning at 10:30 a.m.

Following blastoff, Euclid will take about 30 days to reach its operational orbit around Lagrange Point 2 (L2), an area a million miles toward the outer solar system where Euclid can maintain a constant position relative to Earth. The James Webb Space Telescope also orbits L2.

[Related: A super pressure balloon built by students is cruising Earth’s skies to find dark matter]

Once on location and operational, Euclid will begin what is expected to be a six-year mission where it will survey around a third of the sky, carefully measuring the shapes of billions of galaxies up to 10 billion light-years away to catch a glimpse at the ways dark matter and dark energy shape our cosmos. To do that, the roughly 4,600-pound space telescope will use its four-foot-wide primary mirror to collect and focus visible and near-infrared wavelengths of light on two instruments: the VISible instrument camera and Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer, which helps determine the distance to far off galaxies.

“The awesomeness of how many galaxies Euclid will be able to measure and at what amazing precision—it’s just an amazing feat of human engineering,” says Lindley Winslow, a professor of physics at MIT who designs experiments to detect dark matter, but is not directly involved with this mission. “The fact that we can do precision cosmology is awesome.”

Cosmologists, who study the formation, evolution, and structure of the universe, have a model called Lambda-CDM that might explain why everything is the way it is. Lambda is the cosmological constant, the force that appears to be causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate and which scientists believe is related to or manifests in mysterious dark energy. CDM stands for “cold dark matter,” which interacts with normal matter gravitationally.

”Those are the two ingredients that have sculpted the universe that we know,” Winslow says. Dark energy drives universal expansion, while “in the early universe, it was this cold dark matter that pulled visible matter that we see now into potential wells, that then allowed it to contract and form galaxies and stars.”

Lambda-CDM helps us construe a lot of the large-scale universe, according to Winslow, but it doesn’t tell us how it fits together with the theory that explains how the small scale universe works: the Standard Model of particle physics. Euclid is one of several attempts to learn more about how the universe expands and revise Lambda-CDM.

“What we’re really interested in is, can we get more data? Winslow says. “And can we find something that Lambda-CDM doesn’t explain?”

To hunt for that evidence, Euclid will use a technique known as weak gravitational lensing. This is similar to the strong gravitational lensing technique employed by JWST, where the mass of a foreground object, such as a galaxy cluster, is used to magnify a more distant background object. With weak gravitational lensing, scientists are more interested in the way the mass of the foreground objects, including dark matter, creates subtle distortions in the shape of background galaxies.

“We’re using the background galaxies to learn about the matter distribution in the foreground,” says Rachel Mandelbaum, an astrophysicist at Carnegie Mellon University who is a member of the US portion of the Euclid Consortium, a group of thousands of scientists and engineers. “We’re trying to measure the effects of all of the matter between the distinct galaxy shape and us.”

[Related: Astronomers used dead stars to detect a new form of ripple in space-time]

This method will also help them measure the effects of dark energy, Mandelbaum adds. Since dark matter helps all other forms of matter clump together, and dark energy counteracts the gravitational effects of dark matter, by measuring how clumpy matter is over a range of distance from Earth, “we can measure how cosmic structure is growing and use that to infer the effects of dark energy on the matter distribution.”

Euclid will not be the first large sky survey using weak gravitational lensing to search for signs of dark matter and dark energy, but it will be the first survey of its kind in orbit. Previous studies, such as the Dark Energy Survey, have all been conducted by ground-based telescopes, according to Mandelbaum. Being up in space offers a different advantage.

“Ground-based telescopes see blurrier images than space-based telescopes because of the effects of the Earth’s atmosphere on the light of distant stars and galaxies,” Mandelbaum says. Euclid’s view from L2 will be helpful when “we’re trying to measure these very subtle distortions in the shapes of galaxies.” 

But dark matter and dark energy are tough enigmas to crack, and scientists can use all the data they can collect, from as many angles as possible. The Vera Rubin Observatory, currently under construction in Chile and scheduled to open in 2025, will host the ground-based Legacy Survey of Space and Time and scan the entire southern sky for similar phenomena. Efforts like these will help ensure the reproducibility of findings by Euclid, and vice versa, according to Mandelbaum.

”Euclid is a really exciting experiment within a broader landscape of surveys that are trying to get at the same science, but with very different datasets that have different assumptions,” she says. “They’re going to be doing somewhat different things that give us a different approach to answering these really fundamental questions about the universe.”

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Last week’s much-hyped test flight of SpaceX’s Starship, the most powerful rocket ever constructed, ended in a fiery explosion minutes after launch, falling far short of the SpaceX team’s optimistic goal of a watery landing near Hawaii. The truncated conclusion was not entirely surprising, however—SpaceX CEO Elon Musk himself estimated a 50 percent chance of failure while speaking at a conference last month. Regardless of how one views the launch postmortem, one thing is for certain—Starship made its presence known to locals last week, and left an absolute mess in its wake.

[Related: Watch SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket explode.]

Hailed as a success by many SpaceX fans and a dud by some of its critics, Friday’s historic Starship launch was nothing if not “truly terrifying” for those living near the Boca Chica, Texas, launchsite. According to a report from The New York Times, “virtually everywhere” in the neighboring town of Port Isabel was covered in a layer of thick dust and sand grain. The force from Starship’s 33 Raptor engines also generated enough power to resemble a “mini earthquake,” residents told the The NY Times, and resulted in at least one store owner’s window shattering. Starship’s takeoff blasted a 25-feet deep crater into the launch site, sending up plumes of dust and dirt, alongside bowling ball-sized debris that smashed into at least one empty parked NASA Spaceflight van nearby. This isn’t the first instance of SpaceX-induced damage, either—in 2021, a SpaceX disintegrating Falcon 9 rocket stage’s pressure vessel landed on a Washington State farm, leaving a four-inch dent in the ground.

As Space.com explained over the weekend, locals have also voiced concerns over future Starship launches’ effects on local flora and fauna. SpaceX’s Starbase facilities are located near wildlife refuge areas—while such rocketry complexes are often built in similar remote areas, safety steps and safe-distance requirements generally minimize harm and disruption. On April 19, one day before Starship’s rescheduled launch, 27 environmental, community, and indigenous organizations signed an open letter expressing concerns over the massive rocket’s effects on both locals and the environment. This includes sacred land for local indigenous peoples.

“We, the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, oppose SpaceX operations destroying our sacred lands,” Tribal Chairman, Juan B. Mancias, said in the co-signed statement, adding “The Tribe was never consulted by any of these companies or electeds about rockets… who never responded to our request for a meeting.”

“SpaceX routine operations and testing are already destroying wildlife refuges and sacred lands of the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas and are threatening Rio Grande Valley communities with explosion risks,” reads a portion of the letter. “SpaceX [cut] off access to the beach from local families, preventing the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe from accessing sacred lands for ceremonies, destroying more than 60 acres of wildlife habitat for threatened and endangered species, and threatening public safety with rocket shrapnel blown into fishing spots and the community.”

Last June, the Federal Aviation Administration concluded SpaceX’s upcoming orbital launch plans would result in “no significant impact” to the nearby region, pending 75 action steps to mitigate environmental concerns. Musk claims his private spacefaring company will have another Starship ready to launch from the same facility in “1 to 2 months.”

Update 4/25/23:  The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) confirmed to CNBC on Monday afternoon that it has grounded the company’s Starship Super Heavy launch program pending results of the “mishap investigation” which was “triggered by debris entering adjacent properties.”

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SpaceX’s mega-rocket Starship exploded earlier today. Using a Super Heavy booster for the first time below Starship itself, the entire vehicle assembly failed minutes after rising from the launch pad in southern Texas. 

A radiating light and brown smoke at the base of the rocket, followed by cheers, marked the beginning of the launch. All appeared to go according to plan as fiery exhaust propelled the double-deck rocket assembly higher into the atmosphere. Crowds and commenters waited to see the silvery rocket and white booster separate as planned—and then kept waiting as the rocket eventually started flipping and spinning. Then, the rocket, which was uncrewed, exploded. 

SpaceX was aiming to send the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built on a trip around the world. If all had gone according to plan, the Starship upper stage would have terminated its flight in the water near Hawaii. That didn’t happen.

This launch was originally scheduled for Monday, but a stuck booster valve delayed the project.

[Related: SpaceX Starships keep exploding, but it’s all part of Elon Musk’s plan]

The launch included two stages: one using the Starship rocket, which has blasted off before. Starship finally landed in 2021 without blowing up after multiple failures and explosions. And the second, a Super Heavy booster, is a new addition designed to propel the rocket farther. This was the first launch with those two sections together.

The plan was to launch from the southern tip of Texas, drop the booster in the Gulf of Mexico, and have Starship cross over the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans before going for a swim into the Pacific near Hawaii. 

Crowds had gathered a few miles away from SpaceX’s launch site, Boca Chica Beach in Texas, to watch the launch. The ultimate goal of the rocket is to shuttle humans and cargo to the Moon and eventually Mars, but that goal might be farther away than the places it hopes to reach. 

“I’m not saying it will get to orbit, but I am guaranteeing excitement. It won’t be boring,” Musk said at a Morgan Stanley conference last month. He estimated it might have a 50 percent chance of reaching orbit.

Though Starship and it’s booster failed to separate, SpaceX still sees this as a success. “It does appear to be spinning, but I do want to remind everyone that everything after clearing the tower was icing on the cake,” one SpaceX announcer said during the event; the vehicle exploded while she made the comment, leading to cheers. She added that it was “an exciting end to the Starship inaugural integrated test flight.” 

The Starship’s Super Heavy booster has 33 methane-fueled engines, and the ship itself could theoretically accommodate 250 tons and 100 people. Before sending any passengers to new destinations, Musk wants to use the unmanned rocket to launch satellites, such as his own Starlinks, into Earth’s orbit. 

Watch all the fiery drama, below:

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In 2016, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk outlined a plan to send human colonists to Mars. As of today, the human population of Mars stands at zero. (The rover population, meanwhile, has climbed to three.)

Can you do whatever you want in space?

Who’s in charge once there’s a human population on Mars?

Although Musk’s hypothetical colony wouldn’t legally be an American colony, it would still be subject to American laws. That’s because even if the Mars mission launches from Kazakhstan or French Guiana, SpaceX is an American company and the colonists would be traveling on an American ship.

Maritime laws provide a good example of the type of legal system we could expect on the Red Planet. Like international waters, nobody can own Mars, so instead each ship needs to follow the rules of the country whose flag it flies under. And, just like sailors, Mars explorers are still expected to abide by those rules even when they’re off the ship.

[Related: Inside NASA’s plan to use Martian dirt to build houses on Mars]

Things get a little more complicated once you start adding other countries and companies into the Martian mix. On the International Space Station, for example, if an American astronaut were to hit a Russian astronaut over the head, first the US would have the right to determine whether a criminal act was committed. If the US doesn’t take action, then he could be tried under Russian jurisdiction.

In addition, any sizable, long-term colony on Mars is also going to need a local governing system. What form of government might or should take shape there? We’ll leave that discussion up to the political scientists.

Does Musk need permission to colonize Mars?

Currently, if you want to launch a rocket into space, you have to ask the government for permission. Then, depending on your activities in space, you have to apply for a second license to do specific things. For example, if you’re launching a telecom satellite, you’ll want to talk to the Federal Communications Commission.

However, as of yet “there is no license specifically for dealing with the legal implications of space colonization,” says von der Dunk. In fact, it’s not even clear which office would be in charge of giving out those licenses. NASA? The Federal Aviation Administration? A whole new branch of the government?

[Related: SpaceX’s all-civilian moon trip has a crew]

As the number of companies wanting to carry tourists into space increases, the government is going to need to figure out a licensing procedure soon.

Why bother enforcing Earth laws on another planet?

We’re supposed to avoid contaminating the celestial bodies that we explore, according to the Outer Space Treaty. Not only does that mean “don’t spread trash all over the solar system,” but it’s generally interpreted to mean “keep your microbes to yourself,” too.

If Earth microbes take root on Mars or Europa, we may never have the chance to find out if those worlds ever hosted alien life. So the major space agencies have a sort of “gentleman’s agreement,” says von der Dunk, to decontaminate their spacecraft as much as possible before sending them to other worlds. But human bodies are much harder to decontaminate, since our health depends on our microbes.

There a few sites on Mars that are considered deserving of heavier protection than others—areas where liquid water is thought to exist, for instance. Only the most thoroughly decontaminated vessels are supposed to enter those areas.

Will Elon Musk and his followers be expected to follow those same planetary protection “gentleman’s agreements”? The licensing process, mentioned above, could determine whether potential colonizers will be legally bound to avoid spreading their germs all over Mars.

“The US licensing process should make sure that the activities of Elon Musk and others do not violate key principles of planetary protection,” says von der Dunk. “The US has the power to make those binding of Elon Musk and whoever flies under his flag.”

[Related: Your ancestors might have been Martians]

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On Sunday, January 15, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off to orbit with a payload for just the fifth time since the company began flying the 70-ton capacity vehicle in 2018.

Launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 5:56 p.m. EST, the partially reusable rocket carried USSF-67, a classified US Space Force mission consisting of two main payloads. The first held a military communications satellite destined for geosynchronous orbit, the Continuous Broadcast Augmenting SATCOM, or CBAS-2, according to a Space Force media release.

The second payload, the Long Duration Propulsive ESPA, or LDPE-3A, is a craft the Space Force uses for deploying multiple smaller payloads into low Earth orbit. In this case, the LDPE-3A carried five payloads, including a prototype of a secure space-to-ground communications device and another prototype designed for “enhanced situational awareness,” as per the Space Force announcement.

The most recent prior Falcon Heavy launch was also a Space Force mission, USSF-44, which launched from Kennedy Space Center on November 1. That was the first flight for the 229-foot-tall rocket since June 2019, a surprising slow pace given the sleeker Falcon 9 rocket launched a record-setting 48 times in 2022 alone.

What’s next for Falcon Heavy?

That the January 15 launch was only the fifth for the Falcon had nothing to do with Falcon Heavy itself, says Laura Forczyk, founder of the space industry analysis firm Astralytical. Instead, it was a result of delays in payloads for both NASA and the US military, including the USSF-44 mission launched in November, that kept the pace of launches low.

“It’s actually very common for payloads to be delayed,” Forcyzk notes. Meanwhile, the majority of SpaceX’s clientele don’t need a rocket as powerful as the Falcon Heavy, and so can fly on the more affordable Falcon 9, which the company uses to launch its own Starlink satellites. A Falcon 9 launch costs $67 million, according to SpaceX pricing, while a Falcon Heavy launch rings up to $97 million.

The Falcon Heavy is the most powerful launch vehicle SpaceX currently operates and consists of three of the company’s Falcon 9 rocket boosters strapped together side-by-side. The combined 27 Merlin engines provide 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, and when combined with an upper stage atop the middle booster, can lift up to 141,000 pounds into low Earth orbit.

That makes the Falcon Heavy “SpaceX’s current solution for launching medium- and large-sized payloads to orbit or beyond,” Forczyk says, but it’s not necessarily a long-term option. SpaceX’s massive Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster are still under development; as they become operational, there will be less and less need for Falcon Heavy launches. The company claims the more powerful Starship will generate 17 million pounds of thrust at liftoff and be capable of hauling more than 220,000 pounds into low Earth orbit.

[Related: SpaceX’s new Starshield program will supply satellite networks to the military]

But Starship has yet to fly in orbit, and in the meantime, Falcon Heavy launches are ramping up, with at least five scheduled so far in 2023. Those launches consist of another Space Force mission and two commercial satellite launches in the spring. NASA’s Psyche mission to an asteroid of the same name is also scheduled to launch sometime in October. That means we’ll probably be seeing a lot more of the Falcon Heavy before it fades away.

“The very fact that Falcon Heavy still exists and is still getting customers means there is a demand for it,” Forcyzk says. “They’re going to be launching more customer payloads, which is going to bring in more revenue for the company. They will absolutely need that as they are ramping up development of Starship.”

What’s next for SpaceX?

SpaceX is working steadily on developing the Starship vehicle, which when paired with the reusable Super Heavy Booster, will make it the largest rocket ever flown. Work had been delayed by years due to a prolonged Programmatic Environmental Review between SpaceX and the FAA necessary for the regulator to issue SpaceX a license for orbital Starship launches from Boca Chica, Texas. The process was finally completed in June 2022 with the FAA requiring some safety changes for the company’s site and protocols. 

The next major milestone for Starship would be an uncrewed orbital test flight, but it’s unclear when that may take place, according to Forczyk. “A year ago, in January 2022, I gave a prediction that SpaceX would have its first orbital launch of Starship in 2022. And I was wrong,” she says. “So I want to say that they’re gonna have their first successful orbital Starship mission in 2023, but I don’t want to be wrong again.”

[Related: Dark matter, Jupiter’s moons, and more: What to expect from space exploration in 2023]

The company will need to get a move on, however. Not only is SpaceX contracted to fly a group of private citizens around the moon in the 2024, but NASA has contracted the company to create a lunar lander variant of Starship for use by NASA astronauts during the Artemis III mission scheduled for 2025.

In the meantime, SpaceX will continue launching everything from satellites to Crew Dragon spacecraft bound for the International Space Station atop its Falcon 9 rockets. In August, its CEO Elon Musk announced on Twitter that the company was aiming for 100 Falcon 9 flights in 2023. Less than a month in, it’s already successfully completed four Falcon 9 flights.    

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The past few years have been a space launch boom: Late 2021 saw the long-awaited arrival of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and in 2022 NASA finally launched its massive new Space Launch System Moon rocket. This year will continue that trend, as several scientific and commercial craft zoom off our world to orbit and beyond.

This year’s historic flights include missions to Jupiter and the asteroid belt, robotic moon landings, and the maiden flight of a new spacecraft to take astronauts to and from the aging International Space Station (ISS). Here are some of the major launches to look forward to in 2023.

Asteroids and icy moons

Both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have big plans for studying celestial bodies beyond the orbit of Mars that kick off in 2023.

ESA’s JUpiter ICy moons Explorer, or JUICE mission, will study the icy Galilean moons of Jupiter, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. Of the three moons, Europa has so far garnered the lion’s share of scientific interest due to the global liquid water ocean beneath the moon’s icy crust, an environment that could host alien life. But evidence now suggests Callisto and Ganymede may also host subsurface liquid water oceans. JUICE, which is scheduled to launch atop an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana sometime in April and will arrive at Jupiter in 2031, will fly by each of the three moons to compare the three icy worlds.

[Related: Jupiter’s moons are about to get JUICE’d for signs of life]

The JUICE spacecraft will enter orbit around Ganymede in 2034, the first time a spacecraft has circled a moon other than Earth’s, where it will spend roughly a year studying the satellite in greater detail. Ganymede, in addition to its potential subsurface ocean and potential habitability, is the only moon in the solar system with its own magnetic field. JUICE will study how this field interacts with Jupiter’s even  larger one.

NASA’s Psyche mission, meanwhile, will blast off no earlier than October 10 on a mission to rendezvous with its namesake asteroid, when it arrives in the belt between Mars and Jupiter in August 2029. The Psyche mission was originally scheduled to launch in August 2022, but was delayed due to problems developing mission-critical software at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The asteroid 16 Psyche is a largely metallic space rock that scientists believe could be the exposed core of a protoplanet that formed in the early solar system. If that theory bears out, the Psyche spacecraft could end up traveling millions of miles to give scientists a better understanding of the Earth’s iron core far beneath their feet.

India returns to the moon

The Indian Space Research Organization, ISRO, is going back to the moon with its Chandrayaan-3 mission, which is scheduled to launch over the summer. The space agency’s Chandrayaan-2 mission carried an orbiter and lander to the moon in 2019, but a software glitch caused the lander to crash on the lunar surface. The Chandrayaan-3 mission is ditching the orbiter in favor of a redesigned lander and rover intended for the lunar South Pole. Carrying a seismometer and spectrographs, among other instruments, the lander and rover will study the chemical composition and geology of the polar region. 

[Related: 10 incredible lunar missions that paved the way for Artemis]

The hunt for dark matter

Astrophysicists believe dark matter and dark energy shape the structures of entire universes—and drive the accelerated expansion of ours. But experts don’t understand much about these enigmatic phenomena. ESA’s Euclid space telescope, scheduled to launch sometime in 2023, will measure the effects of these dark forces on the cosmos over time to try and discern their properties.

After launch, Euclid will make its way to the same operational location as JWST, entering an orbit around Lagrangian Point 2, about 1 million miles behind Earth. From there, Euclid will use its nearly 4-foot diameter mirror, visible light imaging system, and near-infrared spectrometer to survey a third of the sky out to a distance of about 15 billion light years. That will give a view  some 10 billion years into the past. By studying how galaxies and galaxy clusters change over eons and across much of the sky, Euclid scientists hope to grasp how dark matter and dark energy shape galactic formation and the evolution of the entire universe.

Boeing catches up to SpaceX

Boeing will finally launch a crewed test flight of its Starliner spacecraft sometime in April 2023. Boeing developed the Starliner, a capsule that holds up to seven people, as a competitor to the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Like Dragon, Starliner will ferry astronauts and cargo to and from the ISS as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.

[Related: ISS astronauts are building objects that couldn’t exist on Earth]

But while Crew Dragon began flying astronauts to the ISS in November 2020, the Starliner ran into many delay-causing problems, beginning with a software glitch that kept the spacecraft from rendezvousing with the ISS during an uncrewed test flight in December 2020. Boeing kept at it, however, and completed a second attempt at an uncrewed rendezvous with the ISS in May 2022, paving the way for the coming crewed test flight.

If all goes well, NASA will integrate Starliner flights alongside Crew Dragon launches within the Commercial Crew program, providing the space agency some redundancy in case of problems with either type of spacecraft.

The (private) enterprise

As NASA becomes more and more reliant on Boeing, SpaceX, and other contractors for flights to the ISS, private space operators have big plans of their own for 2023.

Axiom Space plans to send a crew of private citizens for a two-week stay on the ISS in the  summer, following the company’s first mission in April 2022 when four private astronauts spent more than two weeks aboard the space station. Axiom Space plans to build a new habitat—first connected to the ISS, then separated to create a free-flying space station when NASA retires the ISS in 2031.

[Related: SpaceX’s all-civilian moon trip has a crew]

Jared Isaacman, the billionaire who funded the first ever all-private orbital space flight in September 2021 with the Inspiration 4 mission, will also be back at it in 2023. The Polaris Dawn mission is scheduled to launch no sooner than March and will once again see Isaacman fly aboard a chartered SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft along with three crewmates. Unlike Inspiration 4, at least two of the Polaris Dawn crew plan to conduct the first-ever private astronaut spacewalks outside a spacecraft.

The Jeff Bezos-founded Blue Origin, meanwhile, will attempt to launch the first test flight of its orbital rocket, known as New Glenn, sometime in 2023. While the company has flown celebrities such as Bezos and William Shatner to the edge of space aboard its suborbital New Shepard rocket, the company has yet to make an orbital flight. This year, it’s aiming higher.

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ON A FOGGY midsummer morning 54 miles northwest of Santa Barbara, California, SpaceX engineers hustled through a ritual they’d been through before. They loaded a Falcon 9 rocket with tens of thousands of gallons of kerosene and supercold liquid oxygen, a propellant combo that brought the craft’s nine Merlin engines roaring to life with 1.7 million pounds of thrust. Soon after, the machine shot through the stratosphere, ready to dispatch 46 of the company’s Starlink internet satellites into low Earth orbit. But the rocket made another delivery too: a trail of sooty particles that lingered over the Pacific hours after blastoff.

The launch was the company’s 32nd of 2022, maintaining its current pace of firing off close to one rocket per week. With a record number of rides shuttling equipment, astronauts, and über-rich tourists to and from Earth, the high skies have never been busier. Between government programs like China’s Long March and private shots like SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, the world tallied some 130 successful launches in 2021 and is on pace to finish 2022 with even more. Many trips, however, spew tiny bits of matter into the stratosphere, an area that hasn’t seen much pollution firsthand yet.

Climate scientists are still working to fully understand how rocket residue affects the planet’s UV shield. But even if they find warning signs, some organization or authority figure would have to step up to establish emission standards for the industry. In the meantime, a few aerospace companies are exploring sustainable alternatives, like biofuels, to power their far-flying systems.

The increasing frequency of launches has researchers like Martin N. Ross, an atmospheric physicist and project engineer at the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit research center in California, worried about the future of the stratosphere—and the world. Predictions for rocket traffic in the coming decades point dramatically up, like a Falcon 9 on a pad. Should the sun heat up enough of the particles from the fuel trails, as some computer models suggest it will, space travel could become a significant driver of climate change. “This is not a theoretical concern,” Ross says.

Unless you are reading this while floating aboard the International Space Station, you are breathing air from the troposphere—the bottommost band of the Earth’s atmosphere, which extends upward for several miles. The layer just above that, the stratosphere, sits anywhere from 6 to 31 miles above sea level and is deathly dull by comparison: There are barely any clouds there, so it doesn’t rain. The air is thin and freezing and contains ozone, an oxygen-based gas that protects all life from solar radiation but is toxic to the lungs.

Most greenhouse gases, including the 900 million tons of carbon dioxide produced by the aviation industry each year, trap heat in the troposphere. But rockets rip their vapors at higher altitudes, making them the single direct source of emissions in the upper stratosphere.

Acid in the sky

The stratosphere was people-free until 1931, when Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard and his aide floated nearly 10 miles up, and back down, with a 500,000-cubic-foot hydrogen balloon. They were the first of many. By the 1960s, the US and Soviet space programs were regularly shooting rockets to the edge of the sky.

As astronaut and cosmonaut programs evolved during the Cold War, so did climate change research—especially studies of carbon dioxide pollution and atmospheric degradation. In the 1970s, NASA’s space shuttle program piqued the interest of atmospheric chemists like Ralph Cicerone and Richard Stolarski, who then attempted some of the first investigations into stratospheric rocket exhaust. The shuttle’s solid engines used a crystalline compound called ammonium perchlorate, which releases hydrochloric acid as a byproduct. Chlorine is highly destructive to ozone—the Environmental Protection Agency estimates a lone atom can break down tens of thousands of molecules of the atmospheric gas.

In a June 1973 report to NASA, Cicerone, Stolarski, and their colleagues calculated that 100 shuttle launches a year would produce “quite small” amounts of chlorine-containing compounds. But they warned that these chemicals could build up over time. Cicerone and Stolarski ultimately focused their attention on volcanic eruptions, because those belches represented larger and more dramatic releases of chlorine.

In the 1980s, British meteorologists revealed that the ozone layer in the Antarctic stratosphere was thinning. They identified the culprit as chlorine from aerosol spray cans and to O3-munching chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons from other human-made sources. That hole began to heal only after the 1987 Montreal Protocol, the first international agreement ever ratified by every member state of the United Nations. It phased out the use of CFCs, setting the atmosphere on a decades-long path to recovery.

In the wake of that treaty, “Anything that emitted chlorine was under suspicion,” Ross says. But it remained unclear whether rocket emissions too could alter the ozone layer.

For the following two decades, the US Air Force enlisted the Aerospace Corporation and atmospheric scientists like Darin Toohey, now a University of Colorado Boulder professor, to study the chemical composition of rocket exhaust. Using NASA’s WB-57 aircraft, a jet bomber able to fly 11 miles high and retrofitted for scientific observations, teams directly sampled emissions from American launch vehicles including Titan, Athena, and Delta into the early 2000s.

Freshly collected material from the plumes gave the researchers a firmer grasp on the ways solid propellant interacted with air. For instance, they examined the particles that were expelled when shuttle boosters burned aluminum powder as fuel—and how those bits reacted to ozone. The effect wasn’t as severe as they had feared, Ross says. Though the plumes depleted nearby ozone within the first hour after a launch, the layer was quickly restored after the emissions diffused.

Meanwhile, at the turn of the 21st century, blastoffs were decreasing in the US and Russia. After the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on reentry in 2003, killing its seven-person crew, NASA suspended other flights in the program for two years. Missions using the WB-57 aircraft to observe exhaust came to an end in 2005. Six years later, NASA officially retired the shuttle system.

New rockets, more soot

When SpaceX sent its first liquid-fueled rocket into orbit in 2008, it set the stage for more privately developed spaceflights. But the chemical it pumped into its marquee machines wasn’t anything new. A refined version of kerosene, Rocket Propellant-1 or RP-1, has powered generations of rockets, including the first-stage engines of the spaceships that ferried Apollo astronauts to the moon. It was well known and relatively cheap.

Sensing an aerospace trend, Ross, Toohey, and their colleague Michael Mills calculated what emissions would be produced by a fleet of similarly hydrocarbon-powered rockets anywhere between the Earth’s surface and 90 miles aloft. Their predictions, which they published in 2010 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, turned up something unexpected: an emissions signature full of black carbon, the same contaminant belched by poorly tuned diesel engines on the ground. “It seemed to have a disproportionate impact on the upper atmosphere,” Toohey says.

Those dark particles are “very, very good at absorbing the sun’s radiation,” adds Eloise Marais, an atmospheric chemist at University College London. Think of how you heat up faster on a hot summer day while wearing a black shirt rather than a white one, and you get the idea.

Near the ground, rain or other precipitation will flush dark carbon out of the air. But in the stratosphere, above rain clouds, soot sticks around. “As soon as we start to put things in that layer of the atmosphere, their impact is much greater, because it’s considerably cleaner up there than it is down here,” Marais says. In other words, the pristineness of the stratosphere makes it more vulnerable to the sun’s searing rays.

Black carbon particles can persist for about two years in the stratosphere before gravity drags them back down to the ground. They also heat up as they wait: In a study published this June in the journal Earth’s Future, Marais and her colleagues calculated that soot from rockets is about 500 times more efficient at warming the air than that from planes or emitters on the surface.

Another recent model run by Ross and Christopher Maloney, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Chemical Sciences Laboratory, came to a similar conclusion about the dark stuff’s impact on climate change. Should space traffic increase tenfold within the next two decades, the stratosphere will warm by about 3 degrees Fahrenheit, they predict.

That uptick is enough that “stratospheric dynamics [will] begin to shift,” Maloney says. Currents carry naturally produced ozone from hotter tropical regions toward cooler poles. If rockets scorch a pool of air above the Northern Hemisphere, where most launches take place, that warm-to-cold path could be disturbed—disrupting the circulation that ferries fresh O3 northward. The upshot: a thinner ozone layer at the higher latitudes and a toastier stratosphere overall.

Sizing up old launches can help clear up some of the gray areas in this process. In a paper published this July in the journal Physics of Fluids, a pair of researchers at the University of Nicosia in Cyprus simulated the plume from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from 2016. According to their model, in the first 2.75 minutes of flight, the craft generated 116 tons of carbon dioxide, which is equivalent to a year’s worth of emissions from about 70 cars.

Toohey sees these projections as validation of the black carbon concerns he raised more than a decade ago—but thinks they’re not as compelling as direct observations would be. There has been “basically no progress, except additional model studies, telling us the original hypothesis was correct,” he says. What’s needed, he adds, is detection in the style of the earlier WB-57 missions. For example, spectrometers planted on the sides of spaceships could measure black carbon.

Policy is another limiting factor. The International Air Transport Association, an influential trade organization, has set carbon-neutral goals for airlines for 2050, but there is no comparable target for space—in part because there is no equivalent leader in the industry or regulatory body like the Federal Aviation Administration. “We don’t have an agreed-upon way to measure what rocket engines are doing to the environment,” Ross says.

While there are newer fuels out there, there’s no good way to determine how green they are. Even the one that burns cleanest, hydrogen, requires extra energy to be refined to its pure molecular form from methane or water. “The picture is very complex, as all propellants have environmental impact,” says Stephen Heister, who studies aerospace propulsion at Purdue University.

Atmospheric scientists say solutions to preserve the stratosphere must be developed collaboratively, as with the unified front that made the Montreal Protocol a juggernaut. “The way to deal with it is to start getting people with common interests together,” Toohey says, to find a sustainable path to space before lasting damage is done.

Photo credits for lead image: Left to right, top to bottom: Patrick T. Fallon/Getty Images; Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua/Getty Images; Zheng Bin/Xinhua/Getty Images; Yang Guanyu/Xinhua/Getty Images; Cai Yang/Xinhua/Getty Images; Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua/Getty Images; Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua/Getty Images; Korea Aerospace Research Institute/Getty Images; SOPA Images Ltd./Alamy (2); Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post/Getty Images; GeoPix/NASA/Joel Kowsky/Alamy; Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua/Getty Images; Paul Hennessy/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images; Zheng Bin/Xinhua/Getty Images

This story originally appeared in the High Issue of Popular Science. Read more PopSci+ stories.

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It’s been half a century since humans last orbited the moon, but SpaceX plans to return next year. The first private, all-civilian lunar loop was first announced in 2018 by Elon Musk and Japanese multibillionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who reportedly bought every seat on an upcoming flight aboard SpaceX’s still-in-development Starship shuttle. Maezawa subsequently put out an open call last year for potential travel mates from around the world, and has just released his official flight roster.

As announced, the eight passengers (who all have multi-role bios on the dearMoon Crew site) will include rapper Choi Seung Hyun, aka T.O.P from the South Korean boy band BIGBANG, DJ Steve Aoki, photographer and host of the popular space-themed YouTube channel Everyday Astronaut Tim Dodd. Two Earth-minded filmmakers, Brendan Hall and Karim Iliya, artist Rhiannon Adam, actor Dev D. Joshi, and designer and non-profit founder Yemi A.D. round out the final eight guests. The voyage’s two alternates are Olympic gold medalist snowboarder Kaitlyn Farrington and the dancer Miyu.

[Related: Meet SpaceX’s first moon tourist, Yusaku Maezawa.]

Maezawa’s project, dubbed dearMoon, is billed as a six-day circumlunar sojourn meant to inspire its passengers’ respective artwork and careers to create art in their respective fields. Maezawa claims his open application received over 1 million entries from “249 countries and regions.”

While a first on many fronts, this actually won’t be Maezawa’s introduction to space. Last year, he rocketed up to the ISS for a 12-day visit, which he documented in a series of YouTube videos. And it’s not the only time an all-citizen team has taken to space, as a four-man all-civilian crew orbited Earth in another SpaceX mission last year.

[Related: With Artemis 1 launched, NASA is officially on its way back to the moon.]

The SpaceX/dearMoon trip is tentatively scheduled to launch sometime next year aboard the private spacefaring company’s massive, 165-foot-tall Starship rocket, which Musk intends to one day utilize for his overarching goal of reaching Mars. Although Starship has not flown since May 2021, SpaceX hopes to conduct a test later this month ahead of next year’s slated dearMoon excursion. NASA is also relying on Starship for its own lunar plans, and intends to use it to reach the moon’s south pole as part of its ongoing Artemis project sometime in 2025 or 2026.

Of course, take all those dates with a grain of moon dust. Musk’s timelines are well-known for their optimism.

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Starlink announced earlier this week the debut of Starshield. This new venture will ostensibly serve as the company’s defense industry counterpoint with the US military as its first customer. First launched in 2019 through Elon Musk’s SpaceX venture, Starlink aims to provide high-speed, reliable satellite internet service virtually anywhere on Earth within the next few years via a satellite constellation numbering in the tens of thousands. Over 3,000 small Starlink satellites are already in low Earth orbit to offer internet connectivity within 40 countries so far, according to the company’s count.

As CNBC reported earlier this week, details are currently vague regarding Starshield’s full scope, although the venture’s official website explains it “leverages SpaceX’s Starlink technology and launch capability to support national security efforts.” The site also lists three areas of “initial focus,” including imagery, communications, and hosted payloads that will allow government contracts to ostensibly hitch a ride on Starshield rockets for separate projects.

[Related: SpaceX says it can no longer fund Ukraine’s Starlink access.]

Starshield will also offer “inter-satellite laser communications” links that can be joined with partner satellites “so as to connect other companies’ government systems ‘into the Starshield network,’” explains CNBC.

Starshield will likely deepen SpaceX’s ties with the Department of Defense, which has long been the umbrella company’s most lucrative and largest customer. The US military previously made it clear that it is determined to expand its next-generation satellite capabilities—earlier this year, the Pentagon announced $1.8 billion in contracts for companies including Northrop Grumman and Lockheed-Martin. Starshield’s debut shows SpaceX is aiming to cement its place among the largest and most influential defense contractors, and is leaning into its security features to do so. Its website boasts “additional high-assurance cryptographic capability to host classified payloads and process data securely, meeting the most demanding government requirements.”

[Related: A solar storm blasted 40 SpaceX satellites out of orbit.]

Although Starshield’s debut represents a major new market for Elon Musk’s company, Starlink itself is already being used for military operations in Ukraine as national forces work to repel Russia’s ongoing invasion of the country. Earlier this fall, Musk threatened to withdraw Starlink access to Ukraine, citing mounting costs, although later backtracked on the statement.

SpaceX, meanwhile, is not restricting its upcoming partnerships to purely military organizations. In October, the company began discussions with longtime customers at NASA about ways to potentially “bump” the Hubble Telescope into a higher orbit. If successful, it could extend the iconic project’s lifespan by another few years.

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The International Space Station is generally a pretty busy place, and this week sounds like no exception. Arriving this week aboard SpaceX’s 26th commercial resupply mission (CRM) is a host of supplies for upcoming experiments, including microbes capable of devouring plastic, developing shelf stable yogurt-like concoctions, and a crop of space tomatoes.

[Related: The ISS’s latest arrivals: a 3D printer, seeds, and ovarian cow cells.]

First up is Pseudomonas putida, the plastic-craving microorganism. Organized by SeedLabs in a collaboration with MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Weill Cornell Medicine, and Harvard Medical School, the upcoming experiments will test out the microbes’ capabilities in space, potentially providing important advancements for both pollution reduction on Earth as well as uses for astronauts during future lunar and Martian explorations. As Fast Company explained earlier today, Pseudomonas putida is not only capable of breaking down PET, an extremely common plastic often used in bottling and packaging, but also turning those broken down compounds into β-ketoadipic acid, “a nylon monomer that can be made into fabric or used in existing manufacturing processes.”

Researchers are hopeful that the microbes’ development in a zero-gravity, high UV radiation-environment might actually strengthen the organisms, which would be a boon both for future space missions as well as humans’ attempts to rein in pollution here on Earth. “Studying how the bacteria fare in space also generally helps glean more information about the microbes’ biological makeup, and if they could withstand changing environmental conditions on Earth,” Fast Company adds.

Pseudomonas putida isn’t the only microscopic arrivals aboard the ISS this week. As Tech Crunch notes, astronauts are receiving additional microbes as part of “the second phase of an attempt to create a shelf-stable pre-yogurt mix that, when hydrated, results in the bacteria naturally producing a target nutrient” like glucose and other complex molecules for medications. Gaining a better understanding of how these processes develop in space could also help future explorations’ achieve greater self-sufficiency in producing meals and necessary drugs.

[Related: NASA astronaut Victor J. Glover on the cosmic ‘relay race’ of the new lunar missions.]

Speaking of meals: ISS denizens have a batch of cosmic tomatoes to enjoy. These “Red Dwarf” miniature tomatoes are part ongoing experiments aimed at growing healthy food in micro- and zero-gravity environments using only artificial lighting. While recent work focused on leafy greens like spinach, the Veg-05 project is concerned with larger products like the red fruit—yes, fruit, remember? After a 104-day growth period from seed to finished food, astronauts will reportedly get a chance to conduct their own taste test. No word on whether space-bound bacon and lettuce will be available on the ISS by then, unfortunately.

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SpaceX just broke Falcon Heavy‘s 40-month hiatus earlier this morning, once again launching the world’s most powerful rocket into orbit at 9:42 a.m. ET. The three-pronged assembly took off with five million pounds of thrust before soon shedding its booster rockets as it entered the upper atmosphere. Two of the boosters made their successful synchronized landing on the nearby Florida coast, while the third was purposefully left to plummet into the ocean due to fuel constraints, per the US Space Force rundown.

Although SpaceX has previously attempted to safely land all three of Falcon Heavy’s modified Falcon 9 boosters for future reuse, it has never been able to pull off the impressive feat. That said, mission planners have come incredibly close to doing so in the past. Watch a recording of the launch below.

[Related: SpaceX and NASA want to bump Hubble into higher orbit.]

Very little is known about the military’s highly classified mission, dubbed USSF-44, although the government’s official release notes that the Falcon Heavy has already delivered “multiple” top secret satellites for the US Space System Command’s Innovation and Prototyping Delta program. Per the program’s website, the project concerns “rapid prototyping development, prototype space operations, worldwide deployable telemetry, tracking, and control, prototyping capability maturation, and executing the Department of Defense Space Test Program.”

[Related: NASA’s new investigation seeks to explain unusual phenomena in the sky.]

Last seen in action back in April 2019, SpaceX had two other previous Falcon Heavy missions delayed due to issues regarding payload readiness. While Falcon Heavy is currently the most powerful rocket available, two other designs from both SpaceX and NASA are dramatically surpass its abilities. SpaceX’s own Starship is in its final stages of development, and when launched is projected to give off 17 million pounds of thrust via its Super Heavy Booster alone. Meanwhile, NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) generates 8.8 million pounds of thrust, and is scheduled to finally launch next month as part of the unmanned Artemis 1 mission around the moon.

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NASA astronaut Nicole Aunapu Mann made history last week, becoming not only the first Native American woman in space, but also the first woman to command a Crew Dragon capsule. SpaceX’s Dragon Endurance spacecraft dropped off Mann and the crew of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-5 mission. Mann is the mission commander, with NASA’s Josh Cassada serving as the pilot. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Koichi Wakata and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina will serve as mission specialists for their expedition.

Mann is enrolled in Wailacki of the Round Valley Indian Tribes in northern California and is a colonel in the US Marine Corps. She served as a test pilot in the F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornet and was deployed twice aboard aircraft carriers in support of combat operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

[Related: Meet the next generation of American spaceflight]

In June 2013, she was selected as one of eight members of the 21st NASA astronaut class. To prepare for her time in space, Mann completed intensive instruction in International Space Station systems, spacewalks, Russian language training, robotics, physiological training, T-38 flight training, and water and wilderness survival training, according to NASA. Mann’s training was complete in July 2015 and she has since served as the T-38 safety and training officer and as the assistant to the chief astronaut for exploration. She led the astronaut corps in the development of the Orion spacecraft, Space Launch System, and Exploration Ground Systems for missions to the Moon.

In an interview with Indian Country Today in August, Mann said, “it’s very exciting,” referring to being the first Native woman in space. “I think it’s important that we communicate this to our community, so that other Native kids, if they thought maybe that this was not a possibility or to realize that some of those barriers that used to be there are really starting to get broken down.”

[Related: SpaceX and NASA are studying how to bump Hubble into higher orbit]

Crew-5 will be aboard the ISS conducting more than 200 science experiments aimed to help prepare for human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit, such as cardiovascular health, bioprinting, and fluid behavior in microgravity. “One of the ones that I’m looking most forward to is called the biofabrication facility. And it is literally 3D printing human cells, which to me sounds so futuristic, right?” she enthusiastically told ICT.

The six month mission is the latest stage in commercial and public space exploration.

“Missions like Crew-5 are proof we are living through a golden era of commercial space exploration. It’s a new era powered by the spirit of partnership, fueled by scientific ingenuity, and inspired by the quest for new discoveries,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, in a press release.

John Herrington is the only other Indigenous American to have entered orbit. Herrington (Chickasaw) flew on a 2002 space shuttle mission and logged over 330 hours in space and has flown 30 different spacecraft before retiring from NASA in 2005.

“I feel very proud,” Mann told Reuters before lift-off. “It’s important that we celebrate our diversity and really communicate that specifically to the younger generation.” When referring to the excitement that her trip has generated among some Native American communities, she said, “that’s really, I think, an audience that we don’t get an opportunity to reach out to very often.”

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The Hubble Space Telescope has sent back dazzling images and critical data back to Earth for 32 years, but nothing lasts forever, even space telescopes. In an effort to give the telescope a longer lifespan, NASA and SpaceX signed an unfunded Space Act Agreement. They will be studying the feasibility of a SpaceX and Polaris Program idea to use SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft to boost the Hubble into a higher orbit at no cost to the government.

The study is designed to help NASA understand the commercial possibilities of missions like this, but there currently aren’t any plans for NASA to conduct or fund a servicing mission to the telescope or commercially compete in this space, according to NASA.

In partnership with the Polaris Program (a planned human space flight company), SpaceX proposed this study as a way to better understand the technical challenges associated with servicing missions in space. The Polaris Program is funded by billionaire Jason Isaacman, who bought three flights to space on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft earlier this year. SpaceX was founded in 2002 by billionaire Elon Musk with the goal of reducing the costs of space exploration and one day colonize Mars. In 2020, Dragon became the first private spacecraft to carry astronauts to the International Space Station.

[Related: Space tourism is on the rise. Can NASA keep up with it?]

This study is non-exclusive, so other space exploration companies may propose similar studies with different rockets or spacecraft as their model. It’s expected to take six months, and will look at technical data from both the Hubble and the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to determine whether it is possible to safely rendezvous, dock, and move the telescope into a more stable orbit.

“This study is an exciting example of the innovative approaches NASA is exploring through private-public partnerships,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, in a press release. “As our fleet grows, we want to explore a wide range of opportunities to support the most robust, superlative science missions possible.”

[Related: This glittery Hubble image shows how far we’ve come in studying distant stars.]

The Hubble and Dragon will be the test models in this study, but portions of the mission concept may be applicable to other spacecraft. It could be particularly applicable to those in near-Earth orbit like the Hubble, according to NASA. Hubble operates about 335 miles (539 kilometers) above the Earth in an orbit that is slowly decaying over time. Orbital decay like this leads to the gradual decrease of the distance between two orbiting bodies. Hubble has now brushed against the outer edges of Earth’s atmosphere and is now about 18 miles (30 kilometers) closer to Earth than it was in 2009. Re-boosting Hubble into a higher, and more stable orbit could add multiple years of operations to its life.

“SpaceX and the Polaris Program want to expand the boundaries of current technology and explore how commercial partnerships can creatively solve challenging, complex problems,” said Jessica Jensen, vice president of Customer Operations & Integration at SpaceX, in a press release. “Missions such as servicing Hubble would help us expand space capabilities to ultimately help all of us achieve our goals of becoming a space-faring, multiplanetary civilization.”

NASA plans to safely de-orbit or dispose of Hubble at the end of its lifetime.

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When Axiom Space sent the first private crew to the International Space Station earlier this year, an overly aggressive itinerary caused some ripples in the professional astronauts’ work performance. Though it’s unclear if the trip interfered with the ISS crew’s science goals, the atmosphere aboard the station was strained—a classic example of too many cooks in the kitchen. Operations were impacted enough that the ISS and Axiom astronauts’ collective experiences motivated NASA to release new rules that commercial space companies will have to adhere to if they continue to join in on spaceflight activities going forward. What those changes could look like, however, will depend on how supportive and accepting NASA is to the still-emerging industry. 

Notably, the agency could require a former NASA astronaut to act as mission commander for private spaceflights, a move that would essentially make the agency a permanent liaison between public and US-based private space commerce. (The Axiom flight did already have a former NASA astronaut on board, Michael Lopez-Alegría, along with three first-time passengers—a businessman, an investor, and a real-estate magnate). 

“We got up there and, boy, we were overwhelmed,” López-Alegría said during a post-mission press conference. “Getting used to zero gravity is not an overnight thing.”

To avoid packed itineraries in flight, space tourism companies might also be required to provide documentation of the private astronauts’ work schedules. Additionally, because research activities weren’t originally envisioned as something space tourists would take part in, private companies will now submit research requests to the International Space Station National Laboratory no later than a year before expected launch. This is a huge hurdle for companies with similar objectives to Axiom, whose business model offers space tourists the opportunity to engage in activities like STEM outreach, experiments, photography and filmmaking once aboard the ISS. Members of the Axiom-1 crew helped conduct tests on self-assembling technology for future space habitats, cancer stem cells, and even air purification research. But by now NASA understands that successfully privatizing space will be harder than originally thought. 

The main reason why the ISS has had a difficult time integrating private space travel into its repertoire is because tourism has never been part of NASA’s charter, says Madhu Thangavelu, a lecturer at the University of Southern California and an expert on space tourism and architecture. “NASA is more interested in exploration, human factors, and in human physiology studies on the station, which is what they excel at,” he says. 

[Related: Here are all the ways to visit space this decade (if you’re extremely rich)]

Axiom isn’t the agency’s first brush with the tourism industry—and previous attempts have been met with much more resistance. In 2001, Dennis Tito, an engineer and US millionaire, became the world’s first space tourist when he planned to visit Russia’s space station Mir. But his flight was diverted to the ISS when the Russian station was later deorbited. Tito stayed on the station for a little less than eight days, compared to the Axiom crew’s 10-day mission, but NASA later reported that his trip caused too many disruptions. 

“They were not at all welcoming to people roaming around the station when the agency is busy doing other things,” Thangavelu, who is also on the board of directors for the National Space Society, says. 

Such instances raise important moral and legal questions as private space tourism expands: Who makes the rules for astronaut behavior, misconduct, or accidents, and who should enforce them? Currently, these space travelers are free from international agency’s scrutiny that professional astronauts are subject to, which means that any misfortune aboard the station would open up a brand new can of worms for companies to deal with.  

Bigger and broader changes need to happen across the industry if space is to become easily and financially accessible to the general public. For example, instead of relying on private commercial companies to pave the way to public access, Thangavelu says that if NASA is serious about enabling commercial space activities, the agency should focus on creating a dedicated office for space tourism. 

“It’s my belief that if we give the station access to the private sector, we will get very creative in how to better manage the facility,” he says. Taking space adventurers on tours of the ISS or involving them in lab research, he says, could also drastically lower the costs of typical missions and lend structure to the preparation and resources needed to ensure both a private and professional astronaut’s continued safety.

[Related: Selling tickets to the space station is actually decades overdue]

Other experts share Thangavelu’s views. Rachel Fu, director of the University of Florida’s Eric Friedheim Tourism Institute, says that compared to typical Earth-bound leisure activities, space tourism is a much more complicated endeavor that impacts our society on a global level. The industry needs to be constantly supervised, and having at least one government entity in the new global space race take that helm would benefit all involved parties, Fu says. Beyond tourism, private companies could further open up independent research and experiments in space. Fu also notes that the more people who are able to contribute to the next generation of knowledge, the better. 

There are currently no public plans by either NASA or the ISS to create a department solely for facilitating private spaceflights. At the moment, “NASA sees private astronaut missions as an important part of stimulating demand for commercial customers and astronauts to live and work in low-Earth orbit,“ Angela Hart, program manager of NASA’s Commercial Low-Earth Orbit Development, told Popular Science in a statement over email. She also said that it offers astronauts an opportunity to interact with crews of different training levels and goals. 

Even now, as space tourism continues its meteoric rise, being able to navigate the subtler social nuances of space travel is important as humans start to expand outwards towards the stars. And when deciding who gets to soar above Earth next, industry experts are likely to prioritize them. 

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When a Falcon 9 rocket launches on Thursday, if all goes well, SpaceX will have sent 32 vehicles to space in 2022–breaking the previous yearly record of 31 launches it set in 2021. And SpaceX has many more blast-offs planned: The California-based commercial spaceflight company is on track to launch 50 rockets this year, almost one a week. 

On July 17, SpaceX completed a launch of 53 Starlink broadband satellites via one of its Falcon 9 rockets. This marked the 31st successful mission this year and the 13th launch using the same Falcon 9 rocket stage. SpaceX has also sent the most boosters to space this year. SpaceX’s US-based competitor United Launch Alliance has completed about one launch every 64 days. 

SpaceX is also launching more often than national space agencies. China planned to be the leader in rocket launches with an ambitious goal of 60 flights in 2020. It has since made efforts to reach that goal but, to date, has completed only 24; the country says it has more than 50 launches scheduled in 2022. NASA, meanwhile, has planned eight more missions, among other projects, through the end of the year. 

SpaceX is living up to its promise of recycling rockets. Reusing rocket parts has made it cost-efficient and faster for the company to prepare launches. The Falcon 9 rocket will use boosters that were refurbished for weeks and months before the next mission.

The road to 50 launches by the end of the year has been bumpy, though. On July 11, SpaceX’s Starship booster engines blew up in a fiery explosion during testing, which SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted was “not good.” 

[Related: SpaceX Starships keep exploding, but it’s all part of Elon Musk’s plan]

Thursday’s mission, to deliver more Starlink broadband satellites to space, will take place at the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. While sending the most rockets and boosters to space is a feat in itself, Musk has a larger vision in mind. His goal is for humans to reach the moon and Mars aboard a Starship rocket—making humans an interplanetary species. If everything goes to plan, according to SpaceX, a crewed mission to the Red Planet could happen as early as 2029. 

But on the way to our solar system neighbor, SpaceX may face some competition from two new companies, Relativity Space and Impulse Space. We may be at the start of a brand-new space race: The two upstarts claim they will reach Mars faster than SpaceX. 

For now, you can watch the record-breaking launch of Falcon 9 in a YouTube livestream Thursday starting at 1:13 p.m. Eastern, beginning 10 minutes before the launch.

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Update (June 13, 2022): Today the Federal Aviation Administration announced that to move forward with the Starship launch, SpaceX will have to make more than 75 changes to its proposed plan to further reduce environmental disruptions in Boca Chica, Texas. Some of those requirements involve closer collaboration with biologists and other experts from federal agencies. Approval of the launch license is contingent on these changes, though on Twitter, SpaceX hinted that it was still on schedule for the first launch test.

After years of development, the SpaceX Starship is rumbling to life for its first big launch. But before the 164-foot-tall rocket can lift off into space, the company, headed by Elon Musk, has to make it through some final regulatory hurdles.

The launch is set to take place at Boca Chica, located at the southernmost tip of Texas and surrounded by state parks and wildlife refuge. The nature of its operations has raised concerns about potential harm to wildlife species, especially to threatened shorebirds, in the region. SpaceX has also bought out dozens of people’s homes to make them relocate, and caused other residents to evacuate during tests.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is currently completing a final environmental assessment of the site and was expected to reach a decision on May 31. However, the agency pushed back the deadline for a sixth time and is now expected to finalize the review on June 13. It said SpaceX had made multiple changes to its application that required additional FAA analysis.

Last month, the FAA released 17,000 comments, some of which raise concerns about the SpaceX project’s impact on endangered species and the nearby Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. The company filed permits to develop an additional 17.6 acres of wetlands next to its existing Starbase facility—the size of the entire affected area will likely be much larger. Boca Chica is one of the most important shorebird sites along the entire Gulf Coast, says David Newstead, director of the Coastal Bend Bays and Estuaries Program’s (CBBEP) Coastal Bird Program in South Texas. It also serves as a critical site on the Central Flyway, connecting migratory birds between North and South America.

“There’s been repeated explosions [at the testing site], many of which have spread debris into the surrounding wildlife refuge and state park habitat,” Newstead says. “And the SpaceX properties are immediately adjacent to occupied, heavily used, important shorebird habitat.”

[Related: Project Icarus is creating a living map of Earth’s animals]

The CBBEP’s monitoring efforts show that in Boca Chica, piping plovers—a federally threatened shorebird species—declined from an estimated population of 327 in 2018 to 214 in 2020. But the population recorded a slight uptick to 276 in 2021. These changes correlate with the start and stop of launch testing at the site, Newstead says. SpaceX first started manufacturing and locally testing its Starship rocket systems in 2018.

“There was a small increase [in piping plovers] this past winter, but not recovered to the extent that they were previously,” Newstead adds. “Notably, from August 2021 until April 2022, there’s been no more launch testing.”

Besides tracking piping plover populations, the CBBEP also monitors nesting snowy plovers and Wilson’s plovers at Boca Chica. These birds have mostly disappeared from the area and seem to avoid nesting in sites close to the launch site, Newstead says. 

The US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has also determined that SpaceX’s continued activity in Boca Chica will impact animals protected under the Endangered Species Act. Among those of the greatest concern are red knot shorebirds and the jaguarundi and ocelot wild cats. Marine life is also in danger, including the Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle, which nests on the beaches of Boca Chica and is the world’s most critically endangered sea turtle.

The SpaceX launch site could threaten wildlife populations by causing direct injury or death through explosions and tests. USFWS and other entities have also noted that heat, pressure, and debris from launch testing that began in 2018 could harm species or drive them away from critical habitat. But the judgment on SpaceX’s environmental impact is ultimately in the hands of the FAA. 

“I am optimistic that we will get approval [from the FAA],” Musk said this February, as reported by Spaceflight News. “Objectively, I think this is not something that will be harmful to the environment. We’ve obviously flown the [Starship spacecraft] several times … We’ve fired the engines a lot. I think the reality is that it would not have a significant impact.”

[Related: SpaceX Starships keep exploding, but it’s all part of Elon Musk’s plan]

SpaceX is shooting for a 2023 launch of its Starship spacecraft, which is designed for voyages to the moon and Mars. If the FAA decides to require a new environmental impact statement from the company, it would cause a setback of six to eight months, Musk said earlier this year. In that case, SpaceX plans to shift its Starship launch operation to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, where the company has already received the environmental approval it needs.

Newstead says although it is not uncommon for regulatory agencies to delay their decisions, the number of FAA postponements around the SpaceX project does stand out.

“I would assume that the extent of the delays is a testimony to the number of stumbling blocks the agency is facing in authorizing this type of activity,” he says. “If it was benign, [SpaceX] would have had their permit a long time ago.”

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NASA is putting $278.5 million into supporting the development of new ways to connect with devices operating in near-Earth space. In a Wednesday statement, NASA shared the six commercial satellite communications (SATCOM) providers it selected to establish “high-rate and high-capacity two-way communications” as part of its Communications Services Project.

The government agency currently uses its own fleet of near-Earth satellites to communicate with ground facilities and orbiting spacecrafts, but, according to Engadget, many were launched in the 80s and 90s, and NASA is now in a long-term process of decommissioning them. Working with commercial businesses to fill this void will allow NASA to dedicate time to other projects, the agency’s statement explains, such as deep space exploration. 

NASA spent more than a year evaluating the potential of various commercial SATCOM networks before selecting six companies to support. SpaceX and Amazon’s Project Kuiper lead the pack in funding, awarded $69.95 million and $67 million respectively, followed by Viasat Incorporated ($53.3 million), Telesat US Services ($30.65 million), SES Government Solutions ($28.96 million), and Inmarsat Government Inc. ($28.6 million). The companies are expected to match (“or exceed”) those contributions as they work to develop new technologies. 

[Related: Alexa will tag along on an uncrewed mission to the moon]

Each company has its own technical approach to facilitate near-Earth communications, which NASA says must also “lower costs, increase flexibility, and improve performance for a broad range of missions.” SpaceX, for example, already has a network of nearly 2,000 satellites in orbit and is proposing an “optical low-Earth orbiting relay network” to support SATCOM services for spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. The six companies have until 2025 to make these plans a reality and offer in-space demonstrations of their work in action. NASA hopes to then enter service contracts by 2030 as the next phase of stepping away from their own satellite system. 

In recent years, NASA has been eager to collaborate with private companies in a growing number of space ventures. In December, NASA announced funding for the private development of space stations in low-Earth orbit that will be available for government and commercial use. Eli Naffah, who leads the Communications Services Project, told Reuters in relation to this latest news that NASA also hopes such deals will spur more commercial activity in this space, which could drive down their own costs. 

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Updated (April 25, 2022): Last night, the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour undocked from the International Space Station after waiting nearly a week past the expected departure date due to adverse weather conditions at the seven possible landing sites back home. At 9:10 PM Eastern Sunday, the capsule closed its hatch and began to move towards low Earth orbit, where it remained for almost 17 hours. It splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean around 1:06 PM Eastern today, and the four Ax-1 crew members disembarked for post-flight health checks. Watch here for more updates.

Update (April 9, 2022): The Ax-1 crew successfully docked at the International Space Station today at 8:29 a.m. EST, about 45 minutes after the intended time, due to a video routing error. It will take several more hours of testing and calibration before the hatch opens to let the SpaceX passengers to embark.

NASA’s first crew of astronauts touched the stars in 1961 with Project Mercury. The Kennedy Space Center’s latest flight, however, had a different sort of crew: paying passengers.

SpaceX’s Dragon Endeavor rocket launched from Cape Canaveral at 11:17 a.m. EST on Friday, and is currently en route to the International Space Station. The crew is set to spend eight days in orbit and land back on Earth on April 18. Instead of a typical team of astronaut corps members, the four passengers include Michael Lopez-Alegría, a former NASA astronaut now working for Axiom (a management and consulting company) as well as three first-time space travelers—a businessman, an investor, and a real-estate magnate. While some have referred to the SpaceX crew members as “space tourists,” Lopez-Alegría disagrees with that description. 

“This mission is very different from what you may have heard of in some of the recent—especially suborbital—missions. We are not space tourists,” Lopez-Alegría told reporters earlier this month. “I think there’s an important role for space tourism, but it is not what Axiom is about.”

[Related: Why space lettuce could be the pharmacy astronauts need]

Before takeoff, the passengers underwent hundreds of hours of training at NASA and SpaceX facilities. In addition, each passenger will be assisting in research onboard the ISS, including collaborations with the Mayo and Cleveland Clinic, a partnership with Canadian hospitals, and several conservation-awareness projects.

For Lopez-Alegría, who was inspired by the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions as a child, going back to space as part of a historic crew is a dream come true.

“It was such an inspiration to me, and to be able to participate in what I think is opening the next chapter is truly an honor,”  López-Alegría said at a news conference on April 1. “I can say with zero hesitation that we are ready to fly.”

[Related: Here are all the ways to visit space this decade (if you’re extremely rich)]

Friday’s launch is just the first in a string of planned SpaceX and NASA flights. This new era of space exploration largely began with former President Donald Trump’s Space Policy Directive 1. Signed in December 2017, the policy called for a return to the moon, eventual exploration of Mars, and a synthesis of governmental, private, and international efforts. In 2019, NASA announced a change in policy allowing for the usage of government resources for commercial activities on the ISS, commercial destinations in low-Earth orbits, and opportunities for private astronaut expeditions.

 Axiom is currently offering three seats on its next mission, set to take place in 2023, to any interested space enthusiasts. All you need is a spare $55 million.

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This story originally featured on The Drive.

In February of 2018, Elon Musk launched his personal Tesla Roadster into orbit around the sun on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Usually, when Musk does something like this, the justification is because Musk simply is who he is, however this time, it was also done for a useful purpose. The rocket needed a test payload, and with the American billionaire having no shortage of new Teslas at his disposal, his old Roadster, the first vehicle the company sold, was a solid candidate. 

Four years have now passed since the Tesla entered a heliocentric orbit and the video feed focused on “Starman,” the space suit-adorned mannequin in the driver’s seat, went dead. That’s a long time spent in the near-complete vacuum of outer space, and as such, we were curious what’s happened to it since that fateful launch in February. To try to get an idea of what might’ve happened to the car and its unforthcoming passenger, we spoke to Dr. Anthony Waas, professor extraordinaire and chair of the aerospace engineering program at the University of Michigan. He had… well, he had a few concerns about how it’s doing.

“There are four main hazards in space,” Dr. Waas sold us. “There is temperature… the effects of gravity and no gravity… there is radiation, and then there is pressure,” he said, also throwing in solar winds for good measure. All of these things will have different effects on the materials the car is made from, and it of course depends on how the Tesla Roadster was constructed, too. What Dr. Waas seemed most concerned about was thermal cycling, and how the Roadster, which is made from a slew of different materials, might react to it. “You get huge temperature variations in space. You can have anything from -101 [degrees] to 219 [degrees] Celsius,” he explained. These changes in temperature make the car’s parts expand and contract much more than they would on earth, as automobiles are not usually subject to temperature variations of 320 degrees Celsius (576 degrees Fahrenheit). “Depending on how they were attached,” he continued, “the joints can come loose.” 

The Tesla Roadster uses a modified Lotus Elise chassis, which is mostly aluminum although it has a carbon fiber body. It’s unclear how the body is fixed to the chassis, however it very likely uses fasteners as opposed to an adhesive. These fasteners might very well come loose after an extended period of time or break under any repeated stress they’re put under. Keep in mind, these fluctuations are constant in outer space, and even something like the resin that binds the carbon fiber together will expand and contract at a different rate than the fiber itself. Dr. Waas was also careful to note that not all carbon fiber is the same. There are different ways to arrange the fiber, different resins, and different methods of combining the two. “The polymer in the [Boeing] 787… is different than the polymer in the Airbus A350, which is also carbon fiber airplane,” he explained. “So it will be different.”

There seemed to be a lot of factors contributing to how pressure—or the complete lack thereof—might affect the various parts of the car. However we then focused on a few specific components that might be affected by the massive temperature fluctuations, and the effect of solar radiation. One of them is paint.

While noting that automotive paint technology is very advanced, Dr. Waas made the informed assumption that automotive paint is not tested to the aforementioned range of temperatures seen in the vacuum of space. As a result, the fluctuations of hot and cold over time may have led to the paint cracking or peeling off entirely. “That could lead to certainly cracking of the paint, and certainly peeling off,” he told me. Interestingly, if this has happened, the tiny flakes of paint are likely just floating around the car in a debris field, as opposed to flying off into space. “If it peels off, it will just fly with the vehicle, because there’s no separation forces as such.”

It’s unclear if the car’s battery pack is still fixed to the vehicle, although seeing as it was launched into space a payload test, we think it’s possible. If it is out there with the car, it may be in a variety of conditions depending on which side is exposed to the sun’s temperature, Dr. Waas says. It’s essentially an unknown, but what is more clear is that much of the rubber on the car like the tires, weatherstripping, etc is probably dry rotted, and perhaps floating around in the same debris field as the paint. “[Rubber] can withstand pretty high temperatures,” Dr. Waas said, but over time it will likely crack and disintegrate. “It’s also thermally cycled… rubber may actually crack. It may dry up, become brittle, and it may tend to crack away.” He also indicated the car’s leather interior would likely be in for similar treatment.

As far as our silent friend Starman goes, he’s probably fine. Dr. Waas notes that he is, after all, in a spacesuit. It might be gradually deteriorating over time from the radiation, however it’s designed to withstand extreme changes in temperature and resist other detrimental forces in space.

Any serious damage to the car, Dr. Wass concluded, would be done by meteorites. As unlikely as it might sound, any part of the car that gets disturbed by an impact of varying force might sustain serious damage in such a taxing environment. How many times the car has been hit by meteorites or indeed if it has been hit at all is speculative, though. It could be nicked up, it could be Swiss cheese, or it could be perfectly fine.

The Roadster has only been out there for four years. After 10 or 20 years? It’s a question that hasn’t been widely pondered, believe it or not. “Well nobody has really thought about this,” the professor told me, clearly amused. “But now that you have asked me this question, his car could be a fantastic asset to test.” If the car or even just part of it could be retrieved and brought back to earth, Waas explained, it could be a valuable resource in exploring how these materials can withstand the conditions in outer space. Everything from the rubber tires to the battery might be valuable to examine. 

This is not impossible as Musk’s Tesla is in a known orbit around the sun between the Earth and Mars, sometimes rather close to the Earth. It would logistically be very difficult, of course, but as is typical with activities in outer space, it’s all very simple on paper. In reality, it’s likely not worth attempting to retrieve it, although saving Starman is a nice thought. Maybe bring him down and give him a friend. Send them back up there after a little party. Just an idea.

Ultimately, the extent of the damage is unknown, however it definitely seems like a fair amount is possible. The rubber, particularly the tires are likely in bad shape. The paint could be worse for wear, too. Is the Roadster totally unrecognizable? I would say that’s unlikely based on what the professor told me, but that being said, parts that have been thermally cycled may be damaged, loose, or floating around the car. Starman is probably faring better though. Always a silver lining.

As Dr. Waas indicates, it would indeed be interesting to attempt to retrieve the vehicle to really find out. That, or figure out a way to get the onboard cameras powered up again, and switched back on. Neither are very likely, but boy do we want to see the car now. Should’ve added some solar panels to keep the livestream going.

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SpaceX launched 49 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit last week, with plans to eventually bring them up to higher altitudes. But due to a geomagnetic storm on Friday, up to 40 of the 49 satellites are falling out of their intended orbit. 

On Friday, the sun’s surface erupted with outbursts of charged particles called “coronal mass ejections.” Those particles made it harder for the satellites, which were planned to provide internet access, to maintain their orbits. In a statement on Tuesday, SpaceX said “the escalation speed and severity of the storm caused atmospheric drag to increase up to 50 percent higher than during previous launches.”

The geomagnetic storm itself “was by no means a big event”—it happened at “just the wrong time,” Bill Murtagh, the program coordinator at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center told Space.com. “That is a drag,” he added. 

By design the satellites will burn up as they return to Earth, posing no risk to people or other satellites.  “Up to 40 of the satellites will re-enter or already have reentered the Earth’s atmosphere,” SpaceX said in a statement on Tuesday. 

[Related: NASA images show the sun has had a rough week]

Friday’s solar storm is a sign of what is to come in the next few years. The sun operates on 11-year cycles, going between periods of calm and periods of intense storms. We’re currently in a milder phase of the sun’s activity, but events like solar flares and coronal mass ejections will ramp up, likely peaking around 2025. During “solar maximum,” storms like this recent one will occur hundreds of times over just a few years. 

NOAA measures geomagnetic storms on a severity scale of G1 to G5. The agency issued a warning for a “likely” geomagnetic storm of G1 to G2 the day before SpaceX launched its 49 satellites. Given this warning, and the fact that the potential impacts of storms on orbits are pretty well known, some experts find it peculiar that SpaceX would not have accounted for this possibility in its launch plans. 

“It’s a bit of a surprise,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, told The New York Times. “They should have been ready for this, one would have thought.” 

Solar storms of this magnitude are fairly common, but to have so many satellites succumb at once is unusual. “To lose most of the batch is unheard of,” McDowell told CNBC. “This is huge compared to anything that’s happened before.”

There are currently 1,915 Starlink satellites in orbit, and SpaceX plans to launch thousands more in the coming years—the company’s goal is to create an internet service accessible from nearly anyplace on Earth. A loss of 40 doesn’t seem so big against that grand scheme. But each of these satellites is estimated to cost $500,000—the loss of about 40 satellites will cost SpaceX around $20 million.

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Update (February 14, 2022): A correction was released that SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will not crash into the moon—but another craft, China’s Chang’e 5-T1 booster, is instead bound for the lunar collision. On Saturday, February 12, Bill Gray, creator of near-Earth object tracker Project Pluto, posted the correction on his website. The error was initially spotted by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer, Jon Giorgini, who prompted Gray to take another look at earlier space missions and the spacecrafts’ trajectories.

Part of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will be crashing into the moon in March—an unintended lunar collision that is likely the first of its kind. 

The piece is a booster from a Falcon 9 rocket that SpaceX launched in February 2015 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The rocket carried NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite on what was supposed to be SpaceX’s first deep space mission. While DSCOVR made it to its target—a point thousands of miles from Earth that provides a stable orbit for the observatory—Falcon 9 faltered at its second stage. 

After releasing its satellite, Falcon 9 was originally supposed to return to Earth. But the rocket had gone too high and lacked the energy to escape Earth’s atmosphere. It is now space junk, and has been circling Earth in a chaotic orbit since then. 

Now, the rocket is on route for “certain impact” with the moon on March 4, writes Bill Gray, the creator of the Project Pluto software, which is used by both professional and amateur astronomers worldwide to track near-Earth objects, asteroids, minor planets, and comets. When the second stage crashes, it will be “the first unintentional case” of space junk impacting the moon that he is aware of, Gray writes in a blog posted last week. Based on his analyses, he believes the rocket, traveling at about 5,770 miles per hour, will slam into the far side of the moon near its equator.

[Related: SpaceX Starships keep exploding, but it’s all part of Elon Musk’s plan]

While this may sound frightening, astronomers assure that this is nothing to worry about. Asteroids and comets have pummeled the moon for as long as there has been a moon, which is the reason for its cratered surface. There have also been previous, deliberate crashes into the moon, like the LCROSS collision of 2009, which helped lead to the discovery of lunar subsurface water.

“For those asking: yes, an old Falcon 9 second stage left in high orbit in 2015 is going to hit the moon on March 4. It’s interesting, but not a big deal,” tweeted Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. When asked what happens if the rocket punctures the moon, he later tweeted a reply: “Just another hole in the green cheese.”

It is unlikely the collision will be observable from Earth, since it will occur on the far side of the moon, and just days after the new moon. Satellites and other spacecraft in the area are also poorly positioned and will also probably miss the event. But the aftermath of the collision could yield potentially interesting findings, like what lunar subsurface material gets ejected upon impact. Gray, who writes that he is “rooting for a lunar impact,” is hoping for something to hit the moon in an area that would be visible from Earth, but “we’d have to get very lucky for that.” 

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On Saturday, four explorers splashed down off the Florida coast after spending three days circling the planet. Like the crews who have orbited the Earth before them, they spent some of their time taking advantage of the rare opportunity to study how the human body—their bodies—reacted to an exotic environment featuring diminished gravity and elevated cosmic radiation. 

But unlike previous orbital crews, the members of the Inspiration4 mission, operated by SpaceX, are not professional astronauts who had spent a career preparing for the experience. Rather, they belong to an emerging class of travelers, variously called spaceflight participants, space fliers, or space tourists. These adventurers are distinguished by a combination of wealth and luck. 

Otherwise, however, the first private orbital crew consists of normal people, presenting researchers with a unique opportunity—and a singular challenge. For the first time, investigators had the chance to find out how everyday folks adjust to space. But to do so, they needed to design experiments that anyone could, and would want to, carry out during an out-of-this-world vacation. 

“We’re looking to the future of private nonprofessional people going into space, so we have to strike that balance of the science being easy to implement, easy to execute, and low burden,” says Jimmy Wu, a biomedical engineer at the Baylor College of Medicine’s Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH), which organized Inspiration4’s research activities. “It’s definitely a shift from working with professional astronauts who are paid to do that.”

A battery of tests

TRISH investigators had a host of questions they hoped Inspiration4’s crew—made up of billionaire Jared Isaacman, physician assistant Hayley Arceneaux, data engineer Chris Sembroski, and geoscientist Sian Proctor—could help answer during their time in orbit. The scientists designed a handful of research projects to answer some of the most pressing concerns. 

Before and after the flight, the crew used a tablet with an accelerometer to see how well they could stay balanced. The system in the inner ear that keeps the body oriented relies on gravity, and its disruption could be linked to the bane of every space traveler: space sickness. Puzzlingly, researchers haven’t found any connection between astronauts who get car sick and those who get space sick, so TRISH scientists are casting a wider net. 

[Related: SpaceX’s Inspiration4 mission and launch in 9 photos]

“We haven’t seen any good correlation between what happens on Earth and what happens in space,” Wu says. “We just need a lot more data to understand this and connect with the general population.”

The Inspiration4 participants also used tablets to take ten tests to measure their reaction times and overall cognitive function. When astronauts have taken such tests on the International Space Station, researchers haven’t detected any mental fog. But that might be because the tests are too rough to pick up subtle dips in the already high performance of elite pilots and the like. If space travelers from more diverse backgrounds experience more significant declines, researchers would like to know. 

Real-time health monitoring

A major challenge of spaceflight is keeping the crew healthy in the absence of hospitals and doctors. Star Trek explorers had a “tricorder” device to monitor the general status of their bodies. In a small step toward that future, the Inspiration4 crew field tested two apparatuses for studying their health in real time. 

One was a handheld ultrasound machine for tracking how water moves through the body when it doesn’t have gravity dragging it downward. Technicians take ultrasounds at hospitals, but Inspiration4’s device uses artificial intelligence to watch the images and guide a novice user accordingly. “That allows for more unskilled operators to do ultrasound, rather than going through many months of training to do that,” Wu says. 

The crew also took saliva and pin-prick blood samples, which another apparatus analyzed instantaneously for signs of stress, inflammation, and immunity. The members brought the samples back to Earth for preservation as the first entries in a long-term scientific endeavor: the building of a “biobank.” 

These samples will remain at the Baylor College of Medicine for research into spaceflight phenomena of the body. It was only after astronauts started spending long periods of time on the space station that NASA began to document still-mysterious changes to their vision, for instance. An extensive biobank could help researchers study other still unidentified health effects, especially as a wider range of people venture into space. 

“Twenty years from now it’d be nice to be able to look back” and answer the question, “‘Was this happening with the very first civilian space flights?’” Wu says. 

A crash course in research

But before they could begin amassing this treasure trove of information, TRISH researchers had to design the experiments to be as simple as possible and train the space fliers to carry them out. While professional astronauts have years to prepare for a mission, the Inspiration4 crew had just a few months. And much of that time was spent learning to cope with life-or-death emergencies, such as what to do if the spacecraft’s window broke. 

[Related: SpaceX Starships keep exploding, but it’s all part of Elon Musk’s plan]

Professional astronauts oversee a wider range of experiments, many of which are automated, but the Inspiration4 team still had to study their intended research program. TRISH researchers taught a SpaceX employee how the experiments worked, and that employee trained the crew on site. Now that the spacecraft and its passengers have returned to Earth, TRISH, which paid an undisclosed amount of money to fly its research, waits to find out how successful its projects were. 

“We did our best to get them ready and capable of doing the science, but the nature of it is they’re on their own,” Wu says. 

More space fliers to come

Determining whether the experiments and training program were straightforward and effective enough will be a major research result in its own right, because Inspiration4 likely marks the beginning of a new wave of space travel. 

On average, fewer than a dozen astronauts have orbited the Earth each year since the beginning of human spaceflight in 1961. SpaceX is already on track to match that number in its first year of private flights, according to Wu, and could easily exceed it if the company starts to launch missions every month or two. In the span of a few years, what has historically been a slow drip of health information could become a deluge. 

And TRISH intends to record it all. The institute has already gotten in touch with specific crew members who will fly on upcoming missions, both announced and unannounced. “TRISH is being aggressive about engaging all potential missions because we don’t want to miss the opportunity to collect that data,” Wu says. 

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This post has been updated. It was last published on September 15, 2021.

On September 15, for the first time in history, the United States successfully sent four non-astronaut space travelers into orbit with the historic Inspiration4 mission, operated by SpaceX. The foursome traveled through space for three days in the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of Florida, on Saturday night.  

The spacecraft lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida carried by a Falcon 9 rocket. While the Dragon capsule reached outer space, it did not dock at the International Space Station. Rather, it soared about 80 miles higher instead. The crew viewed our planet from above for three days in orbit before returning through the atmosphere and landing in the Atlantic Ocean.

Watch the launch here:

The main funding for the mission came from billionaire Jared Isaacman, the founder and CEO of payment processor Shift4 Payments. Isaacman, who is also a jet pilot licensed to fly commercial and military aircraft, assembled this team himself from a sweepstakes, with each crew member embodying a different aspirational characteristic. Isaacman’s private, all-civilian space mission furthers the push for commercial spaceflight. This journey doubles as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Hospital, which the site’s FAQ explains by noting that, “if civilization can journey among the stars, we better have conquered childhood cancer along the way.” Isaacman paid for each spot on this flight and donated an additional $100 million to St. Jude.

The youngest among the eclectic crew is 29-year-old Hayley Arceneaux, representing hope. A childhood bone cancer survivor, Arceneaux works as a physician’s assistant at St. Jude, where she received treatment as a ten year old. Arceneaux not only became the youngest American to enter space, but the first person in space with a prosthesis—a metal rod in her leg.

Geoscientist Sian Proctor—prosperity—has space travel in her blood; her father worked at the NASA tracking stations during the Apollo missions. While she had never been to space prior to this trip, she was an astronaut candidate and completed tasks in simulated space conditions, making her the most highly trained person on the mission. 

Data engineer Chris Sembroski has aerospace experience, though not of the astronaut type. The former US Space Camp counselor served in the US Air Force, and has a degree in professional aeronautics to boot. His spot represents generosity, as it originally went to a friend of Sembroski who bid on the ticket as part of the fundraiser, but passed it off when he wasn’t able to make the journey.

The crew had been training since March, acclimating to a zero-gravity environment and the huge G-forces needed to power a rocket launch.

Inspiration4 surpassed both Blue Origins’ and Virgin Galactic’s suborbital flights in height and duration.

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Last night, the Inspiration4 mission kicked off, launching four civilians into outer space. This historic mission marks the first private, commercial spaceflight with a crew composed entirely of amateurs. Furthermore, this flight, operated by SpaceX, will surpass those by Blue Origins and Virgin Galactic in both altitude and duration. The Dragon capsule containing the crew, who were selected by commander Jared Isaacman, a billionaire businessman, will be soaring about 80 miles above the International Space Station. The capsule will orbit our planet for three days before it returns back into the atmosphere and splashes down in the Atlantic Ocean.

Here’s what the mission has looked like so far.

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As frequent rocket launches make space more accessible, spent vehicles are plummeting back to Earth. In May, a 23-ton Chinese rocket splashed into the Indian Ocean near the Maldives, ending days of uncertainty over where it would land. And in March, the four-ton upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket caused a spectacle when it broke apart over the Pacific Northwest. 

On top of rockets, large projects like internet satellite constellations are just now ramping up, so the current drizzle of falling space debris is likely to keep intensifying. 

Now, a team of researchers believes they have the ideal prototype for tracking the brewing celestial storm: dozens of cameras that keep unwavering watch over Spain’s sky. Designed to spot natural fireballs, in February the Spanish Meteor and Fireball Network (SPMN) picked up a Falcon 9 rocket stage burning up over the Mediterranean Sea. The detection suggests that, together with similar “fireball networks” elsewhere, the SPMN could become a valuable tool for helping space organizations understand and minimize the terrestrial risks of space debris, keeping the odds of a rocket crashing through a roof vanishingly low. 

[Related: The COVID oxygen shortage is delaying NASA rockets]

“Fireball networks can be very useful for the aerospace community, as we have very precise information about the things that are going through space,” says Josep Trigo-Rodríguez, an astrophysicist from the Institute of Space Sciences (CSIC-IEEC) in Barcelona, and coordinator of the SPMN. 

The Spanish fireball network

The SPMN was never supposed to track falling rockets. For a quarter century, the 200 or so cameras, which are spread out across 37 sites on the Iberian Peninsula, have watched the night sky for the bright streaks left behind when meteors plow into Earth’s atmosphere. The scientists behind the network catalog hundreds of fireballs each year, which they use for two purposes. 

First, they look ahead to predict where the space rocks might have fallen. Using the network, researchers successfully recovered a meteorite from Northern Spain in 2004, which at the time was only the 10th meteorite found in this way. 

Second, they look backwards to estimate where in space the meteor came from. Calculating the original orbits of these objects has helped astronomers discover streams of smaller pieces coming from more threatening asteroids and comets. 

“We are trying to understand the sources of hazards to humans coming from space,” Trigo-Rodríguez says. 

An artificial fireball

Now the team is trying to get a handle on hazards originating closer to home. 

On Feb. 16, three of the network’s cameras picked up a fireball that, from their perspectives in southern and eastern Spain, appeared to be traveling across the crown-shaped constellation of Cassiopeia.

But this fireball moved completely unlike those the SPMN usually detects. When meteors arrive from deep space they come in hot, hurtling through the atmosphere at a steep angle and glowing for just seconds. This object took its time, hanging in the sky for minutes. SPMN researchers quickly realized it must be a piece of space debris, since objects in Earth’s orbit move more slowly and travel nearly parallel to the ground. 

By tweaking the software typically used to analyze the furious flashes of natural fireballs to fit the leisurely arc of the debris, the group calculated the object’s precise path through the atmosphere. The researchers then compared the trajectory with the orbits of debris listed in a US government catalog and found a match. Their fireball was the upper stage rocket of a SpaceX launch of 60 Starlink satellites from earlier that night. The group released their calculations on Sept. 2 in a pre-print, which has been accepted for publication in the Journal Astrodynamics. 

“To our knowledge it’s the first time that someone has done this using wide-field imagery,” Trigo-Rodríguez says, referring to the way fireball network cameras capture broad swaths of the sky. 

Tracking space debris

And it likely won’t be the last. Rocket launches are on the rise, and SpaceX is just one of a handful of companies in the process of assembling swarms of thousands of internet satellites. These satellites will operate for roughly five years before swan diving into the atmosphere. Trigo-Rodríguez expects that the refreshed software, which was written by his Ph.D. student Eloy Peña-Asensio, an aeronautic engineer at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and CSIC-IEEC, will flag many more instances of falling debris in the future. Doing so, he says, serves three main purposes. 

[Related: SpaceX Starships keep exploding, but it’s all part of Elon Musk’s plan]

To start, identifying space debris could help calm eyewitnesses who may be alarmed at unusual lights in the sky. The March incident in the Pacific Northwest, for instance, appeared dramatic enough to prompt a child of one observer to ask, “Mom, are we ok?” 

Second, studying the objects’ paths could lead to their recovery. Collecting satellite shards might have some limited scientific value (Trigo-Rodríguez’s past research has found that molten balls of metal can imitate natural meteorites, winning them the tongue-in-cheek-nickname, “meteorwrongs”). But more importantly, it could help researchers understand what can survive a fall from space and whether the debris could be dangerous. 

Next, public knowledge of where rocket and satellite pieces end up could put pressure on space organizations to act responsibly. Most rocket stages dive into oceans through a combination of luck and design (most of the Earth is water and launches generally aim for the middle of the Pacific), but countries are legally responsible for damages if anything goes wrong. 

In 1978, for example, a nuclear-powered Soviet satellite crashed in northern Canada, strewing radioactive material across a 600-mile-long strip of land. The Canadian government charged the Soviet Union $6 million Canadian dollars ( about $18 million in US dollars today), and eventually received half that much. 

Fireball networks capable of recognizing space debris, Trigo-Rodríguez suggests, could increase transparency. “All the space agencies around the world should take care to put all these rockets on the right trajectories to decay far from people,” he says. 

Driven by the scientific desire to collect meteorites, fireball networks are already going global. Networks in Australia, Canada, the US, the UK, Argentina, Morocco, and other countries have unified to form the “Global Fireball Observatory,” which continues to expand. Preparing them for artificial fireballs would require just a simple software upgrade. 

“We can establish closer cooperation with [the] aerospace [community] in order to use all the infrastructure we have already built,” Trigo-Rodríguez says. 

Correction Sept. 13, 2021: This post has been updated to correctly name the body of water over which the Falcon 9 rocket stage was burning. It was the Mediterranean Sea; there is no Mediterranean Ocean.

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This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

Wade at night into the gently lapping surf at Boca Chica Beach, an undeveloped stretch of sand about 20 miles east of the Texas border town of Brownsville, and ahead you’ll see nothing but Gulf waters meeting sky—endless, dark but for the stars and languid whitecaps. A pensive, ancient view to make you feel small and the world enormous. 

Turn around and everything inverts. Beyond a smattering of working-class Latino families, gathered around bonfires and pickup trucks on the beach, looms something brimming with novelty, brightness, and ambition: the South Texas launch site for SpaceX, where one day a 400-foot rocket may leave Earth en route to Mars. 

Just 1,500 feet from the water’s edge, amid rolling sand dunes and acres of tidal mud flats, rises a launchpad of towering cranes and scaffolding lit up like a sports stadium. Two miles back down State Highway 4, the only road reaching this remote bit of Texas coastline, is a bustling command and production facility. Around 10 p.m. on a June evening, construction workers huddle together on a platform encircling a huge white tank, consulting in Spanish about the job at hand, their acetylene torches showering sparks into the night air. Out front, where the company has erected an illuminated sign reading “Starbase,” tourists arrive to take selfies. One man says he came all the way from Kentucky, hoping to get a job with SpaceX. He’s exultant. “It’s like 530 years ago,” he says, “the last time we settled a new world.”

There are those in Brownsville who call SpaceX—the California-based corporation founded by Elon Musk, the world’s second-richest man—a form of colonization. “Brownsville is an area that’s been colonized and recolonized and has done so much to benefit people who come from somewhere else but not the people from here,” says Michelle Serrano, a local activist with the progressive network Voces Unidas.

Musk’s company, a 19-year-old concern now worth $74 billion, is a trailblazer in the field of privatized space travel. Last year, SpaceX became the first private company to carry NASA astronauts from Florida’s Cape Canaveral, the traditional hub of U.S. space launches, to the International Space Station. Musk is presently feuding with fellow space entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest individual, over future NASA contracts. Ultimately, Musk’s dream is to establish human society on Mars, an enterprise for which Texas beachgoers and rare wildlife are paying the price.  

About a decade ago, Musk began scouting locations for a new launch site, looking for cheap land near a body of water to catch falling rockets and relatively near the equator for aeronautic reasons. The tip of South Texas seemed to fit the bill. SpaceX began gobbling up properties near Boca Chica Beach, which runs 7 miles from the mouth of the Rio Grande to the ship channel that separates it from South Padre Island. 

Musk met with county and state officials, who rushed to lure him to an area where poverty rates hover around 30 percent. The state kicked in $15 million in incentives, and Cameron County abated the company’s property taxes for 10 years. In 2013, then-state Representative René Oliveira passed a bill allowing the county to close the beach during SpaceX launch activities, a move otherwise forbidden by Texas’ 62-year-old Open Beaches Act, one of the nation’s strongest laws protecting public beach access. 

For years, Musk barely touched the site. Then, in 2018, a space complex began to emerge. By mid-2019, test rocket launches started. Soon, the explosions followed. At least eight times, experimental space rockets met fiery demises during testing or landing, spewing flames and metal debris into crucial shorebird habitat abutting the beach. The company bought out most residents, some under duress, of a tiny subdivision next to the new production facility. Musk’s public enthusiasm also helped spur gentrification in nearby Brownsville, where housing costs rose last year by 20 percent, outpacing most major Texas cities. Meanwhile, local families, who had for generations come to Boca Chica Beach whenever they pleased, found their path increasingly blocked.

Charlie Guillen, 39, has fished at Boca Chica his whole life, just like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. Standing in the surf, anglers can reel in redfish, black drum, speckled trout, and whiting. Free of charge and open 24/7, Boca Chica has long been the beach for locals, Guillen says, while tourists pay for entry to the condo-riddled South Padre beach. Guillen, who runs a yearly fishing tournament at Boca Chica, used to come to the beach three or four times a week. But since SpaceX began closing the area every few days for everything from launches to equipment moving, he goes less and less. 

“Boca Chica is the poor man’s beach,” he says. “It’s kind of like the fajita: People used to throw that away, and when they found out the poor guy was eating something pretty good, they took it away and started charging a lot of money for it.” 

According to agreements with federal and state regulators, SpaceX should generally give 14 days’ notice before closing the road to Boca Chica and do so for only 300 hours a year. But advisories posted by the county, and monitoring by the state parks agency, show the company routinely provides only a day or two heads-up. The federal Fish and Wildlife Service and an independent environmental group have calculated that SpaceX closed the highway for more than 1,000 hours—around 42 days—in both 2019 and 2020 and is on a similar pace this year. The company also often changes plans last-minute and exceeds announced times. 

Musk seems to have imported the Silicon Valley mantra of “Move fast and break things” to South Texas, where federal and local officials have mostly stayed out of his way. SpaceX employees have used the shoulder of State Highway 4 as a parking lot, and the two-lane road has seen a surge in traffic, potholes, and roadkill. One family is suing the company over a fatal car accident. Musk’s company also told federal regulators it would block lighting from reaching the beach, where it might disturb nesting sea turtles. A beach visit dispels that notion. Federal documents further state SpaceX is avoiding launches during turtle and bird nesting season, roughly March through September, which is disproved by a glance at the feds’ own public data or Musk’s Twitter feed.

In fact, Musk’s entire Texas project has changed from what the Federal Aviation Administration approved in 2014. Back then, SpaceX said the site would be for launching proven Falcon rockets, the ones it’s used to carry astronauts. That never happened, and the company is instead testing much larger experimental “Starships” designed for Martian travel. Hence the fires and explosions.

Musk seems to see Boca Chica as terra nullius, no man’s land. “We’ve got a lot of land with nobody around, and so if [a rocket] blows up, it’s cool,” he said of the area in 2018.

On a Saturday morning in June, Mary Helen Flores, a 56-year-old Brownsville native who helps run volunteer beach cleanups, pulls up to Boca Chica in her white SUV. Parked vehicles extend to the horizon in both directions; mothers sit with children in the shallow tide; seagulls and brown pelicans swarm. “There was no other beach like Boca Chica on the entire Gulf Coast that you could drive on for free, stay as long as you wanted, and it was completely undeveloped,” Flores says.“There’s no replacing that, so I don’t understand how it was just pissed away.” 

Mars. Elon Musk wants to go to Mars, a planet at least 34 million miles away with no breathable air and temperatures about 80 below zero. Once there, he wants to colonize it, establishing an independent human civilization. Why? To save humanity, if you take his word for it.

“Either we’re going to become a multi-planet species and a space-faring civilization, or we’re going to be stuck on one planet until some eventual extinction event,” Musk has said. Elsewhere, he’s stated his only reason for amassing a $160 billion net worth is for this sort of astral charity: “I am accumulating resources to help make life multiplanetary and extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” 

There’s a certain logic to Musk’s claims. By burning fossil fuels and proliferating nuclear weapons, we humans have made our planet more catastrophe-prone. Plus, some hundreds of millions of years from now, the sun could grow too hot for life on Earth. Musk believes we need a fail-safe, a vision that’s earned him both fans and detractors.

“The advocates of Mars colonization are saying, ‘Earth has all these problems with regard to its potential habitability for humans,’ which is certainly true,” says Daniel Deudney, a professor of political science at John Hopkins University who wrote a recent book arguing against space colonization. “But their solution is to go to an utterly lifeless, vastly inhospitable space millions of miles away and start from scratch, as opposed to saving the rainforests or preventing acidification of the ocean.”

Deudney describes life on Mars as hellish: To breathe and avoid death by radiation, humans would shelter in heavily insulated domes or bunkers. We’d need to create contained, artificial ecosystems, something we’ve been unable to pull off on Earth. Musk says we should “terraform” Mars, or make it Earth-like, while NASA says that’s impossible in the foreseeable future. And if we did ever establish a self-sustaining population—a huge if—Deudney believes we’d come to regret it. 

As space colonies became independent, Deudney argues, war would overtake the final frontier just as it does on earthly frontiers, only deadlier. Think weaponized asteroids. “The space environment is intrinsically violent in ways that are completely alien to terrestrial existence,” he says. “Really, our future generations will curse us for having started this.” Better, Deudney says, to put our limited time and money toward directly addressing threats at home—the only place in the universe that we know is conducive to complex life.

Of course, there are other uses for Musk’s massive reusable rockets, even if Mars colonization never takes off. Take luxury tourism. SpaceX has plans to shuttle three tourists to the International Space Station, in a rocket launched from Florida, for a price of $55 million each. Another billionaire, Richard Branson, became the first person to self-fund a brief trip to suborbital space in July, and his company has sold seats on such flights for about $250,000. For reference, the median household income in Brownsville is $39,000 a year. 

Then, there’s satellite deployment. For its budding internet service, SpaceX has launched more than 1,000 satellites into orbit, with plans to send off about 40,000 more. This swarm of reflective objects, sometimes visible to the naked eye, has already polluted astronomers’ space images with trails of light, like a child drawing with a highlighter. Musk “is screwing astronomy with his satellites,” says Nicholas Suntzeff, professor of observational astronomy at Texas A&M. 

Suntzeff especially fears the potential use of satellites for corporate advertising. Next year, SpaceX plans to ferry a satellite into orbit for a company that will display images of a customer’s choice on the satellite in return for cryptocoin payments. The pictures will be visible only via livestream on electronic devices, but Suntzeff suspects ads will one day be seen from the ground. “When you look up at the sky and instead of seeing the moon, you see Chick-Fil-A, it’s gonna really piss people off,” he says. “The sky is the heritage of all humanity … and a few companies trying to make money will take that away from us.”

Last, there’s the long-standing overlap between space and military technologies. In the century behind us, the Nazi Wernher Von Braun invented the V-2 rocket, a long-range ballistic missile for use against the Allies that later propelled the first man-made object into space. In our current century, the American military already pays SpaceX to launch spy satellites, and the Air Force is interested in using the company’s Starship to deliver large payloads all over the world.

Musk is not the first to dream of developing Boca Chica Beach. In the 1800s, a settlement called Clarksville stood where the sand meets the mouth of the Rio Grande; in the 1930s, an Army colonel from Missouri erected a small seaside resort on the beach. Both projects were ravaged by hurricanes. Musk isn’t even the first rocket enthusiast to grace Boca Chica. In 1933, a skydiving exhibitionist put on a show billed as the Human Rocket, in which he leaped from a moving plane and planned to ignite fireworks with a cigar as he descended. With hundreds gathered on the beach to watch, the man vanished mid-stunt into the mist over the Gulf. Newspaper reports suggest he either drowned or fled to Mexico.

In 1954, a new bridge facilitated travel to South Padre Island, and from then on Padre became the hub for waterfront tourism and entertainment. Boca Chica was left alone to cement its identity as the poor people’s beach, free and a touch wild. 

Perhaps, though, Musk will be the man to stick the landing at Boca Chica. Maybe SpaceX will avoid a serious hurricane hit, a scenario that Texas’ parks department has said could cause “catastrophic damage.” Rather than vanish in the mist, Musk might write Boca Chica into the world history books. Already, he’s taken to calling the area Starbase, and—despite the fact that most of the surrounding land is owned by the state or federal government—he professes plans to settle a kind of company town. SpaceX has also hinted at schemes for a luxury resort.

Maybe, one day, Brownsvillians at Boca Chica will be able to stand in the shadow of a colossal Mars-bound rocket, bathed in the lights of a high-dollar hotel, watching countless satellites careen overhead like for-profit shooting stars, knowing that they were a part of history. Some locals will hold jobs at SpaceX, and a few may even be well-paid enough to buy a ride into murderous space itself. Perhaps, it will all be worth it.

Henry Garcia, a slight 55-year-old, stands in the Boca Chica surf holding his infant grandchild on a Friday evening. As the sun sets, a salty breeze erases the last of the day’s heat. “This is where you release the stress, man, forget about everything,” he says. Garcia has six more family members with him, spanning three generations, grilling chicken nearby and prepping a bonfire. He’s fed up with SpaceX disrupting the area. “We want ’em out of here,” he says. “They stop us from enjoying the beach. It’s all ambition.” 

Asked about the jobs the company brings, Garcia shrugs, then gestures across the yawning Gulf. “I prefer this.”  

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Update: SpaceX released two new videos: a high-resolution video of the first stage landing, complete with the ultimate fiery end, as well as a close-up from the barge. Take a look in the videos above and below.

After SpaceX’s routine Falcon 9 launch to the International Space Station yesterday afternoon, the company took a stab at the extraordinary. They tried to land the main stage of their rocket as it fell back down to Earth (a feat that has never been done before). Landing a rocket after launch would mark the first monumental step toward making reusable rockets a reality, which could drastically bring down the cost of spaceflight in the future.

Pretty soon after the launch, however, SpaceX relayed the bummer news: Like their last landing attempt in January, the rocket hit its target a little too hard and could not be recovered. But now, new video released by SpaceX reveals that the initial reports of a crash don’t do the company justice. A 6-second Vine shows that the rocket did indeed stick its landing–only to fall over afterward.

In the video, the first stage of the Falcon 9–the part of the rocket that contains the main engines and most of the fuel needed for the initial launch–steadily descends from above, slowing down as it approaches the floating drone spaceport (named Just Read The Instructions). Right before it meets the ship, it tilts at an awkward angle but still manages to land. According to Musk, an “excess of lateral velocity” is to blame for causing the first stage to topple over.

Hopefully we’ll know in the coming days what problems can be fixed to prevent this type of instability in the future. But one thing is certain: SpaceX is making progress. With their first rocket-landing attempt, the rocket ran out of hydraulic fluid needed to power its hypersonic grid fins, which help to slow down and steer the vehicle to its ultimate destination. The result? The first stage slammed into the drone spaceport at a mostly horizontal angle.

As this latest video shows, the rocket managed to remain vertical for quite some time before landing. That means there’s only up to go from here for SpaceX–or in this case, upright.

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SpaceX, billionaire Elon Musk’s private spaceflight company, appears to be on a hiring spree. On its careers page, the company–which currently employs more than 3,000 people–lists nearly 200 open positions. The page is up to date, SpaceX spokeswoman Hannah Post tells Popular Science.

Many of the openings are for different types of engineers, but there’s room for everyone from a line cook to a space suit engineer. New college grads might be happy to know there are four types of positions explicitly aimed at them.

The aerospace industry is a major employer in the U.S. (though prone to boom-bust cycles). Take heavyweights like Northrop Grumman, which employs about 70,000, and Boeing, which employs more than 170,000. As private spaceflight gains ground, smaller companies such as SpaceX are adding even more jobs to the industry.

About a dozen of the new SpaceX positions are related to the company’s Dragon craft, which brings cargo to and from the International Space Station. In 2012, the Dragon became the first non-government-built craft to exchange cargo in space. The company is now working on tweaking the Dragon to send humans to space, according to its website.

So what else does it take to send private ships to space? Check out some of the surprising positions SpaceX is looking to fill, plus their job requirements:

Visual Coordinator

The visual coordinator has to “maintain on a daily basis [the] pristine aesthetic appearance of company corporate headquarters.” He or she also “takes an active role in selecting furniture, décor, and interior details.”

[Crane Technician Assistant

Besides a minimum of two years in the crane service industry and a willingness to work overtime, SpaceX helpfully specifies that it wants someone with “no fear of heights” and “great hand skills.”

Could This Be You?

General Helper

This job is exactly what it sounds like. The general helper would do everything from repairing machinery to landscaping to carpentry. He or she would need to know how to operate small power equipment, fix plumbing, install lights and more. Hats off to anyone who has all these skills.

Space Suit Design Engineer

Looks like SpaceX wants its own suits. The space suit design engineer would work with the Dragon crew systems team. He or she would design, analyze and test suit ideas. Applicants need at least a bachelor’s degree and two years of experience in structural or composite hardware engineering.

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Aside from its monumental rocket landing attempt, last week’s SpaceX launch made headlines for another reason: It jettisoned an espresso machine into space for the first time ever. Called the ISSpresso, the coffee maker is about the size of a microwave, and all it needs is a pouch of water and a capsule of espresso to make a great pick-me-up for sleepy astronauts.

While space-faring coffee machines may make for interesting cargo, the Falcon 9’s Dragon capsule also held other precious freight. Embedded within the capsule, five experiments–ranging from musculoskeletal and neurological research on rodents to synthetic muscles–made their way to the International Space Station. The sponsors of this research? Private companies including Novartis, Merck, and Ras Labs.

The station’s primary function is to serve as a research laboratory. Its sterile microgravity environment, surrounded by the harshness of space, makes it a unique place for testing the behavior of various materials and textiles, as well as experimenting with the growth of biological tissues and crystals. NASA has conducted a significant amount of research on the station, but now the space agency is beginning to understand how the ISS could help the private sector as well.

CASIS wants to spread the word to private companies across the globe: the ISS is at your disposal.

That’s where CASIS comes in. Short for the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, CASIS manages research conducted in the U.S. National Laboratory on the ISS. In order to get the maximum utility out of the orbital laboratory, CASIS wants to spread the word to private companies across the globe: the ISS is at your disposal.

“We’re working with large pharma, biotech, and material tech companies, as well as small innovative startups,” Cindy Bouthot, CASIS director of business development, tells Popular Science. This most recent payload aboard the Falcon 9 included the fifth series of payloads sponsored by CASIS.

From a research and development perspective, the ISS holds a number of unique properties and variables you can’t recreate easily for experimentation on Earth. For one, its microgravity environment can accelerate the onset of disease, making it attractive for companies hoping to understand the aging process.

“Any living organism in a microgravity environment is in a very different environment than what they’ve experienced in their evolution,” says Michael Roberts, CASIS senior research manager. “When you remove that gravity vector, you uncover gene expression and protein expression that help us to understand various pathways in the body, which are similar to pathways that cause disease on Earth.”

Research Launches To Space

An equally appealing component of the station environment is also reduced sedimentation. On Earth, gravitational forces cause particles in a fluid to settle. This can muck up experiments that involve things like protein crystal formation, as the particles within the crystals aren’t evenly distributed.

That’s something Merck hopes to bypass, by crystalizing two types of human monoclonal antibodies on the space station. (Monoclonal antibodies are important medical tools, often used to target cancer cells and treat autoimmune diseases.) The company hopes that by learning how to grow these crystals in microgravity, they can develop the best crystal structures to improve drug delivery.

“On the station, you’ll have reduced sedimentation, reduced molecular diffusion as well as reduced convection currents,” says Paul Reichert, research fellow at Merck. “All this adds up to larger crystals which are more pure and have more uniform particle size distribution. In the short term, we want to see what benefits we get from this, and see if we can mimic those conditions with Earth processes.”

And of course, there is the severity of space right next door. Material companies hoping to put their products through the ringer can introduce them to the vacuum of space in low Earth orbit, which experiences a wide range of temperatures over the course of a few hours. Bouthot mentioned an undisclosed car company that is proving its engine can withstand the harsh space environment.

“We’re really offering this compelling science platform and we show them that it is worth putting their own skin in the game.”

While conducting research and development on the space station may seem attractive to companies, there’s still the cost to consider. Bouthot says CASIS offers a good return on investment, but sending an experiment into space is still not cheap.

“With this entire infrastructure that’s been created, we’re not charging them for the launch vehicle or the astronaut being their lab tech,” says Bouthot. “Obviously there are internal development costs, their own resources, all of those types of efforts associated with the project have a cost. That can range anywhere from $50,000 and beyond, and they may use CASIS grant money to help defray that cost, or we may ask the customer to pay for that.”

Unfortunately, CASIS doesn’t have much money to give. With a budget of $15 million a year, the non-profit sometimes has to get creative to convince companies that they should send their lab work to space. Otherwise, the station’s resources are at risk of underutilization.

“When we talk with companies, we do lead with the science,” says Buothot. “We’re really offering this compelling science platform and we show them that it is worth putting their own skin in the game.”

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4:55 p.m.: Another update from Elon. Looks like the company is making progress! The rocket did, in fact, land. Musk says we’ll have only pictures for now, but video will be posted in a few days after the drone ship returns to port.

4:31 p.m.: There you have it from the SpaceX CEO himself. Just like the last landing attempt, the final stage hit its target but just couldn’t slow down enough. Hopefully we’ll learn more about the source of the issue and if it can be resolved for future attempts.

A Great Launch

4:25 p.m.: The Dragon capsule is now in orbit, and we’re waiting on word from the final stage. Looks like that will come after the livestream ends.

4:17 p.m.: Stage separation is a success! Now comes the hard part. The first stage has to make it down safely to the autonomous drone ship below.

4:15 p.m.: We’re waiting for stage separation now, when the large first stage separates from the Falcon 9’s second stage.

4:10 p.m.: LIFTOFF!

4:09 p.m.: The strong back holding the rocket has retracted, and we’re hearing a few more “gos” for launch. Looks like we’re set!

4:04 p.m.: We’re well into the terminal countdown, and the Falcon 9 has switched over to internal power. Just a few minutes to go.

3:58 p.m.: The mission team is “go” for terminal countdown.

3:55 p.m.: Liftoff is on target so far, and it looks like we’ll be go all the way through the launch window. But if SpaceX is not able to launch today, the next attempt will be made on Thursday April 16.

And we’re back at it again today. SpaceX is scheduled to launch its Falcon 9 rocket at 4:10 p.m. Eastern in Florida. According to the company, weather is 60 percent “go” for the launch, though it looks like lightning and clouds may still be a problem. Lightning from an approaching anvil cloud scrubbed the first launch attempt yesterday, so let’s hope the clouds die down a bit.

Meanwhile, Just Read The Instructions is ready and waiting in the Atlantic for a first stage rocket to come and land on it.

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Between the SpaceX rocket launch and the start of the 2018 Olympics, it sure was easy to get inspired last week. But, while others launching rockets out of the earth’s atmosphere or performing super-human feats of athletic prowess, we were here keeping tabs on the big tech stories so we could collect them here for you. No need to thank us. It’s all part of the job.

A dummy went to space

Elon Musk and his band of rocket scientists (and publicists) finally launched the Falcon Heavy rocket last week. You can read about the successful operation here and see why we chose Falcon Heavy as one of our Best of What’s New innovations last year. Some time this week, take a break from filing the TPS reports your boss gave you and think about that dummy flying through space in a billionaire’s used car.

Olympic fever set in

The 2018 Olympic games are happening right now in South Korea and they have given us a surprising amount of tech to talk about. You can click here to read about the innovative Olympic stadiums of the past, present, and future. Or, you can click here and find out how to stream this year’s games, so you can watch curling instead of doing your work.

It’s time for new Emojis

The 2018 release from the Unicode Consortium contains Emoji 11.0, which brings 157 new adorable little pixel blobs to the 2,666 that previously existed. The list includes people with red, curly, and no hair. There’s also a partying face and “leg.”

Waymo and Uber settled their self-driving car lawsuit

You may have missed it, but ride-hailing service Uber has been locked in a legal battle against the Alphabet-owned, self-driving vehicle company, Waymo since January 2017. The case alleged that a Google engineer gave Uber trade secrets regarding self-driving car tech. It’s a complex issue of intellectual property and it’s likely not the last one like this we’ll see. This one surprised many when the two sides settled early, giving Waymo a small stake in Uber.

An intern reportedly leaked the iPhone source code

Apple is protective of its property—intellectual or otherwise—so it was a big surprise earlier this week when the code for its iBoot software showed up on code-sharing service GitHub. iBoot is a crucial piece of the iPhone infrastructure that ensures security during the devices boot process. You shouldn’t worry about the security of your phone because of this leak, but it’s a pretty fascinating story, especially when you consider this Motherboard report that says Apple interns perpetrated the leak.

Meet ESPN’s new streaming service

ESPN will soon have its own streaming service, which will cost $5 per month. It won’t allow users to watch ESPN live as if it were on TV, but it will give access to “thousands” of live sporting events not available on the typical channels. Expect a lot of streaming news out of ESPN’s parent company, Disney, soon, as it begins to reveal its plans for the post-Netflix era.

Nobody’s buying CDs so Best Buy is saying “bye bye” to them

Starting on July 1, 2018, Best Buy will no longer sell audio CDs, but it plans to continue selling vinyl records for another two years. It’s a sad day for those of us who grew up with these shiny 4.7-inch platters spitting out our favorite songs. But, I couldn’t even find a CD in my house to take a picture for this article, so maybe the time is right after all.

Under Armour made a connected shoe

Under Armour Hovr sneaker

Energy return is a metric that indicates how much a sneaker can push you forward as its cushioning compresses and rebounds. The higher the energy return, the less work you have to do with every stride. Under Armour redesigned the sole of its new Hovr shoes, then added a digital sensor and transmitter to track things like pace, cadence, and distance during your run. It could be the thing you need to re-start your stalled New Year’s resolution.

Now, get back to watching curling!

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This story originally featured on Task & Purpose.

Whether they’re in Star Wars, Halo, or Warhammer 40,000, I’m a big fan of sci-fi planetary invasions, so my ears perked up when I heard the U.S. Air Force wants to invest $48 million into researching reusable rocket technology that could help shoot cargo or special operations troops into space and then bring them down to an austere base or combat zone anywhere on the planet in under an hour.

At least, that could be a capability in the next few decades if all goes well, and that’s a lot of ifs. The Air Force put the $48 million request in its fiscal year 2022 budget proposal. In the request, titled “Rocket cargo,” the Air Force says it seeks to “leverage a commercial rocket to deliver [Air Force] cargo anywhere on the Earth in less than one hour, with a 100-ton capacity.”

The branch hopes the capability would provide U.S. Transportation Command with a cheap and fast alternative to sealift or airlift, and it could also allow Air Force Special Operations Command “to perform current rapid-response missions at lower cost, and meet a one-hour response requirement,” which is wicked fast compared to a 10-plus hour flight across an ocean in a C-17 Globemaster III transport jet.

While the Air Force did not specify which commercial rocket it hopes to strap its cargo to, Ars Technica pointed out that only one matches its description: the Starship rocket being developed by the private space exploration company SpaceX. A fully reusable heavy launch rocket, Starship is designed to carry crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the moon, Mars, and beyond, according to SpaceX’s website. Once completed it will be the world’s “most powerful launch vehicle ever developed,” the company boasts.

But don’t pull on your Halo Orbital Drop Shock Trooper cosplay just yet. The Air Force was clear in its budget justification that the service does not intend to invest in developing Starship. Instead the funding is meant to help the Air Force understand if and how it can use the rocket for military applications. For example, the funding would help researchers come up with ways for Air Force loadmasters to load or unload a rocket, rapidly launch one from “unusual sites,” figure out where it might be able to land and detect enemies, and even investigate whether the rocket could airdrop its payload after reentry. 

The Air Force has already spent $9.7 million this fiscal year gathering performance and design data on Starship, and the service plans to continue doing so as SpaceX keeps testing the rocket. In fiscal year 2022, the Air Force hopes to test the rocket in greater detail, including a wind tunnel test to figure out if air-drops from the rocket are possible.

If Congress approves the funding, and if Starship works out, and if the Air Force can figure out how to use it for military applications, it could open up some really cool sci-fi scenarios.

“When you can launch an austere airbase in a space capsule, that’s frickin’ awesome!” Will Roper, the former assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics, told reporters in November during a briefing on the service’s new Advanced Battle Management System.

“Just to be able to just have it come down, halfway around the world, with everything you need to be able to maintain and operate a small fleet of airplanes—refuel it, rearm it and get it back in the fight,” Roper added.

The chief of U.S. Transportation Command, Army Gen. Stephen Lyons, said a drop platform like this could redefine military logistics.

“Think about moving 80 short tons, the equivalent of a C-17 payload, anywhere on the globe in less than an hour,” he said in October. “We should challenge ourselves to think differently about how we will project the force in the future, and how rocket cargo could be part of that.”

Lyons’ comments came just weeks after he revealed during a National Defense Transportation Association event that the Pentagon had signed a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) with aerospace pioneer SpaceX to develop potential shipping routes that pass through outer space.

U.S. Transportation Command “has identified that commercial, point-to-point space transportation may provide a unique capability, enabling the command to better support moving equipment and eventually people quickly around the globe to meet our national objectives, global emergencies, and natural disasters,” U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Nirav Lad, principal investigator for space transportation CRADAs at the command, said in a statement.

Whether the under-an-hour capability promised by rocket delivery is worth the added cost is an open question, The War Zone reported. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hopes the cost of future Starship launches will be as low as $2 million a pop, which is about four times the cost of sending a C-17 to do the job, according to The War Zone.

There’s also the question of survivability, as The War Zone asked. How smart would it be to send a big noisy target like a rocket into enemy territory, and then launch it back?

Hopefully the Air Force will answer these questions in the coming fiscal year. And if we ever hear Gen. Lyons start chanting “express elevator to hell!” we want to be the first to tell you.

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China recently unveiled drawings of the capsule it plans to use to carry humans and cargo into space in the 2020s, and the design looks strikingly familiar. With a flat top, sloping sides, and a wide bottom, all of the crew capsules in development today look like candy gumdrops. Where does this shape come from?

You might recognize it from the vehicle that brought the Apollo astronauts home. With few exceptions, human spaceflight hasn’t changed much since those days. The Soyuz capsule uses a similar shape today, and SpaceX, Boeing, and NASA are all designing brand new spacecraft with almost the exact same design.

All of these vehicles are similar because of three competing variables that spacecraft designers have to contend with: weight, space, and heat.

Drawing of the Apollo concept

“Weight is the number one problem,” says Pasquale Sforza, an aerospace engineer at the University of Florida and author of the recent book, Manned Spacecraft Design Principles. “Everything has to be really strictly fashioned for the weight.”

Astronauts need as much space as possible in order to do their jobs and be comfortable. But every pound of a spacecraft’s weight can add $10,000 to the cost of launching it. To maximize space, spacecraft designers like to use spherical shapes. These pack in as much internal volume as possible while minimizing the surface area–the walls.

“Weight is the number one problem.”

But a perfect sphere won’t do. As the spacecraft return to Earth at speeds of 17 to 25 thousand miles per hour, they’re pushing through the air and creating a lot of friction. The friction generates a potentially dangerous amount of heat, and the spacecraft’s shape determines how hot the vehicle gets.

In the early days of launching stuff into space and back again, engineers experimented with pointy-nosed vehicles. Those pointy nose cones were great at reducing drag and flying through the air efficiently, but unfortunately they melted when they tried to reenter the atmosphere.

It was NASA aeronautical engineer Harry Julian Allan who came up with the idea of using the blunt-nosed reentry vehicles like we use today.

The blunt-body principle

Once they’re built, Orion, Crew Dragon, and the rest will drop into the atmosphere bottom first. Their broad bottoms will run into air molecules on the way down. Those particles will rebound off the vehicle and crash into the incoming air. This creates a layer of air around the vehicle, so that the shockwave created by the vehicle doesn’t touch it. The layer shields the spacecraft from the heat of reentry and shapes the airflow around it.

By contrast, a pointy tip does come into contact with the shockwave, exposing the front-most part of the craft to extremely high temperatures.

Pointy shockwave

Similarly, a narrow sphere wouldn’t be great at deflecting that heat, but a larger sphere would be too bulky to maintain a practical weight. So the result is something in between. Spacecraft designers gave these craft the rounded bottom of a very large sphere, but cut off the sides to shave off unnecessary weight.

The rounded base is important, says Orion engineer Stuart McClung. “If you made it flat it becomes very inefficient. It would be like pushing a flat plate through water–the pressure waves would probably make it very rough and choppy.”

Drawing of Apollo’s reentry

The spacecraft’s sides taper into a narrowed top because as the vehicle re-enters the atmosphere bottom first, it comes in at an angle, skimming through the atmosphere instead of plunking straight down. The angled sides mean that less of the spacecraft is exposed to the friction during that skimming, and that means the sides don’t need to have additional heat shields that would make the vehicle heavier.

What about the shuttle?

Space shuttle Discovery lands at Edwards Air Force Base

The retired space shuttle is an exception to the gumdrop rule. Essentially an airplane, the shuttle was designed to land horizontally on a runway so it could be reused again later. But it still followed the same rules as Apollo-inspired spacecraft. The shuttle didn’t enter the atmosphere nose-first. Instead, it approached Earth at a sharp angle so that its broad underside faced the atmosphere–basically belly flopping into Earth’s atmosphere.

The Mercury and Gemini vehicles were also a bit different from the gumdrop shape. These spacecraft were more funnel-shaped, with narrow, cylindrical tops broadening into that familiar cone-shaped bottom. Just like with the Apollo craft, that cone-shaped bottom entered the atmosphere first. The elongated part was just the aerospace equivalent of a car trunk.

Project Mercury paved the way for human spaceflight

“If you’re going on a biking trip and you don’t have enough room in your trunk for the bike, you might strap it on the top of your car,” explains Sforza. It’s the same thing with Mercury and Gemini spacecraft.

However, says Sforza, “It’s not a great idea to have all the stuff hanging out the back of the spacecraft. It can give you some stability problems that are not good…. As time progressed people saw that the Apollo solution was really the best compromise.”

CST-100

Concept drawing for China’s new crew capsule

Crew Dragon

A mock-up of the Orion capsule

Soyuz

Apollo

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Falcon 9 and Dragon Takeoff on a Crisp, Clear Day

SpaceX, the poster child of commercial space flight, has been capturing our imaginations since the company was founded back in 2002, though it took them until 2010 to successfully return a craft from low-Earth orbit. Now, almost six full years from that first successful mission, SpaceX is leading humanity’s charge into space. Their latest feat, landing a Falcon 9 rocket on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean, was a major accomplishment that was picked up by news outlets all over the world. The hope, for the Elon Musk, the company’s founder and CEO, anyway, is to eventually use SpaceX technology to get to Mars and eventually set up a colony. With so much ahead of them, let’s take a look back at some of their best moments through photos.

Grasshopper Soaring Through the Sky

A Field of Rockets

A Dark and Stormy Night

Launch and Land

Abort, Abort!

A Dragon Flies

On the Dragon’s Back

Falcon 9 and Dragon Liftoff!

Falcon 9 Closeup

Falcon 9 Lands on a Barge

The SpaceX Team Gazes at Endeavour

Merlin Test Fire

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Want to live and die on Mars? Mars One has officially begun its worldwide search for astronauts who will fly to Mars in 2023—and never come back.

The first humans on Mars may be reality TV stars.

The ultimate goal is to select 24 to 40 candidates who will travel to Mars in groups of four. Mars One wants to land the first group (two men and two women, ideally from four different continents, says CEO Bas Lansdorp) on the red planet in 2023, with the other groups following one at a time, every two years. Applications close August 31, 2013.

Mars One lander

The nonprofit organization plans to televise the final rounds of the search in 2014, which means the first humans on Mars may be reality TV stars. But first, Mars One is asking the public to rate the application videos to help narrow down the selection pool. According to Norbert Kraft, the chief medical officer and head of the astronaut selection program, aspiring Martians should have five qualities: resilience, adaptability, curiosity, empathy, and creativity.

Mars One habitat

To filter out spam and frivolous entries, Mars One is charging an application fee that varies by country (it’s $38 in the United States). Applicants must create a 30- to 70-second video that explains why they want to go to Mars, and why they’re the best candidate. The pool will be narrowed to 24 to 40 in 2015.

If you’re one of the (uh, lucky?) people chosen for the program, you’ll move to the United States to spend the next seven years as a full-time, salaried employee of Mars One. Nine months of each year will be spent learning dentistry, emergency medicine, general medicine, engineering, biology, mechanics—anything you might need to know on an inhospitable planet with a population of four. The other three months of each year will be spent in a Mars habitat mock-up, complete with a 40-minute communication delay to the outside world and simulated emergencies. The hardest thing they’ll face during the simulation? A broken toilet, Lansdorp says. “That’s when people get out of control.”

Mars farm

It will cost $6 billion to get the first group of four to their new home (the reality show is supposed to fund the mission). The company will use SpaceX spacecraft to send rovers and supplies ahead of the astronauts, and then the SpaceX Falcon Heavy will get the crew to Mars, where they will assemble their habitat and begin growing their own food. Once on the red planet, the crew can do what they want—they won’t be taking orders from Mars One or anyone else back on Earth. “They will make a new civilization,” Kraft says. “They will make their own holidays, their own laws. We need to send mature people, because we won’t be telling them what to do.”

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We’re on our way to Mars. NASA has a plan to land astronauts on its surface by the 2030s. Private spaceflight companies like SpaceX have also expressed interest in starting their own colonies there, while the infamous Mars One project has already enlisted civilians for a one-way trip to our planetary neighbor in 2020.

While many may dream of living their remaining days on Mars, those days may be numbered. The Martian environment poses significant challenges to Earth life, and establishing a Mars habitat will require an extraordinary amount of engineering prowess and technological knowhow to ensure the safety of its residents.

The technology required to keep astronauts alive on Mars isn’t ready–and it may not be for many years.

Though we may soon have the launch vehicles needed to transport people to Mars, a lot of the technology required to keep astronauts alive on the planet just isn’t ready–and it may not be for many years. For those eager to get to Mars as soon as possible, take caution: A number of tragic outcomes await if you head that way too soon.

You’ll Crash

Let’s say you’ve spent many months on your deep space voyage, and you’ve finally made it into orbit around the red planet. Congratulations! Now you need to get down to the surface—and that’s going to be tricky.

The problem is Mars’ atmosphere. The air around Mars is quite thin–about 100 times less dense than the atmosphere around Earth. Spacecraft returning to our planet rely on a combination of parachutes and drag from the atmosphere to slow them down. The heavier the object, the more drag it needs to prevent it from slamming into the surface.

But with so little atmosphere surrounding Mars, gently landing a large amount of weight on the planet will be tough. Heavy objects will pick up too much speed during the descent, making for one deep impact.

Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator

“How we get down through the atmosphere to the surface is a critical challenge,” Bret Drake, deputy manager of the exploration missions planning office at NASA, tells Popular Science. “With current landing techniques, we can land only a metric ton on Mars. That’s not big enough to get a colony going; we’ll need much bigger capabilities.”

According to Drake, NASA will need to land between 20 to 30 metric tons in one trip to get all of the astronauts and supplies needed for a planetary habitat down to the surface safely. To do this, the space agency is coming up with unique lander designs—notably their inflatable Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator. Shaped like an iconic flying saucer, the LDSD’s disc shape and added inflatable balloon increase the surface area of the lander, allowing it to slow down in thinner atmospheres.

The LDSD is still undergoing tests here on planet Earth, with an upcoming test in Hawaii scheduled for June. Whether the lander will be able to land such a heavy payload on Mars’ surface has yet to be determined.

As for Mars One and SpaceX, no specific information has been given about how they plan to land on Mars just yet.

You’ll Freeze

Welcome to Mars! (That’s assuming you’ve made it down in one piece.) It’s time to get acquainted with your new home’s weather conditions.

Mars temperatures average around -81 degrees Fahrenheit, but swing wildly depending on the season, the time of day, and the location, ranging from 86 degrees Fahrenheit near the equator to -284 degrees Fahrenheit near the poles. That means astronauts will have to be equipped to battle harsh, bitter cold.

Mars Polar Ice Caps

NASA has learned a lot about sheltering astronauts from fluctuating temperatures, thanks to years of housing humans on the International Space Station. When exposed to the sun, the ISS endures heats exceeding 200 degrees, and then plunges into -200-degree temperatures on Earth’s night side. The ISS and astronauts’ space suits use specialized thermal control systems and processes like sublimation to both repel excess heat and to shield people from the cold.

Yet those control systems are designed to work well in vacuum. Entirely new methods will be needed for space suits and habitats in the atmosphere of Mars. Though it’s thin, it still contains gases which can convect heat to and from a suit (similar to how wind cools us down here on Earth). So astronauts will feel the rapid temperature changes much more harshly.

“We would need a solution that provides better insulation for the cold environments and a different way of rejecting heat for the hot environments,” says Drake. “A spacesuit in a vacuum is very similar to a thermos, but a space suit on Mars is much more like a coffee cup sitting on a kitchen counter – the coffee cools much faster in the plain cup on the counter top as compared to the coffee in the thermos.”

You’ll Starve

Mars Farming

Living in a habitat on the Martian surface will be somewhat similar to living in the remote research outposts of Antarctica. All the food and supplies needed for these stations must come from other continents, and cargo resupply missions aren’t frequent.

Mars is just a bit further away from mainstream civilization than Antarctica is, and any resupply missions to a Martian habitat would take months or years to complete. If any colony hopes to survive on the red planet, there must be some form of self-sustainability when it comes to food. That means you’ll need some interplanetary farming skills.

Mars One’s plan is to grow crops indoors under artificial lighting. According to the project’s website, 80 square meters of space will be dedicated to plant growth within the habitat; the vegetation will be sustained using suspected water in Mars’ soil, as well as carbon dioxide produced by the initial four-member crew.

“The amount of crops you could sustain just by using the CO₂ produced by people is only sufficient to feed half of the crew.”

However, analysis conducted by MIT researchers last year shows that those numbers just don’t add up.

“When you’re growing all the crops required to feed four people indefinitely, the carbon dioxide produced by the crew is insufficient to keep the crops alive,” says Sydney Do, an aerospace engineer at MIT and lead author of the report. “So essentially the crops die off very quickly, within 12 to 18 days.” Adding more people wouldn’t solve the issue, because then there wouldn’t be enough to eat. “The amount of crops you could sustain just by using the CO₂ produced by people is only sufficient to feed half of the crew’s dietary requirements,” said Do. Talk about a catch-22.

So what can be done to fix this problem? You can grow fewer crops, but that means the astronauts will eventually run out of an important food source. Or you can find a way of introducing extra carbon dioxide, perhaps through CO₂ scrubbing technology. Such innovation, which would involve absorbing gas from the thin Martian atmosphere, is only in its infancy here on Earth. But if such tech can be developed for a Martian habitat, using it to grow an increased supply of crops may have some consequences when it comes to the crew’s oxygen supply.

You’ll Suffocate (Or Maybe Explode)

Growing crops on Mars isn’t just for feeding hungry astronauts; plants will serve as a vital source of renewable oxygen for the habitat. It’s a much better option than consistently sending heavy oxygen tanks to the red planet, which will take up too much precious space on resupply missions and cost a lot of money to transport.

Studies have shown plants may be able to grow in Martian soil, however crops have never been grown in the Mars gravity environment, so further testing is required to see if vegetation can survive at all. But if that works, the plants required to feed a multi-person crew will be producing a lot of oxygen. And that’s not necessarily a good thing.

According to Do’s report, too much oxygen in a closed environment can lead to an increased risk of oxygen toxicity for the crew, and even worse, spontaneous explosions. So O₂ will have to be vented from the habitat. To do this, the astronauts would need a specialized method for separating oxygen from the gas stream. There are a number of methods for doing so here on Earth (cryogenic distillation and pressure swing adsorption) but none of these technologies have been tested for a Martian environment, and considerable research and development would be needed to make these techniques viable on another planet.

“Significant technology development is required, because the tech isn’t there right now,” says Do. “The technologies needed for this habitat can work here on Earth, but they need a lot of human tending and are very large. In terms of practical use in a space envrionment, it would require miniaturizing them, decreasing cost, and increasing their reliability.”

Recently NASA proposed “ecopoiesis” on Mars –- creating a functioning ecosystem that can support life. Their idea is to send select Earth organisms–like certain cyanobacteria–to Mars, which can then feed on the planet’s rocky terrain to produce oxygen. “Ultimately, biodomes on Mars that enclose ecopoiesis-provided oxygen through bacterial or algae-driven conversion systems might dot the red planet, housing expeditionary teams,” according to a NASA statement. However, the space agency didn’t provide word on how much carbon dioxide the organisms would need, and whether or not they could be sustained by air produced by crew members.

And then there’s MOXIE–the Mars Oxygen In situ resource utilization Experiment–which could negate the reliance on plant-based oxygen. Developed by MIT researchers, this machine works by taking carbon dioxide from the Mars atmosphere and splitting it into oxygen and carbon monoxide. A low-scale version of MOXIE will make its way to Mars on NASA’s next rover, planned for a 2020 launch. If it works, MOXIE could provide a renewable source of oxygen without the conundrum posed by growing crops.

Mars 2020 Rover

You May Not Even Make It There At All

All of these scenarios only become critical issues if you actually make it to Mars in the first place. But the sad truth is you might not even survive the trip. Barring any complications with the spacecraft’s hardware or any unintended run-ins with space debris, there’s still a big killer lurking out in space that can’t be easily avoided: radiation.

Beyond lower Earth orbit, the deep space environment is filled with cosmic rays—highly energized particles. This space radiation easily penetrates the walls of spacecraft, and it’s possible that long-term exposure can have weird effects on human health.

A recent study on mice revealed that long-term exposure to cosmic rays might lead to some abnormal changes in the brain. After subjecting mice to simulated cosmic rays, researchers noticed the mice had lost many important brain synapses. Subsequent behavioral studies on the mice showed they exhibited less curiosity and seemed confused—an eerie result, with upsetting implications for a future trip to Mars.

Beyond lower Earth orbit, the deep space environment is filled with cosmic rays.

But perhaps even more alarming is space radiation’s known ability to increase the likelihood of getting cancer. Currently, NASA monitors every astronaut’s lifetime exposure to space radiation over the course of his or her career. If ever an individual reaches a 3-percent increased risk of fatal cancer from space radiation, NASA grounds the astronaut for good.

On the space station, astronauts are partially protected from cosmic rays thanks to the Earth’s magnetic field, so it takes them some time before they reach that 3 percent limit. But on a years long, deep space voyage, there’s no magnetosphere to keep them safe. Plus some astronauts may be more susceptible to radiation exposure than others.

“Because women in general live longer than men, in the NASA prediction model, they’re much more likely to develop cancer in their lifetime with the same amount of exposure as a male,” says Dorit Donoviel, deputy chief scientist of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI), says. “Calculations have indicated a woman probably should not go to Mars, because the cumulative exposure over the duration of the mission would exceed the maximum allowable 3 percent lifetime cancer risk.”

Mars or Bust?

All of this may seem like a major bummer, but it highlights just how many obstacles we need to overcome before heading to Mars. NASA admits they’re not quite ready either, with the space agency currently soliciting ideas from the general public on how to keep Mars astronauts safe. The contest—dubbed the “Journey to Mars Challenge“—will award $5,000 to three winning participants who come up with ways to develop the elements necessary for sustaining a human presence on the red planet.

“This could include shelter, food, water, breathable air, communication, exercise, social interactions and medicine, but participants are encouraged to consider innovative and creative elements beyond these examples,” NASA said in a statement about the challenge.

Little is known about SpaceX’s plans for a Mars mission, but CEO Elon Musk says he hopes to unveil the details later this year. Yet NASA administrator Charles Bolden has a message for SpaceX, Mars One, and all other private companies with big dreams of visiting the fourth rock from the sun: You’re going to need help. Speaking at a U.S. House Committee Meeting in April focusing on space and technology, Bolden expressed his confidence in NASA’s efforts to get to Mars despite the challenges, though he holds less confidence for all private endeavors. “No commercial company without the support of NASA and government is going to get to Mars.”

The challenges of surviving long-term in a Mars habitat are also explored in The Martian, the debut novel of Andy Weir which will be getting the Hollywood treatment later this year. The book follows astronaut Mark Watney, who struggles to survive alone on Mars after his crew mistakes him for dead and leaves the planet without him. Watney must overcome significant obstacles, such as growing his own food and finding clever ways to procure water. Weir echoes a sentiment shared by NASA: Even if you have all the right technology, you can’t just prepare for a perfectly executed mission. “The main thing you have to do for a Mars trip is account for failures,” he says. “How do you make sure the mission plan accounts for this and that? For the book, I was using my imagination about ‘Hey, what could break?’ But there are several things, several problems we haven’t solved yet.”

Though Weir’s book focuses on the worst-case scenario, he’s confident that we will get to our neighbor someday; it’s just going to take a lot of time and a lot of money. “Getting to Mars is an enormous undertaking that I don’t think we have the technology to do currently,” says Weir. “But we could. It’s going to happen.”

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Tired of being stuck in traffic on the highway or waiting endlessly for a delayed subway? Almost three years ago, Elon Musk envisioned The Hyperloop, a new type of public transit that would whisk commuter-filled pods efficiently across hundreds of kilometers in a matter of minutes via tubes running either above- or below ground; and of course, only second to teleportation in terms of “overall coolness.” Despite start-ups trying to get in on the competition sponsored by Musk’s company SpaceX, a student team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology emerged earlier this year as the front-runner when it won the competition’s design phase. On Friday, MIT finally unveiled the prototype pod that it will test this summer at a 1.6-kilometer racetrack near SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

MIT‘s design placed first among more than 115 teams from 20 countries during the first phase of the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition at Texas’s A&M University in College Station. The top five contenders included teams from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands; the University of Wisconsin–Madison; Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech); and the University of California, Irvine.

Despite Musk’s original idea of a pod floating on an air cushion or rolling along a track on wheels, MIT’s team ended up opting for magnetic levitation as a solution to a tough engineering problem: not just how to propel the capsule, but how to keep it on the track, and just as importantly, how to make it stop. The University of Colorado Denver’s HyperLynx team developed a hybrid of Musk’s original vision and MIT’s mag-lev principle — a pod that uses wheels for traveling at less than 160 kilometers per hour and an air cushion for higher speeds.

Greg Monahan, who leads the team’s levitation efforts, stated: “One of the most interesting parts of the Hyperloop is the attempt to go significantly faster than any other type of land travel,” says Greg Monahan, who is pursing a master’s in mechanical engineering and leads the team’s levitation efforts. Once a vehicle nears the speed of sound—1,236 kilometers per hour—”any type of contact with the ground or a track gets really complicated from an engineering standpoint.

Among the 30 finalists to publicly reveal their pod design, MIT’s mag-lev prototype, which costs about $150,000 to build, is 2.5 meters long, weighs 250 kilograms and is expected to reach speeds up to 369 kilometers per hour with an acceleration of 2.4 Gs. SpaceX’s decision not to require competition pods to accommodate passengers had a significant impact on the MIT design — so far, MIT’s designed pod cannot be made bigger to fit passengers.

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U.S. astronauts have been bumming rides to space from Russia for more than three years. Soon they won’t need to. This year, NASA officially selected the SpaceX Dragon Version 2, along with Boeing’s CST-100, as the nation’s new taxi to and from the International Space Station.

the story here

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Update on March 4: Yesterday, Starship number SN10 exploded on the ground after landing. That marks the third consecutive explosion of a SpaceX Starship rocket. The story below, first published on February 17, outlines the company’s controversial approach with the large space vehicles.

In February, a gleaming, 15-story rocket exploded in a massive fireball over a coastal testing facility near Brownsville, Texas. A video of the fiery crash, broadcast via YouTube by SpaceX, looked like something out of a Michael Bay blockbuster.

To many observers, the crash of the SN9 Starship rocket may have seemed like a significant setback for SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and his team of pioneering engineers who hope someday to take people to Mars. But to SpaceX principal integration engineer John Insprucker, the crash was all in a day’s work. “We had, again, another great flight up,” Insprucker said on the video following the crash. “We’ve just got to work on that landing a little bit.”

Work on that landing, indeed. Here’s what to know about that fiery event, a previous one in December, an upcoming attempt (update on March 4: that one exploded too), and why the FAA is involved.

What happened to SpaceX’s Starships SN8 and SN9

Sending rockets to space is hard. Landing them back on earth intact so they can be reused is even harder. NASA has known this for decades, but now we are in a new era of space travel, with private companies like SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, and other private firms who are racing to open up space to the public in a way that only science fiction movies could imagine just a quarter-century ago.

The February 2 crash came less than three months after another Starship rocket, the SN8 (the SN stands for Serial Number), also exploded on December 9, 2020, at SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility near Brownsville, Texas. Though spectacular and seemingly dangerous, both explosions were not entirely unexpected. (It’s worth noting that both were uncrewed tests, and no one was hurt.)

In a tweet on November 24 before the SN8 launch, Elon Musk said that a “lot of things need to go right,” and gave the possibility of total success a “1/3 chance.” Despite the SN8 crash, SpaceX declared afterward that the flight represented an “awesome test,” and added, “Congratulations, Starship team!” In a tweet following the crash, Musk said the explosion was caused by low fuel tank pressure.

[Related: SpaceX’s Starship flies, belly flops, and bursts into flames]

The SpaceX Starship program began in 2016 with the goal of launching cargo and as many as 100 people at a time on missions to the moon and eventually to Mars. During its early development stages, Musk said that the Starship vehicle could potentially launch people into space by 2020, but he has since backtracked on that statement, saying that there are likely “hundreds of missions,” still ahead before that happens.

The Starship rocket is actually the second stage of a two-part reusable launch system. When fully operational, the Starship carries payload and passengers and is lifted into space using a first stage, or booster rocket, called the Super Heavy. The booster is paired with the Starship to help the vehicle leave Earth. Neither should be confused with the company’s tried-and-true Falcon 9, which has proven capable of landing reliably back on earth (usually). The Falcon 9 also does not execute a belly-flop maneuver like the Starships do.

Why the FAA is involved following the Starship explosions

As much as Musk and his SpaceX team would like to frame the thunderous destruction of their spacecraft as a routine part of the arduous process of sending people to space, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has stepped in, raising concerns about how the rocket company is managing its launches and addressing public safety concerns.

The Verge reported in late January that the December launch “violated the terms” of the company’s FAA test license; an investigation of the incident included “a comprehensive review of the company’s safety culture, operational decision-making, and process discipline,” an FAA spokesperson told Popular Science.

The regulatory scrutiny prompted an angry reply on Twitter by Musk, who expressed his frustration with the agency’s critique: “Unlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure,” tweeted Musk. “Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.”

The launch also led some space insiders to call into question SpaceX’s apparent impulsiveness. “I am very critical of SpaceX after it demonstrated that it had effectively become a ‘law unto itself’ when it launched the SN8 test flight,” says David Todd, an analyst at Seradata, a UK-based firm that tracks rocket launches and satellites.

As a result of the FAA scrutiny, the launch of the SN9, which was scheduled for launch on January 28, was delayed for about a week after the agency requested additional information about the vehicle and flight plan before giving final approval.

“While we recognize the importance of moving quickly to foster growth and innovation in commercial space, the FAA will not compromise its responsibility to protect public safety,” FAA spokesperson Steve Kulm told The Verge. “We will approve the modification only after we are satisfied that SpaceX has taken the necessary steps to comply with regulatory requirements.”

The agency ultimately gave the go-ahead, expressing satisfaction that SpaceX had taken the necessary steps to ensure public safety, and the launch of the SN9 proceeded on February 2.

After a successful initial launch, the stainless-steel Starship SN9 reached an altitude of 6.2 miles, as planned, but when one engine failed to ignite as it descended, the craft could not right itself and exploded on the ground.

[Related: Astronauts explain what it’s like to be ‘shot off the planet’]

The FAA has opened a second probe into the company’s launch practices following SN9. An FAA spokesperson said via email: “A mishap investigation is designed to further enhance public safety, not to place blame. It seeks to determine the root cause and identify corrective actions to avoid a similar mishap.”

Again, SpaceX seemed to take the explosion in stride, assuming a seemingly nonchalant attitude towards the crash. In an interview on the Joe Rogan podcast on February 11, Musk said, “This is a test program. We expect it to explode. It’s weird if it doesn’t explode, frankly. If you want to get payload to orbit, you have to run things close to the edge.”

As the space company readies for the launch of the SN10 (update on March 4: it exploded), Musk and his team are projecting a higher possibility of success, perhaps as high as 60 percent. But the company is also hoping to reframe expectations: “These test flights are all about improving our understanding and development of a fully reusable transportation system designed to carry both crew and cargo on long-duration, interplanetary flights and help humanity return to the moon, and travel to Mars and beyond,” SpaceX said on the Starship website.

All told, SpaceX’s collaboration with NASA is a remarkable development in the public-private partnership that has captured the public’s imagination and refueled an interest in human space travel not seen since the early Space Shuttle missions. But the recent explosions in many ways highlight a cultural divide in an arena—space—that has traditionally been the domain of government agencies. Some experts suggest that the staid government approach may be outdated and in need of a more modern perspective.

[Related: Ralphie from ‘A Christmas Story’ could have been the first child in space. Then disaster struck.]

“NASA tries to model everything to the nth degree whereas SpaceX works on the basis of ‘test it until it breaks,’” says Todd.

Todd said the SpaceX “test-to-destruction” approach has the advantage of getting a space launch system operational relatively quickly, “however, it may mean that launch failures happen more often—especially on early flights—when compared to using NASA’s more detailed modeling approach.”

He suggests that eventually these “teething problems” will eventually be ironed out, but the tension between the FAA and SpaceX will likely continue into the foreseeable future.

This story was first published on February 17, 2021. We’ve updated it since that time.

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For SpaceX’s rocket scientists, Mars got a few miles closer yesterday. The company’s flagship spacecraft rose to new heights, executed a controlled freefall back toward the ground, and exploded on impact.

Company executives dream of SpaceX becoming a one-stop-shop for anyone interested in shuttling people or cargo to and from the nearby parts of the solar system. But to do so, they need a spacecraft that’s flexible enough to navigate alien atmospheres and reusable enough to make it home in one piece. Starship, they believe, is that vehicle.

Founder Elon Musk debuted the first prototype of the 160-foot tall, stainless steel behemoth last fall, and the ship’s development has continued at a breakneck pace since then. Over the summer, the fifth and six iterations of the vehicle (dubbed SN5 and SN6, SN standing for Serial Number) each hopped 500 feet into the air before touching straight back down. Today SpaceX used its eighth prototype, SN8, to conduct the vehicle’s first high altitude flight test, an essential step toward making Musk’s dreams of interplanetary transportation a reality.

In anticipation of the launch, SpaceX enthusiasts have been camped out at Boca Chica, Texas—the primary site of Starship’s development—for days. The SN8′s maiden flight could have come as early as Friday, but the launch date slid repeatedly as observers read SpaceX’s plans in the tea leaves of local road closures and Federal Aviation Administration flight restrictions. Starship nearly took off on Tuesday, but one of its engines automatically stopped the countdown with one second remaining.

At last, the colossal rocket blasted off the launchpad Wednesday evening, lifted by the might of three methane guzzling Raptor engines—a first, as the short hops had used just one. After reaching an altitude of nearly eight miles, higher than most passengers will ever travel in a commercial plane, the vehicle executed its daring landing maneuver—the “belly flop”—for the first time.

The SN8 rose for about five minutes, then cut off its engines and tipped sideways, presenting its undercarriage to the ground. Completely horizontal, it fell like a skydiver—a position designed to increase the spacecraft’s surface area—and air resistance—to slow the plunge. If and when Starship returns from orbit (or beyond), it will be coming in hot, and this “aerobraking” method will help break the gigantic spacecraft down to manageable speeds. Computers kept the SN8 level by flapping stubby fins attached to its base and nosecone. After about a minute and a half seconds of silence, the engines roared to life, righting the rocket and aiming its base back at the launchpad.

But it did not stick the landing. The rocket came in a little too hot, bursting into a fireball on the launchpad, which Musk on Twitter attributed to a low fuel tank pressure. Despite the spacecraft’s “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” as he often calls explosions, Musk celebrated the test flight’s successful ascent and belly flop, congratulating the SpaceX team on collecting all the data they needed. “Mars,” he added, “here we come!!”

And the team might not have to wait long before they get a second shot. SN8 is no more, but the assembly of SN9 is nearly complete.

If and when Starship can land safely, it just might be the last rocket SpaceX builds. The colossal body will be able to hoist 220,000 pounds of cargo to Low Earth Orbit, according to the company. That’s four times the capacity of the Falcon 9, three times the capacity of the space shuttle, and approaching twice the capacity of the Falcon Heavy—currently the world’s most powerful launch system.

And the company is designing it to go just about anywhere. Its raison d’etre, of course, is to ferry people and materials to the Red Planet and enable Musk’s endgame, a Martian city. There, the vehicle will use a similar belly flop to arrest itself as it falls through Mars’s thin atmosphere.

It may also reach the moon. NASA awarded SpaceX a $135 million contract in the spring to develop Starship as a vehicle to potentially return astronauts to the lunar surface (Blue Origin and Dynetics also received funding to build lunar landers), and the company intends to fly Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa around the moon (but not land) in the mid-2020s.

SpaceX is even tapping the spaceship for terrestrial applications. The Falcon rockets cost tens of millions of dollars per launch because the upper stage returns from orbit too quickly to be recovered, but the bellyflopping Starship should be fully reusable. Musk hopes to someday launch the vehicle for $2 million a pop, which would make it the company’s the most affordable ride to space by far. At those prices, Starship could even deliver cargo for the military, or fly wealthy passengers between major cities in under an hour.

While the sky would prove no limit for a fully operational Starship, the system still has a long way to go. In addition to installing the rocket’s innards, the company next needs to assemble the Super Heavy, a massive lower stage booster that will give Starship the oomph it needs to actually get into orbit. Musk has said he hopes that might happen as early as next year. It’s an aspirational goal (he forecast an orbital flight in 2020 during the Starship unveiling last year), but keen-eyed observers have already spotted the first Super Heavy prototype being built at Boca Chica.

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On April 12, 1981, the space shuttle Columbia blasted off from the Florida coast. NASA dubbed the flight Space Transportation System-1, or STS-1 for short, and it marked the first of 135 space shuttle missions. Over the next three decades, a fleet of five shuttles would carry more than 800 astronauts into orbit, where they accomplished feats including the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope and the assembly of the International Space Station (ISS).

Sunday night, the Crew Dragon capsule—Resilience—lifted off the launchpad with four ISS-bound astronauts aboard. As a demonstration of the United States’ ability to put human beings in space, the mission, designated Crew-1, harkens back to STS-1. After nearly a decade of bumming rides off the Russian space agency (and paying handsomely for the privilege), NASA officials look forward to being able to stuff the ISS full of astronauts and take full advantage of the facility’s research capacity.

Yet the Crew-1 mission is also a sign of how much the space industry has changed since the first shuttle took off. Resilience belongs not to NASA but to SpaceX, a private company who designed, built, and operates the spacecraft. The space agency mentored the company throughout the vehicle’s development, but ultimately acts as a customer, booking SpaceX seats for astronauts much as the FBI might buy an agent a ticket to fly Delta. And now that SpaceX has a proven track record of flying astronauts into space, it’s eager to expand its clientele—with NASA’s blessing.

“In this new era, especially in the low earth orbit, NASA has the ability to be a customer,” said NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine at a press conference ahead of a crewed demonstration flight of Crew Dragon in June. “One customer of many costumers.”

The Crew Dragon capsule is the first graduate of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, an initiative with roots reaching back to the Bush administration aiming to free up funding for deep space exploration by having private companies handle simpler operations nearer to Earth. After years of development and testing delays, SpaceX became the first to cross the finish line this summer when it flew NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley to the ISS and brought them safely back home with a test flight—Crew Dragon Demo-1.

Sunday’s launch marks the first operational, long-term flight of a Crew Dragon vehicle, now fully certified for official use, and the end of NASA’s reliance on Russia’s Soyuz space capsule to reach the ISS. The two agencies have enjoyed a friendly post-Cold War relationship, but Soyuz dependence meant launching on Russia’s schedule. And it wasn’t cheap either. While a recent seat cost NASA 90 million dollars, Space.com reports, SpaceX tickets are expected to start off at around $55 million. Moving forward, NASA and the Russian space agency plan to share rides and swap seats without exchanging money.

“It’s also good to have your own capabilities, said Mike Hopkins, the spacecraft commander

at a press conference before launch. “It’s great for the world to have options.”

And more options are coming, with Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner capsule also nearing Commercial Crew alumni status. A pair of software glitches stopped it from reaching the ISS during an uncrewed test flight last year, but the company hopes to try again next year.

So far, SpaceX’s mission appears to be going smoothly. Resilience lifted off just ahead of tropical storm Eta at 7:27 pm Sunday Eastern time, and the first full commercial crew—comprising NASA astronauts Hopkins, Victor Glover (the first Black astronaut on the ISS since its construction), Shannon Walker, and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi—settled in. Upon reaching orbit, Resilience became a microgravity environment, which the crew indicated to spectators online by letting a Baby Yoda doll float weightlessly across the capsule.

Roughly three and a half hours after launch, the four astronauts (along with Baby Yoda) climbed into the ISS, exchanging hugs with the three crew members already on board—Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins.

But the new arrivals won’t have much time to rest, because NASA is keen to squeeze as many science results as it can out of the $100-billion orbiting laboratory. Glover will take biological samples to see whether his diet in space will affect the microbes in his gut and his immune system. The crew will also attempt to grow radishes, experiment with rock-munching microbes that could assist with future space mining operations, and test drive the cooling system of NASA’s next generation spacesuit, among other experiments.

“It’s going to be exciting to see how much work we’ll be able to get done while we’re there,” Hopkins said. “I think they’re going to keep us pretty busy.”

And the crew should be even more productive than usual. With both the Soyuz and Crew Dragon operational, the space agencies have been able to pack the ISS—which usually hosts between three and six astronauts—with a long-term crew of seven for the first time. In fact, the station now brims with so many astronauts that it has run out of sleeping berths, so Hopkins may be snoozing in the Resilience capsule itself, he said during the press conference.

The four astronauts will remain in space for the next six months before returning to Earth, but SpaceX and NASA plan to keep up a high cadence of flights. As many as seven Dragon capsules (carrying crew, cargo, or both) may visit the ISS over the next year and a half, maintaining the station’s no vacancy status.

“This mission represents the initiation of a Dragon in orbit continuously, knocking on wood,” Shotwell said, according to The Verge.

With NASA’s seal of approval that SpaceX is ready for human spaceflight, the company is free to take on well-heeled private clients as well. Seven space tourists visited the ISS between 2001 and 2009 (after which the Soyuz became oversubscribed), all excursions brokered by the company Space Adventures. Now that Crew Dragon is open for business, space tourism for the ultrarich might be poised for a comeback.

SpaceX has already announced a partnership with private spaceflight company Space Adventures to fly a record-breaking high orbit around the Earth in a Crew Dragon, without docking with the ISS. The first flight could take place within two years.

Space Adventures isn’t the only company demanding SpaceX’s new services. Axiom Space—which plans to assemble its own private space station this decade—has announced that it will fly the first “fully private” flight to the ISS late next year. Former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría, Israeli fighter pilot and businessman Eytan Stibbe, and two unconfirmed passengers (rumored to be actor Tom Cruise and director Doug Liman, who intend to film a movie in space) will form the four-person crew of mission “Ax-1.” The passengers will spend ten days aboard the ISS, but no word yet on where they’ll be sleeping.

For SpaceX’s ambitions to bring space closer to Earth, the sky seems to be proving no limit at all.

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On June 8, 1959, the Navy launched a rocket carrying 3,000 letters from the submarine USS Barbero, floating off the coast of Florida. “Before man reaches the moon,” Postmaster General Arthur A. Summerfield predicted, “mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to England, to India or to Australia by guided missiles.”

“Missile mail” failed to take off, but the government never gave up on the notion of delivering cargo to far off places in record times. Now the military has asked two private companies, SpaceX and a consulting business called the Exploration Architecture Corporation, to analyze whether rockets could fling payloads far heavier than postcards around the globe, Army general Stephen Lyons announced at a virtual conference of the National Defense Transportation Association last week. The military’s workhorse cargo aircraft, the Boeing C-17 Globemaster, can fly a tank to Afghanistan in about a dozen hours, but rocket delivery would be far faster.

“Think about moving the equivalent of a C-17 payload anywhere on the globe in less than an hour,” Lyons said, according to SpaceNews.

Under the deal, known as a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement, the companies will volunteer their time and resources to work with the US Transportation Command—a military organization that coordinates the movement of weapons and other resources—to study whether rockets might join planes, trucks, and ships in the military’s fleet of transportation vehicles. Lyons suggested that SpaceX could launch a test flight as early as next year.

Rockets and war have long gone hand in hand. In fact, Nazi Germany used one of the first functional modern rockets, the V-2, to terrorize European cities toward the end of World War II. After the war, the USSR and the US raced to scoop up V-2 hardware and key German rocket scientists, acquisitions that would launch the space programs of both countries.

Now things have come full circle. Supported in part by NASA contracts and expertise, SpaceX has emerged as space powerhouse with a growing fleet of rockets capable of placing satellites into orbit and hurling cars toward Mars. To reach orbit a rocket must exceed 25,000 miles per hour (nearly three dozen times the speed of sound), and high above the Earth’s surface there’s no air resistance to slow it down. The bottom stages of SpaceX rockets generally land near their launch site, but there’s nothing stopping the company from bringing them down on a different part of the planet.

Lyons didn’t say which vehicle the military is eyeing for recruitment, but a 2021 demonstration could involve either the company’s Falcon 9 workhorse, or its Falcon Heavy powerhouse, both of which have already demonstrated multiple successful flights. The former can carry 50,000 pounds of cargo to orbit for $62 million, and the latter 140,000 pounds for $90 million, although those figures would likely depend on the flight trajectory. By way of comparison, the C-17 aircraft has a maximum capacity of about 165,000 pounds and has been sold to American allies for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Or the military could be waiting for SpaceX’s upcoming Starship launch system, a fully reusable two stage rocket capable of hoisting 220,000 pounds of cargo to orbit. The company has built a handful of bare-bones prototypes of the first stage, some of which have made small “hop” flights. Construction of the first prototype booster may begin this fall, but so-called “point to point” flight tests on Earth remain years away, according to SpaceX founder Elon Musk. He has claimed that Starship operational costs could be as low as $2 million per flight.

If SpaceX can make Starship a reality, they have big plans for the platform. While the rocket was designed primarily to fly passengers around the moon and to Mars, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell has said that the company also hopes to take advantage of what she calls the system’s “residual capacity” to transport passengers between continents on Earth. At a 2018 TED talk, she predicted that Starship would someday shuttle blast well-heeled travelers between most major world cities in 20 to 40 minutes.

“This is definitely going to happen,” Shotwell said.

Of course, the company has a lot of details—both logistical and engineering—to work out before it does. How will air traffic control adapt to a world with rockets blasting off as often as planes take to the skies? Can explosive spacecraft ever be made as safe as commercial aviation? How will passengers stomach accelerating to 25 times the speed of sound in a matter of minutes?

If SpaceX is serious about operating what amounts to a hypersonic airline, learning to moving cargo around the globe for a client with deep pockets and might be a logical first step. The company has been discussing the idea with the military since at least 2018, and now it seems like their pitch might have landed.

“I had no sense for how fast SpaceX was moving, but I’ve received their update and I can tell you they are moving very rapidly in this area,” Lyons said.

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Update 6/1 at 8:33 am EST: The launch proceeded successfully on 5/30 after being scrubbed on 5/27 due to weather. Both astronauts have now boarded the International Space Station.

At 4:33 p.m. ET today, a classic scene may return (weather permitting) to Cape Canaveral after a nine-year hiatus. Two astronauts will don flight suits, climb into a vehicle perched atop a powerful rocket, and blast off toward the International Space Station (ISS).

If all goes according to plan—at time of this publication, chances of favorable weather hover around 50 percent—the mission will mark two historic milestones. First, space veterans Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will become the first NASA astronauts to launch from American soil since the final Space Shuttle flight in 2011. And second, they will be the first human beings ever to fly to orbit on hardware designed, built, and operated by a private company—Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, commonly known as SpaceX. The mission represents a pivotal moment in an ongoing shift in how NASA handles crewed exploration, as well as a stepping stone toward a future where any well-heeled adventurer can purchase a ticket to space.

“In this new era, especially in low earth orbit, NASA has the ability to be a customer,” said NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine at a recent press conference, “one customer of many customers in a very robust commercial marketplace.”

NASA’s astronaut program has continued since 2011, and the agency has kept the ISS staffed by purchasing more than 70 rides on the Soyuz spacecraft from the Russian space program—pricey tickets that have cost the agency a total of around four billion dollars. But over the last decade or so, NASA has also invested at least three billion dollars in SpaceX and worked closely with the company to help it develop a vehicle—the Crew Dragon—capable of bringing astronauts to the space station. (The NASA program that funded SpaceX and others, Commercial Crew, has also awarded around five billion dollars to Boeing to develop its CST-100 Starliner spacecraft, which may launch with astronauts next year.)

“NASA has been an extraordinary customer, an extraordinary partner, and a mentor for us,” said Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president. “We’ve learned from them. We’ve obviously been pleased by their financial support, technical support, and knowledge.”

With the ability to reach orbit on their own terms restored, NASA officials hope to get more astronauts to the ISS, boosting the amount of research they can accomplish. They also look forward to having more flexibility: The cadence of available Soyuz seats has tended to set the duration of most missions at around six months in recent years, but the commercial crew vehicles may let the agency experiment with shorter and longer missions, according to Kirk Shireman, the program manager for NASA’s ISS program.

And it’s arguably an even bigger day for SpaceX. In 18 years, the rocket company has gone from startup to space heavyweight. It now carries out 70 percent of commercial launches worldwide, according to Bridenstine, and has also resupplied the ISS using its Dragon capsule 20 times. But founder Elon Musk dreams of establishing lunar bases and Martian settlements in the not-so-distant future, and building space metropolises will take more than food, tools, and materials. With today’s launch, SpaceX takes its first step toward moving people around the solar system—not just cargo.

While NASA has overseen more than 150 flights, this time will different because SpaceX will largely sit in the driver’s seat. NASA will participate in mission management, but the company will lead it, according to Steve Stich, the deputy manager of the Commercial Crew Program. That means that if the astronauts encounter a problem, they’ll be reporting it to SpaceX’s flight control team in Hawthorne, California, although NASA will be listening in.

Both organizations, however, have devoted thousands of hours of testing and training to minimize the chances of anything going wrong. NASA officials know the heartbreak of losing astronauts all too well, and SpaceX employees are keenly aware of the heavy responsibility that comes along with flying human beings. At their technicians’ own request, SpaceX started attaching photographs of Behnken and Hurley to every work order, according to Shotwell, keeping the unprecedented stakes of this mission front of mind. “There’ll be a little sense of relief when they’re in orbit,” she said, and “more when they get to the station. I’ll start sleeping again when they’re back safely on planet Earth.”

After Behnken and Hurley launch, it’ll take them about 19 hours to chase down the ISS. Crew Dragon will fly mainly on autopilot during this period, although the crew will have two brief chances to take the wheel (which, in this case, is not a “wheel” but a collection of large touch screens). They will take control first when the spacecraft reaches orbit to test the capsule’s responsiveness to twisting and rolling commands, and then again when the vehicle is few hundred feet from the ISS.

The original plan had been to bring the astronauts right back home, but about six months ago NASA decided that since Behnken and Hurley were going all the way to the ISS, they might as well stay awhile. Simulations suggest that Crew Dragon can remain in space for 119 days before the trace amounts of oxygen that persist hundreds of miles above the Earth’s surface degrade its solar panels. SpaceX and NASA will keep an eye the craft’s performance, and will determine the mission’s length by weighing the tradeoff between keeping extra hands on board the ISS and completing the mission’s main goal: to demonstrate that SpaceX’s hardware, software, and mission management are ready for the big time. A successful end-to-end test will wrap up the experimental portion of the vehicle’s development, letting official operations begin with the subsequent flight, “Crew 1,” whose timeline will depend on how this flight unfolds.

“We should not lose sight of the fact that this is a test flight,” Bridenstine said. “We’re doing this to learn things.”

Some people might feel nervous at the thought of being the first to hurtle through space in a relatively unproven vehicle, but Behnken and Hurley act cool as cucumbers. They’re aware of the unique positions they occupy in the history of the crewed space program—Hurley flew on the final Space Shuttle flight in 2011, and Behnken helped assemble the ISS—but they remain too focused on the task at hand to wax poetic about it.

“You have to go in knowing as much as you can about the vehicle and procedures, hyper focused on making sure all the work is successful,” Hurley said. “From the historical perspective, we’ll let somebody else talk about that when we get back.”

Nevertheless, they’re honored to be breaking new ground. After the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the Space Shuttle vehicles, Crew Dragon will become the fifth American spacecraft to carry human beings into orbit. “It’s probably a dream of every test pilot school student to have the opportunity to fly on a brand-new spacecraft,” Behnken said.

Behnken and Hurley, while not tourists themselves, are also serving as pioneers for the fledgling space tourism industry. In some sense, today represents SpaceX’s debut operating the world’s first “spaceline.” NASA is currently it’s only client, but a successful demonstration of crewed spaceflight could change that quickly. In fact, the company has already announced that seats aboard Crew Dragon will be available to the general public soon, and Hurley, for his part, says that’s exactly how it should be. “Just that look out the window alone is worth going in people’s minds,” he said. “Access to low earth orbit needs to get greater and less expensive, and I think this is part of that exercise.”

Crowds of hundreds of thousands of people gathered at Cape Canaveral to watch past launches, but this time around NASA is inviting all to participate in the historic moment online. The agency will host a variety of digital festivities, and the launch will be broadcast on NASA Live and SpaceX’s website. The SpaceX and NASA teams have adopted a variety of anti-COVID-19 measures, and Behnken and Hurley are well quarantined. All parties hope to keep space enthusiasts safe, too.

“We don’t want an outbreak” resulting from spectators clustering at Cape Canaveral, Bridenstine said. “We need a spectacular moment that all of America can see and all of the world can see, to inspire not just us who have been waiting for years for this but to inspire the generations that are coming.”

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Summer star gazers in rural areas are used to seeing a handful of satellites streak across the sky. But in the coming years, eagle-eyed amateurs may be able to pick out hundreds. And for professional astronomers, research will never be the same again.

The race to blanket the globe in satellite internet is on. SpaceX leads with its fleet of Starlink satellites, which aims to provide high speed connectivity to anyone on the planet. The company has already placed more than 350 of the 570-pound, 30-foot wide machines into orbit, 60 of which launched on Wednesday. The company plans to eventually construct a “megaconstellation” of tens of thousands of satellites, with additional swarms to follow from Amazon and the UK company OneWeb. Ever since the first strings of bright new lights started passing overhead, astronomers have fretted about the future of their field. Now one of the most comprehensive analyses yet of the first 12,000 Starlink satellites brings both good and bad news.

The damage the satellites inflict on astronomical research will vary by project and observatory. The celestial newcomers don’t pose an existential threat to the field, but dealing with them will likely become a significant part of how astronomy is done in the future. “This is a wakeup call for astronomers generally to start thinking about the mitigations,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and author of the analysis.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk claims that Starlink will pose no danger to scientific progress. “I’m confident that we will not cause any impact whatsoever in astronomical discoveries, zero,” he said at a conference last Monday. “We’ll take corrective action if it’s above zero.”

The company is cooperating with a variety of astronomical organizations to minimize its influence on the night sky, but completely eliminating that effect appears next to impossible. In fact, the near-Earth environment is already undergoing an upheaval, according to McDowell’s report, which is under review by the Astrophysical Journal Letters. While thousands of satellites currently circle the Earth (many of them defunct), the zone SpaceX is targeting sits relatively empty. Before the first Starlink launch less than a year ago, there were just 400 large satellites (over 220 pounds) orbiting at low altitude (under 370 miles)—the kind that are easiest to see. Today, Starlink satellites have nearly doubled that number, and the network is only three percent complete.

A sky with 12,000 low-flying Starlink satellites in their current incarnation would look drastically different to the naked eye. McDowell built a simulation considering the satellites’ size, altitude, number, and observed brightness based on reports he commissioned from a network of amateur astronomers. He then calculated how many satellites would pass overhead at different points during the night, for various seasons and locations around the globe. City-dwellers won’t notice a thing, but according to McDowell’s model (which is based on SpaceX’s FCC filings), star gazers in rural areas would see the horizon swarm with hundreds of dim specks as sunlight glints off of the satellites’ metallic surfaces, dozens of them passing directly overhead. The exact number of visible satellites will depend on conditions but peaks in the hours after sunset during the summer—prime time for sky watching.

Fortunately for amateur astronomers, SpaceX is experimenting with painting the Earth-facing side of its satellites black to dim their reflectivity. The company launched its first “darksat” prototype in January, and it does appear to be about 2.5 times dimmer than its shiny counterparts, according to a pre-print published on Monday based on a single pair of observations. McDowell says that this reduction—if confirmed—would likely push the satellites right to the edge of human vision. You might notice a disorienting sense of movement if you squint hard enough, but you probably won’t be able to distinguish specks of light.

“That’s probably enough to save the naked eye sky,” McDowell says. “But it’s not enough to save professional astronomy.”

Astronomers are a diverse bunch, studying everything from local space rocks to distant black holes, and Starlink’s effects will be equally varied. Some research projects, especially those that operate late at night during the winter, will barely notice SpaceX’s additions. At these times, the sun lies entirely behind the Earth, and no reflective sunlight reaches the satellites. That came as a relief to McDowell. “I was unduly pessimistic initially,” he says, “but the fact that it’s not so bad in the winter is important. I was pleased and surprised to see that.”

The bad news, however, is the Starlink components will shine brightly in telescope mirrors during the first and last hours of the night when the sun hovers below the horizon, especially during summer. These conditions are ideal for observing objects near the sun, such as surveys that hunt for asteroids, including those that might someday collide with Earth. Projects like these just can’t be done on midwinter nights. If you restrict yourself to winter observing, McDowell says, “you’re losing half the sky essentially.”

With satellites launching at a monthly, and eventually bi-weekly cadence, McDowell suggests that researchers start preparing for the rapidly approaching Starlink future now.

The simplest way to edit out the unwanted streaks left behind by satellites is to use software. If astronomers take five pictures of a target, and if a satellite photobombs only a couple of frames, researchers can blend the photos together to erase the satellite. This method will work best for observatories with fewer satellites overhead, such as those deep in the southern hemisphere, and will come at the cost of valuable observation time to capture the extra data.

Other observatories will need specialized hardware. A system where small cameras surround the telescope’s main mirror in a ring, for instance, could grant the instrument a sense of peripheral vision. When the cameras spot a satellite coming, they could snap a shutter across the telescope’s field of view, temporarily blinding it until the spacecraft is gone. Projects targeting dim objects by using exposure times much longer than the momentary blips of passing satellites would benefit from this sort of scheme.

Ultimately though, each of the world’s many observatories will have to go through a period of trial and error while it works out which strategies best fit its location and specifications, and sees what problems crop up. “It’s going to change the environment so much that there will be unexpected consequences we haven’t thought of,” McDowell says.

But even if they can find the substantial funding needed to support longer observing runs and new hardware, there’s a limit to how much astronomers can adapt to a sky full of moving lights. At some point, if every image has multiple satellite streaks astronomy would just grind to a halt. McDowell suggests that researchers can learn to live with Starlink’s tens of thousands of darkened satellites, but stresses that in the long term astronomy will need an international treaty limiting the overall number if it is to survive.

“I think the compromise between astronomers and space explorers is that we have to work out some mitigations for a much more crowded sky,” he says, “but the space community has to ultimately set a cap on just how crowded that sky can get.”

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. But McDowell praises the company for its demonstrations of good faith, such developing the darksat and consulting directly with the Vera Rubin Observatory—a flagship facility coming online in 2022. He hopes that additional measures, such as painting the darksats’ antennas black, will continue to minimize the big shifts on the horizon.

“I’m mildly less worried than I was for the short term,” he says. “But it’s still a real change in the sky.”

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When the Falcon 9 rocket burst apart into a puff of flame and white smoke on Sunday, the Crew Dragon capsule soared unscathed above it.

The explosion would have come as a setback during normal flight operations, but for this intentional safety test, events could not have played out more smoothly. “As far as we can tell thus far, it’s a picture-perfect mission,” said Elon Musk, SpaceX’s Chief Engineer and founder, in a press release. “It went as well as one can possibly expect.” Now that the capsule has proven itself capable of handling emergencies both in the air and on the ground, SpaceX expects to launch its first astronauts in the late spring or early summer.

For this test, the rocket blasted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday morning, hoisting the Crew Dragon spacecraft aloft with two mannequins inside. About a minute and a half later—while flying faster than the speed of sound—the capsule automatically separated from its booster, as it would in the unlikely case of an in-air emergency. The capsule’s eight “SuperDraco” engines fired, carrying it clear of the rocket, which exploded about ten seconds after separation. (No need to feel bad for SpaceX though, this Falcon 9 rocket had already reached space three times on previous missions—a solid chunk of its theoretical 10-flight lifespan.)

The Crew Dragon capsule coasted to an altitude of more than 100,000 feet, about three times higher than commercial airplanes fly, before plummeting back to Earth. Four parachutes slowed its decent to a comparative crawl, and nine minutes after launch it splashed down gently in the Atlantic Ocean, about 20 miles off the coast of Florida for recovery.

The in-flight abort system proved that should anything go wrong on the way to the International Space Station (ISS), the capsule will be able to bail the astronauts out—the spacecraft version of a test pilot’s ejection seat. “For this test, Falcon 9’s ascent trajectory will mimic a Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station to best match the physical environments the rocket and spacecraft will encounter during a normal ascent,” SpaceX wrote in a pre-flight statement.

Last March the company demonstrated the Crew Dragon capsule’s ability to reach the ISS with the Crew Demo-1 mission, and planned to follow it up with an in-flight abort test over the summer. But the capsule blew up on the launchpad during a firing test of its engines in April, which pushed back the timeline. Now with the in-flight abort test complete, no major hurdles stand in the way of the long awaited Crew Demo-2 mission, which will bring veteran astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the ISS. Musk expects to have the capsule ready for launch by the end of March, and that it might fly—depending on NASA’s schedule—sometime between April and June. In the meantime, SpaceX plans to carry out further tests of its newest parachute design, which have suffered some recent failures.

Crew Demo-2 can’t come soon enough for NASA, which has been relying on Russia’s space agency to launch American astronauts in its Soyuz spacecraft ever since the space shuttle program ended in 2011. The space agency has funded the development of two private alternatives, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Boeing’s Starliner, but both timelines have slipped repeatedly. NASA once hoped to be flying astronauts again by 2015.

NASA’s final seat on Russia’s Soyuz leaves Earth in April, although the agency could potentially buy additional rides if needed. Those seats have historically cost the US about $86 million a pop, and NASA’s Office of Inspector General has calculated that seats on Boeing’s Starliner and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon will each cost roughly $90 million and $55 million respectively. Both companies say that those numbers will come down after accounting for cargo and full seven-astronaut capacity. Once the commercial crew capsules are operational, NASA and Russia will share rides without exchanging money, according to Spaceflight Now.

Spaceflight is unpredictable and no one knows for sure when each capsule will be ready, but for now NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine expressed satisfaction with Sunday’s step forward. “This critical flight test puts us on the cusp of returning the capability to launch astronauts in American spacecraft on American rockets from American soil,” he said. “We are thrilled with the progress NASA’s Commercial Crew Program is making and look forward to the next milestone for Crew Dragon.”

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The Earth just gained five dozen new artificial satellites. The newcomers represent a drop in the bucket compared with the thousands of functional machines already up there, but also an early raindrop in a deluge of tens of thousands to come.

Private space company SpaceX, which launched the satellites on Monday, is driving the orbital boom with its construction of the Starlink constellation—a flock of satellites that will eventually number in the thousands intended to blanket the planet with internet access. But while the enterprise will increase connectivity here on Earth, astronomers fear it will sever them from the rest of the universe, filling the night sky with unavoidable streaks of light. Such vast assemblies have been prohibitively expensive in the past. But Monday’s launch featured SpaceX’s most reusable (and frugal) rocket yet, and the company appears to be capable of singlehandedly changing our local space environment.

SpaceX launched the stack of satellites, each weighing 500 pounds, from Cape Canaveral on Monday morning, releasing them into orbit 174 miles above the Earth. They will continue to spread out, extend their solar panels, and rise into higher orbits over the following days. There, they’ll join a batch of prototypes from a previous launch, making for a current constellation just shy of 120 working satellites.

After the last Starlink launch in May, strings of satellites glowing with reflected light from the sun as they paraded across the sky delighted some observers. But the astronomical community, which has spent decades designing and building sensitive optical equipment tuned to pick up the faintest of glimmers from across the galaxy and beyond, sees the same sight as a menacing threat to their enterprise. Until recently, such low and bright satellites numbered only in the hundreds, according to the International Astronomical Union, which posed little risk to observations and nocturnal animals. But Starlink and similar constellations could rapidly change that.

“We do not yet understand the impact of thousands of these visible satellites scattered across the night sky and despite their good intentions, these satellite constellations may threaten both [astronomy and wildlife],” the Union said in a statement.

Eager to fund its Martian ambitions, SpaceX hopes to start selling internet service made possible by its satellite constellation sometime in 2020. CEO Elon Musk has already tweeted via a Starlink connection, and the company plans to ramp up fast. Monday marks the first of nearly every-other-week launches planned to push the constellation size past 1,000 satellites over the next year. The constellation’s planned size has swelled from 12,000 satellites to more than 40,000, paperwork submitted to the International Telecom Union revealed last month. That’s twenty times the total number of working satellites currently in orbit from every nation combined. Space is about to get crowded.

Astronomers are scrambling to see how the influx of night lights will affect their operations. An earlier simulation found that the original 12,000-satellite version of Starlink would make the upcoming Large Synoptic Survey Telescope—a billion dollar venture—unusable about 20 percent of the time, Shannon Hall reports in the New York Times. Researchers are currently updating their calculation to see what the company’s new plan will do to theirs. SpaceX, for its part, has said it will work with astronomers to take steps such as painting the satellites black to reduce their shine.

The constellation may affect the general public too. Once completed, the global sky will contain four to five times more Starlink satellites than it will visible stars. In fact, 500 satellites will be simultaneously visible from certain points, according to calculations by astronomer Alex Parker. Urban dwellers who count themselves lucky to see Jupiter on a good night likely wouldn’t notice, but rural stargazers could experience a drastically different night sky. “I’ll wait to see what happens when they reach their operational orbits, but my heart sank when I saw those first pictures,” Parker wrote on Twitter after the first launch.

Musk believes that the satellites won’t impact astronomy, and that the economic benefits of a global internet represent a “greater good.” He has also tweeted that the future of astronomy lies in space anyway.

Monday’s launch showcased the reason why SpaceX can afford to assemble space infrastructure on such an unprecedented scale, setting not one but two records for rocket reusability. The bundle of satellites flew on a Falcon 9 whose booster stage was being launched for a record fourth time. The booster went on to make its fourth landing too. “These boosters are designed to be used 10 times,” said SpaceX Starlink engineer Lauren Lyons during launch commentary according to Space.com. “Let’s turn it around for a fifth, guys.”

The protective capsule that carried the satellites at the nose of the rocket, known as the payload fairing, had been to space before too—another first for the company. The nose cone originally ferried a communications satellite for the Arab League into orbit on a Falcon Heavy in April, after which SpaceX was able to recover and refurbish the fairing. Over the summer SpaceX started successfully catching more of its fairings (which cost $6 million each, about 10% of the $62 million sticker price for a launch) with a giant net before they hit the corrosive seawater, making future fairing reuse more likely.

The Falcon family, however, will never achieve full reusability, since the upper stage returns from orbit too fast for recovery. For that milestone, SpaceX is betting everything on its next generation system, the more maneuverable Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster. Despite being able to hoist more than four times as much stuff into orbit as the Falcon 9, Musk recently estimated that Starship launches will cost SpaceX about 30 times less than its semi-reusable sibling, coming in at around $2 million dollars—roughly a million for fuel and a million for refurbishing the recovered parts and putting them back together.

SpaceX plans on retiring the Falcon family in the 2020s and relying exclusively on the reusable Starship system for all its space activities, from Mars missions to Starlink launches. No word yet, however, if all that extra launch capacity will be able to move the earthbound telescopes out beyond the glare of the expanding Starlink constellation.

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Had there been a real launchpad emergency, Boeing’s test dummy would have been perfectly safe.

By escaping the launchpad—where a disaster like a rocket explosion could theoretically take place—and touching down nearby, the company’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft passed a crucial flight test Monday morning. It was one of two major remaining trials before NASA can certify the vehicle ready to carry astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). Boeing’s Pad Abort Test, as it’s called, came just one day after SpaceX announced a string of successful parachute tests, setting it up for an in-flight safety demonstration later this year. The overdue successes come as welcome news for NASA, which will otherwise be locked out of the ISS after its last ride from the Russian space agency next spring. It could conceivably purchase another one to replace the American astronaut returning to earth next fall, but would need special permission from congress to continue doing business with Russia, which supports Iran’s nuclear program, into 2021.

Meant to simulate the rescue of a crew in the event that the rocket they’re sitting on malfunctions, the Pad Abort Test put every safety system of the Starliner capsule through its paces. From atop a test stand at the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, the vehicle blasted off and flew away from the launchpad, reaching an altitude of nearly a mile. It then released a series of parachutes to right and slow the craft, which landed gently on a pillow of airbags a minute and a half after launch. One parachute failed to deploy, but the test dummy inside was none the worse for it.

“[It was] really a test of a system that we hope we never have to use,” said NASA commercial crew project manager Kathy Lueders in an interview on Twitter, “but it really gives us confidence when we see all those different aspects of a system tried out and put through an arduous test like this.”

Launchpad anomalies pose especially grave threats to astronauts, according to Boeing, because the crew needs to get away from the rocket it’s sitting on quickly, and the capsule needs to get high enough for the parachutes to work effectively.

But Boeing doesn’t have time to rest on its laurels. After this milestone, both NASA and the company are looking ahead to an Orbital Flight Test, when an uncrewed Starliner will launch, dock with the ISS, and return to Earth. This final test could take place on December 17 of this year, after which NASA can approve the first crewed flight, which will likely happen early next year.

Racing Boeing to the launchpad is SpaceX, which performed a similar Pad Abort Test in 2015. The company highlighted its recent progress on Twitter over the weekend with a video of a parachute dragging a test weight out of an open aircraft, triggering the deployment of three main chutes. The footage, from October 31st, captured the 13th successful parachute test in a row, according to SpaceX. Earlier trials tested a single parachute, while the final Crew Dragon capsule will have four.

SpaceX team has completed 13 successful tests in a row of upgraded Mark 3 parachutes for Crew Dragon. Most recent test demonstrated the parachute system’s ability to land the spacecraft safely in the unlikely event that one of the four main parachutes fails. pic.twitter.com/VJzDeS8UAG

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 3, 2019

Following a parachute test failure in May, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk considers the system one of the program’s most pressing concerns, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said during a visit to the company’s headquarters in October. “Elon has told me, and he’s showed me, that that’s where their priority is,” Bridenstine said, according to SpaceNews. “They’re putting as much resources and manpower as they can to getting those parachutes ready.”

Like Boeing, SpaceX also faces one major hurdle before it can fly its first astronauts—an in-flight abort where the Crew Dragon will launch from the pad as if on its way to space, and then demonstrate the ability to bail out and land. The capsule arrived in Cape Canaveral last month, and Musk expects it to fly before the end of the year.

While it’s good news that Boeing and SpaceX seem poised to fly crews in early 2020, spaceflight timelines are notoriously difficult to hit. Both capsules were once supposed to fly in 2017, but have suffered continual delays. NASA’s last ride to the ISS aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft leaves next spring, so any additional holdups to the SpaceX and Boeing programs could put the space agency’s access to the space station at risk. The situation has caused “full panic” at NASA, according to reporting by Eric Berger of Ars Technica.

But with testing targets now being measured in weeks rather than years, both Boeing and SpaceX are hoping to deliver NASA out-of-this-world holiday gifts: vehicles that can get anybody to and from the ISS safely, test dummies and humans alike.

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Elon Musk wants people to live on Mars, and now he has the “Starship” he’ll use to get them there—or at least a bare-bones prototype of it.

The SpaceX founder and CEO showed off a spotlight-illuminated spacecraft in Boca Chica, Texas on Saturday, celebrating the company’s progress and laying out his vision for its future. To Musk’s left stood a Falcon 1, the rocket that solidified the company’s place in the new space race when it first reached orbit 11 years ago. Looking forward, Musk insisted Starship’s complete reusability would be the key to opening up the final frontier.

“Which future do you want,” Musk asked the crowd. “The future where we are a spacefaring civilization, out there among the stars, or one where we are forever confined to Earth?”

The Starship “Mark 1” prototype stands 164 feet tall, measures 30 feet across, and looks like what a kid might sketch if you asked them to draw a spaceship. Although original designs from 2016 (back when the vehicle was called the “Interplanetary Transport System”) called for carbon fiber construction, on Saturday Musk touted the switch to steel for the old-school material’s strength in both the icy depths of space and the inferno of reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. Coming in at just two percent the price of high-tech composite materials, steel is also easy to work with. SpaceX welded the Mark 1 outside in the elements (Musk was in too much of a hurry to erect buildings for fabrication), a flexibility that might come in handy elsewhere. “On Mars, you can cut that up. You can weld it. You can modify it no problem,” Musk said. “I’m in love with steel.”

The Mark 1 features three Raptor engines (future Starships will have six), which Musk says will provide enough juice to take off from the surface of the Moon or Mars. But the silver rocket will need a lot more help to fully escape Earth’s formidable gravitational pull. Just as the Crew Dragon capsule sits on top of a Falcon 9 rocket, and the Apollo lunar module perched atop a Saturn V, Starship could someday hitch a ride to orbit on a large booster, currently dubbed the Super Heavy. SpaceX hopes to start building the booster, which is about 60 feet taller than Starship itself, after flight testing a handful of Starship prototypes. The main challenge, Musk said, will be building the 24 to 31 Raptor engines needed to power each booster.

Both parts will be fully reusable, returning to Earth for soft landings as SpaceX has increasingly done with more of its Falcon 9 rocket parts in recent years. By keeping the machines as simple as possible, Musk hopes to keep maintenance low, letting launch costs stay close to the price of refueling the vehicles.

But first SpaceX will see how the Starship prototype flies, and Musk, often chided for his self-described “aspirational timelines,” wants to move quickly. The first hurdle will be a controlled hop, similar to recent test flights of the Raptor engine, but higher. Musk mentioned 65,000 feet as a target altitude to hit in the next few months. “It’s going to be pretty epic to watch that thing take off and come back,” he said.

SpaceX will continue to build additional prototypes at its Boca Chica and Cape Canaveral facilities. The fourth or fifth iteration will attempt the next major milestone: orbiting Earth and returning to the ground. Musk said he was targeting an orbital flight in the next six to nine months, though he admitted the timeline sounded a little wild. Building the Mark 1 took four or five months, he said, and future iterations could come even faster.

Musk went on to paint a picture of the full Starship system, which he says will be able to ship 150 tons of science experiments, people, building materials, food, and other necessities to orbit. After refueling there, it could then land the same payload on the surface of the moon or Mars. Doing some on-the-spot figuring, Musk ballparked the cargo capacity of a theoretical fleet of ten Starships, each launching at an optimistic three times per day, at around 1,000-times greater than what humanity can currently put in orbit. “You need that if you want to build a city on Mars,” he said.

Starship will provide affordable delivery of significant quantities of cargo and people, essential for building Moon bases and Mars cities pic.twitter.com/0BImZP1qmM

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 29, 2019

Given SpaceX’s track record, its capable scientists very well may build a launch system resembling the one they’re promising. But building a liveable Martian city—much less a thriving one—will take more than dumping millions of tons of cement and glass onto the Red Planet’s surface. Musk received two questions about SpaceX’s plans for life support, but gave little indication that the company is actively working on the question of how to keep a million mouths fed, watered, and breathing on a Mars settlement. “Relative to the spacecraft itself,” Musk said, “that’s not super hard.”

The International Space Station (ISS) does make and recycle what it can, but it still relies on regular supply shipments from Earth. A Martian settlement would have to go farther in recreating a mini-ecosystem, capable of producing its own food and water and purifying its own air, due to the vast distance. Experiments on Earth have revealed just how difficult it will be to find stability. Arizona is home to the Biosphere 2 facility, for instance, which hosted a number of high profile, closed-ecosystem experiments in the 1990s. One problem, researchers later realized, was that uncured cement conspired with a surprising abundance of soil microbes to throw off carbon dioxide and oxygen levels.

Even though the ISS doesn’t have nearly as much dirt or greenery as Biosphere 2, astronauts there also struggle to deal with fallout from unwanted hitchhikers. A tube for urine control, for instance, becomes so overgrown with bacteria that astronauts need to replace it every few weeks, according to John Rummel, a biologist with the SETI institute and past Planetary Protection Officer for NASA. “Earth microbes run the space station now,” he says, “and we just try to keep ahead of them.”

Getting off the planet may be rocket science, but living off the planet will require significant advances in biology and microbiology too. And SpaceX may already be getting a taste of how hard working in that intersection can be. While its rocket fleet racks up new flights, landings, and commercial contracts, its efforts to ferry humans to the ISS languish years behind schedule—a fact NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine lamented on Twitter before Saturday’s presentation.

My statement on @SpaceX's announcement tomorrow: pic.twitter.com/C67MhSeNsa

— Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) September 27, 2019

Musk attributed the delay to the challenges in optimizing production, commenting that despite the speed of the Starship prototyping, its development takes less than five percent of SpaceX’s resources. The fact that competitor Boeing has experienced nearly identical struggles meeting the same timeline further emphasizes the difficulties of crewed spaceflight.

Despite the challenges, Musk remains optimistic that humanity’s future lies in space and stresses that while getting to Mars won’t solve Earth’s numerous and immediate crises, he finds inspirational value in dreaming big. “There are so many things to be concerned about, so many troubles. These are important and we need to solve them. But we also need things that make us excited to wake up in the morning,” he said, “and space exploration is one of those things.”

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A European satellite dodged one belonging to SpaceX over the Pacific Ocean on Monday morning, hopping around the other spacecraft after a communication glitch left SpaceX unresponsive to follow-up messages.

While the odds of a collision remained low—never exceeding 1 in 1,000—the extraterrestrial game of chicken highlights the growing challenge of flying satellites through Earth’s ever-more-crowded orbital environment. Streets have stoplights. Airports have air traffic controllers. But space remains wide open, with European Space Agency (ESA) operators addressing Monday’s near miss the same way one might request a sick day—writing a polite email and hoping for a speedy response. As SpaceX and other companies build global internet networks using “mega constellations” of thousands of satellites, experts say only a better traffic control system can keep our space-based infrastructure from coming crashing down.

“I don’t think this is something we should consider normal in the 21st century,” says Holger Krag, the Head of Space Safety at ESA.

The U.S. Air Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron, which maintains the Department of Defense’s catalog of more than 20,000 crisscrossing space objects, notified the ESA about a potential crash (diplomatically called a “conjunction”) about one week in advance. The ESA gets hundreds of conjunction warnings every day, Holger says, and the risk initially looked too low to merit wasting precious fuel on a maneuver.

But the orbits of ESA’s Aeolus, which studies wind patterns, and SpaceX’s Starlink44, one of a 60-satellite pilot program for a future internet service, continued to inch closer. The collision risk reached 1 in 50,000 on August 28, prompting the ESA and SpaceX to exchange emails, but both agreed that evasive maneuvers would not be necessary.

The next day, however, the risk reached 1 in 10,000—the industry standard for taking action. ESA pinged SpaceX again, but heard nothing back. The ghosting didn’t bother the space agency, though, because they already knew that the Starlink satellite would be staying put—enough information to avoid a catastrophic hallway dance while they shifted their own course. “We actually like it that way,” Holger says. “Only one needs to take action.”

A SpaceX spokesperson said that after the first email exchange, a bug in the on-call paging system stopped them from seeing the rising risk estimates, and that had they been aware they would have communicated more with ESA to decide which satellite should move. “SpaceX is still investigating the issue and will implement corrective actions,” the spokesperson said.

The collision risk peaked at 1 in 1,000 on September 1, and ESA sent commands to get its satellite to safety. The next morning, half an orbit before its rendezvous with Starlink44, Aeolus fired its thrusters three times, boosting it up by nearly 1,000 feet. The satellite phoned home half an hour later and has since resumed its normal wind-watching activities.

ESA operators may have avoided creating satellite confetti this week, but Krag is worried about next time—and the many close-calls that will follow. SpaceX’s planned Starlink constellation alone would mean a ten-fold increase in the number of active satellites, and other companies plan to launch similar swarms.

As those numbers swell, operators will have to work harder to avoid pileups. The industry considers collision risks more likely than 1 in 10,000 worth spending fuel on, because even though one such event is rare, when they consider the hundreds of potential events each day the danger starts to add up. At the 1-in-10,000 level operators can avoid 90% of the risk with just a couple of maneuvers per year, Krag says, but that math will change as more satellites enter the fray.

And a single slip-up can have lasting consequences. Space debris has tripled since the year 2000, and just two events—a 2007 test where China intentionally destroyed one of its satellites and a 2009 crash between a pair of U.S. and Russian satellites—showered their respective orbits with enough junk to account for about a fifth of that jump.

A bunch of groups are working on ways to get the riskiest pieces out of the fast lane, but most experts—and the White House—agree that we need a better system to keep the machines that power our maps and timekeeping systems from becoming scattered clouds of expensive rubble. “We do not want to write emails anymore,” Krag says. “We need protocols and automated coordination.”

He first proposes assisting the Air Force’s tracking efforts with more accurate ground-based observations to nail down exactly where each object is. “You can [safely] fly within 10 meters if you know the accuracy to one meter,” he says.

ESA will also propose the development of a communication network and protocols—fixed plans for when a conjunction seems likely. Member satellite operators would all share the same information about location and speed, and, for instance, could even agree on standard movement plans so everybody knows what everybody else will do without ever crafting a polite email. Eventually, Krag hopes artificial intelligence could run the entire system autonomously.

He imagines such clever technological solutions will convince countries to opt-in to the network, but other experts suggest a more specific legal framework is also necessary. Chris Johnson, the space law advisor to the Secure World Foundation, says that any space traffic network will also need a way to resolve disputes and enforce decisions.

Future legal code should also specify what responsibilities each operator has, he says, such as staying on top of collision risk estimates rather than waiting for a message from the Air Force. For his part, he suggests that SpaceX’s communication glitch is an explanation, but not an excuse. “Could you tell an officer, ‘well, I didn’t know that I was speeding because my speedometer doesn’t work’?”

Developing better tracking and avoidance technology and agreeing to communal rules won’t happen overnight. In the meantime, maybe ESA and SpaceX should set up a Slack channel.

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It was one giant leap for a silo-shaped prototype, one small hop for SpaceX’s Martian ambitions.

The 60-foot-tall “Starhopper,” a partial mockup of the vehicle Elon Musk hopes will one day land on other worlds, soared nearly 500 feet into the Texas sky on Tuesday afternoon. This second and final test flight represents the most significant trial yet of the company’s Raptor engine. While the trial frustrated residents in Boca Chica, many of whom evacuated their homes for safety concerns, it encouraged aerospace enthusiasts with its demonstration of a new type of rocket that runs on methane—an essential feature for a space program targeting the moon and beyond.

“People have talked about using methane engines for decades, and they’re finally here,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and spaceflight historian.

Tuesday’s flight was the latest run in a sequence of increasingly demanding experiments for the Raptor engine. After years of development, SpaceX began test firings with the contraption on its side and locked in place. It then followed with two more tests of the prototype nose up and tethered. The six-story, stainless steel cylinder finally flew freely for the first time in July, hovering a few dozen feet off the ground—although a cloud of billowing smoke obscured the vehicle for most of the time.

Tuesday’s round marked SpaceX’s second flight attempt this week—a day after an electrical issue stopped the Raptor’s igniter (like a spark plug for rockets) from setting off the controlled explosion just as the countdown hit zero. The more recent, successful test showcased the engine’s capabilities in a clearer light. It rose about 50 stories into the air, appearing to hover above the mottled brown and green landscape before touching down on a nearby pad. The full flight clocked in at 57 seconds.

In addition to tens of thousands of online viewers following various livestreams, a number of Boca Chica residents watched the hop too—although not necessarily out of interest. Fearing that a “malfunction” such as an explosion could shatter windows in nearby houses, the police department handed out fliers asking people to leave their homes (with their pets) when they heard the wail of a siren, ten minutes before flight.

Rocket scientists and aficionados, however, embraced the display of technology that will likely power the next generation of spacecraft. The single-engine Starhopper is a baby step toward the full vision: a 35-engine booster rocket (the Big Falcon Rocket) and a six-engine “Starship” spacecraft that Musk hopes will someday carry people to the moon and Mars.

“This is a key test of the Raptor in flight,” McDowell says.

The Raptor replaces the company’s Merlin family of engines, which ran on a refined form of kerosene, like most traditional rocket engines. The oil emerged as the industry favorite in the 1950s because it offered the most push per pound of fuel. Methane, however, has other advantages. In addition to producing fewer toxins, it’s the obvious choice for anyone who wants to leave this planet—and its abundant stockpiles of energy—behind.

Even if Mars were somehow hiding an unexpectedly rich fossil record, petroleum, the source of kerosene, needs a lot of processing to be turned into rocket fuel. Future astronauts could manufacture methane on Mars, though, by shuffling around the carbon and hydrogen atoms in the planet’s naturally occurring ice and CO2-rich atmosphere, McDowell explains. Leftover oxygen atoms could be turned into liquid to make up the other half of the explosive formula. Looking even farther out into the solar system, the compound appears to be everywhere. “In the lakes of Titan,” McDowell says, “you can put in a teacup and scoop up some methane.”

NASA has fired methane rockets on the ground and with small aerial craft before, but this week’s SpaceX flight cues their debut on a large-scale vehicle intended for orbit—putting the commercial company on track to be the first to use them for suborbital and orbital flights, possibly as soon as 2020.

But Musk and his team will have competition. Blue Origin, an aerospace company run by Jeff Bezos that’s also developing reusable rockets, has similarly chosen methane as the fuel for its BE-4 engine. The company carried out firing tests at full power in early August and hopes to use the model to push its upcoming New Glenn vehicle into orbit in the early 2020s.

Now that SpaceX has gotten its Raptor off the ground, the next technical hurdle will be turning what looks like a “flying water tower” into a proper spacecraft that can withstand the heat generated by hurtling through the atmosphere at multiple times the speed of sound. The engine will also have to prove itself under various air pressures at different altitudes, as well as in the vacuum of space.

These environments aren’t likely to foil SpaceX’s veteran engineers, McDowell says. Instead, he thinks the real test of the Raptor’s design will be whether unforeseen bugs like corrosion or clogged fuel lines crop up during the longer firing durations needed for it to actually travel somewhere.

Nevertheless, McDowell expects that between SpaceX and Blue Origin, a new era of rocket engines is on its way. “Methane engines are coming,” he says, “and this is the first real serious free flight.”

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SpaceX’s next Falcon Heavy launch is set for Monday, and it will undoubtedly be the Falcon Heavy’s most exciting and most challenging mission to date. It will mark the rocket’s first ever nighttime flight and its third flight overall, and it’s both the feat itself and the payloads it’s carrying that make this such a monumental event.

For starters, there’s the reusability aspect. A Falcon Heavy rocket is essentially three Falcon 9 first-stage boosters strapped together. All three are capable of coming back and landing vertically on the ground, to be reused later on. The side boosters being flown in this mission were both recovered from the Arabsat-6A mission conducted in April, so you could think of this mission as being made of approximately two-thirds recycled material.

While the mission’s success will help the Falcon Heavy become formally certified for delivering national security payloads for U.S. agencies, the real excitement is centered around what the rocket is taking into space this time around. The Falcon Heavy will be tasked with carrying out the U.S. Department of Defense’s Space Test Program 2 (STP-2) mission, which will deliver some of the most dynamic space instruments and experiments ever launched into orbit. There are 24 different payloads going into space, meant to test out some of the most unique emerging technologies and furtherer some of the most novel research investigations being pursued by the scientific community.

Perhaps the most high-profile payload is LightSail 2, the Planetary Society’s prototype solar sail technology for propulsion in space. The concept behind a solar sail is to use sunlight as a mechanism for propelling a spacecraft through space, eliminating the need for a finite chemical propellant. LightSail 2 is made of ultrathin Mylar designed such that when photons hit the material, they exert a radiation pressure which produces a small bump in accelerative force, propelling the sail forward. It’s small, but over time, this force builds up more and more, and theoretically it could reach a velocity that surpasses our best chemical propellant technologies.

The $7 million LightSail 2 is the second iteration of the Planetary Society’s solar sail concept. The first, LightSail 1, was launched in 2015, but was only really meant to test out some of the spacecraft’s hardware and software.

LightSail 2 will go well beyond that, demonstrating the spacecraft’s ability to use sunlight alone to accelerate and increase its orbital distance from Earth. The sail, which is about 344 square feet and composed of four individual triangular sails, is folded into a 10-pound cubesat the size of a loaf of bread. A few days after the mission releases the cubesat into orbit, the solar sail will pop out, unfold, and spread into its full position. The entire sail is fitted with an array of solar cells, avionics, and other sensors to help the mission team navigate the spacecraft and control its orientation.

The team will turn the sail towards the sun for half of each orbit, and for about a month it will continue to speed up and until it hits a target altitude of about 447 miles, where it will be potentially visible in the night sky for about a year.

“It’s really a romantic notion that has tremendous practical applications,” Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society, told reporters during a media call Thursday. Solar sails, said Nye, could be used to help satellites reach speeds that could match Earth’s orbit, or be used as part of cargo delivery systems into deep space (something NASA’s future NEA Scout mission to the moon will seek to demonstrate). Solar sails are also seen as a potential solution for making interstellar travel more viable. We’re still decades away from that vision, but Nye emphasizes that “the only way anyone thinks we can do [interstellar travel] is with solar sails.”

The other high-profile project going up on Monday’s launch is NASA’s Green Propellant Infusion Mission (GPIM), a demonstration of an alternative form of in-space propulsion called AF-M315E, a hydroxyl ammonium nitrate fuel, that is purportedly less toxic, less costly, and more efficient than conventional chemical propellants.

Christopher McLean, the principal investigator for GPIM at Ball Aerospace, which is collaborating on the project, explains that this propellant is 50 percent denser, meaning “for the same volume we get 50 percent more ‘miles per gallon’, so to speak.” As far as safety goes, most conventional propellants like hydrazine have a very low vapor pressure, which means the gas can readily spread throughout a room and affect people’s health, as well as potentially react to other chemicals and start a fire. AF-M315E, on the other hand, has no vapor pressure—it could sit in a beaker on the counter without any concerns. “When we fuel the spacecraft, we can ship the fuel via FedEx,” says McLean. It can be installed into a rocket without much worry. As opposed to the myriad of occupational hazards posed by hydrazine (including as a potential carcinogen), McLean compares AF-M315E’s toxicity to household chemicals.

The GPIM spacecraft going up Monday is equipped with five thrusters for propulsion, steering, and acceleration. Over three months, the spacecraft will undergo a series of firings to demonstrate whether AF-M315E will allow the spacecraft to do everything expected of a viable propulsion system in space. The real milestone for GPIM will be slowing down to lower the spacecraft’s orbit with enough precision and control so it doesn’t plunge into the atmosphere. The following 10 months will involve more data collection as it uses up the rest of the fuel, after which the GPIM spacecraft will reenter the planet’s atmosphere.

AF-M315E probably won’t completely replace hydrazine, especially if it doesn’t get a decent name change. But McLean thinks if the test proves successful, AF-M315E’s safety profile and cost-effectiveness would make it appealing to parties looking to take part in spaceflight.

A few of the other payloads going up on STP-2 include a new Deep Space Atomic Clock built and operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Air Force’s DSX spacecraft tasked with making experimental space weather measurements, a series of meteorological and climatology satellites jointly operated by the U.S. and Taiwan, and a new reconnaissance and surveillance spacecraft.

STP-2 is expected to launch at 11:30 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday, June 24, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida with a launch window open for four hours. SpaceX will, of course, attempt a landing of all three first-stage boosters, and you’ll be able to watch the mission live-streamed from the comfort of your home.

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The problem with failing in spaceflight is that your failures are extremely loud and incredibly public. Once again, SpaceX is at the forefront of the public eye, after a failed engine test at the company’s landing site in Cape Canaveral, Florida likely resulted in the destruction of the company’s Crew Dragon vehicle—the same spacecraft that SpaceX is developing and testing to take astronauts into low Earth orbit. It’s still unclear what caused the accident, but almost certainly the repercussions are going to push back plans to return human spaceflight operations to American soil.

Here’s what we know: On April 20, SpaceX conducted a routine launchpad test of its Crew Dragon vehicle—specifically, the same one that pulled off a successful uncrewed test flight in March into space which docked at the International Space Station. The company is currently preparing for an important test of the vehicle’s launch abort systems this summer. This trial would demonstrate the spacecraft’s ability to fire its newly designed SuperDraco engines (parts of which have been made through 3D printing) and pull onboard astronauts to a safe distance away from the Falcon 9 booster .

According to Florida Today, and other eyewitness accounts, a huge wave of smoke began billowing from the launchpad. A video of the incident has now been taken offline, but Ars Technica reports it showed the company counting down towards the firing of the Crew Dragon’s SuperDraco engines, when the spacecraft inexplicably exploded within the final 10 seconds of the countdown.

In its official statement released on Saturday, SpaceX describes the accident as an “anomaly,” and states: “Earlier today, SpaceX conducted a series of engine tests on a Crew Dragon test vehicle on our test stand at Landing Zone 1 in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The initial tests completed successfully but the final test resulted in an anomaly on the test stand. Ensuring that our systems meet rigorous safety standards and detecting anomalies like this prior to flight are the main reasons why we test. Our teams are investigating and working closely with our NASA partners.”

On NASA’s end, administrator Jim Bridenstine issued the following statement: “The NASA and SpaceX teams are assessing the anomaly that occurred today during a part of the Dragon SuperDraco Static Fire Test at SpaceX Landing Zone 1 in Florida. This is why we test. We will learn, make the necessary adjustments and safely move forward with our Commercial Crew Program.”

It’s still not clear what exactly caused the explosion and the extent of the damage the Crew Dragon received, but it’s almost certainly destroyed beyond reasonable or swift repair. The destruction of the capsule is bad news for the company’s plans to conduct its summer launch abort test. It will either need to use another Crew Dragon vehicle for the test (which were likely built for actual crewed missions, and not to be expended on a single test), or create some kind of stripped-down substitute capsule capable of demonstrating the SuperDraco thrusters.

The latter is not out of the question, but we’re talking about a vehicle that’s supposed to send NASA astronauts into space. Safety is of utmost importance for the public agency, and it won’t tolerate any kind of testing that does not meet its safety standards for sending human beings into orbit.. The hope was to have the vehicle prepared for its first crewed flight in July, but now that schedule is likely to change.

SpaceX is certainly no stranger to explosive setbacks. The company’s most recent high-profile accident occurred in September 2016, when a launchpad fire engulfed a Falcon 9 rocket (destroying a Facebook satellite in the process). The resulting loss in hardware, delays in launch schedules, and at least one customer withdrawal cost the company an estimated $740 million in lost revenue.

The new setback likely won’t cost SpaceX nearly as much money, and the investigation into what happened this time around should be fairly swift. But it does put NASA in a stressful (if familiar) situation: Its options for carrying its astronauts into space are once again grim. Eight years after the Space Shuttle program was shuttered, NASA has relied on Russian Soyuz missions to take people to the ISS. September was supposed to be the last time American astronauts were to fly to the space station from foreign soil. If the first crewed Crew Dragon mission slips, it might very well force NASA to procure even more Soyuz mission seats, which last time around cost $75 million apiece. Earlier this year, NASA announced it would likely purchase additional future Soyuz seats to guarantee a U.S. presence on the space station through September 2020. That’s almost a certainty at this point.

The explosion might create consequences felt further down the road as well. The last few months have been filled with chatter resulting from the White House’s new deadline for NASA to return humans to the moon by 2024, and SpaceX has been seen as a potential launch provider through its Falcon Heavy rocket (which just completed a very successful second ever mission). The launchpad explosion might very well cause some to get skittish and rethink whether its wise to entrust such a young company with such important missions, sophisticated hardware, and the safety of NASA astronauts.

Still, this is all early talk. “We do not know yet what actually happened, so it is premature to speculate on the length of delay for SpaceX or its severity,” says John Logsdon, the founder and former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. He’s especially skeptical of reading into what this accident might do for future Falcon Heavy plans, saying its too early to postulate until there’s more information.

Logsdon points out that accidents are par for the course when it comes to spaceflight, and while the public might be surprised to hear of such events, few within the space community feel the same way. “During Apollo there was the Apollo 1 fire, which delayed the program with beneficial results, and also multiple problems on the second Saturn V test launch, which were quickly remedied. During Space Shuttle development there were multiple engine problems and problems with the tiles, putting the program well behind schedule. So this incident has many precedents.”

And lastly, it’s worth remembering there’s another company contracted by NASA under the Commercial Crew Program: Boeing, which is still in the process of preparing its CST-100 Starliner vehicle for an uncrewed flight to the ISS in August, followed by a crewed flight before the end of 2019. “This incident should have no impact on Boeing’s schedule,” says Logsdon.

For now, we’ll have to wait and see what the investigation behind the explosion tells us, and whether SpaceX can mitigate the effects this will have on its own—and NASA’s—human exploration plans in the near future.

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This post has been updated to reflect that SpaceX postponed the launch.

A little over a year ago, the world was struck with shock and awe when SpaceX finally held the inaugural launch of the Falcon Heavy, the biggest rock the company has ever built and currently the most powerful operational launch vehicle on the planet. Florida’s Space Coast that day was filled with tension and excitement, and as the clock finally ticked down to zero, it was clear there was no coming back from whatever happened next.

Thankfully, the launch was a success—mostly. The Falcon Heavy’s three cores of the successfully delivered its silly payload of Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster (and dummy driver, Starman) en route to an orbit around Mars. And the rocket’s three cores successfully separated from one another. The side pair, which were actually previously recovered Falcon 9 boosters, made smooth vertical landings on the ground in Cape Canaveral Air Force Station without issue The center core’s engines, however, failed to fire during a descent down to the company’s Of Course I Still Love You mid-ocean droneship, and the booster landed smack into the middle of the ocean.

History was made, but the company has only just gotten started with a new era of its goals for spaceflight. After multiple delays, the company is aimed to conduct its second Falcon Heavy launch on Wednesday evening from launchpad 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. While the forecast was quite favorable, with an 80 percent chance weather conditions would be a “go” as of Wednesday afternoon, the launch was ultimately postponed for between 6:35 p.m. to 8:31 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday.

SpaceX aims to send up into space Saudi Arabia’s, 13,300-pound Arabsat-6A satellite, built by Lockheed Martin and designed to help facilitate commercial communications operations for a 15-year lifespan in geostationary orbit.

The launch is supposed to be largely the same as what we saw last year: the launch vehicle goes up, the two side boosters separate and aim for automated vertical landings on land at Cape Canaveral, while the center core attempts landing on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean—which would be a first for the company. The entire launch should feature 10 percent more thrust than last year’s demonstration flight.

The Falcon Heavy won’t be the rocket that lets SpaceX get to Mars; that will be the Super Heavy rocket, which will also be reusable. But there are big plans for the Falcon Heavy to play a pivotal role in the expansion of space operations through Earth’s orbit and humanity’s return to the moon. In fact, amidst large delays in the development of the Space Launch System, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has vocalized the possibility that the agency might partner with SpaceX and use the Falcon Heavy to launch its Orion missions to the moon through the early 2020s, and return American astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024.

SpaceX would undoubtedly jump at the opportunity to take part in these missions, and that means there’s a lot more riding on the success and failure of every Falcon Heavy launch hereafter. A single mishap could shake the agency’s confidence the Falcon Heavy is ready to take a NASA spacecraft to the moon.

Let’s see if the launch, now scheduled for Thursday, bolsters support for the Falcon Heavy or magnifies that there’s still some work to be done before we can trust it to take people all the way to the moon. The Arabsat-6A mission should be streamed over the SpaceX webcast.

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SpaceX has never launched a human being into space, but on March 2, it will take a massive step forward towards finally reaching that goal. The private space company will conduct its first ever launch of the Crew Dragon—the spacecraft that will (if everything goes according to plan) send astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) later this year. Although next week’s mission will be uncrewed, it could spell the beginning of the end of America’s reliance on Russia to send its own people into space.

The mission, called Demo-1, is currently set to launch at 2:49 a.m. Eastern Time on Saturday, from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. As of Tuesday, NASA officials give an 80 percent chance of favorable weather. In case any problems arise, a backup date of March 5 has been set as well.

As part of Demo-1, Crew Dragon will dock to the space station on March 3 (around 6:00 a.m. Eastern Time) and deliver roughly 400 pounds of supplies, including a test dummy strapped with sensors that will help let SpaceX and NASA know whether the flight is safe enough for human travelers. On March 8, Crew Dragon will leave the ISS and splashdown into the Atlantic Ocean.

The Crew Dragon (also called Dragon 2) is SpaceX’s flagship human exploration vehicle. The company has spent nearly all of this past decade working on its development, but participation in NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (along with Boeing) effectively sped things up and caused the company to frame the spacecraft’s design for ferrying NASA astronauts to and from the ISS.

Since the Space Shuttle Program ended in 2011, NASA has been without a working human spaceflight system, and has instead relied on Russian Soyuz missions to get its astronauts to the ISS and back. The U.S. has high hopes the commercial industry can take over many low Earth orbit operations and allow NASA to focus instead on the bigger goal of finally sending people to Mars, although delays in the development and testing of Crew Dragon and Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner have caused quite a bit of frustration and anxiety for many in the government. If SpaceX and Boeing are not fully prepared for crewed flights this summer, NASA is at risk of temporarily losing access to the ISS after September.

But as of now, things are looking bright. SpaceX has plans to follow up with another uncrewed Crew Dragon flight in April to test out the vehicle’s abort system, and if that goes well, the company will send two NASA astronauts to the ISS in the summer.

Floridians living close to “Space Coast” have a few options for seeing the launch in person, but the rest of us can plan to stay up and watch the launch livestream on NASA TV. Coverage will start at 2:00 a.m. Eastern Time.

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It’s been nearly eight years since American astronauts last launched into space from American soil. When NASA shuttered the Space Shuttle Program in 2011, it did so under the hopes that the private industry would be willing and able to take a huge step forward and partner with the agency to ferry astronauts back and forth between the International Space Station, as well as other potential low Earth orbit destinations.

That vision is finally on the cusp of becoming reality. It just took much longer than we all hoped it would.

On March 2, if the weather proves favorable, SpaceX will finally launch its first spacecraft designed for human spaceflight, the Crew Dragon (a.k.a Dragon 2), into space, as part of its partnership with NASA under the Commercial Crew Program. There won’t be any humans going up on this test flight (called Demo-1). But if everything goes right, it will be the prelude to a crewed test flight (Demo-2) featuring two astronauts in July, finally ending eight years of American reliance on Russia for its human spaceflight needs, and returning the country to independence once again.

“There’s a mixture of feelings,” says Phil McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight development at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. “I don’t want to speak for the entire team, but for me personally, I have a combination of excitement and a little bit of anxiousness.”

How did we come to rely on Russian rockets?

Even before formally retiring the Space Shuttle program, NASA was already thinking about potential replacements. In 2010, after ending the Constellation program and its plans to send humans back to the moon, the Obama administration decided to shift the agency’s human spaceflight focus toward developing the Space Launch System and the Orion deep space crew vehicle. This supported the more general goal to send humans to Mars sometime during the 2030s.

And while NASA focused on developing and testing new deep space exploration technologies, it could turn over its needs for getting to low Earth orbit to the private industry, which could ferry astronauts to and from the ISS and find its “space legs” as it developed its own technologies. The agency would simply partner with Russia in the meantime, getting its astronauts to the ISS through Soyuz missions launching from Kazakhstan for a few years. It was a win-win all around.

Thus, in 2014, the Commercial Crew Program was officially born. The agency signed contracts with Boeing and SpaceX, tasking the companies with developing and testing new spacecraft that could basically work as a lower-cost, more efficient, safer replacement of the Space Shuttle. At the time, NASA was already seeing great success with its Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program, which effectively contracted out ISS cargo shipment needs to SpaceX and Orbital Sciences (later Orbital ATK, and recently bought by Northrop Grumman). It was an extraordinarily successful partnership, and NASA believed it could emulate this same paradigm as a part of its human spaceflight operations as well.

Unfortunately, CCP has been plagued with delays from virtually the outset. The original goal was to have SpaceX and Boeing strike for their first crewed missions by 2017. Two years later, both companies have yet to launch even an empty spacecraft into orbit. SpaceX’s delay of Demo-1 into next month seems more like business as usual at this point. (Boeing is aiming for its first uncrewed flight test no earlier than April, and its first crewed flight to take place in the late summer.)

Meanwhile, the U.S. is heading into its eighth year of procuring seats aboard Soyuz launches for getting its astronauts to the space station—and that has been far from a peaceful, reliable process. Amidst deteriorating relations between Washington and Moscow, NASA and Roscosmos (Russia’s space agency) have done their best to keep ISS operations running smoothly. But Russia’s decreased involvement with the ISS has limited the number of seats available to the U.S., at increased prices that have cost NASA billions of dollars. SpaceX and Boeing don’t shoulder all the blame (Congress is arguably most at fault for inadequately funding the CCP early on), but they may already be feeling the effects of those frustrations: according to SpaceNews, schedule certainty was a factor for NASA choosing to go with United Launch Alliance instead of SpaceX for the upcoming Lucy mission to the Trojan asteroids near Jupiter, launching in October 2021. (SpaceX has chosen to protest the contract, arguing it could launch Lucy for less money.)

The bottom line is, American access to the ISS has been relegated to a precarious and costly situation. NASA’s access to the space station through Russia effectively ends in September, so any more delays could mean the U.S. loses access to the ISS entirely for a while.

What’s taking so long?

McAlister counters that while the perception from the outside is a program riddled with delays and waiting, the mood behind the scenes is genial and relatively calm. “When you look historically at how long human spaceflight hardware takes to be developed, [CCP] has been a fairly quick development cycle,” he says. “I know we’ve slipped the schedule a couple of times, so people may think, ‘oh they’ve taken so long,’ but… we signed the contracts in September 2014. Four years later, to be talking about having our first test flights, really isn’t that long in the grand scheme things.”

It’s true: While the Crew Dragon is ostensibly an upgraded version of the original Dragon vehicle, it needs to be ready to house people for spaceflight—and that takes time. Companies must design comfortable and safe seating, an escape system, windows, dashboards for the crew to use to manage controls, and much more.

And from NASA’s perspective, the delays are not all that unexpected. “Generally,” says McAlister, “in the aerospace industry, we tend to like to establish aggressive schedules upfront.” This provides an incentive for the teams to move efficiently and leaves ample time for adjustments when obstacles and challenges come up. This mindset also explains why NASA frequently pushes back its own deadlines. The culture McAlister and his team have tried to instill is inspired by the late UCLA basketball coach John Wooden: “Be quick—but don’t hurry.”

Not even this year—the year of the test flights—is immune to schedule changes. “This next year is probably going to be one of the hardest years we’ve ever had,” says McAlister. “We’re going to have issues we need to address. Every launch has risks associated with their schedules.”

Has it been worth it?

That depends on how you look at it. There’s no question both the Crew Dragon and the Starliner will act as cost-efficient flight systems in the long run. The average Space Shuttle launch cost about $450 million. Neither new spacecraft should cost that much—SpaceX in particular, thanks to its masterful work in proving the viability of reusable rockets. Every launch of the Falcon 9 rocket (which will take Crew Dragon into space) costs only about $62 million. Astronaut launches will presumably not cost much more.

In addition, both spacecraft will feature much better safety systems than were available on the Space Shuttle and other previous spaceflight systems. Both utilize what’s called a “pusher escape system” for launch abort sequences. In this scenario, during an anomaly that requires an abort, the system pushes the spacecraft away from the high-powered engines instead of pulling them, so you still have a propulsion system for maneuvering and altitude adjustment as the crew capsule returns to Earth.

Lastly, the CCP’s approach means NASA doesn’t have to rely on a single launch provider for its needs. “I think that has been a huge benefit for NASA,” says McAlister. It’s important for the government to not be dependent on any single system [alone].”

The recent mid-flight abort of the Soyuz MS-10 launch to the ISS underscores this point. The Russian Soyuz spaceflight system is one of the safest crew vehicles around, having been used for decades on hundreds of successful launches in orbit. “Even with all that flight heritage, it had a failure,” says McAlister. “When you’re depending on a single supplier… it really increases risks.” Multiple suppliers mean multiple options when one company runs into a hiccup.

Everyone is anxiously waiting for the U.S. to return to spaceflight independence, but the CCP’s success could extend beyond just ISS missions. If Demo-1 goes smoothly and the rest of the year’s flights manage to send astronauts into space and back, the agency might very well start asking whether it can expand these types of partnerships to other areas of spaceflight as well, and leverage these technologies for other capabilities. NASA’s already developing its own spaceflight systems for future travel to the moon, Mars, and potentially elsewhere, but it’s certainly not outlandish to think a future version of the Crew Dragon—one designed for deep space missions—could play a role in those plans. For now, let’s just hope next month’s launch goes off without a hitch.

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Only 24 people have ever orbited the moon. The first three managed the feat on Christmas Eve, 1968, nearly 50 years ago. The last three left in 1972. Since then, no one has gone back. Recently, both the United States and China have expressed interest in a lunar return visit—but so have private companies.

On Monday night, at 9:00 p.m. eastern, Elon Musk announced the identity of the first passenger on SpaceX’s inaugural lunar mission.

“We are honored that he’s choosing us—we’re not choosing him,” Musk said of Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who will become the first non-American to fly around the moon.

Maezawa introduced himself to the assembled journalists as a skateboarder, drummer, and an entrepreneur who started an e-commerce business, Zozotown. The 42-year-old’s net worth is estimated at 3 billion dollars and he is an avid art collector who once bought a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting for $110.5 million.

In short, Maezawa could choose to do just about anything with his money. “I choose to go to the moon,” Maezawa declared Monday night.

Most excitingly, Maezawa won’t be alone on his trip, tentatively scheduled to launch as early as 2023. He plans to invite some of his favorite living artists to accompany him on the ride. (He noted during his remarks that the late Basquiat would have been his first pick.) A video at the announcement featured nine different artistic categories; a film director, a painter, a dancer, a novelist, a musician, a fashion designer, a sculptor, a photographer, and an architect.

The idea is for six to eight artists to accompany Maezawa on the roughly week-long journey to the moon and back, and then have them create something based on their time in space upon their return to solid ground. Maezawa describes himself as the ‘Host Curator’ of the venture, which he is calling ‘Dear Moon.’ Maezawa said he plans to start by asking artists whose work he admires.

“I choose to go to the Moon, with artists. If Pablo Picasso had been able to see the moon up-close, what kind of paintings would he have drawn? If John Lennon could have seen the curvature of the Earth, what kind of songs would he have written? If they had gone to space, how would the world have looked today?” Maezawa writes. “Together with Earth’s top artists, I will be heading to the moon… just a little earlier than everyone else.”

You can learn more about the project on its website dearmoon.earth which features a video about the endeavor, or on Twitter @dearmoonproject.

Questions and money

Musk also revealed that Maezawa was the same person who planned to go on the proposed SpaceX lunar launch announced in February of 2017. That initial announcement featured plans to launch in the much smaller Crew Dragon spaceship, which could only accommodate two passengers. The BFR is designed to accommodate up to 100, though for its inaugural lunar flight, it will only carry Maezawa and his companions.

There are plenty of questions still remaining: will Elon Musk be one of the passengers? (Musk left the possibility open during the press conference.) Which artists will be selected? What training will they go through?

Musk didn’t disclose the sum Maezawa committed to the mission, but he did say that it was “a lot of money.” The funds will go toward development of the rocket that will carry him on his long-anticipated journey. Musk said that the development of BFR would cost about $5 billion. “I don’t think it’s more than 10 [billion dollars] or less than 2 [billion dollars],” Musk said.

How will they get there?

And speaking of that rocket… the BFR is still very much under construction in Los Angeles at the moment. Musk said he planned on doing short hopper flights with BFR in 2019, with the first orbital flight in two to three years. Initial flights will be uncrewed.

The short hops will take place in Brownsville, Texas, but the location of the orbital launch and landing is still undecided. Musk mentioned during the press conference that the launch could occur on a floating launch pad.

The Monday announcement did point out new design features of the BFR including movable fins at the fore and aft of the ship, which will help the ship brake in Earth’s atmosphere as it comes in for a very steep landing.

Danger, bravery, and safety all reared their heads over the celebratory announcement. Musk says that the BFR design does build on work they’ve done for the NASA Crew Dragon system, but there are still significant risks in developing new spaceflight technologies, as tragedies on Apollo, Shuttle missions, and test flights have demonstrated over the decades.

What comes next?

Musk said that the BFR is designed to “land anywhere in the solar system” thanks to its propulsive landing system, which will allow it to touch down on planetary bodies without an atmosphere. At an Air Force-sponsored symposium, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said that the company was still aiming to send people to Mars by 2024.

But first, they’ll reach for the moon.

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Tonight at 9 pm eastern time, the world will gain a first glance at the latest private citizen to hand over a load of cash in exchange for a promised rare trip into space and around the moon.

Private space company SpaceX plans to use its Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) to launch a spaceship (nicknamed the BFS) towards the moon, carrying a paying passenger on a trip around our closest satellite—a view that only 24 astronauts have ever seen in person.

SpaceX supplemented its announcement with new concept art of the BFR/BFS system which seems to have been tweaked from its original design with the newest iteration featuring three fins and seven engines to help make the lunar trip.

Wait, haven’t we heard this before?

If you think SpaceX sending someone to the moon sounds really familiar, you’re not imagining it.

In February 2017, SpaceX said it would send two people to the Moon by the end of 2018 on a Falcon Heavy rocket. The two anonymous individuals put down significant deposits. But that trip, as originally planned, hasn’t happened yet. And, it is highly unlikely to happen in quite the same way.

In September 2017, seven months after the announcement of the lunar plans, Musk announced the development of the BFR, and told reporters earlier this year that crewed missions on the Falcon Heavy were being tabled in favor of development of the BFR. (The smaller Falcon 9 rocket will still be used to launch NASA astronauts to the ISS in a Crew Dragon ship next spring.)

Since those customers remained anonymous, and SpaceX never provided further information, it’s impossible to know whether the company gave one of those individuals first dibs on the new trip.

Okay, so what do we know and what’s still uncertain?

The sparse SpaceX announcement on Twitter reads in part: “SpaceX has signed the world’s first private passenger to fly around the Moon aboard our BFR launch vehicle.” Replying to a tweet asking if he was the private customer in question, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted out an emoji of a Japanese flag; perhaps a clue or simply a red herring to ignite conversation about the announcement (just like this).

On the SpaceX webcast page the company calls the signing of a private citizen onto the planned mission “an important step toward enabling access for everyday people who dream of traveling to space.” Unlike the Apollo missions which could only accommodate three astronauts at a time, the BFS should be able to take many more (though specific numbers aren’t available yet). The ship will certainly need a trained crew to operate the vessel.

It’s not entirely clear how signing a single paying passenger will enable access for “everyday people” who might dream of venturing outside our planet’s atmosphere. Reusable rockets, like the ones that SpaceX has championed do reduce overall costs of spaceflight, but it reduces them from hundreds of millions of dollars per launch to tens of millions of dollars per launch. That’s certainly less expensive, and might make economic sense for a space agency like NASA, but it’s just not in the vacation budget of the overwhelming majority of people here on Earth.

A brief history of tourists in space

Of course, there are some people who have already paid for the privilege of going to space. Dennis Tito became the first space tourist to visit the ISS in 2001 securing a berth on the Soyuz with Russian company Space Adventures at a cost estimated at $20 million. Since his trip, six others have also flown to the ISS; Greg Olsen, Charles Simonyi, Anousheh Ansari, Richard Garriott, Guy Laliberté, and Mark Shuttleworth.

Neither SpaceX nor those seven citizens—plus the supposed future space-farer to be revealed tonight—are alone in their desires to turn space into a vacation destination. . Both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin also working to get their clients up past the stratosphere with proposed missions that range from short hops along the edge of space to trips to still non-existent space stations. Virgin Galactic is selling tickets for rides on its Unity spacecraft, which the company claims will one day take day trips to space for the comparative bargain of $250,000. Currently, that idea is lofty; the spacecraft itself has yet to make it to space. Blue Origin, owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, will soon begin selling similar flights at a comparable price point but likewise, is not sending people past the wild blue yonder yet.

What’s so special about the moon?

Both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin plan to offer suborbital flights —not high enough to orbit the Earth. And of the tourists that have actually flown in space, none has left low Earth orbit, the area of space that is easiest to get to where a spaceship (or space station like the ISS) can stay in orbit around the planet . The ISS is about 254 miles above Earth. The moon is 238,900 miles away. That’s a far more challenging trip.

The first crewed mission to circle the moon was Apollo 8 now 60 years ago in 1968. The three astronauts became the first people to see the moon’s far side, orbiting the celestial body 10 times during their six day trip.

The journey wasn’t without its downsides. The commander, astronaut Frank Borman became violently ill less than a day into the flight. Still, they were the first people to see our planet rising over the lunar surface, capturing the iconic sight on film on Christmas Eve, 1968.

The image, known as earthrise is credited with kickstarting the environmental movement. Without a doubt, anyone who signs up for the proposed SpaceX mission is hoping to experience the same stunning view.

When might it happen?

Probably not anytime soon, definitely not before the end of this year, and probably not next year either. SpaceX is targeting next year for crewed missions, but those will involve NASA-trained astronauts headed to the ISS, not private citizens.

As Ars Technica space editor Eric Berger points out, it took seven years for the Falcon Heavy to go from announcement in 2011 to launch earlier this year. If it follows the same trajectory, the BFS, which was just redesigned, likely still needs to go through several years of testing before it carries passengers. (SpaceX’s NASA-funded Crew Dragon capsule is expected to launch to the space station next year after four years of testing). Berger pinpoints 2023 as the earliest launch date. What launch window SpaceX will aim for remains an open question.

Watch tonight for more details.

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It’s been a hard month for space telescopes. First we learned that Kepler is running out of fuel, signaling the end of its second life as an exoplanet hunter. Then we got word that the much-anticipated James Webb Space Telescope faces yet another delay.

But there is some good news on the horizon for astronomers, astrophysicists, planetary geologists, and people who just like learning neat things about far-away worlds. It’s TESS—short for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. If all goes well*, the new telescope will launch this week aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. It’s a relatively small satellite, but researchers have giant hopes for what it might discover. It has the potential to identify thousands of new planets, hundreds of rocky worlds like Earth, and dozens of planets hanging out in their star’s habitable zone (where liquid water could exist on the surface), all within our own little corner of the galaxy.

How it works

“Kepler was amazing, and Kepler’s legacy is that we now know that there is a huge diversity of planets out there,” says Lisa Kaltenegger, Director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell and a member of the TESS science team. Kaltenegger and her colleagues want to build on the knowledge gained from Kepler and take a closer look at some exoplanets that are hanging out around stars a little closer to home.

TESS will systematically examine 85 percent of the sky seen from Earth, focusing on the stars visible in the northern hemisphere for one year, and the southern hemisphere for the next year. It will keep its peeping within 300 light years away from Earth. That might seem like a large distance, but to an astronomer, it’s right in our neighborhood. To put it in perspective, our galaxy is about 100,000 light years across.

”If you think about it, the closest star, Proxima Centauri, is about 4 light years away. We are looking at everything that is bright and close out to 300 light years, so about 100 times that distance, and there’s a huge number of stars that we can look at,” Kaltenegger says.

Within that range, TESS will watch over 200,000 stars for evidence of planets over the course of a two-year mission, taking pictures of a segment of the sky every 30 minutes for 27 days. As with Kepler, researchers will use TESS to watch for moments when stars dim, which happens when a planet passes between the star and TESS. The dips in light can tell us a lot about a planet’s size, shape, and what it’s made of.

“We don’t have any ships or vehicles yet to get there, but light travels the universe for free,” Kaltenegger says. “So we can do this exploration even though we don’t yet have any physical way to actually get there.”

TESS will particularly look for planets around bright stars, much brighter than those Kepler studied. The brightness of the targets means that other, more powerful telescopes—like the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope and ground-based instruments—will be able to look for even finer details of those planets, including their potential for life.

Looking for life

With TESS, researchers will find thousands of planets, take the measure of their masses, and observe strange stars. Some researchers, like Kaltenegger, hope that they will point toward a planet other than our own that might have life.

“My passion is trying to figure out if we are alone in the universe, and what we need for that is planets where we can explore the air, where we get enough light to look at the atmosphere of those planets. [That means] we need planets that are close by, and that’s what TESS affords us,” Kaltenegger says.

Kaltenegger and her colleagues can search for signs of life by watching for worlds with large amounts of unstable compounds in their atmospheres, including oxygen. Oxygen makes up a disproportionate amount of our atmosphere because it is a byproduct of many living organisms. A similar atmospheric imbalance on another world, and especially the presence of multiple gasses that don’t belong together, could indicate the presence of life.

Scientists can tell the composition of another planet’s atmosphere by looking for parts of light that vanish as the globe passes in front of its host star, and reappear when the planet has moved on. Those missing pieces correspond to particular molecules (water, oxygen, and methane, for example) in the planet’s atmosphere that absorb specific parts of the light.

TESS wouldn’t be taking those measurements, but it would point to promising candidates for more stringent examination by JWST or ground-based telescopes.

“It will be the first time in human history that we have the technological means to answer the question ‘are we alone?’” Kaltenegger says.

When does it launch again?

Barring technical glitches, bad weather, or other strange and unfortunate events, TESS will launch on Monday, April 16, at 6:32 p.m. eastern.*

• UPDATE: Looks like the technical glitch wins. SpaceX scrubbed the Monday launch so that their team could conduct additional analysis on the guidance, navigation and control systems. They are aiming for another launch attempt on Wednesday, April 18.

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SpaceX is known for its spaceships—from the Dragon capsule that resupplies the space station, to the proposed interplanetary transport system. But it’s the company’s more traditional, water-going vessels that keep the lofty dreams of affordable spaceflight afloat. Take a closer look at SpaceX’s non-space ships.

Droneships

Before two of the Falcon Heavy engine cores could gracefully land on twin launchpads in a display rivaled only by synchronized divers, Elon Musk and the SpaceX team first had to prove their rockets could come back to Earth in a controlled and steady manner.

While SpaceX’s first touchdown in 2015 happened at Landing Zone 1 in Cape Canaveral, SpaceX still wanted to be able to softly land (and quickly recover) rockets on a floating platform in the ocean—traditional landing pads are small and expensive, and the oceans are vast. SpaceX succeeded on April 8, 2016, landing the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket on the droneship Of Course I Still Love You in the Atlantic Ocean.

Since then, landings on Of Course I Still Love You and its sister ship in the Pacific Just Read the Instructions have become more common, helping SpaceX reuse the expensive first-stage engine cores of its Falcon 9 rockets. The drone ships are especially important for launches carrying heavier loads to higher orbits, as the rockets use more fuel on those launches and have less available to guarantee a safe landing on dry ground. Though the landings get all the attention, the ships—also called Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ships or ASDS—are pretty amazing, too.

Once towed into position (more on the tugs later) the drone ship’s GPS and thrusters keep it in one place, waiting for the return of the rocket. The rockets aren’t small, and these ships aren’t either. They’re modified barges about the size of a football field, with hulls 20 feet deep. Barges like this are typically used to haul cargo, but their large area also makes them a perfect landing pad for rockets.

In 2015, when SpaceX was still anticipating its first landing, NASA Spaceflight reported on some of the extensive modifications used to turn barges into drone ships. The thrusters that keep the ship in place were repurposed from offshore oil rigs that used similar tech. Then there are added steel blast walls to protect equipment during a rocket landing, the autonomous guidance and positioning systems, and steel wings that extend the deck of the ship.

Of Course I Still Love You and Just Read The Instructions will soon be joined by another drone ship—A Shortfall of Gravitas—which is currently under construction and will operate on the East Coast. Having two drone ships on the East Coast could allow for simultaneous water landings of engine cores used in future Falcon Heavy launches.

Mr. Steven

Engine cores aren’t the only important part of a rocket, and SpaceX wants to reuse as much of their equipment as possible. Being able to reuse a rocket makes space launches less expensive.

SpaceX would like to be able to catch and re-use the fairing or nosecone of the rocket, which protects the payload (typically a satellite) from the intense forces of going through Earth’s atmosphere. The fairing is also designed to help reduce drag on the rocket as it cuts through the air. It’s an important job, and it doesn’t come cheap. For SpaceX launches, the cost of the fairing is estimated at about $6 million. It splits in half as it releases a payload in space, and then those halves fall back to Earth. SpaceX has successfully landed these fairings in the ocean before, but Mr. Steven marks a more purposeful plan for recovery and eventual reuse.

Musk says that they’ve integrated thrusters and a guidance system into the fairing to help guide it safely back into the atmosphere, at which point a parafoil (think a parachute shaped like a wing) will deploy, and Mr. Steven will try to catch the nose cone in the steel and netting structure at the back of the ship.

That’s the idea, anyways. Thursday’s attempt to catch the fairing with Mr. Steven missed by a few hundred meters, but Musk hopes that larger parachutes to slow down the fairing’s descent might result in a successful catch next time.

In any case, the fairing did land safely in the water, close enough for people on Mr. Steven to send back this shot:

Other Ships

Once out in the water, SpaceX’s drone ships use their thrusters and GPS to keep them in place, even in rough seas. But to get out to their appointed location, they need a push. Tugboats and supply ships drag the drone ships into position, retreat to a safe distance while the rocket lands, then move in, carrying crew and equipment to secure the rocket (or pieces of rocket) for a ride back into port, welding the rocket to the deck to secure it.

But the drone ships aren’t the only pieces of SpaceX equipment that need a backup team. When SpaceX’s Dragon capsules return from delivering supplies to the International Space Station, they need a lift too. These capsules land in the oceans, where they are picked up by support vehicles like the NRC Quest, a ship that has also worked to respond to oil spills and deployed technology used to generate power from ocean waves. It’s all part of a growing SpaceX fleet, but one that is hardly limited to space.

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Thanks to the successful Falcon Heavy launch on Tuesday, SpaceX shot a midnight cherry-red Tesla Roadster into space, with the top down, blaring David Bowie, and being “driven” by a mannequin in a SpaceX spacesuit.

So… Now what?

The Roadster is currently careening through space toward Mars’ orbit, but it’s possible the car could make an Earth flyby in the future—close enough that experienced telescope-enthusiasts may be able to spot it, according to Tom Narita, an astrophysicist at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. And with hazards like high-speed space dust and cosmic ray radiation, the Roadster may look a little different than it did in the livestream on Tuesday.

When will the Roadster be back?

It’s hard to say. If nothing nudges it out of its current orbit, the Roadster should make a loop around the sun and return to the same neighborhood it was launched from in roughly two and a half years, Narita says. We earthlings wouldn’t be able to see it, though, as we’d be on the other side of the sun. In five years, we might—though Narita is quick to note that it’s hard to make confident, precise estimates because of how little we know about the car’s trajectory.

Planetary Society Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla repeated that sentiment on Twitter, saying the Roadster’s lack of trackable radio transmissions and unplanned trajectory add up to a very unpredictable orbit.

There's two reasons the Roadster's orbit is very uncertain compared to solar system spacecraft

(1) No radio transmissions, so it can't be tracked.
(2) No *intentional* trajectory (at least one reported) beyond "as far as possible"

At this point it's basically an asteroid. https://t.co/Rzz3CYdDH7/

— Emily Lakdawalla (@elakdawalla) February 8, 2018

Plus, there’s something called outgassing, which Ron Turner, a senior scientific advisor to NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts, says could also affect the car’s trajectory a little bit.

“There’s air all throughout the car,” Turner says. “In the vacuum of space, any gases in the seat cushions, the doors, the glove box, and even in the space of the steering wheel wrapper, all of that gas and water vapor from Earth’s atmosphere is eventually going to come out. It doesn’t have any reason to stay there.”

And when the gases do come out, they’ll push the Roadster in various directions. Turner agrees that we could see the Roadster again in five years—but says it could also be “seven and a half, ten or eleven. It’s reasonable we’ll see it again, it just depends on what orbit it finally gets itself into.”

What will it look like?

It’ll probably be a little weathered. “Think of it as finding an artifact, like the Titanic under the ocean,” Turner says. “It’s not gonna be in great shape, it won’t stay pristine.”

The Roadster will be worn down by two things. The first is a constant “sandblasting” of tiny dust-like particles called micrometeorites that whiz through space at high speeds, according to Turner. “Those little motes of dust, which are mostly just fractions of grams, are going to be hitting the car at 20 kilometers per second,” he says. “They’ll vaporize and scatter the paint and make nice little pits in the metal.” Over decades, that could make the Tesla lose its deep cherry-red color.

The second force that’ll hit the Roadster is radiation. “Anything with plastic or rubber will degrade because of cosmic ray radiation, energy from cosmic rays floating around in space that tends to disrupt chemical bonds,” Narita says. Radiation is really tough on carbon bonds, like those present in plastics and rubber. “The metal structure itself should be fine and last for hundreds of thousands of years.” Turner adds that the plastic and rubber bits of the car, like the wheels and the seats, will get worn down and mottled in a few years, and eventually be shredded by that radiation.

And what about the car’s chances of smashing into something larger and being mangled beyond recognition? Han Solo might tell you to never tell him the odds of crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid, but the odds here are actually slim to none. Outer space is a lot more empty than we realize—even the rocks inside the asteroid belt are so spaced out that it’d be difficult to hit one by chance. “If it does by coincidence hit an asteroid, that’s the end of that,” Narita says. “But it’s my speculation that the chance of that is pretty small.”

So what’s the bottom line?

Though the Tesla Roadster probably won’t get smashed by a stray asteroid, it’ll probably be a little space-worn the next time it comes back to our neck of the woods, and especially in years to come.

“Someday, maybe someone will find the relic of what appears to be a car or a hunk of metal with shredded rubber and destroyed plastic covering it,” Narita says. “But I think it’ll be more of an inert piece of space junk than anything dangerous.”

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Patience was in short supply during the leg-jiggling, finger-tapping, tension-filled hours before the launch of the Falcon Heavy, which would, if successful, become the most powerful operational rocket on the planet. From thousands of miles away viewers obsessively checked Twitter for live updates from the hundreds of reporters and thousands of visitors who showed up to witness history.

The knotted insides of space enthusiasts clenched tighter as the launch slipped from 1:30 to 2:20, to 2:50, then 3:15. Fast-moving winds had stirred the blue skies and the upper atmosphere above the rocket sitting on launchpad 39A. The countdown clock stopped, along with the hearts of people who had been waiting seven years for this moment—when Elon Musk introduced the idea of the Falcon Heavy to the world in 2011.

On Tuesday afternoon, winds in the upper atmosphere were blowing at speeds 20 percent higher than the acceptable level for rockets of this kind to take off safely. Anxiety rose as time dribbled out of the 2.5 hour launch window. Then, the countdown clock restarted and a new launch time was set for 3:45.

They started fueling up, adding purified kerosene known as RP-1 to the rocket. Spirits and hopes rose once again as the engineers poured liquid oxygen into the Falcon Heavy, a vote of confidence that the rocket would actually take off as planned.

Hundreds of thousands of people tuned into the live webcast long before it went live, patiently awaiting the first glimpse of the Falcon Heavy. In the end, 2.3 million people tuned in to watch the big event.

Then, there it was, surrounded by a cloud of vented oxygen. The weather held. No technical errors arose. It was five minutes to launch, then 30 seconds, then, 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1… flame and fire roared along with the crowd, and the most powerful rocket in operation today was on its way up, burning its path in the sky.

The scene was breathtaking, but could the rocket stick the landing? The Falcon Heavy approached the darkness at the edge of our atmosphere, and cheers arose once again as two Falcon cores on the sides broke cleanly away from the center core, pivoting back towards two landing pads on Cape Canaveral. Shortly afterwards, the last segment of the first stage separated, and headed back towards a drone ship. Landing the rockets carefully (instead of smashing them into the ocean) makes it more likely that they can be reused on another flight.

The two side cores were already veterans, having launched and landed in previous missions. They touched down in unison, a dramatic flourish to cap off a successful launch. It was, according to Popular Science gathered around their computers, “strangely beautiful,” and “like watching synchronized swimmers, but rockets.” In the words of the jubilant SpaceX flight engineer, “The Falcons have landed.”

The remaining Falcon, the center core, headed towards a drone ship just as the video feed of the landing cut off. Hours later, The Verge’s Loren Grush reported that two of the core’s three engines failed to fire, sending it into the sea just 300 feet from the drone ship at 300 miles per hour. The impact was enough to knock out two of the ship’s engines, and scatter shrapnel on the deck.

One other aspect of the launch went ever-so-slightly off: A cherry-red Tesla roadster (‘driven’ by a mannequin clad in a SpaceX-branded spacesuit) was meant to enter orbit around Mars. The spaceman is headed out into space, but he’s overshot his orbit and will instead go into the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Third burn successful. Exceeded Mars orbit and kept going to the Asteroid Belt. pic.twitter.com/bKhRN73WHF

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 7, 2018

Starman won’t be totally alone. A tiny model of both the car and the astronaut are in tow, along with a plaque bearing the names of 6,000 SpaceX employees, and a disc specially designed to hold information even in the hostile environment in space. The data includes human knowledge, including famed science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.

For four hours after launch, SpaceX had a live stream of Starman available for people to watch the giant Tesla advertisement orbit Earth:

This was only a test run of the rocket, hence the publicity-seeking payload. But now we have an heir to the Saturn V rocket, which carried people to the Moon. The Falcon Heavy isn’t quite as powerful as the Saturn V, but it is operational. NASA discontinued the Saturn V in the 1970s. Since then, the world has gone without a heavy lifter. The Falcon Heavy will likely ferry satellites to space, like its smaller Falcon 9 siblings, but it has the potential to go further, pushing us—or at least our proxies—towards the Moon, or Mars, or farther.

There is no doubt that it is a heavyweight, but its reign might be short. Other rockets, including SpaceX’s own BFR system, a fully reusable two-part rocket and spaceship system, might soon displace it at the top, and ultimately might be the vessel that lands on Mars with earthlings inside.

But that’s all in the future. There will be schedule changes, budget changes, and payload changes, and it’s still unclear when humans will actually head to Mars, or back to the moon. This was an exhilarating, silly, and perhaps a bit ostentatious display of what humans can achieve. But it mostly shows how much more we have left to do: There are scientific missions to launch, human outposts to establish, and a whole universe of worlds to explore.

For now, we’re in a spot where we can take a deep breath, watch an empty space suit in a used sports car circle the Earth, and get ready for what comes next.

Update 2/7/18: This post has been updated with pictures of the launch and information about the fate of the center core, and the final trajectory of Starman.

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UPDATE 2/6/18: The launch has been postponed to 3:45 p.m. EST.

It’s been nearly seven years since Elon Musk first unveiled the concept for his Falcon Heavy rocket, the largest to launch since the Saturn V. Saturn V’s were NASA’s titans of the launchpad, propelling Apollo missions to the moon and Skylab into orbit. Their size and power remain unmatched, even if Tuesday’s test succeeds. But the Falcon Heavy is still a long-anticipated heavy hitter.

Seven years of waiting and anticipation. Two weeks(ish) since it sucessfully test-fired the 27 Merlin engines within its three Falcon 9 cores. And now, finally, finally we get to see it blast off.

The first launch window opens on February 6 at 1:30 p.m. The SpaceX team will have 2.5 hours to launch the rocket before the launch window closes at 4:00. If it doesn’t launch on Tuesday, it will try again the next day. Weather conditions at Cape Canaveral look good so far, with the Air Force’s 45th Space Wing forecasting only about a 20 percent chance of conditions unfavorable to launch—thick clouds or high winds.

Even Elon Musk, who says he’s normally stressed before a launch said on a call with reporters that he was feeling good about this upcoming launch. “I feel quite giddy and happy actually,” he said, attributing his calmness to the immense preparations that have led to this launch. “We’ve done everything we could do to maximize success of this mission.”

Of course, there’s always a chance that technical issues could cause delays as well. The Falcon Heavy’s test-fire (where it fires the engines briefly, but stays on the pad) was delayed numerous times, both for technical reasons and due to the government shutdown.

But whether we get off the ground on Tuesday or Wednesday, you can watch the live stream here:

We recommend tuning in a little before 1:30 pm eastern time, just to make sure you don’t miss anything. And if you can’t wait that long, you can watch this animation of the ideal Falcon Heavy Launch, set to David Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars?’

Even standing on the launch pad, the Falcon Heavy is impressive. It clocks in at 229.6 feet tall and 39.9 feet wide. When the engines ignite they’ll carry 3,125,735 pounds of rocket alone, in addition to the mass of of the cargo. For this first run it will carry Musk’s Tesla roadster with a pressure suit called ‘Starman’ sitting in the car.

On future missions the rocket could carry 140,660 pounds of payload to low-earth orbit, 37,040 to Mars, and 7,720 lbs to Pluto (the longer the journey, the more fuel you need—and fuel takes up weight of its own).

Want to launch something on the Falcon Heavy? There are definitely less expensive ways to get rid of your car. A cargo launch to geostationary orbit will cost you $90 million. The price tag might seem high—but as Reuters reports, it’s a fourth the cost of its closest competitor, and can carry payloads twice as massive.

Being able to reuse rockets is a huge money saver, and SpaceX plans to land all three of the Falcon 9 rockets used in the Falcon Heavy mission safely—two on land, and one at sea.

If all goes well, SpaceX will continue launching the Falcon Heavy, even as Musk and SpaceX begin to turn their attention to their next venture, the BFR. But while we wait for that next leap in technology, the Falcon Heavy will keep launching. It has already won a contract for a Saudi Arabian communications satellite, and is contracted to launch scientific and military satellites for the Air Force later this year.

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We’ve been waiting for so long. SpaceX has managed to keep anticipation for its Falcon Heavy debut high since first announcing it back in 2011.

Testing was delayed for years as engineers figured out what it would take to keep three Falcon-9 boosters—and their 27 Merlin engines—together and headed on the right trajectory when they at last ignited. We finally got a sneak peak of what that would look like when SpaceX put the Falcon Heavy through a dress rehearsal on Wednesday, firing up the engines for 12 seconds on the pad.

Billowing steam created a brief, massive cloud around the launch site. Just check out SpaceX’s footage of the test fire:

Of course, sitting on the launchpad for a quick test fire is a little different from actually launching (and then simultaneously landing three boosters at three different sites).

The real launch date and time remains TBD, but Elon Musk said on Twitter that it could happen in a week.

Falcon Heavy hold-down firing this morning was good. Generated quite a thunderhead of steam. Launching in a week or so. pic.twitter.com/npaqatbNir

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 24, 2018

When it does take off, the Falcon Heavy will carry the hopes and dreams of everyone who has worked on the project. Oh, and Musk’s red Tesla roadster, supposedly with a copy of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy in the glove box, along with a towel and a sign saying “Don’t Panic.” Also, it will be playing “Space Oddity”.

There’s every chance that the launch could still go horribly wrong. But a successful static fire is at least a step in the right direction.

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In 2013, the government of the United States shut down for 16 days, closing agencies and national parks, furloughing employees, and turning off the Panda Cam.

The shutdown only lasted three days this time around, two of which were over the weekend. But for that one half-a-business-day-or-so of uncertainty, many government agencies came online just to announce their official silence, including NASA. Many of the space agency’s public-facing accounts were hushed, as non-essential personnel were asked to stay at home or close their offices until the shutdown ended.

Sorry, but we won't be tweeting/responding to replies during the government shutdown. Also, all public NASA activities and events are cancelled or postponed until further notice. We'll be back as soon as possible! Sorry for the inconvenience.

— NASA (@NASA) January 22, 2018

It now looks like the government will be funded through February 8. But NASA was ready for this latest shutdown—and will be for any that may come along later—with a revised plan in place since November. During a shutdown, NASA continues supporting the International Space Station and any satellites that are already operational. It also must maintain enough staff to avoid endangering lives or equipment in ground operations, including preparations made for upcoming launches. On the other hand, educational activities at NASA, along with other non-essential duties are, well, shut down.

During these events NASA’s major space centers dwindle in staff from thousands of employees to only a few hundred. It’s dramatic, it can be confusing, and this is just one government agency—there are many more that are also affected by the sudden dam in the stream of federal money.

Here are some photos to help you put the shortened shutdown behind you, and keep you looking up.

NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei and Scott Tingle (top right and bottom left, respectively, in the pictured image on the screen) will go on a spacewalk on January 23. Vande Hei and JAXA astronaut Norishige Kanai will perform a space walk on January 29. If the shutdown had continued, the spacewalks would have gone on as scheduled, but NASA would not have televised them to the general public.

The ISS is set against the backdrop of Earth at night, flanked by the docked Soyuz and Progress spacecraft. Six astronauts stay on the internationally-supported craft at all times. Even during a shutdown, NASA continues to support operations there.

Last week, before the shutdown began, NASA and the Navy worked together to practice recovering an uncrewed version of the Orion spacecraft, which will one day carry astronauts on the Space Launch System. Rehearsals like this help the government coordinate better during an actual crewed recovery effort, when astronauts will be waiting for their pickup.

The Space Launch System, a massive rocket, is slated to carry Orion. During ignition and liftoff hundreds of thousands of gallons of water will spray onto the launchpad to keep everything cool. Unlike the geyser seen in this test—which occurred last week—when the pad is set up for launch, the water will flow more sedately through pipes instead of erupting on the launch pad.

No, it’s not technically a NASA image, but with the rise of commercial spaceflight, companies like SpaceX are intertwined with NASA more than ever. The highly-anticipated static test fire and launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket were already delayed last week, and the shutdown looked ready to imperil those plans even further. As The Verge reported, the rocket is set to launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where the United States Air Force’s 45th Space Wing oversees operations.

NASA’s Curiosity kept roving during the 2013 shutdown. Unlike some other NASA operations, the car-sized bot checks in daily with its team, which analyzes the data and tells the rover where to go next.

Last week, the Parker Solar Probe was lowered into a 40-foot-tall thermal vacuum chamber at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center days before the shutdown. The probe is scheduled to spend seven weeks in the nearly-airless chamber, enduring the same extreme heat and cold that it will experience after it launches into space this July.

The Insight Mars Lander is also being prepped for a 2018 launch. The mission will explore the interior of the planet to try to understand more about its evolution over time. Right now, it looks like neither InSight nor the Parker Solar Probe are likely to be affected by this brief shutdown.

Shutdown or no shutdown, spacecraft like New Horizons (in the outer reaches of the Solar System) and Juno (near Jupiter) are continuing on their appointed rounds. This image was taken by Juno in December and cleaned up by citizen scientist Gerald Eichstadt.

This image, taken by the Suomi NPP satellite in 2012, is one of the most popular ever taken by NASA, showing incredible details of the Western Hemisphere. Even during the shutdown, the DSCOVR satellite’s EPIC instrument was still sending out images—take a look if you’d like to feel like you’re a million miles away from the political sphere.

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The glowing ball of light that hovered briefly over over Los Angeles last week was not aliens.

And it definitely wasn’t a Nuclear alien UFO from North Korea.

Nuclear alien UFO from North Korea pic.twitter.com/GUIHpKkkp5

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 23, 2017

… whatever that means.

But it did look really odd. It was a pearly teardrop glowing against the darkening sky, lovely and otherworldly. It was also just a cloud of frozen crystals of water and exhaust marking the path of a SpaceX rocket.

Here’s what happened. On the evening of Friday, December 22, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, carrying 10 telecom satellites for Iridium.

As the first stage of the rocket zoomed through the upper atmosphere, it passed through an area of dry, cold air. The engines—burning rocket propellent and liquid oxygen—left a trail of exhaust that froze quickly in the cold, quiet conditions.

The result was just like the condensation trails or contrails that trace the path of airplanes across the sky. Writing on Forbes, meteorologist Marshall Shepherd explained that the contrail likely looked so luminous because, though the sun appeared to have set about half an hour earlier on the ground, the rocket was at such a high altitude that the sun was still shining on the condensing cloud. It was a cloud glowing with daylight, arcing across a darkened sky.

The glowing teardrop shape also highlighted the separation of the first and second stages of the rocket, which you can see adjusting in sequential pictures—or this beautiful timelapse of the flight taken by Jesse Watson.

The strange light in the sky was so odd that many people in the area began calling the authorities, prompting a local fire department to release a statement noting that the lights were simply due to the rocket launch. It’s not surprising that people had that reaction. In addition to the recent furor around UFOs which likely primed imaginations, contrails at sunset can often look quite strange.

And this isn’t the first time that people have noticed strange streaks left by spacecraft. NASA rockets can leave wiggly contrails as they make course adjustments in the atmosphere. And one eagle-eyed viewer noticed that years ago, during one of the occasions that the space shuttle was docked on the ISS, a contrail appeared beneath the station as the shuttle vented excess water.

If you’re disappointed that it’s just condensation and not a flying saucer, it’s ok, we understand. But take heart in knowing that the world is such an amazing place that even a routine rocket launch can be beautiful.

A previous version of this article mistakenly reported the date of SpaceX’s launch. This has been corrected.

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Over 30,000 hats sold!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2017

Did you know that there’s a new Star Wars movie coming out this weekend? Elon Musk doesn’t care because he’s busy making plans to launch a Tesla Roadster up into space. The mission is a nice mashup of Tesla and SpaceX that could lead to other Musk Mashup projects. Maybe he can make a huge battery that zooms around in subterranean tunnels like the Hyperloop. Or maybe he can launch a bunch of Boring company hats into space, too. So many opportunities. Here’s the rest of last week’s tech news to help you kill time before it’s lightsaber o’clock.

Talk to you later (in the human development cycle)

Facebook announced a new Messenger Kids app, which is designed for children as young as 6. Some people are concerned about the implications of kids on Facebook, while other experts aren’t as worried.

Walkie talkie trackie

If you’re worried about your kids out in the real world, you can check out a new device from Republic Wireless. The Relay is a small, ruggedized rectangle that works like a walkie talkie so you can communicate directly with a child over cellular or Wi-Fi. It’s also a GPS tracker to keep tabs on your little one. The device costs $99 and the service requires a $6.99 monthly subscription fee.

Surprised face emoji!

Have you ever wondered how Apple determines the most popular emojis? Wonder no more.

You got the touch (again)

Google has turned some of the touch functionality back on for its adorable Home Mini smart hub devices. The original version had a glitch that caused it to record users at all times, which is obviously bad. The company temporarily disabled the touch feature completely to find a fix.

Turn out the Lytros

Remember Lytro? It was a promising camera that used “light field” tech to let you shoot a photo and then decide the focus later. It never really caught on with consumers and the company has since pivoted to large-scale VR, so Lytro has disabled all of the embedded photos that once existed on the web. Instead, you’ll find a black box with a message about the termination. It’s one of the big gambles with a new and proprietary system like this one.

Gimbal rally

Shaky video is the worst, but there are a lot of stabilization options out there already. Freefly, however, announced its $299 rig called the Movi. Freefly typically deals in really high-end production gear, so this looks promising.

The art of the annoying exclusivity deals

if you like stories in which companies bicker about whether or not their services are available on competing devices, then you’ll love this forthcoming golden age of tedious legal nonsense. Just this week, Apple TV finally got an Amazon Prime app, while Amazon Fire TV devices lost the ability to stream YouTube. It’s only going to get worse from here.

Lamborghini, have mercy

Lamborghini announced a $200,000 SUV called the Urus. It has 650 horsepower and looks like something Hulk Hogan would drive on his way to drop his grandkids off at soccer practice if he had any. Oddly, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Flip or teraflop

The $3,000 NVIDIA Titan V is the “most powerful PC GPU ever created,” according to the company, and it’s targeted at researchers and scientists instead of the typical gaming audience. It’s capable of churning out 110 teraflops of power, which is crucial when trying to accomplish tasks like training AI. It’s probably also great at running Overwatch, though.

App enlightenment

Apple’s 2017 iPhone App of the Year is Calm, a utility that helps guide users through meditation and relaxation practices. It’s free, but has the obligatory in-app purchases in case you want to see just how calm you can get for $2.99.

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Just how far can that rocket take you? SpaceX founder Elon Musk hopes that his new vessel can take journeys as long as ventures between planets, and as short as a hop across the globe.

SpaceX is on a roll. They’ve stuck the landing of their booster rockets 16 times in a row with Falcon 9, and space enthusiasts are still eagerly awaiting the launch of the far larger Falcon Heavy. Their Dragon capsule has successfully delivered cargo to the space station, and is set to carry humans as early as next year. But despite the string of successes, Musk has headed back to the drawing board for his latest idea, announced on Friday at the International Aeronautics Congress meeting in Australia.

Elaborating on his long-standing plans to get to Mars as expeditiously as possible, Musk announced that while SpaceX would keep working on the Falcons and Dragon long enough to build up a stock of those models, his company would eventually shift focus away from the vehicles entirely, replacing them with a Big F*cking Rocket.

Yes: that is really, truly what Musk is calling his new rocket. We’ll just call it the BFR.

The BFR is slightly smaller than previous iterations of the same concept, but it’s still huge. It will be about 30 feet across and 347 feet tall, powered by 31 methane-fueled Raptor rockets*. It’s big enough to send people and cargo beyond the Earth-Moon system, but that’s not all it’s designed to do.

Instead of designing a rocket for one specific mission, Musk is looking to manufacture the Swiss Army knife of aeronautics. He wants something that can conveniently adapt to any mission required—while still being durable enough for repeat uses.

The entire BFR system involves both a booster to propel the ship out of Earth’s atmosphere, and a spacecraft capable of carrying humans or cargo. Both sections are intended to be re-usable.

The spaceship could be configured for long-haul flights with 40 cabins, giving passengers some private space en route to far-flung destinations like Mars. The BFR could also be tooled to carry cargo, or to pack in even more passengers for short-haul flights.

Really short-haul flights. At the end of his announcement, Musk declared that these rockets could become part of our terrestrial transportation systems. He painted a vision of trips anywhere around the globe in less than an hour—and often even less. One could rocket from London to New York in just about 30 minutes, he claimed.

In an Instagram post, Musk promised that the cost of the flight would be about the same as a ticket on a commercial plane. No word yet on what the environmental impact will be, or how flight controllers will deal with not only the rocket launches, but also the landings of both a spaceship filled with people and the re-usable boosters that pushed them into the sky.

It certainly sounds nice: if you only spent an hour in the air to get to the other side of the planet, travel could truly be about the destination instead of the journey. But people have been dreaming about this kind of thing for decades, and Musk has plenty of hurdles to clear before he can make the enticingly retro-futuristic idea of transatlantic rocket travel a reality.

• Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that the Raptor engines have not been previously used by other rockets. The Falcon series use Merlin engines. We regret the error.

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Yes, watching SpaceX rockets land successfully is awesome. But watching them crash and burn can be just as fun—adding a dash of schadenfreude to your space-enthusiast joy.

Today, SpaceX released this amazing compilation of landing attempts gone wildly, explosively wrong. Or should we say rapid unscheduled disassembly-ly wrong?

The beautiful collage of booms includes 11 landing attempts that just didn’t stick. By focusing on the landing failures, it notably excludes the launch failures of June 2015 and September 2016, both of which destroyed the payloads they were carrying for other entities (as opposed to just the SpaceX-owned rocket, which is presumably easier to laugh off a few years later). Those explosions may have been bigger setbacks for the company, but all were important learning experiences on the path to reusable rocket glory.

The video also includes two of the company’s successful landings, as if to reassure us all that yes, they did manage to get it right eventually.

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On Wednesday, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced that the company is switching up its plans for landing on Mars.

Last year, the company declared that it would try to send its uncrewed Dragon spacecraft to Mars in 2018. Deemed “Red Dragon,” the capsule would fire its retro rockets to softly land cargo or science experiments on the red planet. NASA was hoping this technology could pave the way to putting humans on Mars.

But, like many things in spaceflight, things didn’t go exactly according to plan. The mission got delayed to 2020, and now, speaking at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference in Washington, D.C., Musk said the company is switching up the landing routine.

“There was a time that I thought the Dragon approach to landing Mars, where you’ve got a base heat shield and side-mounted thrusters, would be the right way to land on Mars,” said Musk, speaking at a conference. “Now I’m pretty confident that is not the right way and there’s a far better approach.”

Safety seems to have also been a concern—the company previously planned to upgrade the Dragon capsule’s parachute landing system, to powered landings so that it could carry astronauts from the International Space Station to a landing pad. Those upgrade plans also appear to be scrapped, too. “It would have taken a tremendous amount of effort to qualify that for safety, particularly for crew transport,” said Musk.

He later clarified and said that they’re still considering powered landings on Mars, but with a “vastly bigger ship.” At the moment there are no other details on what that vehicle might look like, but if it works, it might make it easier to send people to Mars by the hundreds, as Musk plans.

It’s not clear whether SpaceX will still attempt the 2020 Red Dragon mission to Mars, but it seems doubtful at this point.

[HT SpaceNews.com]

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Today at 3:10pm Eastern, SpaceX‘s Falcon 9 rocket lofted a Bulgarian communications satellite into space. While BulgariaSat-1 was still making its way into its proper orbit, the first stage of the rocket returned for a landing on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You.

SpaceX has landed its boosters on drone ships many times before, but this one was a particular challenge.

Falcon 9 will experience its highest ever reentry force and heat in today's launch. Good chance rocket booster doesn't make it back.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 23, 2017

The rocket, which was refurbished after its first launch in January of this year, had to send BulgariaSat-1 into a particularly high orbit today. That means the booster had to endure extra heat—and thus extra jostling—while crashing back into Earth’s atmosphere. The land wasn’t super smooth, but the rocket survived, and that’s pretty impressive.

Rocket is extra toasty and hit the deck hard (used almost all of the emergency crush core), but otherwise good

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 23, 2017

This is SpaceX’s second time flying a used rocket—an important component to proving that its reusable rockets might actually make spaceflight cheaper. Whereas the first reused rocket waited a year between its two launches, today’s launch shows that SpaceX is able to refurbish the Falcon 9 first stage boosters in six months or less. Quick refurbishment is key to cutting the costs of spaceflight. Ultimately, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hopes to fly the boosters out again the next day—so there’s still plenty of room for improvement.

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If we ever want to open up spaceflight for everyone, we have to stop throwing away our rockets after every launch. Reusability is the name of the game in modern rocketry, and it should bring down costs considerably.

SpaceX has already managed to re-fly its Falcon 9 rocket booster, and now the company will try reusing the spacecraft that rides in the tip of the rocket. The Dragon capsule slated to fly on June 1 will be the very first private spacecraft to return to orbit after it’s already been there before.

You can check out the livestream of the launch here:

The launch is slated for takeoff at 5:55 p.m. Eastern, and so far the weather looks promising. But if there are any problems and the launch gets scrubbed, SpaceX can try again on Saturday at 5:07 p.m.

This particular Dragon carried a load of supplies and science equipment to the International Space Station in September 2014, and if all goes well, it will ferry a new batch of stuff to the station on Thursday. As Ars Technica‘s Eric Burger points out, returning to the orbital laboratory will put the Dragon in a special class of vehicles.

Eventually, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wants to be able to reuse all of his company’s rocket components. If he really wants to cut costs, he’ll also have to work on refurbishing them and putting them back into use more quickly.

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Elon Musk revealed more about his plans for the Boring Company on Friday, showing a video that features a utopian vision in which sleds whisk cars through buried tunnels at speeds of around 124 miles per hour. Designed to alleviate traffic problems in cities like Los Angeles, the concept includes vertical entrance and exit points to a subterranean network. But while the idea seems sexy, experts are skeptical of its feasibility—or even if it’s the right approach to solving the gridlock woes of modern metropolises.

In an interview with Chris Anderson, the head curator of TED, Musk explained that the system would involve “a 3D network of tunnels to alleviate congestion.” But Musk was upfront about the costs of drilling underground: By his estimate, a mile of tunnel can cost about $1 billion. He’d like to drive that cost down by making the tunnels smaller in diameter—they would just need to be about 12 feet wide in order to fit the vehicle and the skate it would ride on. He’d like to further lower costs by having the boring machines that will dig the passages operate at a higher capacity, as well as reinforce the walls as they dig.

A key premise of Musk’s proposal is that the tunnel network could exist on multiple layers, adding extra capacity to the system. It could even integrate tubes for his Hyperloop trains.

“I think it’s wonderful if he can improve on the tunnel boring machines we have,” says Sam Schwartz, a former traffic commissioner for New York City and an expert on urban infrastructure and transportation. “But physics and money is just not on his side.”

One problem is that cars would need to line up on surface streets to enter the system, via elevators, according to the concept. But that process wouldn’t happen instantaneously: It would take time for the vehicle to stabilize on the platform and then descend, and once it does, the hole left behind in the street “would need to be protected,” Schwartz says. (Read: An open shaft in the street is a bad idea.)

Then, after the vehicle completes its high-speed journey, the exit method is also going to take up space on the ground level, and will need to be secured as well, Schwartz says. And of course, the whole project wouldn’t be cheap.

“The cost is astronomical to build these kinds of tunnels,” Schwartz says. “Let him turn his attention to public transportation, and let’s have more tunnels around L.A. for the high speed subways.” (Schwartz is no stranger to traffic problems: he’s credited with birthing the term “gridlock.”)

Michael Manville, an assistant professor of urban planning at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, also doesn’t think the concept represents a roadmap for cities to follow to alleviate congestion.

“Politically, we can barely build a subway tunnel,” Manville says. “The Beverly Hills school district has pursued a decades-long regulatory and legal campaign against just running a single tunnel under their property to expand L.A.’s subway.” Los Angeles is not the only city with that problem.

Then, there are the logistics of Musk’s plan. Even if tunneling technology could be improved dramatically, “we probably wouldn’t have this system for a very long time,” Manville says.

But ultimately, the solution to congestion doesn’t involve a technological moonshot, according to Manville. It hinges on charging people, in the right way, to use the roads. He argues that dynamic tolling would do the trick: In such a system, the most-congested roads become more expensive when everyone wants to use them. That idea is good, he says, because the problem cities tend to face is not that they don’t have enough roads, but that some of the byways are crowded at certain times, but not all the time.

The dynamic pricing approach to roads is “complementary with public transportation” because people can opt for the train or bus, he says, but also works because it could encourage people to avoid using a route when it’s most expensive and in-demand. Or, of course, they could carpool.

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For the first time, a used SpaceX rocket booster has flown again.

On March 30, the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket sent its second payload into space, after having launched and landed in April 2016.

The achievement is an important milestone in the company’s road to creating a reusable launch system—and a feat that’s 15 years in the making. The launch and subsequent landing on a drone ship proves, as SpaceX CEO Elon Musk noted, “you can fly and re-fly an orbit-class booster.”

The private spaceflight company estimates that by reusing its liftoff boosters rather than tossing them away in the sea, it can slash launch costs by about 30 percent, providing cheap(er) access to the final frontier.

But the dream of reusing rockets on a regular basis isn’t quite here yet. Ten days ago, in an email about rocket engine bearings, Jeff Bezos—founder of Blue Origin, a company that has also successfully reused its own rocket, albeit without reaching orbit or carrying a payload—underlined the challenges that lie ahead:

Indeed, Musk now has set his sights on making the refurbishment process faster. “Rapid reusability of rockets is the key to opening up space,” he said during a press conference after the launch. “We need to get really efficient with the reuse of the booster and the fairing.”

Almost a full year has gone by since the reused SpaceX booster first flew. Granted, a rocket explosion kept the Falcon 9 grounded for several months. Plus, this was a first for the company—and for spaceflight in general—so it makes sense that they might have taken extra precautions before attempting to re-launch it.

If it turns out the boosters need a significant overhaul after launch and landing, that could really put a damper on the reusable rocket discount. But so far, so good. SpaceX’s first recovered booster, which landed on solid ground and now sits as a monument outside the company’s headquarters, was reportedly in good shape after its homecoming, more or less fit to fly again.

During the post-launch press conference, Musk said that the parts most in need of refurbishment are the grid fins that stabilize the rocket as its returning to Earth (during the launch, the grid fins were lighting on fire as it entered the atmosphere), as well as the booster’s base heat shield that protects it from the heat of re-entry, and the paint. The company will be replacing the current aluminum grid fins with a more rugged titanium design soon.

Musk hopes that by next year, the company will be able to reuse boosters within 24 hours. Eventually they might even fly again within an hour, requiring—according to Musk’s vision—nothing more than a fuel tank refill.

Incredibly proud of the SpaceX team for achieving this milestone in space! Next goal is reflight within 24 hours.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 30, 2017

And it looks like SpaceX will have plenty of opportunities to work on its refurbishment process; out of the 20 or so missions SpaceX has planned for this year, Musk expects six will fly on reused rockets. And next year, it could be double that. “The goal is to make this normal,” says Musk.

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If humankind is ever going to become an interplanetary species, we’re going to need cheaper rides into space. That’s why SpaceX and Blue Origin have been working so hard at developing reusable rocket boosters—vehicles that, after launch, are recovered and refurbished and flown again, instead of getting wastefully dumped in the ocean.

On Thursday evening, SpaceX proved a key part of its reusable rocket plan: the re-using part. The private spaceflight company has gotten pretty deft at recovering its rocket boosters, landing them on solid ground as well as floating platforms in the ocean. Now it has shown that the boosters can fly again afterwards. Here’s a replay of the launch:

The used Falcon 9 booster took off on its history-making launch at 6:27pm Eastern on Thursday, March 30. It carried an 11,700-pound telecom satellite, the SES 10, into orbit. Previously, this same booster lifted off with supplies for the International Space Station in April 2016 before making history as the first rocket to land vertically on a drone ship.

Eight and a half minutes after the launch, the booster came back to land on a drone ship yet again.

Blue Origin has flown and re-flown one New Shepard booster five times; however, the Falcon 9 flies higher and comes down faster, which has made landing more of a challenge. Today’s launch proves “you can fly and re-fly an orbit-class booster,” said Elon Musk after the launch. “This is going to be a huge revolution in spaceflight.”

SpaceX estimates that reusable rockets could cut its launch costs by up to 30 percent.

“It’s been 15 years to get to this point,” said Musk. “I’m sort of at a loss for words.”

This post was updated with new information on 3/30/2017 at 6:42pm Eastern.

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After more than 40 years of putzing around low Earth orbit, everyone is suddenly in a rush to go back to the moon. Two weeks ago, NASA announced that it’s considering launching humans into lunar orbit as soon as 2019. This week, SpaceX unveiled a plan to send a Crew Dragon spacecraft holding two private citizens around the moon in 2018. And now Jeff Bezos wants in on the action.

In an exclusive with the (Bezos-owned) Washington Post, the (Bezos-owned) private space company Blue Origin detailed its plans to set up a cargo delivery route to the moon—much like (Bezos-owed) Amazon.com. The proposal has reportedly been sent to NASA and President Trump’s transition team, several members of which have advocated a human return to the moon.

Although the details of the proposal have not been released to the public, here’s what we can glean from the WaPo article:

• Blue Origin wants to develop a lunar lander to ferry cargo (but not people) to and from the moon. The lander might include technology similar to that used by the company to land its New Shepard rocket.
• The company hopes to land their Blue Moon vehicle near Shackleton crater. The edge of the crater is awash in near-permanent sunlight (great for solar panels), while its dark pit may be full of water ice, which could come in handy for supporting a human settlement on the moon. Plus, water can be split into hydrogen and oxygen—a.k.a. rocket fuel. So it’s pretty much prime real estate for an outfit like this.
• The lunar delivery equipment could be ready as soon as 2020, at least according to Blue Origin’s estimates.
• The Blue Moon capsule could launch on a variety of rockets, including NASA’s SLS, United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V, and the New Glenn rocket that Blue Origin is developing. (Presumably, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy would also be capable of carrying it into space, if Blue Origin and SpaceX ever decide to cooperate instead of compete.)
• Although Bezos is planning to invest some of his own money in the venture, he’ll need funding and help from NASA.

Realistically, establishing a working settlement on the moon is going to take longer than three years. NASA and others are still working out a radiation-resistant housing solution to keep astronauts safe outside of Earth’s protective atmosphere. But Bezos may envision using Blue Moon to deliver the essentials to kickstart such a settlement once plans are underway.

SpaceX, too, could be capable of landing cargo on the moon. Both companies have launched their rockets into space and then brought their boosters back for controlled landings here on Earth. SpaceX has gone a few steps further, launching its rockets further and faster, and the Crew Dragon capsule has already demonstrated its ability to land by firing its thrusters. NASA has already promised to help SpaceX on a Mars mission in exchange for data about this propulsive landing technology.

Currently, SpaceX seems to have its sights set on Mars, rather than the moon. But if CEO Elon Musk starts to look a little closer to home—as he did in this week’s announcement—Blue Origin’s lunar concept may not go entirely unchallenged. After all, Musk is going to need some way to finance his expensive dream of colonizing Mars.

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SpaceX is already on track to make history by becoming the first private company to carry astronauts to the International Space Station in 2018. As if that wasn’t ambitious enough, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced on Monday that the company is planning to send two private citizens into orbit around the moon a mere six months after carrying its first crew to the ISS.

“I think this should be a really exciting mission that gets the world excited about sending people into deep space again,” Musk said in a teleconference.

The mission, which would mark humankind’s first return to the moon in 45 years, will be funded by two private individuals who approached SpaceX with the proposition. At this point those backers remain anonymous, but Musk said they’ve placed a significant deposit.

If all goes according to plan, the Falcon Heavy will lift the Crew Dragon and its two passengers into lunar orbit in late 2018. The weeklong mission would circle around the moon on an approximately 350,000-mile journey before returning to Earth. The mission could prove to be an important step between low Earth orbit and SpaceX’s goal of carrying humans to Mars within the next decade or so.

The Falcon Heavy, SpaceX’s upcoming heavy lift rocket, is expected to have its maiden launch later this year. The Crew Dragon will already have flown humans to the ISS by the time the moon mission launches. The Crew Dragon’s main modifications would be to the communication system, Musk said, to allow for deep space communications.

It should be noted that big developments in rocketry and human-rated spacecraft rarely happen according to schedule—explosions and other delays are common. But it looks as if this mission is on track to beat NASA’s next crewed mission, which would put astronauts into lunar orbit in the 2020s or perhaps 2019. However, Musk said that if NASA is interested in using SpaceX to send a crewed mission around the moon, he would give them priority.

“I’m not sure if we’ll be before or after [NASA],” said Musk. “But I’m not sure that’s really the important thing. I think what matters is the advancement of space exploration…. The more the better.”

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A Dragon capsule full of supplies is on its way to the International Space Station, after a successful liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket. The first stage rocket booster then came back for a smooth landing–SpaceX’s third touchdown on solid ground.

This was SpaceX’s first takeoff from the historic Launch Pad 39A. Among the various venerated missions that have blasted off from these hallowed grounds are:

• Apollo 4, the first uncrewed test flight of the Saturn V, the most powerful rocket that’s ever flown

• Apollo 8, which sent the first men into orbit around the moon

• A little thing called Apollo 11, wherein Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on world that was not Earth

• The first and final launches of the space shuttle, as well as many others in between

Now, the launch pad is starting to see a new kind of action. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from 39A at 9:39am Eastern on Sunday, February 19. The launch was originally planned for takeoff on Saturday morning, but some slightly odd behavior in the thrust vector controls (basically, the steering) on the rocket’s second stage caused a delay. It was the first commercially owned, non-NASA rocket to launch from the historic pad, and if all goes as planned, it will be the first of many.

And here’s SpaceX’s webcast:

The Dragon capsule is now in its way to the International Space Station, carrying 5,500 pounds of supplies. The cargo includes more than 250 science experiments, including: SAGE III, a device that will attach to the outside of the space station to measure gases in the atmosphere; Raven, which will test sensors and avionics that could one day help autonomous spacecraft rendezvous and dock with one another; and an experiment that will monitor how the antibiotic-resistant bacteria MRSA mutates in space, in hopes of predicting how the superbug may mutate on Earth in the future.

The Dragon capsule and its cargo is expected to reach the space station in two days.

SpaceX’s first launch from Pad 39A was ushered in by the September 2016 fire that destroyed Launch Complex 40 while the Falcon 9 was being fueled.

Update: This post was updated on 2/18 at 10:10am Eastern with new information about the launch rescheduling, and again on 2/19 after the successful launch and landing.

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When it comes to spaceflight, SpaceX’s prices and flair are hard to beat. But the company hasn’t exactly had smooth flying lately. There’ve been a few explosions, and the most recent blast in September has raised questions about whether the company’s fueling operations could endanger future astronauts. Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that a problem in the Falcon 9’s engine could jeopardize SpaceX’s goal of becoming the first private company to deliver astronauts to the International Space Station in 2018.

The WSJ article (which is behind a paywall) reports that the Government Accountability Office found the turbine blades that pump fuel into the Falcon 9’s engines liable to crack. A GAO report later this month is expected to detail the leaked findings.

Popular Science reached out to GAO to check the facts, but the public affairs office isn’t allowed to discuss the report’s findings until it comes out in a few weeks.

WSJ reports the turbopump cracks could “pose an unacceptable risk for manned flights.” Which is not great news, given the fact that SpaceX hopes to launch its first astronauts in 2018—a milestone that has already been delayed several times.

When asked for more info, SpaceX directed us to this comment from SpaceX’s John Taylor:

It’s not clear whether these modifications will delay the first crewed missions, but it seems quite possible both SpaceX and its competitor, Boeing, will miss the 2018 deadline.

Paulo Lozano, an aerospace engineer at MIT, says cracks on these kinds of blades are relatively common, considering rocket engines undergo a tremendous amount of heat and mechanical stress. But if the cracks turn into breaks, they could potentially lead to “catastrophic failure”—which, in rocket science, generally means explosions.

The blades’ reported cracking problem is particularly concerning because the Falcon 9 is designed to be reusable, meaning the engines will need to withstand the mechanically traumatic ordeal of escaping Earth’s gravity again and again.

“I think it’s good they’ve detected those cracks and hopefully can correct them,” says Lozano.

Fortunately, SpaceX is working with NASA on the planned commercial crew launches, and the space agency has solved similar problems before.

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SpaceX is ready to resume launching again, a little more than four months following the September 1 explosion that destroyed a Falcon 9 rocket, its payload, and the launch pad it was sitting on. The company identified the cause of the explosion, has a short-term fix in place, and is targeting January 8 for its return to flight.

Although SpaceX originally planned to be back in action in November, the failure turned out to be the most complex the company has ever faced, according to CEO Elon Musk.

A statement from SpaceX detailed the findings of the investigation that followed the explosion. Kenneth Change at The New York Times provides a nice breakdown of what happened.

After analyzing massive amounts of data, the investigation panel (which included folks from SpaceX, NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the U.S. Air Force) concluded that the explosion originated with the helium tanks that sit inside the oxygen tanks on the rocket’s second stage. The helium helps to keep the oxygen under pressure while the engine burns.

The helium tanks are made of two layers: a carbon composite wrapper and an aluminum liner. As these layers came into contact with the Falcon 9’s super-cooled oxygen and helium during the fueling process, the rapid temperature change may have caused the two layers to shrink at different rates, causing buckling and opening gaps for the surrounding oxygen to flow in. With oxygen trapped in between the flammable layers, just a little bit of friction is all that would be needed to start an inferno. Just 0.093 seconds after anomalies appeared in SpaceX’s data, the entire rocket was engulfed in flames.

To correct the problem, SpaceX will use warmer helium and return the system to a previous configuration. Over the long-term, some design changes to the helium tanks will hopefully prevent buckling.

If all goes according to plan—which is never guaranteed in rocketry—the Falcon 9 will lift off again on Sunday carrying 10 Iridium telephone relay satellites into orbit.

Milestone Alert: The first ten #IridiumNEXT satellites are stacked and encapsulated in the Falcon 9 fairing. #NEXTevolution @SpaceX pic.twitter.com/W3Sz067pbt

— Iridium (@IridiumComm) December 29, 2016

Seeing as SpaceX’s launch pad at Cape Canaveral was destroyed in September, Sunday’s launch will take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. But later in January, the company aims to launch another communications satellite from the historic Launch Complex 39A—the launch pad from which most of the Apollo and many space shuttle missions blasted off. The company hopes to resume carrying supplies to the International Space Station later this month.

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Every time America gets a new president, NASA undergoes an upheaval. The agency gets new leadership, and sometimes major programs get cut.

Donald Trump’s plans for NASA are still largely up-in-the-air (well, maybe except for its climate change research, which is probably in trouble), but one thing seems certain: the partnerships that the space agency has been developing with private companies won’t suffer during a Trump administration. Yesterday, the president-elect appointed private space advocate and businessman Charles Miller to the NASA transition team.

Miller formerly advised NASA on its strategies for working with the commercial space industry. He co-founded NanoRacks, a company that helps others conduct research on the International Space Station, among other services. Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and the European Space Agency are on the company’s list of clients. Miller is also the president of the consulting company NextGen Space LLC, and has a host of other qualifications.

As part of Trump’s transition team, Miller will join more traditional NASA experts to help shape the space agency’s goals and policies going forward. It’s still unclear whether the policies will lean toward business as usual (such as NASA continuing to develop its own rocket and spacecraft to get to Mars), or favor the cheaper, renewable craft in development by private spaceflight companies SpaceX and Blue Origin. Trump has already had meetings with Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and SpaceX’s Elon Musk.

We’re also waiting to see whether NASA will keep its sights set on reaching Mars in the 2030s, or whether the focus might shift a little closer to home.

Last year, Miller led research that concluded private and international partnerships could make it 90 percent cheaper for NASA to set up a permanent, crewed base on the moon. The lunar base could theoretically be used to mine water from the moon’s craters and split it into hydrogen and oxygen—rocket fuel—to sell to private companies. By turning the moon into a gas station, there are hopes that these mines could make space exploration cheaper and easier.

With moon-colony-advocate Newt Gingrich also advising Trump, there has already been speculation that the new president might want to bring American astronauts back to the moon. Trump’s pro-business tactics may favor the various private companies who hope to mine the moon at a profit.

Other commercial space backers may soon be joining the Trump transition team as well. Alan Stern, chairman of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation (and principal investigator on the New Horizons mission to Pluto), and Alan Lindenmoyer, who formerly led NASA’s commercial space taxi program, may also join Trump’s advisory team shortly.

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On September 1, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket exploded while it was being fueled up for a test fire, engulfing the launch pad, the rocket, and its payload in flames. The disaster has raised some serious concerns about the company’s plan to have future travelers to the International Space Station climb aboard the rocket before it’s fueled and wait there while its tanks are being filled.

Thomas Stafford, a former astronaut and current chairman of NASA’s International Space Station Advisory Committee, originally expressed concerns over the boarding procedure last December.

“There is a unanimous, and strong, feeling by the committee that scheduling the crew to be on board the Dragon spacecraft prior to loading oxidizer into the rocket is contrary to booster safety criteria that have been in place for over 50 years, both in this country and internationally,” he wrote.

So why would SpaceX want to board astronauts it this way, what are the risks, and is there any way to mitigate those risks?

Too chill?

SpaceX has identified super-cooled oxygen as the culprit behind the September 1 explosion.

The Falcon 9 relies on extremely cold liquid oxygen to burn its kerosene fuel. The oxygen’s coldness makes the gas condense into a liquid so that more oxygen can fit into the fuel tanks. Chilling it even further increases the density still more, and SpaceX’s super-chilling is one of the factors that gives the current Falcon 9 version 30 percent more thrust than its predecessor. That extra thrust means the rocket can carry bigger payloads into space or save some of its fuel for landing safely afterward.

SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket explosion on 9/1/2016

However, the super-chilled oxygen is also causing some problems. The September 1 explosion appears to have been caused by a chunk of oxygen so cold that it actually froze into a solid, then combusted with a carbon fiber tank inside the rocket.

Super-chilled oxygen is also the reason SpaceX wants to load astronauts into the Dragon capsule before fueling up the rocket. To keep the oxygen as cold as possible, the company wants to minimize the time it’s sitting there inside the rocket’s tanks. This means putting the payload (or, in late 2017 or 2018, astronauts) on first, and filling up the tanks as close to launch time as possible.

Is SpaceX’s procedure really so uncommon?

Stafford’s letter notes that boarding procedures that would put the astronauts on first haven’t been used in the past 50 years. However, it’s not completely unprecedented. John Glenn, the first astronaut to orbit the Earth in 1962, climbed aboard the Mercury spacecraft before the rocket was fueled.

And even though the rocket that took the space shuttle into orbit was fueled before astronauts began the 1- to 2-hour boarding procedure, the oxygen tanks had to be continually topped off as the oxygen warmed and boiled off. SpaceX argues that’s technically a fueling procedure too, and not all that different from its plans to fill the entire tank with the astronauts onboard.

And according to SpaceX’s logic, it could potentially be safer to fuel the rocket closer to liftoff, instead of letting the fueled rocket sit around for four to eight hours before a launch, potentially endangering ground crews.

Room for change

SpaceX’s first crewed missions aren’t scheduled for takeoff until late 2017 or 2018, and the company says it is working with NASA to refine its plans for the boarding procedure. So it’s possible SpaceX will change its plans and board the astronauts after fueling has completed.

The outcome may depend, at least in part, on what fixes the company makes to prevent the oxygen solidification that caused the September explosion—those plans haven’t been revealed to the public yet.

Ideally, the company would use the same procedure for loading both crewed capsules and uncrewed payloads—consistency is important in rocket science. So if they change the boarding procedure for crewed missions, they would want to change it for all missions.

Had the rocket that exploded been crewed, the crew capsule’s pad abort system might have kicked in to rescue the astronauts on board. The system is designed to jettison the crew capsule away from a rocket that explodes during or just after launch. It seems more likely that, instead of changing its boarding procedures, the company will instead rely on this backup system that’s specifically designed to avoid launch pad tragedies.

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After SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket exploded while being fueled for a test fire in September, the company said it would be launching again by November. It appears the skeptics were right: It’s now November, and SpaceX rockets still aren’t flying—though the company is making progress. CEO Elon Musk says the company has identified the cause of the September explosion, and the Falcon 9 could be fixed and flying by mid-December.

Yesterday Musk explained to CNBC why it took so long to get to the bottom of the explosion: “It was a really surprising problem. It’s never been encountered before in the history of rocketry.”

The problem has to do with some super-cold oxygen reacting with the carbon fiber composites within the fuel tank.

The Falcon 9 rocket flies by combusting liquid kerosene with oxygen. Because there’s no oxygen in space, the rocket needs to bring its own. To pack in as much fuel as possible, most rockets cool oxygen gas until it’s liquefied; SpaceX takes it one step further by cooling it even more, possibly to increase the density and thus how much fuel the rocket can carry.

Well, it turns out that the supercooled oxygen might have been too cold—cold enough to actually solidify.

SpaceX likes its oxygen tanks to be kept at about -340 degrees Fahrenheit, and the stuff ices over at -362 degrees. According to the New York Times, the liquid helium containers inside the oxygen tank could have been responsible for pushing to oxygen over the brink. Helium, which is used to pressurize the oxygen tank, is stored at even colder temperatures than oxygen, at -452 degrees.

Musk didn’t elaborate on how the solid oxygen formed or what happened after that, but the leading theory is that the solid oxygen may have ignited one of three carbon composite helium containers inside the oxygen tank, triggering the explosion that annihilated SpaceX’s launch pad.

“This is the toughest puzzle that we’ve ever had to solve,” Musk told CNBC.

Now that the company has a real lead on the problem, they can get to work on fixing it. SpaceX is targeting a return-to-flight in mid-December, although they haven’t yet revealed what payload will be launched.

[H/T Space News]

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A few weeks ago, after SpaceX’s rocket blew up while it was being fueled for a test fire, the company deduced that a breach in a high-pressure helium system was to blame. But the company is still trying to figure out where that breach came from. And they’re looking into the Scooby Doo-like possibility of sabotage, the Washington Post reports.

“We’ve eliminated all of the obvious possibilities for what occurred there,” Musk said during a conference in Mexico last week. “So what remains are the less probable answers.”

After reviewing footage of the explosion, WaPo reports that SpaceX noticed an “odd shadow, then a white spot” on the roof of a nearby building owned by United Launch Alliance, an old-school rocket-launching company that competes with SpaceX on military contracts. The building has a clear line of sight to the launchpad where SpaceX’s rocket exploded, WaPo notes.

However, a shadow isn’t a lot to go on, and although ULA didn’t let SpaceX upstairs to investigate, ULA says it didn’t see anything unusual up there. Maybe it was a ghost?

Previously, Musk mentioned the investigation was particularly focused on “trying to understand the quieter bang sound a few seconds before the fireball goes off.”

Admittedly, ULA can’t compete with SpaceX on price, so anything that makes SpaceX look less reliable is a boon to ULA. But while hints of sabotage are salacious, it’s best to save speculations for mystery novels. It would be insanely foolish of ULA, Blue Origin, or any other rocket company to try to pull something like this.

It’s a lot more likely that SpaceX, or somebody else along the production line, f’ed up. Because rocket science is, well, rocket science. There’s a lot of moving parts operating at extremely high temperature and pressures, and a lot of things can go wrong. And as Fortune points out, SpaceX has plenty to gain from the theory of an external cause.

SpaceX, for its part, says that it’s just trying to cover all the bases in the investigation.

“The Accident Investigation Team has an obligation to consider all possible causes of the anomaly, and we aren’t commenting on any specific potential cause until the investigation is complete,” says SpaceX Head of Communications Dex Torricke-Barton. “We have sought all available data to support the investigation in a timely manner following the anomaly, as expected for any responsible investigation.”

So, the investigation continues.

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Yesterday, Elon Musk took two hours to detail his plan to bring humanity to Mars. We cut it down to less than 90 seconds. You’re welcome.

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In Mexico today, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk outlined his company’s plans to take humanity to Mars.

Speaking at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, he unveiled a mission architecture that is bold, inspiring, and a little crazy. It all centers around the Interplanetary Transport System–a 55-foot-wide pod-shaped spaceship designed to carry 100 people or 100 tons of cargo–that would ride into orbit on a really big freakin’ rocket. And he hopes the two could take off on a journey to Mars in as little as 10 years, although he acknowledges that timeline depends on a lot of factors.

At 400 feet tall, SpaceX’s Mars rocket would be the largest rocket ever (take that, Jeff Bezos). A CGI video shows it lifting off with nearly 29 million pounds of thrust, compared to the 7.5 million of the Saturn V rocket that took Neil Armstrong to the moon. It’ll need that extra oomph to carry a crew and cargo across the tens of millions of miles of empty space between here and Mars.

Although the rocket is still a concept, SpaceX recently test-fired its Raptor engine, 42 of which would boost the rocket off of Earth.

But the crux of Musk’s talk was about bringing down costs so that regular people might be able to afford it. SpaceX is trying to move the price point for a ride to Mars down from $10 billion per person to $200 thousand or less. The Mars-bound spaceship would launch with its fuel tanks empty to save weight and expense, then fuel up in orbit. Musk says this would make the plan 500 percent cheaper than it would be without in-orbit fueling.

Reusability and choosing the right propellant type will also be key. The new rocket will run on methane, because that’s easy to produce on Mars to fuel return trips to Earth, and it doesn’t require loads of insulation and cryogenic cooling the way a liquid hydrogen fuel would.

As for the spaceship itself, Musk says it could carry up to 450 tons of stuff to Mars. NASA has previously estimated we’d need 100 tons or more, so that seems like a good start to seed a colony of 1 million people, which Musk hopes to achieve over time. The spaceship could see its first test flights within about 4 years, with the first flights to Mars shortly thereafter.

The spaceship could eventually make the journey from Earth to Mars in 30 to 80 days, according to Musk. And it doesn’t have to stop there. Since the vehicle can refuel in orbit, SpaceX could potentially set up fuel depots in strategic locations to send the Interplanetary Transport System beyond Mars.

“This system really gives you freedom to go anywhere you want in the solar system,” said Musk. “I wouldn’t recommend this for interstellar journeys, but this system–provided we have filling stations along the way–means full access to the entire greater solar system.” In particular, he’s eyeing a mission to Europa–something we actually suggested a few days ago.

As for radiation-proofing the spaceship–one of the major challenges to a trip to Mars–Musk does not seem particularly concerned, possibly because the only screening criterion for a ticket to Mars is that the passenger is prepared to die. (Perhaps this is where a public-private partnership with NASA could come in handy.)

“The probability of death is quite high on the first mission,” said Musk with his characteristic bluntness. In other words, getting to Mars ain’t gonna be easy. The dream that Musk laid out today is dangerous. Actually, dangerous probably doesn’t do the risk justice. Neither does ambitious, in reference to the scope of the plan. But also: hell yeah.

Let’s check back in with the idea: Space-X will construct the largest rocket ever built, launch a new kind of spaceship, and deploy an in-orbit refueling system straight outta sci-fi. Then it will send that package–along with 100 souls–to Mars within the next 10 years. Quixotic? Sure. But quotidian dreams and easy missions don’t win you screaming fans who want to rush the stage after your dry, late-starting press conferences.

“It would be an incredible adventure,” says Musk. “It would be the most exciting thing that I could possibly imagine. Life needs to be more than just solving problems every day. You need to wake up and be excited about the future, to be inspired and want to live.”

Unfortunately, you’ve also got to be prepared to die for it. And no doubt hundreds of people will be willing to take that risk on the first flight of the Interplanetary Transport System, whenever it takes off.

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Elon Musk is heading for Mars. Or, at the very least he’s making plans to send other people to Mars.

Today, Musk’s company SpaceX tweeted an enticing teaser trailer showing off the planned SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System, a three part system that is intended to send humans to live on Mars.

The massive spaceship will be carried into orbit by a large booster, similar to the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy in that it is designed to be reusable, but much larger. Musk has already started testing a version of this rocket, currently called the Raptor, in Texas.

The booster will carry the spaceship into orbit, at which point the booster will detach and fall back to Earth, ready to pick up another load, a fuel tanker. The booster will head back into space and drop the tanker off to refuel the spaceship, at which point both the tanker and the booster will return to Earth, and the spaceship will continue on to Mars, powered in part by massive solar arrays.

In the video it appears that Musk plans to take off from launch pad 39A in Cape Canaveral–the same launchpad, the video notes, that set the stage for the Apollo 11 rocket, which took the first astronauts to the moon.

At the end of the short video we see the red planet turn a familiar greenish blue. Maybe sometime soon we’ll be watching Musk introduce his Interplanetary Terraforming System.

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Elon Musk probably writes “try to save the world” at the top of his to-do list every day, above running companies that are revolutionizing energy, transportation, and space travel. In the next decade, he’s hoping to pioneer humanity’s next great adventure: Interplanetary travel, and colonization of other worlds.

On Sept. 27, at 2:30 PM Eastern, the SpaceX founder and CEO is set to give a keynote talk, not-modestly titled “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species,” on the second day of the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico. According to the IAC’s announcement: “Musk will discuss the long-term technical challenges that need to be solved to support the creation of a permanent, self-sustaining human presence on Mars. The technical presentation will focus on potential architectures for colonizing the Red Planet that industry, government and the scientific community can collaborate on in the years ahead.”

In the most far-field scenario — where humans are surviving and thriving on a planet other than Earth — those challenges include the property politics of camping out on interplanetary soil: Who presides over judging Martian crime? Who’s in charge?

But before they even get that far ahead of themselves, SpaceX will need to answer more pressing issues, like how to keep hydrogen tanks from going boom and how to keep us fragile, fleshy humans from starving on the trip or dying of radiation exposure once we’re on the surface.

All of these questions Musk and team hopes to solve by mid-2020s, when the Interplanetary Transport System aims to haul 100 humans and/or 310 metric tons worth of cargo to the Red Planet. It’s still not clear if there are ulterior motives to get our asses to Mars and beyond.

Ahead of the keynote, Musk treated his followers to a characteristically candid behind-the-scenes of the rocket engine that’ll blast this whole thing off the ground in the next decade, tweeting photos from Raptor’s first firing test.

Tune in at 2:30, when this livestream will be active:

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Elon Musk doesn’t let a silly thing like a rocket explosion deter him from dreaming big. Even though SpaceX‘s Falcon 9 is grounded after a fiery demise on September 1, the CEO will take the stage at a conference next week to discuss “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species.”

During the talk, Musk plans to “focus on potential architectures for colonizing the Red Planet.” In other words, he’ll likely be laying out SpaceX’s plan to put humans on Mars.

What we know so far is that Musk hopes to launch an uncrewed Dragon to Mars, to practice landing with its retrorockets, as soon as 2018. He thinks the company could carry the first humans to Mars as soon as 2025.

But getting there (and back) certainly won’t be easy. Here are some of the biggest challenges Musk and others will need to overcome before we can set sail for another planet.

1. How are we getting there?

Although SpaceX’s current Falcon 9 rocket could technically deliver a payload to Mars, it wouldn’t be a very large one. NASA estimates a crewed mission to Mars will require 100 tons of cargo or more. So we’re going to need a bigger rocket, and SpaceX is working on that.

The Falcon Heavy should be capable of taking crew to Mars, although it would need a few trips to deliver all that cargo. The heavy-living rocket was originally supposed to launch in 2013, but the date keeps getting pushed back. After the September 1 explosion, the Falcon Heavy’s maiden launch got delayed again from November to the first quarter of 2017.

We’re also going to need a bigger spaceship. The Crew Dragon, like other crew capsules designed to get astronauts into Earth orbit, has enough room for a few people to stand up inside, but it’s not equipped for a months-long journey to Mars. If the Crew Dragon does make it to Mars, it’ll be attached to a larger habitat module that gives the crew privacy, exercise areas, a bathroom, and other essentials.

SpaceX has a concept for a larger ship–the Interplanetary Transport System, formerly known as the Mars Colonial Transporter–designed to carry either 100 humans or 100 tons of cargo to Mars (or beyond), but little is known about what the ship would look like or how it would operate. Launching this behemoth would require an even larger rocket than the Falcon Heavy.

2. How will the astronauts survive?

After leaving Earth’s orbit, future Mars explorers will be at the mercy of deep space radiation. Not only could these charged particles harm the crew, they might also degrade their food. So the spaceship will either need to radiation shielding (which adds weight and cost), or someone needs to come up with a sunblock that protects against radiation.

What will the astronauts live in when they get to Mars? Currently, Bigelow Aerospace’s expandable habitats are a top contender. Compared to the aluminum structures typically used in space, Bigelow’s habitats are lighter and they travel in a compact state, inflating to full size at the destination site. A test demonstration of a Bigelow module on the International Space Station went well, but the company is not sure whether their designs will hold up on the gritty, radiation-bombarded red planet.

BEAM inflatable space habitat expansion GIF

3. How would such a colony be sustained?

Every resupply mission to a colony on Mars would cost millions or billions of dollars. Who’s going to pay for that? And what will we get from Mars in return? Although the goal of ensuring humanity’s survival in the event of a cataclysm on Earth is nice, NASA’s budget is tight already, and businesses would need a financial incentive to pitch in. Perhaps space tourism will provide the solution.

The ultimate goal is to get a Mars colony to be self-sustaining. But that too will take a lot of time, effort, and money to set up.

Without a realistic long-term plan, the goal of colonizing Mars is in danger of going the way of the Apollo missions: spend a lot of money to put the first humans there, plant a flag, fly a few more missions until the public gets bored, then never return.

4. What will NASA’s role be?

We know that NASA will provide communications and technical advice on SpaceX’s 2018 Red Dragon mission. What will the space agency’s role be in the company’s bigger plans? NASA originally planned to colonize deep space itself–will it be willing to take the co-pilot’s seat on Musk’s trip instead? It seems likely NASA will be onboard with Musk’s plans, but the division of labor, funding, and glory could be a touchy subject.

Space is hard, and Mars is even harder. Elon Musk has his work cut out, and we’re looking forward to learning more about how he plans to solve these problems during Tuesday’s talk, which starts at 2:30pm Eastern.

Correction, 9/26/2019: An earlier version of this article misstated the time of Musk’s Mars talk.

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Today has been a good day for details-starved SpaceX news enthusiasts.

Earlier today we learned that the payload for the first reused rocket would be a telecommunications satellite made by SES.

And now, posts on social media have announced that the first rocket to be reused for launch will be the same rocket that first successfully landed on a drone ship back in April after sending a Dragon capsule loaded with supplies to the ISS.

Just to be clear, it isn’t the first rocket that SpaceX successfully landed. That rocket, which launched and landed back in December is now permanently on display at SpaceX headquarters

Now we just have to look forward to the SES/SpaceX launch sometime this fall.

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We don’t typically get rockets back in one piece. They’re shot beyond the atmosphere at 18,000 miles per hour and come back moments or weeks later at hypersonic speeds, usually in bits and pieces left in the ocean. So if we’re going to start bringing them back — as SpaceX sticks more and more landings — we’ll need to know where to retire them, too.

The first rocket to come home safely is also the first to be put on permanent display, as Spaceflight Now reports. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launcher stage rocket made history in December 2015 as the first to return to a landing pad on Florida’s Space Coast. It blasted 250,000 feet into the atmosphere, sent 11 Orbcomm communications satellites into orbit, and returned to Earth in one reusable piece. Now, all 156 feet of the rocket stands outside the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, following approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Elon Musk has wanted to bring it home to put on display since the successful launch, according to Spaceflight Now. Although it returned in great shape, it was never intended to fly again, but was used to research next iterations of Falcon 9.

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It’s becoming almost routine. SpaceX launches a rocket, then catches the first stage on a droneship, sticking the landing with the precision of Simone Biles.

In the early hours of Sunday morning, SpaceX launched a video and data transmission satellite into geostationary orbit. The satellite was launched as a backup satellite for the SKY Perfect JSAT Corporation, which runs a satellite TV service in Japan, among other satellite communications.

The successful landing of the first stage rocket was a win for SpaceX, which had a successful launch and landing in July, but a successful launch and failed landing in June. The company hopes to start reusing rockets in September or October of this year.

Watch the whole 50-minute webcast of Sunday’s launch and landing above, or scroll through some of the highlights in pictures below.

SpaceX Launch

SpaceX Launch

Stuck The Landing

Launch Path

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SpaceX has released new footage of its Falcon 9 rockets launching in gorgeous slow motion. The reel features launches from May, July and December, highlighting moments from takeoff, separation, re-entry and landing.

In these missions, SpaceX used its Falcon 9 rockets to deliver satellites into orbit and send the company’s Dragon capsule onward to the International Space Station, loaded with supplies.

[H/T The Verge]

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SpaceX has shipped a Raptor, its next generation rocket engine, to its test site in MacGregor, Texas, company president Gwynne Shotwell said today during the Small Satellite Conference in Logan, Utah.

The Raptor, which will be powered by methane and liquid oxygen, is expected to be up to three times more powerful than the Merlin engines that power the company’s Falcon 9 and upcoming Falcon Heavy rockets. The Falcon Heavy could carry payloads and people to Mars; the Raptor is intended to power the next generation of rocket after it, known informally as BFR (guess what that stands for?).

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk envisions using the super heavy lifting BFR to carry passengers and cargo to the Red Planet in a giant spaceship dubbed the Mars Colonial Transporter.

[Ars Technica]

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Now Anyone Can Drive The Mars Rover

A Sand-Sized Implant To Monitor Your Brain

Mars In The Mojave

A Lab-Grown Diamond Ring Proposal

The End Of Headphone Jacks?

A Flashy Medical Wearable

SpaceX’s Dragon Capsule, Docked

RIP, Jade Rabbit

A 3,000-Year-Old Knot

Science Uncovers Hidden Art

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In 2018, SpaceX could become the first private company to land its own spacecraft on Mars. But it doesn’t plan to do so alone. NASA wants to see if SpaceX’s landing tech could put astronauts on Mars, and to find out, its vowed to help the private company send an uncrewed capsule to the Red Planet.

Spaceflight Now has the details on how the partnership will work.

While SpaceX would fund and build the uncrewed Red Dragon capsule and the Falcon Heavy rocket it launches on, NASA would take a supportive role in the mission, providing communications through the Deep Space Network–a mesh of telescopes around the world that keeps NASA in constant contact with all its spacecraft, despite the Earth’s spinning.

NASA will also help locate a landing site for the Red Dragon, Spaceflight Now reports, and will help to prevent Earth microbes from hitching a ride on the Red Dragon and contaminating Mars.

All told, NASA estimates it’ll spend about $32 million dollars on the mission–quite a bargain, considering the space agency hopefully get a new landing technology out of it. The Red Dragon would fire retrothrusters to attempt a soft landing on Mars–something that’s never been attempted before for such a large spacecraft. SpaceX is expecting to spend about $300 million on it.

By contrast, NASA spent $2.5 billion on the Curiosity rover and its novel “sky crane” landing method.

If all goes well, the Red Dragon mission will pave the way to put people on Mars, either by NASA or SpaceX.

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There’s something really satisfying about watching a 14-story-tall rocket burn a million pounds of thrust standing still.

At its Central Texas facility, SpaceX tested the Falcon 9 first-stage rocket booster for two-and-a-half minutes. This rocket’s had a busy few months: It launched from Cape Canaveral on May 6 and re-entered the atmosphere at nearly 4,000 mph to land safely on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. It’ll hang out in Texas for a few more tests, but won’t fly again. It’s just acting as a very large guinea pig for another, less-worn Falcon 9 first stage booster that launched and landed April.

[Spaceflight Now]

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Some special passengers are riding to the space station inside SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, which launched on Monday morning. The 8 species of fungi onboard, which are descended from microbes collected at Chernobyl, may one day lead the way to a “sunblock” that could protect human space travelers from the harmful radiation of space.

Radiation is one of the major hurdles to colonizing the solar system. Outside the protective bubble of Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere, the high-energy charged particles shoot into our squishy bodies like tiny bullets, damaging cells and causing DNA mutations that can lead to cancer. But pharmacologist Clay Wang is hoping the radiation on the International Space Station will induce some good changes in a group of microorganisms.

Wang and his colleagues chose 8 species of fungi that were collected at Chernobyl between 1988 and 2006, and sent them on the ride of their lives. Some of the fungi were found living in the Exclusion Zone directly surrounding the ruined power plant, and others came from areas outside the Exclusion Zone. Two of the species, Cladosporium sphaerospermum and Cladosporium cladosporioides, actually grow toward radiation preferentially.

The microbes were originally collected by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as part of a separate study about the effects of radiation, but Wang’s colleagues are hoping they’ll provide some clue that will help humans survive in space.

“Microorganisms only make certain things when they need to,” Wang explained to Popular Science. “We want to see if they actually make new compounds in space.”

Wang performed a similar experiment on a mission that launched to the ISS in April. In that case, his team wanted to see if a fungus would create novel medicinal compounds in the space environment. At the time, he explained to Popular Science that each microorganism is like a mini factory, except that a lot of its machines have never been turned on, so we don’t know what they do. Putting these organisms in a new environment has been shown to activate some of those other “machines,” causing the microbes to produce new compounds. There’s no environment more exotic than space, so why not see what they’ll produce?

Unlike the laboratory strain of fungus that launched in April, the microbes that launched on Monday are a wilder variety that’s more diverse genetically as well as in the types of compounds they produce.

Although the levels of radiation that astronauts are exposed to on the ISS is much lower than levels at Chernobyl, lead researcher Kasthuri Venkateswaran from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the radiation levels combined with microgravity could lead to useful compounds for mankind.

Further down the line, he says, “Once we understand the molecular mechanisms, these fungi would be a good model for exposing to space and Mars radiation.”

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