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Category: space travel

After last week’s stunning landing, here’s what comes next for Blue Origin

For decades—yes, literally decades—it has been easy to dismiss Blue Origin as a company brimming with potential but rarely producing much of consequence.

But last week the company took a tremendous stride forward, not just launching its second orbital rocket, but subsequently landing the booster on a barge named Jacklyn. It now seems clear that Blue Origin is in the midst of a transition from sleeping giant to force to be reckoned with…

…Limp said success on New Glenn’s second flight would set the company up for a significant increase in cadence. The company is building enough hardware for “well above” a dozen flights in 2026, with the upper-end limit of 24 launches. The pacing item is second stages. Right now Blue Origin can build one per month, but the production rate is increasing.”

“There’s never been such a high demand for launch as there is right now.”

ID830 is the most X-ray luminous radio-loud quasar, observations find

An international team of astronomers have employed the Spektr-RG spacecraft and various ground-based telescopes to investigate a distant quasar known as ID830. Results of the new observations, published November 7 on the pre-print server arXiv, indicate that ID830 is the most X-ray luminous radio-loud quasar known to date.

Quasars, or quasi-stellar objects (QSOs), are (AGN) in the centers of active galaxies, powered by supermassive black holes (SMBHs). They showcase very high bolometric luminosities (over one quattuordecillion erg/s), emitting observable in radio, infrared, visible, ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths.

SpaceX reveals simpler lander to speed up Moon return

With its metaphorical feet held over the allegorical fire by NASA, SpaceX has released a new, simplified plan to build a lander to put US astronauts back on the Moon now that the competition for the spacecraft has been reopened due to delays.

NASA’s Artemis program to establish a permanent US human presence on the Moon is ambitious beyond any doubt. However, like previous American efforts, it’s been fraught with cost overruns, delays and technical problems. One of the most aggravating of these bottlenecks has been building the lunar lander because if you don’t have a way to actually put astronauts on the actual Moon, you’re pretty much wasting your time.

SpaceX’s original plan was to build a lander based on its still-experimental Starship rocket – more than just based on it, the craft would essentially be a complete, baseline Starship complete with airfoils and heat shields. The goal was to land up to 100 tonnes of supplies on the Moon or enough to establish a complete, sustainable base.

The Lunar Module Descent Engine: Apollo’s Most Complex Rocket Motor

The Lunar Module’s Descent Propulsion System (DPS) was the first engine in history that could throttle continuously in deep space — a breakthrough that made Apollo’s lunar landing possible. This engine had to ignite once, vary its thrust smoothly from 10 to 100 percent, avoid combustion instability, and hold steady while the LM hovered just feet above the Moon.
In this video, we explore the real engineering behind the DPS: its hypergolic fuels, injector plate design, the early “chugging” instability problem, throttle control logic, and how the engine kept working even as Apollo 11 pushed it to its limits.
If you enjoy deep dives into Apollo engineering, this one’s for you.

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“We Made the World’s Best Material” — How a Diamond Substitute Could Revolutionize Quantum Computing

Strontium titanate’s remarkable ability to perform at extremely low temperatures makes it a key material for next-generation cryogenic devices used in quantum computing and space exploration. Superconductivity and quantum computing have moved beyond theoretical research to capture the public’s im

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