Lifeboat Foundation

Drawn in by Teslarati photographer Pauline Acalin’s most recent photos of Port of LA Falcon 9 recovery operations SpaceX is in the midst of, CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter on December 8th to discuss titanium grid fins and – more importantly – answer a miscellaneous handful of questions about the status of BFR’s development.

Marked lately by rapid-fire, wide-reaching changes to BFR’s general structural composite, Musk at long last confirmed what some suspected – now known as Starship/Super Heavy, the BFR program has officially moved away from carbon fiber composites as the primary material of choice for the rocket’s structure and propellant tanks, instead pivoting to what Musk described as a “fairly heavy metal”.

But cool pics of the demo Starship that will fly suborbital hops coming in ~4 weeks.

Continue reading “SpaceX CEO Elon Musk teases new Starship photos and ‘heavy metal’ BFR” »

We launched two sounding rockets that will help scientists understand atmospheric escape on our home planet that has applications all over the universe — from predicting which far off planets might be habitable, to piecing together how Mars became the desolate, exposed landscape it is today.

SpaceX’s #Dragon cargo spacecraft was successfully installed on the Earth-facing side of the International Space Station’s Harmony module at 10:36 a.m. EST. While there are now six spaceships attached at the station, the Dragon will spend about five weeks there and return to Earth in January 2019 with more than 4,000 pounds of research, hardware and crew supplies.

China launched the Chang’e 4 spacecraft atop a Long March 3B rocket on Friday in a milestone mission to land a rover on the far side of the moon.

Many years after, the young dreamer has surpassed his imagination. He is now a lead engineer on InSight — NASA’s spacecraft which recently landed on Mars. He is in charge of the mission’s robotic arm mechanism.

But it will still take seven years to get there.

The BepiColombo will be travelling a distance of 9 billion kilometers over the next seven years.

The BepiColombo mission is traveling to Mercury powered by ion thruster engines built into the Mercury Transfer Module component visible at the bottom of this artist’s depiction.

China is getting set to launch the first-ever surface mission to the moon’s far side.

The robotic Chang’e 4 mission is scheduled to launch atop a Long March 3B rocket on Friday (Dec. 7) at around 1:30 p.m. EST (1830 GMT; 2:30 a.m. on Dec. 8 local China time).

If all goes according to plan, Chang’e 4’s lander-rover duo will touch down within the moon’s South Pole‐Aitken (SPA) basin after a 27-day flight, then study both the surface and subsurface of this region. [China’s Moon Missions Explained (Infographic)].

Continue reading “China Preps for Launch of Historic Mission to Moon’s Far Side on Friday” »

#BepiColombo’s thrusters have fired in space for the FIRST TIME. The electric ion propulsion ‘jetpacks’ are now ready for routine firing from mid-December onwards, steering BepiColombo on its interplanetary trajectory ahead of its swingby of Earth in April 2020. See https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Operations/BepiColombo_no…LMEBTF7xEw