Lifeboat Foundation

A new nonprofit organization is partnering with Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, Airbus and other heavy-hitters to create a moon-centric prize program known as “The Moon Race.”

The contest’s goal is to boost technologies that could contribute to sustainable lunar exploration. A lot of the details, however, are still up in the air — including exactly what those technologies will be, and how much the prizes will amount to.

Continue reading “Blue Origin and Airbus back ‘The Moon Race,’ a space contest yet to be defined” »

Blue Origin is best known for its own rocket programs, but it just scored a deal that could make it an important name in the spaceflight industry. United Launch Alliance has chosen Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine (two of them, to be exact) to power the booster stage its next-generation Vulcan Centaur rocket, which is due to launch in mid-2020. Jeff Bezos’ outfit won’t be the only rocket vendor involved, but it crucially beat out Aerojet Rocketdyne — a behemoth in the industry that had tried to pressure ULA into avoiding Blue Origin tech altogether.

The gumdrop-shaped capsule is designed to function essentially as a space taxi, ferrying up to seven astronauts and their cargo to and from the International Space Station. Boeing is expected to conduct the spacecraft’s first crewed test flight to the ISS next year. (SpaceX is putting the finishing touches on its Crew Dragon capsule, which is also scheduled to carry its first crew in 2019.)

Recently, NBC News MACH visited a Starliner mock-up at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to get an insider’s look at the spacecraft — and a sense of what it would be like to fly aboard the futuristic capsule. [Editor’s note: Boeing is a sponsor of MACH’s Making of an Astronaut series.]

Continue reading “360 Video: Inside Boeing’s Starliner space capsule” »

With plans to give the historic rocket its own place on display inside the company’s Hawthorne factory, SpaceX has refurbished the last remaining Falcon 1 rocket booster and an old Merlin 1C engine to create a model representative of the same Falcon 1 that saved SpaceX and made history on September 28th, 2008, becoming the first privately-developed liquid-fuel rocket to reach Earth orbit.

In the process of celebrating the tenth anniversary of that crowning achievement, one is reminded just how meteoric SpaceX’s rise has been over the course of that decade, marked by relentless progress with Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Cargo Dragon, Crew Dragon, and even the early phases of BFR construction.

Ten years ago today, Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket to achieve Earth orbit. Here are a few of our SpaceX employees who helped us achieve this historic milestone! pic.twitter.com/zwgXor0YXt

Continue reading “SpaceX restores a Falcon 1 rocket for 10th anniversary of first launch success” »

Can Tesla survive without Elon Musk? If he is banned from CEO or director positions or being a board member what will the impact to SpaceX be?

Tesla without Elon Musk at the wheel? To many of the electric car maker’s customers and investors that would be unthinkable. But that’s what government securities regulators now want to see.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has asked a federal court to oust Musk as Tesla’s chairman and CEO, alleging he committed securities fraud with false statements about plans to take the company private.

Continue reading “Tesla without Musk at the wheel? That’s what the SEC wants” »

Welcome to Edition 1.19 of the Rocket Report! Lots of news this week about the development of rocket engines in the United States, South Korea, and elsewhere. There are also milestones for the Ariane 5 rocket and an anniversary for SpaceX.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and, if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

SpaceX hits 10 years since the Falcon 1. In an in-depth feature, Ars recounts the harrowing eight weeks following the failed third flight of the Falcon 1 rocket and the finally successful fourth flight. “If we had not reached orbit on that attempt, SpaceX would not exist,” Elon Musk recalled. “That was a very tough launch emotionally.” Shortly after the Falcon 1 launch, SpaceX intensified work on developing its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.

Continue reading “Rocket Report: SpaceX gets Moon launches, South Korean rocket, BE-4 wins” »

Humanity could have an outpost on Mars just a decade from now, Elon Musk said.

Musk’s company SpaceX is building a huge, reusable rocket-spaceship duo called the BFR to help our species explore and settle Earth’s moon, Mars and other worlds throughout the solar system.

The billionaire entrepreneur’s long-term vision involves the establishment of a million-person city on the Red Planet in the next 50 to 100 years. But we could get the founding infrastructure of such a settlement — an outpost Musk calls Mars Base Alpha — up and running much sooner than that, he said. [The BFR in Images: SpaceX’s Giant Spaceship for Mars & Beyond].

A Japanese startup called Ispace is shooting for the moon, and SpaceX is going to help. The company wants to lead the charge in the search for large water ice deposits on the lunar surface, and it has two missions planned to make it happen. Both missions, currently slated for 2020 and 2021, will fly on SpaceX rockets.

Ispace was among the companies competing for the Google-backed Lunar Xprize — it funded the Japanese “Hakuto” team. That challenge to land a rover on the moon dragged on for years as the list of competitors dwindled until the last team failed to secure a place aboard an Indian rocket. Ispace didn’t make it that far, but it was in the final five. Google declined to extend the cash prizes (totaling $25 million) in March of this year after pushing back the deadline several times as teams struggled to get their robots launched.

Ispace isn’t letting that failure bog it down. The first of its two planned lunar missions will consist of an orbital module. The second will be more ambitious with a pair of rovers going all the way to the surface. These are mainly technology demonstration missions rather than true ice scavengers, though.

Continue reading “SpaceX to Launch Japanese Startup’s Lunar Missions” »

Speaking in a September 7th interview with French newspaper Courrier International, Dr. Francis Rocard – director of French space agency CNES’ solar system exploration program – had little good to say about SpaceX and CEO Elon Musk’s long-term ambitions in space, going so far as to question the CEO’s driving ethics and label the company’s next-generation rocket and propulsion system “science-fiction”.