I blogged last time about the success of SpaceX in landing a Falcon 9 first stage on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean. That was not their only recent "first." SpaceX has been shipping cargo to the International Space Station with their Falcon 9 launch vehicles and their Dragon spacecraft and they recently delivered a very special package to the ISS.
One of the major costs of space exploration and exploitation is the one-time use of launch vehicles.
One of the applications that is being considered for spacecraft is tourism and transportation. Last week, the U.N.
I have discussed a number of actual and theoretical engines to be used for spacecraft in this blog. There is a category of space drives that I have not discussed because they are wild speculation about designs that in some way defy well known physical laws which makes their construction and use highly improbable to say the least.
Last week, I blogged about using lasers and space sails for the propulsion of spacecraft. This week, I am going to talk about using nuclear fission for space propulsion.
Crowd funding is a new approach to raising funds for projects.
The basic idea of using a light beam to power a sail attached to a spacecraft with photon bombardment has been around a long time.
The U.S. Department of Defense has requested one hundred and eight million dollars from Congress for the construction of a new facility in Colorado.
The U.K. has had satellites launched by other countries and U.K astronauts have visited the International Space Station courtesy of the manned space craft of other countries. Up until last October, the U.K. had never launched a rocket into space from their own territory.
I have blogged before about all the space junk orbiting the Earth. It is a huge problem and is getting worse with every launch. Space agencies on Earth are tracking over twenty three thousand pieces of space junk bigger than four inches. (For comparison, a baseball is about three inches in diameter.) It is estimated that there are trillions of smaller particles.
