Planetary Protection Officer - Best Job Title Ever - Scott Manley discusses
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And here’s one we made earlier…
James Webb: Telescope’s giant origami shield takes shape - BBC
Credit: NORTHROP GRUMMAN CORP
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For those of you with access to BBC Two, very interesting-looking documentary with Prof. Brian Cox, “The 21st Century Race For Space” next Tuesday! Saw him talking about it and even he was surprised by some of the stuff he found out. Might be worth a watch!
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Prof. Brian Cox should team up with Elon Musk as one of his top science advisor’s.
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A cool website - Artificial-gravity calculator
Reading this article:
Living in space basically shoves a warp drive into your blood stream - theregister.co.uk
If the ISS had a gravity generating spin and better shielding.
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Just watched this and I had no idea about Blue Origin! Really interesting how they’re focusing on building a strong infrastructure for space industry. Couple that with the tourism of Virgin Galactic, and the existing contracts/long term Mars aims of SpaceX… We’re in for an interesting couple of decades!
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The Search for a New Earth
Professor Stephen Hawking, Professor Danielle George and Christophe Galfard join forces to find out if, and how, humans can reach for the stars and relocate to different planets
access to UK BBC Iplayer required
This is a very good 90 min up todate program about our near future options for
flight to and living on Mars and Proxima B.
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Start by giving things there own names. How many Americans know were York or Orleans is?
Damn I should start posting more about them. I figured everyone knew about them like SpaceX. Their goals are to start with space tourism as well, but as you said their long term goals are more similar to ULA of building Earth/Moon infrastructure for more in-space operations. As far as I know, ULA has also chosen their BE-4 engines to power ULA’s next rocket vulcan. So as far as new rockets in the upcoming years we will have Arianne - 6 by Ariannespace, Vulcan by ULA, and New Glenn by BO. SpaceX’s next gen rocket powered by raptor is worth mentioning but I have a feeling it will happen a bit later than the rest.
All of these companies have some sort of “re-usability” concept as well. It’s nice to see the age of 100% expendable rockets is soon to be history. BO wants full first stage reuse similar to SpaceX. ULA plans to jettison first stage engine block parachute down and catch it with a helicopter. Ariannespace wants to attach folding wings and electric prop engines and fly the engine block back to a runway. Pretty interesting concepts to say the least but if they are economical and work while they transition their R&D to 100% re-usability more power to them. It will be no easy feat for any of those organizations to pull off.
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BBC Horizon 2017 - A Traveller’s Guide
*requires uk bbc iplayer access
I find that people took a dislike to BO and Jeff Bezos after his attempts to portray BO and SpaceX as equals in the re-usability race when SpaceX had been delivering 2nd stage to orbit and then doing zero-velocity touchdowns at sea since April 2014.
BO went straight up and down in November 2015 and then when Falcon 9 flight 20 landed at the pad a month later, Jeff tweeted this:
It is a sort of race between them. How friendly a race that is who knows. Slightly different missions but with the common goals of getting people up into space. Once Jeff gets into space for proper on a regular basis who knows what goals he’ll then set himself.
Its all good at the end of the day. If nations won’t compete yet on that sort of level we saw back with the early days of rockets. Its good to see private companies having a good go. Nation level space race might heat up a little more when China lands humans back on the Moon again and that will lightly threaten the USA and Russian military if nothing else. Maybe then NASA and Europe and even Russia will push a little harder. Who knows though, it might all be private from here on out.
All good though, pushing forward always.
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SpaceX just posted this video featuring their water landings and their drone ship landing failures.
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Nice handy simple webpage offering up Mars time.
Mars Clock by James Tauber
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Livestream from NASA Mission Control in about 3 hours from now (1100 UTC)
Reminder: The NASA’s Eyes app lets you watch Cassini’s current position relative to Saturn.
(After installing: click to zoom to Saturn, then Cassini)
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30 Minutes of Data left.
Here’s the non 360 version of the stream:
Watching the end of this great machine.
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Nasa reply
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