An artist’s conception shows the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module attached to the International Space Station. (Credit: Bigelow Aerospace)
For the first time, SpaceX is due to launch an entire room to the International Space Station – a room that can go into orbit folded up, and then be expanded like an accordion once it’s hooked up to the station.
The 3,100-pound Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, is the primary payload for a cargo resupply mission. BEAM will be packed in the “trunk” of SpaceX’s uncrewed Dragon cargo capsule when it’s lofted into space by a Falcon 9 rocket.
Liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida is set for 4:43 p.m. ET (1:43 p.m. PT) April 8. Forecaster Kathy Winters said there’s a 90 percent chance of acceptable weather. “It’ll be a great day to launch a rocket,” she told reporters at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
SpaceX’s Elon Musk sits in a Crew Dragon capsule during its unveiling in 2014. (Credit: SpaceX)
Is SpaceX founder Elon Musk crazy to press ahead with plans to send people to Mars? Or crazy like a fox? A rehash of discouraging words from astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has sparked a renewed debate over Musk’s grand plan.
Tyson’s pronouncements actually date back to last November, when he told The Verge in an interview that people were deluding themselves if they thought private enterprise alone could send people to Mars.
“The delusion is thinking that SpaceX is going to lead the space frontier,” Tyson said. “That’s just not going to happen.”
He explained that interplanetary spaceflight is just too expensive and risky, with too little of an initial return on investment, to make sense as a private venture. “A government has a much longer horizon over which it can make investments,” Tyson said. (He told Larry King pretty much the same thing months earlier.)
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket rises from its pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. (Credit: SpaceX)
After coping with a wayward boat, unfavorable winds and propellant problems, SpaceX launched the SES-9 telecommunication satellite on its Falcon 9 rocket today, then tried unsuccessfully to land the rocket’s first stage on an oceangoing platform.
The Falcon 9 soared into the skies above Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida just after sunset at 6:35 p.m. ET (3:35 p.m. PT) after a smooth countdown.
The satellite was sent on its way to geosynchronous transfer orbit, the first step toward putting SES-9 into position for Luxembourg-based SES to deliver satellite broadcast services to millions of customers in the Asia-Pacific region.
SpaceX and Tesla Motors both received a publicity boost when SpaceX announced last year that it was opening up an office in the Seattle area. (GeekWire photo)
What do the employees at two of billionaire brainiac Elon Musk’s companies, SpaceX and Tesla Motors, think about their job situation? Newly released ratings from Seattle-based PayScale suggest that they don’t draw the highest salaries in the tech world, but see their jobs as extraordinarily meaningful (and stressful).
The two ventures lead a list of 18 top tech companies when it comes to the percentage of survey respondents who say their jobs have lots of meaning (92 percent for SpaceX, 89 percent for Tesla) and high stress (88 percent for SpaceX, 70 percent for Tesla).
That’s in line with the companies’ difficult but rewarding missions: Tesla aims to revolutionize the automotive and power industries with its approaches to electric cars and in-home batteries, while SpaceX aims to lower the cost of spaceflight and eventually turn humanity into a multiplanet species.
Based on PayScale’s data, the employees’ compensation isn’t as high-flown as their aspirations. On the scale for early-career median pay, Tesla ranks 13th at $81,400 a year. SpaceX is one notch lower at $78,500. That’s well above the median U.S. household income ($53,657 for 2014) but relatively low on PayScale’s list.
The Falcon 9 rocket’s engines flare during a last-second shutdown. (Credit: SpaceX via YouTube)
A wayward boat and a load of liquid oxygen that got too warm forced SpaceX to abort what might have been a successful launch of the SES-9 telecommunication satellite today, just as the engines were firing up.
The snags mean SpaceX will have to wait until at least Tuesday for the next opportunity to launch its Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, and to try landing the first-stage booster on an oceangoing platform in the Atlantic.
Today marked the third scrub for the launch, which is aimed at putting Luxembourg-based SES’ satellite into orbit to provide TV and data services to customers in the Asia-Pacific region. The first two delays were due to concerns over chilling down the rocket’s liquid oxygen propellant to the optimal temperature. Liquid oxygen played a role in today’s postponement as well, but there were a couple of additional twists.
The countdown was held up for more than a half-hour because an unauthorized vessel was in the “keep-out zone,” which is meant to keep boat traffic out of harm’s way as the rocket passes overhead. After a helicopter went out to shoo the ship out of the zone, SpaceX got clearance to launch at 7:21 p.m. ET (4:21 p.m. PT).
When the countdown clock reached zero, the engines flared up – and then immediately shut themselves down.
SpaceX’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk, said in a tweet that the shutdown was triggered by a low-thrust alarm about the engines. He said rising temperatures in the liquid oxygen tanks contributed to the weak thrust, and suggested that the launch might have gone ahead if it weren’t for the earlier countdown hold.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 sits on its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. (Credit: SpaceX)
For the second day in a row, SpaceX scrubbed the launch of the SES-9 telecommunications satellite as well as the Falcon 9 rocket landing attempt that was due to follow.
The abort came with just 1 minute and 41 seconds left before the scheduled 3:47 p.m. PT (6:47 p.m. ET) liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
“Right now, preliminary [word] is that we were still evaluating the liquid oxygen propellant load, looking at how much time we had left in the count to finish loading the liquid oxygen, and at that time the launch team decided that we would need to hold the countdown,” SpaceX launch commentator John Insprucker said.
Elon Musk flashes a smile during the StartmeupHK Festival. (Credit: InvestHK via YouTube)
SpaceX founder Elon Musk says he has his heart set on going into space himself, perhaps in the next four or five years, and organize the first flights to Mars by 2025.
Musk’s travel timetable came out this week during Musk’s chat at the StartmeupHK Festival in Hong Kong. The 44-year-old billionaire said he’d unveil his detailed plan for sending settlers to Mars in September at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico. That means the SpaceX fans who have been buzzing about the Mars Colonial Transporter may have to just keep buzzing for another eight months or so.
The StartmeupHK talk was as wide-ranging as Musk’s interests, which take in electric cars (as Tesla Motors’ CEO), solar power (as Solar City’s chairman) and the potentialuses and misuses of artificial intelligence (as a backer of the OpenAI foundation). That’s all in addition to his focus on spaceflight and humanity’s interplanetary future.
Musk introduced yet another theme: the prospects for creating brain-computer interfaces that would let you store and retrieve images and other information directly from implants in your head.
Richard Branson is in a friendly rivalry with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. (Credit: Virgin Galactic)
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture may have done another flight test, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX is making waves with its rocket progress – but don’t forget about Richard Branson.
“Our spaceship comes back and lands on wheels. Theirs don’t,” the billionaire founder of Virgin Galactic said during a CNBC interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “There’ll be banter like this which will take place, and that’s good. People will have a choice of which spaceships they want to use to go to space.”
Today there was a torrent of tweets about a possible Blue Origin flight test. First, the Federal Aviation Administration alerted aviators to stay away from the airspace over the company’s test range in West Texas. Then, around midday today, the restrictions were lifted. One Twitter user, Patrick Brown, went so far as to post a picture of what appears to be a rocket trail leading up from the company’s test range in West Texas.
Blue Origin kept mum. “Unfortunately, Blue Origin doesn’t have anything to contribute at this time,” the company said in a statement emailed to GeekWire.
A newly released video shows SpaceX’s Dragon 2 capsule pulling off a valuable trick: firing its thrusters to hover above a landing pad.
The Nov. 24 test was part of Project DragonFly, the California-based company’s effort to develop a Dragon that can touch down on land rather than splashing down in the ocean. The trick is likely to come into play when future Dragons come back from the International Space Station — or land on Mars.
This test was conducted at SpaceX’s rocket development facility in Texas. The Dragon was suspended from a tether, and then engineers fired up its eight SuperDraco thrusters for five seconds. SpaceX said the firing generated about 33,000 pounds of thrust before the craft was returned to its resting position.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 first-stage booster descends toward a landing on a ship in the Pacific Ocean after the Jason 3 launch. SpaceX says the booster tipped over due to a landing-leg failure. (Credit: SpaceX)
Rocket launches can sometimes turn into flame wars, as shown by last year’s Twitter tug of war between space-minded billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
That rivalry crossed over into the Twittersphere in November, when the Amazon founder used his first tweet to tout the landing of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spacecraft after its first test flight to an outer-space altitude.
