A pilot’s eye view of Copenhagen Suborbital’s unmanned flight from launch to splashdown. It gets eerie toward the end as the camera looks up at a parachute that hasn’t quite deployed. That would be the last thing the pilot would ever want to see. And the last thing he would ever see. Correction: For some reason had a video here originally for Unreasonable Rocket.
A hover test of the Armadillo Aerospace Supermod rocket, shot in fantastic 3D. The test was on June 4 2011 at the Armadillo shop in Caddo Mills, TX. Why is the engine pulsing? It’s a very large engine for the weight of the vehicle, and it doesn’t really want to throttle that low. In actual flight it will be flying all-out, and we don’t want to re-write the code to […]
None of the Above? That looks that might be the case. According to NewsCore (who?), “Avatar” and “Titanic” director James Cameron bought the first private trip around the moon. That’s the rumor, anyway. Space Adventures, which is setting up the trip aboard a modified Russian Soyuz transport, is neither confirming nor denying the story. The trip, would could take place as early as late 2015, is still awaiting the sale […]
An international Islamic organization is embarking on an ambitious “Mega” project aimed at allowing its member nations to catch up to the West in building and using satellites and communications technologies. The effort has the backing of cash flush Saudi Arabia, emerging power Turkey, the populous Asian states of Indonesia and Malaysia, and Kazakhstan, which has its own spaceport.
The Mega project was kicked off during a January meeting in Islamabad of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), a 57-nation inter-governmental organization with members on four continents. At the gathering, Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said cooperation would help the Islamic world reverse centuries of technological decline:
Father and son astronauts Owen and Richard Garriott speak at the 2011 National Space Society International Space Development Conference. Owen Garriott spent 60 days aboard Skylab in 1973 and 10 days aboard the Space Shuttle in Spacelab-1 in 1983. His son Richard Garriott is a video game developer and entrepreneur who funded his own 12-day trip flying on Soyuz to the International Space Station in 2008. This talk was given […]
A video animation of Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Cygnus freighter launching from Wallops Island and flying to the International Space Station.
ESA PR — 3 June 2011 — The six men in the Mars500 facility near Moscow have been in isolation now 365 days. The European crewmembers have been writing in their latest letters home about the highlights, monotonous life, team spirit and determination to go on.
“Wow, it’s already been a year,” begins Diego Urbina, one of the two Mars500 crewmembers from ESA, in his latest diary entry.
“One way to visualise it is if you think of what you were doing exactly one year ago, and then picture yourself living in a windowless metal box from then!”
Attention, people of Britain! You can fly into space without making Richard Branson even richer than he already is. Peugeot, in association with Space Adventures, is offering a free suborbital flight into space. All you have to do to enter the sweepstakes is test drive the Peugeot 3008 Crossover or play an online game in which you spot the vehicle in a panoramic picture of London. If you are the […]
AEROJET/TELEDYNE PR — THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. and Sacramento, Calif., June 2, 2011 — Teledyne Technologies Incorporated announced today that its subsidiary, Teledyne Brown Engineering, Inc. (TBE), in Huntsville, Ala., has signed a letter of agreement to form a strategic alliance with Aerojet – General Corporation, a GenCorp company, to manufacture and assemble liquid rocket engines.
The agreement states that Teledyne Brown and Aerojet will cooperatively develop, manufacture and market liquid propellant rocket engines for customers such as NASA and other aerospace companies.
William Shatner (Credit: Jerry Avenaim)
Richard Branson may have snagged A-listers like Russell Brand and Katy Perry for his space tourism joyrides, but one man he can’t convince to climb aboard SpaceShipTwo is William Shatner.
The actor who portrayed the galaxy- and bed-hopping Capt. James Kirk on “Star Trek” won’t fly unless Branson picks up the tab — something the brash billionaire Brit won’t do. The Canadian Press reports:
“I’m scared,” the 80-year-old told a news conference, after he was given an honorary doctorate of Letters at his alma mater, Montreal’s McGill University.
The first successful launch of the HEAT-1X rocket with the Tycho Brahe spacecraft aboard was accomplished on Friday. A Danish press story reports that the rocket reached an altitude of 2.8 kilometers and traveled 8.5 kilometers from the ocean launch platform. The vehicle veered from its planned flight and went sideways. The parachutes were shredded when they deployed at a nearly supersonic speed. The rocket sank, although parts of it […]
Adam Harris is Vice President for Government Affairs, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX). SpaceX President Elon Musk is recipient of the 2011 National Space Society Space Pioneer Award for Business Entrepreneur. This talk was given May 21, 2011 at the NSS International Space Development Conference (ISDC) in Huntsville, Alabama. Timeline: Main presentation 10 min, Q & A 10 minutes (note: inaudible questions were edited out but the answers remain), and four […]