It’s not easy to land a rocket vertically on Earth. Just ask SpaceX, the company co-founded by Tesla and Paypal zillionaire Elon Musk, that has tried twice to stick a vertical landing on a floating barge without success. But this week, another, less well-known player in the private space-race managed to do something similar and industry watchers say it’s one giant leap forward for rocket technology:
In an historic first, the private company founded by Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos has become the first to land a reuseable rocket that's traveled to and from space. On November 23, 2015, Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket launched 330,000 feet into the air. An unmanned crew capsule separated from the rocket on its way up, completing its own successful landing. Then the rocket grazed the lower reaches of space before returning to Earth and slowly touching down in a blaze of glory.
But SpaceX isn’t walking away without any prizes this holiday season. Almost to the day a Russian fighter jet fell dramatically from the sky along the Syrian-Turkey border, news that SpaceX had landed a NASA job to put up the first crewed mission powered by the next generation of NewSpace boosters quietly made the rounds:
NASA placed its first official order for a SpaceX Crew Dragon to carry astronauts to the International Space Station, the agency announced Friday. The order, currently scheduled to be fulfilled in 2017, would take place after SpaceX completes a series of certification milestones culminating with a crewed flight test to the ISS. But NASA continues to warn U.S. legislators that date could slip if the program does not receive its requested funding levels for fiscal year 2016 and beyond.
Although the timing with Russia and the downed fighter was coincidental, it’s also appropriate. Until an alternative is developed and available, the much of US space program depends in part on rocket engines built in the former Soviet Union. Which means a critical part of our program could, in theory, be held hostage to the tender mercies of Vladmir Putin.
- In a couple of weeks I’ll have a review of Syfy’s new miniseries Childhood’s End, based on the novel of the same name by Arthur C. Clarke. The three-part series begins on Monday, Dec 14. I have seen the press sneak peek, and I’m so relieved to report that what I’ve seen is both faithful to the original novel and so far, considering the challenges, downright brilliantly done. As an added bonus, it may also disturb any fundamentalists in your life.
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Dark matter is an exotic substance that outweighs normal matter by several factors in our universe. It’s called dark because its famously difficult to observe, it only interacts with normal matter through gravity. Which could mean our universe is a tangled web of dark matter “hairs” millions of light years long embedded with planets and stars at the moving knots.
- By now we hope the turkey is reduced to sandwiches, the most annoying wingnut uncle is gone, and you are looking over gym deals. But remember there would be no turkey without a type of dinosaurs called maniraptorans. So here’s the latest feathered dino found in fossilized form, the big, bad Dakota Raptor, and a trivia quiz to test your dino-specific knowledge.