Month: April 2018

First-ever luxury hotel in space

Aurora Station
This is exactly the sort of accelerated pace that I hoped, in my fondest wishes, would be a direct result of the recent Falcon Heavy launch and subsequent spaced Tesla roadster. I am convinced that it will encourage and unleash a flood of entrepreneurial excitement and draw the attention of investors and boardroom executives from all corners of the world. Reading today an announcement of a planned “first ever luxury hotel in space” helps to joyously confirm my hopeful assumptions.

The past three days have seen the Space 2.0 Summit held in San Jose, and I will absolutely have to investigate further what was discussed there, since one of the items to emerge was the Aurora Station project proposed by developer Orion Span. This exciting new company is chartered to “build and sustain human communities in space” and I wish them goodspeed and the best success; as they say, a rising tide raises all boats, and I think this starts to show how Elon has opened the floodgates.

Check out the article at sky.com for more details of this new project and how you can reserve your room!

Dragon Connects with ISS

Dragon Docks with ISS
In a follow-up from the story on Monday regarding the successful launch of the Dragon cargo capsule on the NASA resupply mission, word has been received today that docking with the ISS was successful. The 3 tons of supplies have been delivered safely to the orbiting space station, and the Dragon will remain connected for the whole of April, after which time it will be sent back to earth, again loaded this time with outgoing supplies. Landing will take place in the pacific where SpaceX will retrieve the capsule after it’s second successful mission.

At current design tolerances, the Dragon capsules are rated for three missions, so this one may have yet another trip in the future. The goal of re-usability is not only here, but has now been proven to work over and over again, with the results showing clearly in the price to orbit.
(space.com)

Stellar Jurisdiction

Star Laws
There is an interesting article over at SpaceNews today regarding the peculiar and sudden imaging restriction imposed by NOAA on SpaceX in the middle of their Falcon 9 launch last Friday. While conflicting reports had been surfacing, including from NOAA themselves, it seems that the truth of the matter has finally begun to surface, and in so doing may be handily managed by the fleet of lawyers.

It boils down to restrictions on images of Earth taken from orbit, and a number of bureaucratic hoops one must jump through in order to proceed with that sort of event. What really gets my goat however, is the notion that one government (apparently our own) can claim to exercise rights over imaging of the entire Earth from points in orbit which would only briefly even be over top of the US.

It raises in my mind the much larger and more important question of: who “owns” the moon and other planets? Or at least, who claims to? I like to think that Elon and co. can simply get to Mars, set up whatever they like, and then suggest that if someone doesn’t like it they can come there and ask him to stop. The idea that the US (or any nation) would claim to have jurisdiction over the moon or Mars – when so abjectly failing to get us there themselves – is frustrating to say the least. I’m looking forward to seeing that all play out, sooner than we ever expected!

References:

Falcon 9 Launch, Monday 4/2/2018

Dragon capsule docking with space station

SpaceX has committed to a very aggressive launch schedule for the remainder of 2018, and this back-to-back demonstration of master level rocketry is a direct result! We just finished cheering and celebrating the successful launch on Friday (albeit with shortened video thanks to NOAA involvement) and now we look ahead to the scheduled 4:30pm EDT Monday afternoon launch of a Space Station resupply mission.

This will be the 14th mission (code named CRS-14) for SpaceX under the ‘Commercial Resupply Services Contract’ from NASA, and will include about 5,800 pounds of equipment. This is a repeat attempt of a launch which was delayed from February 9th and again from March 13th. Unfortunately the current plan is not to attempt a landing and recovery of this booster, which has flown before and is being reused for this flight – a key feature of Elon Musk’s strategy for reducing the costs of commercial space flight. The rocket will be pushed to the edge of some trajectory limits in order to capture useful mission data, and will be expended upon reentry. Since SpaceX is gearing up to release their new Block 5 version of the Falcon 9, recent (and likely upcoming) missions are cycling out the old Falcon boosters to make way for the new and improved 2018 model. Won’t that be great – when we are versioning rockets as commonly as we do with automobiles?

(Florida Today)