In the APOD photo from May 14th, it is easy to imagine the rocket launching far away into the galactic disk. Sadly the rocket can’t traverse the thousands of light years to reach the distant stars, and is restricted to orbiting the Earth. Another beautiful part of this image is the technique involved in producing it. It required combining two exposures. The first, with low sensitivity to capture the orange rocket trail of the Falcon 9. The second with high sensitivity and a longer exposure time to capture the faint light of the Milky Way galaxy beyond. The result is...
I talk a lot about SpaceX. I write about their exploits, their goals, and their successes and failures. But they are not the only major player in commercial space flight, not by a long shot. They have been the most well-known company due to their 1.6 Billion dollar contract for supply missions to the International Space Station, but there is great work being done by others. The one company that is starting to move into the spotlight is Blue Origin. Another company run by an internet billionaire, in this case Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Blue Origin has similar goals to Elon...
From the recent success of the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch and subsequent landing of the first stage rocket booster, space flight has been changed. The future of space flight will become more like an airline, reusing vehicles regularly. It’s been a long time coming, and it still has a long way to go, but it’s heading in the right direction. SpaceX recently released video footage of the landing in full. Even though the landing was a secondary goal to the mission, which also launched over a dozen ORBCOMM telecommunications satellites into Earth orbit, it was the newsmaker. It took a 60...
After watching the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket explode shortly after launch back in June, two things were going through my head. “How will they handle this disaster?” and “When will they return to flight?” The first question was answered in the weeks that followed as SpaceX CEO Elon Musk reported that the most likely cause of the accident was a failure in a second stage strut that held a high pressure helium tank in place. The second question could be answered this evening when the first Falcon 9 launch in six months takes place at Cape Canaveral. The last time a...
I was downtown Toronto this morning, dressed in a suit and holding my umbrella to stay dry and navigate the city streets as they were soaked with rain. I was headed to the CBC building on John street to do an interview about the SpaceX CRS-7 mission that would launch an hour later. This would be a very important mission, the seventh of twelve ISS resupply missions contracted by NASA. It was also the third attempt at a secondary goal – landing the first stage launch vehicle, the Falcon 9 rocket, upright on an ocean platform, a feat that had...
Today is a busy day in the world of astronomy and space news. The US Air Force has approved SpaceX for military launches, ending a ten year monopoly by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin. A black hole jet moving at nearly the speed of light is having traffic issues, resulting in knots of jet material rear-ending each other. An experiment in Quantum Mechanics has shown that reality simply doesn’t exist until we measure it. Finally, the Gemini planet imager has found a bright, disk-shaped ring of dust around the star HD 115600, which is being likened to the Kuiper Belt in the...
Its no secret that Elon Musk wants to go to Mars, and if he keeps steering the ship of amazing work done by SpaceX, he will have full support. He has been candid about mistakes, honest about goals, and modest about successes. So with Mars on the horizon in the future, here are some tourism posters made by SpaceX. All images courtesy of SpaceX. They have such a retro 50s sci-fi feel, which I love. It’s making fun of all those old campy posters, but there is a decidedly romantic feel to them, especially for anyone who has dreamed of...
As the capsule separates from the first stage rocket, the second stage booster takes over and sends Dragon into orbit around the Earth to rendezvous with it’s target a few hours from now. At this point the mission is a complete success from NASA’s perspective, but to Elon Musk and the rest of the SpaceX team, the real challenge is just beginning. They have to land that first stage rocket on a 300 x 170 foot barge in the vast ocean, or risk losing millions of dollars in their investment. Here’s how it went. Okay not so well, but arguably...
A newsworthy story yesterday was the delay of the launch of the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVER) satellite, atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, in a joint collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA, and the Us Air Force. The launch was originally scheduled for Sunday just after 6pm EST, and had what we call an ‘instantaneous’ launch window, which means that if the craft didn’t launch on time, it would be scrubbed and launched another day. This is due to the fact that the craft is being sent to the L1 Lagrange point, a point in...
Last week, as the Dragon capsule successfully launched for the International Space Station under the watch of Space enthusiasts the world over. There was also a bit of chatter about a secondary SpaceX goal, to land the Falcon 9 rocket on a floating barge in the Atlantic Ocean as a new method of recovery. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk had tweeted at the time that the landing did not go well, implying a bit of damage to the landing pad. A few days later, a first picture surfaced of the landing pad showing a bit of charring and a few rocket...
