Tag: SpaceXs

SpaceX’s next astronaut mission for NASA has been pushed to November following an issue with its rocket engines

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Shannon Walker, Victor J. Glover, Soichi Noguchi that are standing in the snow: From left: mission specialist Shannon Walker, pilot Victor Glover, Crew Dragon commander Michael Hopkins, and mission specialist Soichi Noguchi at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, on September 24, 2020. SpaceX

© SpaceX
From left: mission specialist Shannon Walker, pilot Victor Glover, Crew Dragon commander Michael Hopkins, and mission specialist Soichi Noguchi at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, on September 24, 2020. SpaceX
  • NASA’s next mission with SpaceX will launch “no sooner than early-to-mid November,” the agency announced Saturday.
  • That mission, called Crew-1, will ferry four astronauts to the International Space Station and back.
  • The launch was previously slated for Halloween. The delay allows SpaceX to investigate an issue with its Falcon 9 rocket engines.
  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

NASA’s four-astronaut team will have to wait a little longer to visit the International Space Station. The agency announced Saturday that Crew-1, its joint mission with SpaceX, won’t take off until at least early-to-mid November.

The mission was previously scheduled for 2:40 a.m. ET on October 31. The latest delay allows SpaceX to evaluate an with its Falcon 9

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SpaceX’s Tesla roadster made its first close approach with Mars

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a close up of a car: "Starman" driving SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's Tesla roadster.

© SpaceX/Getty Images/FILE
“Starman” driving SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s Tesla roadster.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s Tesla roadster made its first close approach to Mars on Wednesday.

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The roadster, “driven” by a mannequin dubbed “Starman” wearing a spacesuit, was part of a dummy payload attached to the second stage of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket that launched in 2018.

SpaceX tweeted yesterday that the vehicle made its first close approach with Mars, coming within 5 million miles of the planet.

“It’s a long distance,” Jonathan Dowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told CNN. “Mars would appear about 1/10 the diameter of the Moon, so small but not a point.”

Dowell tracked the rocket using NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Horizons system, which has an accurate trajectory calculated from the Falcon 9’s initial orbit as it left Earth. He says that it is in elliptical orbit around the

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Musk: SpaceX’s Starlink has enough orbiting satellites for public beta

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  • Elon Musk said Tuesday that SpaceX’s internet satellite project, Starlink, has now launched enough satellites for its public beta.
  • Musk tweeted that once the most-recently launched satellites are in position, the company will roll out a “fairly wide public beta” in the northern US and southern Canada.
  • The goal of Starlink is to put a constellation of satellites into orbit that can beam high-speed internet to remote parts of the Earth.
  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Elon Musk’s goal of beaming high-speed internet to remote parts of the Earth using orbiting satellites just got a step closer to reality.

SpaceX on Tuesday successfully launched a batch of 60 satellites, bringing the total number of Starlink satellites in orbit to more than 700, per Ars Technica. Musk, SpaceX’s CEO, said this is enough for a public beta.

“Once these satellites reach their target position, we will be able to

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Case closed: California judge ends SpaceX’s lawsuit against the U.S. Air Force

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The judge said the Air Force’s actions were not arbitrary, capricious, or in violation of the law, and that SpaceX was not entitled to any relief in this action.”

WASHINGTON — A California judge Oct. 2 officially ended SpaceX’s 18-month-long lawsuit against the U.S. Air Force. Following a Sept. 24 ruling denying SpaceX’s claim, the judge on Friday ordered the case to be closed. 

U.S. District Court Judge Judge Otis Wright II of the Central District of California on Sept. 24 ruled against SpaceX in its legal complaint over contracts the U.S. Air Force awarded in October 2018 to United Launch Alliance, Northrop Grumman and Blue Origin. 

The judge’s Sept. 24 order, first reported by Reuters, was sealed by the court because it contained sensitive information.

In the Oct. 2 motion to close the case, the judge noted that his Sept. 24 order denied SpaceX’s claim, “concluding that the

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SpaceX’s Starlink satellites could make US Army navigation hard to jam

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SpaceX has already launched more than 700 Starlink satellites, with thousands more due to come online in the years ahead. Their prime mission is to provide high-speed internet virtually worldwide, extending it to many remote locations that have lacked reliable service to date.

Now, research funded by the US Army has concluded that the growing mega-constellation could have a secondary purpose: doubling as a low-cost, highly accurate, and almost unjammable alternative to GPS. The new method would use existing Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) to provide near-global navigation services. 

In a non-peer-reviewed paper, Todd Humphreys and Peter Iannucci of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin claim to have devised a system that uses the same satellites, piggybacking on traditional GPS signals, to deliver location precision up to 10 times as good as GPS, in a system much less prone to interference. 

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The

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