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SpaceX's most powerful rocket -- the Falcon Heavy -- was ready to send Saudi Arabia's Arabsat-6A telecommunications satellite into orbit Wednesday, but high atmospheric winds have forced SpaceX to postpone the launch by 24 hours. On Wednesday Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO suggested that a delay was likely due to "upper atmospheric wind shear" and SpaceX confirmed there would be no launch on the day. The launch was scheduled for no earlier than 5:32 p.m. PT after the atmospheric conditions pushed the historic flight all the way to the end of its launch window. SpaceX will now use its backup window...

The Raptor engine is designed to power the spaceship currently known as Starship as part of the rocket assembly currently known as Super Heavy (previously dubbed the BFR). The first Raptor test fire took place in September 2016, when the company was targeting an uncrewed Mars launch in 2018. Three Raptor engines like this one are built in to the Starship Hopper, which has been under construction in Texas and which SpaceX will use to begin testing the rocket technology in real life. SpaceX plans to assemble 31 Raptor engines into the Super Heavy rockets, with another seven Raptors on...

The SpaceX Starhopper seems like the fastest development of a prototype rocket outside of a wartime rocket program. The purpose of the inexpensive testing is to have the first flight tests of the new Raptor engine. Three of the engines have been placed in a row and the tests will allow control software to be tested and the throttling of the engines to be tested. The Starhopper rocket should be stacked and welded into one piece within a few days or weeks. The Texas launch pad is still being built and is still piled dirt. The work on the rocket...

The San Francisco-based company said families paid about $2,500 to have a sample of their loved ones’ ashes placed aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Traveling into space will be the remains of military veterans and aerospace enthusiasts, alongside those whose families were “looking to celebrate a loved one within the poetry of the starry sky,” Elysium Space said in an emailed statement. James’ ashes and the others were packed into a 4-inch square satellite called a cubesat, Elysium Space Founder and CEO Thomas Civeit explained to CNN. Families will be able to track the spacecraft in real-time through an...

Much like the late, great physicist Stephen Hawking, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has become a fascinating cultural figure – a super-genius scientist whose observations and ideas are interesting and may be politically influential. Musk is probably right about Artificial Intelligence – specifically, the risks it poses to humankind and the importance of preparing ourselves to eventually compete with computers – and political leaders should pay attention. But Musk is wrong to be part of a new crony capitalist coalition lobbying for expanded tax perks for electronic vehicles (EVs). Republican leaders in Congress should ignore Musk on this issue when voting...

If SpaceX gets lucky the BFR development costs could come in at the $2 billion low-end estimate. Elon Musk had estimated that it would cost $2 billion to 10 billion to develop. A few more critical successes over the next year will enable SpaceX to solidify the finances and funding for the BFR. The needed critical successes are the NASA crewed launch certification in mid-2019 and successful Falcon Heavy launches in 2019. SpaceX has pre-sold a moon orbit tourist flight to a Japanese billionaire. This was likely for $500 to $800 million. The SpaceX Falcon Heavy already has up to...

It's going to be a big night for space tourism. The private spaceflight company SpaceX will reveal its first passenger for a trip around the moon on the company's massive BFR rocket and you can watch it all live online. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has even dropped tantalizing previews of the BFR's new rocket design on Twitter. SpaceX will unveil its BFR rocket passenger (the name stands for Big Falcon Rocket) in a webcast tonight (Sept. 17) at its Hawthorne, California headquarters. You can watch it live here, courtesy of SpaceX, beginning at 9 p.m. EDT (0100 Sept. 18 GMT)....

To make the roughly six-month one-way journey, Musk and his engineers have dreamed up a 347-foot-tall launch system called the Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR. The spacecraft is designed to have two fully reusable stages: a 19-story booster and a 16-story spaceship, which would fly on top of the booster and into into space. SpaceX employees are now building a prototype of the Big Falcon Spaceship at the Port of Los Angeles. Gwynne Shotwell, the company's president and COO, reportedly said Thursday that the spaceship may start small test-launches in late 2019. Several official graphics of the spaceship's internal structure...

For years now, the Pentagon has been in the market for new heavy-lift launch vehicles – rockets that can lift between 44,000 to 110,000 pounds. Currently, the only market options available are either too costly or too reliant on Russian-made parts.To that end, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced that he will begin devoting most of his company’s efforts on developing the “BFR” – short for Big F-ing Rocket – which will allegedly be so huge and powerful that it will make the company’s previous rocket lines outdated in just a few short years. Musk stated at the South by Southwest...

Rocket Lab, SpaceX takes over Los Angeles, Putin surrenders to Elon Musk, DJT and the National Space Council, the FCC whines about Space Regulation, and Long March 5 failure announced...

Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, posted a picture Sunday of what what he described as the “main body tool” for his company’s BFR interplanetary spaceship. BFR—which reportedly stands for “Big F---ing Rocket,” will be designed to withstand planetary entry on Earth, "Mars and beyond,” TechCrunch reported. Space.com reported that BFR's “chief aim” is to make colonizing Mars economically feasible. "We're actually building that ship right now," he said in an interview last month. "I think we'll probably be able to do short flights, short sort of up-and-down flights, probably sometime in the first half of next year." Shortly...

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has published the first public photo of fabrication tooling intended to enable the construction of the first full-scale Mars spaceship prototype. The massive cylinder revealed in Musk’s Instagram post – while not an actual rocket component – is a mold that will be used to carefully craft the carbon composite structures that are expected to be liberally used throughout SpaceX’s Mars rocket boosters and spaceships. Building on a history of R&D with the contractor, SpaceX has likely procured this unique tooling from the Seattle-based Janicki Industries, previously known for their work on the jaw-dropping ITS oxygen...

SpaceX has been given initial approval...to acquire and develop a massive vacant lot into a facility capable of manufacturing the first BFR prototypes and refurbishing the company’s reusable Falcon 9 boosters.... A request summary completed on March 6 details SpaceX’s proposal, laying out a bright future of rocket manufacturing for the abandoned 18-acre lot at Berth 240, one that might soon support “composite curing, cleaning, painting, and assembly [of commercial transportation vessels]” that “would need to be transported by water due to their size.” This description meshes almost perfectly with past discussion of BFR manufacturing plans from SpaceX executives like...

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk told an audience at South by Southwest that his timeline for sending a space vehicle to Mars could mark its first milestone early next year. The privately-funded venture, announced in September 2017, aims to send a cargo mission to the Red Planet by 2022. SpaceX's ultimate objective is to plant the seeds to put a human colony on Mars. Musk held a surprise question and answer session at the annual technology and culture festival in Austin, Texas on Sunday. The billionaire told attendees that "we are building the first Mars, or interplanetary ship, and...

Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket managed a successful takeoff in early 2018, orbiting the Earth with a Tesla car inside and completing its in-space maneuvers, albeit with a bumpy landing. The company can rest on its laurels, right? Hardly. That was certainly big news for the consumer space industry (which is now a real thing!), and promises interesting developments for the future. But SpaceX has grander plans, and is now primarily focused on BFR—which raises the question, what even is BFR? ICYMI, we’ve got an FAQ just for that question! The BFR is an in-development, privately owned rocket that’s...

The so-called ‘Tunguska Event’ refers to a major explosion that occurred on 30 June 1908 in the Tunguska region of Siberia, causing the destruction of over 2000 km2 of taiga, globally detected pressure and seismic waves, and bright luminescence in the night skies of Europe and Central Asia, combined with other unusual phenomena. The ‘Tunguska Event’ may be related to the impact with the Earth of a cosmic body that exploded about 5–10 km above ground, releasing in the atmosphere 10–15 Mton of energy. Fragments of the impacting body have never been found, and its nature (comet or asteroid) is...

It's bad enough when, every few million years, an asteroid rocks our planet. It's worse if the impact triggers regional or global volcanic activity, which is not only hazardous to nearby plants and animals but can choke Earth's atmosphere with deadly gases for months or years. But there's also a possible bright side, like the birth of nice places like Hawaii. For more than three decades, scientists have explored the question of whether an asteroid impact could cause significant volcanic eruptions, hot spots that spring up out of nowhere and create new landforms or rearrange old ones. The process might...

Nearly a quarter-billion years ago, life on Earth almost disappeared. Called the Great Dying, the precise cause of why 70-90% of all terrestrial species might become extinct, challenges geologists, paleontologists and climatologists. But according to a recent study published in Science, astrophysicists who predict meteor orbits have a say in the outcome too. -------- The "Great Dying," a time of earth's greatest number of extinctions, appears to have been caused by the impact of a large meteor, according to a research team that includes Luann Becker, a scientist with the Institute for Crustal Studies in the Department of Geology at...

In 1989, Edward Bryant climbed a point on the southeast coast of his native Australia with a colleague and found an odd jumble of boulders well above the surf. A big wave, he thought, maybe a tsunami from an earthquake, must have tossed them up there. Over the next few years, however, the University of Wollongong geologist explored hundreds of miles of coast and found more signs of wave action, hundreds of feet above the water--too high for any quake-spawned surge. An astonishing hypothesis of devastation from outer space formed in his mind. It gathered some praise, along with many...

Auckland - The dinosaurs were probably heading for extinction even before an asteroid strike wiped them out 65 million years ago, New Zealand scientists said on Monday. Palaeontologist Chris Hollis and a team of scientists from the government-owned Geological and Nuclear Sciences (GNS) have uncovered evidence of significant global climate change even before the meteor strike. "An unknown number of species may have been in sharp decline when the asteroid struck and the impact winter probably finished them off quite quickly," Hollis said in a statement. He added: "There's no scientific agreement on what caused this climatic instability, but it's...