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NASA wants to jump-start development of landers to take humans to the Moon After more than a year of talk about returning humans to the Moon, NASA is asking the aerospace community to come up with designs for landers that can transport astronauts to the lunar surface. NASA’s goal is to test out these vehicles on the Moon as early as 2024 and then use them to take people to the lunar surface by 2028

Blue Origin held a groundbreaking ceremony in Huntsville, Alabama, Jan. 25 to formally mark the start of construction of a factory that will be used for building BE-4 engines. The company announced plans to build the factory there in June 2017, contingent on the selection of the engine by United Launch Alliance for its Vulcan rocket. ULA picked the BE-4 in September 2018. The factory, scheduled for completion in March 2020, will build dozens of BE-4 engines a year for both Vulcan as well as Blue Origin's own New Glenn vehicle. Both rockets are scheduled to make first launches in...

The space tourism firm XCOR Aerospace Inc. announced plans in 2008 to launch its private two-seat Lynx space plane. Lynx was expected to fly paying space tourists to an altitude of about 38 miles above Earth, where passengers would experience 90 seconds of weightlessness. The company first estimated flight tests would begin in 2010, with private flights to follow soon after. Many space tourists bought into XCOR's Lynx model for the chance to briefly experience weightlessness at the edge of space. Having paid XCOR $100,000 for a ticket, customer Nael Hamameh thought his flight would come as early as 2011,...

The Long Now Foundation’s clock is a symbol for multi-generational thinking Jeff Bezos wants us all to be good ancestors. The Amazon supremo just tweeted that installation has begun on one of his pet projects of the last decade, the 10,000 Year Clock, also called the Clock of the Long Now. Designed to stay accurate for that huge time period, the giant clock will tick once a year, moving its century hand every 100 years, and send out a cuckoo once a millennia – just 10 times in its life. And it costs US$ 42 million. What is Bezos thinking?...

There's a new private moon race gearing up to fly new lunar technologies by 2024, but aside from the fact that it has support from Blue Origin, Airbus and other spaceflight companies and agencies, there are few details on how the new space competition will work. The contest, called "The Moon Race," was unveiled Monday (Oct. 1) by Airbus Space at the International Astronautical Congress in Bremen, Germany, promising to develop technologies for a trip to the moon in 2024. Participating entities include the European Space Agency, the Mexican Space Agency, Airbus, Blue Origin and Vinci Construction. In the months...

Chris Hadfield, who flew to the International Space Station as part of the Canadian Space Agency, told Business Insider that making it to Mars is going to take technology that has yet to be conceived. Put simply, he doesn’t believe the new rockets being worked on by NASA, SpaceX, or Blue Origin have much chance of fulfilling their stated goals. “Personally, I don’t think any of those three rockets is taking people to Mars,” Hadfield said regarding the SpaceX Big Falcon Rocket, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, and NASA’s Space Launch System being constructed by Boeing. “I don’t think those are...

Nasa’s output of climate change information aimed at the public has dwindled under the Trump administration, with a former employee claiming “fear and anxiety” within the agency has led to an online retreat from the issue. Laura Tenenbaum, a former science communicator for Nasa, said she was warned off using the term “global warming” on social media and restricted in speaking to the media due to her focus on climate change. “Nasa’s talking point is that it’s business as usual, but that’s not true,” said Tenenbaum, who departed Nasa in October after a decade at the space agency. “They have...

The recently anointed richest person in the world, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, says we need to colonize the moon — and time is of the essence. ..." Speaking at the Space Development Conference in Los Angeles over the weekend, Mr Bezos made the argument that in order to protect Earth and allow the human species to continue growing, we need to move much of our industrial activity to the moon, or even asteroids. The 54-year-old billionaire said moving heavy industry into solar-powered space outposts is the only way to ensure that our planet can cope with the rising...

Mars will be a hard place to raise the children necessary to sustain a permanent colony there. And according to a new paper published in the June issue of the journal Futures, conceiving kids on Mars will be even harder. ... The biological challenges of rearing Mars babies are easy enough to wrap one's head around. For starters, Mars' atmosphere is about 1 percent as thick as Earth's, meaning the planet is hit by a lot more solar radiation than humans are currently used to. NASA studies have shown that radiation exposure might damage astronauts' brain cells and increase their...

Amazon Smile program allows customers to help benefit the charities of their choice through their purchases. That is unless your ‘charity of choice’ happens to be Alliance Defending Freedom. ADF was just dropped by Amazon as a charity option and Christian consumers are in the dark as to why... We contacted Amazon to find out what happened, and lo and behold, Amazon informed us that we were removed because the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) determines who is qualified.” Yes, that SPLC. The one that exploits the terms “hate” and “hate group” against any organization it disagrees with. Without actually...

When Elon Musk and his team at SpaceX were looking to make their Falcon 9 rocket even more powerful, they came up with a creative idea — keep the propellant at super-cold temperatures to shrink its size, allowing them to pack more of it into the tanks. But the approach comes with a major risk, according to some safety experts. At those extreme temperatures, the propellant would need to be loaded just before takeoff — while astronauts are aboard. An accident, or a spark, during this maneuver, known as “load-and-go,” could set off an explosion. The proposal has raised alarms...

Blue Origin test flight, China's space-program, SLS, earth's magnetic field flipping?

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...

Jeff Bezos just donated $33 million to 'dreamers' Jeff Bezos just donated $33 million to 'dreamers' 41 Mins Ago | 00:41 Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos donated $33 million in college scholarships for "dreamers" — childhood undocumented immigrants granted stay in the country under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. TheDream.Us, a nonprofit working toward college access for undocumented immigrants, said the donation from Bezos and his wife MacKenzie is the largest in the organization's history and will fund 1,000 scholarships. "My dad came to the U.S. when he was 16 as part of Operation Pedro Pan," Bezos said...

The BE-3U is the upper stage variant of the liquid hydrogen-fueled BE-3 engine that has powered Blue Origin's reusable New Shepard spacecraft on seven suborbital test flights since its 2015 debut. Mowry said switching to the BE-3U for New Glenn's second stage will allow Blue Origin to conduct the rocket's first launch in the fourth quarter of 2020. He declined to say how much time the engine change saves compared to the original configuration. Blue Origin is developing two versions of New Glenn: a two-stage version designed to launch a wide range of satellites and a three-stage version for more demanding launches such as deep...

Captain Jean-Luc Picard rules. So says Jeff Bezos. The Blue Origin founder apparently sides firmly with Sir Patrick Stewart's portrayal of Picard from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" when picking the best starship captain from the "Star Trek" franchise. Of course, that may be because Bezos hung out with Stewart at a recent event "Kirk or Picard? Picard!" Bezos wrote on Twitter Saturday (March 10)...

It is essential for any nation that wishes to thrive and compete on the world stage to have a successful and flourishing aerospace industry, centered on the capability of putting humans and payloads into space affordably and frequently. This is a bipartisan position held by elected officials from both American political parties since the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957...Unfortunately, since the beginning of the 21st century the U.S. government has struggled to create and maintain a viable launch industry. Even as the government terminated the Space Shuttle program, with its ability to place and return humans and...

The battle of the billionaires between Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson looks set to finally blast its first passengers into space next year. Speaking at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Colorado, Jeff Ashby, a former NASA astronaut who is director of safety and mission assurance for Jeff Bezos' space firm Blue Origin, said the firm is now 'a year out' from human flights. It comes as Richard Branson claimed in October he will travel to space on his Virgin Galactic craft within six months. Elon Musk is also expected to soon reveal the launch schedule for a...

The company's ultimate goal is to become part of the space tourism industry, which most science fiction from the last century assumed we'd have going by now. Blue Origin isn't planning to actually send tourists into space until 2019, but the fact that Mannequin Skywalker returned safely is a great sign. Had it returned in multiple pieces, that 2019 window probably wouldn't be doable anymore. The enormous windows on the capsule are a reflection of Blue Origin's rather unique goal. Unlike SpaceX, which wants to send astronauts to Mars for a possible colony, or Boeing, which is mostly content helping NASA on their rockets, Blue Origin is interested in sending civilians...

Credit six-term Republican Sen. Richard Shelby for Democrat Doug Jones’ shocking win in Alabama, senators from both parties said Wednesday. Shelby, Alabama’s senior senator and the state’s most influential official, publicly opposed GOP nominee Roy Moore and declared before the election that ”the state of Alabama deserves better” than a former judge accused of sexual contact with teenage girls decades ago. A former Democrat, Shelby, 83, announced weeks before the election that he had already cast an absentee ballot for another, unspecified Republican, even as President Donald Trump and other prominent state Republicans stood up for Moore. “I give the...