Free Republic

As their company was swirling around the financial drain in the early 2000s, General Motors executives came up with an idea to counter its gas-guzzling image and point the way to transportation of the future: an electric car with a gas-engine backup that could travel anywhere. […] … On Tuesday, the last (Chevrolet) Volt was built with little ceremony at a Detroit factory that’s now slated to close. Sales averaged less than 20,000 per year, not enough to sustain the costly undertaking. The Volt wasn’t the first electric car, but it was the first to conquer anxiety over range at...

Tesla shares fall nearly 2 percent after a new report, based in part on the reviews of thousands of vehicle owners, raises questions about the reliability of Tesla's Model 3. Consumer Reports says it will no longer recommend the Model 3 due to the reliability issues. A Tesla spokesperson said, "The vast majority of these issues have already been corrected through design and manufacturing improvements." Tesla shares fell after a new report, based in part on the reviews of thousands of vehicle owners, raises questions about the reliability of Tesla's Model 3. Consumer Reports says it will no longer recommend...

BREVARD COUNTY, FLORIDA – Gov. Ron DeSantis sent a letter to President Donald Trump on Tuesday requesting that the United States Space Command (USSPACECOM) be headquartered in Florida. “Today, I submitted a request to President Trump formally asking him to headquarter United States Space Command in Florida,” said Governor DeSantis. “As the world’s premier gateway to space, Florida has been the departure point for more cargo and humans to space than any other place in the world, so I believe our state is the logical choice to base this new command. In addition to my request to the President, I...

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

A nonprofit Israeli consortium said Monday that it hopes to make history this week by launching the first private aircraft to land on the moon. SpaceIL and state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries told a news conference that the landing craft — dubbed “Beresheet,” or Genesis — will take off from Florida, propelled by a SpaceX Falcon rocket on its weekslong voyage to the moon. The launch is scheduled late Thursday in the United States, early Friday in Israel. It had been originally slated for last December. […] The small craft, roughly the size of a washing machine, is equipped with instruments...

Boston startup, wants deliver high-speed 5G internet in major cities at a reasonable price. Today, it announced it is expanding service from its initial launch in Boston to New York City. The company also announced a deal with Related Companies, a large national affordable housing owner, to host Starry equipment on its buildings and offer Starry service to its tenants. The Starry solution consists of three parts: The beam sits on a high roof. The point sits on a lower roof and the consumer gets a Starry Station, which acts as a modem of sorts to deliver the internet service...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the soul of the Democrat Party. By definition, she is crazy. Take her very seriously. Jeff Bezos did not. He had, after all, bought off the equally crazy mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, to get the city to pay for a second Amazon "headquarters" there. Now the deal has fallen through. Fingers are pointed by the political and media class, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is spiking the ball. She should. She killed it. New York City is a socialist mess with an underbrush of rules and taxes so thick that no one can navigate it without...

NASA's Opportunity rover, the third robotic wanderer to land on Mars, changed our understanding of the Martian landscape, geology, atmosphere and history. On Wednesday, NASA announced its mission complete and with it, the rover's life officially over. The plucky robot roamed the Martian surface for approximately 5,515 Earth days, just over 15 years. During a press conference, NASA said that Opportunity hadn't responded to a last-ditch effort Tuesday to establish contact. A planet-encircling dust storm cut off communications with Opportunity on June 10, 2018, preventing its solar panels from storing power. Since then, over 830 rescue commands had been beamed...

Mars One was split into two ventures, the non-profit Mars One Foundation and the for-profit Mars One Ventures. The Swiss-based Ventures AG was declared bankrupt by a Basel court on January 15th and was, at the time, valued at almost $100 million. Mars One Ventures PLC, the UK-registered branch, is listed as a dormant company with less than £20,000 in its accounts. There is no data available on the non-profit Mars One Foundation, which funded itself by charging its commercial partner licensing fees. Speaking to Engadget, Bas Lansdorp said that the Foundation is still operating, but won't be able to...

NASA wants ideas for moon landers, space tugs and refueling ships. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine details the agency's plans to land astronauts on the moon by 2028 to space industry teams. (Image: © Joel Kowsky/NASA) =================================================================== WASHINGTON — NASA really wants to land astronauts on the moon in 2028. But to do that, the agency is looking to commercial space companies to build the landers, space tugs and refueling stations required to make a moon exploration effort that lasts. "This time, when we go to the moon we're going to stay," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told a roomful of space...

SpaceX's Mars ships won't be ferrying just the super rich to and from the Red Planet, if everything goes according to Elon Musk's plan.The price of a seat aboard SpaceX's Starship interplanetary vehicle will eventually drop enough to be accessible to a large chunk of the industrialized world's population, the billionaire entrepreneur predicted over the weekend. "Very dependent on volume, but I'm confident moving to Mars (return ticket is free) will one day cost less than $500k & maybe even below $100k. Low enough that most people in advanced economies could sell their home on Earth & move to Mars if...

WASHINGTON - China is developing sophisticated space capabilities such as “satellite inspection and repair” and debris cleanup — “at least some of which could also function” as weapons against U.S. satellites, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency. (Please see full article at the link)

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...

Cool image time! The picture on the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was part of the January image release from the high resolution camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows an area in the Martian southern highlands where the surface suddenly gets darker, for no obvious reason. The uncaptioned release image is titled “Dark-Toned Ridge at Junction with Dark-Toned Plain.” From the image itself it is hard to understand this title. In the full image the darkest terrain is a strip in the center, with slightly lighter dark terrain on either side, and the lightest terrain to...

NASA seeking proposals for human-rated lunar lander systems Derek Richardson February 9th, 2019 An artist’s illustration of a completed lunar Gateway flying around the Moon with a commercially-developed lunar lander. Image Credit: NASAWith SLS and Orion in the latter stages of development, NASA wants to work with industry to develop a human-rated lunar lander by the mid-to-late 2020s.NASA is working to return astronauts to the Moon under Space Policy Directive-1. In order to do that sustainably, the agency announced plans on Dec. 13, 2018, to work with U.S. companies to develop systems to land on the lunar surface. A formal...

British billionaire Richard Branson plans to travel to space within the next four or five months aboard his own Virgin Galactic spaceship, he told AFP Thursday. "My wish is to go up on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, that's what we're working on," the head of the Virgin group said on the sidelines of an event to honor Virgin Galactic at the Air and Space Museum in Washington. The American Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon July 20, 1969.Virgin Galactic is one of two companies, along with Blue Origin, on its way to sending passengers into space—though...

The first two tiny satellites to ever go interplanetary have fallen silent in deep space for some unknown reason, and it’s likely we may never hear from them again. But for NASA, which launched the probes last year, this loss of communication isn’t considered a failure. Before the pair went quiet, these vehicles demonstrated that tiny satellites could become critical tools for exploring other worlds deep within our Solar System. The silent satellites are the two MarCO probes — nicknamed EVE and WALL-E from Pixar’s sci-fi movie — which flew to Mars along with NASA’s InSight lander last year. Both...

SpaceX had been targeting Feb. 23 for Crew Dragon's shakeout cruise to the ISS, an uncrewed flight called Demo-1. Starliner was scheduled to perform a similar mission in March. But launch dates for both flights have just been pushed to the right, NASA announced today (Feb. 6). "These adjustments allow for completion of necessary hardware testing, data verification, remaining NASA and provider reviews, as well as training of flight controllers and mission managers," they added. The next big box to check after these demonstration flights will be tests of the private vehicles' emergency escape systems, which would get the capsules...

SpaceIL's Beresheet — Hebrew for "In the Beginning" — will become the first privately funded mission to launch from Earth and land on the moon, and the first spacecraft to propel itself over the lunar surface after landing by "hopping" on its rocket engine to a second landing spot. The mission marks yet another milestone, not only in the history and technical arc of space exploration, but also in how humankind goes about space exploration. SpaceIL was founded in 2011 to compete in the Google Lunar XPrize, a program that planned to award US$30 million to the first privately funded...

See the link. All references to the Kindle Books have been removed; the notice from Amazon to the publisher is interesting too. Someone at Amazon *appears* to,have wiped the publisher clean off their databases.