Free Republic

The future for American commercial space activity is bright. Space entrepreneurs are already planning travel to Mars, and they are looking to the moon as the perfect location for a way station to refuel and restock Mars-bound rockets. As much as this sounds like the plot of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” it is coming closer to reality sooner than you may have ever thought possible. A privately funded American space industry is the reason. This industry is making progress in leaps and bounds. The global space economy is approaching $350 billion and is expected to become a multitrillion-dollar industry. There...

Op-ed | Moon Direct: How to build a moonbase in four yearsby Robert Zubrin — March 30, 2018SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, which made its debut Feb. 6, is the foundation of author Robert Zubrin’s “Moon Direct” plan for affordably returning humans to the moon within four years. Credit: SpaceX This op-ed originally appeared in the March 26, 2018 issue of SpaceNews magazine.The recent amazing success of the Falcon Heavy launch offers America an unprecedented opportunity to break the stagnation that has afflicted its human spaceflight program for decades. In short, the moon is now within reach.Here’s how the mission plan...

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, working alongside Boeing and Aerojet Rocketdyne, has demonstrated that it can successfully fire the AR-22 booster rocket engine 10 times over 240 hours. The test outcome marked a major step in the development of DARPA’s Phantom Express experimental spaceplane, officials said July 10. “We needed to show that main propulsion system, the AR-22, … could in fact support rapid turn operations,” said Scott Wierzbanowski, DARPA’s program manager for the spaceplane. “We were extremely successful. We completely destroyed previously held records of how … you deal with a liquid-hydrogen, liquid-oxygen-type engine.” The agency also proved...

For the first time in human history, we are going to "touch the sun". As NASA prepares for an Aug. 4 launch, it has unveiled a "cutting-edge heat shield", installed on June 27, that will keep the spacecraft from being burnt to a crisp. The probe's mission will take it within 4 million miles of the sun, a region of space never before visited by a human-made spacecraft. For comparison's sake, the closest that Mercury ever gets to the sun is approximately 29 million miles. Getting that close to what is, essentially, a giant ball of fire requires some significant...

A space shuttle-era main engine is undergoing a series of daily test firings to demonstrate its suitability for use on a reusable spaceplane under development. The Aerojet Rocketdyne AR-22 engine is in the midst of a series of 10 100-second engine firings over the course of 10 days at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. As of July 2, the company has completed six such tests and was on track to complete the rest on schedule. The engine is a version of the Space Shuttle Main Engine with only minor modifications, said Jeff Haynes, AR-22 program manager at Aerojet, in...

January 14 could have been a bad day for George Bush. As the president was preparing to announce America's return to the moon in a speech at the headquarters of Nasa, he was almost asked to deliver a very different message: that the Earth could suffer a devastating asteroid strike within 24 hours. Astronomers have revealed that during a "nine-hour crisis" the night before Mr Bush's speech they believed there was a one in four chance an asteroid would hit the planet in 36 hours. Had it not been for a break in the clouds that allowed an amateur astronomer...

How can a rocket engine achieve more than a 100-percent thrust? Well, RS-25 engines were first designed more than 40 years ago, for use with NASA's space shuttle, and the power level they were capable of achieving at the time is the margin known as 100-percent thrust, according to NASA. RS-25 engines are former space shuttle engines that have been modified to perform more powerfully than ever before. "Increased engine performance is crucial for enabling SLS missions to deep space as the rocket evolves to be larger and carry astronauts and heavy cargo on a single flight," NASA officials said...

A huge amount of "UFO" videos were posted to YouTube this weekend regarding an object seen in the morning twilight skies over Florida on Friday morning. Popular UFO channels like Third Phase of the Moon reported it as a UFO incident. The real cause? A SpaceX launch of a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon capsule to orbit to deliver cargo and supplies to the International Space Station for CRS-15. Despite some who think that "SpaceX is FakeX" and that all of spaceflight is a hoax (including a number of Freepers), the real hoax is the belief that this was...

From analysis of radar signals, Marc Fries, NASA Cosmic Dust Curator, concluded it was a meteorite about the size of a golf cart that broke apart and splashed down into the ocean about 16 miles off the coast. Approximately two tons of fragments are likely scattered over a half-mile of seafloor. “This is easily the biggest recorded meteor fall in the United States in 21 years,” Luckily, a nearby research ship is in the middle of a survey mission, and they have some high-tech tools to aid in the scavenger hunt.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA’s next-generation space telescope has been delayed yet again at a staggering cost of $1 million a day. For the third time in less than a year, the space agency announced a lengthy postponement Wednesday for the James Webb Space Telescope. The observatory will now fly no earlier than 2021; until last fall, it was on the books for a 2018 launch. The telescope’s overall cost is now expected to reach nearly $10 billion. Development cost alone will exceed the $8 billion cap set by Congress by more than $800 million and require reauthorization. An independent...

As 28-year-old Ocasio-Cortez begins her meteoric rise in politics – observers have pointed out that she has an asteroid named after her, called 23238 Ocasio-Cortez. "It's true! Science was my first passion," she tweeted on June 12, adding that the asteroid was named in honour of longevity experiments she conducted out of Mt. Sinai Health System in New York. "My research won 2nd place globally in Microbiology at @intel ISEF," she said in the tweet, referring to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. "At [Boston University] I started as science major, changed to Econ ???? #nerdalert" The asteroid in...

Nasa has released stunning images of Jupiter taken from the Juno spacecraft. The breathtaking images show swirling cloud belts and tumultuous vortices within Jupiter’s northern hemisphere. Scientists said the photos allowed them to see the planet’s weather system in greater detail. According to the space station, the brighter colours in the images represent clouds made up of ammonia and water, while the darker blue-green spirals represent cloud material "deeper in Jupiter's atmosphere." At the time Juno was about 9,600 miles from the planet's cloud tops. The Juno satellite was launched in order to improve Nasa’s understanding of the solar...

The next time asteroids menace the earth, we'll be ready. Because NASA has created a plan. But before you get too excited, unfortunately, NASA's just-released plan does not include a Bruce Willis-led crew of roughnecks landing on an asteroid and blowing it to smithereens with a nuke. Which begs the question, if that's not part of the plan, what's a potential "Space Force" actually for? Yesterday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a report titled, the "National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan." Okay, see, this is the problem with government bloat. That title is...

Former NASA climate scientist James Hansen famously warned Congress almost 30 years ago to the day that human activities had put the world on the path to disaster, but two scientists now say the global warming “godfather’s” predictions were wrong. Cato Institute scientists Patrick Michaels and Ryan Maue compared Hansen’s temperature predictions to real-world observations and found his supposedly “highly unlikely” forecast with the least amount of warming was the most accurate. “Global surface temperature has not increased significantly since 2000, discounting the larger-than-usual El Niño of 2015-16,” Michaels and Maue wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “Assessed by...

Russia has pledged severe repercussions if President Donald Trump’s order to set up a new, space-oriented military branch violates a treaty banning nuclear weapons in the cosmos. Trump said this week he will establish a sixth branch of the military named the “Space Force,” pending budgetary approval from the U.S. Congress. The idea could require the U.S. to withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which prohibits the deployment of weapons of mass destruction but not conventional arms in space. Viktor Bondarev, head of the Committee on Defense and Security of Russia's upper parliamentary house, told the state-run RIA...

Here's a first look at the ranks and insignia designs of the new 6th military branch, the United States Space Force. The ranks are right out of Star Trek's Starfleet Command.

President Trump announced on Monday during a press conference that he is aiming at creating a Space Force as soon as possible, and he already ordered the Pentagon to “make it so”. Obviously, service guarantees citizenship, to quote from a famous sci-fi movie from the 90s. The US Space Force would make for an independent service branch and I bet dollars for donuts that today, June the 19th, 2018 will become famous in the future as the day when the US Intergalactic Space Force was created, and all that jazz. Joke aside, President Trump has said on Monday that, just...

<p>WASHINGTON — Trump announces he’s directing Pentagon to create ‘space force’ as independent service branch.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.</p>

US President Donald Trump announced a sweeping new space policy on Monday that will focus both on reducing satellite clutter in space as well as creating a specific “Space Force” as the newest branch of the military. “It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space,” said Trump, saying that he wished to revive the US’ flagging space program that has been bogged down by rising costs and a lack of political will. Trump said he does not want “China and Russia and other countries leading us.” […] He also...

President Donald Trump announced Monday that he has ordered the creation of a new military branch, adding the "Space Force" to the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Coast Guard. "It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space, we must have American dominance in space. Very importantly I'm hereby directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a space force as the sixth branch of the armed forces, that is a big statement," Trump said at a meeting of the National Space Council on Monday. "We are going to...