Spacex

Spacex Resumes Space Flights, Xenocs Buys Saxslab, Snolab Bags C$26m

... will manage Xenocs' US and Denmark offices, respectively. Meanwhile, Scott Barton will become responsible for sales in North America as SAXLAB transfers its business from US-distributor Molmex Scientific to the Xenocs' US office. The acquisition involved Xenocs buying 100% of SAXSLAB shares in an all-cash transaction. SNOLAB bags C$26 m in operational funding. DEAP underground: SNOLAB's DEAP-3600 dark-matter detector. The SNOLAB underground physics laboratory has secured a C$26 m infrastructure grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI). Located 2 km below the ground in a working nickel mine in Sudbury, Ontario, SNOLAB is home to seven physics experiments including the DEAP-3600 dark-matter detector and the SNO+ neutrino detector. According to Nigel Smith , director of SNOLAB, the money will partially fund the operation of the lab for the next three years – including the salaries of 96 staff and supporting the operations and maintenance of the facility. The rest of the cost will be borne by the Province of Ontario and Vale, which operates the nickel mine. Completed in 2011, SNOLAB is an expansion of the ...

Nasa Orders More Flights From Boeing, Spacex

... lab module. China carried out 22 launches in 2016, a new national record and tied with the United States for the most launches in the year. [gbtimes]. The White House issued a new strategy Tuesday for dealing with the risks posed by near Earth objects (NEOs).  The Detecting and Mitigating the Impacts of Earth-Bound Near-Earth Objects (DAMIEN) strategy, developed by an interagency working group, sets out a series of goals regarding the detection of NEOs, development of approaches for deflecting threatening NEOs and emergency procedures in the event of an impact. The strategy document will be followed by an action plan to be updated every three years. [Space Policy Online]. The universe may have slightly less dark matter now than it did early in its history.  Russian astrophysicists studied whether dark matter might be unstable and decay over time by examining data from ESA’s Planck mission. They concluded the Planck data could be best explained if the early universe had about two to five ...

Spacex’s Return To Spaceflight Pushed Back To January 14th

... the delay, Space X had been aiming to launch on January 9 th , after receiving a launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration. On Friday, the FAA announced it had accepted Space X’s explanation for what caused one of the company’s Falcon 9 rockets to explode on a Florida launch pad. “The FAA accepted the investigation report on the Amos 6.”. Space X has been grounded since the accident, which occurred on the morning of September 1 st. The Falcon 9 was being fueled in preparation for a pre-flight test, when it exploded in a fireball, destroying both the rocket and the Amos 6 satellite it was supposed to carry into space. The company has spent the past four months trying to figure out what caused the incident, coming to the conclusion that the failure began with helium pressure vessels located in the rocket’s upper oxygen tank. Liquid oxygen propellent is thought to have ignited after getting trapped in materials surrounding the helium vessels. “The FAA accepted the investigation report on the Amos 6 mishap and has closed the investigation,” the FAA said in an email statement to The Verge on Friday. ...

Fired Spacex Employee Can Depose Company's President In Lawsuit, Judge Rules

... him to question the quality of the testing and the risks it posed for not just the rockets potentially exploding, but for the potential loss of human life as well, according to his attorneys' court papers. Blasdell complained to Shotwell, to Space X founder Elon Musk and to the company's human resources department that there were potentially dangerous deviations from protocol that his managers were pressuring test technicians to make, his lawyers state in their court papers. Shotwell told Blasdell during an October 2013 meeting that she would investigate his concerns and hire an outside consultant to investigate, according to the plaintiff's attorneys' court papers. Blasdell followed up in early 2014 when he inquired of Shotwell by email whether the consultant had been hired, his attorneys' court papers state. "Ms. Shotwell never responded to plaintiff's inquiry, but instead wrote a separate email to plaintiff criticizing the manner in which plaintiff communicated with management," according to Blasdell's attorneys' court papers. Blasdell was fired ...

Spacex Is Ready To Fly Rockets Again. An Expert Talks About The Reason A Falcon 9 Blew Up Last Year

... bother : "not worth the trouble, small gain for lots of headaches," he tweeted last year. Space X. Space X's Crew Dragon rockets away from the launch pad during a pad abort test on May 6, 2015. The cause and the fix. After last year's pad explosion, Space X recovered some helium COPVs that weren't part of the accident. The tanks' inner aluminum liner was buckled in places, leaving gaps between the liner and carbon fiber overwrap. Space X did not speculate on why the liner buckled. "Thermal issues seem to be a part of it," Lindy said, noting she could only draw on publicly available information. "The aluminum may have shrunk more than expected relative to the carbon overwrap. Its CTE (coefficient of thermal expansion) is much lower than aluminum. I mean, it's not even in the same ballpark.". According to Space X, supercool liquid oxygen may have seeped into the ...

Spacex In Google Earth

... of Jacksonville, Florida as seen in 3 D imagery. We are not certain which as there is no name and the deck layout is slightly different from ‘Of Course I Still Love You’. ‘Of Course I Still Love You’ can also be seen in Port Cape Canaveral in October 2016. See the KML file at the end of the post for the location. A successfully landed first stage being unloaded from ‘Of Course I Still Love You’ in Port Cape Canaveral in June 2016. See in Street View. Note that you can also explore some of the launch complexes in Street View. ‘Just Read the Instructions’, Space X’s west coast drone ship seen in Port of Los Angeles, California. The Space X testing facility in Mc Gregor, Texas. Space X headquarters, 1 Rocket Road, Los Angeles. The X is drawn with solar panels. Also note next door neighbour Tesla. For the above locations and more, including the location of a planned private ...

Spacex Details Its Plans For Landing Three Falcon Heavy Boosters At Once

... navigation guidance system obviated the need for the contingency pads with the Falcon 9, however. So now the company wants to use the additional space to construct two concrete landing pads, each with an approximate diameter of 282 feet surrounded by an approximate 50-foot-wide hard-packed soil “apron." This would give Space X three landing pads and the ability to bring back all three Falcon Heavy boosters to land while also retaining the option to land one or two on drone ships in the Atlantic Ocean. Further Reading. Space X is free to fly—will attempt a launch Saturday from California [Updated]. In addition to the potential for a dozen Falcon 9 launches and landings each year, the document says Space X may eventually make six Falcon Heavy launches a year, potentially returning an additional 18 boosters to the Florida-based site. The new pads and crane sites would be configured to allow parallel processing of landed boosters. With US Air Force Approval, construction could begin as ...

Would New Port Canaveral Railroad Help Spacex

... Port Canavaral - its fourth reusable rocket to be landed and brought back to the Cape. This is another historic moment in the development of reusing rockets. See more videos. “I’m not going to highlight anyone but, as the commercial space industry is growing at the Cape Canaveral AFS, it appears there are other benefits to this rail line that would assist the commercial space industry going forward,” port CEO John Murray said. “There are some other folks out there that are supportive of this route.”. The port’s railroad was controversial last year, when local Brevard County officials and fishermen opposed a route that would require a bridge over the nearby Banana River. In September, Port commissioners voted 4-1 to accept former CEO John Walsh’s resignation agreement, citing his “corrosive rhetoric” in dealing with the protests. Walsh had said the Air Force Station route had too many hurdles. The port is now identifying the Cape route as its favored route in ongoing studies by the federal Surface Transportation Board. Commission Chairman Tom Weinberg said the port hasn’t put together a budget for the rail route, but he believes there could be many funding partners ...

Spacex Eyes January 8th Return To Flight After Finishing Up Accident Investigation

... accident, and the company found something strange about the COPVs. Something had caused the vessels’ aluminum liners to scrunch up, creating buckles in the material. The most likely scenario, according to Space X, is that some of the liquid oxygen in the tank pooled into these buckles and got trapped there. Then, some of the carbon fibers wrapping the helium vessel may have snapped, causing friction that ignited the trapped oxygen. Additionally, the helium in these vessels is incredibly cold too — so cold that it may have caused the pooled liquid oxygen to turn into a solid. And solid oxygen has an even greater chance of combusting due to friction. Space X poured over 3,000 channels of data to figure out what happened. The process more or less matches CEO Elon Musk’s explanations for the failure last year. Space X says its accident investigation team — which collaborated with the Federal Aviation Administration, NASA, the National Transportation Safety Board, and the US Air Force — ...

A Year Of Highs And Lows

... On April 8, Space X launched the Falcon 9 for National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of a series of Commercial Resupply Services mission (CRS-8). This time, its mission is to send supplies loaded in the Dragon to the International Space Station (ISS). After releasing stage 2 to deliver the payload, stage 1 descended and successfully landed on ASDS Of Course I Still Love You which was floating in the Atlantic. Space X was back in business with Falcon 9 and on May 6 and 27, the company launched satellites for SKY Perfect JSAT Corporation (Japan) and THAICOM 8 and, in both instances, landed perfectly on ASDS Of Course I Still Love You. On June 15, however, after launching Falcon 9 to send the EUTELSAT and ABS satellite into orbit and successfully detaching stage 2, stage 1 experienced some issues and ended up getting destroyed again. Third Quarter. As always, Musk and Space X were not deterred and, on July 18, Falcon 9 and Dragon were launched ...

One Of Elon Musk's Rockets Spectacularly, Mysteriously Exploded. Now He Thinks He Knows Why

... of the Veil Nebula - expanding remains of a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago. 19/30 Hubble Sees a Galactic Sunflower. The arrangement of the spiral arms in the galaxy Messier 63, seen here in an image from the Nasa Hubble Space Telescope, recall the pattern at the center of a sunflower. 20/30 A Hubble Cosmic Couple. The spectacular cosmic pairing of the star Hen 2-427 — more commonly known as WR 124 — and the nebula M 1-67 which surrounds it. 21/30 Pluto image. Four images from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with colour data from the Ralph instrument to create this enhanced colour global view of Pluto. 22/30 Fresh Crater Near Sirenum Fossae Region of Mars. The Hi RISE camera aboard Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter acquired this closeup image of a "fresh" (on a geological scale, though quite old on a human scale) impact crater in the Sirenum Fossae region of Mars. This impact crater appears relatively recent as it has a ...