Beresheet spacecraft entered lunar orbit and further speculation of the future of the SLS and commercial involvement in the Moon programme. The announcement that the Event Horizon Telescope may give us the first ever picture of the event horizon around the Super Massive Black Hole at the centre of our galaxy
The Vice President of the US announced that the administration wants the US to return astronauts to the Moon by 2024. For this to happen there needs to be a way of getting them there and the SLS will probably not be ready.
There’s a Rocket Lab Electron due to lift off on Wednesday, Beresheet is going to land on the Moon on the 11 April and SpaceX’s Starhopper might make it’s first tentative lift off with its one Raptor engine.
NASA acknowledged that a commercial rocket might be an option to get Exploration Mission 1 off the ground. Could the first flight of the Orion Spacecraft be on a Falcon Heavy?
The five teams that made it to the final of the Google Lunar X-Prize are still working on their launch plans, despite the competition ending with no winner, with Moon Express and SpaceIL planning to launch this year.
The Starship/Super Heavy combination that is the new name for SpaceX’s BFR (Big Falcon Rocket) is taking shape in Texas with construction of a test vehicle known as Starhopper.
Some interesting news about space in the last week.
The game changer for access to space will be humanity moving away from the use of chemical rockets to get into orbit. The disrupters to the space industry will be the ones that perfect the alternative technologies.
Orbital ATK is one of the commercial providers of transport services to the International Space Station (ISS) with its Cygnus spacecraft.
The week in space includes the launch of the Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket, the planned helicopter for Mars and the BepiColombo mission is getting closer to launch.
TESS was launched on a Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX on 18 April. The satellite will survey the whole sky to look for exoplanets that transit their stars.
NASA’s plans to get to Mars are a bit slower than Elon Musk’s. They have many more steps and have plans to achieve some quite impressive things such as space station orbiting the Moon and capturing an asteroid.
SpaceX is well advanced in it’s plans to build a huge rocket to take humans to Mars and they plan to do this by 2024. This article has a closer look at the Big Falcon Rocket to see what’s so special about it.
The launch schedule for January, hopefully this will be more successful than last month where a few launches were postponed until this month for various reasons.
2018 is shaping up to be a hot year when it comes to the launch systems to be developed to get humans to Mars.
