For the longest time, Floridians had all the fun, getting to see NASA rockets launch into the night sky. Tonight, folks from North Carolina to Maine get to join that club, by watching the first moon mission to launch from NASA’s Wallops Island facility in Virginia. It’s just about as easy as walking outside, but here’s some tips to maximize your chances of seeing it happen, live.
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Last month, NASA successfully tested its first 3D-printed rocket injector. The test was successful and the pictures were great, but now we’ve got video. Nothing like a good science inferno.
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You’ve seen the SpaceX Grasshopper blast off, hover
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Jeff Bezos’ child-like love and wonder of space and rockets has yielded many a great thing, including Apollo 11’s #5 engine. The Amazon CEO confirmed today that the rockets dredged from the Atlantic earlier this year
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NASA and Aerojet Rocketdyne tested their first 3D-printed rocket engine injector today. What you see above is the little guy passing the test with flying—and flaming—colors. Success is a beautiful thing.
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We’ve been watching as the SpaceX Grasshopper’s leap has grown higher and higher with each successive launch (and landing!), and the rocket’s flights never fail to impress. The reusable spacecraft’s latest test is no exception: this time, the ‘hopper sailed past its previous 840 feet record, stopping at 1,066 feet. According to the company, the launch had a “more precise” landing thanks to new sensors that measure distance between the ground and the vessel. It shows. The touch-down is both noticeably smoother than previous efforts and drama free compared to Russia’s explosive incident in Kazakhstan. The private spaceflight company’s latest video is after the break — do yourself a favor and watch it in HD.
Filed under: Science
Source: SpaceX (YouTube)
A unmanned Russian Proton-M rocket exploded moments after leaving the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan today, destroying its payload of three satellites intended for Russia’s Glonass GPS system. Fortunately nobody was injured, but local news service Interfax is reporting that nearly 500 tons of fuel from the craft has contaminated the crash site. There’s no word on what caused the disaster, but this model’s recent history is fraught with equipment failures — so if you’d like to see the latest disaster (spoiler: explosions), the video resides after the jump.
Via: The Verge
Another day, another Johnny Cash-accompanied test of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Grasshopper rocket—which is not to say this isn’t exciting, because consistency is the name of the game for a commercial reusable rocket. Especially the Grasshopper, which can take off and land vertically. In this most recent test, the Grasshopper takes off, hovers at about 820 feet, and lands neatly back on its launch pad. For those who haven’t been keeping track, that’s about triple the height of the last test, and six times higher than the test before that! [Elon Musk] More »
Jeff Bezos isn’t the only person interested in vintage NASA technology. Public and private entities alike are actively taking a second look at the Rocketdyne F-1 engines that helped notch Saturn V rockets as the tallest, heaviest, and most powerful rocket ever operated—even today, forty years after the demise of the Apollo program. More »
Rocket engines require two important ingredients to fire: fuel, and an oxidizer. And to get the most bang for your buck with those ingredients, you need to find the perfect recipe. As the BBC series Bang Goes the Theory demonstrates with three plastic soda bottles, maxing out on either ingredient doesn’t produce as effective a chemical reaction as ensuring the two are in perfect balance. There’s a reason they call it rocket science after all. [YouTube via The Awesomer] More »
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