Tag Archives: Space

SpaceX Set For Saturday Launch

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Apart from a love of all things science fiction and geek culture, the staff here at Tosche Station has one thing in common: we’re all space junkies.

Tomorrow morning, Elon Musk and his SpaceX private company are prepared to launch the Dragon capsule aboard the Falcon 9 launch vehicle. io9 has prepared a day-by-day breakdown of the mission. Should everything proceed as planned, the unmanned Dragon capsule will embark on an two-week mission that will include a stop at the International Space Station for a supply dropoff.

Elon Musk and the Falcon 9 Merlin-1C engines

The launch will be only the third flight of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle, a craft NASA is pinning a great deal of hopes on. If the vehicle proves to be a capable cargo and crew launcher, it will free up NASA to focus their efforts perhaps on a heavy launch vehicle that can deliver payload beyond the confines of low-Earth orbit.

A successful mission will be an extraordinary boon for the space agency. If NASA can get out of the business of being a space taxi to the International Space Station, they might be able to do something interesting with their criminally underfunded budget.

Engineer Thinks the ‘Enterprise’ can be Built in 20 Years, Fans Begin To Salivate

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Hammy starship captain not included

Sure, it’s not 2245 yet, but why let that stop us from getting a jump on building a vessel to seek out new life and new civilizations? To boldly go where only television serials have gone before? io9 talked about one engineer who thinks not only can we build our own Enterprise in the next 20 years, we absolutely should start the process right-the-frak-now.

Emily briefly touched on this last night, but this is so cool it deserves its own post.

Complete with conceptual designs, ship specs, a funding schedule, and almost every other imaginable detail, the BTE website was launched just this week and covers almost every aspect of how the project could be done. This Enterprise would be built entirely in space, have a rotating gravity section inside of the saucer, and be similar in size with the same look as the USS Enterprise that we know from Star Trek.

 “It ends up that this ship configuration is quite functional,” writes BTE Dan, even though his design moves a few parts around for better performance with today’s technology. This version of the Enterprise would be three things in one: a spaceship, a space station, and a spaceport. A thousand people can be on board at once – either as crew members or as adventurous visitors.

While the ship will not travel at warp speed, with an ion propulsion engine powered by a 1.5GW nuclear reactor, it can travel at a constant acceleration so that the ship can easily get to key points of interest in our solar system. Three additional nuclear reactors would create all of the electricity needed for operation of the ship.

Pipe dream? No doubt it is, but it certainly is fun to imagine. Hey, who knows? Maybe if we actually fund space exploration beyond low-earth Orbit, we could have something crazy awesome like this. As Neil Degrasse Tyson says, we just have to be bold.