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SpaceX completed the last big test of its crew capsule before launching astronauts in the next few months, mimicking an emergency escape shortly after liftoff Sunday.
No one was aboard for the wild ride in the skies above Cape Canaveral, just two mannequins.
A Falcon 9 rocket blasted off as normal, but just over a minute into its capsule catapulted off the top 12 miles (20 kilometers) above the Atlantic. Powerful thrusters on the capsule propelled it up and out of harm's way, as the rocket engines deliberately shut down and the booster tumbled out of control and exploded in a giant fireball.
The capsule reached an altitude of about 27 miles (44 kilometers) before parachuting into the ocean just offshore to bring the nine-minute test flight to a close and pave the way for two NASA astronauts to climb aboard next time.
Everything appeared to go well despite the choppy seas and overcast skies. Within minutes, a recovery ship was alongside the capsule and preparing to pull it from the water.
"I'm super fired up," Elon Musk, the company's founder and chief executive, said at a news conference. "It's just going to be wonderful to get astronauts back into orbit from American soil after almost a decade of not being able to do so. That's just super exciting."
NASA astronauts have not launched from the U.S. since 2011 when the space shuttle program ended.
[...] Last month, meanwhile, Boeing's Starliner crew capsule ended up in the wrong orbit on its first test flight and had to skip the space station. The previous month, only two of the Starliner's three parachutes deployed during a launch abort test.
(Score: 1) by Jay on Tuesday January 21 2020, @04:30PM
Orbital solar power stations are a stupid idea unless you're planning to use all the energy in orbit.
To get that energy to earth you're stuck making a concentrated beam. That beam has losses through the atmosphere, and has issues with heavy cloud cover that far exceed the 5% lost from an eclipse. Not to mention that it's a death-ray. Unless you want to spread it out over a larger and larger area so the power isn't concentrated into a death-ray, at which point you've recreated terrestrial solar power.
It is a waste to stick stuff in orbit that we want on earth. Take all that energy and just make a bigger distribution network of renewables and call it a day. A study done in the last year or two found that Texas could probably rely 100% on wind, given a robust enough distribution network. Between the plains and the coasts, there's always plenty of wind somewhere. That's scalable to the whole country, and maybe the whole continent. No rocketry needed.
Now if you're talking about completely moving heavy industry into orbit and using space minerals and solar power, that's potentially a massive leap forward for humankind. But also not feasible for decades.