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A future with numerous robotic probes spread throughout the Solar System sounds thrilling to space scientists and space enthusiasts, but you can’t get there with flat budgets and billion-dollar missions that take a decade to get off the ground. Many of NASA’s robotic science missions use purpose-built satellites and instruments, usually manufactured by large contractors like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, university labs, or NASA itself. Unlike SpaceX’s hangars full of reusable rockets, there’s no building with cameras, spectrometers, telescopes, and spacecraft buses—the core chassis of a
"I'll buy 10 of those"—NASA science chief yearns for mass-produced satellitesSomething caused two Raptor engines—one of 33 on the Super Heavy booster and one of six on Starship itself—to fail during Friday’s launch sequence. Raptor failures are nothing new for SpaceX, but this flight marked the first use of the company’s upgraded Raptor 3, a redesign with higher thrust, lighter weight, and improved efficiency. Collectively, the 33 Raptor engines on the booster produced up to 18 million pounds of thrust at full throttle, twice the power of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket used on last month’s Artemis II mission. Starship and Super Heavy have engine-out capability, mean
SpaceX's Starship V3—still a work in progress—mostly successful on first flight… NASA could set up future competitions to review proposals and select winners more quickly. In the past, NASA has selected a handful of concepts for study contracts, then chosen one or two proposals to proceed into development. For future competitions, NASA might go straight to a final selection. …
… For most of the Moon, the current imagery resolution is 1 meter, and NASA wants to improve it to 1 cm, Garcia-Galan said. …
… Navigators at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California set up the spacecraft for a course taking it 2,864 miles 4,609 km from the Martian surface, well above the planet’s tenuous atmosphere. …
… Harnessing this capability from NASA satellite data could allow researchers to better filter out interference from GPS jammers that may impact NASA science missions, Chew said. …
… Our collective future flying amongst the stars has become so much closer.” Leaders at NASA, relying on SpaceX to provide Starship as a human-rated Moon lander , were closely watching the launch. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman was in Texas to witness the launch in person. …
… Including refueling launches, this accounts for dozens of missions, and the company has recently signaled to NASA that it will prioritize the government program. So where does that leave customers beyond NASA and SpaceX’s internal Starlink payloads? …
… NASA last placed an order for more SpaceX commercial crew missions in 2022, when it added five missions for $1.4 billion. …
… NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced the change three months ago. …
… NASA’s lunar ambitions with the Artemis program, to a great degree, hinge on its success. …