I think I'm going to ditch the structured "lesson" format. After all, this is a blog, not Khan Academy (those guys are awesome!). I've said what I wanted to say, but if I get any questions I will do my best to answer them. From now on, this blog is going to be much more "bloggy," if you will. I'm just going to talk about what is going on in modern rocketry at the moment, along with my opinions (I'm not a news article writer!). So, here goes: SpaceXSpaceX has been making lots of progress since their first demo launch in 2006. They have recently made a successful landing on a barge out in the Atlantic Ocean, and they got the Falcon 9 back to dry ground. They will test fire this recovered rocket by re-igniting the engines ten times. If the test goes well, we might have a really nice way to cut down the cost of space travel. Later this year, we are expecting a Falcon Heavy launch which is basically three Falcon 9's strapped to each other. This new rocket will have more than double the payload capacity than any rocket currently in service, now that SpaceX has discovered that their Merlin engines are more powerful than originally thought.
I'm looking forward to SpaceX's future, especially for when they test their "red dragons," or their normal Dragon capsules, just on Mars instead of space. When we start sending people on those, we can be comforted knowing that they will look way cooler than NASA's first martians since the space suits are being designed by a superhero costume designer. That's right, Elon Musk has gotten Jose Fernandez, the costume designer for Spiderman, Thor, and a bunch of other Marvel characters, to design a space suit for... Mars missions, I presume. He isn't an aerospace technician, so SpaceX will be in charge of putting "space suit stuff" in the costume once it is done, while keeping the bad-ass look. There aren't any images of the costume yet, but Fernandez says that it resembles a tuxedo. Sounds great!
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Jacob mitchellI like to play computer games, program, and try my hand at 3D printing. Archives
February 2017
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