News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
One of China’s newest launch startups has been raising serious amounts of money for its range of increasingly complex “Gravity” launch vehicles. Orienspace was founded in 2020 and announced itself last year after securing initial funding of $65 million, detailing plans for a series of rockets. The firm has just secured a further $47 million, … Read more
A powerful geomagnetic storm has doomed 40 Starlink satellites launched by SpaceX last week, the company has announced. Elon Musk‘s company launched a Falcon 9 rocket bearing the 49 satellites from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday (Feb. 3), but a geomagnetic storm that struck a day later sent the satellites plummeting back toward Earth, … Read more
A Japanese company targeting the moon pushed back its second moon mission by a year to 2024. The Tokyo-based company ispace is planning a series of robotic moon missions with the first, called M1, expected to visit Earth‘s celestial companion at the end of this year. In an update Monday (Jan. 25), however, ispace said … Read more
Josie Ford No-vax’s good vibrations “If you wish to understand the Universe, think of energy, frequency and vibration.” This quote, attributed to the visionary electrical engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla, possibly in his distinctly odd late phase, has long been beloved of those with a vibrantly different understanding of the universe. Feedback hesitates to use … Read more
The Chinese company Space Transportation is developing a “rocket with wings” for space tourism and point-to-point travel. “We are developing a winged rocket for high-speed, point-to-point transportation, which is lower in cost than rockets that carry satellites and faster than traditional aircraft,” the company said in a recent interview with Yicheng Times. The space plane … Read more
The engineers aboard the floating power station on Lake Kivu could only watch nervously as the volcano in the distance erupted violently, sending tremors rumbling through the water beneath them. It was not the lava shooting from Mount Nyiragongo last May that spooked them, but the enormous concentrations of potentially explosive gases within Kivu, … Read more
One fast-growing rocket start-up is 3D printing its way to space. The space industry is in the middle of a historic boom. As industry giants take their first leaps and crewed voyages to outer space, new, smaller rocket companies continue to crop up, adding to the brewing frenzy to get to space faster, cheaper and … Read more
SpaceX is just months away from its 20th anniversary of founding in 2002 and it’s headed into a new year in a stronger position than ever. In 2021, the California-based company built its strength in fields ranging from broadband communications to human launches. The steady push by SpaceX into space exploration and eventual Mars landings … Read more