NASA releases never before seen images of famed exploding star: ‘Shards of glass’ Powerful solar flare knocks out radio, could be headed for Earth: ‘One of the largest ever recorded’ CNN Sans ™ & © 2016 Cable News Network.‘Strange’ new radio bursts in space excite and confound astronomers Market holidays and trading hours provided by Copp Clark Limited. All content of the Dow Jones branded indices Copyright S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and/or its affiliates. Standard & Poor’s and S&P are registered trademarks of Standard & Poor’s Financial Services LLC and Dow Jones is a registered trademark of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC. Dow Jones: The Dow Jones branded indices are proprietary to and are calculated, distributed and marketed by DJI Opco, a subsidiary of S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and have been licensed for use to S&P Opco, LLC and CNN. Chicago Mercantile: Certain market data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. US market indices are shown in real time, except for the S&P 500 which is refreshed every two minutes. Your CNN account Log in to your CNN account The Artemis contract announcement signals that NASA is willing to put immense trust in SpaceX, which had an early history of butting heads with the space agency for its move-fast-and-break-things approach to rocket development. The space agency confirmed price was a major factor in its decision to move forward with one contractor. NASA said SpaceX will also be required to conduct an uncrewed demonstration mission, landing Starship on the moon, before astronauts will fly onboard.įriday’s surprise announcement that SpaceX would be the sole awardee comes after the space agency struggled for two years to convince Congress to adequately fund the lunar lander development program. The SLS development program has also been billions over budget and years behind schedule. Many in the space community have expressed their frustration that NASA has stuck by the SLS program, considering that SpaceX’s Starship would theoretically be capable of completing the entire mission. That’s the rocket that will carry astronauts to the moon’s orbit, and then the crew will transfer to the Gateway space station, and from there, Starship will carry the astronauts to the moon’s surface, according to Watson-Morgan. Watson-Morgan added that NASA will continue to provide close oversight as SpaceX continues its development, “ensuring that this system will be safe for our astronauts.”īoeing is building another key element for the Artemis program: The Space Launch System or SLS, a gargantuan rocket designed to carry the Orion crew capsule to the moon. Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA’s Human Landing System or HLS program manager, said during a press call Friday that NASA had “supported each partner, providing design support analysis, subject matter experts and testing” to all those contractors during that phase. Last year, NASA announced three different contracts for lunar lander development, which were awarded to SpaceX and Blue Origin’s “National Team,” with the expectation that the companies would each work to bring operational vehicles to fruition and compete with each other on price and technology. How SpaceX and NASA overcame a bitter culture clash to bring back US astronaut launches NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine and Elon Musk shake hands in front of Crew Dragon cleanroom at SpaceX Headquarters in Hawthorne, California on October 10, 2019. Test flights of early Starship prototypes have all ended in explosions thus far, but the company is rapidly building new test vehicles. That vehicle, called Starship, is also the linchpin of Musk’s personal goal of landing the first humans on Mars. But ultimately, SpaceX won with its bid to use of a spacecraft the company is already developing on its own in South Texas. The fixed-price contract is a major vote of confidence for Elon Musk’s rocket company, as the space agency is placing a large amount of responsibility for its cornerstone human spaceflight program, known as Artemis, on SpaceX.įriday’s announcement is a blow to Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, which had proposed working as a “National Team” alongside corporate behemoths such as Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin to design and build a lunar lander, and to Alabama-based Dynetics, which had put in its own bid. SpaceX secured a $2.89 billion NASA contract to build spacecraft that will land astronauts on the moon for the first time in five decades.
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