Sentences with phrase «rocket stage»

The final rocket stage separated an hour and 45 minutes after launch, and soon afterwards the control room confirmed that the spacecraft was in a stable orbit facing the sun.

The larger spacecraft is fast enough to help deliver small satellites into orbit, with the help of a small rocket stage add - on that would sit on top of the vehicle.

But instead of jettisoning its spent rocket stages in flight, the entire vehicle will enter orbit.

In the first half of this year, Elon Musk's Hawthorne, California - based SpaceX unveiled both an experimental reusable rocket stage and a new crew vehicle for carrying humans into orbit.

To hunt for signs of water, NASA's Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission sent a spent rocket stage on a collision course with a 98 - kilometre - wide crater called Cabeus on the moon's south pole on 9 October.

SpaceX is converting the site, formerly known as Launch Complex 13, into a landing pad for the reusable Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rocket stages the company is developing.

His rocket could also serve as a garbage truck, getting dead satellites and discarded upper - rocket stages out of their dangerous orbits around our planet (a job the larger chemical - fueled rockets can't perform efficiently because they use too much fuel).

«The fourth spacecraft, Kosmos 2499, is making regular changes to its orbit, including making a visit on 28 October to the Briz - M rocket stage that launched it,» he says.

The empty rocket stage was probably recaptured by Earth's gravity in April, says Paul Chodas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, when it happened to enter a region known as the L1 Lagrange point.

Based on the object's appearance and calculations of the path it must have followed through space for the past 3 decades, astronomers are fairly certain it is the Saturn V rocket stage.

Galileo had been due to begin this journey sitting on the tip of a Centaur rocket stage, which would power it to Jupiter after it was hefted into space inside a space shuttle's cargo bay.

NORAD officials said the remaining rocket stages also failed and plunged into the sea.

The liftoff from Japan's Tanegashima Space Center at 5:45 p.m. local time and subsequent separation from the two rocket stages went flawlessly.

Dunstan estimates that of the 6000 tonnes of material in Earth orbit, one - sixth is high - grade aluminium in the form of discarded upper rocket stages.

To prepare for it, mission controllers outfit the deep - space vehicle with a high - thrust chemical rocket stage, carried up from Earth by an electrically propelled resupply tug.

Current orbital launchers are large, multistage affairs that combine the thrust of a series of throwaway rocket stages to escape Earth's gravitational clutches and send a small payload into the void above.

I hope science and engineering students everywhere are pondering Elon Musk's Instagram and Twitter flow from Sunday, when his SpaceX company successfully launched the valuable Jason - 3 satellite for American and European space and science agencies but lost the first rocket stage as it landed, as planned, on a floating «drone ship.»

If rocket stages can be refurbished and relaunched, the cost of traveling to space could be greatly reduced, Mr. Musk has said.

What I loved (tracking this on the run in Singapore) was how the stunning video of the slowly toppling and thunderously disintegrating rocket stage contrasted with Musk's dispassionate description of the likely failure mechanism:

Read next: Claimed antiaging benefits of blood transfusion from teenagers to those over 35» «Spacex relaunches Dragon capsule and successfully lands rocket stage

Click back to Ken Chang's coverage of the successful terrestrial landing of a Falcon booster in late December for more on the importance of developing reusable rocket stages.

This clutter of the commons is a mix of dead spacecraft, spent rocket stages, steel bolts, paint chips and even frozen bits of nuclear reactor coolant.

The current high cost of human space transportation is largely tied up in rocket stages that are destroyed after a single use.

The first: Recover, refurbish, and reuse rocket stages (SpaceX has developed and tested reusable rocket stages, and other companies, like Blue Origin, have patented related technologies).

Both single - stage spaceplanes and reusable rocket stages have their merits, Greason said, and there's no obvious reason that one method might have an economic advantage over the other.

SES, a Luxembourg - based satellite operator, announced Tuesday it has signed an agreement with SpaceX to launch a communications satellite on a recovered Falcon 9 rocket stage.

This video captures the moment when two of the rocket stages separate and collide, sending the craft into an uncontrollable spin.

The rocket stage succeeded in hitting its target but landed too hard, exploding on the robotic boat's deck.

But LCROSS's shepherding spacecraft, which followed four minutes behind the rocket stage, caught a clear glimpse of material thrown up by the impact.

A similar trip, made in the opposite direction, probably put the rocket stage in a solar orbit in the first place, as it was discarded by NASA in an elongated Earth orbit in late 1969.

And there's a 3 % chance that the rocket stage will burn up in Earth's atmosphere sometime in the next 10 years, cleansing the solar system of at least one piece of space junk.

What will the rocket stage do next?

It ranges in size from entire satellites that are uncontrolled to rocket stages or fragments from collisions.

No other set - up was powerful enough to lift the Galileo spacecraft into orbit attached to this rocket stage, so the Centaur was ditched, leaving the mission team to find another way to get to Jupiter.

Rocket stages are a particular risk to spacecraft because they often contain large amounts of unused fuel, which can explode when sunlight heats the tank.

A spent rocket stage that NASA sent hurtling into the moon last year in hopes of kicking up water from a polar crater delivered on that mission, revealing that at least a moderate portion of its target was indeed made of ice.

No imaginative gimmick gets reused, save for the prerequisite mine cart and rocket stage — and contrary to what you might expect, Tropical Freeze isn't a game composed entirely of snow levels.

Also the little man trying to escape the glass tube in the rocket stage background does some fun stuff too.