For the fourth time in nine months, SpaceX has docked a Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station with a second Dragon already present at the crewed orbital laboratory. Launched Saturday on a Falcon 9 rocket after a one-day weather delay, SpaceX’s first upgraded Cargo Dragon 2 spacecraft gradually boosted and tweaked its orbit over the course…
CEO Elon Musk says that SpaceX could attempt to catch a Super Heavy booster out of mid-air with a tower-sized ‘Mechazilla’ robot as early as Starship’s second orbital launch attempt. Speaking on Twitter just hours after SpaceX installed said Starship launch tower’s first arms, Musk has thankfully answered a question on the minds of many: how…
One month after SpaceX stacked Starship’s South Texas ‘launch tower’ to its full height, the company has installed the first arm on what amounts to the backbone of ‘Mechazilla.’ At the end of July, after less than four months of work, a team of SpaceX workers and contractors installed the final prefabricated section of a ~145m (~475…
Likely to the relief of many, SpaceX appears to have successfully tested a prototype of the custom-built Starbase propellant storage tanks that will eventually hold thousands of tons of fuel and oxidizer. For reasons unknown, SpaceX’s built its first ground support equipment (GSE) ‘test tank’ – a subscale prototype designed to quickly verify basic production…
For the first time in more than nine weeks, SpaceX has completed a routine Falcon 9 preflight test known as a static fire and verified that the rocket is ready to launch later this week. Save for at least one booster qualification test completed at SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas development facilities, Falcon 9’s August 25th static…
For the second time this month, SpaceX has begun installing 29 Raptor engines on Starship’s first orbital-class Super Heavy booster, potentially paving the way for several crucial milestones. On August 1st, around the same time as SpaceX finished installing car-sized grid fins on a Super Heavy for the first time, the company began the process…
In the latest twist in the saga of SpaceX’s custom-built Starship launch pad propellant storage tanks, the company appears to have retroactively decided to build small prototype meant solely for testing. Known as a ‘test tank,’ the relatively small steel structure was fairly rapidly assembled from parts of an older Ground Support Equipment (GSE) tank…
SpaceX appears to have more or less broken ground on a new, even bigger ‘high bay’ assembly facility at its Boca Chica, Texas Starship factory. Barely one year ago, SpaceX erected the first prefabricated steel sections of what eventually become its Starship factory ‘high bay’ – a spartan 81m (~265 ft) tall designed at the most basic…
Days after Jeff Bezos space startup Blue Origin sued NASA over its decision to solely award SpaceX a contract to turn Starship into a Moon lander, it’s become clear that the space agency will again have to freeze work on the program. Earlier this week, it was reported that Blue Origin had made good on…
SpaceX has submitted an FCC application modifying what it calls Starlinks Generation 2 (Gen2) constellation and laying out plans to launch some 30,000 new satellites with its fully reusable Starship rocket. SpaceX’s latest Starlink Gen2 modification request comes more than a year after the company first submitted an application for an FCC license for the…