In 2010, an advanced aircraft engineer at Nasa’s Langley Research Centre named Mark Moore published a white paper outlining the feasibility of electric aircraft that could take off and land like helicopters but were smaller and quieter. The
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Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies, better known as SpaceX, returned to the skies on Saturday with a flawless delivery of communications satellites into orbit, its first flight since a 1 September fireball destroyed a rocket
Entrepreneur Elon Musk laid out a vision of travel to Mars that was heavy on both technology – the how of getting there – and on the dangers that await those first explorers just a decade from now. “The first journey will be very
When Elon Musk takes the stage of the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico on 27 September, it won’t be to rehash terrestrial concerns like a fatal Tesla autopilot crash or a poorly received merger proposal. Instead
Nasa’s Juno spacecraft has begun to orbit Jupiter to probe the origin of the solar system, the US space agency has said. The US$1,1bn mission launched five years ago successfully entered the orbit of Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, after a 35-minute manoeuvre
Researchers in Stellenbosch have developed avionics for the two DebrisSats which will remove space junk in orbit around Earth. But a local satellite project – developed by CubeSpace, one of Stellenbosch
On Friday, 8 April 2016, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launched a mission to deliver a spacecraft called Dragon with its payload of supplies and experiments into a trajectory towards the International Space Station (ISS). Most remarkably, the first-stage booster then landed
Last Friday, SpaceX achieved something incredible. It successfully landed one of its Falcon 9 rockets on a small barge bobbing in the ocean. This is after the rocket delivered a 1,5t supply payload for the International Space Station into orbit, and just nine minutes after it
There’s plenty of excitement at the announcement overnight that a new planet is potentially waiting to be found at the extremes of our solar system. The possible ninth planet is thought to be quite substantial, with a mass around 10 times that of Earth and a radius that’s two
Salty streaks have been discovered on Mars, which could be a sign that salt water seeps to the surface in the summers. Scientists have previously observed dark streaks (see image above) on the planet’s slopes which are thought to have resulted from seeps of water wetting surface dust. Evidence of salts left