SpaceX

SpaceX Will Launch Starlink Satellites from California

SpaceX will launch a batch of Starlink high-speed internet satellites into Low Earth Orbit.

, SpaceX launched 26 Starlink high-speed internet satellites into Low Earth Orbit.

SpaceX has launched 9165 Starlink satellites to date.

Cell phones in even the most remote areas will soon be able to connect to the internet, using Starlink satellites. 

In early 2014, SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Greg Wyler – founder of O3b Networks – were rumored to be working together to build a constellation of over 700 satellites. Called WorldVu, this constellation would be 10x larger than the size of the then-largest satellite constellation, operated by Iridium.

These discussions didn’t last long and SpaceX secretly filed an ITU application courtesy of the Norway telecom regulator under the name STEAM. Later renamed Starlink, the mission was to provide high-quality internet bandwidth in the area where a fiber connection is unfeasible. This includes rural and remote areas all over the globe, including oceans, and even in the air for commercial and military customers.

Now, years later, SpaceX and TMobile are promising to provide service in dead zones using the Earth-orbiting satellites, enough for texts and messaging apps to work. T-Mobile’s CEO Mike Sievert stated that operators of messaging apps like WhatsApp or iMessage will need to work with T-Mobile and Starlink for their services to recognize the satellite connection and work with it once it launches.

The move continues an aggressive debut of Starlink's service that has been making headlines around the world due to a rapid launch cadence, interventions in natural disasters, and the technology's critical role on the battlefield in Ukraine. While this article was being edited, SpaceX announced the TMobile deal, launched two Falcon 9 Starlink missions, activated the service in Norway, and announced a deal to provide Starlink on Royal Caribbean cruises.

The buzz might make it seem like Starlink is a new invention but beaming the internet using satellites isn’t a novel idea. Companies like HughesNet, Iridium, and Telesat already have satellites up in space servicing the unserviceable areas, but Starlink is fundamentally different from existing constellations. Traditional companies have just 4-5 huge satellites in geostationary orbit, where each of them services a large area of the globe. Geostationary orbit is a special orbit of Earth above 36,000 kilometers where the satellite’s orbit period is equal to the rotation of Earth, which allows the satellite to appear stationary relative to an observer on Earth.

Satellites in geostationary orbit allow planet-wide coverage with fewer satellites but the connection is usually spotty and the ping is very poor, mostly because of the large distance between the satellite and the receiver.

Starlink is attempting to fix these common issues by launching a large number of satellites — 12,000 — to Low Earth orbit. This not only significantly reduces the distance that the signal needs to travel from the receiver but also makes it easier to mitigate space debris as satellites in LEO can easily deorbit. Those in geostationary orbit are too far from the Earth to deorbit and have to be placed in a special orbit that lies away from common operational orbits, known as the graveyard orbit.

SpaceX first tested Starlink tech when they launched two identical test satellites named Tintin A and Tintin B in 2018. A year later, the company launched their first batch of 60 satellites. Used only for testing, SpaceX was able to communicate with all 60 but lost contact with 3. By October, Elon publicly tested the network when he sent his first tweet using Starlink.

The launch of the operational satellites began in November 2019. After the company placed sufficient satellites to provide internet in certain parts of the US, it introduced a paid beta service called “Better Than Nothing Beta,” charging $499 for the user terminal with an expected service of 50 to 150 Mbps and latency from 20 to 40ms. By January 2021, the beta service was extended to other countries, starting with the United Kingdom.

Washington is the home of Starlink’s research and development facility and was one of the first states to receive the beta services in the US. As part of that initiative, the Hoh Tribe became one of the first users of SpaceX’s broadband. Located in a remote part of the state, Starlink allowed the tribe of 28 households and 116 people to access a high-speed internet connection.

"It seemed like out of nowhere, SpaceX came up and just catapulted us into the 21st century," 

said Melvinjohn Ashue, vice chairman of the Hoh Tribe

. "Our youth are able to do education online and participate in videos. Telehealth is no longer going to be an issue." At a time when the whole world was reeling from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, reliable access to an internet connection couldn’t have come at a better time.

At the same time as schools were being closed due to the COVID outbreak, the Wise County Public Schools in Virginia received Starlink terminals to connect the students with high-speed and low-latency broadband. This enabled over 90 Wise County families to have access to online educational resources.

The word from Virginia spread and a similar effort took place in the Appalachian Region in the US as the Appalachian Council for Innovation raised capital through a public-private partnership to connect students in the American Central Appalachian Mountains who were underserved by the terrestrial internet providers.

As the company iteratively improved their services and increased its coverage area with every launch, they prioritized extending the beta service to the emergency responders and areas without internet. In September 2020 as west coast wildfires wrecked numerous rural areas, Starlink helped both locals and emergency workers. One of the towns was Malden in Washington, where Starlink was supporting emergency responders who helped rebuild the scorched town.

The impact was not limited to the US. Starlink partnered with the Brazilian Government to operate satellites in the Amazon rainforest to connect over 19,000 unconnected schools in rural areas and monitor the forest. SpaceX’s satellite internet was also introduced in Tonga in February of this year when the teams provided emergency relief during 

Starlink’s capability to provide internet isn’t limited to the ground. In 209, US Air Force Research Laboratory demonstrated that Starlink was able to clock over 610 Mbits/s of data rate onboard the Beechcraft C-12 Huron flight. They also successfully tested the terminal on a Lockheed AC-130 aircraft. In 2020, the Air Force used Starlink during a live-fire exercise to support their advanced battlefield management systems by connecting it to a variety of aerial and terrestrial assets, including the Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker.

Starlink became a critical asset in Ukraine as the Russians invaded, demonstrating how satellite internet can be used in a modern conflict. SpaceX was in talks to bring Starlink to Ukraine well before the war to improve connectivity in the vast rural regions, however, the war accelerated the process significantly when the vice prime minister and Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, Mykhailo Fedorov, tweeted a request for Starlink terminals and the service to be activated in the country. In around 10 hours, Elon confirmed that the service was active in Ukraine with the first batch of terminals arriving after just 2 days.

SpaceX continued to upgrade its services to better suit the war. A firmware update enabled terminals to be powered by a car’s cigarette lighter. The company also devised a solution to Russian attempts to interfere with the Starlink signals. Dave Tremper, director of electronic warfare at the Pentagon, praised the speed with which SpaceX evaded that jamming with a software update. “How they did that was eye-watering to me,” he said at a conference on defence technology, lamenting that US military equipment was not so flexible. “We need to be able to have that agility.”

This speedy, widespread rollout of Starlink had been an unplanned experiment in providing connectivity to people suffering the privations of war or an authoritarian government. According to Fedorov, the fighting in the Chernihiv region northeast of Kyiv destroyed 10 kilometers of cable, however, a local ISP was able to bring all the people in the area online with a single Starlink terminal.

By April, SpaceX sent over 50k terminals to Ukraine to replace the internet services destroyed by Russia. Starlink played a key role in Ukraine’s new artillery fire coordination systems which gave Ukraine a surprising superiority in the initial months of the War. What enabled such reliable and low-latency high-speed service in remote and war-torn areas is the sheer number of Starlink satellites in orbit and SpaceX’s ability to get them to orbit as fast as possible.

Out of this, only 2822 of them are operational or slowly raising themselves in the desired orbit. The launch of so many Starlink satellites in such a short amount of time is possible because of SpaceX’s high launch cadence and low turnaround time of its workhorse rocket: The Falcon 9.

On average, SpaceX is launching a Falcon 9 every 6.4 days, most of them being Starlink missions. In the first quarter of this year alone, SpaceX has placed nearly 1.16 tonnes of cargo in orbit, most of them being Starlink satellites.

The company aims to set up the Starlink constellation in two phases. Under phase 1, the satellites will be placed at 4 different altitudes — varying between 540 kilometers to 570 kilometers — with different inclinations to provide worldwide coverage, aiming to complete it by March 2027. The next phase will see Starlink satellites being launched to a lower orbit of around 330 - 340 kilometers, with an estimated time of completion being November 2027.

In February 2023, SpaceX launched the second-generation Starlink satellites.

SpaceX calls them “V2 Mini”. They represent a step forward in Starlink capability. V2 minis include key technologies—such as more powerful phased array antennas and the use of E-band for backhaul—which allows Starlink to provide ~4x more capacity per satellite than earlier iterations. This means Starlink can provide more bandwidth with increased reliability and connect millions of more people around the world with high-speed internet.

Among other enhancements, V2 minis are equipped with new argon Hall thrusters for on orbit maneuvering. Developed by SpaceX engineers, they have 2.4x the thrust and 1.5x the specific impulse of our first gen thrusters.

Starlink

 is a reusable, two-stage rocket designed and manufactured by SpaceX for the reliable and safe transport of people and payloads into Earth orbit and beyond. 

Falcon 9 is the world’s first orbital-class reusable rocket.


Payload to Low Earth Orbit (LEO): 22,800 kg / 50,265 lb


Payload to Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO): 8,300 kg / 18,300 lb

On January 24, 2021, Falcon 9 launched the first ride-share mission to Sun Synchronous Orbit. It was delivering a record-setting 143 satellites to space. And while this was an important mission for SpaceX in itself, it was also the moment Falcon 9 overtook United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V for the total number of consecutive successful launches.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 had become America’s workhorse rocket, launching 31 times in 2021. It has already beaten that record this year, launching almost an average of once a week. While most of the launches deliver Starlink satellites to orbit, the company is still launching the most commercial payloads to orbit, too.

Falcon 9 is a medium-lift launch vehicle, with the capability to launch over 22.8 metric tonnes to low earth orbit. Unlike any other rocket, its first stage lands back on Earth after separating from its second stage. In part, this allows SpaceX to offer the cheapest option for most customers with payloads that need to reach orbit. 

Under its ride-share program, a kilogram can be placed in a sun-synchronous orbit for a mere 1.1 million dollars, far cheaper than all other currently operating small satellite launch vehicles.

The reusability and fast booster turnaround times have made Falcon 9 the preferred choice for private companies and government agencies. This has allowed SpaceX to capture a huge portion of the launch market.


Photo courtesy of Jenny Hautmann for Supercluster.

Falcon 9 (Block 5)

Space Launch Complex 4 (SLC-4) at Vandenberg Space Force Base is SpaceX’s west coast launch and landing facility, with its launch pad designated SLC-4E (the eastern-most of the two areas). Originally built in the early 1960s for Atlas-Agena rockets, the pad served that rocket line until 1967, when it was taken offline and rebuilt for Titan IIID rockets. From 1971 to 1988, SLC-4E launched Titan IIID rockets, after which it was reconfigured for Titan IV missions, which continued between 1991 and 2005.

In 2011, SpaceX leased SLC-4E and spent two years rebuilding the pad for its Falcon 9 rocket. From 2013 to 2019, the pad exclusively supported Falcon 9 polar missions. However, in 2020, SpaceX began splitting polar launches between Vandenberg and Cape Canaveral, after the Air Force lifted a 51-year ban on Florida-based polar launches, previously imposed due to the risk of overflying Cuba during launch. Despite these new opportunities from Florida, SpaceX plans to continue utilizing Vandenberg, with many more launches scheduled from this location.

SLC-4E - Vandenberg Space Force Base, California

"Of Course I Still Love You" (OCISLY) is one of SpaceX’s Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ships used to recover Falcon 9 rocket boosters from the ocean. Like its sister ships, "Just Read the Instructions" (JRTI) and "A Shortfall of Gravitas" (ASOG), OCISLY plays a crucial role in SpaceX’s reusability program, which aims to make spaceflight more cost-effective and sustainable.

The name "Of Course I Still Love You" is inspired by science fiction author Iain M. Banks' Culture series, known for its imaginative and whimsical ship names. This naming theme extends to SpaceX's other drone ships.

OCISLY originally operated in the Atlantic Ocean, primarily from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It has since been retired and replaced by ASOG in the Atlantic, with its operations shifting to the Pacific Ocean.

Equipped with advanced navigation systems and thrusters for precise positioning, OCISLY featured a large landing platform designed for recovering rocket boosters at sea. It was instrumental in supporting missions where boosters couldn’t return to solid ground, enabling SpaceX to reuse rocket stages and contribute to lowering costs and improving the sustainability of space missions.

Of Course I Still Love You

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Starlink Mission Patch

United States of America

Starlink 17-3

Shoemaker–Levy 9 was a comet that broke apart in July 1992 and collided with Jupiter in July 1994, providing the first direct observation of an extraterrestrial collision of Solar System objects. This generated a large amount of coverage in the popular media, and the comet was closely observed by astronomers worldwide.

Shoemaker-Levy 9

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a collective term for scientific searches for intelligent extraterrestrial life. Scientific investigation began shortly after the advent of radio in the early 1900s, and focused international efforts have been ongoing since the 1980s.

SETI

VERITAS (Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System) is a major ground-based gamma-ray observatory with an array of four 12 meter optical reflectors for gamma-ray astronomy in the GeV – TeV photon energy range. VERITAS uses the Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope technique to observe gamma-rays that cause particle showers in Earth's upper atmosphere.

VERITAS

The NEO Observations Program sponsors projects that make use of telescopes around the world to search for NEOs, track them across the sky to determine their orbits, and gain information on their sizes, shapes, and composition.

NEOO

The Vostok program was a Soviet human spaceflight project to put the first Soviet citizens into low Earth orbit and return them safely. Competing with the United States Project Mercury, it succeeded in placing the first human into space, Yuri Gagarin, in a single orbit in Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961.

Vostok

Blue Origin is an American spaceflight services company founded in 2000 by Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. Blue Origin is developing technologies to enable private human access to space with the goal of lowering costs and increasing reliability.

Blue Origin has a focus on rocket-powered vertical takeoff and landing vehicles for access to suborbital and orbital space.

Blue Origin

SpaceX and Axiom Launch First Entirely Private Astronaut Crew to the ISS.

Axiom Mission 1

ESA - European Space Agency. ESA is the intergovernmental space organization for 22 European nations.

Apogee is the highest altitude of an object's orbit around the Earth. Apogee is the Earth-specific word for this point in an orbit. The same location in an orbit around Earth's Moon is called apolune.

Apogee

Sputnik 1 was the first artificial Earth satellite, launched by the Soviet Union into an low Earth orbit on 4 October 1957. Sputnik orbited for three weeks with power, then silently for two months before falling into the atmosphere. This surprise success triggered the Space Race, and was the beginning of a new era of political, military, technological, and scientific developments.

Sputnik

The Pioneer program was a series of US unmanned space missions designed for planetary exploration. The most notable were Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, which explored the outer planets and left the solar system. Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 carry a golden plaque, depicting a man and a woman and information about the origin and the creators of the probes, should any extraterrestrials find them someday.

Pioneer Program

Low Earth orbit is the closest orbital zone to Earth that extends up to 2,000 km above Earth sealevel. 

Some well-known missions in this orbital zone include:

all human spaceflights except for the Apollo lunar missions,

all Soviet, Russian, US and Chinese space stations,

a fleet of international Earth observation satellites, and

Photo: Earth seen from the International Spcae Station in low Earth orbit. Credit: NASA

low Earth orbit

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of technology for use by the military.

Darpa was created in February 1958, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite.

DARPA

United Launch Alliance (ULA) provides spacecraft launch services to the United States government. It was formed as a joint venture between Lockheed Martin Space Systems and Boeing Defense, Space & Security in December 2006.

ULA employs two expendable launch systems – Delta IV and Atlas V. In 2015, ULA unveiled a new vehicle, the Vulcan, with a first flight scheduled for no earlier than 2022.

United Launch Alliance

Cherenkov radiation is electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle passes through a medium at a speed greater than the speed of light in that medium. The blue glow of an underwater nuclear reactor is due to Cherenkov radiation. It is named for Soviet physicist Pavel Cherenkov, who shared the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics for its discovery.

Cherenkov Radiation

Ax-1

The Kármán line is a boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space. This is important for legal and regulatory measures; aircraft and spacecraft fall under different jurisdictions and are subject to different treaties.

The US Air Force and NASA define the Karman Line to be 50 miles (80 km) above sea level, however here is no international law defining the edge of space.

Karman Line

The International Space Station (ISS) is a space station in low Earth orbit. It has been inhabited continuously since November 2000.

The ISS is the largest human-made body in space. It serves as a laboratory for microgravity experiments in biology, physics, astronomy, meteorology, and other fields.

The ISS is a joint project between five space agencies: NASA, Roscosmos, JAXA, ESA, and CSA.

International Space Station

Cosmonauts have lived and trained in Star City since the 1960s. In the Soviet era the location was a highly secret and guarded military installation, access to which was severely restricted. Many Russian cosmonauts, past and present live in Star City with their families.

There is a statue of the "space dog" Laika, the first animal to orbit the earth, in Star City.

Star City

ISS - International Space Station. The ISS is a multi-national and supranational cooperative effort led by the United States, Canada, Japan, Russia, and the European Space Agency. More than half of Earth's nations have flown at least one experiment to the station, which serves as a research laboratory to help us learn how to live in space and better our lives here on Earth.

A gamma ray is a penetrating electromagnetic radiation arising from the radioactive decay of atomic nuclei. Gamma rays are biologically hazardous. Due to their high penetration power, they can damage bone marrow and internal organs. Unlike alpha and beta rays, they pass easily through the body, requiring shielding made from dense materials such as lead or concrete.

Gamma Rays

Es'hail-2 is a Qatari satellite, launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on November 15, 2018. Es'hail-2 was built by Japan's Mitsubishi Electric company, and will operate at 26° East longitude along a geostationary orbit to provide direct-to-home television services in the Middle East and North Africa region

Eshail Sat-2

Eugene Merle Shoemaker (1928 – 1997) was an American geologist and one of the founders of planetary science. He is best known for co-discovering the Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 with his wife Carolyn S. Shoemaker and David H. Levy. This comet hit Jupiter in July 1994. The impact was televised around the world. Shoemaker was also known for his studies of Earth impacts, such as Meteor Crater in Arizona.

Eugene Shoemaker

CSA - Canadian Space Agency. CSA is the national space agency of Canada.

Lagrange points are positions in space where objects sent there tend to stay put. These points in space can be used by spacecraft to reduce fuel consumption needed to remain in position.

Lagrange Point

A black hole is a region of spacetime exhibiting gravitational acceleration so strong that nothing can escape from it. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole. The boundary of the region from which no escape is possible is called the event horizon.

Black Hole

Azerspace-1 / Africasat-1a is Azerbaijan's first satellite. Built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, it was launched by an Ariane 5 rocket on February 7, 2013 from Kourou in French Guiana.

It offers coverage over Europe and a significant part of Asia and Africa, and is operated by the Azerbaijani company Azercosmos for TV, radio broadcasting, and the internet.

Azerspace-1

is an American private aerospace firm based in

Firefly Aerospace

Black Holes

The Constellation Program is a cancelled human spaceflight program developed by NASA from 2005 to 2009. The program was designed to help complete construction of the International Space Station and a return to the Moon no later than 2020. A crewed flight to the planet Mars was the ultimate goal.

Constellation Program

A supernova is a powerful stellar explosion, which occurs during the last evolutionary stages of a massive star, or when a white dwarf is triggered into runaway nuclear fusion. The original object either collapses to a neutron star or black hole, or it is completely destroyed. The peak luminosity of a supernova can be comparable to an entire galaxy.

Supernovae

The Landsat program is the longest-running series of missions designed to aquire satellite images of Earth, running from July 23, 1972 until the today. The Landsat imagery archive is a unique resource for global change research with applications in agriculture, cartography, geology, forestry, regional planning, surveillance and education, and can be viewed through the 'EarthExplorer' website.

Landsat

Spaceport America is an FAA-licensed spaceport located in New Mexico. The site has been described as "the world's first purpose-built commercial spaceport." The site's major tenants have experienced problems in the development of their programs, resulting in spaceport revenue far below projections, and a political controversy about what to do with the expensive government-built spaceport.

Spaceport America

A CubeSat is a miniaturized satellite designed from multiples of smaller cubic units. CubeSats have a mass of no more than 1.33 kilograms (3 pounds), and often use off-the-shelf components for their electronics and structure.

CubeSats are sometimes used to test experimental technologies or scientific experiments with unproven theory, because their low cost can justify higher risks.

CubeSats

"Air-launched" is a term used in spaceflight to refer to a rocket that is carried into the air by a plane and then dropped from underneath its wing. Notable air-launched rockets include Launcher One (pictured) from Virgin Orbit and Pegasus from Northrop Grumman.

air-launched

Supernova

Solar sails, also called light sails or photon sails, are spacecraft that use radiation pressure exerted by sunlight on large mirrors. A useful analogy may be a sailing boat; the light exerting a force on the mirrors is akin to a sail blown by the wind. Solar sail craft offer low-cost operations combined with long operating lifetimes, since they require few moving parts and use no propellant.

solar sail

The Mariner program was a 10-mission series of robotic interplanetary probes, from 1962 to 1973, designed to investigate Mars, Venus and Mercury. The program included the first planetary flyby, the first planetary orbiter, and the first gravity assist maneuver.

Seven missions were successful, and the planned Mariner Jupiter-Saturn vehicles were adapted into the Voyager program.

Mariner

Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630) was a German astronomer, mathematician, and astrologer. He is a key figure in the 17th-century scientific revolution, best known for his laws of planetary motion. Kepler incorporated religious arguments and reasoning into his work, motivated by the belief that God had created the world according to an intelligible plan, accessible through the natural light of reason.

Johannes Kepler

A neutron star is the collapsed core of a giant star. Neutron stars are the smallest and densest stars, excluding black holes, hypothetical white holes, quark stars and strange stars. There are thought to be around 100 million neutron stars in the Milky Way, a figure obtained by estimating the number of stars that have undergone supernova explosions

Neutron Stars

The Pegasus is an air-launched rocket developed by Orbital Sciences Corporation. Capable of carrying small payloads into low Earth orbit, Pegasus first flew in 1990 and remains active as of 2019. Pegasus is released from its carrier aircraft at approximately 40,000 ft, and its first stage has a wing and a tail to provide lift and attitude control while in the atmosphere.

Pegasus rocket

The Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle is an interplanetary spacecraft for a crew of four astronauts to destinations at or beyond low Earth orbit.

It is Currently under development by the European Space Agency and NASA for launch on the Space Launch System. Orion will facilitate human exploration to the moon, asteroids, and Mars, and retrieve crew or supplies from the International Space Station.

Orion Crew Vehicle

Lunar Prospector was a NASA Discovery Program mission. In polar orbit of the Moon it mapped surface composition, located lunar resources, measured magnetic and gravity fields, and studied outgassing events. Principal Investigator Alan Binder's personal account of the mission, Lunar Prospector: Against all Odds, is highly critical of the bureaucracy of NASA and of its contractors.

Lunar Prospector

Ariane 5 is a European heavy-lift rocket manufactured under the authority of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the French Spatial Agency Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales. Airbus Defence and Space is the primary contractor for the vehicles.

Ariane 5 is operated and marketed by Arianespace as part of the Ariane programme. The rockets are launched from the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana.

Ariane 5

 of length used to measure large astronomical distances. One parsec is equal to about 3.26 light-years. The kilo- prefix denotes 1000 parsecs, or about 3,620 light-years.

The parsec was defined to make calculations of astronomical distances quick and easy for astronomers. For this reason it is the unit preferred in astronomy, though the light-year is prominent in common usage.

kiloparsecs

Space Launch System (SLS) is an American Space Shuttle-derived super heavy-lift expendable launch vehicle. It is part of NASA's deep space exploration plans including a crewed mission to Mars.

SLS follows the cancellation of the Constellation program, and is to replace the retired Space Shuttle. The SLS is to be the most powerful rocket ever built with a total thrust greater than Saturn V.

Marvin Minsky (1927 – 2016) was an American cognitive scientist concerned largely with research in artificial intelligence. He joined the staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1958, and a year later he and John McCarthy initiated what is known now as the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Marvin Minsky

Neutron Star

A neutrino is an elementary particle that interacts via the weak subatomic force and gravity. The neutrino is so named because it is electrically neutral and its mass is so small, that it was long thought to be zero. The weak force has a very short range, and the gravitational interaction is extremely weak, thus neutrinos typically pass through normal matter unimpeded and undetected.

Neutrino

The Big Bang theory is a cosmological model for the observable universe. The model describes how the universe expanded from a very high-density and high-temperature state, and offers a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of phenomena.

Measurements of the expansion rate of the universe place the Big Bang at around 13.8 billion years ago, which is thus considered the age of the universe.


big bang

The Kuiper belt is a region of space beyond the orbit of Neptune, consisting mainly of small remnants from the formation of the Solar System. Kuiper belt objects are composed largely of frozen volatiles (termed "ices"), such as frozen methane, ammonia and water. The Kuiper belt is home to three officially recognized dwarf planets: Pluto, Haumea and Makemake.

Kuiper Belt

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a federally funded research and development center and NASA field center, Founded in the 1930s and based in California.

The laboratory's primary function is the construction and operation of planetary robotic spacecraft, though it also conducts Earth-orbit and astronomy missions. JPL is also responsible for operating NASA's Deep Space Network.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Arianesapce - a European company founded in 1980 as the world's first commercial launch service provider. Arianespace undertakes the operation and marketing of the European Space Agency's various rockets.

Arianespace

Hale–Bopp is a comet that was perhaps the most widely observed of the 20th century and one of the brightest seen for many decades. Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp discovered Comet Hale–Bopp separately on July 23, 1995 before it became visible to the naked eye. It was visible to the naked eye for a record 18 months.

Hale-Bopp

New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe that is part of NASA's New Frontiers program. The spacecraft was launched in 2006 with a primary mission to perform a flyby study of the Pluto system in 2015. A secondary mission to study one or more other Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) included Ultima Thule (2014 MU69) in 2019. New Horizons was the fastest man-made object ever launched from Earth.

New Horizons

Jezero is a crater on Mars. Thought to have once been flooded with water, this crater contains a fan-delta deposit rich in clays. The lake in the crater was present when valley networks were forming on Mars. In several Slavic languages the word jezero means 'lake'. In November 2018, it was announced that Jezero crater had been chosen as the landing site for the planned Mars 2020 rover mission.


Jezero Crater

Baikonur Cosmodrome is the world's first and largest operational spaceport.

Leased by the Kazakh Government to Russia until 2050, Baikonur is managed jointly by the Roscosmos State Corporation and the Russian Aerospace Forces.

Originally built by the Soviet Union, currently Baikonur remains a busy spaceport, with numerous commercial, military, and scientific missions launched annually.

Baikonur

Perigee is the lowest altitude of an object's orbit around the Earth. Perigee is the Earth-specific word for this point in an orbit. The same location in an orbit around Earth's Moon is called perilune.

Perigee

The Apollo program, also known as Project Apollo, was the third United States human spaceflight program carried out by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which succeeded in landing the first humans on the Moon from 1969 to 1972.

Apollo

A parking orbit is a temporary orbit used during the launch of a satellite or other space probe. A launch vehicle boosts into the parking orbit, then fires again to enter the final desired trajectory. The alternative to a parking orbit is direct injection, where the rocket fires continuously (except during staging) until its fuel is exhausted, ending with the payload on the final trajectory.

Parking Orbit

The Space Shuttle was a partially reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system operated by NASA. The Space Shuttle retired from service on July 21, 2011.

Operational missions launched numerous satellites, interplanetary probes, the Hubble Space Telescope, and participated in the construction and servicing of the International Space Station.

Shuttle

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990 and remains in operation. Although not the first space telescope, Hubble is one of the largest, and is well known as a research tool and a public relations boon for astronomy. Many Hubble observations have led to breakthroughs in astrophysics, such as accurately determining the rate of expansion of the universe.

Hubble Space Telescope

Project Mercury was the first American human spaceflight program, running from 1958 through 1963. The Mercury goal was to put a man into Earth orbit and return him safely, ideally before the Soviet Union.

Mercury missions were followed by millions around the world, and laid the groundwork for Project Gemini, which perfected the space docking maneuvers essential for the subsequent Apollo program.

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