DailyDirt: Made In The USA Rockets

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

We've covered a bunch of plans for manned missions to space from amateurs and private companies and various governments. There are three countries that have built space vehicles for people: Russia, China and the US. However, the US hasn't had a launch system for its astronauts made domestically since the retirement of the space shuttle program. NASA is getting closer to having more new launch systems made in the USA, and here are just a few links on the topic.

• A bill in Congress might ban the use of Russian rockets to launch military payloads into space. This move could accelerate plans to build new rocket designs made in America. [url]
• SpaceX software engineers answered some AMA questions a while back, saying that a mission to Mars might take 5-10 years. They also advised people to learn C and C++ and to work on programming side projects to develop skills. [url]
• NASA has completed a successful test of its Orion spacecraft on a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket which took the capsule to an altitude of 3,604 miles on its second orbit around the earth. No one was aboard on this test mission, but this is NASA's next generation vehicle for getting astronauts into (deep) space -- a space craft that could potentially do much more than previous Apollo missions. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: astronauts, launch systems, manned missions, mars, rockets, space, space exploration, spacecraft
Companies: nasa, spacex, ula