Important Innovations

  CEO Elon Musk's Roadster Approaches Mars                                                                           Source:  SpaceX and Tesla "Starman" Behind the Wheel, Inside a Rocket SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk's red, $100,000 Tesla Roadster had made its closest approach to Mars.  The Roadster driver "Starman", which is a mannequin in a spacesuit, are part of a payload inside the second stage of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Colonizing Mars One of entrepreneur Elon Musk's major goals is to colonize Mars and make all of us an interplanetary civilization. SpaceX says the Falcon Heavy rocket vehicle with the Roadster inside made their first close approach to Mars and was within 5 million miles of the planet.   Harvard Astronomer Tracking Harvard astronomer Jonathan Dowell is tracking the journey.  He says the SpaceX spacecraft is in an elliptical orbit around the Sun.  The vehicle is 37 million miles from Earth and has travelled 1.3 billion miles sin

SpinLaunch: Launching Rockets with a Giant Centrifuge Source: SpinLaunch Tremendous Fuel Savings A Long Beach, California based company has developed a unique breakthrough technology that literally flings rockets into space.  The technology is under development with big investment backing and a contract from the US Department of Defense.  The SpinLaunch system is a giant centrifuge, the size of a football field, that will spin rockets up to 5,000 mph and then fling them out for orbit into space.  What's the key value:  tremendous fuel savings.  The company says, it will be able to do 5 launches a day at a cost of $250,000 per launch as a result of  the fuel savings. Giant Centrifuge and Kinetic Energy The giant centrifuge launch system is based on kinetic energy.  Inside the centrifuge, which is a partial vacuum, a long arm with a launch vehicle on one end and a counterweight on the other, starts accelerating the spin speed over a few hours.  At peak velo