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Thompson, A. (2021, October 29). SpaceX is launching science experiments to space with crew-3 astronauts on Halloween. Space.com. Retrieved February 15, 2022, from https://www.space.com/spacex-crew-3-astronuts-halloween-launch-science

Treviño, X., By, -, Treviño, X., &amp; are community activists concerned about the environment. Xandra Treviño is from Brownsville. (2021, October 18). Environmentalists: SpaceX's negative impacts on Boca Chica are clear and numerous. Rio Grande Guardian. Retrieved February 15, 2022, from https://riograndeguardian.com/environmentalists-spacexs-negative-impacts-on-boca-chica-are-clear-and-numerous/

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SpaceX has been putting wins on the board ever since the company-founded by serial entrepreneur Elon Musk-became the first privately funded group to put a payload in Earth orbit, in 2008. Since then,the company has continued to impress, launching unmanned cargo vehicles to the International Space Station (ISS) and winning a contract from NASA to fly astronauts as well, as early as 2017. There have been setbacks-most disastrously last June when a cargo rocket bound for the ISS exploded en route, costing the crew much-needed supplies and shaking confidence in the company as a whole. On December 21, however, Musk bounced back, launching a payload of satellites to orbit and then recovering the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, which landed upright, settling itself down under the power of its own engines, just six miles from the Cape Canaveral launch pad. Recoverable, reusable rocket stages that touch down on dry land have been talked about for decades as a way to keep costs down and speed turnaround times, but no one had been able to do it-until now. Here are 10 other things you need to know about the SpaceX.

1. Who is Elon Musk and why is he building rockets?
Musk (b. 1971) is a South African-born entrepreneur with degrees in business and physics from the University of Pennsylvania-and he's launching rockets because he just kind of decided to. That's the short answer, and it's not much different from the long answer. Musk has no formal training in rocketry, but he does have an eye for new markets. He made his initial fortune as a co-founder of PayPal, and has since founded Tesla Motors and SolarCity-a solar energy company. In the early 2000s, he and others saw the opening NASA was creating by retreating from the business of launching spacecraft to low earth orbit. In 2002, he jumped into that gap, founding Space Exploration Technologies Corporation-or SpaceX-going into competition with other, generally more-established companies such as Boeing and Virginia-based Orbital Sciences.

2. What Has SpaceX Done That Other Companies Haven't?
SpaceX scored its first big headline in 2010, when it became the first private company to launch a payload into orbit and return it to Earth intact-something only government agencies like NASA or Russia's Roscosmos had done before. Its upright landing and recovery of the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket on Dec. 21 2015, was another first. Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, sent a rocket to the edge of space and landed it upright earlier this year, but it was a demonstration flight and did not achieve orbit.

3. Are SpaceX Rockets Special?
Progress in rocketry is incremental. The basic science of liquid-fueled rockets hasn't changed much since the days of Robert Goddard. And solid fueled rockets-well, they go back millennia. The advances are made at the margins, and Musk is doing well there. His rockets are modular: the Falcon is a single engine model; the Falcon 9-no surprise-has nine; the Falcon Heavy, which has yet to fly, will have 27, in three clusters of nine engines. This streamlines production in the same way that building different car bodies atop similar chassis helps keep costs down for car manufacturers. Roughly 80% of the parts in any SpaceX rocket are made on the company's own factory floor, reducing the cost of outsourcing. This keeps price per pound of payload down and quality control in house. One study, by NASA and the Air Force, estimated that the price tag for going from the initial design stages of the Falcon 9 rocket to its first flight was $440 million, about a third of what it would have cost NASA.

4. How Close Is SpaceX To Flying A Crew?
Very close-maybe. The company has used its Dragon spacecraft to make uncrewed cargo runs to the ISS. The Dragon was designed with crew compatibility in mind, which means the ship has already proven its basic spaceworthiness, though it has a good way to go before its life support systems are similarly proven. SpaceX and Boeing are both scheduled to begin crewed runs to the ISS in 2017, and NASA has already designated the first astronauts who will fly in the new ships. The 2017 target could slip and the June explosion of one of SpaceX's cargo rockets during launch was hardly good news for the company. The recent launch of the Falcon 9, even without the upright first-stage landing, was a confidence booster. But with astronaut lives on the line in future flights, the company will have to put a string of good launches together to make up for that very bad one.

5. Where is SpaceX's Mission Control?
You know the kitchen area in your office, where you microwave your coffee and reheat your lunch? Well, the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California has a better kitchen. And you know that area next to the kitchen where people gather to gossip and avoid going back to their desks? At SpaceX they use that place to launch rockets. Really. The SpaceX facility is a sprawling, one-floor industrial plant that was originally a factory for Boeing aircraft fuselage. SpaceX took it over and repurposed into an all-in-one spaceport. Thousands of square feet are given over to cubicles-almost no one at SpaceX, including Musk, has an office with doors. Adjacent to that is the factory floor and the kitchen. And adjacent to that, behind a high glass wall, is mission control. Workers gather to watch launches and recoveries, then go back to their lathes or computers or desks. It's very Silicon Valley only way cooler.

6. What Is The Dragon Spacecraft Like?
Picture a 21st century Apollo spacecraft. After the troubled history of the space shuttle-including the loss of two seven-person crews-SpaceX and most other rocket companies have returned to the old model of the upright rocket with the crew perched on top of the stack. The Dragon is configurable to seat up to seven people, but it can and usually will carry fewer. The escape rockets, which are used to pull the ship away from the booster in the event of a fire or possible explosion, are not mounted in a tower above the capsule, as they were in the Apollo and Mercury days. Instead they are built into its base, pushing the capsule away, instead of pulling it. This helps the Dragon achieve one of its other goals: reusability. The spacecraft and escape system are not simply thrown away after use but could instead be cleaned up, checked out and configured for another flight.

7. Is SpaceX Profitable?
It's hard to say since the company is privately held, which means its books aren't open for inspection. The belief among most analysts, however, is that SpaceX must, by now, be making money. It has $4.2 billion in contracts from NASA alone and its recent success in cracking the defense contract business-breaking the monopoly United Launch Alliance enjoyed with the military-means more revenue. All of this is on top of its contracts for private satellite launches, giving it 60 launches over all on its manifest, worth about $7 billion. That's a lot for a company whose main selling point is that it can launch satellites for about a third of the cost the older companies do, clearing a lot of cap room for profits. There is much speculation over when and if Musk will go public and there is much hope on Wall Street that he will. SpaceX's rep is partly sizzle, yes, and there is no guarantee it will be a big moneymaker over the long term.

8. Why Are Rockets Still So Failure Prone Despite Decades of Production?
A better question might be why they fly at all. Think of a rocket as an egg or, more specifically, an egg shell. Think of the fuel as the white and the yolk. The Saturn V, the largest rocket ever built, weighed 6.5 million lbs. at launch, and 5.5 million of that was fuel. That's basically a bomb, one that's designed to perform a controlled explosion. The forces in play when a rocket is lit-in terms of chemistry, physics, speed and air resistance-can be colossally destructive. It's only by controlling them to within extremely narrow tolerances that any launch is successful. The SpaceX explosion in June is believed to have been caused by a faulty strut in the rocket's second stage, which allowed a high-pressure container of helium to break free, sending it smashing through a nearby tank of liquid oxygen. The company described the result as an "overpressure event," which basically means everything blew up. It's true that these things inevitably happen in the space game. Bit it's equally true that you don't get to stay in that game if you can't minimize those risks.

9. Who Are Musk's Main Competitors?

He has a lot of them. Boeing, which is building its CST-100 spacecraft to fly crewed ISS missions along with Musk's Dragon, is a key rival. So is Orbital Sciences, the company that shares the ISS cargo-run contract with SpaceX. United Launch Alliance (ULA) is a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and Musk is at war with it for a piece of the defense launching business. Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is a marginal player, planning to sell only suborbital rides for vacationers with deep pockets. Paul Allen's Vulcan Aerospace similarly wants to play in the space vacation sector, but here too, actual flights are still nowhere near imminent. Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin sees itself as a big player, and its recent upright landing of a suborbital spacecraft put it in the game. But Blue Origin too has a long way to go before it is actually flying passengers or payloads.

10. What Are Musk's Ultimate Goals?
Becoming the Apple of the rocket business is one way of looking at it, though Musk demurs on that analogy without demurring on the idea of assuming a similarly dominant role in the space sector. His biggest, dreamiest target is sending people to Mars-which does not make him unusual unless he can actually achieve it. He boasts that he could fly human passengers there for as little as $500,000 per seat, but in this case he may be over-promising. The laws of economics might be even harder to overcome than the laws of physics, and neither has been cracked sufficiently yet to make a Mars mission achievable. As for whether Musk himself would go? "I would like to go to space, but I have to forgo that," he told TIME in 2012, citing his five sons and multiple companies. "I have to be careful with personal risks."

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SpaceX has been putting wins on the board ever since the company-founded by serial entrepreneur Elon Musk-became the first privately funded group to put a payload in Earth orbit, in 2008. Since then,the company has continued to impress, launching unmanned cargo vehicles to the International Space Station (ISS) and winning a contract from NASA to fly astronauts as well, as early as 2017.

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Billionaires play an outsized role in shaping the global economy, politics, and philanthropy. Forbes puts the number of billionaires in the world at 2,640 in 2023. The wealthiest among them is Elon Musk; CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and owner of X (formerly Twitter).

The individuals on this list belong to an even more exclusive club and wield still more power. Many are founders of technology giants, with much of their wealth still invested in the companies they started.

With so much of their wealth in publicly traded stocks, the net worth of the richest fluctuates along with the market valuations of the companies they own. Below are the 10 wealthiest people on the planet, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. All figures are current as of Jan. 2, 2024.

Age: 52

Residence: United States

Co-founder and CEO: Tesla

Net Worth: $229 billion

Tesla Ownership Stake: 13% ($102 billion)

X Ownership Stake: 79% ($9.32 billion)

Other Assets: Space Exploration Technologies ($53.2 billion private asset), The Boring Company ($3.33 billion private asset)

Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. He was born in South Africa and attended a university in Canada before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned bachelor's degrees in physics and economics. Two days after enrolling in a graduate physics program at Stanford University, Musk deferred attendance to launch Zip2, one of the earliest online navigation services. He reinvested a portion of the proceeds from this startup to create X.com, the online payment system that was sold to eBay ( EBAY) and ultimately became PayPal Holdings ( PYPL).

In Dec. 2020, Tesla joined the S&P 500, becoming the largest company added, and in Jan. 2021, Musk became the richest person in the world-a title that has fluctuated alongside the value of Tesla.

In April 2022, Musk began a campaign to take X private, which culminated in a $44 billion buyout. Musk planned to fund the deal with $21 billion of his own capital. In the run-up to the buyout announcement, Musk sold 9.6 million shares of Tesla, valued at roughly $8.5 billion.

In July 2022, Musk decided to back out of the buyout. The company filed a lawsuit against Musk to force the buyout to go through. Musk countersued the company but then reversed course and declared he was willing to buy it after all. The deal officially closed in Oct. 2022, giving him a 79% stake in the company.

2. Bernard Arnault

French national Bernard Arnault is the chair and CEO of LVMH, the world's largest luxury goods company. LVMH brands include Louis Vuitton, Hennessey, Marc Jacobs, and Sephora.

Most of Arnault's wealth comes from his massive stake in Christian Dior SE, the holding company that controls 41.4% of LVMH. His shares in Christian Dior SE, plus an additional 6.2% in LVMH, are held through his family-owned holding company, Groupe Familial Arnault.

An engineer by training, Arnault first showed his business acumen while working for his father's construction firm, Ferret-Savinel, taking charge of the company in 1971. He converted Ferret-Savinel to a real estate company named Férinel Inc. in 1979.

Arnault remained Férinel's chair for another six years, until he acquired and reorganized luxury goods maker Financière Agache in 1984, eventually selling all its holdings other than Christian Dior and Le Bon Marché. He was invited to invest in LVMH in 1987 and became the majority shareholder, chair of the board, and CEO of the company two years later.

3. Jeff Bezos

Age: 59

Residence: United States

Founder and Executive Chair: Amazon (AMZN)

Net Worth: $177 billion

Amazon Ownership Stake: 10% ($150 billion)

Other Assets: Blue Origin ($11.2 billion private asset), The Washington Post ($250 million private asset), Koru ($500 million private asset), and $14.8 billion in cash

Though Amazon originally started out selling books, it has since morphed into a one-stop shop for everything under the sun and is expected to overtake Walmart as the world's largest retailer by 2024. Amazon's pattern of constant diversification is evident in some of its unexpected expansions, which include acquiring Whole Foods in 2017 and entering the pharmacy business the same year.

Bezos owned as much as 16% of Amazon in 2019 before transferring 4% to his former wife, MacKenzie Scott, as part of their divorce proceedings. In 2020, Amazon's share price jumped 76% on the heightened demand for online shopping amid the COVID-19 pandemic. On July 5, 2021, Bezos stepped down as CEO of the e-commerce giant, becoming its executive chair.

Bezos originally took Amazon public in 1997 and went on to become the first man since Bill Gates in 1999 to achieve a net worth of more than $100 billion. Bezos' other projects include aerospace company Blue Origin, The Washington Post (which he purchased in 2013), and the 10,000-year clock-also known as the Long Now.

On July 20, 2021, Bezos, his brother Mark, aviation pioneer Wally Funk, and Dutch student Oliver Daemen completed Blue Origin's first successful crewed flight, reaching an altitude of more than 66 miles before landing safely. Bezos' wealth peaked at $213 billion in the same month.

In 2023, he paid $500 million for the superyacht, Koru.

4. Bill Gates

Age: 68

Residence: United States

Co-founder: Microsoft (MSFT)

Net Worth: $141 billion

Microsoft Ownership Stake: 1.4% ($24.3 billion)

Other Assets: $67.6 billion in cash and billions over multiple other companies

The largest software company in the world, Microsoft, also produces a line of personal computers, provides email services through its exchange server, and sells video game systems and associated game devices. It has recently invested heavily in cloud services.

Gates shifted from the company's CEO to the role of board chair in 2008. He joined Berkshire Hathaway's board in 2004. He stepped down from both boards on March 13, 2020.

Bill Gates has much of his net worth in Cascade Investment LLC. Cascade is a privately-held investment vehicle that owns a variety of stocks including Canadian National Railway ( CNR), Deere ( DE), and Republic Services ( RSG), as well as private investments in real estate and energy.

5. Steve Ballmer

Age: 67

Residence: United States

Owner: Los Angeles Clippers

Net Worth: $131 billion

Microsoft Ownership Stake: 4% ($120 billion total)

Other Assets: Los Angeles Clippers ($4.56 billion private asset), The Forum ($400 million private asset), Intuit Dome ($2 billion private asset), $3.75 billion in cash

Steve Ballmer joined Microsoft in 1980 after Bill Gates convinced him to drop out of Stanford University's MBA program. He was Microsoft's 30th employee. Ballmer went on to succeed Gates as Microsoft CEO in 2000. He held the position until stepping down in 2014. Ballmer oversaw Microsoft's 2011 purchase of Skype for $8.5 billion.

Ballmer owns an estimated 4% of Microsoft, making him the software giant's largest individual shareholder. In 2014, shortly after stepping down as Microsoft CEO, Ballmer purchased the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team for $2 billion.

Ballmer lived in the same dorm and on the same floor as Bill Gates while the two attended Harvard University. The brotherly relationship between the two became strained when Ballmer started pushing the tech company into hardware, such as the Surface tablet and the Windows mobile phone, during his tenure as CEO.

6. Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg first developed Facebook (now Meta) alongside fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes while attending Harvard University in 2004. As Facebook began to be used at other universities, Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to focus entirely on his growing business. Today, Zuckerberg is the CEO and chair of Meta, which had 3 billion monthly active users as of Q2 2023.

Facebook is the world's largest social networking service. As the website is free to use, most of the company's revenue is generated through advertising.

Meta is also host to several other brands, including photo-sharing app Instagram, which it acquired in 2012; cross-platform mobile messaging service WhatsApp and virtual-reality-headset producer Oculus, both acquired in 2014; Workplace, its enterprise-connectivity platform; and Portal, its line of video-calling devices.

Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2015, with each of them serving as co-CEOs. Their charity seeks to leverage technology to fix societal ills, such as improving the access and quality of education, reforming both the criminal justice system and the U.S. immigration system, improving housing affordability, and eventually eradicating all diseases.

7. Larry Page

Like several of the tech billionaires on this list, Larry Page embarked on his path to fame and fortune in a college dorm room. While attending Stanford University in 1995, Page and his friend Sergey Brin came up with the idea of improving Internet data extraction. The duo devised a new search engine technology they dubbed Backrub after its ability to assess links to a page.

From there, Page and Brin went on to found Google in 1998, with Page serving as CEO of the company until 2001, and again between 2011 and 2019.

Google is the world's dominant Internet search engine, accounting for more than 92% of global search requests. In 2006, the company purchased YouTube, the top platform for user-submitted videos.

After acquiring Android in 2005, Google released the Android mobile phone operating system in 2008. Google reorganized in 2015, becoming a subsidiary of Alphabet, a holding company.

Page was among early investors in Planetary Resources, a space exploration and asteroid-mining company. Established in 2009, the company was acquired by blockchain firm ConsenSys in 2018 amid funding problems. He has also shown an interest in flying car companies, investing in both Kitty Hawk and Opener, although Kitty Hawk ceased operations in 2022.

8. Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison was born in New York City to a 19-year-old single mother. After dropping out of the University of Chicago in 1966, Ellison moved to California and worked as a computer programmer. In 1973, he joined the electronics company Ampex, where he met future partners Ed Oates and Bob Miner. Three years later, Ellison moved to Precision Instruments, serving as the company's vice president of research and development.

In 1977, Ellison founded Software Development Laboratories alongside Oates and Miner. Two years later, the company released Oracle, the first commercial relational database program to use Structured Query Language. The database program proved so popular that SDL changed its name to Oracle Systems Corporation in 1982. Ellison gave up the CEO role at Oracle in 2014 after 37 years. He joined Tesla's board in Dec. 2018 and stepped down in June 2022.

Oracle is the world's second-largest software company, providing a wide variety of cloud computing programs as well as Java and Linux code and the Oracle Exadata computing platform. Oracle has acquired numerous large companies over its history, such as Sun Microsystems and Cerner.

Ellison has focused his philanthropy on medical research. In 2016, he gave $200 million to the University of Southern California for a new cancer research center. Ellison backed the Oracle Team USA sailing team, which won the America's Cup racing series in 2010 and 2013.

9. Sergey Brin

In addition to its dominant internet search engine, Google offers a suite of online tools and services known as Google Workspace, which includes Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Meet, Google Chat, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, and more. Google also offers a variety of electronic devices, including Pixel smartphones, computers, and tablets, Nest smart home devices, and the Stadia gaming platform.

Brin has donated millions of dollars to Parkinson's disease research, partnering with The Michael J. Fox Foundation.

10. Warren Buffett

Widely known as the Oracle of Omaha, Buffett is a buy-and-hold investor who built his fortune by acquiring undervalued companies. More recently, Berkshire Hathaway has invested in large, well-known companies. Its portfolio of wholly owned subsidiaries includes interests in insurance, energy distribution, and railroads as well as consumer products.

Buffett is a notable Bitcoin skeptic.

Buffett has dedicated much of his wealth to philanthropy. Between 2006 and 2020, he gave away $41 billion-mostly to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and his children's charities. Buffett launched the Giving Pledge alongside Bill Gates in 2010.

Now 93 years old, Buffett still serves as CEO, but in 2021 he stated that his likely successor would be Gregory Abel, head of Berkshire's non-insurance operations.

Who Are the Top 10 Richest People in the World?

Who Is the World's Richest Man in 2024?

Who Is the Richest Woman in the World?

The Bottom Line

If you want to get a little closer to making the richest billionaires rankings, you might need to become a technological innovator or luxury retail mastermind. Or you could keep it simple and focus on value investing.

It also wouldn't hurt to have been born into wealth; however, the greatest fortunes on this list started as good ideas that people with creativity, drive, and connections used to build some of the world's largest companies.

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Learn who the top 10 billionaires in the world are and how they built their wealth.

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Just mere months after its first destructive ground-level rocket explosion in the Rio Grande Valley, SpaceX is seeking expansion permits from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to make way for Starship/Super Heavy, the largest rocket in history. The FAA released a faulty analysis on SpaceX that says its expansion will not have a significant impact on the community. This is absolutely false as SpaceX's negative impacts are clear and numerous.

The FAA will soon have a virtual public comment hearing on their analysis and SpaceX expansion, where non-industry experts can raise awareness of its inadequacies and explain the many ways SpaceX has already negatively impacted our communities. This is an important opportunity to show the FAA the unbearable reality that SpaceX has created for the Rio Grande Valley.

Before launching into the problems with Elon Musk's project, let's talk about the built-in barriers for those wanting to participate in these hearings. We're a predominantly Spanish speaking community, but there is no Spanish version of the FAA analysis and it is not clear that the public comment hearing on their analysis will have translation. Limiting language access is against the law as a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Spanish speakers should not be prohibited from participating in a public process that affects them.

On an economic development level, Cameron County Commissioners and the City of Brownsville are neglecting community and environmental advocates' concerns. Elected officials naively believe that SpaceX is improving the community and will create local jobs. The truth is SpaceX has created very little economic opportunity for locals and disrupted more lives than improving them. In fact, more people from outside the community have filled these jobs and forced local people to move.

The FAA and Cameron County leaders must acknowledge that SpaceX has already made Boca Chica Village uninhabitable and inaccessible, as many locals have been displaced. Some have left because they fear more explosions or because their health suffered from poor air quality from nearby construction. Many residents felt they had no choice but to take incentives to leave, even though they didn't want to. Others held on for as long as they could, but the construction, noise, and light pollution from SpaceX has made living in the Village unbearable.

SpaceX has already stolen beach access away from locals by closing off HWY 4 to Boca Chica several times per month, and plans to shut down the beach up to 800 hours or more per year. SpaceX and the County commissioners have not appropriately consulted community members on the development of this volatile project.

Let's be real: rocket explosions are already happening close to home. Explosions are yet another threat to our safety because of the proposed LNG plants and Jupiter oil refinery, the Valley Crossing pipeline, and existing industries at the Port of Brownsville. LNG plants would pollute the air and water, and come with their own high risk of explosions from day-to-day operations.

If built, SpaceX's explosion debris could fall onto highly flammable, explosive, gas facilities. Even the FAA admits that rocket launches would shut down Port of Brownsville operations.

SpaceX expansion is part of a much more destructive plan to drill our beaches for gas and build Musk's own gas plants, and recolonize our land with his "Starbase" city, privatizing our much loved public spaces.

We all know how special Boca Chica is. It's an international spot where the Rio Grande empties into the Gulf. It's where we hang out with our families barbecuing and fishing. Many of us grew up going to the beach to volunteer for clean ups, swim, fish, and have vacation time with our family. But just over the past year, that reality has changed dramatically.

Cameron County Commissioners, the FAA, and the City of Brownsville must acknowledge that SpaceX was never a good idea, and its expansion is an even worse one. Our communities need jobs and local economic development that doesn't harm us or the environment. Is that too much to ask? Locally-owned sustainable enterprises should be the focal point of our elected leaders, not kowtowing to a billionaire with delusions of grandeur and colonization.

Please show up for the environment, the community, and for Boca Chica by telling the FAA at the Oct. 18 and 20 virtual public hearings to stop SpaceX from expanding.

Editor's Note: The above guest column was penned by six community activists and environmentalists. Xandra Treviño is from Brownsville, Michelle Serrano is a member of Voces Unidas and Las Imaginistas, Patricia Rubio is a member of South Texas Environmental Justice Network, Juan Mancias is a member of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, Dave Cortez is director of the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter, and Freddy Jimenez is from Brownsville.

Editor's Note: The main image accompanying the above guest column was taken by Bekah Hinojosa of the Lower Rio Grande Valley Sierra Club.

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are community activists concerned about the environment. Xandra Treviño is from Brownsville, Michelle Serrano is a member of Voces Unidas and Las Imaginistas, Patricia Rubio is a member of South Texas Environmental Justice Network, Juan Mancias (pictured) is a member of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, Dave Cortez is director of the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter, and Freddy Jimenez is from Brownsville.

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Environmentalists: SpaceX's negative impacts on Boca Chica are clear and numerous

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Just mere months after its first destructive ground-level rocket explosion in the Rio Grande Valley, SpaceX is seeking expansion permits from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to make way for Starship/Super Heavy, the largest rocket in history. The FAA released a faulty analysis on SpaceX that says its expansion will not have a significant impact on the [...]

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Four astronauts are headed to the International Space Station (ISS) this Halloween (Oct. 31), where they'll spend six months conducting research for scientists back on Earth. During their stay, the international crew will work on more than 200 different research investigations.

NASA astronauts Raja Chari, who will command the mission, Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron, along with European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Matthias Maurer, make up the quartet of astronauts that will join the Expedition 65 crew already on board the space station. This will be the first spaceflight for Chari, Barron and Maurer.

The astronauts will launch on the Crew-3 mission to the orbiting lab in a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft from Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 2:21 a.m. EDT (0621 GMT) on Sunday (Oct. 31), and you can watch the launch and prelaunch action live here at Space.com.

Live Updates: SpaceX's Crew-3 astronaut mission

During their stay, the crew will work on hundreds of experiments, including new medical research. Those experiments will help scientists here on Earth to combat diseases and help space agencies around the world better understand how space affects the human body so they can better prepare astronauts for future, longer-duration space travel to the moon, Mars and beyond.

Among the research investigations, the crew will work on is a protein crystal growth experiment from the National Cancer Institute. As part of this experiment, called Uniform Protein Crystal Growth (UPCG), tiny crystals of RNA (ribonucleic acid) will be grown in microgravity and then examined using a powerful light source to look at their 3-dimensional shape.

The crew will also study the impacts of an enhanced spaceflight diet on astronaut health, as part of a food physiology experiment.

(Image credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky)

The astronauts will launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as part of the third operational crew launch for SpaceX which followed the successful test flight of its Crew Dragon vehicle as part of the Demo-2 mission in May 2020. The private spaceflight company is one of two commercial partners that NASA has contracted to send its astronauts to and from the space station as part of its commercial crew program - Boeing is the other. (Boeing has yet to launch astronauts on its Starliner crew capsule; a second uncrewed Starliner test flight was scheduled to launch in August, but was put on hold indefinitely as the teams continue to try and fix valves stuck in the vehicle's propulsion system.)

NASA's commercial crew program was created to not only return the capability of launching astronauts back to the U.S. but also to enable more research to be conducted on the space station. By having a fourth U.S. crew member on station, NASA says it's able to significantly increase the amount of science being conducted at the orbiting lab.

"One of the benefits that the relatively new Commercial Crew Program (CCP) provides to ISS research is being able to launch science alongside the crew," David Brady, NASA's associate program scientist for the International Space Station Program at Johnson Space Center (JSC) told reporters during a science briefing held on Thursday afternoon (Oct. 28). "And by being able to do so, we've increased our ability to conform to schedules that are based upon the needs of our researchers, which makes for better science."

The upcoming protein crystal growth experiment is a good example of that, says Brady, since the experiment is riding up to space with Crew-3 and then returning to Earth with the Crew-2 astronauts a week later.

The commercial crew vehicles have another added benefit: quicker return time for experiments. "Another advantage of the CCP program is that it keeps the transportation path close to the lab," Brady said. "For Dragon vehicles, the science launches from Florida and is then recovered just off the Florida coast, which is perfect for expediting samples back to the lab."

That capability is thanks to some upgrades the Crew Dragon and its cargo-toting counterpart received. Each reusable capsule is capable of flying as many as five times and, instead of being recovered off the coast of California and then trucked across country, each Dragon is scooped up out of the water and then transferred to a facility here at the Cape where it is prepped to fly again, while the science is sent to investigators within just a few hours of returning from space, compared to other craft and missions that could take several days.

Let's take a look at some of the science investigations that the Crew-2 astronauts will perform during their six-month stay on orbit:

Protein crystal growth

With the help of powerful lasers, researchers hope to determine the 3-dimensional shape of protein crystals grown in microgravity. As part of the UPCG experiment, researchers will grow a bunch of RNA crystals in space and send them back to Earth where researchers will analyze their 3D atomic structure.

This is important because the shapes of these proteins are directly correlated with their biological functions. When the protein crystals are forming, there are a number of factors that can peterb their growth, which would in turn alter their structure and ultimately affect how well they function.

In microgravity, the crystals are able to grow in a more uniform fashion, enabling the production of more perfect crystals than would be possible with gravity on Earth. This in turn could lead to better therapies and treatments for disease, says Jason R. Stagno, staff scientist in the Structural Biophysics Laboratory at the National Cancer Institute, and researcher on the project.

This investigation focuses on X-ray Free-Electron Laser (XFEL) technology, which enables imaging of biological molecules that cannot be grown into large crystals - such as viruses, nanoparticles and single molecules (like ribose) - and lets researchers track time-resolved structural changes of important biological molecules.

As part of the experiment, the researchers are focusing on riboswitch RNA because it controls gene expression. This type of non-coding RNA is highly prevalent in bacteria and has the potential for the development of novel antibiotics as well as engineering RNA-based therapeutic switches. ( Riboswitches are called "switches" because they can turn genes on and off through a series of structural changes, which are controlled by the binding of a small molecule.)

"The RNA is like a light switch, and whether or not it's in the on or off position is determined by what it interacts with," Stagno said during the briefing. "So like a camera with a very fast shutter speed, we're going to try to capture the moment the RNA structure changes in response to stimulation."

The research team is hoping to make a mini RNA movie of sorts. To do that, they need millions of tiny crystals instead of just a few large ones, which typically has been the focus of other space station protein crystal growth experiments.

Food physiology

Grace Douglas, lead scientist for NASA's Advanced Food Technology research effort, is looking at the impact of diet on human response to gut microbiota and nutritional status during spaceflight. "We wanted to start this experiment because when we look at current spaceflight, we learn a lot," she said. "And some of the things that we learn are that astronauts do have changes in their immune system like dysregulation of the immune system, reduced immune cell function, bone and muscle loss."

Douglas said that these changes occur within the timeframe of a six-month ISS mission, so as humanity pushes further out into the solar system, researchers want to be able to counteract these issues and improve astronaut health. To do this, diet is a great place to start, she said. "What we eat, our microbiome eats," says Douglas. "[The microbiome] essentially influences everything, so if we're eating the right diet, we can promote health and performance."

Astronaut diets tend to contain more processed food, as it needs to be shelf stable or otherwise endure the environment of space travel. Douglas says that the team's goal is to give the astronauts access to healthier foods that are rich in omega three fatty acids as well as a greater selection of fruits and vegetables, and then determine the impact of this change on the astronaut's immune system function and microbiome over the course of the mission.

The team aims to do that by looking for specific markers in biological samples that the astronauts provide. Douglas says that they tried out this Food Physiology experiment here on the ground during some Human Exploration Research analog missions here on Earth and did notice improvements in both nutritional and cognitive outcomes. "And so over 45 days, I can say one of the very apparent outcomes was a reduction in cholesterol, and, and some other nutritional benefits similar to that. So pretty quickly, you can start seeing benefits just from increasing these numbers of fruits and vegetables and things like that," she said.

Now, Douglas and her team want to try their Food Physiology experiment in space. "Some of the things that were developed specifically to support this study were some freeze dried vegetables, like butternut squash and sweet and savory kale," she said. "And then also some extra fish products were developed, like barramundi, which is a farmed fish that's rich in omega threes and has a less fishy taste than the traditional salmon or tuna."

Smartphone video guidance sensor

Hector Gutierrez, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Florida Institute of Technology has been working with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center to develop a software sensor called Smartphone video guidance sensor, or SVGS.

The purpose of their investigation is to demonstrate that it's possible to have a software sensor - capable of being used on multiple platforms - that can calculate the position and attitude of illuminated beacons. "That is a very valuable means to provide guidance and navigation information when you are doing proximity maneuvers with a small spacecraft or drones or mobile robots," says Gutierrez.

He says that as the investigation's name says, one version of SVGS can be deployed using a cell phone. "The code can be programmed to run on a cell phone as an app that uses the phone camera to take photos of a target and navigate and obtain position and attitude information from two dimensional images coming from the phone," he said during the briefing.

According to Gutierriez, most robots will have multiple CPUs, and many of them will have cameras. So SVGS is a technology that can be deployed on a variety of robotics platforms. "We are going to demonstrate this by deploying it on the free flying robot currently on the ISS, called ," he said.

Astrobee has been on the station for over a year, and is the replacement for a previous group of free-flying robots called spheres. These robots are used to help out with some of the research investigations, like SVGS. Gutierriez says that the bees will be positioned in the Japan pressurized module (JPM) with four LED beacons that will be used to conduct a series of five maneuvers that will be carried out in order to test the sensors.

Spaceflight standard measures

NASA's Human Research Program is hoping to mitigate the human health risk associated with spaceflight by surveying its astronauts and collecting data using tech and measures like smartwatches from now until the end of the space station.

The risks associated with spaceflight could be caused by a variety of factors like the absence of gravity, radiation, isolation and confinement and as well as different spacecraft design. NASA has been collecting biological samples, medical data and more from its astronauts for years in order to better understand how microgravity affects the human body. However, what's different with this project is that it spans multiple disciplines.

"This project is a cross-cutting project," said Giles Clement, of Lyon Neuroscience Center in France. "And by that we mean that we collect response, not from just one discipline like muscle or bone, or immune system, but we collect response from all of the disciplines at once in physiology, human biology, and psychology as well."

According to Clement, the astronauts participating in the investigation will be wearing smartwatches that they will wear all day (even when sleeping). They will do this for two weeks every other month during their spaceflight. It will help researchers on the ground measure things like how long they sleep.

Clement also says that the crew members will be asked to complete monthly surveys about how they interact with the team in order to evaluate equations and performance. "We also have a laptop on the space station in which they can test over 10 different neurocognitive tests to measure their reaction time, their attention concentration, working memory, spatial orientation," he said. "We are also collecting some blood and saliva samples to look at the given status and function and in general blood and urine chemistry at different periods during the flight."

This project began in 2018 and Clement says that the researchers have already collected a wealth of data. The project is helping the team predict things like which astronauts are likely to have cardiovascular events after they return home thanks to arterial changes from radiation and other aspects of spaceflight.

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SpaceX is launching science experiments to space with Crew-3 astronauts on Halloween

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Four astronauts are headed to the International Space Station (ISS) this Halloween (Oct. 31), where they'll spend six months conducting research for scientists back on Earth. During their stay, the international crew will work on more than 200 different research investigations.

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Reusability

SpaceX believes a fully and rapidly reusable rocket is the pivotal breakthrough needed to substantially reduce the cost of space access. The majority of the launch cost comes from building the rocket, which historically has flown only once.

Compare that to a commercial airliner - each new plane costs about the same as Falcon 9 but can fly multiple times per day and conduct tens of thousands of flights over its lifetime. Following the commercial model, a rapidly reusable space launch vehicle could reduce the cost of traveling to space by a hundredfold.

While most rockets are designed to burn up on reentry, SpaceX rockets can not only withstand reentry but can also successfully land back on Earth and refly again.

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SpaceX believes a fully and rapidly reusable rocket is the pivotal breakthrough needed to substantially reduce the cost of space access. The majority of the launch cost comes from building the rocket, which historically has flown only once.

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Advantages of Reusable Rocket | disadvantages of Reusable Rocket

This page covers advantages and disadvantages of Reusable Rocket. It mentions Reusable Rocket advantages or benefits and Reusable Rocket disadvantages or drawbacks.

What is Reusable Rocket?

The reusable rocket is the space launch system which allows recovery of its all or partial parts for later reuse. The system can be categorized into fully reusable and partially reusable.

Following are the specifications of Falcon-9 reusable rocket.
* Length: 68 m
* Dry mass: 25 tonnes
* Take-off mass: 506 tonnes
* Payload to LEO: About 13 tonnes
* Vehicle Cost: About £40 million
* Refuel Cost: £130,000
* Reusability: About 10 flights

Figure-1 depicts flight of reusable rocket developed by SpaceX to launch Dragon cargo ship and its return on the Earth back.

Benefits or advantages of Reusable Rocket

Following are the benefits or advantages of Reusable Rocket:
➨Cost for launching becomes much cheaper as it reduces material cost due to reusability.
➨Some of the reusable rockets use kerosene (of rocket grade type) as fuel which do not generate harmful chlorine as exhaust. This helps to protect the environment.
➨We can effectively reuse rockets similar to airplanes, hence space travel will become cheaper to a greater extent.

Drawbacks or disadvantages of Reusable Rocket

Following are the disadvantages of Reusable Rocket:
➨Fuel can not be reused in the rocket as it is released in the atmosphere as exhaust rate of 300 pounds/second.
➨They produce carbon dioxide which pollutes the atmosphere due to emission at stratosphere layer and mesosphere layer.
➨Due to cheaper flight cost, more flights are launched at frequent intervals. This leads to more exhaust and more harm to the atmosphere.

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Advantages of Reusable Rocket | Disadvantages of Reusable Rocket

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This page covers advantages and disadvantages of Reusable Rocket. It mentions Reusable Rocket advantages or benefits and Reusable Rocket disadvantages or drawbacks. The reusable rocket is the space launch system which allows recovery of its all or partial parts for later reuse. The system can be categorized into fully reusable and partially reusable.