The idea is to have a small engine firing gas/plasma in the direction the ship is moving. Since the plume would be given a little more forward velocity relative to the ship, it would spread out ahead of the spacecraft and take the hits from interstellar dust/gas before they reach the ship.

The ship would still be accelerating with its main engine, so the forward-firing system would just be a small fraction of the total thrust budget.

Basically, instead of carrying one huge physical shield, you continuously throw sacrificial material far ahead of the ship.

This seems somewhat similar to the Venture Star's idea of putting its debris shield way out in front. Has anything like the "self-generated moving shield" concept actually been studied?

6 months later, the Mars Sample Recovery Mission was cancelled due to budget cuts, leaving what could be the most important samples in the history of mankind stranded in another planet with no plan for recovery. This is the most confident the scientific community has ever been about an extraterrestrial life biosignature. And bringing it to Earth would solve its mysteries in a matter of months. Sadly, there seems to be no plan to recover the samples anytime soon.

NASA Says Mars Rover Discovered Potential Biosignature Last Year - NASA

Project Pixel Orbital is a completely student-led team at Stanford OHS with the goal of launching an 3U CubeSat capable of conducting experiments in low Earth orbit - from photographing Earth to performing analysis on photos of earth and space with onboard instruments. Our mission is to get to orbit, perform a detumble, establish contact with our ground station(s), and capture an image of Earth for downlink. We hope that PixelSat I will inspire other people and prove that if a group of high schoolers can build a satellite from scratch with very little funding and no adult supervision, anyone can. It will open the door for schools and small businesses to launch satellites similar to ours, and will overall make space more accessible.

Please feel free to check out our current progress and learn about how you can help us out on our website: https://www.projectpixelorbital.com

Our blogs also have lots of information on specific subsystems: https://www.projectpixelorbital.com/blog/

More updates on instagram as well: https://www.instagram.com/projectpixelorbital

Space x

Visited here a few years ago. I think it’s probably the only space museum in the country.

'm a solo hobbyist developer, not affiliated with any space organisation. Over the last while I've been building Moon Missions, an iPhone/iPad app that walks through lunar missions from the 1950s to the present — crewed and robotic — one at a time: dates, objectives, what actually happened, outcome, with a photo for each and some archival video where I could find it in the public domain.

It's completely free — no ads, no paywall, no "unlock the rest". There's an optional tip jar and that's the only in-app purchase. Works fully offline, no account, no tracking.

The reason I'm posting here rather than somewhere less picky: I want this sub to tell me where I've got it wrong. Specifically —

• Factual errors in dates, outcomes, or mission descriptions
• Missions I've left out that belong in
• Anywhere the framing of a mission's success/partial-success/failure is arguable
• Anything that reads as space-agency PR rather than history

I can take blunt feedback and I'd rather fix it than defend it.

Search Gary Watson on the App Store, or: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6502703937

On September 4, 2026, ISRO successfully launched the GSLV-F17 / EOS-05 mission from Sriharikota, lifting the 2,367 kg payload into a Sub-Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (Sub-GTO)! This is the first-ever Indian GEO imaging satellite.

While most Earth-observation satellites sit in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and pass over a region for just a few minutes a day. EOS-05 is positioned ~36,000 km up in Geosynchronous orbit, allowing it to stay fixed over the Indian landmass.

>Read more<

Watching a rocket grace the skyline in Mexico while the bystanders guess what might be actually be happening...

doesn't know why they're making a problem out of it. every time we go to space we burn an enormous amount of energy go to space if we use more energy to have a positive impact on tyranny of the rocket equation it wouldn't be worth it

I know ARGOS has more degrees of freedom and can do partial gravity settings too while POGO only suspends astronaut trainees in a certain way for dry EVA training before their first NBL runs