Another magnate will soar into space this month. Jeff Bezos, best known as the founder of Amazon, will launch July 20 on board a crewed New Shepard, built by his company, Blue Origin. The passengers will include Oliver Daemen (18) and former “Mercury Thirteen” candidate Wally Funk (82), who will become, respectively, the youngest and oldest people in space to date.
Details below.
Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson will launch Sunday, July 11 at 9am 10:30 EST aboard the VSS Unity, the first Virgin Galactic flight to carry a full crew. The event, intended in part to show the viability of space tourism, will go full media circus, with Stephen Colbert hosting and Khalid debuting a new song at the landing site.
SpaceX’s current (or replayed, depending on when you watch) activity:
SpaceX has has announced the full (hypothetical) crew of the first “all-civilian” space mission, scheduled to launch next September. Hopefully the launch will occur without too many complications and prove an Inspiration for future space exploration.
Meanwhile….
Eccentric Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa plans to travel on Elon Musk’s SpaceX ’round the moon, and he’s seeking eight artistic and creative types to join him. Will you go to the moon?
Meanwhile, here on earth, a cuttlefish has passed a delayed-gratification cognitive test designed for human children. “Iä! Iä!
Today sees the landing of the most advanced Martian exploration device thus far, the Perseverance Rover. Information on how to follow the event may be found at NASA’s official site.
Updated
James Doohan, best-known as the Enterprise’s Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, died in 2005. His ashes made it to the International Space Station three years later, a fact only . Entrepreneur and “private astronaut” Richard Garriott, with the backing of Doohan’s family, smuggled the ashes onto the ISS in 2008, thus fulfilling a final wish of the Star Trek actor.
Lunar exploration has been in the news lately, with China’s Chang’e-5 capsule returning with rock samples, and ambitious American plans to send Artemis II around our moon (with the first ever Canadian on the mission) in 2023. If successful, it will represent the first time since the final Apollo mission that humans will fly so far from home. Artemis III is even more ambitious: humanity will return to the lunar surface.
If you’ve been following the non-political news this last week, you know that members of the Utah Department of Public Safety, while counting Bighorn sheep, discovered a monolith in the Utah desert. It is, of course, an object strangely familiar to SF fans….
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Disney will be opening a new MCU themed land at its California park in 2020, and others will follow in other countries. While the fact of the park has been known for some time, specific details were announced at the D23 Expo that runs this weekend. The Avengers will have to miss Walter Disney World in Florida, however, since Marvel sold the rights to using most of its characters in theme parks to Universal back in the 1990s.
However, regardless of what decision gets made regarding movie rights, Spider-man will be able to swing around the California park– Disney/Marvel has full park/character rights on the side of the continent.
I hope its less confusing negotiating one’s way around the actual park.
What do you think of their plans? And what would go in your Marvel Park?