Space launches that take off from a runway are cheaper, but are they the future of spaceflight?
20 January 2021 • 6:00am
About 35,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean, 100 miles out from Los Angeles, the rocket s break-up was easily visible on weather radar: a bright fan of debris, spreading out like scattered salt.
It was not an auspicious debut for Virgin Orbit s LauncherOne rocket system, first imagined in 2007 and a centrepiece of Richard Branson s space flight dreams. But it was far better than the tragedies felt by its sister company, Virgin Galactic, whose space programme suffered three deaths in an accidental explosion at a contractor s facility in 2007, and one more when its SpaceshipTwo vehicle disintegrated above the Mojave Desert in 2014.
The Cost of Visiting Earth May Be Too Astronomical For Aliens
MATT WILLIAMS, UNIVERSE TODAY
27 DECEMBER 2020
In 1950, Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi sat down to lunch with some of his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he had worked five years prior as part of the Manhattan Project.
According to various accounts, the conversation turned to aliens and the recent spate of UFOs. Into this, Fermi issued a statement that would go down in the annals of history: Where is everybody?
This became the basis of the Fermi Paradox, which refers to the disparity between high probability estimates for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) and the apparent lack of evidence.