Space Missions and News in 2019 This year is going to bring us more into space than ever before. The Chinese have decided to land on the dark side of the moon and we will be launching rockets which are reusable, thanks to SpaceX. As I said before, this may force other companies to create reusable rockets. Why would I say that? It is far cheaper to reuse a rocket than waste the entire rocket on a launch. If other companies don’t turn to reusable rocket parts, theoretically they will not be able to compete in price with SpaceX. They will have a real problem with the other aspect of the SpaceX rocket and that is getting their rockets to land nose up. As far as the landing on the dark side of the moon, it will be interesting to see what they find. It has been claimed for quite a few years there are mysterious things there, such as bases and UFOs. Whistleblowers have claimed the U.S. military has bases on the dark side. Rumors which persisted after World War II claimed the Nazis set up bases there. The Chinese have released all the info from their previous moon landing, and if they find anything relating to what I am talking about, is there a chance they might release that information? If they find U.S. moon bases will they use it as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations with the United States or actually come out with it? I guess we will have to wait and see what happens. No Chinese astronauts are scheduled to go to the moon before the 2030s. Speaking about all things space, one of the biggest UFO stories came out in 1980 when a U.S. Air Force installation on a RAF base in England encountered a UFO landing. Yes, a landing. First lights were observed above the woods next to the base, and then things got more serious. U.S. personnel went out to investigate and what they saw caused them to call the Deputy base commander, Colonel Halt to the scene. While they were in the woods a vehicle floated through the trees and set down in their midst. One of the airmen touched it and felt what only can be called some sort of shock. Suddenly numbers started running through his mind and when he got out of the woods, sometime later he was able to remember many pages of these numbers and wrote them all down. Later it was said when the numbers were translated, they stated the vehicle was an alien probe sent to earth. As the airmen watched, the probe slowly lifted and floated away. Ever since this happened people have been trying to debunk it, but unsuccessfully. The latest attempt claims it was a hoax set up by the SAS. Unless they possess a functional UFO there is no way they could have accomplished this. The story angered Colonel Halt who stated the story was entirely silly and an insult to the SAS. There are quite a few interesting things which are related to space which we can look forward to in 2019. You just never know what we might find out there. It is felt many of the most important things will relate to commercial space travel. Ultima Thule is the most distant object we ever visited and is located far beyond Pluto. We have already taken pictures of it with our probe. The craft doing the traveling is NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft which will continue to take photos and study the Kuiper Belt until at least 2021 and maybe longer if something unexpected is found. The Kuiper Belt exists beyond Pluto and is the home for many objects, some believed to be quite large and maybe bigger than the earth. This February NASA’s InSight probe is scheduled to start drilling into Mars. This should be no problem since NASA has said the probe landed perfectly. NASA is going to use instruments known as the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package or HP3. It is expected to drill down to almost 16 feet in places. It is supposed to let us know how much heat is flowing out of the planet. The Juno spacecraft will perform five close flybys of Jupiter. The Japanese have their own special ground-breaking mission scheduled for 2019 and it is known as the Hayabusa-2 probe. The mission consists of a landing on an asteroid named Ryugu. The probe is to collect a sample. The idea is to bring the sample back to earth. This sounds like a plot from a science fiction movie where alien samples are brought back to our planet and kill us all. Many companies want to commercialize as much of space launches and travel as they can, and 2019 should see a tremendous increase in commercial launches. Tests are scheduled for both the Boeing CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX Dragon and they will be both crewed and uncrewed. When we study launches it seems the commercial ones will be cheaper than the government ones. SpaceX will attempt to land a lunar lander built by an Israeli company on the moon. Originally this was part of the Google Lunar XPRIZE. No one succeeded. SpaceX now feels it can do this alone. Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit company is planning to send it first rocket into space in 2019. Remember the probe NASA launched to the sun? It is going to make another solar trip in April 2019. It has been hanging around the sun’s outer corona and is the first probe created by man to get this close to the sun. Could it be we might get some data which could disturb us in some way? You never know. Russia has plenty of launches scheduled for 2019, but they seem to all be in the nature of routine satellite launches or launches connected with the International Space Station. The other big force in space is the European Space Agency or ESA. The ESA has scheduled a probe to be launched in 2019 to study exoplanets which have already been discovered. Exoplanets are those planets located outside our solar system. The probe is named CHEOPS. Routine satellite launches will take place which have many different functions. India is hoping to launch its moon rover on January 31st. It is named Chandrayaan-2. India wants to be the first country to land a rover at the South Pole of the moon.
|
