Its backers, who include Tom Clancy, a rich novelist, are betting that its radical design will prove superior to dreary old rockets and space-planes.
SpaceX was quick to make the point that the ability to carry on despite an engine failure demonstrates a big advantage of multi-engined rockets like the Falcon (Space Shuttles and Saturn V moon rockets could both do something similar).
But Bigelow argues the balance of risk and reward is changing with low-cost private rockets and his own inflatable space stations, which could be modified for surface use.
Space, rockets and science sprang out of the pages of the pulp science-fiction magazines he bought in Woolworths for threepence each, and which he could not always afford.
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One alternative to Ares, proposed by the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, is to use modified versions of their existing Delta 4 and Atlas 5 rockets both to go to the moon and to resupply the space station, but at lower cost.
Nazi aerospace engineers pioneered the jet engine and their early work on rockets laid the foundations for the post-war space programs of both the United States and the Soviet Union.
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The weight of the lunar module, on top of the command and service module, was the main reason why the Saturn V rockets that shot Apollo astronauts into space needed to be the tallest, heaviest and most powerful ever flown, a record they still hold.
Following the retirement of the American space shuttle in July, the Soyuz rocket is the only means of getting astronauts and cosmonauts to the ISS. August's failure saw manned flights stand down even longer than the six weeks for unmanned Soyuz rockets, and the hiatus put a severe strain on the operation of the space station.
President Obama declined to keep the shuttles going, canceled the planned replacement platform for manned space flight and thereby condemned this country for the foreseeable future to reliance on Russian and perhaps, in due course, Chinese rockets to deliver our astronauts to the space station.
Once in flight, the plane will disengage from its capsule and return to the ground, while the capsule launches multistage booster rockets to propel it into space orbit or to the International Space Station.
This left Russia's Soyuz capsules as the only means of transportation to and from the space station, reducing Russia's ability to sell seats on its rockets.
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Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal, and chief designer for SpaceX and Tesla, makes a strong case that space travel can be far more affordable if we can learn to return and land rockets.
Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, a leading space research center, recently conducted feasibility studies into junk-zapping lasers and garbage-collecting rockets.
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Other primates and mice followed, and the Soviet Union a few years later joining the animal space race when nine dogs went skyward aboard rockets.
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