By Alex

The first space race occurred in the 1960s. It was a heated battle between the United States and the now defunct Soviet Union. Now, in 2019 a new heated battle for privatization of space travel has arisen. There are four main competitors.

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SpaceX	Virgin	Blue Origin	ULA
Founded and run by eccentric billionaire owner Elon Musk, SpaceX is best known for its extremely successful Falcon 9 and launching a car into space on the Falcon Heavy, a variant of the Falcon 9. The Falcon 9 is a 23 story tall twin stage rocket that has a reusable first stage. The Falcon 9 has around half the government contracts for national security and the International Space Station, who they supply. The Falcon 9 is also used in the private sector.	English conglomerate Virgin has two units that deal with space travel. The first, Virgin Galactic, is known for its quad engine, dual body plane, White KnightTwo, which launches an eight seater reusable spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, from between its wings. At the end on 2018, Virgin launched SpaceShipTwo into sub-orbit with passengers in it for the first time, starting its era of space tourism (only $250,000 a pop!). Virgin’s second branch, Virgin Orbit, plans to launch smaller, lighter cargo rockets from the wing of a 747. Although this is only in prototype stage, it still works and will be somewhat revolutionary, as this is a less expensive way to launch a rocket, by around $70,000,000	Blue Origin, a space flight company run by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, specializes in suborbital rockets. The first rocket is New Shepard, named after one of the first American astronauts, Alan Shepard. It is nearing the end of its testing stage, and will soon not only carry experiments, but humans. Just like Virgin and SpaceX, the New Shepard is reusable. Blue Origin has a second rocket, although only on paper.They have designed the New Glenn, named after famed astronaut John Glenn. The New Glenn is a is a two stage, 31 story rocket with nine engines. Although it has not yet been built, it has already secured national security contracts and others in the private sector, most likely because it has two times as much storage then any other rocket on the market.	ULA is an acronym for United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between national security contractors Boeing and Lockheed Martin space divisions. They hold the other half of the United States space contracts. They are producers of the Atlas family, and the Delta family, both of which are cargo rockets. ULA is also working on the starliner, a replacement for the cargo pod atop the Atlas 5, so the Atlas  can launch astronauts, and is expected to start ferrying astronauts to the ISS this year, limiting our dependence on Russia’s Soyuz for transportation.

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Photo Gallery

The Falcon 9 illuminated at its Vandenberg, CA launchpad.

An under view of Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo, with SpaceShipTwo underneath.

Virgin Orbit’s 747-400 with the LauncherOne attached.

New Shepard illuminated at night at its west Texas launch site.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard flight path. The Karman line is defined as the start of space and you can earn US astronaut wings if you go above it.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn Rocket, as compared to a human (Which is the tiny grey spec in the bottom right corner).

A ULA Delta IV heavy taking off in California

A ULA Delta IV on the launch pad

A ULA Atlas 5 approaching the launch pad. This launch is carrying the Mars probe Curiosity.

By Smaran

In every end there is a beginning. For every beginning there is an end. When life is take away, life is also given. We all know that the standard black hole devours and destroys and it is the end of all things. We know that once something enters the gravitational field and has passed the point of no return, kaput. But what if i told you that a black hole actually could give life. When you think about it while factoring in the information and evidence, it starts to piece together so just here me out. The incredibly immense gravitational pull of the black hole – what we call its tidal force, the same force that the Moon exerts to cause the ocean tides (only on a much larger scale) – will tear the star apart, and devour, or accrete, the remains. But if the star is a white dwarf, the evolutionary endpoint of low- to middle-mass stars like our Sun, something interesting can happen. In these white dwarves, hydrogen fusion has already come to a halt before they get gobbled up. But as the black hole’s tidal forces simultaneously stretches and compresses the star in opposing directions in what is called a tidal disruption event, the compression can actually reignite fusion in the star’s core, even if just for a few seconds, according to new simulations. The destroyer of worlds instead feeds the spark of life.

But here’s the catch: this can only happen if it’s an intermediate mass black hole. For some reason, those seem to be missing from the Universe. There are two categories of black holes in the Universe. There are your regular stellar-mass black holes, typically below around 100 times the mass of the Sun. These are the ones whose collisions are responsible for gravitational wave observations. Then there are the supermassive black holes, ranging from a lower limit of  around 100,000 solar masses, but ranging up to millions or billions of solar masses. Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, is about 4 million solar masses. But the problem is that neither stellar-mass nor supermassive black holes will produce the white dwarf resurrection effect. It is basically as Goldilocks being the dwarf star and the little bear’s stuff being the teenage black holes. A stellar-mass black hole is quite physically small, which means that initially the white dwarf will engulf it; and a supermassive black hole’s tidal forces are so strong that the star will fall into it before it can be disrupted. Only the teenage sized black holes provide just enough leeway for the process to happen.

But for the sake of the article, lets just say that it actually happened. If a white dwarf was to be swallowed by an intermediate mass black hole, the reignited nuclear fusion can convert the typical white dwarf composition of helium, carbon, and oxygen into heavier elements such as iron and calcium. Simulations show that, when the white dwarf is a little farther away from the black hole, more calcium is produced; but when it’s closer, more iron is produced. Since not all of the star ends up devoured by the black hole, these elements can then be blown out into space, where eventually they’ll be incorporated into new stars. So it is basically a win win for both the black hole because it is getting more food and for the universe because it just had a couple of new stars born.

And you can make your own star for the low low price of your soul, Mc. Scrooge’s bank account (Duck Tales), and the Eye of Vishnu. If you give me that then with a little compression here, a time machine there, a white dwarf over there, and a whole lot of matter all the way over there (I don’t know why we need matter but what’s the matter with you), you will make your own little star! Batteries not included.

Like how for every beginning there is an end, this is the end of this article and this series, and thank you for reading the black holes series. If you have any ideas, please ask this email account, smaran.tadepalli@gmail.com and no it is not my real name and my actual account.

By Smaran

Black holes, a bundle of information that no one can read. They shatter what was regular physics and create a whole new dimension. What is a black hole? Black holes are naturally formed when the largest stars, those with more than 20 times the mass of the Sun, collapse violently and explode. Here the density of matter is so high, the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light.

Think of it this way, space is a blanket held taut and the objects in space make divots in it depending on the mass of the object. The larger the object’s mass, the bigger the divot. A black hole makes a divot so deep that the speed that you need to escape the black holes is faster than the speed of light, which the speed of light itself is impossible (speed of light: 299,792,458 m/s).

Scientists can find black holes by seeing warped light. Around a black hole, light is warped because of the black hole’s gravitational pull, which is kind of obvious. Also, when they pass between you and another object you can see the space distortion and a red aura if the black hole is eating something. They even give of the radiation in the ultraviolet spectrum. But the most noticeable act of a black hole is when the overload and spit out lots of energy that can strip planets and maybe even whole solar systems of their life and each of their planet’s atmosphere.

If you are scared about black holes and think that no one will ever remember you if you’ve sucked into one, don’t worry because your image will always be on the surface/ event horizon of the black hole and everyone who is unfortunate enough to come that close to a black hole will see it thanks to the magic of time dilation. If you think that your image will fade away then don’t because through the magic of time dilation your image will stay there and just redden one tint per eternity for the low low price of you dying to a black hole. The only thing you should fear from a black hole is the agonizing pain of your body stretching as it gets stretched until it is one atom thin, but it all happens in a flash for you but the viewer never sees it happen through the magic of time dilation for the low low price of you dying to a black hole.