A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website. Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
Mr Musk has long targeted a trip to Mars and has previously said he can get humans to the red planet by 2026. His company, SpaceX, is planning "Red Dragon" missions to Mars to test technology for bigger missions. In a tweet, Mr Musk said that its Dragon 2 spacecraft is "designed to be able to land anywhere in the solar system". But Mr Musk "wouldn't recommend transporting astronauts beyond Earth-moon region" as the internal area of the spacecraft is only the size of a large car. "Wouldn't be fun for longer journeys," he said in a tweet.SpaceX has been developing rockets and has a $1.6bn (£1.08bn) contract with Nasa to supply the International Space Station.
On Wednesday it won an $83m contract from the US Air Force to launch a satellite for GPS navigation services. It is a significant win for the company as, for the last decade, Lockheed Martin and Boeing have been supplying space launches for the military.
Last December SpaceX had another breakthrough, landing its Falcon-9 unmanned rocket upright. That was an important development in its plan to cut the cost of space launches by re-using rockets.
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