Sascha Deri is CEO at bluShift Aerospace. He is the man behind the “Starless Rogue” – the long-awaited suborbital sounding rocket powered by a groundbreaking non-toxic, carbon-neutral, bio-derived solid fuel, on which is also the movie devoted.

The company has worked with Knack Factory for the official trailer and it also designed a film poster for this occasion. In addition, Deri directs from a script by Knack Factory, based on real-life events and an ongoing, first-of-its-kind equity crowdfunding campaign on Wefunder, according to a post from the official bluShift’s Facebook profile.

The money raised in the Race To $1 Million will help with testing of MAREVL™ 2.0 and unlock $100,000 in non-dilutive funding from the Maine Technology Institute. After they pass $1 Million, Sascha will draw 5 winners at the monthly webinar.

The company’s goal is “to create an earth-friendly aerospace industry – with an Uber-like space launch service that carries small payloads for paying customers”.

The space observatory has been designed as a successor to NASA and ESA’s Hubble telescope. James Webb will be launched to what is known as Lagrange point 2, or L2, where it will orbit the sun 1.5 million km from Earth.

This vantage point, as well as the infrared capabilities of Webb, will allow scientists to peer further and deeper into the cosmos. Raphael Chevrier, Head of Bid Management and Innovation for Arianespace, told Euronews Next:

“The further we look, the more we go back in time, closer to the origins of the universe and therefore the Big Bang.” 

The French aerospace company will be providing the Ariane 5 heavy launcher that will carry the James Webb telescope into space from the ESA launchpad in French Guiana.

“Webb will be able to look at the formation of the first galaxies, primitive galaxies, and see how they have evolved in time.” added Chevrier.

James Webb can look very far into the universe and the launch will last 27 minutes. There’s also the enormous cost of the project.

The telescope has been built with 12 rocket thrusters. The goal is to course-correct post-launch, reposition itself and maintain its prescribed orbit in space.

It will take the telescope 29 days before it can insert itself into orbit at L2.

The billionaire entrepreneur tweeted that the technology will “also be important for Mars”. On Monday, Musk published on the social media:

“SpaceX is starting a program to take CO2 out of atmosphere & turn it into rocket fuel. Please join if interested”.

The statement came days after the SpaceX and Tesla founder was named Time magazine’s person of the year.

A “clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman” in its piece – that’s how the magazine called him.

The Financial Times newspaper also named him as their person of the year on Wednesday.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was surpassed by Musk`s nomination as the world’s wealthiest person this year.

There is currently no further information on the carbon capture plans from SpaceX.

It is not yet clear how SpaceX would capture carbon and turn it into rocket fuel. Scientific processes do exist, such as the one used by Canadian company Carbon Engineering, which is making liquid fuel with carbon dioxide from the atmosphere which is then combined with hydrogen from water.

In an infographic published on Blue Origin’s website and seen on Wednesday, the company called SpaceX using Starship to transport NASA astronauts to the lunar surface an “immensely complex & high risk” approach. Blue Origin is referring to a criticism that NASA officials made in evaluating Starship for the lunar lander program. Blue Origin wrote:

“There are an unprecedented number of technologies, developments, and operations that have never been done before for Starship to land on the Moon.”

Last Friday, the U.S. Government Accountability Office denied Blue Origin’s protest of NASA awarding SpaceX with a $2.9 billion contract under the Human Landing System program. In three one-page documents, Blue Origin decried NASA’s decision as “wrong for America’s leadership in space” and repeated its prior critique that the space agency “ran an inconsistent and unfair competition” — even though the congressional watchdog ruled that NASA did not. Blue Origin added:

“NASA ran a flawed acquisition and ignored the significant risks of a one provider model.”

The company wants NASA to award a second contract under the original Human Landing System acquisition structure. While NASA has said it would offer future contracts under HLS through Lunar Exploration Transportation Services awards, those contracts are expected to be $45 million or less each.

Blue Origin’s infographic focused on comparison between its crewed lunar lander concept, which looks and operates more akin to previous U.S. landers, and SpaceX’s approach to using a moon-specific version of its Starship rocket.

Beyond criticizing Starship’s complexity, Blue Origin emphasized that SpaceX’s facility in Texas has “never conducted an orbital launch.” Yet Musk’s company has launched more than 100 successful orbital launches with its Falcon 9 rockets, and Bezos’ company has yet to reach orbit at all.

SpaceX is also in the midst of final preparations for Starship’s first orbital launch attempt, having completed a high-altitude launch and landing of a Starship prototype in May.

Blue Origin made additional technical comparisons, noting that SpaceX’s plan requires more than 10 Starship launches to land once on the moon and needs to be refueled in orbit, “a process that has also never been done before.”

Lastly, Blue Origin compared the height of the astronaut exit hatches. Starship’s exit is 126 feet off the ground, and conceptually uses an elevator to bring astronauts to the surface, while the Blue Origin lander is 32 feet off the ground and requires crew drop down a long ladder.

One comparison that Blue Origin did not make was in regard to cost. NASA cited cost as a major factor in its decision to only select one winner under the Human Landing System, due to Congress granting the agency a fraction of its requested budget for the program. SpaceX bid $2.9 billion, while Blue Origin was roughly double at $5.99 billion.

But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is one tech billionaire that’s not following suit. Instead, he unveiled his own futuristic ambitions recently: positioning his company as the center of the so-called metaverse.

The metaverse concept has been somewhat niche, presiding largely in the gaming world, until Zuckerberg pushed it into the limelight this week in an interview with The Verge.

He said Facebook would evolve from a social media company into a “metaverse company“. And Facebook’s Andrew Bosworth said Monday that the company is even building out a designated executive team to oversee progress towards the metaverse vision. It’ll exist within Facebook’s virtual reality branch.

Facebook’s VR and AR technology can currently “teleport you into a room with another person, regardless of physical distance, or to new virtual worlds and experiences,” Bosworth said in the Facebook post:

“But to achieve our full vision of the Metaverse, we also need to build the connective tissue between these spaces — so you can remove the limitations of physics and move between them with the same ease as moving from one room in your home to the next.”

Zuckerberg said he’s banking on the transition to occur over the course of the next five years or so.

The launch of New Shepard’s first crewed flight will be broadcast beginning at 7:30 a.m. EDT (1130 GMT) at BlueOrigin.com and at Space.com. Liftoff is scheduled for 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT), but that will depend on the weather forecast and other technical factors.

A typical New Shepard flight lasts 11 minutes, and a live broadcast with the astronauts will be available at BlueOrigin.com after the landing, Blue Origin said in a press release Monday (July 12). The company will also be sharing mission updates all day via @BlueOrigin on Twitter.

Riding along with Bezos will be Mercury 13 aviator Wally Funk, whom he personally invited to join the crew, along with his brother Mark and a so-far anonymous auction winner who paid $28 million for a seat.

The New Shepard rocket and capsule will launch from Launch Site One, a remote area in the west Texas desert that will be closed to all spectators, even along nearby sections of State Highway 54, Blue Origin said.

Bezos (best known for creating Amazon) founded Blue Origin in 2000 with the hopes of eventually bringing rich space tourists to suborbital space. Sheer altitude has become one of the points in which Blue Origin hopes to differentiate itself from competitor Virgin Galactic, which was founded in 2004 and just launched its own billionaire founder Richard Branson last Sunday (July 11).

Days before Branson’s flight, Blue Origin released an infographic snarkily comparing the two systems and criticizing Virgin Galactic’s design decision to fly below the Kármán line, the 62-mile (100 kilometers) mark that is internationally recognized as the boundary of space. That said, all Virgin Galactic astronauts do soar well above 50 miles (80 km), the demarcation point recognized by NASA, the U.S. military and the Federal Aviation Administration.