Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: space travel

UCF physics professor Dan Britt has been named to the New Horizons mission team as the spacecraft heads to the Kuiper Belt. He’s also just landed a grant to help create fake asteroid material, which will help NASA and private companies prepare the technology needed to mine asteroids and eventually other planets.

“It’s been a pretty good month,” Britt said from Boulder, Colo., where he’s working on another proposal for NASA. “This is a great time to be in this field.”

Britt joins the team responsible for sending New Horizons to Pluto and which made Professor Named to NASA Mission, Lands Grant to Plan for Space Minings last year when it unveiled the first pictures of Pluto’s surface. Mountain ranges and perhaps even oceans under its frozen surface have been recorded by the spacecraft.

Read more

SpaceX has entered into an agreement with NASA for a Dragon mission to Mars, set to take place as early as 2018. Known as “Red Dragon”, the variant of the Dragon 2 spacecraft will be launched by the Falcon Heavy rocket, ahead of a soft landing on the surface of Mars. The spacecraft is set to carry a suite of scientific instrumentation as part of the NASA agreement.

Red Dragon:

SpaceX’s Martian ambitions are well known, although this year will finally see an outline of the ambitious roadmap that it hopes will eventually result in a human colony on the Red Planet.

Read more

SpaceX has been teasing potential Mars plans for a while now, but the company just announced a launch date—and it’s soon. They plan to launch to the surface of Mars in 2018.

Especially intriguing is that the announcement refers to the spacecraft as the “Red Dragon.” Does this mean that we’ll be seeing an update to the spacecraft so that it can handle the conditions of the red planet? We hope so.

Read more

Getting beyond the commercial space hype; will the new captains of the space industry really bring about interplanetary commerce? Here’s my take with views from two execs at The Space Frontier Foundation.

The entrepreneurial captains of the new commercial space frontier are sometimes brash, sometimes brazen, and often larger than life. But are they really going to get us beyond low-Earth orbit (LEO)?

For those of us who grew up in an era when NASA budgets were a tenet of Cold War geopolitics, it’s understandable that we approach this new phase of private space funding with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. But are we Apollo-ites simply being too skeptical?

After all, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has proven that it can deliver goods to the International Space Station (ISS) and is in the midst of testing reusable rockets. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has successfully tested its own reusable rocket. And Robert Bigelow’s Bigelow Aerospace has just made good on its inflatable habitat now attached to the ISS.

Read more

Nice

WASHINGTON — NASA is aiming to send astronauts to Mars sometime in the 2030s, but a new technology could help scientists explore the surface of the Red Planet — from its sprawling craters to its enormous volcanoes — from right here on Earth.

Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, partnered with Microsoft to develop software that uses the tech giant’s HoloLens headsets to allow scientists to virtually explore and conduct scientific research on Mars.

The HoloLens is an augmented reality platform that “allows us to overlay imagery on top of the world and integrate it into that world as I’m looking at it,” Tony Valderrama, a software engineer at JPL, said Sunday (April 24) in a demonstration of the technology here at the Smithsonian magazine’s “Future Is Here” festival. [Photos: Microsoft’s HoloLens Transforms Surroundings with Holographic Tech].

Read more

We’re in an exploding evolution state for technology across all industry sectors and consumer markets.

3 to next 5 years — we see IoT, Smartphones, Wearables, AI (bots, drones, smart devices and machines), 3D printing, commercialization of space, CRISPR, Liq Biopsies, and VR & AR tech.

5 to next 8 years — we will see more BMI technology, smart body parts, QC & other Quantum Tech, Humanoid AI tech, bio-computing, early stage space colonization and mining expansion in space, smart medical tech., and an early convergence of human & animals with technology. 1st expansion of EPA in space exploration due to mining and over mining risks as well as space colonization. New laws around Humanoids and other technologies. Smartphones no longer is mass use due to AR and BMI technology and communications.

Beyond 10 years, Singularity (all things connected) and immortality is offered.

Read more

Nice

Quantum computers have been hailed for their revolutionary potential in everything from space exploration to cancer treatment, so it might not come as a surprise that Europe is betting big on the ultra-powerful machines.

A new €1 billion ($1.13 billion) project has been announced by the European Commission aimed at developing quantum technologies over the next 10 years and placing Europe at the forefront of “the second quantum revolution.”

The Quantum Flagship announced will be similar in size, time scale and ambition as the EC’s other ongoing Flagship projects: the Graphene Flagship and the Human Brain Project. As well as quantum computers, the initiative will aim to address other aspects of quantum technologies, including quantum secure communication, quantum sensing and quantum simulation.

Read more

NASA will hold a teleconference press briefing on Thursday, April 21, to detail its latest advancements in solar electric propulsion for deep-space missions. The briefing will begin at 11:30 a.m. EDT (1530 GMT) on NASA’s News Audio page, and will be embedded below if possible once it goes live. (Note: The window below will play NASA TV until the briefing time.)

From NASA:

“Tuesday’s award of a contract to Aerojet Rocketdyne, Inc. for the design and development of an advanced electric propulsion system is the latest SEP milestone. A new electric propulsion system could significantly advance the nation’s commercial space capabilities, and enable future deep space missions, including NASA’s Journey to Mars.”

Read more