Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: space

In an interview newly published by Popular Mechanics, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shared his thoughts on colonizing Mars — from how the first settlers will grow food to the friendly vibe he envisions at the first base on the Red Planet.

“For having an outdoorsy, fun atmosphere, you’d probably want to have some faceted glass dome, with a park, so you can walk around without a suit,” Musk told the magazine. “Eventually if you terraform the planet, then you can walk around without a suit. But for say, the next 100-plus years, you’ll have to have a giant pressurized glass dome.”

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WFIRST ain’t your grandma’s space telescope. Despite having the same size mirror as the surprisingly reliable Hubble Space Telescope, clocking in at 2.4 meters across, this puppy will pack a punch with a gigantic 300 megapixel camera, enabling it to snap a single image with an area a hundred times greater than the Hubble.

With that fantastic camera and the addition of one of the most sensitive coronagraphs ever made – letting it block out distant starlight on a star-by-star basis – this next-generation telescope will uncover some of the deepest mysteries of the cosmos.

Oh, and also find about a million exoplanets.

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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wants to send its first passengers to space as soon as this year. Bezos spoke during a private event at the Yale Club in New York City, Business Insider reports.

“This year. This is the first time I’ve ever been saying, ”this year.” For a few years, I’ve been saying, ”next year,” Bezos told Jeff Foust, senior staff writer at Space News, during the event.

The billionaire’s private space tourism company Blue Origins has been making some big strides towards that goal in recent years. Its flagship suborbital vehicle New Shepard reached the so-called Kármán line (62 miles or 100 km), widely agreed to be the edge of outer space, for the first time during a test flight in 2015.

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Thanks to The Netherlands-based Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), 300,000 new galaxies have just been discovered.

LOFAR, a massive radio telescope network, was designed to pick up low radio frequencies, which are invisible to other telescopes. Using this method, it found traces of radiation that forms when galaxies are merging.

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Understanding the global carbon cycle provides scientists with vital clues about the planet’s habitability.

It’s the reason why the Earth has a clement stable climate and a low dioxide atmosphere compared to that of Venus, for instance, which is in a runaway greenhouse state with high surface temperatures and a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere.

One major difference between Earth and Venus is the existence of active plate tectonics on Earth, which make our environment unique within our solar system.

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