Musk may have to pay more taxes and he’s not happy about it (of course he’s not).
Elon Musk may have to pay more taxes as part of a proposed United States budget. Here’s what it means for the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s Mars plans.
Category: space
Creating the most reusable launch vehicle, ever.
Far from the Space Race where billionaires are outwitting one another to build colonies and private stations in space, a quiet YouTuber has built a water rocket that uses a parachute to gently return to Earth.
We are always on the lookout for interesting bits of engineering. While we cover the achievements of private companies with as much enthusiasm as we have for space technology, there is something very soothing and peaceful about watching a water rocket go up from a launch site that is nothing more than a lush green meadow and an overcast sky.
Thanks to the YouTube channel The Q, you can sit back and enjoy this beautiful launch powered by just air and water; in case you want to go back to the school days and do it all over again over the weekend, the video presents instructions on how to make the rocket as well.
Full Story:
A new chapter in physics is here, says a team that hunted for a key building block of the Universe.
Tokyo space startup Gitai Japan successfully conducted a technology demonstration of its autonomous robotic arm inside the International Space Station last week, a key milestone as the company prepares to provide robotics as a service in space.
The S1 robotic arm performed two tasks: operating cables and switches, and assembling structures and panels. These tasks — common crew activities — can be used in a general-purpose way for a range of in-space activities. The successful demo raised what NASA calls the “technology readiness level” of the Gitai robot to TRL 7. There are nine TRLs in total and hitting all of them will be critical for Gitai commercializing its robots.
The demonstration was performed inside space company Nanoracks’ Bishop Airlock, the world’s first (and only) commercial airlock to be attached to the exterior of the station. Nanoracks — which announced plans last week to launch a fully private commercial space station with Voyage Space and Lockheed Martin — also furnished on-orbit operations, data downlink and the launch opportunity.
“…The authors modified a well-used climate model for exoplanet research and applied it to the planet in Dune. The work was carried out in their spare time and is intended as an appropriate outreach piece to demonstrate how climate scientists use mathematical models to better understand our world and exoplanets…”
Looks like the Kingdom of Jordan to me. 😉
Is Dune scientifically plausible? We ran a climate model to find out.
The comprehensive maps of the entire observable Universe is now in development.
A Co-founder of Apple has reported that his new organization is moving towards the objective of building the ‘Google maps of space’.
It wasn’t too quite a while in the past that a prime supporter of Apple declared he was joining the private space industry with an organization called Privateer.
That Apple prime supporter is in all honesty Steve Wozniak, and part of the way through September, Wozniak declared Privateer Space, a space-based organization that is reason remains covered in secret. What we do think about Privateer Space is that it anticipates handling the steadily developing issue of room garbage, however, how the organization will tackle this issue is obscure.
The energetic phenomena known as Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are one of the greatest cosmic mysteries today. These mysterious flashes of light are visible in the radio wave part of the spectrum and usually last only a few milliseconds before fading away forever. Since the first FRB was observed in 2,007 astronomers have looked forward to the day when instruments of sufficient sensitivity would be able to detect them regularly.
That day has arrived with the completion of the 500-Meter FAST Radio Telescope (aka. Tianyan, “Eye of Heaven”). Since it commenced operations, this observatory has vastly expanded the number of detected FRBs. In fact, according to research led by the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAO/CAS), the observatory detected a total of 1,652 independent bursts from a single source in 47 days.
The research, which recently appeared in the journal Nature, was conducted by researchers from the Commensal Radio Astronomy FAST Survey (CRAFTS) project. CRAFTS includes researchers from the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and multiple universities in China, Australia, and the U.S.
FlexSail: Solar Sails and Tech Revolutions — Kent Nebergall — 2021 Mars Society Virtual Convention
Posted in bioengineering, economics, environmental, genetics, government, information science, robotics/AI, solar power, space, sustainability | Leave a Comment on FlexSail: Solar Sails and Tech Revolutions — Kent Nebergall — 2021 Mars Society Virtual Convention
Track code: TD-3
Abstract:
Solar Sails are at the same stage of engineering development as electric motors were in the 1830’s. Each attribute of solar flux has been examined in isolation, such as photon, proton, plasma, and electrodynamic systems. This talk recommends designing a simple baseline system that converges multiple propulsion methods into optimized systems, as is currently done with electric motors. Many convergences can come from this solution space. Once a baseline design is created, AI genetic algorithms can “flight test” and refine the designs in simulation to adjust proportions and geometry. Once a base design is refined, a second AI evolution pass would design fleet systems that flock like birds to optimize performance. These could fly as a protective shield around Mars crewed fleets, provide space based solar power, deploy rapid reaction probes for interstellar comets, and be used in NEO asteroid mining. In the long term, fleets of solar energy management vehicles can provide orbital Carrigan event protection and Martian solar wind protection for terraforming. This talk is also a case study in how technology revolutions happen, and how to accelerate the creation and democratization of technical solutions.
From the 24th Annual International Mars Society Convention, held as a Virtual Convention worldwide on the Internet from October 14–17, 2021. The four-day International Mars Society Convention, held every year since 1,998 brings together leading scientists, engineers, aerospace industry representatives, government policymakers and journalists to talk about the latest scientific discoveries, technological advances and political-economic developments that could help pave the way for a human mission to the planet Mars.
Conference Papers and some presentations will be available on www.MarsPapers.org.
For more information on the Mars Society, visit our website at www.MarsSociety.org.
#MarsSociety #MarsSocCon2021
The infamous twin paradox sends the astronaut Alice on a blazing-fast space voyage. When she returns to reunite with her twin, Bob, she finds that he has aged much faster than she has. It’s a well-known but perplexing result: Time slows if you’re moving fast.
Gravity does the same thing. Earth — or any massive body — warps space-time in a way that slows time, according to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. If Alice lived her life at sea level and Bob at the top of Everest, where Earth’s gravitational pull is slightly weaker, he would again age faster. The difference on Earth is modest but real — it’s been measured by putting atomic clocks on mountaintops and valley floors and measuring the difference between the two.
Physicists have now managed to measure this difference to the millimeter. In a paper posted earlier this month to the scientific preprint server arxiv.org, researchers from the lab of Jun Ye, a physicist at JILA in Boulder, Colorado, measured the difference in the flow of time between the top and the bottom of a millimeter-tall cloud of atoms.
Georgia Tech scientists believe that microbes could be the key to producing the rocket fuel needed to take humans from Mars back to Earth.