Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: space

The global space economy is growing, generating more than $300 billion a year in space-related activities, and attracting new, diverse participants and investors. A recent study also found more private money invested in commercial space development in 2015 than in the previous 15 years combined.

NASA has selected six new research proposals to understand the effective drivers of investments in the space economy.

In its second call for economic studies related to investments in the space economy, the agency picked studies that cover topics ranging from in-space manufacturing in low-Earth orbit (LEO) to the economics of resources obtained from near-Earth objects (NEO), such as asteroids.

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Part 2

In part 1 of the journey, we saw the leading observations that needed explanation. Explanations that we want to do through the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. No technical and expert knowledge in these theories yet, only scratches of its implications. So let us continue.

THE RELATIVITY THEORY Deducing from the Hubble expansion, the galaxies were close in the distant past but certainly not in this current form as the telescopes now see them receding. In fact, if they were receding it also means they were expanding.

Therefore, when we reverse the receding galaxies into the far distant past they should end up at a point somewhere sometime with the smallest imaginable extension, if that extension is conceivable at all. Scientists call it the singularity, a mathematical deduction from the relativity theory. How did this immeasurable Universe made of clusters of galaxies we now see ever existed in that point called singularity?

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When Khoshnevis imagines the future of colonies on Mars, he imagines very tall buildings, with a lot of protection from the elements.

“Gravity is one third of Earth’s, and therefore with less construction material we can build stronger structures out there, therefore we can build much taller,” he says. “The cost of energy for elevators and all that will be much less. Theoretically everything could be three times as high as here with the same consumption of energy,” he says.

A human utopia on Mars will soon be technologically feasible, but it will take some political will to get there, he says. It will take sustained resources and effort over decades to get the ball rolling, and keep it moving forward. “There really has to be philosophical support for this — that this is the future of humanity, Mars is the closest thing to a livable planet, so we should not miss the opportunity — we should dedicate a good effort in making sure that we go there and we change the conditions of Mars to make it habitable, because one planet is not enough for this amazing species.”

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Got a grand burning a hole in your pocket? You could get a new laptop — or you could send this tiny, palm-sized satellite to space. That’s what a team of engineers at Arizona State hope, anyway: their “FemtoSats” are meant to be as cheap a space-bound platform as has ever been devised.

At just 3cm per side and 35 grams (that’s about 1.2 inches and 0.077 pounds, dogs of the Imperial system), the SunCube 1F is the prototype FemtoSat. It’s powered by a salvaged scrap of solar panel (they don’t make them small enough off the shelf), the tiny unit includes propulsion, imaging, communication, and data collection.

“The design standard bootstraps from the Cal Poly CubeSat standard and is extensible, allowing major customization,” wrote Jekan Thanga, the ASU assistant professor who heads up the project, in an email to TechCrunch.

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