Lifeboat Foundation

NASA and the U.S. Dept. of Energy have come together to solicit design proposals for a nuclear reactor that will power Lunar and Martian exploration!

Over the next fifteen years, multiple space agencies and their commercial partners intend to mount crewed missions to the Moon and Mars. In addition to placing “footprints and flags” on these celestial bodies, there are plans to establish the infrastructure to allow for a long-term human presence. To meet these mission requirements and ensure astronaut safety, several technologies are currently being researched and developed.

At their core, these technologies are all about achieving self-sufficiency in terms of resources, materials, and energy. To ensure that these missions have all the energy they need to conduct operations, NASA is developing a Fission Surface Power (FSP) system that will provide a safe, efficient, and reliable electricity supply. In conjunction with solar cells, batteries, and fuel cells, this technology will allow for long-term missions to the Moon and Mars in the near future.

Continue reading “NASA is Building a Nuclear Reactor to Power Lunar and Martian Exploration!” »

NASA’s Europa Clipper scientists are devising a variety of creative strategies to find active plumes when the spacecraft arrives at this moon of Jupiter in 2030, though they’re not relying on plumes to understand what’s going on inside Europa.

On Christmas Eve 1968, the first mission to the Moon changed how we view our home planet forever.

On Christmas Eve, three days after its launch, Apollo 8 reached its destination, successfully carrying humans closer to the Moon than ever before. Finally, the US had beaten the Soviets to a major lunar milestone.

It would have been possible for the crew to simply loop around the Moon and come straight back to Earth. But since the mission was running smoothly (bar a case of space sickness on the part of Commander Frank Borman), the order was given to enter lunar orbit.

Continue reading “Apollo 8: the Christmas mission around the Moon” »

It will take a lot to get to Mars.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wants to send humans to Mars and beyond, but he may face a hurdle on Earth first.

Elon Musk thinks SpaceX needs to ramp up production of its next-generation Raptor engine soon or face potentially dire consequences, according to media reports.

Raptors will power Starship, the huge, fully reusable vehicle that SpaceX is developing to take people and cargo to the moon, Mars and other distant destinations. Each Starship will need a lot of Raptors — 33 for the giant first-stage booster, called Super Heavy, and six for the upper-stage spacecraft, known as Starship.

Future predictions in 2019 are notoriously hard to make. What will life be like in 2050? Technology does not progress in a steady state, it accelerates.
And usually the technology advances faster than we can imagine it, let alone predict it. But still many predictions that were made in the past have turned out to be true, even though they were unimaginable at the time that the prediction was made.

In 1,865, Jules Verne, the author who wrote 20,000 leagues under the sea, and journey to the center of the earth, predicted that we would send people to the moon, and it would precisely 3 people, from of all places, Florida. And he even described weightlessness in space. He had no way to know 150 year ago how gravity would behave in space.

Continue reading “10 Future Predictions to Blow Your Mind from World’s Best Futurists” »

For scanning underground structures and caves. Maybe scanning buildings, and doing security stuff, but doors would be a problem. Also too loud, but would be a nice start point for an Ion Drive flight system.

By Jim Magill

Looking like a micro-sized version of the Death Star, the Dronut X1, which Boston-based start-up Cleo Robotics released for commercial use earlier this month, is the first professional-grade bi-rotor ducted-fan drone – a drone without exposed rotor blades – built to conduct inspections in close-quartered and hazardous environments.

Continue reading “Drone Without Exposed Rotor Blades the Dronut” »

The two billionaires are locked in a race to send humans to space, with Musk’s SpaceX far in front of Bezos’ Blue Origin venture. But the two differ on what to do when humanity arrives in space: Musk wants to establish a self-sustaining city on Mars, while Bezos would rather see humans orbiting Earth in giant space stations.

Musk’s vision receives a lot of publicity, but space consultant Rand Simberg tells Inverse that Bezos’ goal is the “more expansive.”

“Elon is what [science fiction writer Isaac] Asimov would have called a planetary chauvinist,” he says. “He thinks people need to be on planets. He wants to be a multi-planet species. That’s nice, I guess. But Bezos actually has a more expansive vision.”

Today’s quantum computers are complicated to build, difficult to scale up, and require temperatures colder than interstellar space to operate. These challenges have led researchers to explore the possibility of building quantum computers that work using photons—particles of light. Photons can easily carry information from one place to another, and photonic quantum computers can operate at room temperature, so this approach is promising. However, although people have successfully created individual quantum “logic gates” for photons, it’s challenging to construct large numbers of gates and connect them in a reliable fashion to perform complex calculations.