Lifeboat Foundation

Orbital Assembly is now aiming to launch not one but two space stations with tourist accommodation: Voyager Station, the renamed original design, is now scheduled to accommodate 400 people and to open in 2027, while new concept Pioneer Station, housing 28 people, could be operational in just three years.

The goal, says Orbital Assembly, is to run a space “business park” home to offices as well as tourists.

Space tourism seems closer than ever before — over the past year, billionaire Virgin founder Richard Branson blasted into suborbital space with his company Virgin Galactic, while Star Trek actor William Shatner became the oldest person in space thanks to a jaunt with Blue Origin.

WASHINGTON — Sierra Space says it is making good progress on its first Dream Chaser spaceplane as the company looks ahead to versions of the vehicle that can carry crews and perform national security missions.

The company provided SpaceNews with images of the first Dream Chaser, named Tenacity, being assembled at its Colorado headquarters. The vehicle’s structure is now largely complete, but there is still more work to install its thermal protection system and other components.

“We have the wings on now. It really looks like a spaceplane,” said Janet Kavandi, president of Sierra Space, during a panel at the AIAA ASCENDx Texas conference in Houston April 28, where she played a video showing work building the vehicle.

It’s a little dusty.

The first helicopter to fly in another planet’s sky captured aerial views of some of the wreckage left behind by its companion rover, Perseverance.

Rocket Lab has been trying to actualize its mission called “There and Back Again.” The company tweeted on Friday that it was targeting May 1 or May 2 for the launch.

SpaceX’s fully reusable Starship, powered by Raptor V2 engines could reach orbit as soon as next month, as Elon Musk previously announced.

The Axiom-1 mission — the first fully private crew to visit the International Space Station — splashed down on Earth on board a SpaceX Crew Dragon on April 26. During that return journey, a camera meant to track meteors caught sight of the spacecraft, the ISS and a blazing fireball all at the same time. Wow.

The European Space Agency Operations Twitter account shared the video on Friday, writing, “An incredible sighting: a meteor strikes, burning up in Earth’s atmosphere, passing by four astronauts cocooned in the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft as it departed from the International Space Station on 26 April, bound for home.”

The meteor is pretty clear in the video. It’s the one dragging out like a fiery smudge heading downward. The ISS is the brightest moving dot, above and to the right of the meteor. Crew Dragon is the fainter dot above the streak of light.

Sending humans virtually anywhere in space beyond the Moon pushes logistics of health, food, and psychology to limits we’re only just beginning to grasp.

A staple solution to these problems in science fiction is to simply put the void-travelers to bed for a while. In a sleep-like state akin to hibernation or torpor, metabolism drops, and the mind is spared the boredom of waiting out endless empty hours.

Unlike faster-than-light travel and wormholes, the premise of putting astronauts into a form of hibernation feels like it’s within grasp. Enough so that even the European Space Agency is seriously looking into the science behind it.

Elon talks about x-risks and making us a multi-planetary species, amongst other things.

What’s on Elon Musk’s mind? In this exclusive conversation with head of TED Chris Anderson, Musk details how the radical new innovations he’s working on — Tesla’s intelligent humanoid robot Optimus, SpaceX’s otherworldly Starship and Neuralink’s brain-machine interfaces, among others — could help maximize the lifespan of humanity and create a world where goods and services are abundant and accessible for all. It’s a compelling vision of a future worth getting excited about. (Recorded at the Tesla Texas Gigafactory on April 6, 2022)

Continue reading “[Exclusive] Elon Musk: A future worth getting excited about | TED | Tesla Gigafactory interview” »

Planetary Protection — how strict should the guidelines be to protect our home planet, to protect other worlds?

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Continue reading “Three Myths of Planetary Protection” »