Lifeboat Foundation

Plus, we can bring along 1.5 tons.

Scientists have outlined the wild way humans could travel past Neptune in under 10 years—with over 1.5 tons of cargo on board.

Continue reading “The Direct Fusion Drive That Could Get Us Past Neptune in 10 Years” »

I just finished the most recent season of The Expanse – my current favourite Sci-Fi series. Unlike most of my other go-to Sci-Fi, The Expanse’s narrative is (thus far) mainly contained to our own Solar System. In Star Trek, ships fly about the galaxy at Faster-Than-Light speeds giving mention to the many light years (or parsecs *cough* Star Wars) travelled to say nothing of sublight journeys within solar systems themselves. The distances between stars is huge. But, for current-day Earthling technology, our Solar System itself is still overwhelmingly enormous. It takes years to get anywhere.

In The Expanse, ships use a fictional sublight propulsion called The Epstein Drive to travel quickly through the Solar System at significant fractions of light speed. We’re not nearly there yet, but we are getting closer with the announcement of a new theoretical sublight propulsion. It won’t be an Epstein drive, but it may come to be known as the Ebrahimi Drive – an engine inspired by fusion reactors and the incredible power of solar Coronal Mass Ejections.

Rocket engines have been the backbone of space exploration lifting humans to the Moon, rovers to Mars, and sending probes outside the Solar System. However, for all their blast-offy awesomeness, they are inherently inefficient and bulky. You can only get so much energy out of rocket fuel. As a result, most of your entire spacecraft is a giant fuel tank. The mass of a rocket destined for Mars could be as much as 78% fuel. To reduce weight, we need more efficient engines.

Elon Musk has given us his findings to why the SpaceX Starship SN 11 exploded above the landing pad.
I explore fixes from a system safety standpoint. See what I recommend.

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Humanity has come a long way in understanding the universe. We’ve got a physical framework that mostly matches our observations, and new technologies have allowed us to analyze the Big Bang and take photos of black holes. But the hypothetical EmDrive rocket engine threatened to upend what we knew about physics… if it worked. After the latest round of testing, we can say with a high degree of certainty that it doesn’t.

If you have memories from the 90s, you probably remember the interest in cold fusion, a supposed chemical process that could produce energy from fusion at room temperature instead of millions of degrees (pick your favorite scale, the numbers are all huge). The EmDrive is basically cold fusion for the 21st century. First proposed in 2001, the EmDrive uses an asymmetrical resonator cavity inside which electromagnetic energy can bounce around. There’s no exhaust, but proponents claim the EmDrive generates thrust.

The idea behind the EmDrive is that the tapered shape of the cavity would reflect radiation in such a way that there was a larger net force exerted on the resonator at one end. Thus, an object could use this “engine” for hyper-efficient propulsion. That would be a direct violation of the conservation of momentum. Interest in the EmDrive was scattered until 2016 when NASA’s Eagelworks lab built a prototype and tested it. According to the team, they detected a small but measurable net force, and that got people interested.

The competition will focus on testing the participants’ physical and mental strength in preparation for spaceflight.

Rocket builder ABL Space signed a long-term agreement for multiple launches with Lockheed Martin, agreeing to provide the defense giant with as many as 58 rockets through the end of the decade.

Lockheed Martin will buy up to 26 of ABL’s RS1 rockets through 2025, with an option for up to 32 additional launches through 2029, ABL announced on Monday.

“Having this assured access to space will accelerate our ability to demonstrate the spacecraft and associated payload technologies we are developing to the meet the future mission needs for our customers,” Lockheed Martin Space executive vice president Rick Ambrose said in a press release.

Circa 2019

SpaceX’s Mars ships won’t be ferrying just the super rich to and from the Red Planet, if everything goes according to Elon Musk’s plan.

The price of a seat aboard SpaceX’s Starship interplanetary vehicle will eventually drop enough to be accessible to a large chunk of the industrialized world’s population, the billionaire entrepreneur predicted over the weekend.

While a Mars rover can explore where no person has gone before, a smaller robot at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia could climb to new heights by mimicking the movements of a lizard.

Simply named X-4, the university’s climbing robot has allowed a team of researchers to test and replicate how a lizard moves in the hope that their findings will inspire next-generation robotics design for disaster relief, remote surveillance and possibly even space exploration.

In a scientific paper published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the team states that lizards have optimized their movement across difficult terrain over many years of evolution.

China has a good chance of becoming the dominant space power in the 21st century, and it’s not just looking to copy NASA on the way to the top. Instead, it’s paying close attention to innovative US companies like SpaceX, writes Eric Berger.