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Category: space travel – Page 280
Episode 31 — Interstellar Propulsion — What We Need to Make Star Trek Real
Will humanity ever travel to the stars? This is a question for the ages and it remains as open as a deserted stretch of interstate highway. To answer this question, we need an international scientifically-based effort that can chip away at the physics needed to make Star Trek real. Please have a listen to this episode with Guest Marc Millis. Well worth your time.
Propulsion physicist Marc Millis talks about the prospects for fast, efficient interstellar travel. Millis was head of NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Program at Glenn Research Center outside Cleveland for years beginning in the mid-1990s. We discuss why the problem of traveling to the stars is so difficult and what would need to happen to help such dreams become a reality. It’s a lively and irreverent discussion!
Why the Future Will Be Weird with Isaac Arthur
Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur is a YouTube channel which focuses on exploring the depths of concepts in science and futurism. Since its first episode in 2014, SFIA has considered topics ranging from the seemingly mundane, to the extremely exotic, featuring episodes on megastructure engineering, interstellar travel, the future of earth, and the Fermi paradox, among others. Yet regardless of how strange a subject may seem, Isaac always tries to ensure that the discussion is grounded in the known science of today.
Isaac Arthur joins John Michael Godlier on today’s Event Horizon to discuss these subjects, the future past 2020. Thoughts on life extension. Nanotechnology. Artificial intelligence. The Fermi paradox.
What is the most obvious answer to the Fermi paradox?
Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g.
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Astronaut Anne McClain on designing and piloting the next generation of spacecraft
NASA recently announced the astronauts who will be taking part in the Artemis missions, and among them is Anne McClain, who has spent 203 days in orbit and conducted two spacewalks on the ISS. With the space industry looking nothing like it did 10 years ago and new spacecraft and technologies on the rise, McClain share her thoughts about how she and other astronauts would be embracing the future.
Lt. Col. McClain’s time aboard the ISS spanned from December 2018 to June of 2019, meaning her ascent and descent were both aboard Russia’s Soyuz capsules, as astronauts have gotten to and from space since the Shuttle days. The Artemis missions, however, will use a variety of new launch vehicles and spacecraft. And while she didn’t get to fly a Dragon capsule, she did get to check one out while it was docked at the station.
“I was so happy to have flown the Soyuz, because it is such a reliable, basic spacecraft — it’s almost like flying a piece of history — knowing I was going to be able to compare that to other vehicles to in the future,” she said. “I had the opportunity when I was on Space Station when DM-1 flew. And so, being able to float into that and look at their screens, their monitors, you notice right away that the technology has advanced to where it looks like the inside of a commercial airliner.”
NASA 2021: Let’s Go To The Moon
In 2020, we persevered. Now with the blistering energy of the most powerful rocket ever built we step fearlessly into 2021. We will:
🌖🚀 Send the first NASA’s Artemis Program mission to the Moon.
🛰️🌌 Launch NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope into space.
🔴🤖 Achieve a #CountdownToMars landing.
Let’s go: youtu.be/_fRSaLAEW2s
Elon Musk says ‘Building ~1,000 Starships to create a self-sustaining city on Mars’ is SpaceX’s Mission
That’s a lot of ships. 😃
To achieve that ambitious goal, SpaceX could build one hundred Starships per year over the course of ten years. –“Building 100 Starships per year gets to 1000 in 10 years or 100 megatons per year or maybe around 100000 people per Earth-Mars orbital sync,” Musk said in January. SpaceX would launch a Starship fleet approximately every 26 months, which is when Earth and Mars orbits align closer to each other.
Building 100 Starships/year gets to 1000 in 10 years or 100 megatons/year or maybe around 100k people per Earth-Mars orbital sync— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 172020
You can watch SpaceX operations as they work to develop the Starship spacecraft at the South Texas facility in the video below, courtesy of LabPadre via YouTube. In the weeks ahead, SpaceX plans to continue preflight preparations of the Starship SN9 prototype that is awaiting at the launchpad. Meanwhile, teams at the assembly facility are manufacturing multiple vehicles that will also undergo testing next year.
SpaceX will attempt to ‘catch’ Starship’s Super Heavy rocket booster instead of landing it
Tesla will need a landing platform to catch the rocket as it lands. According to Elon Musk its to save mass/weight and speed up the rockets readiness for its next launch.
This is for Tesla’s reusable rocket program.
SpaceX aims to develop a fully reusable Starship and Super Heavy launch vehicle, capable of performing multiple flights per day. Musk shared that not adding landing legs to the Super Heavy rocket “Saves mass & cost of legs & enables immediate repositioning of booster on to launch mount — ready to refly in under an hour,” he said. When asked if the decision to eliminate the legs is due to the high stress the vehicle would experience upon landing Musk responded, “Legs would certainly work, but best part is no part, best step is no step,” he wrote via Twitter.
Saves mass & cost of legs & enables immediate repositioning of booster on to launch mount — ready to refly in under an hour— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 302020
Legs would certainly work, but best part is no part, best step is no step— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 302020
The Ancient Moon’s Missing Magnetism
Simulations rule out plasmas caused by meteoroid impacts as the source of lunar magnetism, supporting the proposal that the ancient moon generated a core dynamo.
Today, the moon lacks a global magnetic field, but this wasn’t always the case. Spacecraft measurements of the moon’s crust and lunar rocks retrieved by the Apollo missions contain remnant magnetization that formed 4 to 3.5 billion years ago in a magnetic field comparable in strength to that of the Earth. Scientists have argued that the source of this was a dynamo — a magnetic field generated by the moon’s churning, molten, metal core. However, research indicates that the moon’s suspected small core may not have been able to generate enough energy to sustain the ancient magnetic field that planetary scientists have inferred from in its rocks.
In a recent Science Advances paper, research scientist Rona Oran and professor of planetary sciences Ben Weiss of the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences examined the plausibility of an alternative hypothesis that has been around since the 1980s that could produce the remnant magnetization in the lunar crust: transient plasmas generated by meteoroid impacts. Here, they describe some of their findings.
Looking Back At 2020 — Tesla/SpaceX/Starlink/5G/mRNA + more
Are you fed up with all the negativity?
Between Tesla, SpaceX (Starship & Starlink), 5G, mRNA vaccines and more, 2020 has been an eventful year full of breakthroughs all set to make our lives better, and ushering in a sci-fi future quicker than ever…so I brought them all together in one video to celebrate the great people working tirelessly to make our future better.
If you want a feel good boost, why not drop by and spend a few mins revelling in the positive stories of 2020.
Have an awesome New Year!!
In Looking Back At 2020 I want to review the year to show that for all the bad, there was still some amazing good and positive stories that refused to take a back seat.