Lifeboat Foundation

A controversial new type of electric propulsion system that physicists say defies Newton’s Laws of Motion, known as the Quantum Drive, has secured a spot on a SpaceX rocket and will launch into low Earth orbit (LEO) this October.

Designed by IVO Ltd., an electronics prototyping company, the promising yet controversial Quantum Drive could change the future of space travel and, if proven to work, would potentially rewrite or expand many of the accepted principles of inertia and motion that have existed for centuries.

Newtonian Physics Says creating inertia Without Propellant is Impossible.

LOS ANGELES – Artificial intelligence, quantum computing and nuclear power are among the key technologies Lockheed Martin sees as important for future space missions.

Through a project called Destination: Space 2050, Lockheed Martin executives are exploring, for example, how AI could assist scientific exploration of locations where communications with remote sensors would be disrupted by high latency.

In that type of environment, “you really can’t interact with the robotic sensors,” David Lackner, Lockheed Martin senior manager strategy and business development, said during a June 28 webinar. “You have to have something that is super autonomous that can deal with unknown unknowns. We’ve got some really interesting causal autonomy tools that … allow the AI to be super smart about running into something that it hasn’t encountered before.”

It will also reduce travel time to Saturn’s moon Titan to just two years.

Pulsar Fusion, a UK-based space firm, is building a nuclear fusion-based rocket engine that could exceed temperatures on the Sun. The construction of the largest-ever fusion rocket engine has begun, and its exhaust speeds could exceed 500,000 miles per hour.

Continue reading “UK space firm is building a nuclear fusion rocket engine that will get hotter than the Sun” »

It squats on the Las Vegas skyline like an enormous spaceship, black and mysterious – until night falls, when it will glow like the Earth from space.

The MSG Sphere won’t open to the public for almost three more months, when U2 christens the entertainment venue with a series of concerts. But anticipation is growing.

Continue reading “This futuristic concert venue in Las Vegas is a giant sphere with the world’s biggest LED screen” »

NASA technicians have installed the heat shield on the Artemis 2 Orion spacecraft, which will carry astronauts around the moon in late 2024.

Woven across our universe is a weblike structure of galaxies called the cosmic web. Galaxies are strung along filaments in this vast web, which also contains enormous voids. Now, astronomers using Webb have discovered an early strand of this structure, a long, narrow filament of 10 galaxies that existed just 830 million years after the big bang. The 3 million light-year.

A light year is the distance that a particle of light (photon) will travel in a year—about 10 trillion kilometers (6 trillion miles). It is a useful unit for measuring distances between stars.

The ARCAFF project aims to use deep learning AI to make better predictions of space weather events and calculate how probable these predictions are, to help protect vital technology and infrastructure.

A new project led by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) is using AI as a way of getting faster and more accurate warnings about space weather events like solar flares.

These solar flares have the potential to disrupt vital technologies and infrastructure, including radio communications, electrical power grids and navigation systems. They can also present risks to spacecraft and astronauts.

Space propulsion company Pulsar Fusion has started construction on a large nuclear fusion chamber in England, as it races to become the first firm to fire a nuclear fusion-powered propulsion system in space.

Nuclear fusion propulsion tech, arguably a golden goose of the space industry, could reduce the travel time to Mars by half and cut the travel time to Titan, Saturn’s moon, to two years instead of 10. It sounds like science fiction, but Pulsar CEO Richard Dinan told TechCrunch in a recent interview that fusion propulsion was “inevitable.”

“You’ve got to ask yourself, can humanity do fusion?” he said. “If we can’t, then all of this is irrelevant. If we can — and we can — then fusion propulsion is totally inevitable. It’s irresistible to the human evolution of space. This is happening, because the application is irresistible.”

We live in an era of renewed space exploration, where multiple agencies are planning to send astronauts to the Moon in the coming years. This will be followed in the next decade with crewed missions to Mars by NASA and China, who may be joined by other nations before long.

These and other missions that will take astronauts beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and the Earth-Moon system require new technologies, ranging from life support and radiation shielding to power and propulsion.

Continue reading “New NASA Nuclear Rocket Plan Aims to Get to Mars in Just 45 Days” »