Lifeboat Foundation

Amy Shira Teitel — Motherboard

One night in the spring of 1914, what appeared to be an impossibly large comet whizzed through the skies over Innsbruck, the capital city of Tyrol in western Austria. It terrified the locals; it was too big and too low in the sky to be something as innocent and ordinary as an actual comet or a planet. It turned out to be something equally innocuous, however alien: a rocket-powered model airplane. Nineteen-year-old high school student Max Valier had launched his model with a firecracker as its engine. It was the first in a series of rocket-powered vehicles he would test in his short lifetime, all in the hope of eventually seeing rockets carry men into space.

Read more

Private Space exploration is gaining a lot of attention in the media today. It is expected to be the next big thing after social media, technology, and probably bio fuels . Can we take this further? With DARPA sponsoring the formation of the 100 Year Starship Study (100YSS) in 2011, can we do interstellar propulsion in our life times?

The Xodus One Foundation thinks this is feasible. To that end the Foundation has started the KickStarter project Ground Zero of Interstellar Propulsion to fund and accelerate this research. This project ends Fri, May 9 2014 7:39 AM MDT.

The community of interstellar propulsion researchers can be categorized into three groups, those who believe it cannot be done (Nay Sayers Group – NSG), those who believe that it requires some advanced form of conventional rockets (Advanced Rocket Group – ARG), and those who believe that it needs new physics (New Physics Group – NPG).

The Foundation belongs to the third group, the New Physics Group. The discovery in 2007 of the new massless formula for gravitational acceleration g=τc^2 , where τ is the change in time dilation over a specific height divided by that height, led to the inference that there is a new physics for interstellar propulsion that is waiting to be discovered.

Continue reading “Ground Zero of Interstellar Propulsion” »

By Hotelier Middle East Staff

Virgin Galactic — backed by the Abu Dhabi government’s Aabar Investments — is expected to launch its first space flight within three months, marking the first commercial trip into outer space in history.

Branson, who also spoke about his plans to launch commercial space flights between London and Australia during a recent trip to Dubai, said if the flights are commercially successful there were numerous plans for space-related enterprises.

“If we can get enough people wanting to fly [to space] we can start building Virgin hotels in space, we can start doing trips to Mars, we can colonise Mars, we can start pulling asteroids back to Earth to see what minerals they have got in them,” he said during an interview on The Jonathan Ross show in the UK on Saturday.

Read more

By Katie Lobosco — CNN Money


The brothers, known for their legal battle over the creation of Facebook (FB, Fortune 500), are going to space and paying for it with Bitcoins. Take that, Mark Zuckerberg.

The twins bought tickets, valued at $250,000 each, for a ride to space with Virgin Galactic. That’s about 375 Bitcoins, at Wednesday’s price.

They think of their purchase “as seed capital” supporting new technologies they have high hopes for.

Read more

By Harry Corlett — SpaceNews
Neil Armstrong is dead. The space shuttle program is no more. The Constellation program has been canceled, and the main spacecraft is a wheezy 50-year-old Soyuz. Our cosmic escapades feel distant. All those memories of daring men and women of “The Right Stuff” will soon be lost in time, like tears in rain, unless as a species we recognize the urgent need to venture to the stars.

On Jan. 31, NASA honored all the members of Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia who perished while “furthering the cause of exploration and discovery.” Surely they would be devastated that their bravery and sacrifice might have been in vain as the great American pioneer flame gutters in the winds of political expediency.

Read more

By Eduard Gismatullin — Irish Examiner

More than 70 individuals with a combined wealth of $200bn (€145bn) are investing in space projects including travel, Knight Frank said ahead of its release of The Wealth Report 2014 on Wednesday.

A suborbital trip from London to Sydney will take about two hours and 12 minutes or one-tenth the time of flying by plane.

Continue reading “Property investors to use space travel” »

LIST OF UPDATES (FEBRUARY 24 THROUGH MARCH 02/2014). By Mr. Andres Agostini at The Future of Scientific Management, Today! At http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC

Brain signals from a primate directly move paralyzed limbs in another primate ‘avatar’
http://www.kurzweilai.net/brain-signals-from-a-primate-direc…ate-avatar

Rice’s carbon nanotube fibers outperform copper
http://www.kurzweilai.net/rices-carbon-nanotube-fibers-outperform-copper

Single-chip device to provide real-time ultrasonic 3D images from inside the heart and blood vessels
http://www.kurzweilai.net/single-chip-device-to-provide-real…od-vessels

Continue reading “The Future of Scientific Management, Today!” »

Space.com  | by  Leonard David

Is it time to push the "up" button on the space elevator?

A space elevator consisting of an Earth-anchored tether that extends 62,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) into space could eventually provide routine, safe, inexpensive and quiet access to orbit, some researchers say.

Read more

Continue reading “Can Quiet, Efficient 'Space Elevators' Really Work?” »

THE OMNISCIENT TRUTH ABOUT OUTER-SPACE INTELLIGENCE AND WHAT THE OFFICIAL ESTABLISHMENT HAS TO DECLARE ABOUT IT! BY MR. ANDRES AGOSTINI.

I have the glory to have read every book by Dr. Raymond Kurzweil with the sole exception of “Transcend.”

Dr. Kurzweil is an engineer graduate from grandiose M.I.T. (the technological avant-garde within the Ivy League universities).

Continue reading “The Omniscient Truth About Outer-Space Intelligece And What The Official Establishment Has To Declare About It!” »