Lifeboat Foundation

The Moon is a hot destination right now — especially for NASA, which wants to send people back to the lunar surface, but also for the private space industry. The most ambitious private lunar exploits are still many years off, but already, three companies claim they’ll be putting small robotic landers on the Moon in the next two years, amping up a small space race.

So far, no private entity has landed something successfully on the Moon. Only three government superpowers — the United States, China, and Russia — have ever been able to gently touch down vehicles on the lunar surface, and the Indian government may become the fourth in September. An Israeli nonprofit, SpaceIL, attempted to land the first private spacecraft on the Moon in April, but an early engine shutdown caused the vehicle to crash into the lunar surface instead. That means the door is still open for one of these three companies to make the first private lunar landing.

After delays, the prototype version of Elon Musk’s Mars rocket could soon get the go-ahead to rise up.

Vulcan rocket on Bezos engines.

The first American spacecraft expected to land on the moon in nearly 50 years will be an unmanned robotic lander.

The aerospace company Astrobotic Technology told Reuters it expects to launch the spacecraft named Peregrine in the summer of 2021 from Florida’s Cape Canaveral. The company said Peregrine will be the first American spacecraft to land on the moon since Apollo astronauts last touched down there in 1972. The mission will bring technology and experiments to the moon to prepare for human flights by 2024.

Continue reading “Plan for First US Mission to the Moon Since Apollo Landing” »

Is a privately-owned startup based out of New Mexico, USA. Their team leans on expertise gained at NASA, the US Department of Energy, Sandia and Los Alamos National Labs, and the US Air Force. Planetoid Mines’ primary focus is developing the core components that enable asteroid mining. Many of their instruments and tools will be compatible with mining applications on the lunar surface and on Earth.

A lot of activity has been brewing with regards to new space exploration initiatives. Launch costs are plummeting due to market competition and the development of reusable rockets. Additionally, there has been a measurable uptick in growth and investment in commercial space ventures. Every major national space agency has ambitions for operations in lunar orbit and on the lunar surface within the next 5 to 20 years.

Vast interstellar events where clouds of charged matter hurtle into each other and spew out high-energy particles have now been reproduced in the lab with high fidelity. The work, by MIT researchers and an international team of colleagues, should help resolve longstanding disputes over exactly what takes place in these gigantic shocks.

Many of the largest-scale events, such as the expanding bubble of matter hurtling outward from a supernova, involve a phenomenon called collisionless shock. In these interactions, the clouds of gas or plasma are so rarefied that most of the particles involved actually miss each other, but they nevertheless interact electromagnetically or in other ways to produces visible shock waves and filaments. These high-energy events have so far been difficult to reproduce under laboratory conditions that mirror those in an astrophysical setting, leading to disagreements among physicists as to the mechanisms at work in these astrophysical phenomena.

Now, the researchers have succeeded in reproducing critical conditions of these collisionless shocks in the laboratory, allowing for detailed study of the processes taking place within these giant cosmic smashups. The new findings are described in the journal Physical Review Letters, in a paper by MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center Senior Research Scientist Chikang Li, five others at MIT, and 14 others around the world.

Half a century after the first moon landing, NASA plans to go back to…

Ranging in size from the experimental Mini Bee , a 250kg technology demonstration spacecraft, through the Honey Bee, capable of capturing a 10m asteroid and extracting its resources, to the Queen Bee, capable of capturing a 40m asteroid for resource extraction. All use an asteroid containment system similar to that proposed for the original Asteroid Redirect Mission, optical mining for resource extraction, and a water based Omnivore™ Thruster system for propulsion. A variant called the Worker Bee, can serve as an orbital transfer vehicle, transporting items to high Earth orbits and beyond, potentially even to Mars.

NEW DELHI (AP) — An unmanned spacecraft India launched last month began orbiting the moon Tuesday as it approaches the lunar south pole to study previously discovered water deposits.

The Indian Space Research Organization said it successfully maneuvered Chandrayaan-2, the Sanskrit word for “moon craft,” into lunar orbit, nearly a month after it left Earth. The mission is led by two female scientists.

Chandrayaan will continue circling the moon in a tighter orbit until reaching a distance of about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the moon’s surface.

A Luxembourg company is working to develop 3D printers which will create human skin on board a spaceship while out in space.

Space company, Blue Horizon, based in Betzdorf, is working with German company OHB SE – of which it is subsidiary –and the Technical University of Dresden to develop the printers.