Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: space travel – Page 303

NASA’s New “Metallic Glass” Gears Can Withstand Impact, Freezing Temperatures During Lunar Missions

Many exploration destinations in our solar system are frigid and require hardware that can withstand the extreme cold. During NASA ’s Artemis missions, temperatures at the Moon’s South Pole will drop drastically during the lunar night. Farther into the solar system, on Jupiter ’s moon Europa, temperatures never rise above −260 degrees Fahrenheit (−162 degrees Celsius) at the equator.

One NASA project is developing special gears that can withstand the extreme temperatures experienced during missions to the Moon and beyond. Typically, in extremely low temperatures, gears – and the housing in which they’re encased, called a gearbox – are heated. After heating, a lubricant helps the gears function correctly and prevents the steel alloys from becoming brittle and, eventually, breaking. NASA’s Bulk Metallic Glass Gears (BMGG) project team is creating material made of “metallic glass” for gearboxes that can function in and survive extreme cold environments without heating, which requires energy. Operations in cold and dim or dark environments are currently limited due to the amount of available power on a rover or lander.

Virgin Galactic plans next test spaceflight for Oct. 22 as it nears flying founder Richard Branson

Virgin Galactic plans to conducts its next crewed spaceflight test on Oct. 22, according to documents the company filed with the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday.

The flight will be the first of two that the space tourism company has planned to complete testing of its SpaceShipTwo spacecraft system and should have just two test pilots on board. Virgin Galactic said last month that the second test spaceflight will then have four “mission specialists” inside the cabin. If both test flights succeed, Virgin Galactic expects to fly founder Sir Richard Branson in the first quarter of 2021 – a milestone that will mark the beginning of the company’s commercial tourism service.

Shares of Virgin Galactic closed down 3.7% on Friday at $15.92 a share.

Following Starship SN6’s hop, SN7.1 prepares to pop

With two successful 150-meter hops in the bag for SpaceX, Starship testing is preparing to enter the next phase. Starship SN6’s successful 150-meter hop followed just weeks after SN5’s achievement.

While SN5 is preparing to conduct another leap, Starship SN8 is closing in on its maiden flight, this time sporting three Raptor engines, a nosecone, and aero surfaces – likely to come after additional data is gathered via the upcoming SN7.1 Test Tank “Burst Test.”

SpaceX shares photo of gigantic Starship vacuum-optimized Raptor engine

Featured Image Source: SpaceX

SpaceX is rapidly manufacturing multiple Starship prototypes at the South Texas facility located in Brownsville’s Boca Chica beach. An orbital-class Starship will be equipped with six powerful Raptor engines. Raptors are fueled by cryogenic methane and liquid oxygen which is a unique fuel combination in the aerospace industry. Each Raptor is capable of producing over 200 tons, or 2MN (meganewtons), of thrust at full throttle. Three of Starship’s Raptors will be sea-level engines for atmospheric flight, and three vacuum-optimized Raptors for propulsion in space. Vacuum-optimized engines are more complex and different than sea-level engines; they’re specifically designed to have a higher performance in the vacuum of space. A visible difference between the two engines is that the bell nozzle is larger in the Raptor vacuum engine. Today, SpaceX shared a photograph showcasing the gigantic Raptor vacuum engine, pictured below.

SpaceX will initiate the development of Starship Super Heavy ‘booster prototype one’

Featured Image Source: SpaceX

Chief Engineer Elon Musk founded SpaceX with the goal to enable humans to live on Mars. The aerospace company is developing its next-generation launch vehicle in South Texas at Boca Chica Beach. According to SpaceX, Starship will be the most powerful rocket in the world; It will be a 120-meter-tall, two-stage launch vehicle consisting of a spacecraft capable of carrying one hundred passengers, and a Super Heavy booster used to propel the craft out of Earth’s atmosphere.

During the Humans To Mars teleconference that took place on Tuesday, Musk said Starship’s Super Heavy “booster prototype one” will initiate construction “this week.” SpaceX Boca Chica teams are building multiple Starship prototypes at the assembly facility, where gigantic vehicle assembly buildings are taking shape to accommodate the massive stainless-steel rocket booster. – “Making a prototype of something is, I think, relatively easy,” he said, “But building the production system so that you can build ultimately hundreds or thousands of Starships, that’s the hard part.”

Vimana: From Mythical Flying Chariots to Space Age Vehicles

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador, interviews Mr. Evgeni Borisov, CEO and Co-founder of Vimana Global Inc.

Ira Pastor Comments:

A flying car is a type of personal air vehicle, or “road able” aircraft, that provides door-to-door transportation by both ground and air, and was a popular theme in fantasy and science fiction stories throughout the early 20th century.

One of the first debuts of a flying car was that of Henry Ford, back in 1926, when he displayed an experimental single-seat airplane.

There were a lot of attempts over the 20th century, but activity has ramped up significantly in the early 21st century, and several groups have brought us close to the true flying car ideal: a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft that can hover, take off, and land vertically.

Vimana Global

Continue reading “Vimana: From Mythical Flying Chariots to Space Age Vehicles” | >

NASA-Funded Scientist Claims New Thruster Could Approach Light Speed

“I was shocked at the huge increase in measured force,” Hal Fearn, close collaborator and physicist at California State University, Fullerton, told Wired.

Yet other researchers are still skeptical of the novel device.

“I’d say there’s between a 1-in-10 and 1-in-10,000,000 chance that it’s real, and probably toward the higher end of that spectrum,” Mike McDonald, an aerospace engineer at the Naval Research Laboratory in Maryland, told the magazine.

Quest to colonize space demands boost from biotechnology, synthetic biology

Over the last 12,000 years or so, human civilization has noticeably reshaped the Earth’s surface. But changes on our own planet will likely pale in comparison when humans settle on other celestial bodies. While many of the changes on Earth over the centuries have been related to food production, by way of agriculture, changes on other worlds will result, not only from the need for on-site production of food, but also for all other consumables, including air.

As vital as synthetic biology will be to the early piloted missions to Mars and voyages of exploration, it will become indispensable to establish a long-term human presence off-Earth, namely colonization. That’s because we’ve evolved over billions of years to thrive specifically in the environments provided by our home planet.

Our physiology is well-suited to Earth’s gravity and its oxygen-rich atmosphere. We also depend on Earth’s global magnetic field to shield us from intense space radiation in the form of charged particles. In comparison, Mars has only patches of localized magnetism, thought to be remnants of a global magnetic field in the distant past. Currently, the Red Planet has no global magnetic field that could trap particle radiation from interplanetary space. Also, the Martian atmosphere is so thin that any shielding against space radiation of any kind is minor compared with the protection that Earth’s atmosphere affords. At the Martian surface, atmospheric pressure never gets above 7 millibars. That’s like Earth at an altitude of about 27,000 m (89,000 ft), which is almost the edge of space. And while the moon’s proximity to Earth could make it a better location than Mars for the first off-world colony, the lunar radiation environment is similar to that of Mars.