Lifeboat Foundation

Starship is designed to be a fully reusable launch system, and is intended to transport as many as 100 people at a time to and from the moon or Mars.

On the call Wednesday, Musk clarified that SpaceX’s recent fundraising rounds “have been oversubscribed.” He said SpaceX has the funding needed to build and launch enough Starlink satellites to begin using the network.

“At this point it looks like we have sufficient capital to get to an operational level,” Musk said.

Continue reading “Elon Musk says SpaceX Starlink internet satellites are key to funding his Mars vision” »

Advanced propulsion breakthroughs are near. Spacecraft have been stuck at slow chemical rocket speeds for years and weak ion drive for decades. However, speeds over one million miles per hour before 2050 are possible. There are surprising new innovations with technically feasible projects.

NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) is funding two high potential concepts. New ion drives could have ten times better in terms of ISP and power levels ten thousand times higher. Antimatter propulsion and multi-megawatt ion drives are being developed.

Continue reading “Going 1 Million Miles per Hour With Advanced Propulsion” »

The space snowman known as 2014 MU69 or Ultima Thule added to its celebrity today by showing up on the cover of the journal Science, with the first peer-reviewed results from an encounter with NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft laid out within.

Close study of the two-lobed object — which orbits 4 billion miles from the sun within a sparse belt of icy material known as the Kuiper Belt — could shed light on how the solar system was formed, said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute.

“We’re looking into the well-preserved remnants of the ancient past,” Stern said in a news release. “There is no doubt that the discoveries made about Ultima Thule are going to advance theories of solar system formation.”

Continue reading “New Horizons’ far-out findings from solar system’s Kuiper Belt turn into a cover story” »

I’ve always liked living spaceships, but it seems to me that the animal kingdom would make far inferior spaceships to the plant kingdom. With that in mind, what does this tree-ship have to be made from to:

Illustrations by Jason Schneider

“In terms of strength, wood is pretty good,” says Mike Gruntman, professor of astronautics at the University of Southern California. Early airplanes were built with wood, all the way into the early 1930s. (There were also wooden submarines.) Gruntman thinks it may be possible to build a wooden spacecraft that could survive the stress of a rocket launch.

Once your timber ship made it into space, however, you’d have a lot of problems. For starters, the organic matter would contain a fair amount of water. In a vacuum, that water would leak out and evaporate, which could affect the structure—especially in places where screws and brackets were attached. Even if this process unfolded over many weeks or months, the integrity of the spacecraft might be compromised.

Continue reading “Ask Anything: Could You Build A Spaceship Out Of Wood?” »

As Northrop Grumman’s NG-11 Cygnus spacecraft flew high above in low Earth orbit, NASA astronauts at the Johnson Space Center recently completed testing and evaluation of the company’s Earth-based full-scale cislunar habitat mockup.

Designed to test the ergonomics, feature layout and functional compatibility with basic “day-in-the-life” astronaut tasks for potential long-term use as a part of the future Lunar Gateway in cislunar space, the habitat mockup necessarily incorporated all core elements that would eventually be needed by a four-person Orion crew: sleep stations, a galley, crew exercise equipment and of course accommodations for science, a robotics workstations and life support systems.

Continue reading “NASA, Northrop Grumman finish testing cislunar habitat mockup” »

But neither SpaceX nor Musk have announced plans to do so.

When designing the Tesla Model S, Elon Musk wanted an electric motor that had the same horsepower as the most powerful internal combustion engine but with nearly-instantaneous torque. And he wanted it to be the size of a watermelon. Engine manufacturers told him this couldn’t be done. So the Tesla CEO decided to build his own motor. The earlier versions of this had a hand-wound stator which increased winding density to help eliminate resistance and increase peak torque. Later versions of the stators were built by robots.

Musk made the same decision with practically every other component of the Tesla — including the power electronics and other elements of the drivetrain. For him, there could be no compromises in design and functionality. That is why almost every component of the Tesla Model S is produced at its factory in Fremont, Calif.

When you drive a Model S, you can see the results. The car literally seems to fly. It picks up acceleration like a spaceship shifting into warp speed. The car is eerily quiet, comfortable, and elegant. It is a completely different driving experience than the cars we are used to. There is no engine to start, gears to shift, or oil to replace. The brakes don’t wear out because you hardly use them. The Tesla regenerative-braking system charges the car as it slows.

Continue reading “Tesla will have a $35K car that can go 1,000 miles on a single charge by 2020” »

I’m at the Humans to Mars Summit in Washington D.C. sharing about NASA’s plans to use the Moon as a proving ground for our ultimate goal of sending humans to Mars. Watch: