Lifeboat Foundation

Elon Musk has a reputation for pushing the envelop and making bold declarations. In 2002, he founded SpaceX with the intention of making spaceflight affordable through entirely reusable rockets. In April of 2014, his company achieved success with the first successful recovery of a Falcon 9 first stage. And in February of this year, his company successfully launched its Falcon Heavy and managed to recover two of the three boosters.

But above and beyond Musk’s commitment to reusability, there is also his longer-term plans to use his proposed Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) to explore and colonize Mars. The topic of when this rocket will be ready to conduct launches was the subject of a recent interview between Musk and famed director Jonathon Nolan, which took place at the 2018 South by Southwest Conference (SXSW) in Austin, Texas.

Continue reading “The first SpaceX BFR should make orbital launches by 2020” »

I recently got a private tour of a NASA space shuttle’s cockpit, a quirky mosaic-covered LA home, and a peaceful chapel with light streaming through ornate stained-glass windows—all without leaving my chair.

That chair was in an office at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters, and I was wearing an HTC Vive virtual-reality headset on my face. But because these places were filmed with a high-resolution prototype camera that reproduces some of the key cues we use to understand depth in the real world, it felt more like actually being there than anything I’ve experienced with any other live-action VR. Which is to say it was pretty damn cool.

I could peer around the seats in the space shuttle Discovery, revealing buttons and switches on the walls of the cockpit that were previously obscured. As I looked closely at mirrored bits of tile on the outside of the mosaic house, I glimpsed reflections of other tiles in the background and saw a dizzying display of shapes and patterns. In the chapel, I gazed at the floor, and the colorful sunbeams moved as I did.

Continue reading “VR is still a novelty, but Google’s light-field technology could make it serious art” »

Spending an extended period of time in outer space takes a toll on the human body. And while NASA was aware of some physical changes that astronauts needed to be prepared for upon coming back to Earth, they were curious to learn further about how extended space time would affect a human body on a molecular level. After one astronaut spent a year in space, NASA was able to determine that the prolonged spaceflight actually altered his DNA.

Astronaut Scott Kelly and his twin brother Mark Kelly took part in NASA’s twin study, a means to compare the human body on Earth to its counterpart following a year in space. While Scott spent a year in space, Mark stayed behind, and upon Scott’s return, NASA was able to track and monitor the ways that spaceflight had altered Scott’s body.

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NASA has a plan to deal with potential asteroid impacts that sounds like it’s been taken straight from a science fiction film.

The space agency is building a spacecraft named HAMMER — which stands for Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response.

The plan is to blow any harmful looking asteroids out of the sky before they have a chance to hit out planet.

Continue reading “NASA building ‘HAMMER’ spacecraft to save Earth from cataclysmic asteroid impact” »

Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the Moon, once said, “Mars is there, waiting to be reached.”

If Elon Musk has his way, he’ll be the one to reach it, even if it’s likely to be a dangerous journey that could result in the loss of human life.

Speaking at the South by South West festival in Austin, Texas, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Musk said he envisions test flights of his Mars spacecraft next year, though he cautioned early trips could end in death.

Continue reading “Elon Musk plans Mars spaceship, warns there’s a ‘good chance’ that early passengers could die” »

Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX and Tesla, came to SXSW this week and gave a grave talk about the future of humanity, warning about the dangers of nuclear war, climate, change, and runaway AI and telling the audience that the only way to keep humanity alive is to colonize the Solar System.

MOSCOW, March 6. /TASS/. CosmoCourse, a private Russian company that is designing a reusable spacecraft for suborbital flights, plans to make its first commercial launch with tourists onboard in 2025, CosmoCourse Director General Pavel Pushkin told TASS in an interview.

“The first flight of the prototype (a missile and a space vessel — TASS) is due in 2023, and the first tourist flight is expected in 2025,” Pushkin said.

CosmoCourse’s director general specified that the operational testing for the missile and the launched capsule would kick off in 2022. “The hardware is to be finished in 2021, and in 2022 test operations will begin,” he said.

Back in 2015, researchers in Spain created a tiny magnetic wormhole for the first time ever. They used it to connect two regions of space so that a magnetic field could travel ‘invisibly’ between them.

Before you get too excited, it wasn’t the kind of gravitational wormhole that would theoretically allow humans to travel rapidly across space in science fiction TV shows and films such as Stargate, Star Trek, and Interstellar, and it wouldn’t have been able to transport matter.

But the physicists managed to create a tunnel that allowed a magnetic field to disappear at one point, and then reappear at another, which is still a pretty huge deal.

Continue reading “A Magnetic ‘Wormhole’ That Connects Two Regions of Space Was Created in The Lab” »

Elon Musk has pushed his still-fledgling aerospace company, SpaceX, into a remarkable rhythm of frequent and routine launches.