Lifeboat Foundation

SpaceX’s Elon Musk wants to put millions on Mars, but fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos envisions having them in rotating space habitats.

Society is about to take another big step into the age of space-based manufacturing.

Early next year, California-based startup Made In Space plans to launch a machine to the International Space Station (ISS) that will produce ZBLAN optical fiber.

ZBLAN has the potential to be much more efficient than the silica-based fiber currently used in the internet and telecommunications industries, but it’s tough to make here on Earth because the planet’s strong gravitational pull induces imperfections in the ZBLAN crystal lattice, Made In Space representatives said. [3D Printing: 10 Ways It Could Transform Space Travel].

The team of NASA, the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME), and online educational platform Future Engineers has been a lot of fun to follow over the last year. Their collaborative 3D Printing in Space Challenges have resulted in some amazing, ingenious inventions from children as young as five years old, all aimed at improving the daily lives of astronauts now and in the future, on the International Space Station and, one day, on Mars.

Continue reading “Mars Medical Challenge Asks Students to Design 3D Printable Items to Keep Astronauts Healthy on Mars” »

“After being spurned in Chicago, Lucas’s Museum of Narrative Art is looking for a West Coast home.”

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Elon Musk is obsessed with space. At age 30, he founded SpaceX. At age 41, he oversaw the first cargo mission to the International Space Station by a private company. And at age 12, as a kid living in South Africa, he made a space-themed PC game called Blastar. Now, thanks to the power of the internet, you can play that game.

Musk sold the code for Blastar for $500 to the magazine PC and Office Technology, and a reproduction of the page it appeared on was published in Ashlee Vance’s biography Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. From there, Tomas Lloret Llinares — a software engineer at Google — took the code and rebuilt the game to work in HTML5.

Your mission, as the game’s lonely space pilot, is to “destroy [the] alien freighter carrying deadly hydrogen bombs and status beam machines.” Blastar is mostly a mix of Space Invaders and Asteroid, though it’s much more basic. There is never more than two ships on the screen, there are few sound effects, and — like many games of its time — it really has no ending. It’s almost unimpressive; that is, until you remember that it was made by a 12-year-old in 1984.

Continue reading “Play the PC game Elon Musk wrote as a pre-teen” »

Elon Musk wants to launch a million people to Mars in the event some apocalyptic disaster eventually ruins Earth. And he wants it to be somewhat affordable — US $200,000 or less per person.

To that end the SpaceX CEO outlined his plan to colonise Mars on September 27, including how his Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) of rockets, spaceships, fuel pods, and other crucial components would get the job done.

Still, the full presentation at the International Astronomical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, barely scratched the surface.

Continue reading “Elon Musk just shared his 4-step plan for Mars — colonists should be ‘prepared to die’” »

What does the future hold for computing? Experts at the Networked Quantum Information Technologies Hub (NQIT), based at Oxford University, believe our next great technological leap lies in the development of quantum computing.

Quantum computers could solve problems it takes a conventional computer longer than the lifetime of the universe to solve. This could bring new possibilities, such as advanced drug development, superior military intelligence, greater opportunities for space exploration and enhanced encryption security.

Continue reading “The exciting new age of quantum computing” »

Nextbigfuture has interviewed Ryan Weed, CEO of Positron Dynamics. Positron Dynamics is developing antimatter catalyzed fusion propulsion which they will first demonstrate in a cubesat launch. They are getting around the still mostly unsolved difficulties of storing antimatter. They are doing this by using Sodium 22 isotopes.

Positron Dynamics has previously received a lot of press coverage when it was funded by the Thiel Breakthrough foundation to work on antimatter.

In Brief:

• Expensive, unsustainable rockets have served as our primary means to exit Earth, but space elevators present a cheaper way to enter outer space.
• Although new materials are needed, space elevator missions are in motion and we could see the first elevator constructed in the next several decades.

Getting into space with rockets is ridiculously expensive. A NASA Inspector General report says the agency will pay Russia $491.2 million to send six astronauts into space in 2018. That’s almost $82 million a seat.