Lifeboat Foundation

Nearly 200 separate remains, including those of the late Star Trek creator and two of the show’s cast members, will be part of an inaugural deep space mission to permanently orbit the sun as their final resting place.

Celestis, a company that has been promoting space burial service since 1994, will launch the first-of-its-kind memorial spaceflight to take place in nearly 30 years.

Continue reading “Star Trek creator set for first deep space burial” »

Pulsar Fusion has begun construction of the world’s largest rocket engine, which will be fuelled by fusion. Within four years, the British company intends to create an 8-metre-long combustion chamber.

Here’s What We Know

The fusion engine will be based on a very hot plasma trapped inside an electromagnetic field. Now scientists are working on how to keep the plasma in the electromagnetic field. The announcement was made by James Lambert, CFO of the UK-based company.

BENGALURU, July 14 (Reuters) — India’s space agency launched a rocket on Friday that sent a spacecraft into orbit and toward a planned landing next month on the lunar south pole, an unprecedented feat that would advance India’s position as a major space power.

The Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) LVM3 launch rocket blasted off from the country’s main spaceport in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh on Friday afternoon, leaving behind a plume of smoke and fire.

About 16 minutes later, ISRO’s mission control announced that the rocket had succeeded in putting the Chandrayaan-3 lander into an Earth orbit that will send it looping toward a moon landing next month.

There’s a reason the saying “that’s why we test” exists. I’ve seen it a lot in my mentions the past few days. Unfortunately, and crucially, it ignores that tests happen for different reasons.

Let’s get into that, especially in light of the recently unveiled explosion of a BE-4 rocket engine during Blue Origin’s testing in Texas. The engine was bound for the second launch of its customer United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket.

Nuclear fusion propulsion technology has the potential to revolutionize space travel in terms of both speeds and fuel usage. The same kinds of reactions that power the Sun could halve travel times to Mars, or make a journey to Saturn and its moons take just two years rather than eight.

It’s incredibly exciting, but not everyone is convinced this is going to work: the tech needs ultra-high temperatures and pressures to function.

To help prove the viability of the technology, the largest ever fusion rocket engine is now being built by Pulsar Fusion in Bletchley, in the UK.

The thrusters will play an important role on NASA’s Gateway, the outpost orbiting the Moon.

Engineers from NASA and Aerojet Rocketdyne have begun the multiyear qualification testing of the most powerful solar electric propulsion (SEP) thrusters, which are expected to radically change propulsion in space, a press release from the space agency said.

For decades, space research has relied on chemical propulsion to generate millions of pounds of thrust and has attempted to make bigger and more powerful rockets to take us further in our space voyages. While this is a standard even with the most advanced methane-powered rocket engines, it is not necessarily the most efficient way to move about in space.

Now that Virgin Galactic has flown its first commercial spaceflight, it’s ready to take civilians aboard. The company now expects to launch its first private passenger flight, Galactic 2, as soon as August 10th. Virgin isn’t yet revealing the names of everyone involved, but there will be three passengers alongside the usual crew. You can watch a live stream on the company website.

The inaugural commercial flight, Galactic 1, flew in late June. However, all three passengers were Italian government workers (two from the Air Force and one research council member) conducting microgravity studies. While it’s not clear what 02’s civilian crew will do, they can be tourists this time around.

The firm has been ramping up its operations in recent months after numerous delays from previous years. While Galactic 2 is just Virgin’s seventh spaceflight of any kind, it’s the third in 2023. The company says it’s establishing a “regular cadence” of flights, and you can expect them to become relatively routine if this voyage goes as planned.

Earth has often been compared to a spaceship, one that’s successfully orbited our star and the galaxy many times over billions of years. So what about moving our planet or even converting it or another world into a spaceship? Can we use entire planets to cross the intergalactic void to settle planets in distant galaxies or superclusters? And what sort of engine and drive could move a whole planet?

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Continue reading “Planet Ships” »

A controversial new type of electric propulsion system that physicists say defies Newton’s Laws of Motion, known as the Quantum Drive, has secured a spot on a SpaceX rocket and will launch into low Earth orbit (LEO) this October.

Designed by IVO Ltd., an electronics prototyping company, the promising yet controversial Quantum Drive could change the future of space travel and, if proven to work, would potentially rewrite or expand many of the accepted principles of inertia and motion that have existed for centuries.

Newtonian Physics Says creating inertia Without Propellant is Impossible.