Lifeboat Foundation

JAXA has signed a memo of understanding with iSpace to create moon mining industry.

And it will change how we think about construction here on Earth.

NASA’s Mars Curiosity strikes again with the first ever discovery of boron at Gale Crater. This detection of Boron, a telltale chemical signature of evaporated liquid water, gives new impetus to the idea that Mars once had clement weather and habitable conditions.

A pretty epic recipe to creating a new kind of substance.

In Brief

• Jürgen Schmidhuber asserts that, by 2050, there will be trillions of self-replicating robot factories on the asteroid belt.
• In a few million years, robots will naturally explore the galaxy out of curiosity, setting their own goals without much human interaction.

John Glenn, who captured the nation’s attention in 1962 as the first American to orbit the Earth during a tense time when the United States sought supremacy over the Soviet Union in the space race, and who rocketed back into space 36 years later, becoming the oldest astronaut in history, died Dec. 8 at a hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Mr. Glenn, who in his post-NASA career served four terms as a U.S. senator from Ohio, was 95.

The death was confirmed by Hank Wilson, communications director at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State University. Mr. Glenn had a stroke after heart-valve replacement surgery in 2014, but the immediate cause was not announced.

Mr. Glenn was one of the seven original astronauts in NASA’s Mercury program, which was a conspicuous symbol of the country’s military and technological might at the height of the Cold War. He was not the first American in space — two of his fellow astronauts preceded him — but his three-orbit circumnavigation of the globe captured the imagination of his countrymen like few events before or since. Mr. Glenn was the last survivor of the Mercury Seven.

Continue reading “John Glenn, first American to orbit the Earth, dies at 95” »

The scientists who support Project Blue are already thinking about how future explorers could get to the planets around Alpha Centauri.

Physics Today has a speculative article that proposes that laser light be used to shape and polish an asteroid to high optical standards. This could create an Asteroid Belt Astronomical Telescope (ABAT).

The Asteroid Belt Astronomical Telescope (ABAT) focuses light from laser-polished asteroids onto dual imaging arrays above and below the solar system; other intense laser pulses maneuver the arrays to different locations, thus allowing ABAT to point at multiple celestial targets. Asteroid ablation residue corralled into a pair of Devil’s Footprints shields the focal regions from solar illumination. (Courtesy of Laura Kim.)

Imagined 10 meter resolution imaging of exoplanet.

Continue reading “Vision of a Asteroid Belt Astronomical Telescope and hypertelescopes” »

Continue reading “Space Warp Dynamics: The startup that's working on sending humans to Proxima Centauri” »