Lifeboat Foundation

Forget the moon. The next giant leap for mankind could be building a habitat on Mars.

The fourth planet from the sun may be cold — Martian winters can reach -190 degrees Fahrenheit (−87 degrees Celsius) — full of deserts and lacking in oxygen, but for Behrokh Khoshnevis it’s humans’ next destination.

The pioneering professor in engineering at the University of Southern California has been working with NASA on the possibility of building a colony on Mars since 2011.

Continue reading “A NASA-funded engineer’s plan to colonize Mars” »

NASA has enlisted a professor from the University of Central Florida (UCF) in order to find a way of 3D printing structures on Mars.

Pegasus Professor Sudipta Seal, interim chair of UCF’s Materials Science and Engineering program is looking at how metals can be extracted from Martian soil. Speaking about the project, Seal said,

It’s essentially using additive-manufacturing techniques to make constructible blocks. UCF is collaborating with NASA to understand the science behind it.

Continue reading “3D printing houses on Mars with NASA and the University of Central Florida” »

Real estate is a valuable commodity aboard a CubeSat, a compact satellite about the size of a shoebox, so the smaller each component can be made, the better. To that end, scientists at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and the University of Miami are developing a thin, solid-state battery, which could not only save space for more important instruments aboard satellites, but also provide power on other planets, in cars or within the walls of a home.

At less than 3 mm (0.1 in) thick, the new batteries could be incorporated into the structure of pint-sized satellites, rather than taking up room in the area designated for research instruments. The batteries are made by sandwiching a solid-state battery layer between two layers of compressed carbon fiber.

“Creating a structural battery material could revolutionize the way NASA operates small payloads,” says senior principal investigator, Luke Roberson. “Rather than placing a battery in the experiment taking up 20 to 35 percent of the available volume, the battery now resides in the payload structure, thereby opening up additional free space for researchers to perform more science.”

Continue reading “Thin, built-in batteries to free up valuable space on CubeSats” »

The last extreme luxury frontier… Production, sale and hire.

Very cool concept for visiting nature.

The Next Nature Habitat explores how we want to live in the near future.

We will need a good dose of healthy stoicism if we are to survive in the world after work. Luxury items will be significantly reduced in the world we’re imagining. Stoics like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca recommended that we adjust our desires to simple, reliable pleasures, like fresh water, decent bread, modest clothing, and good friends. Luxury pleasures are rare and unreliable so we suffer more when they fail to materialize.

But chocolate cake is delicious and diamonds are beautiful. When Plato sketched a Spartan lifestyle in the Republic, his friends accused him of designing a city for pigs not humans — and they demanded that he add spices and luxury to the imagined utopia. While I’m sensitive to this worry, I hasten to point out that many Americans are currently, and by their own initiative, downsizing their sense of the good life. The contemporary “tiny house movement” — which builds elegant housing around 1/10th the size of average homes — is already the kind of stoic adjustment that Americans will need to make when we’re all unemployed.

Drones could drop you off at your apartment in the future.

New research details how to use the radiation and gravity of the stars to decelerate a high-velocity interstellar projectile.

In April last year, billionaire Yuri Milner announced the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative. He plans to invest 100 million US dollars in the development of an ultra-light light sail that can be accelerated to 20 percent of the speed of light to reach the Alpha Centauri star system within 20 years. The problem of how to slow down this projectile once it reaches its target remains a challenge. René Heller of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen and his colleague Michael Hippke propose to use the radiation and gravity of the Alpha Centauri stars to decelerate the craft. It could then even be rerouted to the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri and its Earth-like planet Proxima b.

Continue reading “Space Travel Visionaries Solve the Problem of Interstellar Slowdown” »

The future of nuclear power might look very different than we thought, with a US-based company presenting plans for miniature, modular nuclear power plants that are so small, they can fit on the back of a truck.

NuScale Power, the company behind the power plants, says each modular device is completely self-contained, and capable of producing 50-megawatts of electricity — enough to power thousands of homes.

The power plants stand 29.7 metres tall, so aren’t really that ‘miniature’, except relative to an acutal nuclear power plant. They also haven’t been tested as yet, so we need to reserve our excitment for when we can actually see these things in action.

Continue reading “‘Miniature’, Modular Nuclear Power Plants Could Be Rolled Out in the US” »