Lifeboat Foundation

# **MARS: A GATEWAY TO THE SOLAR SYSTEM**

Today’s highlight: **Bruce MacKenzie**, founder of the Mars Foundation.

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Interstellar travel has always caught the imagination of humankind. Though our scientific knowledge and imagination have long conceptualised interstellar space travel, actual travel is a massive undertaking. Till date, only two spacecraft (Voyager 1 and 2) have crossed the solar system boundary. More spacecraft will surely follow in future.

The main issue in interstellar travel is that a person aboard the spacecraft sees a different starscape than that from Earth. The astronaut will see position and movement of stars differently than on Earth.

Ever wondered how we get such smooth tracking shots of rockets moving at incredibly fast speeds?

Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity famously dictates that no known object can travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum, which is 299792 km/s. This speed limit makes it unlikely that humans will ever be able to send spacecraft to explore beyond our local area of the Milky Way.

However, new research by Erik Lentz at the University of Göttingen suggests a way beyond this limit. The catch is that his scheme requires vast amounts of energy and it may not be able to propel a spacecraft.

Lentz proposes that conventional energy sources could be capable of arranging the structure of spacetime in the form of a soliton – a robust singular wave. This soliton would act like a “warp bubble’”, contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind. Unlike objects within spacetime, spacetime itself can bend, expand or warp at any speed. Therefore, a spacecraft contained in a hyper-fast bubble could arrive at its destination faster than light would in normal space without breaking any physical laws, even Einstein’s cosmic speed limit.

With SpaceX aiming to send the first humans to Mars in 2024, they will need to set up the essentials like water and power before they get there.

SpaceX want to catch the enormous booster as it’s falling out of the sky!

We all love watching SpaceX landing the Falcon 9, so why is it so difficult to get footage of it?

New images of Jupiter’s polar auroras, captured by the Juno spacecraft, revealed the full cycle of intense and unusual polar light displays.