Lifeboat Foundation

Elon Musk hopes to send first humans to Mars aboard a Starship craft within the next four years.

Future lunar landers might come equipped with 3D printed rocket engine parts that help bring down overall manufacturing costs and reduce production time.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=nf83yzzme2I

On December 8th, SpaceX plans to conduct its most ambitious test flight yet of its Starship prototype, sending the vehicle to an altitude of 12.5 kilometers, or nearly 8 miles high.

This theoretical engine could drastically reduce the cost of getting to space. Now two companies are trying to make it real.

That’s over 33 megapixels of Martian goodness.

For now, it looks like our best bet for going interstellar is to rely on robotic spacecraft that are optimized for speed.

For countless generations, the idea of traveling to an extrasolar planet has been the stuff of dreams. In the current era of renewed space exploration, interest in interstellar travel has understandably been rekindled. However, beyond the realm of science fiction, interstellar space travel remains a largely theoretical matter.

Continue reading “Reaching for the Stars: The Case for Interstellar Travel” »

Its SpaceX’s first-ever autonomous Dragon docking.

A SpaceX Dragon cargo ship arrived at the International Space Station today (Dec. 7) to deliver vital supplies for NASA and try something brand-new: park itself without the help of astronauts.

The private spaceflight company used a Falcon 9 rocket to launch CRS-21, the first flight to use the upgraded version of its Dragon cargo spacecraft, to the space station Sunday (Dec. 6) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The vehicle autonomously docked with the orbiting laboratory today at 1:40 p.m. EST (1840 GMT), parking at the zenith, or space-facing, side of the station’s Harmony module.

LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / December 7, 2020 / US Nuclear (OTCQB: UCLE) is the prime contractor to build MIFTI’s fusion generators, which could be used in the relatively near future to power the propulsion systems for space travel and provide plentiful, low-cost, clean energy for the earth and other planetary bases once our astronauts get to their destination, be it the moon, Mars, Saturn or beyond. Chemical powered rockets opened the door to space travel, but are still far too slow and heavy even to travel to distant planets within our solar system, let alone travel to other stars. Accordingly, NASA is now looking to nuclear powered rockets that can propel a space vessel at speeds close to the speed of light and thermonuclear power plants on the moon and Mars, as these are the next steps towards space exploration and colonization.

The US Energy Secretary, Dan Brouillette, recently said, “If we want to engage in outer space, or deep space as we call it, we have to rely upon nuclear fuels to get us there… that will allow us to get to Mars and back on ‘one tank of gas’.” This is made possible by the large energy density ratio which makes the fuel weight for chemical fuels ten million times higher than the fuel that powers the fusion drive. NASA is now relying on private companies to build spaceships: big companies like Boeing, but more and more on high-tech startups such as Elon Musk’s Space-X, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic.

While nuclear fission has been considered as a basis for the next generation of rocket engines, the fuel used for fission is enriched uranium, which is scarce, costly, unstable, and hazardous. On the other hand, thermonuclear fusion uses a clean, low-cost isotope of hydrogen from ordinary seawater, and one gallon of this seawater extraction yields about the same amount of energy as 300 gallons of gasoline.

WASHINGTON — Blue Origin has achieved a new milestone in the development of the engine that will power the lunar lander it seeks to provide for NASA’s Artemis program.

The company announced Dec. 4 that it started a fourth series of hotfire tests of the thrust chamber for the BE-7 engine. That thrust chamber was fired for 20 seconds on a test stand at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where the company did previous tests of the engine.

“This thrust chamber test measured the ability to extract energy out of the hydrogen- and oxygen-cooled combustor segments that power the engine’s turbopumps, the key to achieving high engine performance,” said John Vilja, senior vice president of engines at Blue Origin, in a company statement.