Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: space travel – Page 277

SpaceX’s fleet of reusable Falcon 9 rockets enabled it to conduct more missions in 2020 than ever before. SpaceX completed a record-breaking launch manifest this year, it conducted 26 rocket launches –the most annual launches it has performed in history. Rocket reusability has played a significant role in increasing launch cadence. Falcon 9 is capable of launching payload to orbit and returning from space to land vertically on landing pads and autonomous droneships at sea. To date, SpaceX has landed 70 orbital-class Falcon 9 boosters and reused 49. This year the company accomplished flying two particular rocket boosters 7 times. Engineers aim to reuse a first-stage booster at least 10 times to reduce the cost of spaceflight. The most reused Falcon 9 rockets that reached 7 reflights this year are two first-stage boosters identified as B1051 and B1049. SpaceX is just three flights away from achieving 10 reflights. SpaceX officials state Falcon 9 [Block 5] is designed to perform up to 100 reflights.

Stephen Marr, a spaceflight photographer who goes by the name @spacecoast_stve on Twitter, shared a photo collage of all the Falcon 9 boosters used in 2020, “SpaceX carried out a record-breaking 26 launches this year, but how many boosters did it take to get it done? The answer is 11. And here they are!” he wrote. SpaceX founder Elon Musk replied to Marr’s tweet –“Falcon was 25% of successful orbital launches in 2020, but maybe a majority of payload to orbit. Anyone done the math?” he said.

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NASA scientists and their colleagues are now proposing corporate financing for a human mission to Mars. This raises the prospect that a spaceship named the Microsoft Explorer or the Google Search Engine could one day go down in history as the first spaceship to bring humans to the Red Planet.

The proposal suggests that companies could drum up $160 billion for a human mission to Mars and a colony there, rather than having governments fund such a mission with tax dollars.

Joel Levine, a senior research scientist at NASA Langley Research Center, was quoted in a release in the Journal of Cosmology by Dr. Rhawn Joseph. The plan covers “every aspect of a journey to the Red Planet — the design of the spacecrafts, medical health and psychological issues, the establishment of a Mars base, colonization, and a revolutionary business proposal to overcome the major budgetary obstacles which have prevented the U.S. from sending astronauts to Mars,” said Levine.

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After nearly 300 million miles (470 million km), NASA ’s Perseverance rover completes its journey to Mars on February 18, 2021. But, to reach the surface of the Red Planet, it has to survive the harrowing final phase known as Entry, Descent, and Landing.

The mission uses technological innovations already demonstrated successfully, especially for entry, descent, and landing (EDL). Like NASA’s Curiosity rover (, the Mars 2020 spacecraft uses a guided entry, descent, and landing system. The landing system on Mars 2020 mission includes a parachute, descent vehicle, and an approach called a “skycrane maneuver” for lowering the rover on a tether to the surface during the final seconds before landing.

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In October, NASA announced the first selection of a scientist to conduct research aboard a commercial spaceflight mission. I am that scientist, and I will be flying aboard Virgin Galactic’s Spaceship 2.

On that flight, which will reach altitudes over 300, 000 feet, I’ll be conducting experiments to further both astronomy and space life sciences.

This is a game-changing move by NASA. Why? Because it represents a normalizing of research in space to be more like other research disciplines, such as field geology, oceanography and volcanology, where researchers do their work themselves in the field, rather than designing, building and testing robots to go in their stead. The end result of this important evolution will be beneficial in many ways.

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Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have discovered a way to make self-assembled nanowires of transition metal chalcogenides at scale using chemical vapor deposition. By changing the substrate where the wires form, they can tune how these wires are arranged, from aligned configurations of atomically thin sheets to random networks of bundles. This paves the way to industrial deployment in next-gen industrial electronics, including energy harvesting, and transparent, efficient, even flexible devices.

Electronics is all about making things smaller—smaller features on a chip, for example, means more computing power in the same amount of space and better efficiency, essential to feeding the increasingly heavy demands of a modern IT infrastructure powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence. And as devices get smaller, the same demands are made of the intricate wiring that ties everything together. The ultimate goal would be a wire that is only an atom or two in thickness. Such would begin to leverage completely different physics as the electrons that travel through them behave more and more as if they live in a one-dimensional world, not a 3D one.

In fact, scientists already have materials like carbon nanotubes and transition metal chalcogenides (TMCs), mixtures of transition metals and group 16 elements which can self-assemble into atomic-scale nanowires. The trouble is making them long enough, and at scale. A way to mass produce nanowires would be a game changer.

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