Lifeboat Foundation

Steven Hawking: “I don’t think we will survive another thousand years without escaping beyond our fragile planet.”

Probably the most notable direct result of space exploration is satellites. Once we could position a ship in orbit and take telemetry, we knew we could place unmanned pieces of equipment there and just let it orbit, running on its own, while receiving orders from the ground. From those satellites, we have created a global communication system and the global positioning system (GPS) that powers most of our communications capabilities today. What can bring peace and harmony on the planet more than our ability to communicate with each other beyond geographic and political boundaries? These technologies have been enhancing and saving for years.

Continue reading “The Value of Space Exploration” »

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Blue Origin formally opened a factory Feb. 17 that the company plans to use to produce engines both for its vehicles and for United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony marked the completion of a 350,000-square-foot factory here that will produce BE-4 and BE-3U engines. The factory, built in a little more than a year, will host more than 300 employees and produce up to 42 engines a year.

“You can see we can get some things done really quickly,” said Bob Smith, chief executive of Blue Origin, in remarks at the ceremony. “Twelve months to actually build this kind of facility is an amazing accomplishment for our team.”

Emergent technologies have made our world more efficient, engaging, and accessible. We’ve witnessed how innovations like artificial intelligence (AI) have transformed from largely an insider trend of the leading edge of the tech industry into more commercially viable devices, such as Amazon Echo, Siri, and on-demand machine learning from AWS. There tools have democratized the way we interact with the world.

In addition to AI, other innovative technologies have helped democratize many markets across the globe. However, the sector with, perhaps, the most notable impact in democratizing technology lies in industries that go beyond our planet.

The NewSpace industry—now comprised of startups, developing countries, and universities—is leading a movement of tech innovations that are helping to pave the way for the new space explorers. This new era not only focuses on lowering the barriers of entry for investors and companies, but it’s also fostering more sustainable, consumer-friendly models that promote better access to the final frontier.

It seems like there’s nothing Elon Musk can’t do.

As CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, founder of The Boring Company, and cofounder of OpenAI and Neuralink, Musk seems to be everywhere all at once, pushing all kinds of futuristic technologies. He’s said he won’t be happy until we’ve escaped Earth and colonized Mars.

Between space rockets, electric cars, solar batteries, and the billions he’s made along the way, Musk is basically a real-life Tony Stark — which is why he served as an inspiration for Marvel’s 2008 “Iron Man” film.

A SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule arrived on Florida’s Space Coast on Thursday (Feb. 13), completing a cross-country trek from the company’s California headquarters.

The space industry is in the midst of a widespread transformation, as the last decade has seen several young, private companies seek to profit in areas historically dominated by governmental interests. Among these areas is lunar mining, which represents a crucial step for the development of the space economy by enabling the utilization of lunar resources. Though significant opportunities exist for wealth creation and societal benefits, it will require sustained multibillion-dollar investment to develop a vibrant lunar mining industry.

Exploration is the essential first step for any mining endeavor, terrestrially or otherwise, but with the technical challenges of lunar mining largely solved, access to capital has become the prevailing constraint. While the uncertainty of operating in space is the commonly used explanation for capital constraints, in reality, terrestrial explorers have seen funding steadily decline for a decade, with investors favoring lower risk, passive exposure to the mining sector. For lunar mining firms seeking to attract capital for exploration, this essay details the incompatibility of traditional investment options, the financing strategies developed by the similarly cash-strapped terrestrial mining industry, and how prospective lunar miners should capitalize on emerging trends in project finance.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Virgin Galactic’s spaceship VSS Unity, tucked under the wing of its special carrier aircraft, took a long-awaited ferry flight Thursday from Southern California to its new home in the New Mexico desert, where it will undergo final testing in preparation for commercial operations that will carry tourists on hops into space.

The mothership, named Eve, took off from Mojave Air & Space Port and circled over the Mojave Desert before turning east toward Spaceport America in southern New Mexico. The flight lasted more than three hours, giving pilots a chance to evaluate the spaceship at high altitude and cold temperatures for a prolonged period of time.

The move to New Mexico marks a significant milestone toward commercial flights, which the company anticipates this year.

A favorite theme of science fiction is “the portal”—an extraordinary opening in space or time that connects travelers to distant realms. A good portal is a shortcut, a guide, a door into the unknown. If only they actually existed…

It turns out that they do, sort of, and a NASA-funded researcher at the University of Iowa has figured out how to find them.

“We call them X-points or electron diffusion regions,” explains plasma physicist Jack Scudder of the University of Iowa. “They’re places where the magnetic field of Earth connects to the magnetic field of the Sun, creating an uninterrupted path leading from our own planet to the sun’s atmosphere 93 million miles away.”

A PROTOTYPE of a British-built plasma-powered rocket engine which could propel spacecraft at 100,000mph, thus halving journey times to Mars, has been tested successfully in the UK.