Lifeboat Foundation

Earth, in all its beauty, is just our starting place. Blue Origin is opening the promise of space to all.

In his 1971 State of the Union address, president Richard Nixon promised to kick off what would soon come to be known as the War on Cancer, asking congress for a $100 million appropriation to launch a campaign for finding a cure. “The time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease,” he said. “Let us make a total national commitment to achieve this goal.”

Welcome to the War on Aging, where death is optional.

Mars 2020 engineers and technicians prepare the high-gain antenna for installation on the rover’s equipment deck. The antenna is articulated so it can point directly at Earth to uplink or downlink data.

The image was taken on April 19, 2019, in the Spacecraft Assembly Facility’s High Bay 1 clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California.

JPL is building and will manage operations of the Mars 2020 rover for the NASA Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington.

Continue reading “Now Mars 2020 Can Phone Home” »

NASA is warning that meteors pose a major threat to Earth, so agencies are already testing out ways to defend against them by using lasers or by ramming spacecraft into them.

During a conference last week, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine explained that not taking meteors seriously could have catastrophic consequences. In 2013, a 20-metre meteor exploded over Russia and the sonic boom caused windows and glass to shatter, injuring more than 1,000 people.

That relatively small meteor contained more than 30 times the energy of the atomic bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima during the Second World War.

Continue reading “Catastrophic meteors: How space scientists hope to protect ‘the only planet we know’” »

These are the adventures of the “StarChip Wafersize.”

UC Santa Barbara students sent up, via balloon, a prototype miniature spacecraft that might eventually become the “wafercraft” that researchers posit could be propelled by lasers to achieve space travel at relativistic speeds to reach nearby star systems and exoplanets.

So begins a journey, funded by NASA and several private foundations, that may one day lead to interstellar travel.

Continue reading “Experimental cosmologist group launches its first iterations of space-traveling ‘wafercraft’” »

The latest SpaceX Dragon cargo mission to the International Space Station (ISS) included an experiment that could help to combat the ravages of time here on Earth. The European experiment will test how ceramic nanoparticles interact with cells to act as an anti-aging supplement that not only holds promise for alleviating the effects of growing old, but also for combatting chronic illness and space-related stresses for astronauts on prolonged space missions.

At last, it’s done. The biggest spaceship size chart ever created is now complete and fully operational. 4,268 × 5,690 pixels of technological terror that includes everything from the smaller Star War ships to EVE. According to its author, Dirk Loechel, this is the last update. It’s epic.

The last update

For real this time: This is the final major content update, though if there are issues I’ll still fix them. I also haven’t forgotten I wanted to vectorize the writing. It’s still on the radar. But content-wise, I think that is about all I can put in.

Continue reading “The biggest comparison of sci-fi spaceships ever is complete at last” »

A “spaceplane” that will be able to travel at 25 times the speed just reached a major breakthrough.

Reaction Engines is working with the European Space Agency and the UK Space Agency to develop a hypersonic aircraft that could zip from New York to London in just one hour.

The British aerospace manufacturer has tested the an essential piece of equipment called a precooler, which prevents the plane’s engine from overheating.

Continue reading “This Hypersonic ‘Space Plane’ Can Fly at 25 TIMES the Speed of Sound” »

A few years ago, a friend and fellow author Manu Saadia (author of Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek) posed a question to me about the viability of creating actual cities on other planets. It was, in his mind, one of the few things about Star Trek which seemed unrealistic, because of the fact that cities here on Earth thrive due to one important reason: imports/exports, i.e. resource exchange.

As we continue planning ahead for the future of both space travel and space colonization, the need for advanced 3D printing will ultimately dictate our ability to maintain viable civilizations on other planets.

Continue reading “3D Printing and the Viability of Interplanetary City Construction” »