Space Travel – Lifeboat News: The Blog

May 10
2019

Apollo Fusion Obtains Hall Thruster Technology from JPL

WASHINGTON — Satellite electric propulsion startup Apollo Fusion is expanding its product line through an agreement with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, giving it access to advanced Hall thruster technology.

The Silicon Valley-based company said May 7 that it signed a deal that gives it an exclusive worldwide commercial license for JPL’s Magnetically Shielded Miniature, or MaSMi, Hall thruster technology, as well as a contract to provide JPL with three thrusters that use that technology.

Apollo Fusion plans to use the MaSMi technology in an electric thruster called the Apollo Xenon Engine (AXE), which will provide higher performance than the existing electric thrusters that the company has been developing.

May 10
2019

Blue Origin is ‘going to the MOON’: Jeff Bezos unveils lunar lander

At mysterious invite-only event in Washington D.C. and suggests his firm will hit VP Pence’s 2024 deadline for putting humans back on the surface…

On stage, Bezos took the wraps off a massive model of what will be the firm’s first lunar lander, dubbed Blue Moon. The event kicked off at 4 p.m. in Washington D.C, and was not live streamed.

May 9
2019

Jeff Bezos unveils lunar lander to take astronauts to the moon by 2024

“This vehicle is going to the moon,” Bezos said during an invite-only presentation to media and space industry executives.

“We were given a gift — this nearby body called the moon,” Bezos said. He added that the moon is a good place to begin manufacturing in space due to its lower gravity than the Earth. Getting resources from the moon “takes 24 times less energy to get it off the surface compared to the Earth,” Bezos said, and “that is a huge lever.”

The Blue Moon lander can bring 3.6 metric tons to the lunar surface, according to Bezos.

May 9
2019

How To Make A Spaceship

Jeff Bezos just unveiled a giant lunar-landing vehicle created by his rocket company Blue Origin.

Called “Blue Moon,” the lander is designed to deliver a variety of sizes and types of payloads to the moon’s surface, with the eventual goal of establishing what the company calls a “sustained human presence” on the moon.

The model of the Blue Moon lander that Bezos revealed today is the version designed to carry robotic and infrastructure payloads to the moon. Bezos said payloads could weigh up to 7 tons (6.5 metric tonnes). But according to the company’s website, “the larger variant of Blue Moon has been designed to land an ascent vehicle that will allow us to return Americans to the moon by 2024.” A vehicle designed for people was not shown at the event, however.

May 9
2019

Billionaire Bezos unveils moon lander mockup, touts Blue Origin’s lunar goals

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Billionaire entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, founder of rocket company Blue Origin, unveiled on Thursday a mockup of a lunar lander spacecraft and discussed missions to the moon in a strategy tailored to the U.S. government’s renewed push to establish a lunar outpost in just five years.

May 9
2019

Blue Moon

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

May 9
2019

“I don’t plan to die:” The immortality movement is going mainstream

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.

May 8
2019

Now Mars 2020 Can Phone Home

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.

May 8
2019

Catastrophic meteors: How space scientists hope to protect ‘the only planet we know’

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.

May 8
2019

Experimental cosmologist group launches its first iterations of space-traveling ‘wafercraft’

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.