As commercial space travel gets closer to becoming a reality, here are some things to watch for in the coming years.
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Category: space travel – Page 428
Charania told GeekWire that the first Blue Moon landing could take place even before 2023.
Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, is laying out a plan to support the creation of permanent settlements on the moon, starting with a lunar landing mission within the next five years.
The Kent, Wash.-based company’s roadmap was laid out most recently last week during the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace conference in Renton, Wash.
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The next phase of a NASA sponsored mission to 3D print human organs and tissues in space will launch in February 2019. A 3D BioFabrication Facility (BFF) developed by nScrypt and Techshot and destined for the International Space Station (ISS) will form part of the cargo of SpaceX CRS-17.
3D printing in zero gravity
nScrypt is based in Orlando, Florida and is a manufacturer of industrial micro-dispensing and 3D printing systems. The company is spin out of Sciperio Inc who, under a DARPA contact, developed an award winning bioprinter in 2003.
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The disk of our home galaxy – the Milky Way – is bigger than we previously thought. A new study shows it would take 200,000 years for a spaceship traveling at the speed of light to go across the entire galaxy.
Researchers made the find after analyzing the abundances of metals (heavy elements) in stars, also known as their metallicities. When looking beyond the previously assumed boundary of the Milky Way’s disk, scientists were surprised to see stars with compositions resembling those of disk stars. [Amazing Photos of Our Milky Way Galaxy]
“We have shown that there is an appreciable fraction of stars with higher metallicity, characteristic of disc stars, further out than the previously assumed limit on the radius of the galaxy disc,” study co-author Carlos Allende, a researcher at Astrophysics Institute of the Canary Islands (Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, said in a statement.
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TOKYO, Japan — A rocket developed by a Japanese startup company burst into flames seconds after a failed liftoff Saturday in northern Japan.
The MOMO-2 rocket, developed by Interstellar Technologies, was launched in Taiki town on Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost main island. It was supposed to reach as high as 100 kilometers (62 miles) into space.
Television footage showed that the 10-meter (33-foot) pencil rocket lifted only slightly from its launch pad before dropping to the ground, disappearing in a fireball. Footage on NHK public television showed a charred rocket lying on the ground.
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“Humanity is not perfect, but it’s all we’ve got,” the SpaceX and Tesla boss said.
To safeguard human life requires moving beyond the blue planet, in Musk’s view, because earth is likely to become uninhabitable.
“There will be some eventual extinction event” if humans stay on earth forever, Musk said in an article published in academic journal New Space, which was published online in June 2017.
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Some market observers worry the solutions to problems the new technologies offer might become the causes of other problems. With AI gathering steam and large amounts of data flowing to empower machine learning, how to protect privacy in a region where the use of personal information is loosely regulated has become a pressing question.
Filing taxes using blockchain in Indonesia. Growing better crops in Vietnam with artificial intelligence. Sending rockets into space in Singapore. Southeast Asia is quietly emerging as a breeding ground for new technology.
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“The countries which have the capacity to bring that source from the moon to Earth will dictate the process,” said K Sivan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). “I don’t want to be just a part of them, I want to lead them.”
The mission would solidify India’s place among the fleet of explorers racing to the moon, Mars and beyond for scientific, commercial or military gains. The governments of the US, China, India, Japan and Russia are competing with startups and billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson to launch satellites, robotic landers, astronauts and tourists into the cosmos.
The rover landing is one step in an envisioned series for ISRO that includes putting a space station in orbit and, potentially, an Indian crew on the moon. The government has yet to set a timeframe.
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