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Category: space travel – Page 432

A couple of years ago, researchers at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre discovered a thruster system which actually generates thrust, despite requiring absolutely no propellant. The implications of this discovery are far-reaching; applications for space flight and other technologies which require propulsion could one day become far cheaper, allowing space exploration to expand exponentially.

The existence of this technology also further validates the fact that energy can be derived from tapping into the quantum vacuum, also known as “zero-point.”

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T he Moon will have a 4G mobile network installed next year, according to plans set out by Vodafone and Nokia.

The mission, organised by space exploration company PTScientists, will be the first ever privately-funded Moon landing.

Nokia masts will be launched on a SpaceX rocket in 2019 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, USA.

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Physicists have confirmed the existence of a new form of atomic nuclei, and the fact that it’s not symmetrical challenges the fundamental theories of physics that explain our Universe.

But that’s not as bad as it sounds, because the 2016 discovery could help scientists solve one of the biggest mysteries in theoretical physics — where is all the dark matter? — and could also explain why travelling backwards in time might actually be impossible.

“We’ve found these nuclei literally point towards a direction in space. This relates to a direction in time, proving there’s a well-defined direction in time and we will always travel from past to present,” Marcus Scheck from the University of the West of Scotland told Kenneth MacDonald at BBC News at the time.

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The rise of commercial spaceflight companies such as SpaceX and Bigelow Aerospace sparked the age of space tourism as the ultra-wealthy became able to buy a ticket for a rocket ride into space. Of course, there is a huge limit on tourism if there isn’t a place to stay in one’s intended destination, but that’s about to change in space. Bigelow has announced plans to build two space stations that will float in low-Earth orbit. The company has big plans for these space stations and ideas about who might pay to use them. Essentially, the stations will be like orbiting space hotels where astronauts and possibly even tourists might stay one day.

In a press release this week, Bigelow Aerospace announced that it has created a spin-off venture called Bigelow Space Operations, which will operate and manage two space stations that will serve as hotels. The company expects to launch both hotels in 2021, and it’s beginning to work toward building them this year. Bigelow describes the two space stations as “the largest, most complex structures ever known as stations for human use in space.”

The two stations are currently being referred to as B330-1 and B330-2, and they aren’t the only two that Bigelow Space Operations plans to build. The two space stations are inflatable and will provide shelter for up to six people in low-Earth orbit with about 12,000 cubic feet of living space.

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The antimatter of science fiction vastly differs from the real-life antimatter of particle physics. The former powers spaceships or bombs, while the latter is just another particle that physicists study, one that happens to be the mirror image with the opposite charge of the more familiar particles.

Normally, scientists produce antimatter in the lab, where it stays put in an experimental apparatus for further study. But now, researchers are planning on transporting it for the first time from one lab to another in a truck for research. Elizabeth Gibney reports for Nature:

In a project that began last month, researchers will transport antimatter by truck and then use it to study the strange behaviour of rare radioactive nuclei. The work aims to provide a better understanding of fundamental processes inside atomic nuclei and to help astrophysicists to learn about the interiors of neutron stars, which contain the densest form of matter in the Universe.

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