Lifeboat Foundation

Alone in a Spartan black cockpit, test pilot Mike Melvill rocketed toward space. He had eighty seconds to exceed the speed of sound and begin the climb to a target no civilian pilot had ever reached. He might not make it back alive. If he did, he would make history as the world’s first commercial astronaut.

The spectacle defied reason, the result of a competition dreamed up by entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, whose vision for a new race to space required small teams to do what only the world’s largest governments had done before.

Peter Diamandis was the son of hardworking immigrants who wanted their science prodigy to make the family proud and become a doctor. But from the age of eight, when he watched Apollo 11 land on the Moon, his singular goal was to get to space. When he realized NASA was winding down manned space flight, Diamandis set out on one of the great entrepreneurial adventure stories of our time. If the government wouldn’t send him to space, he would create a private space flight industry himself.

A state-backed agency is testing its first vehicle to send tourists to the edge of space and back — and hopes to fly up to 20 people at a time.

In 2009, Carbon nanotube tethers with a strength of 9 N/Tex [9 million newton meters/kg] is over twice as strong as any fibers ever produced before.

In 2016, Jian Nong Wang and his colleagues made nanotubes with a process akin to glass blowing: Using a stream of nitrogen gas, they injected ethanol, with a small amount of ferrocene and thiophene added as catalysts, into a 50-mm-wide horizontal tube placed in furnace at 1,150–1,130 °C.

They packed the nanotubes even more densely by pressing the film repeatedly between two rollers.

Continue reading “Drum rolled Carbon fiber tethers five times stronger than Kevlar and Mach 8 spaceplane can place payloads into orbit at super low cost” »

An exotic “impossible” space propulsion technology known as “Cannae Drive,” less known than the EmDrive but equally controversial, made news headlines a few weeks ago with the announcement that it is about to be tested in space. There are speculations that the Cannae Drive could exploit physics known as “Mach Effect.” But perhaps the same physics plays a role in the EmDrive as well.

Cannae Inc., the company formed by engineer Guido Fetta to commercialize Cannae Drive technology, announced the forthcoming launch of a cubesat to test its space propulsion technology. “Cannae’s technology requires no on-board propellant to generate thrust and will provide station-keeping for a cubesat flying below a 150-mile orbital altitude,” claimed the announcement. “The demonstration satellite will remain in this orbit for a minimum of six months.”

Ending a wave of speculations on the similarities between Cannae Drive technology and the anomalous EmDrive effect, Fetta posted a clarification a few days ago:

Elon Musk doesn’t want to simply send humans to Mars. The SpaceX CEO has bigger ambitions. He wants us to be an “interplanetary species,” which means creating a self-sustaining civilization on Mars, which means living and dying on Mars — which at some point might mean sex and pregnancy on Mars.

So how would that work?

Given that Musk hasn’t figured out how to keep people alive on the trip to the Red Planet, it’s unlikely he has details on how people will make more people once they’re there. We don’t have any data on how human bodies will work on Mars specifically, but we have enough information to know that sex in space could be a real hassle.

Continue reading “How would sex work in space?” »

Elon Musk spent two hours detailing his plan to bring humanity to Mars. We cut it down to less than 90 seconds. You’re welcome.

“It’s driven by infinite improbability.”

The exploration of Europa begins under the ice in Antarctica.

That’s where a team of researchers, led by the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), has been testing a variety of robotic subs in recent years to learn about what technologies will work best when NASA eventually launches a mission to Jupiter’s icy moon.

Continue reading “If There’s Life on Europa, Robots Like These Will Find It” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=A1YxNYiyALg

Tech billionaire Elon Musk is convinced that we must colonise Mars with a million people if the humanity is to survive long-term. To that effect in 2008, he almost went broke funding SpaceX – his then-new aerospace company – to keep developing next-generation rockets.

And on Tuesday, at a challenging moment in the 14-year-old company’s history, Musk plans to unveil his grand vision: to turn Mars into a “backup drive” and save humanity.

Continue reading “Elon Musk just unveiled a critical piece of his plan to save humanity” »