Lifeboat Foundation

The X Prize Foundation has launched a number of competitions over the years that includes everything from addressing water quality and women’s safety to exploring the depths of the ocean, to sending rovers to the moon. Now, it’s assembled a supergroup of some of the world’s best-known science fiction authors to help the organization imagine what the future will look like.

The Science Fiction Advisory Council is made up of 64 advisors, which includes some of the biggest names from the world of science fiction literature, film, and television: Charlie Jane Anders, Paolo Bacigalupi, Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman, David Goyer, Nancy Kress, Annalee Newitz, Larry Niven, Bruce Sterling, J. Michael Straczynski, Charles Stross, Andy Weir, and many others. Eric Desatnik, X Prize’s senior public relations director, told The Verge in an e-mail that he brought the idea of the advisory council to the foundation’s founder, Peter Diamandis last year, who “said yes before I could even finish my sentence.”

The goal, he explains, “is to accelerate positive change in the world by bringing together” people who have already been doing just that. He noted that several of the foundation’s projects, were inspired directly by science fiction stories, including this the tricorder-style device that was awarded a $2.6 million prize.

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Getting astronauts to Mars will be far from a cakewalk. In order to safely land a crewed ship on the surface of the red planet, the agency needs to invent things that don’t yet exist. And we’re not talking about just one or two or five new gadgets. NASA is working on a staggering 40 new technologies in order to meet a 2033 deadline for launching a crew to Mars that can live on the planet for at least a few months.

Yes, Thomas Edison was awarded thousands of patents, but the man wasn’t trying to get human beings to safely land on the surface of another world sitting 33.8 million miles away, separated by a cold, eternal vacuum. Each of those 40 technologies is a hell of a lot more complex than a light bulb.

Stephen Jurczyk, the associate administrator of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, is the person in charge of making sure NASA’s engineers stay on task and get these technologies ready on time. He seems optimistic NASA can pull off a trip to Mars, but he says the agency just needs to remain flexible while moving forward. “This is a tremendous challenge, and we absolutely can do this,” he tells Inverse.

Continue reading “40 Technologies NASA is Inventing for Its Mars Missions” »

Equipped with 3D printers, CNC machines, computers, digital tools and other equipment, a fabrication laboratory, otherwise known as a Fab Lab, is a facility set up to enable people to ‘make anything’. In a bid to provide these capabilities to missions for deep-space exploration, NASA are accepting FabLab proposals from corporate, institutional and charitable teams in the private-sector, due to be reviewed late 2017.

Hey, kids! Who wants to live on the moon!

SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk may have his heart set on building a city on Mars, but Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space vision looks closer to home. He’s gazing at the moon.

“I think we should build a permanent human settlement on one of the poles of the moon,” Bezos said today during a Q&A with kids at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. “It’s time to go back to the moon, but this time to stay.”

During a chat with students at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, the billionaire founder of Amazon and Blue Origin discusses how to build a permanent human settlement on the moon. Get the full story on GeekWire: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-moon/

A major new breakthrough in jet propulsion technology could revolutionize the aerospace industry, paving the way for plasma jet engines that could carry a craft to the edge of space using only air and electricity.

Berkant Göksel, the lead researcher in a new study by the Technical University of Berlin, says his team have successfully completed tests on plasma engines that could take future aircrafts to altitudes of 30 miles (50km) and beyond.

SpaceX’s Elon Musk wants to send men and women on a one-way trip to Mars.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=m9t-G9p8LrI

What does a prototype computer with 160 terabytes of memory have to do with missions to Mars? The way Kirk Bresniker sees it, a giant leap in computing is required for the giant leap to the Red Planet.

“That’s actually what we need to wrap around that crew,” Bresniker, chief architect at Hewlett Packard Labs, told GeekWire.