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Category: space travel – Page 456

Ever since the EM drive first made headlines, science lovers have puzzled over how the propulsion system seems to produce thrust, despite the fact it’s ‘impossible’ according to one of the most fundamental laws of physics — Newton’s third law of motion.

Now a team of physicists have put forward an alternative explanation — it turns out the EM drive could actually work without breaking any scientific laws, if we factor in a weird and often overlooked idea in quantum physics — pilot wave theory.

For those who need a refresher, the crux of the problem here is that the EM, or electromagnetic, drive appears to produce thrust without any fuel or propellant.

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Entrepreneur Elon Musk’s announcement last week accelerating plans for manned flights to Mars ratchets up political and public relations pressure on NASA’s efforts to reach the same goal.

With Musk publicly laying out a much faster schedule than NASA — while contending his vision is less expensive and could be financed primarily with private funds — a debate unlike any before is shaping up over the direction of U.S. space policy.

Read: Before Elon Musk can get SpaceX to Mars, he must overcome these nontechnical hurdles.

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Musk said he’s “confident” the plan will be under way within five years.

“I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars,” Musk said, adding that he thinks SpaceX has figured out a way to make it affordable by using revenues from the company’s satellite launches, service missions to the International Space Station and by making smaller, more efficient rockets that are mostly reusable.

Nine years after SpaceX’s first successful launch — its fourth ever — Musk said his engineers are now perfecting propulsive landing. He believes the BFR rocket can carry out missions to the moon and back without producing propellant, enabling the establishment of a lunar space station.

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Futurist and inventor Elon Musk unveiled ambitious plans Friday to send cargo ships to Mars in five years and use rockets to carry people between Earth’s major cities in under half-an-hour.

The founder of SpaceX said a planned interplanetary transport system, codenamed BFR (Big Fucking Rocket), would be downsized so it could carry out a range of tasks that would then pay for future Mars missions.

“The most important thing… is that I think we have figured out how to pay for (BFR),” Musk told a packed auditorium at a global gathering of experts in Adelaide.

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NASA’s goal to reach Mars is just over a decade away, and Lockheed Martin revealed Thursday how humans might soon walk upon the red planet’s surface.

Lockheed Martin gave CNBC a first look at its new spacecraft prototype, which the company will unveil Thursday at this year’s International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia.

“This is a single-stage, completely reusable lander which will be able to both descend and ascend,” said Lockheed Martin’s Robert Chambers.

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Finally Mach Effect propulsion had gotten useful levels of funding and will get a validation test with NASA. They reported interim results and have made good progress. Nextbigfuture covered the announcement of funding by NASA NIAC for mach effect propulsion in April 2017. They now have presented the new experiments and path forward with the needed materials to clearly prove significant propulsion and unambiguous space experiments. They have advanced the experimental work and will get test state-of-the-art PIN-PMN-PT materials. They have demonstrated a Force versus Voltage scaling relationship that is consistent with the theory. They have a roadmap to continue.

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NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos have announced a new partnership for human exploration of the moon and deep space. Both agencies signed a joint statement on cooperation today (Sept. 27) at the 68th International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia.

The decision to partner with Russia on human missions to the moon and beyond came about as NASA continues to flesh out ideas for its “deep-space gateway” concept, a mission architecture designed to send astronauts into cislunar space — or lunar orbit — by the 2020s. Traveling to and from cislunar space will help NASA and its partners gain the knowledge and experience necessary to venture beyond the moon and into deep space.

A crewed mission to the moon and ultimately deep space would likely involve NASA’s gigantic new Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion space capsule. “This plan challenges our current capabilities in human spaceflight and will benefit from engagement by multiple countries and U.S. industry,” NASA officials said in a statement. [Photos: NASA’s Space Launch System for Deep Space Flights].

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Lockheed Martin has revealed plans to set up a ‘Mars base camp’ orbiting the red planet — and says it hopes to launch it within ten years.

Using NASA’s Orion spacecraft as the command deck, the orbiting outpost could give astronauts the ability to operate rovers and drones on the surface in real time, helping us better understand the Red Planet and plan for manned missions.

‘The time is now,’ Lockheed Martin said in a video revealing the project at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, Australia, where it also showed off a lander that could eventually take astronauts form the station to the red planet’s surface.

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