Lifeboat Foundation

Is it aliens? Sure sounds like aliens—but these strange, glowing patches over Pluto are actually something else (almost) as mysterious.

NASA’s New Horizons snapped this photo of sunlight streaming through Pluto’s haze haze during the spacecraft’s close approach on July 14, 2015. But, as researchers looked closer at the photo, a question emerged: Uh, what’s with that weird glowing patch in the upper right hand corner?

It’s funny, because even in the space industry, it isn’t every day that you get to work on a really far reaching idea. At Made In Space the vast majority of our engineering energy goes to concepts that will be operational hardware within 5 years. We like to talk about the future a lot, and there is a great deal of whiteboard engineering of what space colonies will look like or what the constraints to manufacturing on Enceladus would be. But we don’t usually get to work directly on the long term stuff. Thanks to the NIAC program, we’ll be doing some of that work.

NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program awards research grants with the intent of studying out-of-the-box ways that space exploration might be done differently. Most of the focus is longer horizon stuff that would be operational on 10+ year timescales. Made In Space recently proposed a new vision for exploring and using asteroids and was awarded a NIAC grant. This is what we proposed.

The only real reason to leave the solar system is arguably for science and exploration. But to actually make our interstellar dreams a reality, we also need to get serious about interstellar propulsion with solid funding and a willingness to pursue any credible idea to its logical conclusion.

Aside from your candidate losing the election, what other reasons would you have for not only leaving Earth — but the solar system itself? Here are five possible drivers to escape the surly bonds of our own heliopause.

— To search for mineral riches

Continue reading “5 Reasons To Leave The Solar System?” »

Oh boy.

Got a design concept? You have until July 22 to submit your plan.

By Jennings Brown.

A Russian rocket company has announced that it’s working on a space taxi that’ll shuttle crews from the ISS down to the moon. The plans were announced at an international conference on space exploration just outside Moscow and reported by Russia Today. The craft, provisionally named Ryvok, would be permanently docked on the ISS — or its replacement — transporting cargo and crews to the lunar surface. Each flight would be powered by fuel in an “accelerator block,” brought up from Earth on the back of a Russian rocket. The report explains that it’s likely to be the Angara A5, a heavy-lift vehicle that’s intended to replace the trusty old Soyuz.

Once it’s time to return to the ISS, the craft will blast off the moon for the five-day return journey. In order to slow its speed on approach, the ship will deploy a 55-square-meter “umbrella” that’ll reduce its speed like a parachute on a drag racer. At least, that’s the idea. The craft is expected to be developed by 2021, with the first launches anticipated to take place in 2023. The company is suggesting that its concept would be cheaper and faster to implement, since you don’t have to wait for the Angara rockets to be certified safe for human transportation.

If there’s one thing that’s given us pause, it’s the historical parallel between this Russian plan and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. After all, things were relatively staid on the space station until the crew got their hands on the USS Defiant. After that point, the whole Federation suddenly found itself embroiled in a universe-wide war with a vastly superior enemy. There’s always a slight worry that, mere months after Ryvok docks at the ISS, that humanity, too, will find itself similarly overwhelmed.

The same laser system being developed to blast tiny spacecraft between the stars could also launch human missions to Mars, protect Earth from dangerous asteroids and help get rid of space junk, project leaders say.

Last month, famed physicist Stephen Hawking and other researchers announced Breakthrough Starshot, a $100 million project that aims to build prototype light-propelled “wafersats” that could reach the nearby Alpha Centauri star system just 20 years after launch.

The basic idea behind Breakthrough Starshot has been developed primarily by astrophysicist Philip Lubin of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has twice received funding from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program to develop the laser propulsion system. [Stephen Hawking Video: ‘Transcending Our Limits’ with Breakthrough Starshot].

Continue reading “Lasers Could Blast Astronauts to Mars, Protect Earth from Asteroids” »

Fifty-five years ago, Yuri Gagarin rocketed into orbit and began to break our bonds to our planet. To mark the occasion, the nonprofit Breakthrough Institute just announced plans to free us from an even more formidable set of bonds and send a fleet of small spacecraft beyond our solar system, off to the stars. News of the ‘Breakthrough Starshot’ plan was met with great enthusiasm, but also with more than a little skepticism. The distance between stars is vast. Our closest neighbour, the Alpha Centauri system, is 4.4 light years away – roughly 25 trillion miles. The Voyager 1 spacecraft, the fastest object ever created by humans, would take 70,000 years to travel that far. Many reporters greeted the Breakthrough Starshot as an idea grounded more in fantasy than in reality.

The reaction was understandable. All previous plans for interstellar flight relied on non-existent or impractical technologies such as antimatter, wormholes and warp drives. But now we have a concrete path forward, which I have published in detail. It is possible to begin the journey to the stars today.

Drawing on recent advances in photonics and electronics, we could use arrays of lasers to accelerate miniature probes (the size and mass of a semiconductor wafer, weighing less than one ounce) to unprecedented velocities. Particles of light, or photons, have no rest mass but they carry energy and momentum. Just as a sailboat can be propelled by the wind, light sails can ride the momentum of photons by reflecting a wind of intense laser light. We call such focused beams of light ‘directed energy’.

Continue reading “We can begin an interstellar mission today – and we should” »

Representative John Culberson (R–TX) wants agency to envision a spacecraft that can travel at 10% light-speed.

This week, Lockheed Martin revealed its Mars Base Camp concept, a space station that will orbit the Red Planet and help astronauts prepare for landing.