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Category: space travel

Researchers from Case Western Reserve University, Dayton Air Force Research Laboratory and China have developed a new dry adhesive that bonds in extreme temperatures—a quality that could make the product ideal for space exploration and beyond.

The gecko-inspired adhesive loses no traction in temperatures as cold as liquid nitrogen or as hot as molten silver, and actually gets stickier as heat increases, the researchers report.

The research, which builds on earlier development of a single-sided dry adhesive tape based on vertically aligned carbon nanotubes, is published in the journal Nature Communications (“Carbon nanotube dry adhesives with temperature-enhanced adhesion over a large temperature range”). As far as the researchers know, no other dry adhesive is capable of working at such temperature extremes.

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Bigelow Aerospace and Axiom Space — plan to launch habitat modules to orbit in 2020, with the aim of making some money off Earth. If all goes according to plan, private space stations will eventually form the backbone of commercial facilities that replace the International Space Station (ISS), which is currently funded through 2024.

“Hopefully, if we’re successful in the private-sector community, NASA’s going to save a boatload of money, on multiple locations [in orbit] — not just one — with more volume than they’ve ever had before,” Bigelow founder and CEO Robert Bigelow said here Wednesday (Oct. 12) at the 2016 International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS). “So, whether it’s Axiom or us or other people, that is the future.”

A new company, named Axiom Space LLC, was incorporated in January, 2016 in Delaware but is based in Houston. Mike Suffredini (former NASA manager of the International Space Station) serves as its president and Kam Ghaffarian, the president and chief executive of SGT, is the chief executive.

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In August Hacked covered the rumor, then confirmed by NASA, that a paper by the NASA Eagleworks team, titled “Measurement of Impulsive Thrust from a Closed Radio Frequency Cavity in Vacuum,” to be published in December’s issue of American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)’s Journal of Propulsion and Power, a prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal, will reveal promising experimental results on the controversial, “impossible” EmDrive propulsion system. Now, a NASA Eagleworks paper that could be the December paper, or a draft, has been leaked.

The EmDrive results are often dismissed because they appear to violate the fundamental conservation laws of physics, but possible models for the anomalous thrust effect have been proposed that, while belonging to highly imaginative areas of theoretical physics, could explain the controversial results without violating fundamental conservation laws.

The leaked paper was first shared in the NasaSpaceFlight forum, which is often the primary source of updates for all things EmDrive, and a Reddit thread that was then removed at the request of the Eagleworks authors, then posted with a commentary by tech news site Next Big Future. Of course, the paper could be removed again, and therefore those who want to read it before December might want to download it now.

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