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Things are slowly falling into place for the Polaris Program’s first mission, Polaris Dawn. The mission is nearing milestones that might finally give it a launch date that will actually hold.

Polaris Dawn, a private mission being paid for by Shift4 CEO Jared Issacman, who also paid for and flew on Inspiration4 in 2021. The goal of the mission is to fly higher than any human spaceflight since Apollo, perform the first private spacewalk, and conduct numerous science experiments in orbit.

Like Inspiration4, Polaris is partnering with SpaceX to complete this. Currently, SpaceX is the only company capable of this sort of feat. To do so, the company has modified its Dragon spacecraft to support spacewalk operations and develop an upgraded spacesuit to be used in the vacuum of space.

\r The most recent piece of news on this front comes from American space agency NASA, which announced last week that it is getting ready to launch a new kind of solar sail that may revolutionize such technologies.

\r.

\rYou see, one of the trickiest parts of making a solar sail is not the sail surface itself but the booms that are used to deploy them. That’s because solar sails are meant to extend after the ship reaches space.

Learn more from a science course on Brilliant! First 30 days are free and 20% off the annual premium subscription when you use our link ➜ https://brilliant.org/sabine.

Hyperjumps, wormholes, and warp drives sound like science fiction, but they’re actually based on real science! Though I believe out of the three, warp drives are the most plausible. The math seems to agree. Today I want to tell you about a new way of analysing and visualizing warp drives.

Code: https://github.com/pbbp0904/WarpFactory.

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NASA’s next moon spacecraft for humans made one small leap into an altitude chamber for vital testing before it brings astronauts on board.

The Orion spacecraft for Artemis 2 is slated to fly around the moon with four astronauts no earlier than September 2025 — but first, engineers with NASA want to make sure it is ready for the job.