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Category: space travel – Page 479

China is already well on the way to establishing its own version of America’s GPS network with its Beidou satellite constellation, but now it is seeking to take navigation and timing to stellar levels.

In November China will launch the X-ray pulsar navigation satellite — XPNAV-1 — a satellite that will conduct the world’s first test of the possibilities of using the regular emission of X-ray signals from pulsars for spacecraft navigation.

The spacecraft will attempt to triangulate its position relative to the Sun using the highly regular emissions from pulsars.

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There has been a lot of talk recently about reusable rockets and asteroid mining making space travel cheaper, but a proposed idea for a maglev train into space might be the real answer.

Using existing maglev technology, the Startram project proposes to launch people and cargo down a 1,000-mile long tunnel 12 miles high at 20,000 mph using a superconducting cable.

The idea sounds far fetched, but it’s being pitched by some really smart people. Dr. James Powell co-invented superconducting maglev trains and Dr. George Maise is an aerospace engineer; they believe the train into space is the answer that could make interplanetary travel possible.

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Interstellar travel is the term used for hypothetical manned or unmanned travel between stars. Interstellar travel will be much more difficult than interplanetary spaceflight; the distances between the planets in the Solar System are less than 30 astronomical units (AU)—whereas the distances between stars are typically hundreds of thousands of AU, and usually expressed in light-years. Because of the vastness of those distances, interstellar travel would require a high percentage of the speed of light, or huge travel time, lasting from decades to millennia or longer.

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Ww.geekwire.com/2016/iot-genetics-self-driving-ships-space-travel-darpa-chief-arati-prabhakar-tours-agencys-landscape/

The Internet of Things so widely predicted as the Next Big Thing in computing is full of promise but presents a correspondingly large vulnerability to cyber attacks, said Arati Prabhakar, director of DARPA, at the 2016 GeekWire Summit in Seattle today.

IoT offers “a huge value, but then with every advance comes more attack surface,” said Prabhakar during an interview with Alan Boyle, GeekWire’s aerospace and science editor. “Provably secure embedded systems is part of the answer.”

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You may be thinking this is not a big deal but u would be wrong. Competition DRIVES INNOVATION!

Competition breeds progress, so it’s a bit thrilling to hear Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg say that he’s going to beat SpaceX to Mars in terms of delivering real humans to the surface of the red planet.

Muilenburg said that he’s “convinced the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding a Boeing rocket,” speaking at a conference in Chicago Tuesday, according to Bloomberg. Boeing is working on a heavy-lift rocket project called the Space Launch System which would aim for a similar goal to what SpaceX is hoping to achieve with its Interplanetary Transport System, the details of which SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shared in a keynote presented at an international aeronautics convention last week.

Boeing and SpaceX are already close competitors when it comes to commercial spaceflight contracts from NASA, and the company’s approach to its system designed for reaching Mars reflects similar tensions to those present in the ongoing battle between the two for space missions closer to home. Boeing’s plan involves at least $60 billion in NASA-funded development prior to a human-crewed Mars mission in the late 2030s at the earliest.

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The United Nations (UN) has announced its first ever official space mission, with the aim of giving developing countries the opportunity to conduct research in a microgravity environment.

The mission, which is intended to launch in 2021, will make use of a Dream Chaser spacecraft – a shuttle-like spaceplane that’s currently in development by American aerospace firm Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC).

The focus of the mission is to give developing nations – many of which don’t have their own dedicated space operations or craft – a chance to develop and fly payloads for an extended duration in orbit.

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