Lifeboat Foundation

Microscopic spaceships powered by Earth-based lasers are being developed to hunt for extra-terrestrial life in Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to ours.

The £70m Breakthrough Starshot concept involves creating a tiny robotic spacecraft, no larger than a mobile phone chip, which would carry cameras, thrusters, a power supply and navigation and communication equipment.

Physicist Stephen Hawking, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Russian internet billionaire Yuri Milner have all joined the project’s board giving it major backing.

A ‘brane’ is a dynamical object that can propagate through spacetime. Flattening a spacecraft into a membrane, or 2-brane, can produce a low mass vehicle with ultra-high power-to-weight ratio (7.7 kW/kg using thin film solar cells). If most of this power is used by an array of thinned, distributed electrospray thrusters with a specific impulse of 4000 s, a Brane Craft could start in low Earth orbit, land on Phobos, and return to low Earth orbit.

Other possible targets include any near-Earth asteroid and most main belt asteroids. Propellant is stored as a liquid within a 10-micron wide gap between two Kapton sheets that form the main structure of the Brane Craft.

This NASA NIAC project will study how to design an ultra-light dynamic membrane spacecraft, with 3-axis attitude determination and control plus navigation, that can significantly change both its shape and orbit. Conventional sensors like star trackers will have to be replaced by 2-dimensional alternatives. Estimated mass is about 35 grams for a 1 square meter Brane Craft.

Continue reading “Membrane spacecraft with 7.7 kW/kg power-to-weight ratio and 4000 ISP” »

MOUNTAIN VIEW The next big thing in space exploration might not come from a shiny NASA research facility. Instead, it may spring from an abandoned gas station or a converted McDonald’s in the heart of Silicon Valley’s growing space startup scene.

Bay Area companies are commercializing the space industry, with ambitions as lofty as the cruising altitude of the International Space Station. They range from Deep Space Industries, which plans to mine asteroids, to Made In Space, which is working on in-space manufacturing, to Planet Labs, which aims to take daily photographs of everywhere on Earth.

Just as in other technology sectors, Silicon Valley is leading the space startup boom. At least a dozen space companies have popped up in the Bay Area over the past few years, with a concentration taking over empty buildings on Mountain View’s Moffett Field.

The Direct Fusion Drive (DFD) concept provides game-changing propulsion and power capabilities that would revolutionize interplanetary travel. DFD is based on the Princeton Field-Reversed Configuration (PFRC) fusion reactor under development at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. The mission context we are proposing is delivery of a Pluto orbiter with a lander. The key objective of the proposal is to determine the feasibility of the proposed Pluto spacecraft using improved engine models. DFD provides high thrust to allow for reasonable transit times to Pluto while delivering substantial mass to orbit: 1000 kg delivered in 4 to 6 years. Since DFD provides power as well as propulsion in one integrated device, it will also provide as much as 2 MW of power to the payloads upon arrival. This enables high-bandwidth communication, powering of the lander from orbit, and radically expanded options for instrument design. The data acquired by New Horizons’ recent Pluto flyby is just a tiny fraction of the scientific data that could be generated from an orbiter and lander. We have evaluated the Pluto mission concept using the Lambert algorithm for maneuvers with rough estimates of the engine thrust and power. The acceleration times are sufficiently short for the Lambert approximation, i.e. impulsive burns, to have some validity. We have used fusion scaling laws to estimate the total mission mass and show that it would fit within the envelope of a Delta IV Heavy launch vehicle. Estimates of the amount of Helium 3 required to fuel the reactor are within available terrestrial stores.

Stephen Hawking will be making a big announcement today about space exploration. What will it be? Find out at noon, EST.

Hawking and Yuri Milner of the Breakthrough Prize have been building up to an announcement on Project Starshot. So far, the only thing known about the new project is that it has to do with space exploration.

But what’s Hawking’s big reveal about the project? No one knows yet—but it’ll be streaming live right here at noon, EST. Watch along with us.

Continue reading “Watch Stephen Hawking Deliver a Mysterious Announcement on Space Exploration” »

Yuri Milner is spending $100 million on a probe that could travel to Alpha Centauri within a generation—and he’s recruited Mark Zuckerberg and Stephen Hawking to help. In an interview with The Atlantic, Milner makes his case for star travel.

In the Southern Hemisphere’s sky, there is a constellation, a centaur holding a spear, its legs raised in mid-gallop. The creature’s front hoof is marked by a star that has long hypnotized humanity, with its brightness, and more recently, its proximity.

Since the dawn of written culture, at least, humans have dreamt of star travel. As the nearest star system to Earth, Alpha Centauri is the most natural subject of these dreams. To a certain cast of mind, the star seems destined to figure prominently in our future.

Continue reading “​Inside a Billionaire’s New Interstellar Mission” »

Regardless of whether or not this particular project achieves it’s aims, hopefully it will encourage other obscenely wealthy philanthropists to funnel their donations into private (or governmental ) outer-space related endeavors!

Yuri Milner has backed a plan to research sending tiny, laser-powered spacecraft to the nearest star at 20 per cent of the speed of light.

Forget about generation ships, suspended animation, or the sudden appearance of a worm hole. The most likely way for aliens to visit us — whatever their motive — is by sending robotic probes. Here’s how swarms of self-replicating spacecraft could someday rule the galaxy.

Top image by Alejandro Burdisio via Concept Ships.

Back in late 1940’s the Hungarian mathematician John Von Neumann wondered if it might be possible to design a non-biological system that could replicate itself in a cellular automata environment, what he called a universal constructor. Von Neumann wasn’t thinking about space exploration at the time, but other thinkers like Freeman Dyson, Eric Drexler, Ralph Merkle, and Robert Freitas later took his idea and applied it to exactly that.

Continue reading “How Self-Replicating Spacecraft Could Take Over the Galaxy” »

Future space missions, including the journey to Mars, edge closer to reality as NASA reveals its top picks from a series of competitions designed to crowdsource innovative concepts.