Mars mission with plasma rockets concept. NASA
By Gary Li / 07.29.2016 PhD Candidate in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering University of California, Los Angeles
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Category: space travel – Page 485
The next president needs to invest the damn money that’s needed to get this entire thing going. No more deferring. No more dithering. If this turns out to be an impossibility, then we should just privatize the entire production and design process, get rid of the red tape, and just get it DONE before we get delay after delay and then, when we finally DO get there, we find the Chinese have already built a damned settlement.
Scientific Method —
A new, independent review of the Orion spacecraft is pretty damning.
The capsule is over budget and may need seven more years before flying crews.
WASHINGTON — NASA estimates that SpaceX is spending on the order of $300 million on its Red Dragon Mars lander mission, a down payment on the company’s long-term ambitions for human Mars missions.
At a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s technology committee in Cleveland July 26, Jim Reuter, deputy associate administrator for programs in NASA’s space technology mission directorate, provided an overview of NASA’s agreement with SpaceX, announced in April, to support that company’s plans for an uncrewed Mars landing mission that could launch as soon as May 2018.
That agreement, in the form of an unfunded Space Act Agreement, does not include any exchange of funds between NASA and SpaceX. Reuter said NASA estimates it will spend approximately $32 million over four years, primarily in the form of NASA personnel providing technical support for SpaceX. About $6 million of that will be spent this fiscal year, he added.
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Ever really wanted to know what folks truly are thinking about?
A new experiment advances the idea that brain scans can teach us something about how the human mind works.
By Nathan Collins
Mind reading stands as one of science fiction’s most enduring improbabilities, alongside light-speed space travel and laser guns. But unlike those latter two, mind reading actually has a whiff of reality: In a new demonstration, psychologists have shown they can figure out how far along someone’s brain is in the process of solving a sophisticated math problem—a result that, more than anything else, indicates the promise of new brain-scanning techniques for understanding the human mind.
I wonder, if NASA and/or SpaceX goes to Mars in the 2030’s as planned, by the time the 2050’s roll around a manned attempt to Ceres or Jupiter trojans might be attempted or perhaps an unmanned vehicle made on Mars beats this sail.
Japan’s space agency has its sights on unexplored asteroids as far away as Jupiter, a project that at one level draws on centuries of sail science.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency this month unveiled a huge prototype solar sail designed to power a JAXA probe as it explores asteroids that circle the sun on roughly the same orbit as Jupiter. The sail measures 2,500 sq. meters and is made up of thousands of ultraslim solar panels.
It was 47 years ago that NASA won the space race against the Soviet Union, and Apollo 11 astronauts first walked on the Moon.
And now American companies have pitched a series of new plans that would see the country finally return to the lunar surface… this time, alongside the Russians.
The collaboration between the two countries isn’t entirely surprising — Russia and America have been working together in space since their association on the International Space Station (ISS) first began in 1993.
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A new paper asserts that a physical body might be able to pass through a wormhole in spite of the extreme tidal forces that are at play.
A physical object, such as a person or a spacecraft, could theoretically make it through a wormhole in the centre of a black hole, and maybe even access another universe on the other side, physicists have suggested.
In what looks like the logical extension of the plot of Interstellar – where astronauts try to hunt down another universe after the catastrophic effects of climate change destroy Earth – physicists have modelled what would happen to a chair, a scientist, and a spacecraft, if each one ended up inside the spherical wormhole of a black hole.
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