“Travel along with the Voyager spacecrafts as they traverse the solar system on their planetary expedition spanning over three decades.
A film by — Santiago Menghini”
Voyagers | Santiago Menghini
Posted in space, space travel
Category: space travel – Page 499
Interstellar Comparisons
Posted in engineering, environmental, space travel
Adam Crowl talking about the energy of the Sun and what we can do with it.
No one thinks big better than Adam Crowl, a Centauri Dreams regular and mainstay of the Icarus Interstellar attempt to reconfigure the Project Daedalus starship design of the 1970’s. If you’re looking for ideas for science fiction stories, you’ll find them in the essay below, where Adam considers the uses to which we might put the abundant energies of the Sun. Starships are a given, but what about terraforming not just one but many Solar System objects? Can we imagine a distant future when our own Moon is awash with seas, and snow is falling on a Venus in the process of transformation? To keep up with Adam, be sure to check his Crowlspace site regularly. It’s where I found an earlier version of this now updated and revised essay.
By Adam Crowl
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GOLDEN, Colorado — A major American launch provider has outlined a plan that the company says will help enable a space economy based on refueling spacecraft in Earth orbit.
Dubbed the “Cislunar 1,000 Vision,” the initiative foresees a self-sustaining economy that supports 1,000 people living and working in Earth-moon space roughly 30 years from now. The concept stems from an analysis and ongoing technical work by United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing Co. that provides launches aboard Atlas and Delta rockets.
A central element of the plan involves the use of a souped-up Centaur rocket stage called ACES (Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage). This liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen upper stage is designed to be reusable and can be refueled, perhaps by propellant made using water extracted from Earth’s moonor asteroids. [Moon Base Visions: How to Build a Lunar Colony (Photos)].
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Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos today put a spotlight on the construction of a giant rocket production facility in Florida for his Blue Origin space venture – but he also gave a shout-out to the engine production team back in Kent, Wash.
In an email to Blue Origin’s fans, Bezos noted that ground has been broken for an orbital vehicle manufacturing site at Exploration Park, just south of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Ground-clearing actually began last month.)
“The 750,000-square-foot rocket factory is custom-built from the ground up to accommodate manufacturing, processing, integration and testing,” Bezos wrote. In comparison, the production facility in Kent where Blue Origin is building rocket engines and its New Shepard suborbital spaceships takes in about 300,000 square feet.
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A new paper in AIP Advances argues that the controversial EM Drive doesn’t break physics as we know it, as it emits light (photons) as exhaust. However, other experts assert that it’s likely just an artifact.
Want to get people excited about science? Simple. Just post about EM Drive.
For those of you who may be new to the topic, EM Drive is a method of space travel that, if realized, would utterly transform our way of life. We could get to Mars in just 10 weeks (as opposed to the current 6+ month journey), and we could save a massive amount of money on fuel. We could have a truly viable space industry.
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The new “Independence Day” is likely to be a popcorn-chomper, but it does provide us with some serious food for thought. We need to take a page from our former secretary of defense’s playbook and start thinking about such ‘known-unknowns.’ Eg., we need to take the development of interstellar propulsion much more seriously for a whole host of reasons.
As debris from an exploded mothership burned through Earth’s atmosphere, many audiences likely left the 1996 film “Independence Day” wondering when the rest of this ugly, stinking group of fictional extraterrestrials would return for a sequel? The answer lies in “Resurgence,” Roland Emmerich’s new blockbuster about locust-like space aliens that appear hellbent on killing off earth-like civilizations.
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While continuing to impress even themselves with their ability to successfully propulsively land Falcon 9 first stages on land and in the ocean, SpaceX is continuing to progress on its human spaceflight endeavors, with the company’s Dragon spacecraft, Falcon 9, and ground operations development all keeping pace for a second quarter 2017 debut of the human-rated Dragon spacecraft before the first human Dragon launch by the end of 2017.
Humans on Dragons:
As one of two companies to receive funding and contracts for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP), SpaceX has spent years developing its human-rated Dragon spacecraft to help fill a crucial aspect of spaceflight left void by NASA following the conclusion of the Space Shuttle Program in July 2011.
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NASA contractor Techshot have become the first to 3D print a heart structure in zero gravity using human stem cells. Together with 3D bioprinter developers nScrypt and bio-ink specialists Bioficial Organs they have successfully printed cardiac and vascular structures, and believe this could further 3D bioprinting efforts on solid ground.
Techshot have been developing technologies for NASA, SpaceX and other partners for more than 25 years. They have tech aboard the International Space Station among other places, and are also known for combining their aerospace specialism with the medical sector, having built the Bone Densitometer zero-gravity X ray machine.
NScrypt are responsible for building the world’s first 3D bioprinter back in 2003, and have been working on micro-dispensing and 3D printing systems for years. Also in the team was Bioficial Organs, which has grown out of the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute in Louisville, Kentucky, and specializes in organ 3D printing innovations.
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Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, has always had the dream of sending the human race to Mars. Now, thanks to SpaceX’s advancements, that dream is not far off. In an interview with The Washington Post, Musk divulges some new details on his plan to get to Mars.
The first step in his plan is to send an uncrewed spacecraft to Mars as early as 2018. These missions will continue every two years when Earth and Mars are at closest approach supplying rovers and science experiments to the Red Planet, and testing pertinent systems of the spacecrafts.
“Essentially what we’re saying is we’re establishing a cargo route to Mars,” Musk told The Post. “It’s a regular cargo route. You can count on it. It’s going happen every 26 months. Like a train leaving the station.”
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