Lifeboat Foundation

One year ago today, SpaceX took a giant leap forward for private spaceflight with the launch of its first Crew Dragon to the International Space Station and the company is celebrating that feat with an epic new video.

The new video, which SpaceX shared on YouTube and Twitter, shows the company’s first Crew Dragon spacecraft launched on the Demo-1 mission from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission, an uncrewed test flight, launched a spacesuit-clad dummy named Ripley and an adorable Celestial Buddy Earth plush toy to the station.

AI/Humans, our brave now world, happening now.

Are we facing a golden digital age or will robots soon run the world? We need to establish ethical standards in dealing with artificial intelligence — and to answer the question: What still makes us as human beings unique?

Continue reading “Artificial intelligence and its ethics | DW Documentary” »

It’s hard living in a relativistic Universe, where even the nearest stars are so far away and the speed of light is absolute. It is little wonder then why science fiction franchises routinely employ FTL (Faster-than-Light) as a plot device.

Push a button, press a petal, and that fancy drive system – whose workings no one can explain – will send us to another location in space-time.

However, in recent years, the scientific community has become understandably excited and skeptical about claims that a particular concept – the Alcubierre Warp Drive – might actually be feasible.

Continue reading “Scientists Are Starting to Take Warp Drives Seriously, Especially This One Concept” »

Elon Musk’s giant rocket is getting a bizarrely-shaped tower.

The partial rocket named “SN1” literally buckled under pressure.

NASA has contracted SpaceX to carry out the launch for its upcoming Psyche mission to a strange metal asteroid in our solar system. The launch will use one of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rockets, for a cost of $117 million.

“The Psyche mission will journey to a unique metal-rich asteroid, also named Psyche, which orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter,” NASA explained in a statement. “The asteroid is considered unique, as it appears to largely be made of the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet — one of the building blocks of our solar system.” Astronomers believe that studying this unusual asteroid could help us to understand how planets develop, including planets like Earth.

“Deep within rocky, terrestrial planets, including Earth, scientists infer the presence of metallic cores, but these lie unreachably far below the planet’s rocky mantles and crusts,” NASA said. “Because we cannot see or measure Earth’s core directly, the mission to Psyche offers a unique window into the violent history of collisions and accretion that created terrestrial planets.”

Space travel company Axiom’s station will have the largest space observatory ever built, plus private modules with windows.

Boeing, an important player in the US space program for decades, hopes that its Starliner manned spacecraft will deliver astronauts to the International Space Station and the moon.

A software issue that prevented an unmanned test capsule from docking with the space station caused NASA to launch a review; preliminary results highlight serious safety concerns.

Boeing may have to attempt another test launch to meet the requirements of NASA’s Commercial Crew Development Program, which would cost it $410 million.

Un-edited Zoom video of Seeking Delphi episode #42. Host Mark Sackler interviews former NASA Mars navigator Moriba Jah.