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Can urine whiz rockets to Mars?
Posted in space travel
Category: space travel – Page 94
The space race has been revived, but this time, the goal post has been shifted much further – to Mars. As recent technological advancements promise to open new horizons of exploration, NASA plans to cut the travel time to Mars with a nuclear-powered spacecraft.
A trip to Mars currently takes approximately seven months, covering a staggering 300-million-mile journey. NASA, in collaboration with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), now proposes an ambitious plan that hinges on the promise of nuclear thermal propulsion technology to reduce this duration significantly.
NASA aims to launch a nuclear-powered spacecraft, known as DRACO (Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations), into Earth’s orbit either by late 2025 or early 2026. The spacecraft, under construction by Lockheed Martin, a leading aerospace and defense company, will serve as a testbed for this groundbreaking technology.
SpaceX and NASA are working to include Starship in an architecture of low Earth orbit opportunities by considering the massive spacecraft for use as a space station.
Reducing reliance of aninmal experimentation. 🐀
According to the team, this new unparalleled technology facilitates the precise manipulation of biological materials, enabling the creation of highly sophisticated and realistic organoids that closely mimic the complexity of the corresponding human organs.
The cutting-edge magnetic and acoustic levitation will bioprint heart models to improve protection against radiation both in space and on Earth.
After being awarded nearly 4 million euros by the European Innovation Council’s Pathfinder Open, PULSE is aiming to foster technological innovations to improve human health and pave the way for safer and more sustainable space exploration.
Multi-Levitation bioprinting and creating realistic organoids
The device, designed by PULSE, combines magnetic and acoustic levitation into an innovative bioprinting platform capable spatiotemporal control of cell deposition.
Read more about NASA’s iconic Voyager 2 spacecraft silent after antenna misalignment on Devdiscourse.
Living without gravity spells disaster for the human body. Even a few weeks in microgravity can lead to issues with circulation and vision; over the longer term, the complications compound even further. The heart begins to degenerate and atrophy. Bones turn thin and brittle.
But what about Martian gravity, which is around 0.38 that of Earth? Or somewhere in-between — 0.16 G on the moon, or 0.91 on Venus? How do these gravity levels affect the body, plants and other organisms, even manufacturing processes? We have astonishingly few answers to these questions.
gravityLab wants to find some. The company is developing a spinning spacecraft that will be able to generate what co-founder and CEO Grant Bonin calls “programmable gravity.” The spacecraft will be equipped with a motorized boom that can extend and retract a counterweight. By dynamically varying the length of the boom and the rotation rate, the company says it will be able to control the acceleration of gravity inside the spacecraft.
By harnessing magnetic and acoustic fields, the PULSE project is developing 3D-printed hearts that’ll be launched to the ISS in 2027.
With the aim of allowing astronauts to live off the land as much as possible when they return to the Moon, NASA has awarded Blue Origin a US$35-million Tipping Point contract to develop the company’s Blue Alchemist process to make solar cells out of lunar soil.
The biggest bottleneck to establishing a permanent human presence on the Moon and beyond is the staggering cost of sending equipment and supplies from Earth. NASA and other space agencies believe that the best way to overcome this is to use local resources as much as possible to manufacture what’s needed.
Under development since 2021, Blue Alchemist is an example of this. The basic concept is to develop a complete process that takes the lunar soil, more formally known as the regolith, at one end and spits out complete solar cells and other products at the other.
The Starship upper stage’s impressive 29.5-foot diameter means it could fit up to 100 passengers at a time.
SpaceX’s Starship rocket program is the culmination of founder Elon Musk’s original plan of sending humans to Mars and making humans an interplanetary species.
And yet, Musk has always championed the launch system, originally called the Interplanetary Transport System, as a versatile spacecraft that could be used as a rapid point-to-point transportation system for Earth — a modified version of Starship has also been contracted by NASA for the Artemis III Moon landings, expected to take place in 2025.
Chemical propulsion has long been the standard for spaceflight, but for humans to reach Mars, we’ll need a much more powerful and efficient propulsion. Nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) engines offer thrust as high as conventional chemical propulsion with much higher efficiency.