Lifeboat Foundation

Jetson One is an electrical VTOL flying vehicle you can actually buy—well, pre-order—that shows not only that it can be done but that it can be done with style and flair. The catch is battery life—about 20m flight time per charge for a 187lb rider.

A complete vehicle is 92 000 USD and is delivered to you as a partially (50%) assembled kit for home completion. It contains everything you need, from the aluminium space frame to motor controllers, propellers and motors. You will also receive detailed build instructions.

Continue reading “VTOL electronic vehicle flies one and is yours for $92k” »

Built for critical research, continuous LEO presence, and space tourism.

Nanoracks, Voyager Space, and Lockheed Martin just announced that they aim to launch the first-ever free-flying commercial space station into low Earth orbit (LEO) by 2027 as part of a collaboration with NASA, a press statement reveals.

The space station, called Starlab, will be used for conducting critical research, ensuring continuous U.S. presence in low Earth orbit, and also for “tourism and other commercial and business activities,” Lockheed Martin explains. The fact that the space station is free-flying means that it will not be locked into one orbital position.

Astronomers found reservoirs of organic molecules around young stars, suggesting the ingredients for life are more widespread in the universe.

That layer would be absolutely essential in trying to defend against a FOBS, that is if a defense at all is actually feasible or even strategically sound. We are not talking about a rogue state here with a few advanced ballistic missiles. China would be able to deploy dozens or even hundreds of these at once. At a certain point, kinetic defenses against such a capability become a losing proposition and a very costly one at that.

Still, this was an early test aboard a full-on rocket used for traditional space access missions. It will take China some time to perfect such a system and package it in a quickly deployable militarized configuration. Major thermal and ablative issues also must be overcome, among others, but it’s not like China hasn’t been working diligently in the hypersonic boost-glide vehicle realm for many years.

Regardless, if this report ends up being fully accurate, one thing is likely: New calls for hugely expensive missile defense capabilities will be ringing loud and often on Capitol Hill, as well as demands to do whatever possible to bring China to the bargaining table in hopes of obtaining some type of strategic arms limitation treaty.

A NASA spacecraft named Lucy rocketed into the sky with diamonds Saturday on a 12-year quest to explore eight asteroids.

Such planetary smashups are likely common in young solar systems, but they haven’t been directly observed.

Young planetary systems generally experience extreme growing pains, as infant bodies collide and fuse to form progressively larger planets. In our own solar system, the Earth and moon are thought to be products of this type of giant impact. Astronomers surmise that such smashups should be commonplace in early systems, but they have been difficult to observe around other stars.

Now astronomers at MIT, the National University of Ireland Galway, Cambridge University, and elsewhere have discovered evidence of a giant impact that occurred in a nearby star system, just 95 light years from Earth. The star, named HD 172,555 is about 23 million years old, and scientists have suspected that its dust bears traces of a recent collision.

Continue reading “Astronomers detect signs of an atmosphere stripped from a planet during giant impact” »

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Imagine if we could control earthquakes and tsunamis to generate power. Or maybe even terraform every planet in the solar system. These are just a couple of the things that might happen if human civilization was to advance in the future.

New images have revealed detailed clues about how the first stars and structures were formed in the Universe and suggest the formation of the galaxy got off to a fitful start.

An international team of astronomers from the University of Nottingham and Centro de Astrobiología (CAB, CSIC-INTA) used data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), the so-called Frontier Fields, to locate and study some of the smallest faintest galaxies in the nearby universe. This has revealed the formation of the galaxy was likely to be fitful. The first results have just been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).

One of the most interesting questions that astronomers have been trying to answer for decades is how and when the first galaxies formed. Concerning the how, one possibility is that the formation of the first stars within galaxies started at a steady pace, slowly building up a more and more massive system. Another possibility is that the formation was more violent and discontinuous, with intense, but short-lived bursts of star formation triggered by events such as mergers and enhanced gas accretion.