Lifeboat Foundation

More lakes discovered under Martian ice. Could these liquid water pools be inhabited by life?

But would such cold places be habitable?

NASA is crowdsourcing ideas for energy systems that would keep Moon missions powered, even in the dark.

The far side of the Moon is the hemisphere of the Moon that always faces away from Earth. The far side’s terrain is rugged with a multitude of impact craters and relatively few flat lunar maria compared to the near side. It has one of the largest craters in the Solar System, the South Pole–Aitken basin.

Source: earth sky, NASA Music: Epic Hybrid Trailer by Infraction / We Will Win.

No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least to our knowledge – but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists.

As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others show, moving around in time creates a lot of problems for the fundamental rules of the Universe: if you go back in time and stop your parents from meeting, for instance, how can you possibly exist in order to go back in time in the first place?

It’s a monumental head-scratcher known as the ‘grandfather paradox’, but now a physics student Germain Tobar, from the University of Queensland in Australia, says he has worked out how to “square the numbers” to make time travel viable without the paradoxes.

Circle Oct. 20 on your calendars.

The OSIRIS-REx probe is scheduled to pull off NASA’s first-ever asteroid-sampling operation on Oct. 20, snagging precious dirt and gravel from a carbon-rich space rock called Bennu.

HyImpulse completed the first hot-fire test of the company’s 16,800-pounds-force hybrid rocket motor on Sept. 15. Credit: HyImpulse.

VALLETTA, Malta — Launch startup HyImpulse successfully tested its 16,800-pounds-force hybrid rocket motor this month at German space agency DLR’s Lampoldshausen facility.

Headquartered in Neuenstadt am Kocher, Germany, HyImpulse is developing its three-stage SL1 launch vehicle designed to carry payloads of up to 500 kilogram to Sun-synchronous orbit. The light-lift launch vehicle will be powered by twelve 16,800-pounds-force hybrid rocket motors — eight on its first stage, and four on its second stage — plus four smaller but otherwise identical engines powering its third stage.

Continue reading “HyImpulse hybrid rocket motor roars to life for the first time” »

The upgraded toilet could be used on moon flights one day.

The bathroom on the International Space System is getting a major upgrade with a new, high-tech, compact space toilet to be delivered next week.

According to Blue Origin, the launch is now set for Friday, Sept. 25 at 10 a.m. central time. You can watch the launch live here.

Boeing to Face Independent Ethics Probe Over Lunar Lander Bid

According to a press release, the New Shepard will fly 12 commercial payloads to space and back, including a demonstration of a lunar landing sensor that will test technologies for future missions to the Moon in support of NASA’s Artemis program.

No, like, it literally might be garbage.

A strange object is hurtling toward Earth and, according to estimations of its trajectory, it will briefly become a mini-moon.

🌌You like badass space stuff. So do we. Let’s nerd out over the universe together.

Continue reading “Earth Is Getting a New Mini-Moon That Might Be a Piece of Human-Made Junk” »