Lifeboat Foundation

Boeing Space Taxis in a couple of years.

This past Friday, Boeing unveiled its most recent assembly plant in Florida, only the new facility won’t be building commercial jets or fighter aircraft. Instead, it will be building spaceships, yes actual spaceships.

Boeing is aiming to have its soon-to-be-flown spaceships in the air and space by 2017. Dubbed the CST-100 Starliner, the spaceships could potentially be the first commercial spacecrafts on the market, though Boeing is in a tight race with SpaceX.

Continue reading “Space race heating up as Boeing partners with NASA” »

1. The Habitat.

2. Farming in space.

Continue reading “7 real NASA technologies in sci-fi movie The Martian” »

The first VASIMR experiment was conducted at MIT in 1983 on their magnetic mirror device plasma device, and in 1998 ASPL created the first VASIMR rocket, the VX-10. By 2005 the ASPL had created the VX-50, which was capable of up to 50kW of plasma discharge. So, what’s so significant about this design?

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The now-famous hoverboard company will work over the next few years to tug NASA’s tiny satellites.

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Great news. It’ll be fascinating to see what they discover.

In the distant reaches of the Universe, exploding stars and supermassive black holes are bending the very fabric of spacetime. It’s hard to wrap our brains around such tremendous forces, but we may be able to quantify them, in the form of gravitational waves. A new European Space Agency mission marks humanity’s first bold attempt to do so in outer space.

This fall, the ESA’s LISA Pathfinder will be blasted into space on a course for the L1 Lagrange point. Situated nearly a million miles from Earth, it’ll begin pilot-testing fundamental technologies for the detection of elusive gravitational waves. The miniature science observatory bid farewell to the public this week, on display at a test centre in Ottobrunn, Germany for the last time before its long journey.

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Ever heard of 3-D printing? Besides, if humanity had followed this guys advice, MIT or not, we would have never left Africa. Never built a new village, town, or city. Never gone to the moon — and we DEFINITELY would never have created a place like MIT AT ALL.

Life is messy, painful, rough and often unforgiving, but taking risks is part of our collective species identity. To succeed sometimes we have to fail, and if that’s what happens with this endevor then, at the very least we’ll know what NOT to try next time.

Continue reading “Mars One Mission Called 'Unsustainable,' And Here's Why” »

Matt Damon stars as a NASA astronaut stranded on the Martian surface in the forthcoming film adaptation of Andy Weir’s The Martian. Credit: Twentieth Century Fox.

Martian dust storms rank among the most impressive in our Solar System. But no matter how menacing they appear from Mars orbit, they’re not likely to cause astronauts to abort future surface missions, says a planetary scientist who studies the phenomena.

Although such storms routinely engulf large swaths of the Red Planet for days at a time, any emergency serious enough to evacuate a crew isn’t likely to be triggered by a dust storm of the sort depicted in the forthcoming film adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel The Martian.

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It could save the lives of tomorrow’s astronauts.

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A new international report lays out the challenges to building Earth’s next great mega-project — and they’re more surmountable than you think.

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