Lifeboat Foundation

SpaceX has been teasing potential Mars plans for a while now, but the company just announced a launch date—and it’s soon. They plan to launch to the surface of Mars in 2018.

Especially intriguing is that the announcement refers to the spacecraft as the “Red Dragon.” Does this mean that we’ll be seeing an update to the spacecraft so that it can handle the conditions of the red planet? We hope so.

On April 12th, 1961 Yuri Gagarin launched into space on a Vostok rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, becoming the first person ever to leave the planet.

Here’s the crazy thing: today’s astronauts travel to space on a nearly identical rocket, the Soyuz, which went into operation only five years after Gagarin’s historic flight.

“The point of this excursion into tech history is that a technology often produces its best results just when it’s ready to be replaced — it’s the best it’s ever been, but it’s also the best it could ever be.”

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My new Vice Motherboard article on environmentalism and why going green isn’t enough. Only radical technology can restore the world to a pristine condition—and that requires politicians not afraid of the future:

I’m worried that conservatives like Cruz will try to stop new technologies that will change our battle in combating a degrading Earth

But there are people who can save the endangered species on the planet. And they will soon dramatically change the nature of animal protection. Those people may have little to do with wildlife, but their genetics work holds the answer to stable animal population levels in the wild. In as little as five years, we may begin stocking endangered wildlife in places where poachers have hunted animals to extinction. We’ll do this like we stock trout streams in America. Why spend resources in a losing battle to save endangered wildlife from being poached when you can spend the same amount to boost animal population levels ten-fold? Maye even 100-fold. This type of thinking is especially important in our oceans, which we’ve bloody well fished to near death.

Continue reading “If You Care About the Earth, Vote for the Least Religious Presidential Candidate” »

Getting beyond the commercial space hype; will the new captains of the space industry really bring about interplanetary commerce? Here’s my take with views from two execs at The Space Frontier Foundation.

The entrepreneurial captains of the new commercial space frontier are sometimes brash, sometimes brazen, and often larger than life. But are they really going to get us beyond low-Earth orbit (LEO)?

For those of us who grew up in an era when NASA budgets were a tenet of Cold War geopolitics, it’s understandable that we approach this new phase of private space funding with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. But are we Apollo-ites simply being too skeptical?

Continue reading “Can Commercial Space Really Get Us Beyond Low-Earth Orbit?” »

Tomorrow’s cars will be all-electric, self-driving, connected to high-speed communications networks … and free.

And probably Chinese.

That, at least, is the vision of Jia Yueting, a billionaire entrepreneur and one of a new breed of Chinese who see their technology expertise re-engineering the automobile industry, and usurping Tesla Motors, a U.S. pioneer in premium electric vehicle (EV) making.

Continue reading “Chinese Billionaire Taking on Tesla With Cars He Hopes One Day Will Be Free” »

This device could save thousands of lives from heart failure.

Turn your house plants into living solar panels!

DARPA wants to bring autonomy and agility to military transportation.