Lifeboat Foundation

NASA and SpaceX have announced the date for the upcoming Crew-5 launch to the International Space Station. The space station is also orbiting higher today to prepare for next month’s Soyuz crew vehicle swap.

The fifth crewed operational mission aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft has been given a launch date of Oct. 3 from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. The four SpaceX Crew-5 crewmates, Commander Nicole Mann, Pilot Josh Cassada, and Mission Specialists Koichi Wakata and Anna Kikina will dock Dragon Endurance to the forward port on the station’s Harmony module about 24 hours later.

Several days after that, the four SpaceX Crew-4 astronauts will enter the Dragon Freedom crew ship and undock from Harmony’s space-facing port for a parachute-assisted splashdown off the coast of Florida. Freedom Commander Kjell Lindgren, Pilot Bob Hines, with Mission Specialists Jessica Watkins and Samantha Cristoforetti, have been living and working on the orbital lab as Expedition 67 Flight Engineers since April 27.

The rover found that Jezero Crater’s floor is made up of volcanic rocks that have interacted with water.

Blue Origin’s announcement of next weeks’ New Sheppard 23 sub-orbital flight, which will feature a NASA-funded Tipping Point hydrogen fuel cell experiment designed and manufactured by Infinity Fuel Cell and Hydrogen, Inc. It will be the first fuel cell to fly into space since the space shuttle was retired ten years ago this summer, and the first ever to fly into space on a commercial flight.

On August 31, New Shepard’s 23rd mission, a dedicated payloads flight, will fly 36 payloads from academia, research institutions, and students across the globe. The launch window opens at 8:30 AM CDT / 13:30 UTC from Launch Site One in West Texas.

In the US growing building sector carbon emissions a threat to 2050 net-zero goal.

U.S. economywide greenhouse gas emissions fell 12% from 2005 to 2019, but direct emissions from the building sector were higher, according to an Information Technology and Innovation Foundation report this week.

Why we should be performing interstellar archaeology and how Avi Loeb and his team at the Galileo Project plan to recover an interstellar object at the bottom of the ocean.

“Any chemically-propelled spacecraft sent by past civilizations into interstellar space, like the five we had sent so far (Voyager 1 & 2, Pioneer 10 & 11, and New Horizons), remained gravitationally bound to the Milky Way long after these civilizations died. Their characteristic speed of tens of kilometers per second is an order of magnitude smaller than the escape speed out of the Milky Way. These rockets would populate the Milky Way disk and move around at similar speeds to the stars in it.

Continue reading “Why a Group of Scientists Plan to Search for Alien Technology with Avi Loeb” »

Read this about a potential environmental disaster that can be stopped.

To sign and send a letter to the Canadian government access it here.

https://act.newmode.net/action/greater-victoria-climate-hub/oil

Continue reading “A Ticking Time Bomb Lies Off The Coast of Yemen — An Old Tanker with 1.1 Million Barrels of Oil” »

A volunteer with severe liver disease will soon undergo a procedure that could lead them to grow a second liver.

Actual universal basic income going on 💸💵💰🪙

STIMULUS checks have given Americans a feel for universal basic income (UBI) – but folks in certain states and cities are getting used to this idea.

UBI is a set of recurring payments that individuals get from the government. These can be paid out every month, several times a year, or just once annually.

Continue reading “Thousands of Americans eligible for direct payments worth up to $2,550” »

Solar cells are vital for the green energy transition. They can be used not only on rooftops and solar farms but also for powering autonomous vehicles, such as planes and satellites. However, photovoltaic solar cells are currently heavy and bulky, making them difficult to transport to remote locations off-grid, where they are much needed.

In a collaboration led by Imperial College London, alongside researchers from Cambridge, UCL, Oxford, Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin in Germany, and others, researchers have produced materials that can absorb comparable levels of sunlight as conventional silicon solar cells, but with 10,000 times lower thickness.

The material is sodium bismuth sulfide (NaBiS₂), which is grown as nanocrystals and deposited from solution to make films 30 nanometers in thickness. NaBiS₂ is comprised of nontoxic elements that are sufficiently abundant in the earth’s crust for use commercially. For example, bismuth-based compounds are used as a nontoxic lead replacement in solder, or in over-the-counter stomach medicine.