Lifeboat Foundation

Proxima b, our nearest neighboring exoplanet, is almost 25 trillion miles away. Even one of our fastest spaceships—the 31,600-mile-per-hour New Horizons—would take hundreds of thousands of years to get there. Assuming we can’t figure out how to warp space-time (seems unlikely, but fingers crossed), we’re still looking at a couple-hundred-year trip in the best-case scenario, which leads to the real problem: No human crew could survive the entire ride. Science-fiction writers have long floated so-called generation ships as a solution. Designers would outfit these interplanetary cruise vessels to support a community of adults and their children, and their children’s children, and their children’s children’s children…until humanity finally reaches a new celestial shore. Here’s our best guess for what it would take to sow the seeds of an extrasolar species.

Career planning

Successive generations need to fill all the vital crew roles—such as medics and mechanics—which doesn’t leave much room for freedom of choice. A version of modern career tests would assign occupations based on aptitude, passions, and available jobs.

Continue reading “We could move to another planet with a spaceship like this” »

We are making tangible progress in America’s return to the Moon’s surface to stay. The innovation of America’s aerospace companies, wedded with our goals in science and human exploration are going to help us achieve amazing things on the Moon and feed forward to Mars.

Nine U.S. companies now are eligible to bid on NASA delivery services to the lunar surface through Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contracts, as one of the first steps toward long-term scientific study and human exploration of the Moon and eventually Mars.

These companies will be able to bid on delivering science and technology payloads for NASA, including payload integration and operations, launching from Earth and landing on the surface of the Moon. NASA expects to be one of many customers that will use these commercial landing services.

Continue reading “NASA Announces New Partnerships for Commercial Lunar Payload Delivery” »

It’s not like moon-walking astronauts don’t already have plenty of hazards to deal with. There’s less gravity, extreme temperatures, radiation—and the whole place is aggressively dusty. If that weren’t enough, it also turns out that the visual-sensory cues we use to perceive depth and distance don’t work as expected—on the moon, human eyeballs can turn into scam artists.

During the Apollo missions, it was a well-documented phenomenon that astronauts routinely underestimated the size of craters, the slopes of hilltops, and the distance to certain objects. Objects appeared much closer than they were, which created headaches for mission control. Astronauts sometimes overexerted themselves and depleted oxygen supplies in trying to reach objects that were further than expected.

This phenomenon has also become a topic of study for researchers trying to explain why human vision functions differently in space, why so many visual errors occurred, and what, if anything, we can do to prepare the next generation of space travelers.

NASA has chosen a set of companies to partner on moon exploration, and the winners will be announced tomorrow (Nov. 29).

Showrunner Jeff Buhler has built a fascinating world around Martin’s story seeds, starting by setting the action within the foreseeable future, rather than in an incomprehensibly distant one. The invented technologies here are particularly intriguing, like the genetic modifications first officer Melantha Jhirl (Jodie Turner-Smith) has to make her better suited for space travel, or the cybernetics technician Lommie (Maya Eshet) uses to interface with machinery. Given the state of real-world technological developments in genetic engineering and research into brain-machine interfaces, the series feels plausible and grounded, even though it’s set in a spacefaring future.

The 10-episode space series adapts a 40-year-old George R.R. Martin novella.

Continue reading “Syfy’s Nightflyers asks whether humanity deserves to be saved” »

“We are going,” is an important part NASA’s motto for its return to the Moon, and to get there, the space agency will need corporate partners. As part of carrying out the private sector integration requirements of White House Space Policy Directive 1, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced today at 2 pm EST the nine companies the agency has selected to compete for $2.6 billion in contracts to support its Moon to Mars mission. These contracts will be geared to filling the needs of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program over the next ten years of its development.

Engineers know that tiny, super-fast objects can cause damage to spacecraft, but it’s been difficult to understand exactly how the damage happens because the moment of impact is incredibly brief. A new study from MIT seeks to reveal the processes at work that produce microscopic craters and holes in materials. The hope is that by understanding how the impacts work, we might be able to more durable materials.

Accidental space impacts aren’t the only place these mechanisms come into play. There are also industrial applications on Earth like applying coatings, strengthening metallic surfaces, and cutting materials. A better understanding of micro-impacts could also make these processes more efficient. Observing such impacts was not easy, though.

For the experiments, the MIT team used tin particles about 10 micrometers in diameter accelerated to 1 kilometer per second. They used a laser system to launch the projectile that instantly evaporates a surface material and ejects the particles, ensuring consistent timing. That’s important because the high-speed camera pointed at the test surface (also tin) needed specific lighting conditions. At the appointed time, a second laser illuminated the particle allowing the camera to follow the impact at up to 100 million frames per second.

Continue reading “MIT Studies Micro-Impacts at 100 Million Frames Per Second” »

NASA has selected the first batch of U.S. companies to join the agency on its journey to its next destination, the moon, which NASA wants to explore in order to prepare to go on to Mars.

During a public event held today (Nov. 29), the agency unveiled nine new partners that will be designing and building lunar landers aimed at facilitating scientific exploration of the moon. In addition to the specific companies chosen, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine also announced that the program running those contracts — the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program — is now part of the science section of NASA’s bureaucracy, not the human exploration section.

The general idea is that these companies will be able to compete for contracts to deliver NASA science experiments to the surface of the moon by flying lunar landers on rocket launches purchased from other commercial space companies. Those individual contracts would substitute for NASA needing to build those capacities itself. [Building Apollo: Photos from Moonshot History].

Continue reading “9 US Companies Are Going to the Moon! Here Are NASA’s New Partners” »

The technology we used to first explore the Moon was groundbreaking for its time. Just imagine what we will accomplish this time around! Join us live as NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announces new Moon partnerships with American companies at 2 p.m. EST from our Headquarters in Washington, DC. http://go.nasa.gov/2raigLb&h=AT2-8jJD2ombVAS-0YRBs3zHITf…_ADxNsNZ9g