Lifeboat Foundation

Speaking at the annual Space Symposium Bezos outlined his ambitious plans and said he was ‘super optimistic’ there would be a good market for this thrill-seeking trips starting in 2018.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed that he will be selling $1 billion (£800 million) of Amazon stock every year to fund his space travel company Blue Origin.

Continue reading “Jeff Bezos says Blue Origin will usher in a ‘golden age of space’” »

THE global investment bank Goldman Sachs has claimed mining asteroids for precious metals is a “realistic” goal.

It has released a report exploring the possibility of using an “asteroid-grabbing spacecraft” to extract platinum from space rocks.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – The seats in Blue Origin’s suborbital spaceship are like a dentist’s chair that’s fully extended, with a big difference. You can float out of this one when weightlessness sets in.

Of course, we couldn’t get the zero-G experience when we tried out the seats in a mock-up of the New Shepard crew capsule, on display here at the 33rd Space Symposium. But we did get a condensed version of the 11-minute flight scenario, from launch to landing.

Boeing, the world’s second-largest defense firm, has detailed the hardware it thinks humanity will need to stage a piloted mission to Mars — and outlined plans for lunar bases, which will serve as a jumping off point for deep space missions, and assist in exploration of the Moon.

Boeing, and five other companies, are already collaborating with NASA to develop the Space Launch System (SLS), which it is hoped will power a trip to Mars. Now, the firm has offered up conceptual designs for other accessories it will be useful for the mission, and a more general vision of how it could be achieved — and made easier on repeat visits. Of particular note are a deep space habitat design, and transport vehicle.

Continue reading “Fly Me to the Moon and Then to Mars, Boeing: Defense Firm Expands Space Plans” »

Erika Ilves is an entrepreneur who does not let herself be limited by the size of planet Earth while there is a whole universe out there. ‘For now, we are developing and training our mining robots on Earth. But in less than a decade they will underpin mining operations on the Moon and beyond,’ she claims.

2008 Disney-Pixar animation WALL-E takes us to planet Earth in 2805, abandoned by people and covered in heaps of trash. There is only one cute robot left whose job is cleaning up the planet. In real life, we do not have to wait another 800 years to see this happen. Robots like this already exist. And if we treat our resources more reasonably, the picture might not turn out be as gloomy as depicted in the movie.

‘Personally, I do not believe we will be running out of resources any time soon. We have plenty of resources on Earth to last us a few centuries,’ says Erika Ilves, cofounder of OffWorld, a company that is developing a new robotic work force to enable the settlement of the solar system. But Erika would not want to be among the first humans to set foot on Mars. Before moving people to other planets, it might be wiser to send robots out there.

Continue reading “To the Moon, Indefinitely” »

Sometimes people bring up overpopulation scenarios where the population can fit inside Texas. But they ask, what about all the stuff that supports that population? Here is one answer.

Located in an abandoned 70,000-square-foot factory in Newark, New Jersey, the world’s largest vertical farm aims to produce 2,000,000 pounds of food per year. This AeroFarms operation is also set up to use 95% less water than open fields, with yields 75 times higher per square foot. Their stacked, high-efficiency aeroponics system needs no sunlight, soil or pesticides. The farm’s proximity to New York City means lower transportation costs and fresher goods to a local market. It also means new jobs for a former industrial district.

Continue reading “From Home Aeroponic Gardens to Vertical Urban Farms” »

Reusable rockets will drive down the cost of space access and power America’s economy into the 21st century. Entrepreneurs, investors and policy makers should take note of what SpaceX has demonstrated.

A visit to SpaceX’s careers page reveals a surprising growth plan for Musk’s 15-year-old rocket company.

Private spaceflight company Blue Origin has released the first interior photos for the New Shepard, offering a glimpse at what the finished crew capsule will look like.

New Shepard is a reusable vehicle aimed at taking tourists to the edge of space, where they can float around weightless for a few minutes. The rocket has been successfully launched and landed five times already, but no people have ridden in the capsule yet. Blue Origin is planning to take its first paying customers to space by 2018, according to CEO Jeff Bezos.

The photos of New Shepard look quite different from the interior of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule. But while the New Shepard focuses on tourism, the main purpose for Crew Dragon is to send astronauts to the International Space Station. (Though CEO Elon Musk recently announced that he plans to send two tourists around the moon in the spaceship in 2018.)

Continue reading “Blue Origin releases first interior photos of the capsule that will take tourists to space” »