Lifeboat Foundation

An antimatter propulsion drive probe could be the first human-made spacecraft to orbit the newly-discovered extrasolar earthlike planet Proxima b. Or so says Gerald Jackson, the president of the Chicago-based Hbar technologies, whose antimatterdrive.org began a $200,000 Kickstarter campaign this weekend.

The idea is to use the fledgling antimatter propulsion technology to travel 4.2 light years to the newfound exo-earth circling Proxima Centauri, the Sun’s nearest stellar neighbor.

“Our antimatter drive project proposes an initial mission taking as long as 90 years, traveling at 5% of the speed of light for the majority of that duration,” Jackson, a former Fermilab physicist, told me. The hope is that the craft could eventually go into orbit around a nearby earthlike planet such as Proxima b.

Continue reading “Antimatter Probe May Do Proxima b Interstellar Flyby” »

Fuel/ energy efficient method for travel is my guess.

The US Air Force’s unmanned X-37B space plane has now spent more than 500 days orbiting the Earth, without statement or explanation. The 29-foot unmanned plane is part of the Air Force’s orbital program.

Launched May 20, 2015, it is the program’s fourth flight (hence its other name, OTV-4 for Orbital Test Vehicle-4). The first OTV took flight in 2010 and spent 224 days in orbit; two others brought the total number of OTV days in orbit before 2015 to 1,367, according to the Air Force.

Continue reading “US Air Force’s X-37B space plane has been in orbit for 500 days, but why?” »

NASA-funded project sends holographic recordings of real humans in Virtual Reality to crew members of 12-month Simulated Mars Isolation Study

October 13 2016 — As NASA prepares for its Journey to Mars in mid 2030’s, an experiment recently concluded in a remote University of Hawaii Mars simulation site to study the effects of long term isolation on an international team of six scientists, and the potential for virtual reality as an asynchronous communication tool. In a first of its kind pilot, the subjects at the facility called HI-SEAS have received holographic recordings of astronaut Buzz Aldrin and vocal artist/comedian Reggie Watts, which when viewed in virtual reality, simulate true presence and could help mitigate the feeling of isolation.

The research, led by R&D consulting company SIFT (Smart Information Flow Technologies), is enabled by holographic software company 8i, which developed proprietary technology to bring photorealistic holograms of humans into virtual and augmented reality experiences.

Continue reading “Virtual Reality studied as potential communication tool for Mars Exploration Future Missions to mitigate effects of isolation in astronauts” »

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama sought Tuesday to reinvigorate his call for the U.S. to send humans to Mars by the 2030s, showcasing budding partnerships between the U.S. government and commercial companies to develop spacecraft capable of carrying out the extraterrestrial mission.

Obama was calling attention to government contracts awarded to six companies to build prototypes for “habitats” that could sustain human life in deep space. He also said that within two years, private companies will send astronauts to the International Space Station, part of a program to allow companies to use an open docking port on the station to develop their own innovations.

“These missions will teach us how humans can live far from Earth, something we’ll need for the long journey to Mars,” Obama wrote in an op-ed on CNN’s website. He said the ultimate goal is for humans eventually to stay on the red planet “for an extended time.”

Continue reading “Obama pushes US goal to send humans to Mars” »

We are seeing lot of inventions being made prior to the upcoming Mars missions. However, you don’t have to be into science-fiction to understand that NASA still needs to get a grip on many technical hurdles before our astronauts can put their boots on the red planet safely.

Yes, [Mark Watney](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3659388/) has become quite a Martian but real humans need more to survive and especially have to consider the *less obvious* things like how to deal with injuries that far away from mother Earth. That can be overlooked, but certainly is important.

Continue reading “NASA’s new bleeding-edge gauze might save astronauts lives” »

It’s been a big year for the ‘impossible’ EM Drive — a new kind of rocket engine that appears to generate thrust without any kind of exhaust or propellant. Back in May, NASA researchers reported a successful 10-week trial of their EM Drive prototype, and inventor Guido Fetta just got approval to test his own version in space.

Now, the UK Intellectual Property Office has released the latest patent application from British EM Drive inventor Roger Shawyer, and he says millions of pounds rest on the success of design within.

“The patent process is a very significant process, it’s not like an academic peer review where everyone hides behind an anonymous review, it’s all out in the open,” Shawyer told Mary-Ann Russon at the International Business Times.

Continue reading “The latest patent for the ‘impossible’ EM Drive has just been made public — and it’s wild” »

The space race is on, and it’s only a matter of time before humans land on Mars. With several different groups aiming for the red planet, there’s likely to be not one outpost among the stars, but many.

National space agencies and private transport companies are all competing to reach Mars and establish their own base of operations, and they all have very different motivations and ideas on how to govern their colonies once they get there.

If Elon Musk gets his way and manages to lower the cost of a trip to Mars, the floodgates will open and settlers will stream towards the red planet in mass numbers. The resulting chaos is likely to produce several different Martian metropolises with their own character, laws, and forms of government much like the city-states of ancient Greece.

Continue reading “Will A Mars Colony Bring Back The City-States Of Ancient Greece?” »

That’s why researchers are hard at work on ways to make spacecraft power systems more efficient, resilient and long-lasting.

“NASA needs reliable long-term power systems to advance exploration of the solar system,” said Jean-Pierre Fleurial, supervisor for the thermal energy conversion research and advancement group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. “This is particularly important for the outer planets, where the intensity of sunlight is only a few percent as strong as it is in Earth orbit.”

Continue reading “No extension cord is long enough to reach another planet, and there’s no spacecraft charging station along the way” »

The stability of a light sail riding on a laser beam is analyzed both analytically and numerically. Conical sails on Gaussian beams, which have been studied in the past, are shown to be unstable in general. A new architecture for a passively stable sail and beam configuration is proposed. The novel spherical shell sail design is capable of “beam riding” without the need for active feedback control. Full three-dimensional ray-tracing simulations are performed to verify our analytical results.

Arxiv — Stability of a Light Sail Riding on a Laser Beam (6 pages by Zachary Manchester, Abraham Loeb of Harvard)

Continue reading “Spherical shell laser sail would simplify interstellar laser sails” »