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Archive for the ‘space travel’ category: Page 452

Sep 29, 2016

Elon Musk unveils plan to colonise Mars (2016.9.27)

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, government, space travel, transportation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFA6DLT1jBA

Elon Musk unveils SpaceX’s future Mars vehicle and discusses the long-term technical challenges that need to be solved to support the creation of a permanent, self-sustaining human presence on Mars. The presentation focuses on potential architectures for sustaining humans on the Red Planet that industry, government and the scientific community can collaborate on in the years ahead.

Overview:
00:00. Why Mars and become a multi-planetary civilisation.

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Sep 28, 2016

Robert Zubrin’s Nuclear Salt Water Rocket Design

Posted by in category: space travel

Robert Zubrin is best known for his advocacy of the manned exploration of Mars.

Zubrin also had a design for interplanetary propulsion called the Nuclear Salt Water Rocket.

A nuclear salt-water rocket (NSWR) is a theoretical type of nuclear thermal rocket. A conservative design for the rocket would be fueled by salts of 20 percent enriched uranium or plutonium. The solution would be contained in a bundle of pipes coated in boron carbide (for its properties of neutron absorption). Through a combination of the coating and space between the pipes, the contents would not reach critical mass until the solution is pumped into a reaction chamber, thus reaching a critical mass, and being expelled through a nozzle to generate thrust.

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Sep 27, 2016

Challenge Accept Peter

Posted by in categories: Peter Diamandis, space travel

What would happen in the world if we could find renegade thinkers, give them the right dose of inspiration, and reinforce the audacity, passion and perseverance needed to pursue their biggest ideas?

How to Make a Spaceship is exactly the inspiration the next generation of audacious thinkers needs. (For more on the book, click through these tabs!)

As author Julian Guthrie said, “I hope this story is an inspiration. I hope that when you get to the end of this story, you set down the book and feel like you can go out and do something impossible in your own life.”

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Sep 27, 2016

SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System

Posted by in category: space travel

Sep 26, 2016

Lawrence Krauss Versus Freeman Dyson on Gravitons

Posted by in categories: alien life, engineering, genetics, particle physics, quantum physics, robotics/AI, space travel

Yesterday, in the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson analyzed a trio of recent books on humanity’s future in the larger cosmos. They were How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Space Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight; Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets; and All These Worlds Are Yours: The Scientific Search for Alien Life.

Dyson is “a brilliant physicist and contrarian,” as the theoretical astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss recently told Nautilus. So I was waiting, as I read his review, to come across his profound and provocative pronouncement about these books, and it came soon enough: “None of them looks at space as a transforming force in the destiny of our species,” he writes. The books are limited in scope by looking at the future of space as a problem of engineering. Dyson has a grander vision. Future humans can seed remote environments with genetic instructions for countless new species. “The purpose is no longer to explore space with unmanned or manned missions, but to expand the domain of life from one small planet to the universe.”

Dyson can be just as final in his opinions on the destiny of scientific investigation. According to Krauss, Dyson once told him, “There’s no way we’re ever going to measure gravitons”—the supposed quantum particles underlying gravitational forces—“because there’s no terrestrial experiment that could ever measure a single graviton.” Dyson told Krauss that, in order to measure one, “you’d have to make the experiment so massive that it would actually collapse to form a black hole before you could make the measurement.” So, Dyson concluded, “There’s no way that we’ll know whether gravity is a quantum theory.”

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Sep 24, 2016

Bioengineered bacteria could be used to 3D print food, medicine, and tools on Mars

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, bioengineering, biotech/medical, food, solar power, space travel, sustainability

Just like checking your bag on a commercial airline, space travel comes with some pretty big weight restrictions. How big? According to estimates, reaching space costs a whopping $10,000 per pound, which means that every ounce saved has a big impact on the bottom line.

That’s where a group of Danish researchers comes in. The team is working on a synthetic biology project called CosmoCrops, which hopes to use bacteria to make it possible to 3D print everything needed for a respectable space mission, using a cutting-edge co-culturing system. And it could even make life better for those of us back on Earth in the process.

“We are trying to make space exploration cheaper, because many inventions we use in our daily life were invented because of space exploration, like Velcro and solar energy,” Joachim Larsen, one of the students working on the project, told Digital Trends. “The way we want to achieve this is to [be] able to produce everything from food to medicine and bioplastic for 3D printers out in space — making the space rocket a lot lighter.”

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Sep 23, 2016

It’s Official: We’re Going to Mars

Posted by in category: space travel

A bipartisan bill was passed by the U.S. Senate committee that oversees NASA space projects. The bill would allocate $19.5 billion in funds to NASA in 2017, but it has a critical mission for the space agency: send men to Mars.

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Sep 23, 2016

The Science of Star Trek — Documentary 2016

Posted by in categories: education, physics, science, space travel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrSCinkFUtA

Is building our own starship Enterprise possible? Will we ever travel between the stars as easily as they do in Star Trek? JJ Abrams’ new feature, Star Trek Into Darkness, hits the screen in a golden age of scientific discoveries. HISTORY is there, giving viewers a deep look behind the scenes, on the set, and into the science–amazing new exoplanets, the physics of Warp drive, and the ideas behind how we might one day live in a Star Trek Universe.

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Sep 23, 2016

Exotic Space Propulsion including Mach Propulsion and EMDrive will be discussed at Space Studies Institute conference

Posted by in categories: innovation, space travel

The Estes Park Advanced Propulsion Workshop, 20–22 September 2016, organized by the Space Studies Institute (SSI), will feature presentations by NASA Eagleworks scientist Paul March and Prof. Martin Tajmar, chair for Space Systems at the Dresden University of Technology, who last year presented an independent confirmation of the anomalous EmDrive thrust.

Other notable participants include Prof. James Woodward and Prof. Heidi Fearn, both from California State University, Fullerton, and Prof. David Hyland from Texas A and M University.

The 3-day conference will address at most 6 concepts for a breakthrough in propulsion. They are devoting a half-day per concept. The half-day is broken into theory and experiment sessions for the concept. The concept will be investigated on both grounds, with substantial give-and-take between the audience and the concept presenter, verbally and on the whiteboard.

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Sep 22, 2016

Electrostatic Glider Could Maneuver Around Asteroids Without Expending Fuel

Posted by in category: space travel

The charged dust around airless bodies provides a surfable environment for tiny electric spacecraft.

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