Lifeboat Foundation

Thinking about Eugen Sänger’s photon rocket concept inevitably calls to mind his Silbervogel design. The ‘Silverbird’ had nothing to do with antimatter but was a demonstration of the immense imaginative power of this man, who envisioned a bomber that would be launched by a rocket-powered sled into a sub-orbital trajectory. There it would skip off the upper atmosphere enroute to its target. The Silbervogel project was cancelled by the German government in 1942, but if you want to see a vividly realized alternate world where it flew, have a look at Allen Steele’s 2014 novel V-S Day, a page-turner if there ever was one.

I almost said that it was a shame we don’t have a fictionalized version of the photon rocket, but as we saw yesterday, there were powerful reasons why the design wouldn’t work, even if we could somehow ramp up antimatter production to fantastic levels (by today’s standards) and store and manipulate it efficiently. Energetic gamma rays could not be directed into an exhaust stream by the kind of ‘electron gas mirror’ that Sänger envisioned, although antimatter itself maintained its hold on generations of science fiction writers and scientists alike.

Enter the Antiproton

Continue reading “The Evolution of Antimatter Propulsion” »

A new study—the result of a competition to design a century-long interstellar mission—has a possible solution to that problem.

The ISS has just installed a new technology known as Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking, the first stage in a new mission that aims to allow the implementation of a Solar System-wide Internet in the near future.

As more investment and innovation is given to space exploration, the ISS is becoming a very busy place. And with Moon colonies and manned missions to Mars looking more and more like reality, the nearly-20 year old station is in dire need of an upgrade.

And its getting one. New technology has been installed in the ISS, and it is designed to form the basis of an internet-style network spanning the whole (or most of the whole) of our cosmic neighborhood. It’s called DTN, or Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking.

Continue reading “New Tech Installed on The ISS Set To Form Solar System-Wide ‘Internet’” »

Mars mission with plasma rockets concept. NASA

Continue reading “Traveling to Mars with Immortal Plasma Rockets” »

Russian development of a nuclear rocket engine for deep space exploration to the moon and Mars received a funding boost of about $60 for 2016–2018.

The next president needs to invest the damn money that’s needed to get this entire thing going. No more deferring. No more dithering. If this turns out to be an impossibility, then we should just privatize the entire production and design process, get rid of the red tape, and just get it DONE before we get delay after delay and then, when we finally DO get there, we find the Chinese have already built a damned settlement.

Scientific Method —

A new, independent review of the Orion spacecraft is pretty damning.

Continue reading “A new, independent review of the Orion spacecraft is pretty damning” »

WASHINGTON — NASA estimates that SpaceX is spending on the order of $300 million on its Red Dragon Mars lander mission, a down payment on the company’s long-term ambitions for human Mars missions.

At a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s technology committee in Cleveland July 26, Jim Reuter, deputy associate administrator for programs in NASA’s space technology mission directorate, provided an overview of NASA’s agreement with SpaceX, announced in April, to support that company’s plans for an uncrewed Mars landing mission that could launch as soon as May 2018.

That agreement, in the form of an unfunded Space Act Agreement, does not include any exchange of funds between NASA and SpaceX. Reuter said NASA estimates it will spend approximately $32 million over four years, primarily in the form of NASA personnel providing technical support for SpaceX. About $6 million of that will be spent this fiscal year, he added.

Continue reading “SpaceX spending about $300 million on Red Dragon mission” »

When it happens, it will be a game-changer for space travel as we know it.

Ever really wanted to know what folks truly are thinking about?

A new experiment advances the idea that brain scans can teach us something about how the human mind works.

By Nathan Collins

Continue reading “Can a Brain Scan Tell What You’re Thinking? — Pacific Standard” »