Lifeboat Foundation

A bit of every speculative propulsion system.

When Greg Matloff’s “Solar Sail Starships: Clipper Ships of the Galaxy” appeared in JBIS in 1981, the science fictional treatments of interstellar sails I had been reading suddenly took on scientific plausibility. Later, I would read Robert Forward’s work, and realize that an interstellar community was growing in space agencies, universities and the pages of journals. Since those days, Matloff’s contributions to the field have kept coming at a prodigious rate, with valuable papers and books exploring not only how we might reach the stars but what we can do in our own Solar System to ensure a bright future for humanity. In today’s essay, Greg looks at interstellar propulsion candidates and ponders the context provided by Breakthrough Starshot, which envisions small sailcraft moving at 20 percent of the speed of light, bound for Proxima Centauri. What can we learn from the effort, and what alternatives should we consider as we ponder the conundrum of interstellar propulsion?

by Dr. Greg Matloff

Continue reading “Near-Term Interstellar Probes: Some Gentle Suggestions” »

This variable gravity station would have space for research, processing and living quarters that range from a full 1G to zero G.

The Juno spacecraft has made several close flybys of the gas giant, revealing massive cyclones—and other weird features beneath its surface.

The science community just figured out why we wont actually be doing space mining, until capitalism is no longer a factor anyways.

It might have just pushed back its manned mission to Mars, but NASA just fast-tracked a planned journey to 16 Psyche — an asteroid made almost entirely of nickel-iron metal.

Estimated to contain $10,000 quadrillion in iron alone, if we could somehow mine Psyche’s minerals and bring them back to Earth, it would collapse our comparatively puny global economy of $78 trillion many times over. Fortunately for the economic stability of our planet, NASA plans on looking but not extracting.

Continue reading “NASA Just Fast-Tracked Its Mission to Explore a $10,000 Quadrillion Metal Asteroid” »

Now is the time to voice your opinions on the lander’s instruments.

The galaxy M87 emits a jet of plasma that looks like it’s breaking the cosmic speed limit – here’s how it manages the trick.

Bigelow Aerospace is building space habitats for the public. Get an exclusive tour inside one of their prototypes, and see where we would live in space.

For the first time, scientists have detected evidence of a magnetic field that’s associated with the vast intergalactic ‘bridge’ that links our two nearest galactic neighbours.

Known as the Magellanic Bridge, the bridge is a huge stream of neutral gas that stretches some 75,000 light-years between our two neighbouring galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC). Although researchers had predicted it was there, this is the first observation of its magnetic field, and it could help us understand how these vast bridges come to be.

“There were hints that this magnetic field might exist, but no one had observed it until now,” said lead researcher, Jane Kaczmarek from the University of Sydney.

Continue reading “For The First Time, Physicists Have Observed a Giant Magnetic ‘Bridge’ Between Galaxies” »

Nearly a half-century has passed since the earliest rotational artificial gravity testing was performed, such as at the Rockwell Rotational Test Facility and the NASA Langley Rotating Space Station Simulator. Periodically over the decades since then a few experiments have taken place, and proposals have been made for government-sponsored rotating artificial gravity test facilities, both on the ground and in orbit.^1,2 And yet no such project has been started since those early government programs.