Lifeboat Foundation

We might be witnessing the start of the private space station race.

Dare we say that a new type of space race is heating up? Blue Origin, the space tourism firm founded by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced a partnership with Sierra Space and Boeing to build and launch a commercial space station called Orbital Reef by the end of the decade, a press statement reveals.

Continue reading “Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Will Launch an Orbital ‘Space Business Park’” »

DUBAI, U.A.E. — SpaceX has won a contract to launch an Emirati high-resolution imaging satellite on a Falcon 9 rideshare mission in 2023.

The Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) announced at an Oct. 27 press conference here, held during the 72nd International Astronautical Congress, that it selected SpaceX to launch its MBZ SAT satellite in the second half 2023. The center did not disclose the value of the contract.

Salem AlMarri, deputy director general of MBRSC, said the center looked at several launch providers for the mission. “At the end of the day, we look, for each mission, what is best. For this mission, SpaceX was the best.”

Physicists in China expand quantum sampling well beyond the realm of classical computers.

They’ll launch to the International Space Station on Halloween (Oct. 31).

Scientists say it could represent a bridge between freshwater and marine species.

Laura Hiscott reviews Quantum Technology | Our Sustainable Future by The Quantum Daily.

How could quantum computing help us to fix climate change? This is the question at the heart of Quantum Technology | Our Sustainable Future, a half-hour-long documentary published on YouTube in July.

Continue reading “Qubits for the future: YouTube documentary explores how quantum computing could promote sustainability” »

Blue Origin and Sierra Space have revealed plans for Orbital Reef, a commercial space station to be built in low Earth orbit. Check out animation of what it will look like here.

The infamous twin paradox sends the astronaut Alice on a blazing-fast space voyage. When she returns to reunite with her twin, Bob, she finds that he has aged much faster than she has. It’s a well-known but perplexing result: Time slows if you’re moving fast.

Gravity does the same thing. Earth — or any massive body — warps space-time in a way that slows time, according to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. If Alice lived her life at sea level and Bob at the top of Everest, where Earth’s gravitational pull is slightly weaker, he would again age faster. The difference on Earth is modest but real — it’s been measured by putting atomic clocks on mountaintops and valley floors and measuring the difference between the two.

Physicists have now managed to measure this difference to the millimeter. In a paper posted earlier this month to the scientific preprint server arxiv.org, researchers from the lab of Jun Ye, a physicist at JILA in Boulder, Colorado, measured the difference in the flow of time between the top and the bottom of a millimeter-tall cloud of atoms.

Similar to grass stems, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists have created nanostrut-connected tube-in-tubes that enable stronger low-density structural materials.

Porous materials with engineered stretching-dominated lattice designs, which offer attractive mechanical properties with ultra-light weight and large surface area for wide-ranging applications, have recently achieved near-ideal linear scaling between stiffness and density.

In the new research, the team developed a process to transform fully dense, 3D-printed polymeric beams into graphitic carbon hollow tube-in-tube sandwich structures, where, similar to grass stems, the inner and outer tubes are connected through a network of struts. The research is on the cover of the Oct. 25 issue of Nature Materials.