SpaceX’s Mars ships won’t be ferrying just the super rich to and from the Red Planet, if everything goes according to Elon Musk’s plan.
The price of a seat aboard SpaceX’s Starship interplanetary vehicle will eventually drop enough to be accessible to a large chunk of the industrialized world’s population, the billionaire entrepreneur predicted over the weekend.
While a Mars rover can explore where no person has gone before, a smaller robot at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia could climb to new heights by mimicking the movements of a lizard.
Simply named X-4, the university’s climbing robot has allowed a team of researchers to test and replicate how a lizard moves in the hope that their findings will inspire next-generation robotics design for disaster relief, remote surveillance and possibly even space exploration.
In a scientific paper published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the team states that lizards have optimized their movement across difficult terrain over many years of evolution.
China has a good chance of becoming the dominant space power in the 21st century, and it’s not just looking to copy NASA on the way to the top. Instead, it’s paying close attention to innovative US companies like SpaceX, writes Eric Berger.
Great new episode with Michael Seiffert, the NASA project scientist for the U.S. contribution to the European Space Agency’s Euclid spacecraft. Seiffert talks candidly about what it takes to strike a balance between risk and reward in the design of this upcoming $1 billion dollar dark energy mission.
Fascinating new chat with Michael Seiffert, the NASA project scientist for the U.S. contribution to the European Space Agency’s Euclid spacecraft. Due for launch in the second half of 2022, we discuss how this new space telescope will help astronomers finally understand the mystery of dark energy and maybe even dark matter.
Dr. Shawna Pandya MD, is a scientist-astronaut candidate with Project PoSSUM, physician, aquanaut, speaker, martial artist, advanced diver, skydiver, and pilot-in-training.
Dr. Pandya is also the VP of Immersive Medicine with the virtual reality healthcare company, Luxsonic Technologies, Director of the International Institute of Astronautical Sciences (IIAS)/PoSSUM Space Medicine Group, Chief Instructor of the IIAS/PoSSUM Operational Space Medicine course, Director of Medical Research at Orbital Assembly Construction (a company building the world’s first rotating space station providing the first artificial gravity habitat), clinical lecturer at the University of Alberta, podcast host with the World Extreme Medicine’s WEMCast series, Primary Investigator (PI) for the Shad Canada-Blue Origin student micro-gravity competition, member of the ASCEND 2021 Guiding Coalition, Life Sciences Team Lead for the Association of Spaceflight Professionals, sesional lecturer for the “Technology and the Future of Medicine,” course at the University of Alberta, and Fellow of the Explorers’ Club.
Company officials say it will likely be summer before the ship begins glide flight testing at Spaceport America in southern New Mexico.
Virgin Galactic has reached space twice before — the first time from California in December 2018. The company marked its second successful glide flight over Spaceport America last June.
See my recommendations to get Starship landing, videos, and discussions of quantity distance and other aspects of safety and mission assurance that could potentially help assure successful Starship flights.
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Space travel nowadays relies on physical ejection of propellants, which is challenged by reachable distance of a vehicle in desirable time. In contrast, electromagnetic propulsion was proposed to be a potential solution without need of carrying bulky mass of propellants, by using force interaction of local magnetic dipoles with the external natural magnetic field. Further development of this technique, however, has been daunted by extremely small magnetic induction that can be obtained.
To generate a significant thrust by a system with a reasonable scale, we propose an alternative concept of design, based on the variation of local magnetic dipole moments that has not been considered.
A magnetic dipole is created by wrapping a solenoid around an iron core. It is varied spatially by changing the cross-sectional area of the solenoid, hence giving a gradient of magnetic dipole moment. The interaction force is measured by an in-house force sensor based on a cantilever, which has a high sensitivity of one micro-Newton. In addition, numerical simulation is used to calculate the magnetic field and created force via the Maxwell stress tensor.
When SpaceX launches four civilian astronauts on the private Inspiration4 spaceflight, they’re going to have the ultimate window: a glass dome offering panoramic views of Earth from space.
