Lifeboat Foundation

What will the first Mars colony look like? In National Geographic’s “Mars” series, a group of pioneers build the first colony on Mars, complete with rovers, helicopters and other tech inspired by NASA, SpaceX and other “big thinkers” in the space industry. How does the fictional tech in Nat Geo’s series match up to real-world ideas for how we’ll colonize Mars? Shown here is Mars 2’s fictional idea of a Mars base.

Next: SpaceX’s Mars Base Vision

Building a sustainable human presence on other worlds should be open to all. Comparing the journey to violent conquest doesn’t help.

First spied in the 1960s, the huge dust clouds have now been confirmed—and may affect plans for future space exploration.

On Wednesday, November 7, NASA will launch its Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) spacecraft to study the ionosphere. This boundary lies between space and Earth, being home to a “sea” of charged electrons and ions; it reacts to both lower atmosphere weather and solar energy, the result being space weather. NASA’s ICON will study this, offering unprecedented scientific data.

SpaceX has started preparations for recovering International Space Station (ISS) astronauts during ocean touchdowns, conducting landing and patient loading rehearsals on their recovery ship GO Searcher.

NASA recently shared photos of the rehearsals on board GO Searcher, which has been upgraded with a medical treatment facility and a helipad in the center of the vessel.

SpaceX practiced how the helicopter will pick up astronauts and fly them to a nearby hospital, in case of a medical emergency.

Continue reading “SpaceX Rehearses Recovery of Astronauts During Ocean Landings, Builds Helipad on Ship” »

Russia has continued the expansion of its GLONASS constellation with the Saturday, Nov. 3, 2018 launch of a Soyuz 2.1b rocket from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome located in northern Russia.

The GLONASS-M (GLONASS-M No. 757) spacecraft that was sent aloft will now become part of Russia’s Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS). The rocket and its payload took to the late evening’s skies at 11:17 p.m. Moscow time (20:17 GMT / 3:17 p.m. EST) from Plesetsk’s Pad 4 at Site 43.

Elon Musk is an engineer at heart, a tinkerer, a problem-solver—the kind of person Popular Mechanics has always championed—and the problems he’s trying to solve are hard. Really hard. He could find better ways to spend his money, that’s for sure. And yet there he is, trying to build gasless cars and build reusable rockets and build tunnels that make traffic go away. For all his faults and unpredictability, we need him out there doing that. We need people who have ideas. We need people who take risks.

We need people who try.

Space enthusiasts stirred by NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong’s venture to the moon spent more than $4 million (€3.5 million) in just the first day of a rare auction of Armstrong’s personal collection of memorabilia.

On July 20, 1969, Armstrong, who led the Apollo 11 mission, became the first human to walk on the moon.

The auction is the first major sale of his personal collection that comes amid a growing demand for space collectibles as the 50th anniversary of the July 20, 1969 moon landing approaches.

Continue reading “Neil Armstrong astronaut memorabilia auction lifts off” »

Elon Musk and SpaceX’s Big Falcon Rocket is a 387-foot-tall Mars launch system. This size-comparison tool shows how big a real-life BFR might be.