Lifeboat Foundation

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft carried out a short engine burn on Oct. 3 to home in on the location and timing of its New Year’s flyby of the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule.

Word from the spacecraft that it had successfully performed the 3½-minute maneuver reached mission operations at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, at around 10:20 p.m. EDThe maneuver slightly tweaked the spacecraft’s trajectory and bumped its speed by 2.1 meters per second – just about 4.6 miles per hour – keeping it on track to fly past Ultima (officially named 2014 MU69) at 12:33 am EST on Jan. 1, 2019.

“Thanks to this maneuver, we’re right down the middle of the pike and on time for the farthest exploration of worlds in history – more than a billion miles beyond Pluto,” said mission Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute. “It almost sounds like science fiction, but it’s not. Go New Horizons!”

As a Master’s student at University of Houston’s Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA), I was exposed to many interesting aspects of space exploration. One that I’m particularly intrigued about is the daily lives of astronauts, and their most mundane activities — how they sleep, eat, shower, exercise, work, etc. When the time came to choose what to focus on for my design thesis, I knew it would have something to do with habitation, community, and daily lives in space.

My undergrad was in architecture and urban studies with an equal emphasis on both. This gave me an understanding of how dwellings changed throughout the centuries in relation to the evolution of cities. I think in most cases, our definition of “home” is very intertwined with our definition of “city”. And I believe as humans set sail for the stars, this intertwining will stay strong. What defines a home and a city varies greatly from culture to culture, and changes with time. However, in a broad sense, a home is for your personal and intimate activities, alone or with close family members, and a city is a collection of private and public areas where the community can interact and coexist.

Does Chinese commercial space rival government? A story has gone viral in China about the departure of a rocket scientist named Zhang Xiaoping from his job as deputy director of rocket design at the state-owned Xi’an Aerospace Propulsion Research Institute. He was rumored to be helping lead the design of China’s heavy Long March 9 rocket. According to the South China Morning Post, a document posted on a Chinese social media site described how Zhang was “most crucial to the development process,” and had “irreplaceable” talents. The document argued that Zhang’s departure could affect China’s race to send people to the Moon.

Gone to LandSpace … Zhang is rumored to have taken a research position at the private aerospace firm LandSpace (cited above), earning 10 times his previous salary of 120,000 yuan (US$17,400) per year. This is an interesting development, although we have few hard facts from our Western vantage point. However, the Zhang kerfuffle does suggest that some of the same tensions we’re seeing between public and private space in the United States also exist in China with its emerging commercial space market.

Blue Origin signed a letter of intent with two German space companies to deliver supplies to the Moon by 2023.

First unpiloted flights of new commercial crew ships from the two companies slip into 2019.

BREMEN, Germany — A SpaceX executive said Oct. 3 that the company’s first commercial crew test flight could be delayed until early 2019 because of paperwork issues.

In a speech at the 69th International Astronautical Congress here, Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of build and flight reliability for SpaceX, said launching an uncrewed test flight before the end of the year will be a “close call” even though the hardware itself should be ready.

“We’re working hard to get this done this year,” he said. “The hardware might be ready, but we might still have to do some paperwork on the certification side of it. It’s going to be a close call whether we fly this year or not.”

Continue reading “First SpaceX commercial crew test flight could slip to 2019” »

Humans aren’t built for deep space exploration. We’ve evolved to live here on Earth with an atmosphere, gravity, and a vitally important magnetic field that deflects high-energy cosmic radiation. It will take all our technological prowess to expand on to other worlds, and it won’t simply be a matter of physically getting there. We also need to preserve delicate human biology. A new study from Georgetown University and NASA suggests it may be much harder than we thought to ensure astronauts maintain healthy gastrointestinal (GI) tract tissue in space.

While doctors expect long-term exposure to high-energy radiation will have myriad effects, it’s difficult to study them in a lab on Earth. The effects of the GI tract are easier to assess because the cells lining this body system are replaced every few days. New cells migrate upward from a structure called a “crypt” to take their places lining the gut. Any disturbance of this mechanism can lead to dysfunction.

The study assessed mice under exposure to different radiation conditions as an analog for humans. They’re much smaller, so they can’t handle as much radiation has a human. However, their GI tracts respond much like ours would from exposure to high-energy particles. The researchers used the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NSRL) in Brookhaven National Laboratory to bombard the mice with either simulated galactic cosmic radiation (sometimes called cosmic rays), gamma rays, or no radiation (control group).

Continue reading “Deep Space Exploration Could Permanently Damage Human GI Tracts” »

NASA’s got a whole new plan. It wants boots on the Moon in 10 years and on Mars in 20. Give or take.

On Wednesday, the space agency announced its detailed National Space Exploration Plan to achieve the President’s lofty goals set out in his December 2017 Space Policy Directive-1.

Those bold plans include: planning a new Moon landing, long-term human deployment on and around the Moon, reassertion of America’s leadership in space, strengthening private space companies, and figure out how to get American astronauts to the surface of Mars.

Continue reading “It’s Official: NASA Just Announced a Bold 3-Part Plan to Send Humans to The Moon And Mars” »

From space colonization to resurrection of dinosaurs to machine intelligence, the most awe-inspiring visions of humanity’s future are typically born from science fiction.

But among an abundance of time travel, superheroes, space adventures, and so forth, biotech remains underrepresented in the genre.

This selection highlights some outstanding works (new and not so new) to fill the sci-fi gap for biotech aficionados.

Continue reading “5 Sci-Fi Books Biotech Geeks Should Read Right Now” »