Lifeboat Foundation

Two historic events happened this past week that will lay the groundwork for the future of American space exploration.

First, after a close vote in the Senate, Rep. Jim Bridenstine, R-Okla. – a former Navy combat pilot – was confirmed as the new head of NASA. I am confident he will be a strong leader in space exploration as we begin a new era of innovation, technological advancement and limitless exploration.

Second, Vice President Mike Pence laid out a bold vision for America’s future in space exploration during his opening remarks at the Space Foundation’s 34^th Annual Space Symposium in Colorado. The vice president showed the Trump administration’s commitment to restoring American leadership in space, rightly pointing out that “we stand at the dawn of a new era of human activity in space; a turning point that will bring new opportunities and new challenges.”

Continue reading “Newt Gingrich: A glimpse of America’s future in space in 2024” »

Elon Musk’s planned BFR Mars rocket finds a home in Los Angeles. It’s oddly fitting for what could be a very historic spacecraft.

A trip to the moon for the rest of us.

The Carbonite-2 spacecraft can resolve moving cars, lorries, boats and planes from a height of 505km.

SpaceX just got the okay to build its giant Mars spaceship in LA.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said on Monday that he’s officially approved SpaceX’s plan to build a Mars spaceship factory at the city’s port.

Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. will build its giant in-development rocket, nicknamed “BFR,” at the Port of Los Angeles.

Most proposals for emotion in robots involve the addition of a separate ‘emotion module’ – some sort of bolted-on affective architecture that can influence othe…r abilities such as perception and cognition. The idea would be to give the agent access to an enriched set of properties, such as the urgency of an action or the meaning of facial expressions. These properties could help to determine issues such as which visual objects should be processed first, what memories should be recollected, and which decisions will lead to better outcomes.

For more than two millennia, Western thinkers have separated emotion from cognition – emotion being the poorer sibling of the two. Cognition helps to explain the nature of space-time and sends humans to the Moon. Emotion might save the lioness in the savannah, but it also makes humans act irrationally with disconcerting frequency.

In the quest to create intelligent robots, designers tend to focus on purely rational, cognitive capacities. It’s tempting to disregard emotion entirely, or include only as much as necessary. But without emotion to help determine the personal significance of objects and actions, I doubt that true intelligence can exist – not the kind that beats human opponents at chess or the game of Go, but the sort of smarts that we humans recognise as such. Although we can refer to certain behaviours as either ‘emotional’ or ‘cognitive’, this is really a linguistic short-cut. The two can’t be teased apart.

Continue reading “Robot cognition requires machines that both think and feel” »

Elon Musk took to Twitter Sunday night to announce a new recovery method for an upper stage SpaceX rocket. A balloon — a “giant party balloon” to quote him directly — will ferry part of a rocket to a bounce house. Seriously.

If anyone else proposed this idea they would be ignored, but Elon Musk lately has a way of turning crazy ideas into reality.

It was just in 2012 that SpaceX launched and landed its first rocket and now the company is doing it with rockets significantly larger. And then early this year SpaceX made a surprise announcement that it would attempt to use a high-speed boat and large net to catch part of rocket. And it worked after a failed first attempt.

Continue reading “Elon Musk’s latest SpaceX idea involves a party balloon and bounce house” »