Lifeboat Foundation

NASA has a plan to deal with potential asteroid impacts that sounds like it’s been taken straight from a science fiction film.

The space agency is building a spacecraft named HAMMER — which stands for Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response.

The plan is to blow any harmful looking asteroids out of the sky before they have a chance to hit out planet.

Continue reading “NASA building ‘HAMMER’ spacecraft to save Earth from cataclysmic asteroid impact” »

Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the Moon, once said, “Mars is there, waiting to be reached.”

If Elon Musk has his way, he’ll be the one to reach it, even if it’s likely to be a dangerous journey that could result in the loss of human life.

Speaking at the South by South West festival in Austin, Texas, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Musk said he envisions test flights of his Mars spacecraft next year, though he cautioned early trips could end in death.

Continue reading “Elon Musk plans Mars spaceship, warns there’s a ‘good chance’ that early passengers could die” »

Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX and Tesla, came to SXSW this week and gave a grave talk about the future of humanity, warning about the dangers of nuclear war, climate, change, and runaway AI and telling the audience that the only way to keep humanity alive is to colonize the Solar System.

MOSCOW, March 6. /TASS/. CosmoCourse, a private Russian company that is designing a reusable spacecraft for suborbital flights, plans to make its first commercial launch with tourists onboard in 2025, CosmoCourse Director General Pavel Pushkin told TASS in an interview.

“The first flight of the prototype (a missile and a space vessel — TASS) is due in 2023, and the first tourist flight is expected in 2025,” Pushkin said.

CosmoCourse’s director general specified that the operational testing for the missile and the launched capsule would kick off in 2022. “The hardware is to be finished in 2021, and in 2022 test operations will begin,” he said.

Back in 2015, researchers in Spain created a tiny magnetic wormhole for the first time ever. They used it to connect two regions of space so that a magnetic field could travel ‘invisibly’ between them.

Before you get too excited, it wasn’t the kind of gravitational wormhole that would theoretically allow humans to travel rapidly across space in science fiction TV shows and films such as Stargate, Star Trek, and Interstellar, and it wouldn’t have been able to transport matter.

But the physicists managed to create a tunnel that allowed a magnetic field to disappear at one point, and then reappear at another, which is still a pretty huge deal.

Continue reading “A Magnetic ‘Wormhole’ That Connects Two Regions of Space Was Created in The Lab” »

Elon Musk has pushed his still-fledgling aerospace company, SpaceX, into a remarkable rhythm of frequent and routine launches.

Space travel is dangerous for a lot of very obvious reasons — traveling off of Earth on a rocket has its risks, after all — but even when everything goes well it seems that a brief stay in space has the potential to alter a person’s very DNA. That’s the takeaway from a long-term NASA study that used astronaut Scott Kelly and his twin brother Mark as guinea pigs to see how living in space can affect the most basic building blocks of life.

Scott Kelly has spent over 500 days in space overall, but a huge chunk of that came with a single mission which had him stay aboard the International Space Station for 342 days. His brother Mark, who is a retired astronaut, is his identical twin and has the same DNA. This provided a never-before-possible opportunity for NASA to study how long-term space travel affects the human body and the genes that make us who we are. As it turns out, space really does change us, and upon Scott’s return to Earth it was discovered that his DNA has significantly changed.

Don’t Miss : 12 different Nexus smartphones just got deep discounts in Amazon’s one-day sale.

When it comes to the future of space exploration, a number of new technologies are being investigated. Foremost among these are new forms of propulsion that will be able to balance fuel-efficiency with power. Not only would engines that are capable of achieving a great deal of thrust using less fuel be cost-effective, they will be able to ferry astronauts to destinations like Mars and beyond in less time.

This is where engines like the X3 Hall-effect thruster comes into play. This thruster, which is being developed by NASA’s Glenn Research Center in conjunction with the US Air Force and the University of Michigan, is a scaled-up model of the kinds of thrusters used by the Dawn spacecraft. During a recent test, this thruster shattered the previous record for a Hall-effect thruster, achieving higher power and superior thrust.

Hall-effect thrusters have garnered favor with mission planners in recent years because of their extreme efficiency. They function by turning small amounts of propellant (usually inert gases like xenon) into charged plasma with electrical fields, which is then accelerated very quickly using a magnetic field. Compared to chemical rockets, they can achieve top speeds using a tiny fraction of their fuel.

Continue reading “We Just Completed a Record-Breaking Test of a Revolutionary Ion Engine” »

For all those people wandering around our great Australian cities and spewing they can’t watch a streaming video over 4G because of network access and congestion — we’ve found a place where you can get access to a brand new 4G network that isn’t being hammered. The downside — you’ll need to travel about 384,000km to get there. Nokia and Vodafone are teaming up to put 4G on the moon.

German company PTScientists is planning the first privately-funded Moon landing in 2019, using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral. Their plan is is to look at an old roving vehicle left behind back in 1972, when the last Apollo mission left the lunar surface. And, to do that, the new vehicles they’re sending up small, 1kg, base stations to transmit HD images from the moon’s surface back to earth for the first time. Audi is building the vehicles that will be used on the lunar surface.

Nokia said “The 4G network will enable the Audi lunar quattro rovers to communicate and transfer scientific data and HD video while they carefully approach and study NASA’s Apollo 17 lunar roving vehicle that was used by the last astronauts to walk on the Moon”.