In Brief.
Imagine the hybrid of a rocket and a sleek airplane, blasting off and taking you all the way up to outer space. China might be offering just that in a few years.
The United Nations (UN) has announced its first ever official space mission, with the aim of giving developing countries the opportunity to conduct research in a microgravity environment.
The mission, which is intended to launch in 2021, will make use of a Dream Chaser spacecraft – a shuttle-like spaceplane that’s currently in development by American aerospace firm Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC).
The focus of the mission is to give developing nations – many of which don’t have their own dedicated space operations or craft – a chance to develop and fly payloads for an extended duration in orbit.
Continue reading “The United Nations just announced its first ever space mission” »
Alone in a Spartan black cockpit, test pilot Mike Melvill rocketed toward space. He had eighty seconds to exceed the speed of sound and begin the climb to a target no civilian pilot had ever reached. He might not make it back alive. If he did, he would make history as the world’s first commercial astronaut.
The spectacle defied reason, the result of a competition dreamed up by entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, whose vision for a new race to space required small teams to do what only the world’s largest governments had done before.
Peter Diamandis was the son of hardworking immigrants who wanted their science prodigy to make the family proud and become a doctor. But from the age of eight, when he watched Apollo 11 land on the Moon, his singular goal was to get to space. When he realized NASA was winding down manned space flight, Diamandis set out on one of the great entrepreneurial adventure stories of our time. If the government wouldn’t send him to space, he would create a private space flight industry himself.
In 2009, Carbon nanotube tethers with a strength of 9 N/Tex [9 million newton meters/kg] is over twice as strong as any fibers ever produced before.
In 2016, Jian Nong Wang and his colleagues made nanotubes with a process akin to glass blowing: Using a stream of nitrogen gas, they injected ethanol, with a small amount of ferrocene and thiophene added as catalysts, into a 50-mm-wide horizontal tube placed in furnace at 1,150–1,130 °C.
They packed the nanotubes even more densely by pressing the film repeatedly between two rollers.
An exotic “impossible” space propulsion technology known as “Cannae Drive,” less known than the EmDrive but equally controversial, made news headlines a few weeks ago with the announcement that it is about to be tested in space. There are speculations that the Cannae Drive could exploit physics known as “Mach Effect.” But perhaps the same physics plays a role in the EmDrive as well.
Cannae Inc., the company formed by engineer Guido Fetta to commercialize Cannae Drive technology, announced the forthcoming launch of a cubesat to test its space propulsion technology. “Cannae’s technology requires no on-board propellant to generate thrust and will provide station-keeping for a cubesat flying below a 150-mile orbital altitude,” claimed the announcement. “The demonstration satellite will remain in this orbit for a minimum of six months.”
Ending a wave of speculations on the similarities between Cannae Drive technology and the anomalous EmDrive effect, Fetta posted a clarification a few days ago:
Elon Musk doesn’t want to simply send humans to Mars. The SpaceX CEO has bigger ambitions. He wants us to be an “interplanetary species,” which means creating a self-sustaining civilization on Mars, which means living and dying on Mars — which at some point might mean sex and pregnancy on Mars.
So how would that work?
Given that Musk hasn’t figured out how to keep people alive on the trip to the Red Planet, it’s unlikely he has details on how people will make more people once they’re there. We don’t have any data on how human bodies will work on Mars specifically, but we have enough information to know that sex in space could be a real hassle.
The exploration of Europa begins under the ice in Antarctica.
That’s where a team of researchers, led by the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), has been testing a variety of robotic subs in recent years to learn about what technologies will work best when NASA eventually launches a mission to Jupiter’s icy moon.
Continue reading “If There’s Life on Europa, Robots Like These Will Find It” »
