“The space race has changed since the Soviet Union sent Sputnik 1, the first man-made satellite, into space in 1957. The fight for domination is now between private companies rather than governments.”
Category: space travel – Page 451
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a double-armed, laser-guided robot that can basically 3D print a 50-foot-wide house in less than 14 hours with almost no human intervention. The Digital Construction Platform, described today in Science Robotics, consists of a large hydraulic arm mounted on a platform with motorized treads, plus a smaller electric-powered arm for finer movements. The MIT team programmed the solar-powered machine to spray out foam construction material, layer by layer, to form a 12-foot-high, igloo-like structure big enough to house a family. The researchers hope such robots could someday be sent to the moon, Mars or Antarctica to build “print-in-place” habitats from the materials at hand … or at manipulator.
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We all know that real space travel and space colonization will not be achieved without the hard work, passion, and courage of people willingly taking risks for the greater good of humanity.
However, we can put all our hearts into deep space missions but won’t succeed unless we also provide the technological innovations needed. Let’s say, that thermal radiation isn’t our biggest enemy in space (literally roasting and melting our astronauts), speed and time are still affecting us the most. Mars, which is only a mere six months of travel time away from Earth, is certainly manageable, but getting to the outer parts of our own solar system already took some 10 years to accomplish.
So, it’s obvious why sci-fi avoids any further questioning by putting space explorers in sleep mode. In reality, shutting down humans is hard to do, whereas keeping a body alive in suspension mode is tricky, to say the least.
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Tesla founder and chief executive Elon Musk said his latest company Neuralink is working to link the human brain with computers by creating micron-sized devices.
Neuralink is aiming to bring to the market a product that helps with certain severe brain injuries due to stroke and cancer lesion in about four years, Musk said in an interview with the website Wait But Why on Thursday.
“If I were to communicate a concept to you, you would essentially engage in consensual telepathy,” Musk said in the interview. Neuralink will be Musk’s third company along with Tesla and SpaceX.
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Chinese engineers rolled out a Long March 7 rocket to a seaside launch complex on Hainan Island in the South China Sea on Monday, aiming to fire a robotic refueling freighter into orbit as soon as Thursday to test technology for China’s future space station.
The Tianzhou 1 spacecraft mounted on top of the 174-foot-tall (53-meter) Long March 7 launcher will dock with the Tiangong 2 space lab around two days after liftoff, the first of three linkups planned during the cargo carrier’s mission.
Chinese officials said the automated mission is due to launch some time between Thursday and next Monday.
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In order to boldly go where no man has gone before we first need to sort out a few things — achieving near-relativistic speeds is certainly one of it. Space travel would allow humanity to explore all the new worlds, visit other galaxies and more so, seek out new life.
Right now NASA scientists are weighing in on that subject again, claiming that the cutting-edge technologies needed to making this pipe dream a reality are getting closer by the day.
Imagine getting to Mars in just 3 days… or putting points beyond our solar system within our reach. New propulsion technologies could one day take us to these cosmic destinations making space travel truly interstellar! — Philip Lubin
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When we think about our species’ future in space, we often imagine a network of large space stations, on-orbit factories producing large transport vessels, and giant imaging systems gazing deep into the universe’s history. That future is achievable, but it requires we think about more than just lowering the cost of launching to space. The International Space Station, the largest structure humans have put in space thus far, took more than a decade, billions of dollars, and dozens of launches and spacewalks to complete. Despite an incredible result, this construction approach won’t scale to meet future demand. A future in space that includes residences, industrial facilities, and transport stations needs platforms that allow us to manufacture and assemble large space systems in space.
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Theoretical physics often lifts the sanctions we set on our own imaginations. Whether it’s exploring the possibility of warp drives or understanding the rate of the universe’s expansion, we are quick to explore the unknown on our chalkboards until our tech is ready for our ideas.
In a similar deep-dive into the theoretical, a Norwegian professor argues in the journal Acta Astronautica for the of possibility of photon rockets that can reach 99.999 percent of the speed of light (300,000 km/s [186,000 mph]); asserting that, while humanity can’t do it anytime soon, we could potentially build a spacecraft that falls just short of the ultimate speed limit sometime in the future when the necessary technology is feasible.
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