Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: space travel – Page 96

With the aim of allowing astronauts to live off the land as much as possible when they return to the Moon, NASA has awarded Blue Origin a US$35-million Tipping Point contract to develop the company’s Blue Alchemist process to make solar cells out of lunar soil.

The biggest bottleneck to establishing a permanent human presence on the Moon and beyond is the staggering cost of sending equipment and supplies from Earth. NASA and other space agencies believe that the best way to overcome this is to use local resources as much as possible to manufacture what’s needed.

Under development since 2021, Blue Alchemist is an example of this. The basic concept is to develop a complete process that takes the lunar soil, more formally known as the regolith, at one end and spits out complete solar cells and other products at the other.

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The Starship upper stage’s impressive 29.5-foot diameter means it could fit up to 100 passengers at a time.

SpaceX’s Starship rocket program is the culmination of founder Elon Musk’s original plan of sending humans to Mars and making humans an interplanetary species.

And yet, Musk has always championed the launch system, originally called the Interplanetary Transport System, as a versatile spacecraft that could be used as a rapid point-to-point transportation system for Earth — a modified version of Starship has also been contracted by NASA for the Artemis III Moon landings, expected to take place in 2025.

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Mysterious radio wave pulses from deep in space have been hitting Earth for decades, but the scientists who recently discovered them have no concrete explanation for the origin of the signals.

For 35 years, the strange blasts of energy in varying levels of brightness have occurred like clockwork approximately every 20 minutes, sometimes lasting for five minute intervals. That’s what Curtin University astronomers from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) concluded in research published last week in the journal Nature.

The discovery of the signal, which researchers named GPMJ1839-10, has the scientists baffled. Believed to be coming from around 15,000 light years away from Earth, the signal has been occurring at intervals and for a period of time previously thought to be impossible.

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A British aerospace startup is working on a fusion rocket it says will slash the amount of time it takes astronauts to travel to Mars and beyond — allowing humans to explore places that are currently far out of reach.

The challenge: Long-term exposure to microgravity and cosmic radiation can cause serious health issues for astronauts. That means NASA needs to keep its future Mars missions short enough that astronauts come home healthy — less than 4 years should work.

Using our current rocket propulsion technology, though, it’s going to take seven months just to get astronauts to Mars. Factor in the amount of time to get back to Earth, and nearly a third of a Mars astronaut’s mission is just going to be dedicated to the commute.

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Elon Musk recently stated SpaceX made ‘well over a thousand changes’ to Starship since its debut flight.

SpaceX continues to prepare for the second orbital launch attempt of Starship despite concerns over a potential delay caused by the ongoing environmental lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA).

Elon Musk’s private space company, likely eager to show that preparations continue uninterrupted, has shared a number of images on Twitter of Booster 9, the Super Heavy prototype that will be used for the massive rocket’s second test flight.

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