Carnival of Space 393

The Carnival of Space 393 is up at Universe Today

Meet Three People Who Intend to Die on Mars at Universe Today

More than 200,000 people have applied to the Mars One Project, and 663 candidates have been put on the shortlist. Eventually just 4 people will be packed into a spacecraft and blasted off to the Red Planet in 2018. Once they get there, they’ll need to survive with what they brought with them, and what they can scrounge from the surface of the planet. And then they’ll be joined every 2 years later by another crew of potential colonists.

Dina from Iraq/USA one of severalon the Mars One shortlist of Mars candidates

Nextbigfuture – Some have called the Elon Musk comment that Tesla Motors could reach $700 billion in market valuation by 2025 with 50% per year annual revenue growth.

Achieving anywhere close to becoming a trillionaire who enables reusable rockets and some level of human colonization on Mars would put Elon Musk to the level a hero in a Robert Heinlein classic science fiction story.

Heinlein’s protagonists are typically geniuses, often with perfect memory and a love for mathematics.

Nextbigfuture – Spacex successfully launched the DSCOVR satellite and sent it into a parking orbit. The satellite was successfully deployed.

Waves were to high for the drone ship, but the first stage successfully soft landed vertically into the ocean 10 meters from its target.

Ultimately, DSCOVR will be positioned at the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrangian point, 1,500,000 kilometers (930,000 mi) from Earth, more than four times farther than the Moon. SpaceX delivered DSCOVR to a parking orbit just under 200km, and the satellite will reach its final orbit 110 days after launch.

While extreme weather prevented SpaceX from attempting to recover the first stage, data shows the first stage successfully soft landed in the Atlantic Ocean within 10 meters of its target. The vehicle was nicely vertical and the data captured during this test suggests a high probability of being able to land the stage on the drone ship in better weather.

Nextbigfuture – Robert Hoyt, Tethers Unlimited – SpiderFab: Architecture for On-Orbit Construction of Kilometer-Scale Apertures

Two things are the most exciting for near term transformation of space capability
Spiderfab and Spacex reusable rockets.

Here is the Spiderfab update.

Improving and testing reliability and a lot of engineering would be needed to get to 100 kilometer structures.

Nextbigfuture focused on the second half with the talk by Young Bae.

Young Bae, Y.K. Bae Corporation – Propellant-less Spacecraft Formation-Flying and Maneuvering with Photonic Laser Thrusters

Young Bae used a diamond thin disk laser and increased the power to achieve 1.03 millinewtons of force with a laser photonic thruster.

It bounces lasers between mirrors. The bouncing amplification was 100-200 times.
He believes they can get bouncing amplification to 1000 times.
The mirrors can handle 50 megawatts per square centimeter and they are at 500 kilowatts per square centimeter.