Carnival of Space 277

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The Carnival of Space 277 is up at Venus Transit

Centauri Dreams looks at Rod Hyde’s ideas on laser fusion, as developed in a starship paper he wrote in the 1970s along with collaborators at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Universe Today – The Mars Science Laboratory team has hinted that they might have some big news to share soon. But like good scientists, they are waiting until they verify their results before saying anything definitive.

Nextbigfuture – In an interview with NPR, John Grotzinger, the principal investigator for the Mars Curiosity rover mission, indicated that the data [that they are getting from Mars Science Laboratory Sample Analysis at Mars Instruments] is gonna be one for the history books. It’s looking really good. The announcement will be in a few weeks after more tests and confirmations are run. Curiosity can not directly detect the presence of Mars life. Curiosity can detect organics, which would be the presence of the building blocks of life on the surface of Mars.

Nextbigfuture – Information acquired by L2 this week revealed plans for a “game-changing” announcement as early as December that a new commercial space company intends to send commercial astronauts to the moon by 2020. According to the information, the effort is led by a group of high profile individuals from the aerospace industry and backed by some big money and foreign investors. The company intends to use “existing or soon to be existing launch vehicles, spacecraft, upper stages, and technologies” to start their commercial manned lunar campaign. New Space Watch identifies the company Golden Spike as the company that will have the commercial manned mission to the moon. It is registered in Colorado to Alan Stern, a former administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, and now working on the New Horizons Pluto mission at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

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