A ten thousand person colonization space ship design is proposed with a focus on how the community and living spaces should be designed. People are assigned area with the density of the city of Seattle and standard mixed use living areas. Everyone has 50 square meters of living space. There is agricultural and other green …
Tethers Unlimited has developed (DARPA contract) a revolutionary technology that will enable small spacecraft, such as nanosatellites and picosatellites, to deploy and utilize very large antenna apertures with exceptionally low mass requirements. This technology will enable new capabilities for small, low-power nanosatellites such as transmission of real-time video from GEO. If you liked this article, …
Tethers Unlimited is currently developing a revolutionary suite of technologies called “SpiderFab” to enable on-orbit fabrication ofof large spacecraft components such as antennas, solar panels, trusses, and other multifunctional structures. SpiderFab provides order-of-magnitude packing- and mass- efficiency improvements over current deployable structures and enables construction of kilometer-scale apertures within current launch vehicle capabilities, providing higher-resolution …
The latest NASA phase 2 NIAC $500,000 awards were announced. Robert Hoyt, Tethers Unlimited SpiderFab: Architecture for On-Orbit Construction of Kilometer-Scale Apertures Young Bae Propellant-less Spacecraft Formation-Flying and Maneuvering with Photonic Laser Thrusters Here was a paper from 2007 on the Photonic laser thruster (PLT) Dr Bae has proposed phased development of Photonic propulsion systems. …
India’s economy slowed in early summer to its weakest pace since the bottom of the global economic downturn in 2009, government statistics released Friday evening showed. The Central Statistics Office in New Delhi said that the economy grew 4.4 percent in the quarter ended June 30, well below economists’ expectations of 4.8 percent. The quarter …
Billionaire Peter Thiel is famous for his early investment in Facebook. He also was a cofounder of Paypal which was then merged with Xcom which was started by Elon Musk. Positron Dynamics has seed funding from Paypal billionaire Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs. Initial simulations show that as much as 10 micrograms of positrons could be …
By lowering the expression of a single gene, researchers at the National Institutes of Health have extended the average lifespan of a group of mice by about 20 percent — the equivalent of raising the average human lifespan by 16 years, from 79 to 95. The research team targeted a gene called mTOR, which is …
In a series of experiments run by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick, low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests, saddled with a mental load that was the equivalent of losing an entire night’s sleep. Put another way, the condition of …
Drinking several cups of coffee daily appears to reduce the risk of suicide in men and women by about 50 percent, according to a new study by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). The authors reviewed data from three large U.S. studies and found that the risk of suicide for adults who …
Engineers at the NIST Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNST) have developed a new technique for fabricating high aspect ratio three-dimensional (3D) nanostructures over large device areas using a combination of electron beam (e-beam) lithography, photolithography, and resist spray coating. While it has long been possible to make complicated 3D structures with many mask …
DARPA’s Quantum-Assisted Sensing and Readout (QuASAR) team built two optical lattice clocks that use ultracold ytterbium atoms to measure the passage of time. Much like the ticking of a pocket watch, the ytterbium clocks tick off seconds by measuring the frequency of light absorbed by atoms as electrons in the ground state jump to an …