Doug Plata describes how a few tele-operated robots can make roads and landings pads on the moon. The road would be built by robots to remove boulders. These would be followed by bulldozer bots to flatten the path. There would then be heavy roller bots to flatten and compact the regolith. A laser-equipped bot would …
There are many fictional stories where Germany or Germany and Japan win World War 2. The stories usually ignore how this happens or give a few sentence reason like the Germans develop the A-bomb first. There are other exercises in alternate history where people try to analyze the real history and try to find battles …
SpaceX Super Heavy Starship is tracking to a mid-2020 orbital launch. This is a summary of developments from a Mars Society presentation. The Super Heavy Starship development schedule has slipped a few months from the information in this presentation. The presentation does provide a good summary of the Super Heavy Starship. Brian WangBrian Wang is …
Doug Plata has proposed a solar drape concept for the moon. The moon has no wind and has one-sixth Earth gravity. A large robotic rover would place telescoping towers on the moon and thin-film solar cells that are like drapes or rectangular banners. There would be suspension lines between the towers and would be connected …
Mars has a launch window every 26-months. The round trip travel time to the moon is about 11 days. This means that you could send 72 round trips to the moon for every launch window to Mars. Doug Plata has also described how greenhouses can be made on both Mars and moon. The moon greenhouse …
Accion Systems technology is built around a thruster chip architecture. Each chip houses hundreds of microscopic emitters that produce beams of ions generated from our novel propellant source: ionic liquid. They plan to eventually scale to millions of emitters per chip which would enable thrust that is 6000 times higher than they currently have. They …
Elon Musk tweeted out that Tesla is considering a Gigafactory in Texas. Giga Texas? — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 5, 2020 Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and …
1. U.S.-based biotech Gilead, known for its HIV and hepatitis C treatments, has partnered with Beijing’s China-Japan Friendship Hospital to test out an antiviral drug called remdesivir in actual humans in Wuhan, the apparent origin site of the coronavirus outbreak. 2. Thailand is verifying a treatment using three drugs. Large doses of the flu drug …
As of Dec 2019, the number of lithium ion battery megafactories in the pipeline has reached 115 plants. The world’s leading EV and battery manufacturer added a huge 564GWh of pipeline capacity in 2019 to a global total of 2068.3GWh or the equivalent of 40 million EVs by 2028. In Jan 2019, Benchmark Minerals’ saw …
The NASA Assemblers project is a recently awarded Early Career Initiative (ECI) proposal led out of NASA’s Langley Research Center, seeks to advance the technology, including hardware and software, that would allow autonomous in-space assembly, a critical technology for future human exploration and being able to live and work further on the Moon and Mars. …
NASA has awarded a $142 million contract to Maxar Technologies of Westminster, Colorado,to robotically assemble a communications antenna and manufacture a spacecraft beam in orbit. The technology demonstration is slated to take place on NASA’s Restore-L spacecraft, designed to service and refuel a satellite in low-Earth orbit. Above – The Space Infrastructure Dexterous Robot (SPIDER) …