Solar sails made out of extreme metamaterials, nanostructured and with some ceramics will be able to withstand over 1000 degrees celsius. They will reach slingshot within 2-5 solar radii of the sun, which is 2 to 4 times closer than the Parker solar probe. The solar sails should cost about $10 million per launch and …
NASA NIAC has an update on the Lunar Polar Mining Outpost (LPMO). It is a breakthrough mission architecture that promises to greatly reduce the cost of human exploration and industrialization of the Moon. The first invention, Sun Flower™ stems from a new insight into lunar topography. Multi-kilometer landing areas in lunar polar regions are likely …
Micrometeoroid bombardment has already broken most solid material in the upper part of the regolith into fine grains. This includes solid material of all compositions, including the ice, which is as hard as granite at PSR temperatures and is therefore essentially another type of rock. These ice grains are intermixed with all the other minerals, …
Unlike a reflective solar sail, a sun-facing diffractive solar sail uses a component of force perpendicular to the sun line. This allows navigation without sacrificing the amount of solar power on the sail. The angular deviation of light from a diffractive film may be engineered to provide electronic, rather than mechanical, navigation protocols, e.g. by …
Sandy Munro explains how Tesla’s Big Cell glued onto the cooling plate will be manufacturing and serviceability wins. Sandy Munro has a company that for decades has been engineering and reverse engineers cars. He takes apart and studies every component of the leading cars. He shows the prismatic cell and the pouch cells that are …
Tom Cruise and Director Doug Liman will fly to space on October 2021 on a SpaceX Crew Dragon flight. They will film Tom Cruise’s new movie. So its confirmed that @CommanderMLA is flying the @Axiom_Space @SpaceX #CrewDragon tourist mission with Director @DougLiman & Tom Cruise. One seat still to be filled. They are to launch …
There are several important things that were mostly overlooked in what Elon Musk said yesterday at Battery Day. Elon Musk stated that 2020 car deliveries will be 30-40% over 2019. Tesla had 367,500 cars delivered in 2019. This means Tesla would have between 477.7k-514.5k cars delivered in 2020. This means Elon is repeating that 300k …
R-MXAS is a revolutionary aerospace architecture for realizing a synthetic aperture imaging radiometer (SAIR) in a manner affording unprecedented sparsity in terms of number of antenna elements. As such, it enables a feasible path to space-based implementation of RF apertures of unprecedented size. The R-MXAS system is a single platform comprising a 1-D sparse antenna …
The Swarm-Probe Enabling ATEG Reactor, or SPEAR, is a nuclear electric propulsion spacecraft that uses a new, lightweight reactor moderator and advanced thermoelectric generators (ATEGs) to greatly reduce overall core mass. This will subsequently require a reduction in operating temperatures and reduce the total power levels achievable by the core. However, the reduced mass will …
Howe Industries is investigating a Pulsed Plasma Rocket system that can produce 20,000 lbs of thrust with an Isp of 5,000 seconds. The Pulsed Plasma Rocket (PPR) is smaller, less complex, and more affordable. They fire a 2 kilogram bullet down a barrel where it gets converted into plasma and generates the thrust. They think …
Algae could be used for fuel production on Mars and it would also produce oxygen on Mars. It would also produce fertilizer for growing crops on Mars. Georgia Tech aims to reduce the Entry Descent Landing (EDL) mass of a crewed mission to Mars by approximately 7 tons. This technology will enable long-term human presence …