France uses about 80% nuclear energy for its electricity supply. The US has used about 16-24%. The US was on track to go to 80% nuclear energy but allowed this to be derailed with over-regulation. The spike in interest rates in the 1970s caused a problem but when interest rates went back down was when …
Robert Zubrin says it takes life to create an atmosphere with free oxygen. If we analyze the spectrum of atmosphere for exoplanets and find free oxygen he argues we will have found alien life. If we find a region of space with many exoplanets with free oxygen then we will have found alien life that …
With composite booms, the NASA principal investigator believes we could make 1000 to 4000 square meter solar sails today with a funded project. Then with the learnings from that mission we could rapidly advance to 10,000 square meter solar sails. Les Johnson believes that he can see the development path to kilometer sails with a …
Beamed propulsion could achieve single stage to orbit. It could be 6 to 100 times cheaper. Most of the rocket becomes payload. DARPA funded developing a heat exchanger for direct energy. They tested a microwave beam director for a 100KW microwave source. The Breakthrough starshot update was the cost and engineering system model. This was …
Positron Dynamics gave an overview and update on their Antimatter propulsion work. They are slowing the positrons that are generated. Krypton isotopes to generate hot positrons. Use their system to moderate the positrons so they can be used. They need to efficiently create more isotope to get more positrons instead of using magnetic storage. They …
Breakthrough Discuss is an academic conference focused on the question of life in the Universe. More information on the Breakthrough Initiatives is available at https://breakthroughinitiatives.org. Sonny White has a new paper Spacedrives and Conservation Laws Raymond Sedwick University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20740 Associate Professor, Department of Aerospace Engineering. Associate Fellow AIAA. Harold White …
Tajmar is finding more magnetic interaction from cables. He is not conclusively saying that is all that is happening with EMdrive or Mach Effect but he thinks it is a significant error source for such tiny thrust measurements. Propellantless propulsion is believed to be the best option for interstellar travel. However, photon rockets or solar …
Previously, planets have been detected only in the Milky Way galaxy. Researchers show that quasar microlensing provides a means to probe extragalactic planets in the lens galaxy, by studying the microlensing properties of emission close to the event horizon of the supermassive black hole of the background quasar, using the current generation telescopes. they show …
AirMap is the world’s leading airspace management platform for drones, supporting more than 100,000 drone flights per day. The only platform that powers millions of flights today with APIs and SDKs built for tomorrow. Millions of drones, hundreds of drone manufacturers and developers, and hundreds of airspace managers and stakeholders rely on AirMap’s airspace intelligence …
The Russian Avangard mach 20 hypersonic glide vehicle is expected to enter Russia’s arsenal by 2020. Russia successfully tested the weapon, which could carry a nuclear warhead, twice in 2016. The third known test of the device, called a hypersonic glide vehicle, was carried out in October 2017 and resulted in a failure when the …
Next week will use a previously-flown Falcon 9 booster, and the final two Iridium Next missions will fly on new Block 5 boosters. This would be the tenth launch for SpaceX in 2018. May 22 Falcon 9 Iridium Next 51-55 & GRACE Follow-On Launch time: 1947:58 GMT (3:47:58 p.m. EDT; 12:47:58 p.m. PDT) Launch site: …