Super-lightweight Robot Friendly Modular Construction for Bridges and Space Colonization

NASA Ames team created and tested prefabricated voxels standardized reconfigurable building blocks. They built a set of 256 of those blocks—extremely strong 3D structures made with a carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer called StattechNN-40CF. Each block had fastening interfaces on every side that could be used to reversibly attach them to other blocks and form a strong truss …

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NASA and Sierra Space Burst a Space Station on Purpose

NASA and Sierra Space intentionally burst an inflatable space station in ground testing. It surpassed the 63 PSI goal and is stronger than normal steel space stations. The test article reached over 77 PSI before failing. The inflatable station has nine layers of material for the walls. There is an inflatable module on the space …

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Habital Cold Ocean Planets Could Be Vastly Outnumber Earth-Like Worlds

Ocean planets are a proposed class of low-density, terrestrial exoplanets with substantial liquid water layers. They may exist in a variety of climactic states including ice free, partially ice covered, or completely frozen over at their surfaces. Researchers call ocean-bearing planets with ice-covered surfaces as cold ocean planets. Cold ocean planets may be plentiful in …

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Lex Talks to Bezos about Blue Origin and the Moon

Lex Fridman interviews Jeff Bezos about Blue Origin and Amazon. Jeff also admitted the obvious that Blue Origin’s progress has been too slow and Elon Musk is a great business leader. 0:00 – Introduction 0:24 – Texas ranch and childhood 4:02 – Space exploration and rocket engineering 16:36 – Physics 26:10 – New Glenn rocket …

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Honeybee Robotics Lunar Ice Drill for 2024 NASA Mission

The Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) will help scientists search for water at the lunar South Pole, and will be the first in-situ resource utilization demonstration on the Moon. PRIME-1, which will be mounted to a lunar lander, is made up of two components – The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain …

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