Open Lunar Foundation is a San Francisco based non-profit that had the goal of creating settlements on the moon. Steve Jurvetson and executives from Planet Labs are among those involved. There is $5 million invested in the organization. They were founded in 2018 and recently have appeared in Bloomberg. Their analysis is that will be …
John Blincow is the President of the Gateway Foundation. John Blincow has worked as a pilot for 24 years, flying all over the world in such aircraft as the Boeing 757, DC-10, and Boeing 747-400. John Blincow’s experience as a pilot instructor includes United Airlines, Boeing Flight Safety, and as a security instructor for The …
The Goal of Gateway Foundation Von Braun Station is to build a dual-use station that is economically self-sustaining. There are corrections to this article as of Aug 27, 2019. I interviewed John Blinkow and received details on the 400 person Von Brau n station. I will follow up with several articles on Gateway. The plan …
George Dvorsky, Futurist and Transhumanist, has written at Gizmodo that Humans will never colonize Mars. This is an interesting position from George who wrote in favor of Dyson Spheres in 2012. George wrote in favor of self-replicating space probes modifying the galaxy. George’s predictions for the future are not consistent. A tiny fraction of Dyson …
Jeff Bezos discussed his vision to go to space to benefit Earth. He announced the Blue Moon lunar lander and provided updates on the New Shepard sub-orbital rocket and the New Glenn rocket.
Gateway Spaceport is a membership funded organization that wants to create next-generation space stations. Nextbigfuture has written about their earlier designs for an orbiting spaceport. They have made nice renderings and animations of their designs and construction methods. The Gateway Foundation newest design is similar to an Icarus Interstellar proposal for a 10,000 person worldship. …
One of Elon Musk’s speeches was animated by After Skool. Elon discussed how societal and technological progress is not inevitable. Elon cited the examples of the Egyptians forgetting how to build Pyramids and the Romans forgetting how to build their massive aqueduct systems. It takes a lot of hard work by many people and good …
The New York Magazine describes how President Trump offered some people at NASA to imagine and propose an Apollo-style crash program to get humans to Mars. NASA described getting to humans to Mars in the 2030s. Trump asked if the first humans to Mars could be achieved by 2020 or 2024 with an unlimited budget? …
What will the moon be used for and how big could moon bases be? The main things that I can see as near-term uses for the moon are 1. Source of water for space operations that is many times cheaper than bringing water from the Earth. Lunar mining for water and ISRU for lunar cement. …
The technology needed for mining water ice on the moon and converting it into fuel is pretty straight forward. Various groups are already making the actual needed hardware. Paragon Space Development and Giner are already making key pieces of what is needed. If we are making large amounts of fuel on the moon then we …
Elon Musk indicated that life on Mars will be very hard. It will like Shackelton’s expeditions to the Antarctic. It will not be an escape hatch for the wealthy. During the Heroic Age the Antarctic continent became the focus of international efforts. It resulted in intensive scientific and geographical exploration. 17 major Antarctic expeditions were …