SpaceX is making water-cooled steel plate for launching and landing the two stages of the SpaceX Super Heavy Starship. The launch and landing pad challenges for the moon and Mars are far less than for the Earth. For the Moon, NASA has awarded a lunar landing pad contract to ICON. From the lab to the …
NASA has published its new goals for the moon and Mars. Most of the ambitious goals will require SpaceX to develop the Superheavy Starship, in orbit refueling and the lunar Starship. The purple infrastructure goals are interesting for developing a lunar power grid and robotics automation. Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and …
NASA and DARPA will work together to develop and demonstrate a nuclear thermal rocket engine in space by 2027. The Demonstration Rocket is part of the Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) programme. DRACO’s proposed solid core nuclear thermal rocket temperatures could reach almost 5000 degrees fahrenheit, which will need new advanced materials. It will use high-assay …
Benjamin Jorns, U-M associate professor of aerospace engineering led a new Hall thruster study that operated a Hall Plasma thruster at five times old power limits. His team challenged ran a 9 kilowatt-rated Hall thruster at up to 45 kilowatts while maintaining roughly 80% of its nominal efficiency. This increased the amount of force generated …
The Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding instrument has detected liquid water beneath the Mars South Polar Ice Cap. This data supports the presence of basal water beneath Ultimi Scopuli and suggest. If we bring surface topography instruments to Mars we could get radar confirmation other potential subglacial water bodies and confirm this …
NASA’s Perseverance rover is collecting many organic material rich rock-core samples. They are sampling a top prospect for finding signs of ancient microbial life on Mars. The rover has collected four samples from an ancient river delta in the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater since July 7, bringing the total count of scientifically compelling rock samples …
SpaceX is making a 480-foot-tall giant robot with arms that will catch giant rockets. It is insanely cool. Sci-fi made real. But moon landings were already insanely cool. The difference is with this working we have almost a thousand launches per month from the same launch pad versus at most one today. This means rockets …
Ivan Ermanoski, Arizona State University, has NASA NIAC funding to evaluate, computationally and experimentally, the feasibility of a process–thermal swing sorption/desorption (TSSD)–to generate oxygen from the Mars atmosphere with 10x less energy than the state of the art, and bring other breakthrough performance improve-ments. The basis for TSSD is a two-step thermally-driven cycle operating below …
Elon Musk believes 2029 is the year we can achieve both AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and humans on Mars. Clearly, Elon believes Teslabot will be used to achieve realworld AGI and realworld AI. He also believes that SpaceX Super Heavy Starship will be used to place humans on Mars. 2029 feels like a pivotal year. …
Elon Musk was interview at the All in Podcast. There were some highlights. Elon Musk thinks it is 100% certain that nuclear fusion will technically work. The question is will nuclear fusion be economically viable. Elon thinks nuclear fusion will not be economically viable. Elon repeated his point that there is a low birthrate problem. …
There have been other Mars Society Studies analyzing using Mars resources to make more efficient colonization. The first unmanned missions need to bring the solar panels and automated equipment to move the solar panels around. There is needs to be mining, excavating and other automated machines. There needs to be automated exploration equipment. We have …