Arthur C. Clarke's famous novel, Rendezvous with Rama, depicted an alien starship hurtling through the solar system, which humans mistake for an asteroid, before discovering that it is something much more puzzling...
Now NIAC is working with Made in Space on Project RAMA (Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata). This long-term proposal is looking into the feasibility of turning asteroid fragments into AI-powered spacecraft. These 'flying mining stations' could then be directed to more accessible orbital locations in order to efficiently access the minerals within. For more details, see Made in Space cofounder Jason Dunn's article, How We Want to Turn Asteroids into Spacecraft. The Benford boys give an interview about proposals to create starships for interstellar travel, during the lifetimes of some of you. On the podcast show, "From Here to the Stars," Jim Benford explains what kinds of beam-driven sailing vessels might be possible fairly soon.
Puzzled by the purported "EM Drive"? I'm a skeptic, but some of the ideas proposed - to wriggle around measly quibbles like conservation of momentum - are indeed clever. Guys should write sci fi!
Some bold envisioning from Popular Science's Spaceship Design Contest winners!
The United Arab Emirates plans to send an unmanned spacecraft to Mars. They hope it will be the first probe created by an Islamic country to reach the red planet. They will work together with NASA.
== Closer to Earth ==
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Aerospace is building a giant airplane in the Mojave Desert for carrying rockets to 35,000 feet adding to their oomph into space. It has twin fuselages - most of a 747 would feet in between them - joined across the top by a massive wing, more than 1 hundred meters across. Howard Hughes eat it.
Two cannibalized 747s make up much of the working portions, including cockpit and engines. Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites has experience with twin fuselaged aircraft. They built for Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic the much smaller but also dual-hulled White Knight Two, the mothership used to launch a small suborbital vehicle carrying passengers. With a rocket attached, Allen's aircraft will weigh 1.3 million pounds, equal to a fully loaded giant Airbus A380. Possible rollout next year.
Interesting article on some of NASA’s forthcoming series of “X-plane” test beds for new aviation technologies. In June, while participating in NIAC meetings, I also spoke at the DC meeting of the AIAA on a panel about the “Future of Military Aviation,” where I pointed out how many decades it has been since the public got to see something ground-breaking out of any of the top secret "skunk works" research centers.
Video: ride the SpaceX first stage back down to a barge landing! Okay coolness just popped up a notch. This time a camera onboard recorded Elon's fourth successful rocket re-landing and the time-lapse video is nothing less than amazing.
You are a member of a species doing stuff like this!
You are a member of a species doing stuff like this!
After an initial failure, NASA inflated the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, an essential tech for human-crewed spaceflight. And we are on our way to 2016 being as terrific a year for our outward progress as fantastic-2015 was.
New video takes you on a close-up tour of the International Space Station.
The venerable Hubble Space Telescope is doing so well that NASA has extended its science mission until 2021, even after the James Webb Telescope is launched in 2018.
A detailed update on flying cars(!) which seem about to launch (at last) into their golden age. One company – run by the non-Brin other owner of Google – seems to have real legs.
A fascinating article on how we seem to be creeping ever closer to a dangerous possibility of war in space, as depicted in P.W. Singer and August Cole’s novel Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War. I suspect that one of NASA’s long range programs may be partly inspired by a need for deep protection of assets, out there.
== Resources from Phobos or the moon? ==
I’ve long believed that the Russians are right about Phobos… that the larger moon of Mars is one of the most valuable sites in the solar system. Ideally situated to serve as a logistics hub for visiting the Red Planet, it would offer a radiation-shielded base for humans and a supply and refueling center. The capstone would be if Phobos has a lot of volatile deposits – ideally water. If so, then In Situ Resource Utilization or ISRU could multiply its value ten-fold, allowing us to ship Mars landers empty and fuel them with locally made propellants. (After landing, they could then top off from ISRU auto-factories pre-set on the Martian surface.) Eliminating fuel and life support water from the transport loop would make Mars trips viable.
Hence finding out more about Phobos is vital! Yet, the failure of the Russian GRUNT mission left a void in this department. Are there volatiles? We thought so, when reflectance data suggested Phobos might be a carbonaceous chondritic asteroid, but orbital considerations make that seem almost impossible. See where it’s now thought the Mars satellites formed from material blown off the planet by some long ago impact which, I fear, might mean they are as dry as our bone-dead moon. Alack.
== We drag $%#! politics into everything... ==
There is a mythology going around that, even if the Republican Party is waging outright war against most kinds of science, at least they like space! Indeed, GOP led Congresses have given NASA small increases, over the years.
But this is misleading. Both President Bush and the Boehner-Ryan Congresses yanked the money back by commanding earmarks for very specific and spectacularly useless endeavors.
But this is misleading. Both President Bush and the Boehner-Ryan Congresses yanked the money back by commanding earmarks for very specific and spectacularly useless endeavors.
Take the Constellation program, a lavish effort to simply re-create Apollo and go back to the moon, achieving no forward-purpose, whatsoever. Since there was no major new funding, this meant stealing from every other realm in NASA, especially technological development programs... the seed corn for our real future in space. These were slashed ferociously.
When the Obama Administration canceled that loony-lunar boondoggle, it seemed the money might be spent on actual missions to explore the cosmos. Instead, Congress in 2010 imposed a restoration of core elements of Constellation, called the Space Launch System (SLS), resurrecting many Space Shuttle components for a system without any mission on the near or intermediate horizons. The GOP-run House and Senate have since imposed increases in the SLS budget, mostly at the expense of science missions.
All of this against a backdrop of success in the Obama endeavor to spin off and commercialize orbital launch services to private companies like SpaceX, which are developing capabilities at a vastly quicker rate.
All of this against a backdrop of success in the Obama endeavor to spin off and commercialize orbital launch services to private companies like SpaceX, which are developing capabilities at a vastly quicker rate.
“So the Senate is telling NASA to hurry up and build a rocket for which it has no real use for human exploration in the 2020s. Unfortunately, once the rocket is built, the expenses don't end. Ground crews must be kept ready, supply lines kept open, and contractors taken care of. These fixed costs can be enormous. For the space shuttle, those costs amounted to about $2.5 billion annually—whether the vehicle flew or not…” reports Eric Berger in Ars Technica. So much for the party that opposes government boondoggles. Though part of it is pure pork: Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), wants SLS because it is managed by the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. And MSFC has been Instrumental for 30 years in systematically preventing humans from getting into space.
== Mining Asteroids ==
Recall I mentioned countries helping companies prepare for the new space gold rush? Luxembourg is partnering with California-based Deep Space Industries to produce a spacecraft that will test many features necessary for asteroid mining. The module, known as Prospector X, will consist of three coupled cube satellites, or cube-sats. (This article is mistaken on the dimensions.)
And a bigger dog wants this bone, too. “Asteroid mining was taken a step closer to reality last year when President Barack Obama signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act into law, allowing companies to keep what they take from outer space, and Luxembourg says it plans to enact a similar legal framework.”
Interesting article about Nathan Myhrvold meddling in asteroid studies... a good read. Once the chief technologist at Microsoft, Dr. Myhrvold claims research from several NASA and other instruments has misjudged the albedo and thus the size of many asteroids. Created quite a stir... and check out the rebuttals.
A new book by Michael K. Shepard, Asteroids: Relics of Ancient Time, delves into the science and importance of asteroids and meteorites, how these relics provide clues to the origins and evolution of the solar system. Shepard looks at the spacecraft that have begun to provide stunning close-up views of asteroids, giving us insight into the valuable minerals that groups such as Planetary Resources, Deep Space Industries and Made in Space seek to access in the near future.
And a bigger dog wants this bone, too. “Asteroid mining was taken a step closer to reality last year when President Barack Obama signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act into law, allowing companies to keep what they take from outer space, and Luxembourg says it plans to enact a similar legal framework.”
Interesting article about Nathan Myhrvold meddling in asteroid studies... a good read. Once the chief technologist at Microsoft, Dr. Myhrvold claims research from several NASA and other instruments has misjudged the albedo and thus the size of many asteroids. Created quite a stir... and check out the rebuttals.
A new book by Michael K. Shepard, Asteroids: Relics of Ancient Time, delves into the science and importance of asteroids and meteorites, how these relics provide clues to the origins and evolution of the solar system. Shepard looks at the spacecraft that have begun to provide stunning close-up views of asteroids, giving us insight into the valuable minerals that groups such as Planetary Resources, Deep Space Industries and Made in Space seek to access in the near future.
June 30 was Asteroid Day - a global awareness campaign to emphasize the importance of monitoring asteroids that could pose potential hazards to Earth. This is the goal of B612's Sentinel Mission - an infrared space telescope that would catalog and track Earth-crossing asteroids.
And finally...
Much of Mongolia lacks street addresses, so the government commissioned a British startup to overhaul its postal system. What3Words has generated a three word identifier to each 9 square meter plot of the planet. You can locate the White House at Engine.Doors.Cubs. One of the words in my own new address? Spaceship.
A fascinatingly frank discussion of “periods in space.”
