Tag Archives | Space Exploration

Mars One Project Has More Than 1,000 Volunteers For A One-Way Trip To Mars

By on December 10, 2012 in News 11

The previously discussed Mars One project may not be the favorite in the race to devise a feasible plan for colonization of the Red Planet. But even assuming that most would not follow through, it’s astounding that so many people are so eager to get off of Earth. Via Yahoo! News UK:

The Mars One organisation has revealed details of its plans to land four astronauts on the Red Planet in 2023, with four additional ‘crew’ arriving every two years. The organisation said that it had had more than 1,000 volunteers for the mission, who emailed in via the foundation’s website.

Selection of the astronauts will begin next year, the Dutch organisation says. The trip to the planned ‘colony’ would be one-way – and the astronaut volunteers will live and die on Mars.

Mars One aims to finance a mission to Mars via donations from corporations, people – and by creating a reality show-style ‘media event’ around the training and selection of its astronauts.

… Read the rest

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SpaceX Founder Hopes To Send 80,000 People To Mars This Decade

By on November 30, 2012 in News 21

A one-way ticket to Mars would cost a mere half million dollars, quite enticing if you’re wealthy but your daily existence on Earth is barren and meaningless. Space.com writes:

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 a trip. Musk figures the colony program — which he wants to be a collaboration between government and private enterprise — would end up costing about $36 billion.

“At Mars, you can start a self-sustaining civilization and grow it into something really big,” Musk told an audience at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London on Friday. In Musk’s vision, the ambitious Mars settlement program would start with a pioneering group of fewer than 10 people, who would journey to the Red Planet aboard a huge reusable rocket.

… Read the rest

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Elon Musk’s Mission To Mars

By on October 31, 2012 in News 1

Picture: Steve Jurvetson (CC)

Commentary from Media Underground

How exactly is it that SpaceX can do everything so cheaply? Well, it would seem from this recent interview with Elon Musk that there are a couple of reasons in particular. The first being that there’s a tendency for big aerospace companies to outsource everything to subcontractors who then, bizarrely, outsource work to other subcontractors who subsequently – in what seems to be little more than an utter bureaucratic shambles by this point – outsource to other subcontractors and so on and so forth… ad nauseum. As one commenter aptly points out at the foot of this Wired article: “One reason for all that expensively administered subcontracting is that it pleases exactly those committees [who control NASA's funding]. The large projects they favor can subcontract in many different districts, whose congressmen then have a good reason to vote for NASA’s budget. This means the committee members need not trade away any more of their political capital to get the projects that support contractors in their districts.”

In short, SpaceX don’t engage in this subcontracting farce but do it all themselves from the bottom up.… Read the rest

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NASA Building A Prototype Deep-Space Habitat In Texas

By on October 26, 2012 in News 3

Living in the deep reaches of outer space, in Texas. Via Popular Science:

It’s not going to send anyone to deep space. But it does give us a tantalizing look at what it’ll look when NASA does take the next steps in space travel.

Engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center and experts Johnson Space Center in Houston are tinkering with the spaceship mockup, deciding the right size, necessary equipment, and everything else that’s going to make a mission to Mars, a near-by asteroid, or the second Earth-Moon Lagrangian point (277,000 miles away from Earth) as pleasant as possible.

The team’s also planning what [devices] will be sent along and built in. One is a 3-D printer, which would allow astronauts to create any tools they need right on the spot. There’s also greenhouse for astronauts to grow their own and food, and a barrier of water on the outside that could be used to shield explorers from cosmic rays.

… Read the rest

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Inching Closer to the Light Barrier

By on September 30, 2012 in News 11

Picture:By AllenMcC. (CC)

The speed of light has often been called the universal speed limit, but scientists believe that breaking it may be possible. Physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a real-life warp drive in 1994, but the drive’s power requirements were so enormous that it was relegated to merely theory. Space.com is reporting that scientists at the 100 Year Starship Symposium have made adjustments to Alcubierre’s calculations, which lowered the power requirements significantly.

“Everything within space is restricted by the speed of light,” explained Richard Obousy, president of Icarus Interstellar, a non-profit group of scientists and engineers devoted to pursuing interstellar spaceflight. “But the really cool thing is space-time, the fabric of space, is not limited by the speed of light.”

With this concept, the spacecraft would be able to achieve an effective speed of about 10 times the speed of light, all without breaking the cosmic speed limit.

The only problem is, previous studies estimated the warp drive would require a minimum amount of energy about equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter.

… Read the rest

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NASA Probe Spots Pyramid On Mars?

By on September 25, 2012 in News 28

Time to unravel the mystery of the tiny Martian pyramid. Via the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

The drive by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity during the mission’s 43rd Martian day, or sol, (Sept. 19, 2012) ended with this rock about 8 feet (2.5 meters) in front of the rover.

Curiosity is about 8 feet (2.5 meters) from the rock. It lies about halfway from the rover’s landing site, Bradbury Landing, to a location called Glenelg. In coming days, the team plans to touch the rock with a spectrometer to determine its elemental composition and use an arm-mounted camera to take close-up photographs.

… Read the rest

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The Catalog Of Habitable Outer Space Planets

By on September 17, 2012 in News 7

Curious about where to go next? The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog is a project to grade and rank the planets outside of our solar system which offer the most livable conditions, were humanity to ponder a move.

At right is a rendering of sunrise on one of the planets in the Gliese 581 planetary system, a top contender. As of now, there are 6 confirmed potentially habitable planets, 27 unconfirmed potentially habitable planets, and 30 predicted potentially habitable moons:

The exoplanets Gliese 581 d, HD 85512 b, Kepler-22 b, Gliese 667C c, Gliese 581 g, and now Gliese 163 c are the only current six planets that are considered potentially habitable or object of interest for the search of extraterrestrial life (image above). The image shows these objects approximately to scale and compared with Earth and Mars. They also are ranked with the Earth Similarity Index, or ESI (number below the names).

… Read the rest

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Mysterious Silhouette on Mars

By on August 15, 2012 in News 17

Picture: NASA (PD)

Via Yahoo:

A mysterious blotch that appeared along the horizon in a photo from the surface of Mars stirred speculation about what it might be, as two hours later it was gone.

One image from the Curiosity rover as it landed on the fourth planet from the sun showed a “faint but distinctive” image on the horizon, the Los Angeles Times reported. However, a subsequent batch of images sent from the unmanned rover two hours later showed no trace of the blotch.

One theory put forth by space enthusiasts in the L.A. Times story is that Curiosity had somehow snapped a photo of part of the spacecraft that escorted the rover through the Martian atmosphere crash-landing a distance away.

Opinions welcome. A few to get us started, based solely on the contour & shape of the smudgy silhouette:

  1. Bigfoot
  2. Martian Nephilim
  3. Mr. Clean
  4. Jawa Sandcrawler

Read more at Yahoo.… Read the rest

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Scientists: We May Find Alien Life On Saturn’s Tiny Moon Enceladus

By on July 30, 2012 in News 1

The grueling process will involve of a decade of preparation, sending a probe on a journey which takes seven years in each direction, with several years of sample collecting in the middle. But after all of that, we may have proof of non-Earthly life from a place where all signs point to its existence. Via the Guardian:

Saturn’s tiny moon has suddenly become a major attraction for scientists. Many now believe it offers the best hope we have of discovering life on another world inside our solar system…and argue that Enceladus should be rated a top priority for future space missions.

The cause of this unexpected interest in Enceladus – first observed by William Herschel in 1789 and named after one of the children of the Earth goddess Gaia – stems from a discovery made by the robot spacecraft Cassini, which has been in orbit of Saturn for the past eight years.

… Read the rest

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Moon Communion And Religion In Space

By on July 25, 2012 in News 16

One might assume that conquering space would undermine belief in God, but faithful fervor seems, if anything, to strengthen in space, albeit in mutated forms. Via the Atlantic:

Before the launch this weekend of three human beings into the ether of space around the Earth, before they boarded their Soyuz spacecraft, and before the rockets were fired, precautions were taken. Not the humdrum checklists and redundancies of space exploration — assessing the weather, the equipment, the math — but a preparation with a more mystical dimension: the blessing, by a Russian Orthodox priest, of the spacecraft, as it sat on the launchpad on the Kazakh steppe.

The discordance is obvious: Here we are, on the brink of a new expedition to space, a frontier of human exploration and research that is the capstone of our scientific achievement. “The idea of traveling to other celestial bodies reflects to the highest degree the independence and agility of the human mind.

… Read the rest

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