Lifeboat Foundation

Forget about generation ships, suspended animation, or the sudden appearance of a worm hole. The most likely way for aliens to visit us — whatever their motive — is by sending robotic probes. Here’s how swarms of self-replicating spacecraft could someday rule the galaxy.

Top image by Alejandro Burdisio via Concept Ships.

Back in late 1940’s the Hungarian mathematician John Von Neumann wondered if it might be possible to design a non-biological system that could replicate itself in a cellular automata environment, what he called a universal constructor. Von Neumann wasn’t thinking about space exploration at the time, but other thinkers like Freeman Dyson, Eric Drexler, Ralph Merkle, and Robert Freitas later took his idea and applied it to exactly that.

Continue reading “How Self-Replicating Spacecraft Could Take Over the Galaxy” »

Colorado Springs, Colo., (April 11, 2016) – Bigelow Aerospace (BA) and United Launch Alliance (ULA) announced they are partnering to develop and deploy habitable volumes in Low Earth orbit (LEO). The volumes will be based on the Bigelow Aerospace B330 expandable module with the initial launch to orbit in 2020 on ULA’s Atlas V 552 configuration launch vehicle.

The B330 will have 330 cubic meters (12,000 cu ft) of internal space. The craft will support zero-gravity research including scientific missions and manufacturing processes. Beyond its industrial and scientific purposes, however, it has potential as a destination for space tourism and a craft for missions destined for the Moon and Mars.

“We are exploring options for the location of the initial B330 including discussions with NASA on the possibility of attaching it to the International Space Station (ISS),” said Robert Bigelow, founder and president of Bigelow Aerospace. “In that configuration, the B330 will enlarge the station’s volume by 30% and function as a multipurpose testbed in support of NASA’s exploration goals as well as provide significant commercial opportunities. The working name for this module is XBASE or Expandable Bigelow Advanced Station Enhancement.”

Future space missions, including the journey to Mars, edge closer to reality as NASA reveals its top picks from a series of competitions designed to crowdsource innovative concepts.

Events and trainings hosted and sponsored by the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

(Phys.org)—A new study shows that a swarm of hundreds of thousands of tiny microbots, each smaller than the width of a human hair, can be deployed into industrial wastewater to absorb and remove toxic heavy metals. The researchers found that the microbots can remove 95% of the lead in polluted water in one hour, and can be reused multiple times, potentially offering a more effective and economical way to remove heavy metals than previous methods.

The researchers, Diana Vilela, et al., have published a paper on the lead-adsorbing microbots in a recent issue of Nano Letters.

“This work is a step toward the development of smart remediation system where we can target and remove traces of pollutant without producing an additional contamination,” coauthor Samuel Sánchez, at the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany; the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia in Barcelona; and the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Barcelona, told Phys.org.

Testing has started at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, on a concept for a potentially revolutionary propulsion system that could send spacecraft to the edge of our solar system, the heliopause, faster than ever before.

The test results will provide modeling data for the Heliopause Electrostatic Rapid Transit System (HERTS). The proposed HERTS E-Sail concept, a propellant-less propulsion system, would harness solar wind to travel into interstellar space.

“The sun releases protons and electrons into the solar wind at very high speeds — 400 to 750 kilometers per second,” said Bruce Wiegmann an engineer in Marshall’s Advanced Concepts Office and the principal investigator for the HERTS E-Sail. “The E-Sail would use these protons to propel the spacecraft.”

Continue reading “NASA Begins Testing of Revolutionary E-Sail Technology” »

The global space economy is growing, generating more than $300 billion a year in space-related activities, and attracting new, diverse participants and investors. A recent study also found more private money invested in commercial space development in 2015 than in the previous 15 years combined.

NASA has selected six new research proposals to understand the effective drivers of investments in the space economy.

In its second call for economic studies related to investments in the space economy, the agency picked studies that cover topics ranging from in-space manufacturing in low-Earth orbit (LEO) to the economics of resources obtained from near-Earth objects (NEO), such as asteroids.

Continue reading “NASA Expands Economic Research to Advance Space Development” »

Hmmm; not sure if I can watch given my tolerance level of seeing blood.

Cutting-edge technology has a way of snaking itself into the medical field. Over the past few years, for example, we’ve seen 3D printers used to create prescription medication, prosthetic limbs, casts, replacement bones, homemade cosmetic braces and even cartilage implants.

Now, we’re beginning to see some of the ways that virtual reality will impact modern medicine with a company by the name of Medical Realities leading the way.

Continue reading “Watch a live surgery take place in virtual reality on April 14th” »

Nice; Universal Soldier time.

So Orlowski and the advanced research agency have their work cut out for them. Meanwhile Americans have plenty of reasons to be skeptical they’ll succeed — and not just because the Pentagon has repeatedly failed to manage complex weapons programs without cost overruns and technical problems, the prime example being the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

The Pentagon launched Squad X in 2013, to solve longtime serious problems. A squad, which is roughly a dozen troops, is the smallest conventional military unit capable of fighting independently. A “dismounted” squad — meaning traveling on foot rather than in vehicles — usually carries rifles, grenades, a few machine guns and several radios. It depends on larger units for speedy transportation, heavy firepower and long-range communications.

Continue reading “What is Squad X, and how much will it change the U.S. Army?” »