Lifeboat Foundation

We could soon see a SpaceX’s Starship SN8 prototype lift off 50,000 feet (ft) above Boca Chica Beach in South Texas! The launch will be the company’s first higher altitude test flight performed by a stainless-steel prototype of the Starship spacecraft SpaceX is developing to colonize Mars. –“I think the most important thing is to create a self-sustaining city on Mars,” the founder of SpaceX Elon Musk says, “That’s, I think, the critical thing for maximizing the life of humanity; how long will civilization last.” Musk hopes the vehicle could one day launch hundreds of astronauts to build the first settlement on the Red Planet. SpaceX is working on an ambitious schedule to make life multiplanetary in our lifetime. The company targets to launch a Starship with cargo to the Martian surface by 2022, followed by the first crewed mission in 2024. “I think we have a fighting chance of making that second Mars transfer window,” Musk said, in reference to the launch opportunity that arises every 26 months when Mars and Earth’s orbit align closer to each other to enable a shorter-duration voyage. He said that if it the orbital alignments that enable voyages to Mars every 26 months were not needed, SpaceX “would maybe have a shot of sending or trying send something to Mars in three years. […] But the window is four years away, because of them [planets] being in different parts of the solar system,” he stated during the Humans To Mars conference in August.

Believing in a dream pic.twitter.com/kicgiwFYDc — Austin Barnard🚀 (@austinbarnard45) November 28, 2020

Musk plans to convert Boca Chica into a spaceport, the “Gateway to Mars.” SpaceX teams are simultaneously building multiple Starship prototypes and rapidly expanding the launch facility. Today, Musk shared the Starship SN8 prototype could take flight as soon as Wednesday, December 2nd. Tomorrow, engineers will perform a static-fire test, to assess Starship SN8’s triple Raptor engines performance. During the routine pre-flight preparation, they will briefly ignite the Raptors while the vehicle is grounded to a test stand at the launch pad. When asked if he was ‘nervous about people watching from the build site’ due to the engines’ high thrust, Musk said – “Static fire is not risky from build site, but we need to clear the build site for early flights,” he wrote via Twitter. The static-fire test could take place on Monday, November 30, sometime between 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. CST, according to Cameron County Boca Chica Beach road closure announcements.

Amateur astronomer and YouTuber Alberto Caballero, one of the founders of The Exoplanets Channel, has found a small amount of evidence for a source of the notorious Wow! signal. In his paper uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, Caballero describes searching the Gaia database for possible sun-like stars that might host an exoplanet capable of supporting intelligent life.

Back in 1977, astronomers working with the Big Ear Radio Telescope—at the time, situated in Delaware, Ohio—recorded a unique signal from somewhere in space. It was so strong and unusual that one of the workers on the team, Jerry Ehman, famously scrawled the word Wow! on the printout. Despite years of work and many man hours, no one has ever been able to trace the source of the signal or explain the strong, unique signal, which lasted for all of 72 seconds. Since that time, many people have suggested the only explanation for such a strong and unique signal is extraterrestrial intelligent life.

In this new effort, Caballero reasoned that if the source was some other life form, it would likely be living on an exoplanet—and if that were the case, it would stand to reason that such a life form might be living on a planet similar to Earth—one circling its own sun-like star. Pursuing this logic, Caballero began searching the publicly available Gaia database for just such a star. The Gaia database has been assembled by a team working at the Gaia observatory run by the European Space Agency. Launched back in 2013, the project has worked steadily on assembling the best map of the night sky ever created. To date, the team has mapped approximately 1.3 billion stars.

Where to search for life on Mars: look for subsurface water-containing clay like smectite.

Just amazing!

A small fraction of the cremated remains of 61 people will be flown to the Moon next July as part of the payload delivered by Astrobotic’s Peregrine Mission One lander. The payload is offered by Celestis, a company that provides memorial spaceflights. This particular one has intrigued people because among the many deceased whose ashes will be taken to the moon, there are the remains of science writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke.

Clarke is known to most people for being the author of 2001 – A Space Odyssey, a book in which an ancient alien civilization left one of its peculiar monoliths on the Moon. In the novel, this monolith is found in Tycho crater, but that is not where the Peregrine mission is landing. More aptly, the Astrobotic mission will land in a basaltic lava plain known as Lacus Mortis: the lake of death.

Continue reading “Arthur C Clarke Remains Among Those Expected To Fly To The Moon Next Summer” »

Applying the laws of life on Earth to the rest of the galaxy, a new series blends science fact and fiction to imagine alien life on other planets.

“Astronomers think it’s only a matter of time before some alien life forms are discovered,” says the narrator of Alien Worlds, which debuts exclusively on Netflix from 2nd December 2020.

But what might it look like, and how similar would it be to the animals and plants we are familiar with? The new show will attempt to answer that question as it features a dizzying variety of crawling, slithering, flying and swimming creatures depicted in gorgeous, high-quality CGI.

It’s a sad day. The observatory has not only been used to observe radio wave signals in deep space. It’s also become an iconic landmark over the decades after being featured in countless films and TV shows including the 1995 James Bond blockbuster “GoldenEye.”

The observatory has also made significant contributions to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), spotting mysterious radio signals emanating from distant corners of the universe.

“This decision is not an easy one for NSF to make, but safety of people is our number one priority,” Sean Jones, the assistant director for the mathematical and physical sciences directorate at NSF, told reporters today over a conference call, as quoted by The Verge.

Leave it to Elon Musk to think of putting life on other planets before we’ve even gone back to the moon.

Musk said the capability of SpaceX’s Starship rockets is “designed to make life multiplanetary,” before eventually building a city on Mars.

Interesting.

The building blocks of life can form even before there are stars or planets, a team of researchers have found in a study.

The new research looked at “dark chemistry”, or the ways that new kinds of materials can form without energetic radiation.

Continue reading “The building blocks of life can form even without stars or planets, scientists say” »

The cause of the crashes remain unclear. The Arecibo Observatory was built in the 1960s and has been in used for decades to search for extraterrestrial civilizations. Experts are worried cables could corrode further as they age.

The radio telescope, among the world’s largest single-dish radio telescopes, is now in a sorry state — and at risk of total collapse.

“For me, it’s probably fifty-fifty,” former observatory director Michael Nolan from the University of Arizona told National Geographic. “They are doing what can be done. I’m still really worried that they can’t do enough.”