Lifeboat Foundation

Sustained space exploration will require infrastructure that doesn’t currently exist: buildings, housing, rocket landing pads.

So, where do you turn for construction materials when they are too big to fit in your carry-on and there’s no Home Depot in outer space?

“If we’re going to live and work on another planet like Mars or the moon, we need to make concrete. But we can’t take bags of concrete with us—we need to use local resources,” said Norman Wagner, Unidel Robert L. Pigford Chair of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware.

He was the first expert on the scene after two farmers found pieces of fallen space machinery.

How do you identify a piece of space debris that’s partially burned up on re-entry before falling down to Earth like a comet? It turns out that, in the case of a piece of SpaceX’s Crew-1 capsule that recently came crashing down onto a sheep field in Australia, it wasn’t too hard at all.

Before he saw the piece of fallen space machinery in person, Dr. Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist from the Australian National University, was pretty sure it was going to be a piece of Crew-1, he tells IE in an interview.

Continue reading “Australian astrophysicist says ‘we are lucky’ SpaceX’s Crew-1 debris landed in a rural area” »

“Some people are still pretty uptight about these things,” he added.

Musk didn’t comment on how often he smokes weed, but said he’s not very skilled at it.

“I don’t even know how to smoke a joint, obviously. I mean, look at me, I have no joint-smoking skills,” he said.

No person or animal was injured by the falling objects, but it’s scary to think about how these pieces could have fallen in more populated areas. Yet, astrophysicist Dr. Brad Tucker says incidents…

Imagine driving home after a long day at work. Suddenly, a car careens out of an obscured side street and turns right in front of you. Luckily, your autonomous car saw this vehicle long before it came within your line of sight and slowed to avoid a crash. This might seem like magic, but a novel technique developed at Caltech could bring it closer to a reality.

With the advent of autonomous vehicles, advanced spacecraft, and other technologies that rely on sensors for navigation, there is an ever-increasing need for advanced technologies that can scan for obstacles, pedestrians, or other objects. But what if something is hidden behind another object?

In a paper recently published in the journal Nature Photonics, Caltech researchers and their colleagues describe a new method that essentially transforms nearby surfaces into lenses that can be used to indirectly image previously obscured objects.

Worry not though, as the Mars-bound spacecraft could finally make its orbital test flight on September 1. That’s because SpaceX set out a six-month window that opens on the first day of September. The license was granted by the FCC on Wednesday, August 10, according to Space.com.

The space between the planets in our solar system is filled with a wispy sea of charged particles that flow out from the Sun’s atmosphere. This particle population is augmented by cosmic rays — speedy protons and atomic nuclei accelerated in extreme environments across the universe — which ebb and flow against the 11-year solar activity cycle. This undulating particle background is punctuated by bursts of high-energy particles from the Sun, which can be unleashed suddenly in violent solar storms.

Spacecraft that venture out from the protection of Earth’s magnetic field must navigate this ocean of particles and weather solar storms. And if we someday wish to send astronauts to other planets, we’ll need to know how high-energy solar particles, which pose a risk to the health of astronauts and electronic systems alike, travel through the solar system.

In a new publication, a team led by Shuai Fu (Macau University of Science and Technology), Zheyi Ding (China University of Geosciences), and Yongjie Zhang (Chinese Academy of Sciences) studied the high-energy solar particles produced in an event in November 2020, when the Sun emitted a solar flare and a massive explosion of solar plasma called a coronal mass ejection.

Booster 7 and Ship 24 both conducted two spin prime tests, Ship 25 was welded in the High Bay, and the Chopsticks were raised.

Video and Pictures from Mary (@BocaChicaGal), Nic (@NicAnsuini), and the NSF Robots.
Edited by Patrick Colquhoun(@Patrick_Colqu).

Continue reading “Starship and Booster Engine Testing Double Header | SpaceX Boca Chica” »