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Category: space

This is the best news you will read all day: Star Trek is coming back. The franchise will get a brand new series in January 2017, one year after it turns 50.

CBS made an announcement today, stating that Alex Kurtzman, who co-wrote the two latest Star Trek films will be the executive producer for the new series, which will be streamed over CBS’ on-demand online service, CBS All Access. You can watch the premiere on TV, but after that you’ll have to subscribe to the $5.99/month service in order to see more episodes. It’s a clever ploy to bring in subscribers, because, really, who doesn’t want to see the next Star Trek series?

A Star Trek television show hasn’t graced the airwaves since Enterprise ended its four season run in 2005. This news is likely utterly thrilling to fans of the series that have contented themselves with movies and binge-watching episodes from the original Star Trek series, The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, and Voyager.

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The U.S. government is getting more serious about dealing with the dangers posed by powerful sun storms.

On Thursday (Oct. 29), the White House released two documents that together lay out the nation’s official plan for mitigating the negative impacts of solar flares and other types of “space weather,” which have the potential to wreak havoc on power grids and other key infrastructure here on Earth.

The new “National Space Weather Strategy” outlines the basic framework the federal government will pursue to better understand, predict and recover from space-weather events, while the “National Space Weather Action Plan” details specific activities intended to help achieve this broad goal. [The Sun’s Wrath: Worst Solar Storms in History].

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There are some very inexpensive ways of testing human effects of spinning motions and artificial gravity in space. We could probably do our first tethre based experiments, and our first short arm centrifuge experiments in space as well, within a year or two of deciding that this is a priority project.

But as for building such a module — it would be expensive to do the module — depending how it works. But not impossibly so. They actually had an idea to do this, the Nautilus X ISS demo, costed as between $83 million and $143 million at the time (2011) and requiring three years to develop, so if they had started then, it would be in space by now:

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To critics, it’s flat-out junk science, not even worth thinking about. But its inventor, Roger Shawyer, has doggedly continued his work. As Danger Room reported last year, Chinese scientists claimed to validate his math and were building their own version.

Shawyer gave a presentation earlier this week on the Emdrive’s progress at the CEAS 2009 European Air & Space Conference. It answered few questions, but hinted at how the Emdrive might transform spaceflight — and warfare. If the technology works, that is.

The heart of the Emdrive is a resonant, tapered cavity filled with microwaves. According to Shawyer, a relativistic effect generates a net thrust, an effect confirmed by various Emdrives he has built as demonstrations. Critics say that any thrust from the drive must come from another source. Shawyer is adamant that the measured thrust is not caused by other factors.

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Cosmic inflation is a theory that was proposed in the 1980s by cosmologist Alan Guth to answer some of the most fundamental questions of the origins of our universe. It also solved the Horizon Problem and the Flatness Problem.

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The air around the comet that Rosetta landed on has plenty of oxygen, scientists say, potentially changing our understanding of the beginnings of the solar system.

In current theories, oxygen shouldn’t be able to exist in high quantities, and should instead have combined with hydrogen and formed water. But oxygen is the fourth most common gas around the comet.

Professor Kathrin Altwegg, project leader for Rosetta’s Rosina mass spectrometer instrument, said: “We had never thought that oxygen could ‘survive’ for billions of years without combining with other substances.”

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