Lifeboat Foundation

To learn more about Breakthrough Starshot, visit http://breakthroughinitiatives.org.

On the fifty-fifth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s great leap into space, April 12, 2016, Yuri Milner was joined by Stephen Hawking at New York’s One World Observatory to announce Breakthrough Starshot, which will lay the foundations for humanity’s next great leap: to the stars. It was also announced that Mark Zuckerberg joined the board of the initiative.

Continue reading “Stephen Hawking Discusses Breakthrough Starshot” »

A blueprint for QC larger servers mass production. The question is; is it the right blueprint for everyone? Not sure.

An international team, led by a scientist from the University of Sussex, have today unveiled the first practical blueprint for how to build a quantum computer, the most powerful computer on Earth.

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New research details how to use the radiation and gravity of the stars to decelerate a high-velocity interstellar projectile.

In April last year, billionaire Yuri Milner announced the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative. He plans to invest 100 million US dollars in the development of an ultra-light light sail that can be accelerated to 20 percent of the speed of light to reach the Alpha Centauri star system within 20 years. The problem of how to slow down this projectile once it reaches its target remains a challenge. René Heller of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen and his colleague Michael Hippke propose to use the radiation and gravity of the Alpha Centauri stars to decelerate the craft. It could then even be rerouted to the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri and its Earth-like planet Proxima b.

Continue reading “Space Travel Visionaries Solve the Problem of Interstellar Slowdown” »

Nothing to fret about, but it is interesting that our Earth and Moon may end up colliding in the end. That’s long after our Sun has expanded as a Red Giant, but the implications for other earth-moon type systems are interesting.

For now, our anomalously large Moon is spinning away from us at a variable rate of 3.8 centimeters per year. But, in fact, the Earth and Moon may be on a very long-term collision course — one that incredibly some 65 billion years from now, could result in a catastrophic lunar inspiral.

“The final end-state of tidal evolution in the Earth-Moon system will indeed be the inspiral of the Moon and its subsequent collision and accretion onto Earth,” Jason Barnes, a planetary scientist at the University of Idaho, told me.

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Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is being pushed across the universe by a large unseen force, according to new research. Although it may not seem like a friendly gesture, the newly discovered Dipole Repeller is actually helping our galaxy on its journey across the expanding universe.

Researchers have known that the galaxy was moving at a relative speed for the past 30 years, but they didn’t know why.

“Now we find an emptiness in exactly the opposite direction, which provides a ‘push’ in the sense of a lack of pull,” said Brent Tully, one of the study authors and an astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy in Honolulu. “In a tug-of-war, if there are more people at one end, then the flow will be toward them and away from the weaker side.”

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Arizona State University (ASU) is developing a small satellite that will search hydrogen in lunar craters with the ultimate goal of creating the most detailed map of the moon’s water deposits. The spacecraft, named Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper (LunaH-Map), is expected to shed new light on the depth and distribution of water-ice on the moon.

Last year, a Made In Space-led team achieved something that had never been accomplished. For the first time in history, a commercial in-space manufacturing facility began operation aboard the International Space Station (ISS). While private parties are able to commission objects to be built by Made In Space’s Additive Manufacturing Facility (AMF) on orbit, the hardy device also supports astronauts by manufacturing parts, tools, and supplies that can be used on the ISS.

Made In Space has continued its mission to enable humans to live and work in space by demonstrating several new technologies in microgravity. Testing machines on Earth that are optimized to work in environments which have little or no gravity can be difficult at the bottom of Earth’s gravity well. The Flight Opportunities Program (FOP) at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas utilizes high-tech aircraft to fly in aggressive parabolic arcsa nose dive followed by a sharp ascent. This maneuver creates a gravity-free environment within the plane’s cabin for less than a minute before having to pull up and repeat. After partaking in over 200 of these parabolic flights, MIS has demonstrated several manufacturing techniques in microgravity that will be critical to the success of our journeys to other planets.

China’s Chang’e lunar probe dynasty is already having a great year. The Chang’e 3 lunar lander surpassed all expectations last week to emerge from its 14th hibernation while the Chang’e 5-T1 just completed its transfer from the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 2 into a stable orbit around the Moon. Chang’e 3’s main mission was only to take spectrographic and ground penetrating radar measurements, but the Chang’e 5 missions will bring back the first samples containing the actual prize — fusion-ready helium-3.

One of the main reasons helium-3 is sought as a fusion fuel is because there are no neutrons generated as a reaction product. The protons that do get generated have charge, and can therefore be safely contained using electromagnetic fields. Early dreamers imagined that Saturn or Jupiter would be the ideal places to try and get their hands on some helium-3, but it now appears that the Chinese have set their sights on the Moon.

Continue reading “China is going to mine the Moon for helium-3 fusion fuel” »

Republican members of Congress are now ordering DARPA to end their work on Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites. Why are they ordering them to stop? Because, according to National Space Policy guidelines, DARPA might be conducting operations that are potentially discouraging similar research in the private sector. Hmmmm :-(.

Republican congressmen orders DARPA to stop their work for in-space satellite services; DARPA refuses. — B.J. Murphy for Serious Wonder.