Space  

YouTuber ColdfusTion, looks at how certain billionaires' efforts to continue development of the space industry in a new video.  The piece examines Eric Anderson, Denis Tito,  Richard Branson and Elon Musk.

It is easy to be jealous of the world's billionaires, with their extravagant, luxury-filled lifestyles free of want and worry, but this image does not reflect the drive behind many of them, and their continued effort to push humanity forward.

The United States. hasn’t had manned spaceflight capability since it ended the Space Shuttle program in 2011.

In a new video from YouTuber ColdfusTion, the work of four billionaires continuing the race into space is examined.  The piece looks at Eric Anderson and Denis Tito, but presents more information on Richard Branson and Elon Musk.

Anderson serves as Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of Planetary Resources, a company that plans to revolutionize current space exploration and help ensure humanity's prosperity for generations to come.

Planetary Resources' first experimental satellite is presumed destroyed in the explosion of the Orbital Sciences Antares rocket earlier this week, says its long-term development schedule won’t be thwarted by the incident.

Branson's Virgin Galactic has moved back the estimated launch dates for suborbital space flights from New Mexico so many times that company executives hesitate to offer new timelines, however Branson’s latest speculation is early 2015.

The company envisions a fleet of five rockets and two motherships, although the number depends on flight demand. To date, Virgin has taken deposits from more than 700 people to reserve seats, which cost $200,000 each.

SpaceX founder, Musk unveiled the commercial space venture’s second-generation space capsule earlier this year. The Dragon V2 space capsule will give NASA the ability to put up to up to seven astronauts into space for roughly $20 million a ride. That’s a fraction of the $71 million charged by Russia to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station.

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Other billionaires involved heavily in space are Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace and Amazon's Jeff Bezos.

Bigelow created Bigelow Aerospace with the express purpose of revolutionizing space commerce via the development of affordable, reliable, and robust expandable space habitats. Bigelow Aerospace's habitat will be flown to the International Space Station on a SpaceX rocket in 2015 for testing.

The more secretive Blue Origin, founded by Bezos, is developing technologies to enable human access to space at dramatically lower cost and increased reliability. "This is a long-term effort, which we’re pursuing incrementally, step by step," states the company. Blue Origin is focused on developing reusable launch vehicles utilizing rocket-powered Vertical Take-off and Vertical Landing (VTVL) technology.

SOURCE  ColdfusTion

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 Space  

NASA physicist Harold White and a team have been working on a theoretical design for a faster-than-light ship for a few years. They have now collaborated with an artist to create an updated, more realistic design of what such a spaceship might actually look like.

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NASA physicist has unveiled a more realistic concept of his warp drive spacecraft, and the not-so-subtle influence of Star Trek is front and center. While it's clearly just a concept at this stage, it's hard not to be inspired.

The space agency's Harold White worked with the artist Mark Rademaker to realize in images his long-standing idea for a ship capable of travelling at virtually unbelievable speeds and distances.

The concept, based on the Alcubierre warp drive would involve a spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it. This ring, potentially made of exotic matter, would cause space-time to warp around the spaceship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind.

White has been working on a functional warp drive concept at NASA's Johnson Space Center since 2010. The idea is to try and warp space time, literally shortening the distance between two points around the ship and allowing it to travel faster than light.

Related articles Is Warp Drive Possible?  To Mars In 30 Days   NASA's NEXT Ion Thruster Will Open Up Exploration of Solar System

The renderings show what a craft fitted with the drive (named the IXS Enterprise) could really look like. Annalee Newitz at iO9 also unearthed the video below, in which White describes his idea at the SpaceVision 2013 conference (skip ahead to about the 42 minute mark).

Check out the full gallery of images on his Flickr. Rademaker said the images took more than 1,600 hours to make.




SOURCE  iO9

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 Mars One  

The first round of the Mars One Astronaut Selection Program has now closed for applications. In the five month application period, Mars One received interest from 202,586 people from around the world, wanting to be one of the first human settlers on Mars.

The first round of the Mars One Astronaut Selection Program has now closed for applications. In the five month application period, Mars One received interest from 202,586 people from around the world, wanting to be one of the first human settlers on Mars.

The applicants come from over 140 countries; the largest numbers are from the United States (24%), India (10%), China (6%), Brazil (5%), Great Britain (4%), Canada (4%), Russia (4%), Mexico (4%), Philippines (2%), Spain (2%), Colombia (2%), Argentina (2%), Australia (1%), France (1%), Turkey (1%), Chile (1%), Ukraine (1%), Peru (1%), Germany (1%), Italy (1%) and Poland (1%).

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From this applicant pool, the Mars One Selection Committee will select prospective Martian settlers in three additional rounds spread across two years. By 2015, six-ten teams of four individuals will be selected for seven years of full-time training. In 2023, one of these teams will become the first humans ever to land on Mars and live there for the rest of their lives.

The current applicants will be screened by the Mars One Selection Committee. This process is expected to take several months. Candidates selected to pass to the next round will be notified by the end of 2013. The second round of selection will start in 2014, where the candidates will be interviewed in person by a Mars One Selection Committee.

Aspiring martians who have missed Round 1 or could not meet the age restriction can join subsequent Astronaut Selection Programs. Mars One will commence regular recruitment programs as the search for follow-up crews continues.



SOURCE  Mars One

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 Space Exploration  

During a public event at NASA Headquarters, televised on NASA TV, agency officials and crew members aboard the International Space Station celebrated the one year anniversary of The Mars Curiosity Rover's landing on Mars and discussed how its activities and other robotic projects are helping prepare for a human mission to Mars and an asteroid.

During a public event at NASA Headquarters, televised on NASA TV, agency officials and crew members aboard the International Space Station celebrated the one year anniversary of The Mars Curiosity Rover's landing on Mars and discussed how its activities and other robotic projects are helping prepare for a human mission to Mars and an asteroid.

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The discussion focuses on the steps that will be required for NASA to put humans on Mars by the 2030's.  Jim Green, Director of Planetary Science for NASA enthusiastically went over some of the past robotic missions to Mars, like Pathfiinder and Curiosity.

"Our future is really in our hands. Our destiny is to leave low-earth orbit, and trek out into the solar system," Green says.  "The solar system is ours - let's take it."

Curiosity is presently headed to the base of the five kilometer high Mount Sharp to conduct further exploration.  In the future a new rover like Curiosity, with more instruments will be launched. Green says this mission will launch in 2020.

Mars exploration in the future

SOURCE  NASA

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 Return To The Moon

Space blog Parabolic Arc reports that a stealthy enterprise, called the Golden Spike Company, is going to make an announcement about its future plans at a press conference at the National Press Club on December 6. Golden Spike is reported to be the commercial space company that plans to undertake a private expedition to the moon by 2020.

Now that one rumor mill concerning space exploration has been put to rest, the space blog, Parabolic Arc has kicked up another.

The mysterious Golden Spike Company — which is said to be planning a privately-funded landing on the moon by 2020 — will hold a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Dec. 6 at 2 p.m. EST.

They have a Facebook page and a Twitter account, but other than that, the company has been operating in stealth mode, but tidbits are trickling out.

The Golden Spike Facebook profile reads, "Established 2010, became public 2012, aiming for bigger things in the future. Oh yeah, we're over the Moon about space exploration!"

NASASpaceflight.com, which first broke the news, reports that “the effort is led by a group of high profile individuals from the aerospace industry and backed by some big money and foreign investors.”

A Tumblr account run by an anonymous writer is providing additional details apparently swiped from NASASpaceflight.com’s subscription-only L-2 website. According to the information, Warren Buffet, Richard Branson and Guy Laliberte are reported to be among the investors.  Branson has since been dropped from this list of investors.

Also from the site, it is reported that the company has signed a $120 million deal for a Falcon Heavy rocket with expeditions to be moon will cost about $2 billion apiece.
NASA chief science officer, S. Alan Stern, who now works for the Southwest Research Institute, is the registered agent for the company, which is located in Colorado and incorporated in Delaware.

NASASpaceflight.com has also reported that:

The company intends to use “existing or soon to be existing launch vehicles, spacecraft, upper stages, and technologies” to start their commercial manned lunar campaign. 

The details point to the specific use of US vehicles, with a basic architecture to utilize multiple launches to assemble spacecraft in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The details make direct reference to the potential use of propellant depots and fuel transfer technology. 

Additional notes include a plan to park elements in lunar orbit, staging a small lunar lander that would transport two commercial astronauts to the surface for short stays. 

The architecture would then grow into the company’s long-term ambitions to establish a man-tended outpost using inflatable modules. It is also understood that the company has already begun the design process for the Lunar Lander.

The plan apparently has been circulating for some time among advocates of private exploration and commercial exploitation of the moon. A brief mention of the plan was included in a description of a conference held in Hawaii in May titled, “Independent Human Moon Mission: Prospects Emerging From Rising Tide of 21st Century Exploration.”

A privately circulated proposal, known as “Golden Spike” and backed by respected scientific and astronautical entities, envisions the development of a reliable “Cislunar Superhighway”.

Hisorically, the Golden Spike was a ceremonial final spike driven by Leland Stanford to join the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads on May 10, 1869 at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory. This act completed America’s first transcontinental railroad, uniting the nation from coast to coast.

SOURCE  Parabolic Arc

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 Space

Dutch-based Mars One hopes to establish the first human settlement on Mars in 2023. It has created a technical plan for this ambitious mission that is “as simple as possible” and says it has identified potential suppliers, such as SpaceX, for every component of the mission.

The successful completion of the SpaceX mission to the International Space Station, as well as the ongoing developments at other private space companies have apparently set off a trend.

With the enormous difficulty and expense related to space travel, a Dutch group has announced plans to set up a small living station on Mars by 2023. The group effort, dubbed Mars One, is led by Bas Lansdorp, a researcher from the Netherlands with a Masters in Science from Delft University of Technology. The plan is to send a communications satellite to the planet by 2016 and after several stages finally land humans on Mars for permanent settlement in 2023.

Claiming to have international letters of interest from suppliers who would potentially supply services to the effort, the group has produced a video presentation (below) outlining the mission that, at first glance, looks a bit low-budget and strains the credibility of the entire effort. But then Gerard 't Hooft, a Dutch theoretical physicist and winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics, appears on the video, lending his support to the project.

According to the Mars One website:

Mars One will establish the first human settlement on Mars in 2023. A habitable settlement will be waiting for the settlers when they land. The settlement will support them while they live and work on Mars the rest of their lives. Every two years after 2023 an additional crew will arrive, such that there is a real living, growing community on Mars. Mars One has created a technical plan for this mission that is as simple as possible. For every component of the mission we have identified at least one potential supplier.

Although Lansdorp's credentials might be questioned by those unfamiliar with his work, upon closer inspection it appears that Lansdorp is quite serious in his Mars aspirations. In an effort to learn more about this ambitious new would-be player in the commercial space race, we reached out to Dr. Richard Ruiterkamp, who co-founded Ampyx Power with Lansdorp back in 2008.

According to Ruiterkamp, the energy company, which is headquartered in The Hague, was Lansdorp's primary focus up until February 2011, when he left to pursue his new space venture. When asked about Lansdorp's background in space research, Ruiterkamp confirmed that Lansdorp has maintained a deep focus on the area for years, dedicating a good deal of his doctoral research with help from the team that launched the Young Engineers' Satellite 2 (YES2) project in 2007, and as a member of the Dutch branch of the Mars Society.

You can see Lansdorp's ambition and futuristic vision on full display in a 2010 TED talk in Amsterdam on the topic of energy production. Although Hooft's support, a graphic video presentation, and letters of intent from suppliers are hardly proof that the Mars colony project will become a reality, they all point to a very real trend of excitement around the commercialization of space.

Putting a colony on Mars is likely much farther away than 2023, but ambitious proposals like Mars One will serve to encourage others hoping to follow in the footsteps of Elon Musk's SpaceX and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. In Aug. 2011, Musk discussed his own aspirations for Mars colonization, arguing that a trip to Mars will be as commonplace as a trip to Europe in just several decades.

In April, NASA's Mars Program Planning Group (MPPG) called on researchers and engineers in planetary science to submit their ideas for how best to explore the Red Planet. The space agency's Curiosity Rover, meanwhile, is expected to arrive on Mars by Aug. 6. If you're in Manhattan, the American Museum of Natural History is currently running an exhibit that touches on Mars colonization. "Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration" will be open until Aug. 12.




SOURCE  PC Magazine

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Update - Watch Dragon Splash Down Live


 Space

SpaceX's Dragon module has been released from the international space station, and is on its way toward the Pacific Ocean loaded with 1,455 pounds of return cargo.

After making the historic journey as the first commercial spacecraft to visit the International Space Station, SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft will return to Earth today.

The return is by no means an easy operation. In fact, today, Dragon is the only spacecraft capable of returning a significant amount of cargo from the space station. The other cargo vehicles serving the space station - from Russia, Japan and the European Space Agency - can carry cargo up but all are destroyed after leaving the station.

While Dragon was attached to the space station, astronauts unloaded 1,146 pounds of cargo including food, other crew provisions and student experiments. They then packed the spacecraft with 1,455 pounds of cargo that will be returned to NASA on Earth including hardware used for experiments, spacewalks and station systems.

Astronauts have closed the hatch on the vehicle, and the module has been released from the station.

Dragon is targeted to land in the Pacific Ocean, a few hundred miles west of Southern California, at approximately 8:44 AM Pacific/11:44 AM Eastern on Thursday, May 31st. The spacecraft returns to Earth like a burning comet, protected from extreme reentry temperatures by its powerful PICA-X heat shield. The landing location is controlled by firing the Draco thrusters during reentry.

In a carefully timed sequence of events, dual drogue parachutes deploy at 45,000 feet to stabilize and slow the spacecraft. Full deployment of the drogues triggers the release of the main parachutes, each 116 feet in diameter, at about 10,000 feet, with the drogues detaching from the spacecraft. Main parachutes further slow the spacecraft's descent to approximately 16 to 18 feet per second.




SOURCE  SpaceX

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