Bigelow Aerospace’s billionaire founder says he’ll be skipping a step in his grand plan to send up an inflatable space habitat capable of hosting humans, due to escalating launch costs. That means Bigelow’s Sundancer module, which will be designed to accommodate three people, could be ready to go even before 2010
(via Hit and Run).
Recently, British astronomers told the government that we might find life in space. It is only a matter of time, this year perhaps, before astronomers detect a planet even more similar in size and mass to our Earth, circling another star. And when we find that planet, we may discover a lot more than new oceans and land masses.
Astronomers have been actively looking for intelligent life in space since 1960, when Frank Drake started Project Ozma, using a radio telescope to listen for signals from two nearby sun-like stars – Drake knew that radio waves travel more easily through the cosmos than light waves. He didn’t hear anything back. Since then, our searches have become more thorough thanks to larger radio telescopes and more sophisticated computers that look for fainter signals. But we still have no signal from ET. Should we want to?
(above from Get Your War On).
Historically, crossing oceans and setting up farmsteads on new lands conveniently stripped of indigenous inhabitants by disease has been a cost-effective proposition. But the scale factor involved in space travel is strongly counter-intuitive.
[…]
We’ve sent space probes to Jupiter; they take two and a half years to get there if we send them on a straight Hohmann transfer orbit, but we can get there a bit faster using some fancy orbital mechanics. Neptune is still a stretch – only one spacecraft, Voyager 2, has made it out there so far. Its journey time was 12 years, and it wasn’t stopping. (It’s now on its way out into interstellar space, having passed the heliopause some years ago.)
[…]
Space elevators, if we build them, will invalidate a lot of what I just said. Some analyses of the energy costs of space elevators suggest that a marginal cost of $350/kilogram to geosynchronous orbit should be achievable without waving any magic wands (other than the enormous practical materials and structural engineering problems of building the thing in the first place). So we probably can look forward to zero-gee vacations in orbit, at a price. And space elevators are attractive because they’re a scalable technology; you can use one to haul into space the material to build more. So, long term, space elevators may give us not-unreasonably priced access to space, including jaunts to the lunar surface for a price equivalent to less than $100,000 in today’s money. At which point, settlement would begin to look economically feasible, except …
We’re human beings.
[…]
Colonize the Gobi desert, colonise the North Atlantic in winter – then get back to me about the rest of the solar system!
Very good article, lots more detail besides what I’ve excerpted here.
The European aerospace giant EADS is going into the space tourism business.
Its Astrium division says it will build a space plane capable of carrying fare-paying passengers on a sub-orbital ride more than 100km above the planet.
[…]
Tickets are expected to cost up to 200,000 euros (?135,000), with flights likely to begin in 2012.
(Thanks Chaoflux).
Taylor and Boan are hardly basement-dwelling paranoids obsessed with tinfoil hats and Area 51. Taylor holds advanced degrees in astronomy and physics, and is an associate at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. He and Boan have done consulting work for the Defence Department and the U.S. space agency
NASA.But their views have won few audiences outside of science fiction conventions, and their book is published by BrownWalker Press, which specialises in fringe topics and books with titles like “The Science and Lore of the Plant Cell Wall” and “ESP and Psychokinesis”.
(Made any more relevant by this news?)
New Mexico hopes to break ground soon on the world’s first commercial spaceport, which state elders envision as a 21st-century departure point for thousands of paying space tourists.
New Mexico’s governor Bill Richardson worked with the southwest desert state’s legislature to secure 33 million dollars for the final design of “Spaceport America,” the worlds first commercial spaceport.
Now the voters in the Dona Ana County municipality where the project is to be located will weigh in, in a referendum scheduled for April 3 on a new sales tax to fund the project.
If Spaceport America meets with voter approval, a maiden space voyage is expected in two to three years. If passed, the new tax would add 25 cents to a 100-dollar purchase, bringing in about 6.5 million dollars per year.
Amazon boss shows off spacecraft:
The billionaire founder of Amazon.com has released the first images of the launch of a private spacecraft that could bring space travel to the masses.
A video of the cone-shaped Goddard vehicle shows it climbing to about 85m (285ft) before returning back to Earth.
The test launch took place in November 2006 in a remote part of Texas, but details have only now been released.
(reminded by Nerdshit).
Stephen Hawking plans to go into space in 2009:
World renowned British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking wants to go to a place he has only theorized about in his long career: space.
“This year I’m planning a zero-gravity flight and to go into space in 2009,” he was quoted as saying in the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
Hawking, 65, has said he hopes to travel on British businessman Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic service, which is scheduled to launch in 2009. The service will charge space tourists about $200,000 US for a two-hour, suborbital trip some 140 kilometres above the Earth.
(via Monkey Filter).
NASA unveiled plans yesterday to set up a small and ultimately self-sustaining settlement of astronauts at the south pole of the moon sometime around 2020 — the first step in an ambitious plan to resume manned exploration of the solar system.
The long-awaited proposal envisions initial stays of a week by four-person crews, followed by gradually longer visits until power and other supplies are in place to make a permanent presence possible by 2024.
EO-1 is a new breed of satellite that can think for itself. “We programmed it to notice things that change (like the plume of a volcano) and take appropriate action,” Chien explains. EO-1 can re-organize its own priorities to study volcanic eruptions, flash-floods, forest fires, disintegrating sea-ice-in short, anything unexpected.
Is this real intelligence? “Absolutely,” he says. EO-1 passes the basic test: “If you put the system in a box and look at it from the outside, without knowing how the decisions are made, would you say the system is intelligent?” Chien thinks so.
(Thanks Daniel).
Yeah, I’m a little late to the punch with this one, but I’ve been busy. Hail Eris!
A distant, icy rock whose discovery shook up the solar system and led to Pluto’s planetary demise has been given a name: Eris.
The christening of Eris, named after the Greek goddess of chaos and strife, was announced by the International Astronomical Union on Wednesday. Weeks earlier, the professional astronomers’ group stripped Pluto of its planethood under new controversial guidelines.
Since its discovery last year, Eris, which had been known as 2003 UB313, ignited a debate about what constitutes a planet.
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