Lifeboat Foundation

It’s hard living in a relativistic Universe, where even the nearest stars are so far away and the speed of light is absolute. It is little wonder then why science fiction franchises routinely employ FTL (Faster-than-Light) as a plot device.

Push a button, press a petal, and that fancy drive system – whose workings no one can explain – will send us to another location in space-time.

However, in recent years, the scientific community has become understandably excited and skeptical about claims that a particular concept – the Alcubierre Warp Drive – might actually be feasible.

Tourists could fly from Britain to Australia in just four hours by the 2030s with a new hypersonic engine being developed by UK scientists, the head of the UK Space Agency has said.

Reaction Engines, who are based in Oxfordshire, are in the process of building a hybrid hydrogen air-breathing rocket that will allow a plane to fly at Mach 5.4 — more than twice the speed of Concorde — then speed up to to Mach 25 in space.

Not only would the new ‘Sabre’ engine allow speedier journeys — with a flight between London and New York slashed to just over an hour — but the hydrogen/oxygen engine would be far greener and cheaper than current air travel.

There is never a dull day for participants of the CAVES campaign, ESA’s field training adventure that hones the communication, problem solving and teamwork skills an international crew will need to explore the tough, uncharted terrain of the Moon and Mars.

This week six astronauts turned ‘cavenauts’ from five space agencies headed underground in Slovenia, where they are currently living and working for the week. To keep the element of exploration, astronauts themselves do not know the exact location.

The goal is to run scientific experiments while managing the psychological toll of being in an extreme environment with a multinational crew.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

The entire Apollo 11 mission to the moon took just eight days. If we ever want to build permanent bases on the moon, or perhaps even Mars or beyond, then future astronauts will have to spend many more days, months and maybe even years in space without a constant lifeline to Earth. The question is how would they get hold of everything they needed. Using rockets to send all the equipment and supplies for building and maintaining long-term settlements on the moon would be hugely expensive.

This is where 3D printing could come in, allowing astronauts to construct whatever their lunar colony needed from raw materials. Much of the excitement around 3D printing in space has focused on using it to construct buildings from lunar rock. But my research suggests it may actually be more practical to use this moondust to supply lunar manufacturing labs turning out replacement components for all sorts of equipment.

If you can’t get to Mars, what’s the next best thing? Apparently Iceland. A team of renowned explorers and researchers recently journeyed to Iceland to test a Mars analog suit in a Martian-like environment.

The United sponsored expedition, led by The Explorers Club — an internationally recognized organization that promotes the scientific exploration of land, sea, air and space — and in partnership with Iceland Space Agency, involved the team venturing inside the Grímsvötn volcano and across the Vatnajökull ice cap. The group traveled to the remote location and lived for six days in the Grímsvötn Mountain Huts and endured harsh weather conditions and unstable terrain.

SpaceX’s Starship prototype is coming together: Elon Musk recently teased some photos of the spacecraft and its construction site looks like something straight out of Star Wars.

The spacecraft, which serves as a prototype for SpaceX’s Mars-bound Starship, is currently under development, CNN reported. It follows the Starhopper, SpaceX’s first Starship prototype that aced a major hover test in August. Now, SpaceX is ready to build a prototype that may be able to fly into our planet’s orbit.

Droid Junkyard, Tatooine pic.twitter.com/yACFR9y04P

What might it take to feed a million people on Mars? Lab-grown meat, tunnel-grown crops and cricket farms, a new study finds.

When it comes to plans for crewed missions to Mars, NASA typically assumes round trips with only brief stopovers on the Red Planet. However, commercial space companies have emerged with the goal of colonizing outer space, with SpaceX specifically aiming to develop a civilization on Mars.

Billionaire company founder Elon Musk tweeted a pair of photos this week apparently showing progress on one of the Starship prototypes SpaceX is currently developing.

SpaceX has said it plans to use the rockets to shuttle passengers and cargo across the planet or beyond it.

“Droid Junkyard, Tatooine,” Musk wrote in the first tweet, making a joking “Star Wars” reference.

NASA is on a mission to go back to the moon by 2024 and use it as a “backyard” of experimentation, according to Lucien Junkin, chief engineer of the space exploration vehicle at NASA.

ABC toured NASA’s Johnson Space Center’s robotics design area: https://abcn.ws/2AleGSQ