Lifeboat Foundation

The greatest space program spinoff? Human collaboration.

NASA didn’t set out to confirm the feasibility of a seemingly impossible fuel-less thruster design, but it seems they did exactly that.

An Egyptain teenager has patented a next-generation propulsion system that could send spacecraft to other solar systems—without using a single drop of fuel. While it is not quite warp-drive technology, young physicist Aisha Mustafa’s system is based on quantum physics and could see mankind boldly go where no man has gone before.

A team of scientists has discovered a new possible pathway toward forming carbon structures in space using a specialized chemical exploration technique at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

The team’s research has now identified several avenues by which ringed molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, can form in space. The latest study is a part of an ongoing effort to retrace the chemical steps leading to the formation of complex carbon-containing molecules in deep space.

PAHs—which also occur on Earth in emissions and soot from the combustion of fossil fuels—could provide clues to the formation of life’s chemistry in space as precursors to interstellar nanoparticles. They are estimated to account for about 20 percent of all carbon in our galaxy, and they have the chemical building blocks needed to form 2-D and 3D carbon structures.

X conducted a static-fire test Thursday (Aug. 29) of the Falcon 9 rocket that will send two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station in the near future.

“Over decades, both military and space programs all around the world have known the negative impact of radiation on semiconductor-based electronics,” says Meyya Meyyappan, Chief Scientist for Exploration Technology at the Center for Nanotechnology, at NASA’s Ames Research Center. What has changed with the push towards nanoscale feature sizes is that terrestrial levels of radiation can now also cause problems that had previously primarily concerned applications in space and defence. Packaging contaminants can cause alpha radiation that create rogue electron-hole pairs, and even the ambient terrestrial neutron flux at sea level – around 20 cm⁻² h⁻¹ – can have adverse implications for nanoscale devices.

Fortunately work to produce radiation-hardy electronics has been underway for some time at NASA, where space mission electronics are particularly prone to radiation exposure and cumbersome radiation shielding comes with a particularly costly load penalty. Vacuum electronics systems, the precursors to today’s silicon world, are actually immune to radiation damage. Alongside Jin-Woo Han and colleagues Myeong-Lok Seol, Dong-Il Moon and Gary Hunter at Ames and NASA’s Glenn Research Centre, Meyyappan has been working towards a renaissance of the old technology with a nano makeover.

In a recent Nature Electronics article, they report how with device structure innovations and a new material platform they can demonstrate nanoscale vacuum channel transistors that compete with solid-state system responses while proving impervious to radiation exposure.

What happens when you combine a Tesla pickup truck with a bit of off-road SpaceX flair? The answer is in this Tesla truck render.

If the render looks familiar it’s because we’ve seen a similar Tesla truck render from the same render artist before. However, this SpaceX off-road version didn’t register on our radar the first time around.

Falcon 9 uses blasts of pressurized Nitrogen to orientate, guide and correct itself during the descent and reentry phase of the first stage.

Several images labelled as “Candidate Landing Site for SpaceX Starship in Arcadia Region” were found in the latest data release from University of Arizona.