October 2nd, 2019
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HUNTSVILLE, Alabama – The 100 Year Starship (100YSS) project is building a global community to spotlight the capabilities for human interstellar travel beyond our solar system within the next ten decades. An independent, non-governmental, long-term initiative, 100YSS was started in 2012 with seed-funding through a competitive grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) […]
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The Space Studies Institute (SSI) has posted videos of presentations given at SSI 50: The Space Settlement Enterprise. Held September 9-10, 2019 at the Museum of Flight In Seattle, the two focused days with ten sessions ran the gamut from habitat design to economics and construction techniques. SSI has begun the release of the […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has just initiated Sol 2543 duties. Reports Roger Wiens, Geochemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico: “Curiosity has been at this same location for all of August and September, which included a number of days of waiting for Mars to pass behind the Sun (‘conjunction’), drilling two holes, and […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover is now conducting Sol 2542 duties. “Go, SAM, go!” Those are the words from Susanne Schwenzer, a planetary geologist at The Open University in the UK. The Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) Instrument Suite “is healthy and Curiosity will be spending most of her time of the coming three sols on […]
That troubled heat probe on NASA’s InSight Mars lander continues to be a worrisome dilemma. The instruments locomotion system, a self impelling nail nicknamed “the mole” was designed to hammer itself down into the surface of Mars. Labeled the Heat and Physical Properties Package (HP3), the German-provided mole hasn’t been able to dig […]
Elon Musk’s/SpaceX’s Starship and Super Heavy launch vehicle is a fully, rapidly reusable transportation system designed to carry both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, and anywhere else in the solar system. On Saturday, September 28 at the firm’s launch facility in Cameron County, Texas, SpaceX Chief Engineer and […]
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has just begun performing Sol 2540 science duties. Reports Kristen Bennett, Planetary Geologist at USGS Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Arizona, recently planned use of the rover’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) Instrument Suite did not fully complete. “There was an issue in the set of planned SAM activities that […]
The lander, Vikram, was scheduled to touch down on Sept. 6 at 4:24 pm Eastern Daylight Time. This event was India’s first attempt at a soft landing on the Moon. The site was located about 600 kilometers (370 miles) from the south pole in a relatively ancient terrain (70.8°S latitude, 23.5°E longitude). Vikram had a […]
Near our home planet Earth we should be on the lookout for “Lurkers” – possible sites for extraterrestrial probes that may be quite ancient. Scientist James Benford of Microwave Sciences in Lafayette, California is promulgating the view that an attractive location for extraterrestrial intelligence may well be anchoring a probe to observe Earth throughout our […]
David Criswell, 1941–2019 I lost a great friend and true space visionary. David Criswell passed away on September 10. He was 78 years old. Over the decades of my journalistic career, I discussed with Criswell an incredible sweep of his creative thoughts regarding the utilization of space – in particular use of extraterrestrial materials for […]
