When I was a little kid long ago, I read a comic book where a man in a spacesuit climbed a ladder all the way to space. It turns out that an elevator to space was first written of in 1895 by the Russian scientist, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. In 1979 two different novels were published by well-known science fiction authors that featured the construction of the first space elevator.
NASA has split a sixty-five million dollars grant among six contractors to build a prototype space habitat by the end of this year. The contractors include Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Space Systems, Orbital ATK, Nanoracks and Bigelow Aerospace.
NASA has split a sixty-five million dollars grant among six contractors to build a prototype space habitat by the end of this year. The contractors include Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Space Systems, Orbital ATK, Nanoracks and Bigelow Aerospace.
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NASA is working on new missions to send astronauts back to the Moon and on to Mars. They have developed a new spacecraft capsule design, a new heavy rocket to carry the capsule into space and the design for a new space station called the Lunar Gateway to orbit the Moon. This station will serve as a way-station for deep space missions.
Solar sails are based on the principle that light exerts a tiny pressure on solid objects. Spacecraft have been launched that deployed reflective metallic “sails” to test the idea of using the pressure of sunlight to provide propulsion for future spacecraft. Now researchers are going beyond the conventional materials used for solar sails.
The Google Lunar XPRIZE was a contest that took place between 2007 and 2018. It was organized by the X Prize Foundation and it was sponsored by Google. The challenge was for a privately funded team to be the first to land a robotic spacecraft on the moon which would travel five hundred meters and send high-resolution video and images back to earth. The prize for the winner would be twenty million dollars.
Blue Origin is the private space company started by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire. During the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace conference in Renton, WA, Blue Origin presented their plan to support the development of permanent settlements on the Moon. Their plans will begin with a mission to land on the Moon in the next five years.
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