Lifeboat Foundation

The space station has been showing its age, with new damage and other signs of wear being found in various modules. Most recently, Russian cosmonauts spotted about half a dozen new cracks in their Zarya module. And while both NASA and Roscosmos say the cracks don’t pose a threat to crewmembers, Insider reports that Shepherd spoke to a House of Representatives committee on Tuesday, telling the lawmakers that they need to pay attention to the possible hazard, which he called a “serious problem.”

NASA is currently trying to secure another four years’ worth of funding for the ISS, which would allow it to keep the orbital outpost running until 2,028 according to Insider. But Shepherd says NASA would be unwise to do so before actually investigating these cracks to determine not only how bad they are today but whether they’ll continue to get worse, as Russian officials have warned they might.

“Getting to the bottom of this is a fairly serious issue,” Shepherd told Congress. “I don’t think the station’s in any immediate danger. But before we clear the station for another so many years of operational use, we should better understand this.”

WASHINGTON — Northrop Grumman today has two Mission Extension Vehicles in orbit providing station-keeping services for two Intelsat geostationary satellites that were running low on fuel.

The company meanwhile is preparing to launch a new servicing vehicle equipped with a robotic arm that will install propulsion jet packs on dying satellites.

Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory turned light into electrons, validating a theory that dates back nearly a century.

WASHINGTON — The ground stations and tracking antennas the U.S. military relies on to communicate with its satellites — known as the Satellite Control Network, or SCN — are decades old and short of the capacity needed to keep up with the projected growth in space activities.

There are seven SCN sites located in the United States and around the world. About 15 large dish antennas at these sites command more than 190 military and government satellites in multiple orbits.

“Certainly the Satellite Control Network is a venerable system that’s been around for a long time. So we have multiple efforts ongoing to ensure that it’s ready for the future that we now find ourselves in,” Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of the U.S. Space Operations Command, said last month at the 36th Space Symposium.

The U.N. human rights chief is calling for a moratorium on the use of artificial intelligence technology that poses a serious risk to human rights, including face-scanning systems that track people in public spaces.

Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, also said Wednesday that countries should expressly ban AI applications which don’t comply with international human rights law.

Applications that should be prohibited include government “social scoring” systems that judge people based on their behavior and certain AI-based tools that categorize people into clusters such as by ethnicity or gender.

A dress worn this week by Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), which bore the message “tax the rich,” set off a wave of debate over how best to address wealth inequality, as Congress weighs a $3.5 trillion spending bill that includes tax hikes on corporations and high-earning individuals.

The debate coincides with the ongoing pandemic in which billionaires, many of whom are tech company founders, have added $1.8 trillion in wealth while consumers have come to depend increasingly on services like e-commerce and teleconference, according to a report released last month by the Institute for Policy Studies.

In a new interview, artificial intelligence expert Kai Fu-Lee — who worked as an executive at Google (GOOG, GOOGL), Apple (AAPL), and Microsoft (MSFT) — attributed the rise of wealth inequality in part to the tech boom in recent decades, predicting that the trend will worsen in coming years with the continued emergence of AI.

Civilian Space Development has kicked-off: the work begins now!

Newsletter 17.09.2021 by Bernard Foing & Adriano V. Autino

During the last months we have seen the first civilian passengers fly to space, onboard Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic vehicles. September 15th, four civilian astronauts, onboard a Space X Dragon capsule, passed the 500 km orbit, more than 100 km higher than the ISS.In 2016 we started to publicly talk about and promote Civilian Space Development, while the whole space community kept on talking only about space exploration. Earlier, in 2,008 we founded the Space Renaissance movement, and a couple of years later the Space Renaissance International, as a philosophical association targeted to complete the Kopernican Revolution, supporting the Civilization expansion into space. Nowadays the concept of civilian space flight is everywhere on the media, and many people in the space community talk about a space renaissance. Of course the Coronavirus pandemics accelerated the awareness of the urgency to expand humanity into outer space. And space tourism — the first stage of civilian space settlement — is now a reality, in its first steps.

Of course nobody could be more happy than ourselves, for the above development, and of course**2 we want to congratulate with Elon, Richard and Jeff, for such a great achievement!

Continue reading “Civilian Space Development has kicked-off: the work starts now!” »

GM Defense, a subsidiary of General Motors, was recently awarded a contract to develop next-generation SUVs for the government’s fleet.

This specific contract was awarded by the US Department of State, and the vehicles will be built to support the Diplomatic Security Service. Diplomatic Security is a federal law enforcement agency charged with securing diplomatic assets and personnel. In 2,020 GM Defense also got the contract to build the army’s new infantry squad vehicle based on the Chevrolet Colorado ZR2. That particular contract was more extensive and, at the time of writing, valued at $213.4 million. The eventual goal was 2,065 vehicles.

The UK government has approved Europe’s first field trials of Crispr-edited wheat. The experiments will be conducted in Hertfordshire by the agricultural science institute Rothamsted Research.

The Rothamsted project is aiming to produce wheat with lower levels of the amino acid asparagine. When bread is baked or toasted, asparagine is converted into acrylamide – a carcinogenic contaminant that requires close monitoring under EU law.

Laboratory and greenhouse studies have already shown Crispr can be used to create wheat plants that produce much lower levels of asparagine. Rothamsted Research says that the new five-year project will examine ‘how the plants fare in the field and whether asparagine concentrations continue to be low in grain produced under field conditions’.