Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: space travel – Page 211

The selected companies will develop lander design concepts, evaluating their performance, design, construction standards, mission assurance requirements, interfaces, safety, crew health accommodations, and medical capabilities. The companies will also mitigate lunar lander risks by conducting critical component tests and advancing the maturity of key technologies.

The work from these companies will ultimately help shape the strategy and requirements for a future NASA’s solicitation to provide regular astronaut transportation from lunar orbit to the surface of the Moon.

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Four private astronauts are currently circling the globe in a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, and you can see the capsule from Earth — if you’re in the right place at the right time.

The Crew Dragon launched into space on Wednesday (Sept. 15), carrying the Inspiration4 mission on a three-day orbital trip. It is currently traveling around Earth in a nearly circular orbit up to 367 miles (590 kilometers) above our planet, according to SpaceX, and completes an orbit about every hour and a half.

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The SpaceX capsule is much higher and will spend substantially more time in space than that of its rivals, Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin or Sir Richard Branson-owned Virgin Galactic.

Those two companies have yet to reach orbit and have only launched passengers barely across the official US-recognized border of space.

When Bezos traveled to space on his company’s flight, one of his fellow passengers, 82-year-old Wally Funk, gave a lukewarm review of the trip.

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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!

So, may we consider that our mission has been completed? Let’s see.

Firstly, were those crews composed by regular travelers, like normal air-flight passengers? Not exactly. The Inspiration4 crew members received astronaut training, for many months, including lessons in orbital mechanics, operating in a microgravity, stress testing, emergency preparedness training, and mission simulations. They have studied over 90 different kinds of training guides and manuals and lessons to learn to fly Crew Dragon, and what to do under emergency situations. The legal aspects are not clear: did FAA quickly authorize Space X and Blue Origin to deal commercial space flights? Doubt is more than legitimate, considering the long procedure followed by Virgin Galactic to be authorized to transport paying passengers in space. Likely, these first “civilian” passengers — like the first orbital tourist Dennis Tito did in 2001 — accepted conditions similar to the military astronauts (i.e. zero rights and warrants).

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

“The door is open now. The view is pretty incredible.”

Watch four “amateur astronauts” and a floating stuffed dog go to space.

The four crew members — Shift4 Payments founder Jared Isaacman, scientist Sian Proctor, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital employee Hayley Arceneaux, and aeronautical engineer Chris Sembroski — are the first all-civilian crew to fly aboard a private vehicle to low-Earth orbit.

“The door is open now. The view is pretty incredible,” said Isaacman, a billionaire who founded the retail payment processing company Shift4 Payments in 1999.

Continue reading “Watch: Civilian astronauts depart Earth on Inspiration4 mission” | >

Dubbed Inspiration4, the mission launched Wednesday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida just after 8 p.m.

During their live-streamed ascent, some of the crew gave a “thumbs up” and pumped their fists in the air in celebration of the successful liftoff.

The four private citizens — two men and two women — will spend three days circling the world at an altitude of 335 miles — about 75 miles higher than the International Space Station and on a level with the Hubble Space Telescope.

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Space has seen a number of high-profile, incredibly rich tourists in the past few months. The so-called “billionaire space race” kicked off in July, when Richard Branson rode his Virgin Galactic space plane to the upper layers of Earth’s atmosphere. Shortly after, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos rode his rocket a little further. Whether they made it to “space,” though, has been hotly debated. Most space watchers agree these short suborbital trips aren’t quite the same as getting into low Earth orbit.

There will be no debate about the Inspiration4 mission. This flight takes the crew of four higher than Bezos or Branson and is different from those flights in key ways, even if it was bankrolled by another billionaire in Isaacman.

When SpaceX announced the mission in February, Isaacman bought up the entire flight and donated three of the Crew Dragon seats to “individuals from the general public.” He offered up two seats to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, handpicking Arceneaux, a childhood cancer survivor who now works as a physician’s assistant at the hospital and acts as the medical officer on Inspiration4.

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Theoretical physics video nominated for international award.

A West Vancouver student may have the keys to interstellar travel. He just needs a few votes and a whole lot of mass.

Holden Liu, 16 is a finalist in the Breakthrough Junior Challenge, an international competition that aims to capture difficult scientific concepts or theories and present them in accessible videos.

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