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Category: space travel – Page 465

Japan’s private sector sets its sights on the moon

TOKYO There is a new race to the moon, and it is the private sector — not governments — that is providing the runners. And unlike last time, Japan is in the thick of the action. If all goes as planned, a Japanese rover will soon be cruising across the lunar landscape for the first time ever.

The race is sponsored by the Google Lunar XPRIZE, a contest for privately funded teams to be the first to land a rover on the surface of the moon, have it travel 500 meters, and transmit high-definition video and images back to Earth. The winner receives $20 million — plus bragging rights. The contest aims to encourage the continuous exploration of the moon through privately led technologies and businesses.

Team Hakuto, as the Japanese effort is called, is a collaborative effort among more than 30 companies, including many startups as well as several established players. The team’s rover, dubbed the Sorato, represents a distillation of Japanese knowledge, with materials, technologies and know-how contributed by a diverse lineup of companies.

Will SpaceX become the world’s biggest telecoms provider? Probably

(This is a followup post to three earlier posts on forecasting. The first in May 2015 forecast both blimp-based and dedicated building-based drone deployments (later patented by Amazon); The second in October 2015 largely predicted Elon Musk’s Tesla Masterplan Part Deux by 9 months, the third in July 2016 among other things correctly hypothesised the use of Model X falcon wings for future possible Tesla bus designs. I try to get it right but I mainly enjoy the idle speculation).

I was recently in San Francisco and had a very random number of drinks with two very friendly employees of US telco AT&T. As is often the case I turned the conversation towards autonomous vehicles, and more specifically two of Elon Musk’s companies, Tesla and SpaceX.

I was curious about how cars, such as a Model S, have much greater data connectivity needs than ever before. Right now, Teslas connect to AT&T’s network and it seems clear that data needs will only increase for data hungry vehicles that drive themselves. Already Tesla cars consume quite a few gigabytes of data per month.

NGA 2017 SUMMER MEETING — Introducing the New Chair’s Initiative “Ahead of the Curve”

Breaking : Elon Musk’s ideas on SpaceX DeepMind Tesla and The Dangers of #AI #Robots #Armageddon caused by AI & ideas for NASA — National Aeronautics and Space Administration (starts at 42mins in video).

Closing Plenary Introducing the New Chair’s Initiative “Ahead of the Curve”

Speaker: Elon Musk
Governor Terry McAuliffe, Virginia, Chair.
Governor Brian Sandoval, Nevada, Vice Chair.

Keynote speaker: • elon musk, CEO of tesla and spacex

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RCA graduate proposal would see ordinary people driving NASA’s space exploration rovers

Royal College of Art graduate Brian Black has designed a concept rover and virtual-reality interface that would allow anyone on earth to contribute to space exploration missions.

Black’s vision would see participants driving the rovers over real planets and moons, and collecting samples for analysis, all via a virtual-reality (VR) headset.

Installed in galleries, universities or other public places, the VR experience would function as an engagement mechanism during future interplanetary missions by NASA and other space agencies.

Air Enhanced Nuclear Thermal Rocket

John Bucknell was Senior Propulsion Engineer for the Raptor full-flow staged combustion methalox rocket at SpaceX and is currently the Senior Propulsion Scientist for Divergent3D in Torrance, CA developing additively manufactured vehicle technologies.

In 2015, Bucknell presented the Nuclear Thermal Turbo rocket which added air-breathing to a nuclear thermal rocket.

Specific impulse (usually abbreviated Isp) is a measure of the efficiency of rocket and jet engines. By definition, it is the total impulse (or change in momentum) delivered per unit of propellant consumed and is dimensionally equivalent to the generated thrust divided by the propellant mass or weight flow rate. You can think of it like miles per gallon for cars. Higher ISP is better.