Lifeboat Foundation

Give people a barrier, and at some point they are bound to smash through. Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947. Yuri Gagarin burst into orbit for the first manned spaceflight in 1961. The Human Genome Project finished cracking the genetic code in 2003. And we can add one more barrier to humanity’s trophy case: the exascale barrier.

The exascale barrier represents the challenge of achieving exascale-level computing, which has long been considered the benchmark for high performance. To reach that level, however, a computer needs to perform a quintillion calculations per second. You can think of a quintillion as a million trillion, a billion billion, or a million million millions. Whichever you choose, it’s an incomprehensibly large number of calculations.

Continue reading “Supercomputer uses machine learning to set new speed record” »

JAXA’s SLIM spacecraft, fondly known as the ‘Moon Sniper,’ took off for a precision lunar landing on January 19, 2024.

People believe that exotic new propulsion systems are needed to reduce the one way trip times from Earth to Mars from 180–270 days down to 45 days each way. The slower mission times are for chemical rockets where we barely get out of Earth orbit with a small rocket engine. SpaceX Starship can refuel after reaching orbit to enable faster orbits (straighter and less looping paths) to go to Mars. This makes 90 day times each way easy with chemical Starship and even more wasteful but still chemical rockets to Mars in 45 days each way.

This is calculated by Ozan Bellik.

In 2033 there are opportunities to do a high thrust ~45 day outbound transit with a ~10.5km/s TMI (trans Mars injection). If you refill in an elliptical orbit that’s at LEO+2.5-3km/s then the TMI burn requirement goes down to 7.5-8km/s. A SpaceX Starship with 1,200 tons of fuel should be able to do with roughly 150 tons of burnout mass. This is enough for ship, residuals, and a crew cabin with enough consumables to last a moderately sized crew for the 45 day transit. The trouble is that once you get there, you are approaching Mars at ~15km/s.

The autonomous setup constructs and links hollow lattice blocks, adeptly disassembling and repurposing them as needed for efficient functionality.

The researchers envision their new system as revolutionizing material life cycles, fostering sustainability, and furthering space exploration.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 will launch the four Ax-3 astronauts on Jan. 18 at 4:49 p.m. EST (2111 GMT).

WASHINGTON — The U.S. needs to flex its space muscles in the face of China’s lunar ambitions, argues a new report from the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies released Jan. 17.

More specifically, the U.S. military should step up collaboration with NASA and support the development of infrastructure for scientific and economic activities in cislunar space, “as well as the means to secure those activities from potential threats such as territorial claims and irresponsible or hostile behavior,” writes Charles Galbreath, senior fellow for space studies at the Mitchell Institute.

Cislunar space — the region of space between Earth and the orbit of the moon — is becoming increasingly important strategically and economically due to potential lunar exploration, space mining and other commercial efforts poised to ramp up in the coming years.

Japan’s SLIM moon lander has entered a lower, near-circular lunar orbit ahead of its Jan. 19 landing attempt.

The private Ax-3 mission is scheduled to lift off at 5:11 p.m. ET on Wednesday (Jan. 17).

We can calculate the travel times for the SpaceX Starship to reach Mars. It is relatively easy to get 90 day trips each way with SpaceX Starship. This is faster than the usual 180–270 one-way travel times. This can be faster because we will have a lot more fuel to enable more direct routes to Mars. We could catch up Mars in 1/6th of an orbit instead of half of an orbit around the Sun.

There are ways to use extra expandable Starship tankers that fly with the main Starship and then transfer the extra fuel for deceleration from higher speed.

If there is more things built and working in orbit around the Earth, then this can be used to enable more ways to save fuel for faster or bigger missions. This can be done with reusable tugs to move a fully fueled Mars bound ship to higher orbits or even to escape velocity.