Lifeboat Foundation

by Miriam Kramer — Space.com

Do you want to fly on a suborbital space plane? What about a rocket launch all they way into orbit? A new commercial spaceflight training company wants to help you develop the right stuff for flying to space.
Waypoint 2 Space — a Houston-based company aimed at helping commercial astronauts train for spaceflight — just received Federal Aviation Administration safety approval for their plan to train would-be astronauts. Officials with the company hope to start training commercial spaceflyers for private trips to space in spring of this year. People holding tickets aboard a private spacecraft or space fans interested in learning how to fly to space are eligible to purchase a training package.

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www.FUTURE-OBSERVATORY.blogspot.com JANUARY/30/2014 HEADLINES. By Mr. Andres Agostini

Cancer Researchers Identify New Drug to Inhibit Breast Cancer
http://guardianlv.com/2014/01/cancer-researchers-identify-ne…st-cancer/

Russia, US to join forces against space threats
http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_01_29/Russia-US-to-join-f…eats-1145/

The rise of artificial intelligence
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-ne…317g3.html

Continue reading “Future Observatory” »

We have been using the same propellant system for rockets since the Chinese fire arrows in 1000 A.D. A gas is expanded in a tube to generate force. Enough gas and force and you can break the bonds of the earth.

From gunpowder to liquid propellants to solid rocket boosters, nothing except size and volume has changed.

New proposed systems such as nuclear engines, magnetic rail guns, ion engines are all options that have not been shown to be functional at this point in time.

Our popular fantasy TV and movies all have some unspecified, powerful propulsion system that can easily break our gravity well to send us to outer space.

Continue reading “Hydrogen Space Launch” »

The Future of Spage-Age Management, Today! by Mr. Andres Agostini at http://lnkd.in/d7zExFi

This is an excerpt from the conclusion section o, “…The Future of Spage-Age Management, Today!..,” that discusses some management strategies. To read the entire piece, just click the link at the end of article:

BEGINNING OF EXCERPT.

Mr. David Shaw’s question, “…Andres, from your work on the future which management skills need to be developed? Classically the management role is about planning, organizing, leading and controlling. With the changes coming in the future what’s your view on how this management mix needs to change and adapt?…” This question was posited on an Internet Forum, formulated by Mr. David Shaw (Peterborough, United Kingdom) at http://lnkd.in/ba6xX-K on October 09, 2013.

This P.O.V. addresses practical and structural solutions, not onerous quick fixes. THIS P.O.V. WILL BE COMMUNICATED UNAMBIGUOUSLY AND EMPHATICALLY.

Continue reading “The Future of Spage-Age Management, Today!” »

Written By: Jason Dorrier — Singualrity Hub

First, the private organization announced they would colonize the Red Planet by 2023 and fund the mission, in part, by making a television show about their space adventures. Then they took some 200,000 applications from would-be astronauts (with no required qualifications) for a one-way ticket to Mars.

If you’re disappointed that human beings haven’t flown beyond the Moon—then all this bold Mars talk is inspiring. But talk is cheap. Now, comes the costly part.

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By AOL Real Estate Editors

Thinking about building a home on Mars, but having trouble finding a contractor? That might no longer be such a problem, thanks to a new technology that one day could make it much faster to build one there than it takes us now on Earth. A professor at the University of Southern California has designed an automated 3D printer that, he says, would make it “possible to build an entire home within a day.” “You press a button and it will be built,” says Behrokh Khoshnevis, who teaches industrial and systems engineering at USC.

The process, called “Contour Crafting,” was conceived as a way to quickly construct emergency housing on this planet out of concrete. But NASA sees other applications for Khoshnevis’ homebuilding innovation — for starters, projects such as an airport on the moon. “Behrokh’s work is one of the most creative and far reaching concepts I’ve seen,” said Jason Derleth, the program manager for NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts, in a news release this past summer. “He really has a chance to change the world by robotically printing buildings here, and he may even change the next human world by doing the same on the moon and Mars.”

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By Robert McMillan

One of the top software engineers behind the Bitcoin digital currency wants to launch it into space.

Last month, Jeff Garzik floated the idea of Bitcoin in space on an internet discussion forum, pitching it as a way to always keep the system up and running — even if it’s attacked by malicious hackers.

The plan is to send up a Bitcoin computer on a tiny inexpensive satellite and have this machine communicate with terrestrial Bitcoin computers via radio. Garzik — who works at Bitcoin payment processor Bitpay and helps shape the open source software that drives the digital currency on thousands of machines across the internet — says that the satellite node could help the Bitcoin network fight back something known as a Sibyl attack. This is where malicious computers flood a node on the peer-to-peer network with bad data. It could give criminals a way of spending their bitcoins more than once, and it’s also part of the so-called selfish miner scenario that Cornell University researchers described last month, saying it could bring down the entire system.

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By Sharon Gaudin

Computerworld - China’s lunar probe, and the moon rover it carried, landed successfully Saturday night, marking a major accomplishment for the country’s space efforts.

This is the first time a spacecraft from China has landed on an extraterrestrial body. China becomes the third country, after the United States and Russia, to land a spacecraft on the moon.

China’s Chang’e-3 craft lifted off early on Dec. 2 on top of an enhanced Long March-3B rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China.

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By Andrew Rosenblum

“When space traffic becomes routine, there’s going to be significant conflict between commercial air traffic and space traffic,” says Juan Alonso, a Stanford professor of aeronautics and astronautics.

Right now, orbital launches are infrequent — about 70 per year around the world. So if there is, say, a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch scheduled from Cape Canaveral, the FAA decrees the area to be a “special use airspace” and bars plane traffic from the area for hours to accommodate it.

But Alonso is thinking 5 to 7 years into the future. With space tourism carriers like Virgin Galactic and XCOR planning multiple suborbital flights per day, and orbital flyers like SpaceX, Sierra Nevada, and Bigelow sending people and material into orbit, the skies will be getting crowded. The suborbital “up-and-down” space tourism flights offered by carriers like Virgin Galactic and XCOR may number anywhere from several hundred to multiple thousands a year – from zero today. Airline passengers will be less than thrilled to accept a lengthy delay so a rock star can sing in space or a billionaire can hang out in a “space hotel.” Also, airlines lose money from delays, or from re-routing around special-use airspace, requiring extra fuel burn.

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