Lifeboat Foundation

A NASA material that’s 99% air lets this jacket maintain its temperature, even when it’s blasted with liquid nitrogen! Meet Oros.

Love this.

If it’s a successful kick start campaign, regardless of whether or not it actually gets built, it could go a long way towards showing the powers that be that this is truly mankind’s desire. and it’s ultimate manifest destiny. (I know the problem some people have with using that phrase, “manifest destiny”, but it fits this issue in a way that’s totally unrelated to the horrors we inflicted on native americans during our relentless push westward.)

It’s not a warp drive, but it could get us to the nearest star in two decades. If it works.

Continue reading “An Interstellar Antimatter Engine Is on Kickstarter” »

Not a great time to be living on Mars, me thinks. wink

Space is so metal.

I am not in fact talking about the delightful Deus Ex game, but rather about the actual revolution in society and technology we are witnessing today. Pretty much every day I look at any news source, be it on cable news networks or facebook feeds or whathaveyou, I always see fear mongering. “Implantable chips will let the government track you!” or “Hackers will soon be able to steal your thoughts!” (Seriously, seen both of these and much more and much crazier.) …But I’m here to tell you two things. First, calm the hell down. Nearly every doomsday scenario painted by fear-mongering assholes is either impossible or so utterly unlikely as to be effectively impossible. And second… that you should psych the hell up because its actually extremely exciting and worth getting excited about. But for good reasons, not bad.

“The goal of the yearlong expedition is to better understand how the human body reacts to microgravity for long durations. Researchers say they hope the data acquired in this mission will help them figure out how to send humans on even longer missions, like one to Mars, which would take two-and-a-half years, roundtrip.”

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The Goodyear Eagle-360 concept tire.

Goodyear has taken the wraps off two concept tires designed for the autonomous cars of tomorrow – including a spherical tire that allow cars to drive sideways and one that can sense road conditions and adapt to them.

Spherical tire takes autonomous cars sideways into the future.

http://www.gizmag.com/goodyear-tires-autonomous-cars/42135/

Continue reading “The Goodyear Eagle-360 concept tire” »

Mercedes-Benz has developed a car that would be grown in a lab rather built on a production line.

Within the next year, the U.S. Air Force plans to unveil novel spacecraft concepts that would be powered by a potentially revolutionary reusable engine designed for a private space plane.

Since January 2014, the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has been developing hypersonic vehicle concepts that use the Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE), which was invented by England-based Reaction Engines Ltd. and would propel the company’s Skylon space plane.

In April 2015, Reaction Engines announced that an AFRL study had concluded that SABRE is feasible. And AFRL is bullish on the technology; the lab will reveal two-stage-to-orbit SABRE-based concepts either this September, at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ (AIAA) SPACE 2016 conference in Long Beach, California, or in March 2017, at the 21st AIAA International Space Planes and Hypersonic Systems and Technologies Conference in China, said AFRL Aerospace Systems Directorate Aerospace Engineer Barry Hellman. [The Skylon Space Plane in Pictures].

Continue reading “US Military Set to Unveil Concepts Based on Skylon Space Plane Tech” »