Sinister Security: life on Mars

It's Official: Elon Musk Will Send Humans to Mars in 2024

Read

Image result for SpaceX's Elon Musk updates Mars plans (CNET News )

On the last day of the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia, SpaceXCEO Elon Musk took the stage to talk about his company’s BFR project. Moreover, sharing details on how the technology might be utilized to transform long-distance travel on Earth, Musk also clarified how it could aid our off-world activities.

The basic concept behind the BFR is to make a single booster and ship that could substitute the company’s Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Dragon. This would let SpaceX to pour all the assets at present divided across those three crafts into the one project.

Once finished, the BFR could be utilized to launch satellites and space telescopes or clear space debris. It would also be able to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) for the supply of cargo. Most extraordinarily, however, is the BFR’s potential to assist the establishment of off-world colonies.

Mission to Mars

The present BFR design is big enough to ship up to 100 people and sufficient equipment, which Musk thinks will be instrumental in making a base of operations on the Moon.

“It’s 2017, I mean, we should have a lunar base by now,” he said during his IAC presentation. “What the hell is going on?”

Musk’s ambitions go well beyond the Moon, however. SpaceX’s goal of journey to Mars as soon as they have the resources to do so is well known, and in last night’s presentation, Musk shared images of a fully-fledged Martian city.

Construction on SpaceX’s first ship able to head to Mars is projected to start within the next nine months, and Musk hopes to send a pair of cargo ships to the planet in 2022, however he confessed that this goal is somewhat “aspirational.”

In 2024, SpaceX would send astronauts to the Red Planet on-board two crewed BFRs. These first “settlers” would make a fuel plant that would work as the start of the Martian colony.

After that, the plan is to construct multiple landing pads, then enlarge out into terraforming and the construction of an urban environment.

Musk’s goals are certainly daring. Though, putting humans on Mars will take some big, bold ideas, and his certainly qualify.

Read More Add comment

Sorry, Mars Fans – NASA Can’t Afford the Trip

By 0x000216

Read

0 Comments

NASA’s human spaceflight director dropped a bombshell, saying they can’t afford a crewed mission to Mars. The agency may instead focus on its Moon plans.

If the mission and special occasion hint at a bright future ahead for Mars and space exploration in general, Curiosity won’t be joined by human explorers anytime soon, at least, not from NASA.

Sorry, Can’t Afford the Price tag to Mars!

NASA’s made its inspiring Journey to Mars a priority of its space program and, for years, has been developing the capabilities that enable landing humans on the Red Planet sometime in the 2030s.

NASA has regularly communicated its Mars plans, inspiring many people and raising high hopes. A dream which seemed even more feasible by the recent innovations in space technologies and NASA’s own projects, including the new Orion Spacecraft and the new SLS rocket.

Orion Spacecraft | NASA.gov

However, with budget cuts everywhere except defense spending in the U.S., perhaps we should have seen this coming. NASA blatantly cited budgetary reasons for why the Martian journey will not happen anytime soon.

The news broke last month when, at a propulsion meeting of the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics, William H. Gerstenmaier, the head of NASA’s human spaceflight, said the agency lacked the budget to carry on its Martian journey.

“… through the 2030s, I can’t put a date on humans on Mars,” said Gerstenmaier.

“And the reason really is … at the budget levels we described, this roughly 2 percent increase, we don’t have the surface systems available for Mars.”

The Moon Instead?

Despite our surprise, naysayers had already expressed doubts about the agency’s Martian plan.

In a report entitled, “Pathways to Exploration”, the National Research Council heavily criticized NASA’s strategy for landing crews on Mars, as, at that time, the funds didn’t align with the work needed and the timeframe.

In a direct reaction to NRC’s report, NASA released a statement where it revalidated its plan and reassured it would continue the path goal toward which it had allegedly made significant progress.

It’s only now that NASA has openly admitted it can’t afford building the spacecraft necessary to land on and ascend from Mars because the Space Launch System (SLS rocket) and Orion spacecraft design and testing had already taken up much of the budget.

SLS rocket with Orion Spacecraft | Nasa.gov

The U.S. Congress allocated NASA $19.5 billion USD as a budget for NASA’s 2017 fiscal year, yet the agency hasn’t specified the exact figure it needs to land crews on Mars.

Experts from within NASA have estimated the cost of a crewed mission to Mars to be $100 billion USD over 30 to 40 years, and more recent estimates take that figure up to $1 trillion USD.

Responding to questions, Gerstenmaier said sending a human mission to Mars is still a goal for the agency–it’s just not a priority anymore.

“… we have the ability with Deep Space Gateway to support an extensive Moon surface program,” Gerstenmaier said. “If we want to stay focused more toward Mars we can keep that.”

The Trump administration, re-launching the National Space Council, officially promised a new era of space exploration that would see “American boots get back to the moon” as well as land on Mars.

NASA seem to be letting its options open to whatever works, financially and politically speaking, but now the moon is a more feasible destination. NASA might have to settle for affording a lunar outpost and one SLS rocket flight per year.

Read More Add comment

This New Technology Could Get Humans to Mars in Two Days

By 0x000216

Read

0 Comments

Charles Bombardier, is a Montreal-based innovator, has uncovered an idea for a hypothetical space train called Solar Express that can take passengers and freights between planets faster than any present systems. If ever a reality, Charles Bombardier and his team visualize Solar Express travelling at roughly 1% the speed of light, about 3,000 km per second (1,864 miles per second), dropping the travel time between Earth and Mars to less than two Earth days.

Bombardier said on Solar Express site, "In space, the most costly portions of travel are the acceleration and deceleration phases. The energy required for those portions is terrific, particularly for something as heavy as a space train. In addition, if you were to start shipping cargo, it would become very expensive.

"However, once the train reached its travelling speed, its energy consumption would be nominal. That’s the idea behind the Solar Express model. It would never stop; instead, space wagons/capsules would rendezvous with it."

While it is necessarily important to keep in mind that this is just a theoretical idea and not a project in fact being implemented in reality (yet, besides), the team is looking at outside-of-the-box answers to humanity’s space travel problems. So, how would it work? Well, according to the team, Solar Express would contain of a series of allied cylinders almost of 50 meters (164 feet) in length. Six of these cylinders, which you can consider as train cars, would be connected together in a straight line and hurtle through space.

To launch, one of the most expensive features of space travel, Solar Express would use rocket boosters, keeping a low amount of fuel on standby to regulate course. Then, the train would slingshot around astronomic bodies to gain speed without requiring more fuel. Charles Bombardier describes, "Huge solar groups located along the train’s path could be used to capture solar energy and transfer it by laser to super-capacitors. Water gathered from comets or small moons would be used for humans living on the train and transported to other places."The gathered water could also be used to create hydrogen and propellant, but the central propulsion system should take the form of an ion thruster."

After in motion, the train would never stop. Instead, smaller crafts would join up with the train when it orbits a planet to collect supplies and drop the passengers. The capacity to keep going forever would cut expenditures, though the up-front manufacture cost would be huge. There are also many technical questions that the team is still figure out, such as how to control such a fast ship, how the space shuttles would discharge goods from the moving craft, and how to get it to such great speed.

Bombardier said,"Clearly, there is a lot to consider starting with dimensions, speed, masses, energy, etc. How do you control such a multipart vehicle? The Solar Express is a basic idea and we would like to know how we could advance it."

If you can take the imaginative dive, though, the opportunities of a working Solar Express would be senseless. According to Kritin Tablang from Forbes, a tour from Earth to the Moon would take only 2.13 minutes, although a trip to Mars would take about 37 hours. A trip to Neptune, the utmost planet from Earth, would take almost 18 days. To put that into perception, it acquired Voyager 2 about 12years to get to Neptune, and NASA says it takes approximately 260 days to get Mars by using current technology. Since the time constraint for space travel within our own Solar System is one of the many restrictive issues for us humans, throwing around ideas to circumvent the old-style approach is always a good thing, no matter how doubtful they are to ever come to achievement. Optimistically, scientists will have some answers to Bombardier’s remaining questions about Solar Express. Till then, we have to just imagine it.

Read More Add comment

Elon Musk: "We Need To Leave Earth As Soon As Possible For One Critical Reason"

By 0x000216

Read

0 Comments

In all the planets of our home galaxy, humankind happens to discover itself on a planet which is perfectly suitable for life. Earth isn't without its dangers however. Earth has seen five massive extinctions throughout its history, due to catastrophic disasters like huge asteroids and massive volcanic outbursts. Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is very much concerned about the next mass destruction.

He's so worried that he thinks we have to get off Earth and grow into a multi-planet species as soon as possible, according to an article posted by blogger Tim Urban called How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars. Musk's thought is quite straightforward. Perhaps by the time the next huge asteroid heads our way, we'll have the equipment to protect the planet or redirect the space rock. But if it's something a bit more disastrous, like a neighboring star exploding, we may all get vaporized.

Musk says we certainly can't afford to just wait around and find out.In his article, Urban provides us another way to think about it: Visualize Earth as a hard drive, and every single species is a word document saved on that hard drive. The hard drive has already been crashed at least five times, and each time it misses a giant piece of those documents (species being vanished). So you can reflect the human species as an extremely valuable document generated on that hard drive: “Now—if you owned a hard drive with an extraordinarily important Excel doc on it, and you knew that the hard drive pretty reliably tended to crash every month or two, with the last crash happening five weeks ago—what’s the very obvious thing you’d do? You’d copy the document onto a second hard drive.”

That's precisely why Musk is so hell-bent on Mars — it might turn out to be
humanity's backup drive.

Musk doesn't just want to send a minority of colonists to Mars, either; he'd like to send 1 million people to the red planet. If we want anything similar to the industry and stuff built here on Earth, and generous-genetic variety, then we'll need no less than that many people to get things going perfectly. That's the just the only way we'll persist as a species on Mars, Musk apparently told Urban.

Later this year, via his rocket firm SpaceX, Musk plans to disclose a spacecraft designed to transport as many as 100 people at a time to the Mars.

Read More Add comment

Sinister Security

It's Official: Elon Musk Will Send Humans to Mars in 2024

Sorry, Mars Fans – NASA Can’t Afford the Trip

This New Technology Could Get Humans to Mars in Two Days

Elon Musk: "We Need To Leave Earth As Soon As Possible For One Critical Reason"

Recent Posts

Facebook