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Space Tourist to Announce Daring Manned Mars Voyage for 2018

The world’s first space tourist, Dennis Tito is planning to launch a manned mission to Mars in January 2018 on a round-trip journey lasting 501 days.

Tito, who paid about $20 million to visit the International Space Station in 2001, has founded a new nonprofit company called the Inspiration Mars Foundation. The manned mission is intended to “generate new knowledge, experience and momentum for the next great era of space exploration,” according to a press briefing posted by NASA Watch, a website dedicated to space news, on Feb. 20.

The company will hold a press conference on Feb. 27 to provide details of the mission and answer any questions, of which there are numerous. In particular, how the mission intends to keep its participants safe and healthy during the journey will be a key issue.

In attendance at the conference will be Taber MacCallum and Jane Poynter of the Paragon Space Development Corporation, which creates life-support systems for space and other environments. MacCullum and Poynter were members of the Biosphere-2 project that attempted to build a completely isolated environment inside a giant structure in the 1990s (an experiment that had mixed success). The briefing also mentions Jonathan Clark, a medical researcher at the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, who will probably address the dangers from potentially lethal radiation to humans in deep space.

NASA Eyes Mission to Jupiter Moon Europa

Though NASA is devoting many of its exploration resources to Mars these days, the agency still has its eye on an icy moon of Jupiter that may be capable of supporting life as we know it.

Last week, NASA officials announced that they plan to launch a $1.5 billion rover to Mars in 2020, adding to a string of Red Planet missions already on the docket. The Curiosity rover just landed this past August, for example, and an orbiter called Maven and a lander named InSight are slated to blast off in 2013 and 2016, respectively.

But NASA is also thinking about ways to investigate the possible habitability of Europa, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon. One concept that may be gaining traction is a so-called “clipper” probe that would make multiple flybys of the moon, studying its icy shell and suspected subsurface ocean as it zooms past.

“We briefed NASA headquarters on Monday, and they responded very positively,” mission proponent David Senske, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said here Dec. 7 at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

The $2 billion unmanned Europa Clipper, which could be ready to launch by 2021 or so, would also do vital reconnaissance work for a potential lander mission in the future, Senske told SPACE.com.

Intriguing Europa

Astrobiologists regard Europa, which is about 1,900 miles (3,100 kilometers) wide, as one of the best bets in our solar system to host life beyond Earth.

The moon is believed to harbor a large ocean of liquid water beneath its icy shell. Further, this ocean is likely in direct contact with Europa’s rocky mantle, raising the possibility of all sorts of interesting chemical reactions, Senske said.

The irradiation of Europa’s surface and tidal heating of its interior also mean the moon likely has ample energy sources — another key requirement for life as we know it.

NASA has long been interested in exploring the icy moon and its ocean. Several years back, the agency drew up an ambitious mission concept called the Jupiter Europa Orbiter (JEO), which would have made detailed studies of Europa and the incredibly volcanic Jupiter moon Io.

Huge Mars Colony Eyed by SpaceX Founder Elon Musk

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 a trip.

Image: This still from a SpaceX mission concept video shows a Dragon space capsule landing on the surface of Mars. SpaceX’s Dragon is a privately built space capsule to carry unmanned payloads, and eventually astronauts, into space. Credit: SpaceX

In Musk’s vision, the ambitious Mars settlement program would start with a pioneering group of fewer than 10 people, who would journey to the Red Planet aboard a huge reusable rocket powered by liquid oxygen and methane.

“At Mars, you can start a self-sustaining civilization and grow it into something really big,” Musk told an audience at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London on Friday (Nov. 16). Musk was there to talk about his business plans, and to receive the Society’s gold medal for his contribution to the commercialization of space.

Mars pioneers

Accompanying the founders of the new Mars colony would be large amounts of equipment, including machines to produce fertilizer, methane and oxygen from Mars’ atmospheric nitrogen and carbon dioxide and the planet’s subsurface water ice.

The Red Planet pioneers would also take construction materials to build transparent domes, which when pressurized with Mars’ atmospheric CO2 could grow Earth crops in Martian soil. As the Mars colony became more self sufficient, the big rocket would start to transport more people and fewer supplies and equipment.

Musk’s architecture for this human Mars exploration effort does not employ cyclers, reusable spacecraft that would travel back and forth constantly between the Red Planet and Earth — at least not at first

“Probably not a Mars cycler; the thing with the cyclers is, you need a lot of them,” Musk told SPACE.com. “You have to have propellant to keep things aligned as [Mars and Earth’s] orbits aren’t [always] in the same plane. In the beginning you won’t have cyclers.”

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Bill Nye Asks “Are We Alone in the Universe?”

Bill Nye talks to our very own Dan Hedges about the future and importance of space exploration. He cites the 10,000 significant asteroids in Earth’s orbit and the importance of being able to alter their trajectory to avoid impact or mine them for precious minerals.

by engineering.com.

China Plans Manned Space Mission For June 2013

State media in China has reported that the country is planning a manned space mission in 2013, following a successful launch in 2012.

A three-person crew will be sent into orbit around Earth, comprising of a woman and two men, according to a senior official in charge of China’s manned space programme. The mission will likely be named Shenzhou-10.

The plan closely resembles the launch and safe return of Liu Yang, China’s first female astronaut, and two colleagues: Liu Wang and Jing Haipeng, who blasted off in June 2012 aboard Shenzhou-9 and took part in the country’s first manual space docking mission.

The country is not a member of the International Space Station project, and instead plans to build its own orbital space station by 2020.

According to Niu Hongguang, the deputy commander of China’s manned space programme, 2013’s mission is planned for June, but back-up launch windows have been set out for July or August.

NASA May Unveil New Manned Moon Missions Soon

NASA is serious about sending astronauts back to the moon’s neighborhood and will likely unveil its ambitious plans soon now that President Barack Obama has been re-elected, experts say.

Image: Artist’s concept of astronauts in an Orion capsule helping direct robotic teleoperations on the moon’s farside. Credit: Lockheed Martin

The space agency has apparently been thinking about setting up a manned outpost beyond the moon’s far side, both to establish a human presence in deep space and to build momentum toward a planned visit to an asteroid in 2025.

The new plans have probably already been cleared with the Obama Administration but have been kept under wraps in case Republican candidate Mitt Romney won Tuesday night’s (Nov. 6) presidential election, said space policy expert John Logsdon, a professor emeritus at George Washington University.

“NASA has been evolving its thinking, and its latest charts have inserted a new element of cislunar/lunar gateway/Earth-moon L2 sort of stuff into the plan,” Logsdon told SPACE.com. (The Earth-moon L2 is a so-called libration point where the two bodies’ gravitational pulls roughly balance out, allowing spacecraft to essentially park there.)

“They’ve been holding off announcing that until after the election,” Logsdon added, noting that Romney had pledged to reassess and possibly revise NASA’s missions and direction.

A new vision of human space exploration

In 2010, President Obama directed NASA to work toward sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025, then on to the vicinity of Mars by the mid-2030s. To reach such deep-space destinations, the agency is developing a huge rocket called the Space Launch System (SLS) and a crew capsule named Orion.

But astronauts likely won’t head straight to a space rock when SLS and Orion are ready to fly together in 2021. In the last year, word has begun leaking out that NASA wants to explore Earth-moon L2, a point in space that lies beyond the moon’s far side, as a precursor.

Rumors currently point toward parking a spacecraft at the Earth-moon L2 gateway, so NASA (and perhaps international partners) can learn more about supporting humans in deep space. Astronauts stationed there could also aid in lunar exploration — by teleoperating rovers on the moon’s surface, for example.

NASA officials think they can pull off such manned missions without busting their budget, which stands at $17.7 billion in the proposed 2013 federal budget.

“They’re not talking about plans that imply significant budget increases,” Logsdon said. “It gives a more focused use for SLS and Orion before an asteroid mission.”

Moon missions coming soon?

Exploration of Earth-moon L2 could get started as early as 2021 with the first manned flight of SLS and Orion, which NASA calls Exploration Mission 2. (Exploration Mission 1 is the initial, unmanned test launch of SLS, slated for late 2017.)

“I’m not privy to the specifics of this, but one could conceive of the second SLS mission being the start of activity in cislunar space, rather than just being a lunar orbit mission,” Logsdon said.

We may know soon enough. NASA higher-ups have dropped hints recently that a big announcement may indeed be in the offing before too much longer.

“We just recently delivered a comprehensive report to Congress outlining our destinations which makes clear that SLS will go way beyond low-Earth orbit to explore the expansive space around the Earth-moon system, near-Earth asteroids, the moon, and ultimately, Mars,” NASA deputy chief Lori Garver said at a conference in September.

“Let me say that again: We’re going back to the moon, attempting a first-ever mission to send humans to an asteroid and actively developing a plan to take Americans to Mars,” Garver added.

The Future Deep-Space Suit

“For astronauts to explore deep space, suits must be sleeker, smarter, and far more maneuverable. Many of the materials that could make this happen are in labs right now. —Elbert Chu

Custom Fit

Rather than gas pressurization, future suits may use shape-memory alloys, such as a weave of Nitinol wire made by Boston-based Midé Technology, to apply steady mechanical counterpressure. The alloy would be treated with heat to tightly fit astronauts after they don their suits, but also conform to movement.

Augmented Vision

Astronauts today peer through plastic; future visors could be made of a clear ceramic called ALON, which is thinner than bulletproof glass and three times as strong. A heads-up display by Lumus Optical, used by F-16 pilots, could migrate to space helmets as a full-color display that guides light to the eyes with optical prisms.

Foam Buffers

Concave areas of the body might require another shape-memory material to regulate the suit’s counterpressure. Syracuse Biomaterials Institute has developed the basis for this technology: carbon nanofibers that produce heat when activated by electricity, which could cause foam to expand to a preset shape.

Cooling System

Current suits circulate water through 300 feet of tubing to draw away body heat. Purdue University engineers created a tech­nology that could insulate the tubes and also produce power: glass fibers (in the future, polymers) coated with thermoelectric nanocrystals that absorb heat and discharge electricity.

Protective Shell

One wrong squeeze from mechanical counter­pressure could injure vital organs. A rigid, fully pressurized shell would provide protection without restricting an astronaut’s movement. To minimize bulk and keep the contact points between hard and soft materials comfortable, each shell would be 3-D-printed to fit its user.

Self-Healing Gloves

So far, the best defense against a torn suit or glove is to fortify it with stronger layers. Engineers at ILC Dover investigated a better approach: Integrate self-healing materials, such as polymers embedded with microencapsulated chemicals. When the capsules rupture, the chemicals foam and heal the torn suit.

Extreme Insulation

Silica aerogels, consisting of about 95 percent air, could insulate against severe temperature swings. By coating a silica nanoskeleton with a flexible polymer, a team at the University of Akron made aerogels durable and flexible enough for space. Embedded hydrogen could also block dangerous levels of radiation.

Artificial Gravity

Prolonged exposure to low gravity causes bone loss and muscle atrophy, which astronauts fend off by exercising 2.5 hours each day. Devices developed at Draper Laboratory could build fitness into space suits. Gyroscopes attached to the arms and legs could provide resistance similar to the force of gravity on Earth.

Adhesive Strength

A dry adhesive created at the University of Massachusetts, strategically placed on space suits, could help astronauts hold fast to surfaces and tools. Its weave of carbon fiber and Kevlar mimics the skin and tendon structure of gecko feet, giving it unprecedented strength—yet it easily peels away from surfaces.

Extra Power

The batteries that power life-support systems must be repeatedly charged. Zinc-oxide nano­wires being developed at Michigan Technological University can convert movement into electricity. Embedding such piezoelectric wires into the fabric over knees and elbows could provide valuable redundancy in space.

Full Article: The Deep-Space Suits; Astronauts can only travel so far in existing space suits. What will it take to see the universe?

Nuclear Propulsion Through Direct Conversion of Fusion Energy

The future of manned space exploration and development of space depends critically on the creation of a vastly more efficient propulsion architecture for in-space transportation.

Nuclear-powered rockets can provide the large energy density gain required. A small scale, low cost path to fusion-based propulsion is to be investigated. It is accomplished by employing the propellant to compress and heat a magnetized plasma to fusion conditions, and thereby channel the fusion energy released into heating only the propellant.

Passage of the hot propellant through a magnetic nozzle rapidly converts this thermal energy into both directed (propulsive) energy and electrical energy.

Nearby Earth-Sized Alien Planet Could Spur Interstellar Exploration

The recent discovery of an Earth-size alien planet right next door to us could help spark humanity’s first true exploration steps beyond our own solar system, scientists say.

Image: This wide-field view of the sky around the bright star Alpha Centauri was created from photographic images forming part of the Digitized Sky Survey 2. The star appears so big just because of the scattering of light by the telescope’s optics as well as in the photographic emulsion. Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to the Solar System. Image released Oct. 17, 2012. Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2

Future space telescopes — such as NASA’s proposed Terrestrial Planet Finder and the European Space Agency’s Darwin instrument — could search for signs of life on promising worlds that may neighbor Alpha Centauri Bb, said veteran planet hunter Geoff Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley.

“Those missions can not only image planets in the habitable zone but take spectra of them, to assess the chemical composition of the atmosphere of the planet,” Marcy told SPACE.com via email. “There is a prospect, with planets around Alpha Cen B, to search for bio-signatures in the atmosphere of any planets in the habitable zone.”

Interstellar exploring

That would be exciting enough. But Marcy and some of his colleagues hold out hope that humanity will get a much closer look at the Alpha Centauri system someday — and they think now is a good time to get the ball rolling.

“There is now great impetus to send a probe with a camera to Alpha Cen to study the three stars there (including Proxima Centauri) and to study the planets and moons there,” Marcy said. “What a rich opportunity for NASA and ESA, working with all nations on Earth, to send a probe to Alpha Centauri, galvanizing interest from people of all ages around the world.”

Such a mission is not practical with today’s spacecraft, which would take tens of thousands of years to travel the 25 trillion miles (40 trillion kilometers) to Alpha Centauri. So researchers will have to come up with new, superfast propulsion systems — perhaps nuclear rockets, antimatter fusion drives or another such advanced technology in the early stages of development today.

Marcy thinks the United States should aim to launch a robotic spacecraft toward Alpha Centauri by the year 2100.

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