European Space Agency’s new Ion thruster runs on thin air
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF When satellites and rockets burn all their fuel they inevitably fall back to Earth and crash, but what if they didn’t need to carry fuel in the first place? That would change the economics of space flight… While ion thrusters are a promising propulsion...
Google’s Lunar XPrize will continue, without Google
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Sometimes the prize isn’t the prize, it’s just a bonus, and in this case most of the teams who were involved in the original Google Lunar XPrize still have their sights set on a Moon landing in 2019. The Google Lunar XPRIZE, a $30...
Vodafone and Nokia partner to create a 4G network on the Moon
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As different organisations around the globe look to start building the first human outposts on the Moon they’ll need high quality networks to transmit data and communicate with Earth. Mobile phone coverage on Earth may not be as comprehensive as it could be, and...
SpaceX launches the world’s most powerful rocket into space
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Not only is the SpaceX Falcon Heavy the world’s most powerful rocket, but it’s also destined to be the one that takes colonists to Mars and help Musk realise his ambitions to ferry people around the world in under thirty minutes or less. SpaceX’s...
NASA’s tests its new interplanetary space internet system, sends a selfie to the ISS
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As humanity reaches for the stars and pens its plans to become an interplanetary species today’s Earth bound internet system just won’t hack it, so an alternative is needed. As humanity reaches for the stars, and to colonise Mars from 2024, NASA used a...
$30m Google Lunar XPrize moonshot competition ends without a winner
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The Google Lunar XPrize was ambitious moonshot, but, like any competition time was against the teams from the start. After 10 long years, the Google sponsored competition, the Google Lunar XPrize, which aimed to land a robot on the moon for millions of dollars of prize money...
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy assumes launch position ready for maiden flight
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF If humanity is to reach for the stars then space exploration needs to become easier and more affordable and this is a big step to achieving those goals. Elon Musk this week announced that SpaceX is almost ready to launch its most daring rocket...
Scientists have a plan to seed life throughout the universe
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Today we have the power to create new species of animals never previously thought possible and at some point it seems inevitable that humans will start seeding new life across the universe. In the past six months’ scientists have created alien life forms unlike...
Revolutionary new single stage Aerospike rocket preps for take off
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF All of today’s rockets are two stage rockets, ARCA’s new revolutionary single stage rocket will cut the cost of space launches by up to 80 percent increasing our access to space. ARCA Space Corporation, who are funded by NASA, has announced that their revolutionary linear...
NASA’s new ion thruster smashes all the records
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Chemical rockets are big, bulky and expensive, and once they run out of fuel they’re useless, Ion thrusters operate without fuel and could help propel humanity beyond our solar system. A thruster that’s being developed for a future NASA mission to Mars broke several records during...
Lockheed show off their orbiting Mars station concept
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The race for Mars is on and companies are now lining up to get astronauts into orbit, and onto, the red planet, and it’s only a matter of time before it happens. At the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia, last week rocket companies,...
Musk unveils his plan to put a million people on Mars starting 2024
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF It’s inevitable that humanity will, at one point or another, become an interplanetary species, and Musk wants it to happen in the next decade. It’s no secret that Elon Musk wants to, on the one hand, get to Mars himself, famously saying back in 2015...
Plasma jet engines get ready for real world trials
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Plasma engines are the stuff of science fiction, and now it looks like they’re ready to come out of the labs and push new limits. Imagine a jet engine that could propel an aircraft faster than a traditional engine and take it all the...
Travel to Mars for $200,000 on Elon Musk’s SpaceX Express
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Elon Musk wants you to live on Mars but today’s ticket price of $10 Billion is too high for most individuals so he has a plan to get it down to just $200,000. Last year Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, delivered...
Maiden flight of SpaceX rocket that will take tourists to the Moon lifts off in three months
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The Falcon Heavy will be one of largest rockets ever built and one day it could be the spacecraft that makes Humanity an interplanetary species. Elon Musk has been tweeting again and this time he’s telling everyone that the highly anticipated Falcon Heavy launch,...
NASA gets ready to trial SEXTANT, its galactic navigation technology
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF There are no accurate maps of deep space but now NASA are creating their own deep space Galactic Positioning System (GPS) using pulsars as galactic beacons. If you want to travel in deep space, for example, aboard Stephen Hawking’s interstellar spaceship, which admittedly might...
Watch: SpaceX sticks another great landing
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF SpaceX’s re-useable rockets have helped revolutionise and lower the cost of space exploration, and the Falcon 9 just stuck another landing SpaceX, whose larger reusable Falcon Heavy rockets will one day take colonists to Mars, successfully landed a Falcon 9 rocket for the eleventh...
Space adventurers could be the first true ‘Designer humans’
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Space is the harshest environment known to man and the idea of creating the world’s first genetically altered humans who can survive its extremes “naturally” without the need to take their artificial environments with them is gaining traction. At last year’s International Astronautical Congress in...
Scientists think they’ve found evidence of a parallel universe
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Astrophysisists can’t explain a cold spot on at the edge of our universe using today’s standard models, and they think it could be evidence that a parallel universe is colliding with our own Scientists are a funny bunch. Actually, I could just end this...
The first Mars colony will be 3D printed from Martian dust
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The colossal distances involved in getting to Mars means that shipping equipment to Mars will be an expensive herculean effort so experts want everything to be made in situ A new 3D printing technique could let the first humans on Mars print everything from...
