Concept Spacecraft
“We should become a multi-planetary civilisation” – Elon Musk
An update from Elon Musk on SpaceX’s vision for the future.
Concept Spacecraft
No, NASA is not building a warp drive starship!
There has been a lot of excitement over reports that NASA is developing a faster than light starship propelled by a warp drive capable of making journeys to nearby stars in mere weeks. There are even very pretty artist’s impressions of the hypothetical craft. Is a wonderful space operatic future Read more…
Concept Spacecraft
Whatever Happened to Photon Rockets?
Could humanity ever travel to the stars? Today this is an unattainable dream but world-wide researchers are studying the possibilities of starships. One concept for an interstellar craft is the photon rocket, an idea once popular but less prominent today. What happened to this appealing idea for voyaging into deepest Read more…
Robot Exploration
Voyager Goes Interstellar
A rare astronomical event due to occur in the late 1970s inspired the desire to send a spacecraft to the most distant planets in our Solar System and beyond. That decision almost 40 years later has meant humans have created and launched a spacecraft which has travelled to the boundary Read more…
UFOs and Fringe Science
What Ever Happened to Tachyons?
Tachyons, hypothetical sub-atomic particles which travel faster than light, once attracted a lot of publicity yet we do not hear much discussion of them today. Whatever happened to tachyons? Over a century ago, Albert Einstein anticipated odd things happening on a spaceship travelling at speeds close to that of Read more…
Exoplanets
Alpha Centauri Bb: the Planet Next Door
Audiences flocked to see James Cameron’s epic movie Avatar, the story of a disabled human who gets a chance to live a new life as a 3m tall blue-skinned humanoid alien from a world called Pandora. In the movie Pandora is a lush jungle-covered moon of a gas giant planet Read more…
Concept Spacecraft
Project Orion: the incredible nuclear spacecraft
NASA’s next manned spacecraft will be the Orion, a capsule which will be carried into space by a rocket. Weighing 25 tonnes, each Orion will carry up to six people. Accommodation on board is cosy at best, cramped at worst. Orion was intended to take astronauts to the Moon and Read more…