New NASA Designs for a Reusable Manned Deep-Space Craft, Nautilus-X. This tubular spacecraft could serve as a reusable vehicle for lunar and deep-space missions, holding a crew of six and enough supplies for a two-year expedition. Dubbed Nautilus-X, for "Non-Atmospheric Universal Transport Intended for Lengthy United States eXploration," this craft could be built in orbit and ready for space missions by 2020, according to a briefing by NASA's Future In Space Operations group. It would be assembled from expandable structures, such as the inflatable habitats proposed by Bigelow Aerospace. It would also contain a ring centrifuge to provide partial gravity, and radiation-mitigation systems that could include tanks of water or liquid hydrogen slush, reports the website HobbySpace.com. Nautilus is a multi-mission space exploration vehicle, so it could incorporate mission-specific propulsion units, according to Edward Henderson of NASA Johnson Space Center.
Nautilus is by far the highlight, however, with pretty specific schematics and development estimates. NASA Looks Into Laser-Propelled Rockets As a Safer, Cheaper, and More Efficient Way to Space. Launching payloads into space is expensive, but high costs aside it's also a horribly inefficient process. Conventional rockets are almost pure fuel, leaving only a small percentage (usually in the low single digits) of a launch vehicle's total weight available for payload. So NASA's Glenn Research Center in Ohio is looking into a whole new system of payload propulsion that uses lasers or microwaves to launch vehicles into orbit. Doing so could significantly reduce the costs and physical dangers associated with regular spaceflight. Rockets, as we noted earlier, are more or less massive controlled hydrocarbon explosions--bottled up fuel that (if all goes well) ignites in stages to hurl the rocket skyward.
This heat exchanger causes the temperature of the fuel aboard the rocket to spike, pushing it to something like 3,100 degrees, a temperature that drastically increases the rocket's thrust. [Discovery News] An 'Ion Funnel' Could Help Future Mars Missions Identify Signs of Alien Life. The Mars Curiosity Rover NASA/JPL-Caltech Tapping a bit of frat-boy ingenuity, researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) have devised a new way for an old space exploration instrument to suck down large volumes of vaporized particles and analyze rocks for their compositions using an ion funnel, a process that could speed analysis, lighten instrument loads, and improve the odds of finding signs of life.
Mass spectrometry is an old space standby--the Mars Science Laboratory, launching in November, will host spectrometry instruments as part of its science suite--used largely to identify the composition of soil and rock on the Martian surface. Usually it is gathered by a scoop or a robot arm, deposited into a special chamber where it is prepared and vaporized, and then ionized so the stuff of atoms can be separated and identified. But all this handling of soil and rock samples can taint samples and lead to experimental failures.
. [ International Business Times ] NASA and DARPA Want a "100-Year Starship," As Long as They Don't Have to Build It. Since its inception (okay, since the early 1960s) the United States has been the world leader in space travel and exploration, taking the lead in crafting mankind's vision and agenda for humanity's role in space. So it made sense when NASA and DARPA announced their joint "100-Year Starship" study last year to explore the possibility of a one-way manned mission to another planet. But this initiative isn't quite as exciting as it seems; sure, the United States government would like to see humans explore and settle deep space. It just wants someone else to do it. That's a bit of a contrast from the moon landing, a feat that no private sector entity would have been able to achieve on its own at that time.
The 100-Year Starship won't be one of those projects, at least if an official statement released yesterday is any indication. Says Dave Neyland, Director of DARPA's Tactical Technology Office: Check back in a century and we'll let you know how it goes. [DARPA (PDF) via The Register] Who Owns the Moon's Water? Future Moon Mining Missions May Face Legal Disputes. Not long after NASA confirmed the moon has plenty of water, scientists and entrepreneurs started hatching plans to harvest it, either for lunar colonists or for rocket fuel. There are plenty of ways to do it — you could microwave the lunar soil to turn the ice into water vapor, you could use robots to harvest frozen chunks of ice, and so on.
Space.com talked to space law experts who said determining ownership of those resources may be a more complicated matter. The Moon Treaty of 1979 was intended to govern how the moon's resources would be used, Space.com reports. But none of the spacefaring nations has signed it, rendering it moot. This leaves countries to rely on the Outer Space Treaty, and because it doesn't explicitly ban resource extraction, it can probably be interpreted to mean it's allowed. Still, this doesn't address who owns the title to the materials. Figuring this out will probably require legislation or international agreements, according to Space.com. Two Suns? Twin Stars Could Be Visible From Earth By 2012.