At an upcoming summit in early December, NATO is expected to declare space as a “warfighting domain”, partly in response to new developments in technology. If it does declare space a war zone, NATO could start using space weapons that can destroy satellites or incoming enemy missiles. But what is this technology and how could it enable a war?
But building a moon base and actually living on the moon will require careful planning. First, we need to identify and map available lunar resources, including hydrogen and water ice. Such compounds are crucial if we are to create breathable air and rocket fuel, whether for an observatory or a launchpad to go to the outer planets in our solar system.
his week, Asus revealed its ProArt StudioBook laptops at IFA. The company claims these are the most graphically powerful laptops currently available.
Aerodynamic resistance increases with the square of air speed, which means it increases very rapidly as the speed increases. Rolling resistance, meanwhile, increases linearly with speed, which means it increases much less rapidly as speed rises.
Unlike a nuclear weapon, which would vaporize people within 100 feet and kill almost everyone within a half-mile, the death toll from a large-scale cyberattack would be slower. People might die from a lack of food, power or gas for heat or from car crashes resulting from a corrupted traffic light system.
The entire Apollo 11 mission to the moon took just eight days. If we ever want to build permanent bases on the moon, or perhaps even Mars or beyond, then future astronauts will have to spend many more days, months and maybe even years in space without a constant lifeline to Earth. The question is how would they get hold of everything they needed. Using rockets to send all the equipment and supplies for building and maintaining long-term settlements on the moon would be hugely expensive.
Today, discussions about lunar exploration have moved away from establishment of a permanent lunar base as a preliminary for extended exploration. Instead, there has been a significant advance in planning the construction of the Deep Space Gateway – a space station in orbit around the moon. This is an international project between a number of different space agencies.
Recycling satellites could provide not just raw materials for more construction in space, but a revenue stream to fund it. My research showed that an orbit 150 km further out that GEO Gateway Earth would have access to the whole of GEO. From there whole satellites could be taken by space drones into the floating recycling centre for a tune-up if needed.
A sustainable space program requires reliable, fully autonomous robotic systems both for maintaining the existing space infrastructures and for building new ones beyond low Earth orbits. Autonomy is particularly essential to near-future space robotic systems as they must operate in harsh and partially understood environments.
In this week’s Light Start, we’ve got Bill Nye’s science project, US Army audiobooks, Lego Apollo 11 )(in flight), and Disney’s next live-action remake