Branson Blasts Off With NASA. Maybe February 23, 2007
Read more Gadgets , Gizmodo UK , Science , Technology
You have to admit that the Virgin Galactic commercial space flight venture is looking more likely now with the announcement that it has signed a deal with NASA to collaborate on the design and development of space suits, heat shields for spaceships, hybrid rocket motors and hypersonic vehicles capable of traveling five or more times the speed of sound.
My guess is that NASA will be providing most of the technical stuff.
To be fair though, it also gives NASA a way into the potentially lucrative commercial space flight sector, which is especially important seeing as over the past few years its funding has been either frozen, or slashed more times than a Freddy Kruger victim.
Take a look at what the inside will look like. That’s about as close as any of us will get either since tickets will cost around £100,000 a pop.-Martin Lynch
[More]
Editor and Contributor | Martin Lynch
RSS Feed
Comments
Its amazing what you can do with a wasing up liquid bottle.
Let's do something up there! News agencies in the U.S. have been recently writing and posting articles about "the power from above", meaning deploying very large satellites in geosynchronous orbit to harness energy from the Sun and beam it down to Earth in the form of intense microwaves for instant conversion into electricity. If all goes well, these solsats could supply entire cities with enormous amounts of power, and at the same time be utilized as space-based weapons systems.
Sound like science fiction? Yes, especially considering the fact
there is a really good Sci-fi book titled Sunstroke written by David Kagan (The Berkely Publishing Group, NY), that depicts the deployment and operation of Solsat X-1, involving some unforeseen and most devastating results. Sort of like placing the environment into a gigantic microwave oven set on high, with many surprises along the way.
Here are direct links to articles regarding a true-life Solsat X-1 to be deployed in orbit by the U.S. Pentagon within the next seven years.
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/06/post.html
www.space.com/businesstechnology/070919_sps_airforce.html
Also one Superb article from:
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/09/07/350320.aspx