Do you remember in 1989 when two chemists announced they’d created a setup that created nuclear fusion at room temperature? Everyone was excited, but it eventually turned out to be very suspect. It wasn’t clear how they detected that fusion occurred and only a few of the many people who tried to replicate the experiment claimed success and they later retracted their reports. Since then, mentioning cold fusion is right up there with perpetual motion. Work does continue though, and NASA recently published several papers on lattice confinement fusion which is definitely not called cold fusion, although it sounds like it to us.
The idea of trapping atoms inside a metallic crystal lattice isn’t new, dating back to the 1920s. It sounds as though the NASA method uses erbium packed with deuterium. Photons cause some of the deuterium to fuse. Unlike earlier attempts, this method produces detectable neutron emissions characteristic of fusion.
Several months after NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine confirmed the project was in the works, sources are now reporting that Tom Cruise and director Doug Liman will officially be making the trip to the International Space Station in October of 2021 to film scenes for an as of yet untitled movie. Cruise and Liman previously worked together on the science fiction spectacle Edge of Tomorrow in 2014, which may give us a hint at what the duo are planning for their trip to the final frontier.
Industry insiders claim that the two film makers and potentially a female co-star will fly aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule under the command of Michael López-Alegría, a veteran astronaut who currently holds the American record for number and duration of extra-vehicular activities (EVAs). The mission is being organized by Axiom Space, which previously announced they would perform a series of privately funded flights to the ISS as a precursor to constructing their own commercial expansion to the orbiting laboratory.
This never happened.
Of course, with more than a year before liftoff, anything could happen. SpaceX has been linked, officially or otherwise, to several private trips to space that literally and figuratively never got off the ground.
Mars-One was touting concept art that showed a fleet of modified SpaceX Dragons on the Red Planet as far back as 2012, and Elon Musk himself once announced that the Falcon Heavy would send private passengers on a trip around the Moon by the end of 2018. But to date, a pair of NASA astronauts have been the only humans to actually fly on SpaceX hardware.
Undoubtedly, some will see this flight of fancy as a waste of valuable resources. After all, there’s no shortage of scientists and researchers who would be more deserving of trip to a space than Jerry Maguire. But according to Bridenstine, the hope is that a big budget Hollywood film featuring scenes shot on the ISS could do for NASA what Top Gun once did for the Navy:
There was a day when I was in elementary school and I saw Top Gun. From that day, I knew I was going to be a Navy pilot. If we can get Tom Cruise to inspire an elementary kid to join the Navy and be a pilot, why can’t we get Tom Cruise to inspire the next Elon Musk? That’s what we need.
While we might not all agree on who the next generation of engineers should look to for inspiration, the impact that Top Gun had on Navy recruitment in the 80s and 90s is well established. If sending Tom Cruise to space for a few weeks might help inspire more kids to look into a STEM education, it’s probably worth a shot. Though it seems like Tom Hanks and his fellow Apollo 13 crew mates did a respectable enough job celebrating the incredible engineering behind NASA’s greatest triumph without actually going into orbit themselves.
By now, you’ve likely heard that scientists have found a potential sign of biological life on Venus. Through a series of radio telescope observations in 2017 and 2019, they were able to confirm the presence of phosphine gas high in the planet’s thick atmosphere. Here on Earth, the only way this gas is produced outside of the laboratory is through microbial processes. The fact that it’s detectable at such high concentrations in the Venusian atmosphere means we either don’t know as much as we thought we did about phosphine, or more tantalizingly, that the spark of life has been found on our nearest planetary neighbor.
Venus, as seen by Mariner 10 in 1974
To many, the idea that life could survive on Venus is difficult to imagine. While it’s technically the planet most like Earth in terms of size, mass, composition, and proximity to the Sun, the surface of this rocky world is absolutely hellish; with a runaway greenhouse effect producing temperatures in excess of 460 C (840 F). Life, at least as we currently know it, would find no safe haven on the surface of Venus. Even the Soviet Venera landers, sent to the planet in the 1980s, were unable to survive the intense heat and pressure for more than a few hours.
While the surface may largely be outside of our reach, the planet’s exceptionally dense atmosphere is another story entirely. At an altitude of approximately 50 kilometers, conditions inside the Venusian atmosphere are far more forgiving. The atmospheric pressure at this altitude is almost identical to surface-level pressures on Earth, and the average temperature is cool enough that liquid water can form. While the chemical composition of the atmosphere is not breathable by Earthly standards, and the clouds of sulfuric acid aren’t particularly welcoming, it’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility that simple organisms could thrive in this CO2-rich environment. If there really is life on Venus, many speculate it will be found hiding in this relatively benign microcosm high in the clouds.
In short, all the pieces seem to be falling into place. Observations confirm a telltale marker of biological life is in the upper levels of the Venusian atmosphere, and we know from previous studies that this region is arguably one of the most Earth-like environments in the solar system. It’s still far too early to claim we’ve discovered extraterrestrial life, but it’s not hard to see why people are getting so excited.
But this isn’t the first time scientists have turned their gaze towards Earth’s twin. In fact, had things gone differently, NASA might have sent a crew out to Venus after the Apollo program had completed its survey of the Moon. If that mission had launched back in the 1970s, it could have fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the planet; and perhaps even our understanding of humanity’s place in the cosmos.
There is more than one way to lead a successful life. Some people have all the opportunity in the world laid out before them, and it never does them any good. Others have little more than the determination and desire they’ve dredged up within themselves, and that grit turns out to be the abrasive that smooths the path ahead.
Ronald McNair succeeded despite poverty, racism, and an education system designed to keep Black people down. He became an accidental revolutionary at the age of nine, when he broke the color barrier in his small South Carolina town via the public library. This act of defiance in pursuit of education would set the course for his relatively short but full life, which culminated in his career as a Space Shuttle mission specialist.
Rule-Breaker with a Slide Rule
Ronald McNair was born October 21, 1950 in Lake City, South Carolina, the second of three sons, to Pearl and Carl McNair. His mother was a teacher, and encouraged his love of reading. Ronald’s father, Carl was an auto mechanic who never finished high school and always regretted it. Though the family was poor, Ron grew up surrounded by books, music, and support.
The news was recently abuzz with stories of how the Mars 2020 mission, which launched from Cape Canaveral at the end of July, had done something that no other spacecraft had done before: it had successfully charged the batteries aboard a tiny helicopter that is hitching a ride in the belly of the Mars 2020 rover, Perseverance.
Although the helicopter, aptly named Ingenuity, is only a technology demonstrator, and flight operations will occupy but a small fraction of the time Mars 2020 is devoting to its science missions, it has still understandably captured the popular imagination. This will be humanity’s first attempt at controlled, powered flight on another planet, after all, and that alone is enough to spur intense interest in what amounts to a side-project for NASA. So here’s a closer look at Ingenuity, and what it takes to build a helicopter that will explore another world.
Since the last Concorde rolled to a stop in 2003, supersonic flight has been limited almost exclusively to military aircraft. Many have argued that it’s an example of our civilization seeming to slip backwards on the technological scale, akin to returning to the Age of Sail. There’s no debating that we have the capability of moving civilian passengers and cargo at speeds above Mach 1 safely, it’s just something that isn’t done anymore.
Concorde on its final flight, November 2003
Of course to be fair, there’s plenty of good reasons why the sky isn’t filled with supersonic aircraft. For one, they’ve historically been more drastically expensive to build and operate than their slower peers. The engineering that goes into an aircraft that can operate for an extended period of time at supersonic speeds doesn’t come cheap, nor do the materials required. But naturally, the same could have been said for commercial jet aircraft at one time. With further development, the cost would eventually come down.
The real problem holding supersonic aircraft back is much more practical: they are just too loud. From the roar of their powerful engines on takeoff to the startling and sometimes even dangerous “sonic boom” they leave in their wake, nobody wants them flying over their homes or communities. In fact, civilian flight above Mach 1 over land has been outlawed in the United States for exactly this reason since 1973 under the Federal Aviation Administration’s regulation 91.817.
For any commercial supersonic aircraft to be viable, it needs to not only be much cheaper to build and operate than older designs, but it also needs to be far quieter. Which is exactly what Boom hopes to demonstrate with their XB-1 prototype. The sleek craft will never enter into commercial service itself, but if all goes according to plan during its 2021 test flights, it may prove that the state-of-the-art in aircraft design is ready to usher in a new era of supersonic civilian transport.
Put simply, the goal of any reusable booster is to reduce the cost of getting a payload into space. The comparison is often made to commercial aviation: if you had to throw away the airliner after every flight, nobody could afford the tickets. The fact that the plane can be refueled and flown again and again allows operators to amortize its high upfront cost.
In theory, the same should hold true for orbital rockets. With enough flight experience, you can figure out which parts of the vehicle will need replacement or repair, and how often. Assuming the fuel is cheap enough and the cost of refurbishment doesn’t exceed that of building a new one, eventually the booster will pay for itself. You just need a steady stream of paying customers, which is hardly a challenge given how much we rely on our space infrastructure.
But there’s a catch. For the airliner analogy to really work, whatever inspections and repairs the rocket requires between missions must be done as quickly as possible. The cost savings from reuse aren’t nearly as attractive if you can only fly a few times a year. The key to truly making space accessible isn’t just building a reusable rocket, but attaining rapid reusability.
Which is precisely where SpaceX currently finds themselves. Over the years they’ve mastered landing the Falcon 9’s first stage, and they’ve even proven that the recovered boosters can be safely reused for additional flights. But the refurbishment process is still fairly lengthy. While their latest launch officially broke the record for fastest reflight of a space vehicle that had previously been set by Space Shuttle Atlantis, there’s still a lot of work to be done if SpaceX is ever going to fly their rockets like airplanes.
