NASA Is Now Testing Its Artemis Moon Landing Spacesuit

NASA is now running underwater tests for the spacesuits it plans on using for the upcoming series of Artemis missions to the Moon.

Field Tests

NASA astronauts have started to test out its brand new spacesuits, which the space agency plans to use for its upcoming crewed Artemis missions to the Moon.

The tests for the still-under-development suit took place underwater at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory Pool at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Space.com reports, so that astronauts can practice bouncing around like they will in the Moon’s lower gravitational pull.

Water Trap

The pool can be altered to mimic both lunar and low-Earth-orbit gravity, but bottom of the pool is covered in a mock lunar surface that makes the test environment look more like a sandy beach than an industrial pool, Space.com reports.

That lets the astronauts practice getting their footing in as realistic a scenario as possible. Astronauts have also been practicing using various tools, sampling the surface, climbing a ladder, and even planting a flag into the ground like Buzz Aldrin did in 1969.

Testing Tests

The underwater tests will not only evaluate the spacesuit, but also help NASA develop better and more specific tests for upcoming lunar missions, NASA extravehicular activity test lead Daren Walsh said in a press release.

“At the same time, we are going to be able to gather valuable feedback on spacewalk tools and procedures that will help inform some of the objectives for the missions,” Walsh added.

READ MORE: The xEMU represents the first new spacesuit that NASA has developed in over 40 years [Space.com]

More on spacesuits: Fashion Magazine Roasts SpaceX’s Dorky Space Suit

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Adidas, Lululemon Say They’ll Make Clothes Out of Mushroom Leather

A startup called Bolt Threads is using a special kind of fiber made from mycelium, the underpinning of mushrooms, to create

Mylo Ren

A startup called Bolt Threads is using a special kind of fiber made from mycelium, the thread-like roots of mushrooms, to create a vegan leather-like material called “Mylo,” The New York Times reports.

Some of the most prominent clothing brands in the world, including Adidas and Lululemon, announced that they will be partnering with Bolt, investing significant amounts of money in the company to eventually create hundreds of millions of square feet of the special material.

The first Mylo products are set to go on sale some time next year.

Time Bomb

According to Bolt CEO Dan Widmaier, it won’t just be one company producing the unusual material. “We had to convince these industry competitors that this was about tackling a bigger challenge together than any of them could solve alone,” he told the Times.

The fashion industry remains of the most polluting sectors in the world. By growing its material from mycelium, Bolt is hoping to offset some of this environmental impact.

“The truth is, this industry remains an environmental ticking time bomb and is full of outdated technologies,” he added.

Tanning Mushrooms

To make the stuff, Bolt grows mushroom roots over a bed of sawdust for ten days. The resulting web of mycelium can then be tanned, dyed, and finished like leather. The process, according to the company, is significantly faster — and greener — than raising cattle.

According to its makers, “it has a suppleness and warmth that genuinely feels natural,” as Jamie Bainbridge, Bolt’s vice president of product development, told NYT.

Now, the company is hoping interest from big brands will turn it into the fabric of the future.

READ MORE: Fungus May Be Fall’s Hottest Fashion Trend [The New York Times]

More on fashion: A New Battery Can Be Stitched Into Clothes to Power Wearables

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Elon Musk Just Dissed Russia’s New Reusable Rocket Design

Russia's space corporation just unveiled plans for its

Russia’s space corporation Roscosmos unveiled plans for its reusable “Amur rocket” this week — a design, planned to be completed by 2016, that borrows heavily from SpaceX’s Falcon 9, as Ars Technica‘s senior space reporter Eric Berger pointed out in a Monday tweet.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk quickly waded into the discourse, throwing some shade at the new design.

“It’s a step in the right direction, but they should really aim for full reusability by 2026,” Musk tweeted. “Larger rocket would also make sense for literal economies of scale. Goal should be to minimize cost per useful ton to orbit or it will at best serve a niche market.”

Russia has clearly decided that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em with its new design for a reusable booster. Alas, no flights until at least 2026 means it will be at least 15 years behind the Falcon 9. Russia is lucky SpaceX doesn't innovate, hah.
https://t.co/868cMPa3aO pic.twitter.com/NTWQSyfXRp

— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) October 5, 2020

Both rockets feature a set of grid fins on top and landing legs at the base. The overall shape of the fairing is also very familiar.

But they do differ in other aspects: the Amur is slimmer in diameter and uses five RD-169 engines instead of the nine Merlin engines on the Falcon 9. Amur will also be designed to burn methane for fuel, while the Falcon 9 uses both liquid oxygen and rocket-grade kerosene.

Just like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 first stages, Roscosmos is planning to collect first stages on a boat out at sea — sound familiar? — to later reuse them up to ten times.

SpaceX isn’t quite at ten reuses yet, but it’s made significant progress in reusing the first stages and fairings of its Falcon 9 rockets post launch. In August, SpaceX flew the same first stage for the sixth time, and it’s planning to fly the same first stage for the tenth time some time next year. By 2026, Musk’s tweet seems to imply, it will have vastly surpassed the Amur’s planned capabilities.

Rather than focusing on making the Falcon 9 entirely reusable — unlikely at this late stage — the company is betting on its next-generation Starship, which is designed from the ground up to be fully reusable.

SpaceX is now gearing up to start launching the massive Mars-bound rocket, likely what Musk was referencing with “larger rocket,” to a height of 12 miles. The first test flight to orbit is only a few years away, according to Musk.

Starship is designed to eventually carry up to 100 tons of cargo to orbit, dwarfing the Amur rocket’s planned max payload of 10.5 tons.

SpaceX and Roscosmos have had a rocky relationship. Musk and Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin haven’t been above taking pot shots at each other in the past.

Russia is hoping to start testing its rocket in 2026 — an eternity in terms of how quickly the industry has been progressing.

The space corporation is aiming at just $22 million per launch, for about 10.4 tons of cargo — a competitive price point. Developing the rocket is budgeted at just $900 million.

READ MORE: Russian space corporation unveils planned “Amur” rocket—and it looks familiar [Ars Technica]

More on Roscosmos: Russia Wants to Be the First to Shoot a Movie In Space

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Middle Schooler Builds Tiny, Working Fusion Reactor

With just hours left before he turned 13, Jackson Oswalt managed to fuse two deuterium atoms together in a fusion reactor he built — in his play room.

Jimmy Neutron

While nations are spending billions to build football field-sized nuclear fusion reactors — the elusive process of harnessing energy from fusing atoms, rather than breaking them apart — a 12 year old kid from Memphis, Tennessee, just became the youngest person to have ever achieved nuclear fusion, according to Guinness World Records.

With just hours left before he turned 13, Jackson Oswalt managed to fuse two deuterium atoms together in a fusion reactor he built — in his family’s house.

 

DIY Fusion

According to Jackson, he was the only person who worked on the reactor during both the design and production stages.

“The temperature in my fusor varies, but it’s approximately 100 million degrees [Kelvin],” Jackson said in the Guinness World Records video accompanying the announcement.

“I have been able to use electricity to accelerate two atoms of deuterium together so that they fuse together into an atom of helium 3 [isotope], which also releases a neutron which can be used to heat up water and turn a steam engine, which in turn produces electricity,” he explained in the video.

Jackson was inspired by Taylor Wilson, who was the previous record holder at the age of 14.

Some Reservations

Building a DIY fusion reactor — albeit not one that can generate more power than you put into it, a holy grail among energy researchers — is a challenging but achievable task with a thriving online community around it.

“There were a few moments during the project that I had some reservations,” Jackson’s mother admitted. “I would definitely be googling things before he turned on various stages.”

She also added that “he did a great job of explaining it to us.”

READ MORE: Middle school student achieved nuclear fusion in his family playroom [Guinness World Records]

More on fusion: Elon Musk: Fusion Will Probably Be More Expensive Than Wind, Solar

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Scientists Claim to Invent Hydrogel That Heals Nerve Damage

A new hydrogel, when implanted into rats and toads, worked like a bridge between damaged nerves and healed them faster than other techniques.

A team of doctors and engineers have developed a new hydrogel that they say might be able to repair nerve damage more quickly and reliably than any other methods.

The hydrogel is essentially a porous and water-saturated material that can stretch, bend, and — most importantly — propagate neural signals. In animal trials, the team of Nanjing University researchers found that the hydrogel restored lost bodily function and helped the animals heal faster, according to research published Wednesday in the journal ACS NANO. Now, they’re hoping the gel will work in human medicine as well.

When a nerve is damaged, the bioelectric signals sent to and from the brain can get blocked or lost along the way. That can lead to symptoms like pain, reduced motor function or numbness, depending on the location and severity of the injury.

As it stands, nerve damage can be tricky to treat and repair. In order to replace or repair the damaged nerve, doctors either take one from elsewhere in your body to use as a graft or implant an artificial nerve instead. But recovery can be slow and may require follow-up surgeries.

By contrast, the hydrogel restored functionality to rats and toads with nerve injuries in a matter of weeks, according to the research, though it hasn’t been tested on human patients yet.

That healing factor could be sped up even more, the doctors suggest, as the hydrogel becomes even better at conducting electricity when hit by infrared light, potentially making it even more effective as a substitute nerve.

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UK Pledges to Get 100% of Residential Power From Wind Turbines

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson says the country will power all homes with wind energy by 2030, but it might cost more than he's allocating.

Blown Away

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson just announced a plan to power every home in the country with wind energy by 2030.

It’s an ambitious project, and one that will require serious investments in new wind turbines over the next decade, Engadget reports. But if it works, it would be a major step forward in meeting the global carbon emissions goals laid out in the 2015 Paris agreement.

Ramping Up

Johnson announced that the U.K. would invest about £160 million ($207 million) that will go toward factories that would develop new turbines as well as floating offshore turbines themselves. In order to power every home in the U.K., those turbines would need to generate about 40 GW of power, Engadget reports. That’s four times the nation’s current wind energy output.

“Your kettle, your washing machine, your cooker, your heating, your plug-in electric vehicle, the whole lot of them will get their juice cleanly and without guilt from the breezes that blow around these islands,” Johnson announced at the U.K. Conservative party conference.

Reality Check

Unfortunately, a complete transition to wind power by 2030 might be more expensive than Johnson is anticipating. The independent research firm Aurora Energy Research predicts the project will actually cost £50 billion ($64.6 billion) and that the U.K. will need to install, on average, a new turbine every single weekday through the next decade.

Regardless, the U.K. may continue to announce more ambitious climate goals yet, the Financial Times reports, potentially including support for hydrogen transportation or even a ban on gas-burning cars.

READ MORE: The UK wants to power all homes with offshore wind by 2030 [Engadget]

More on wind energy: The UK Will Soon Be Home to the World’s Largest Offshore Wind Farm

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MIT Scientists Making Key Progress on Universal Flu Vaccine

A team of MIT scientists working on a universal flu vaccine, or a single inoculation that blocks all flu viruses, modeled a successful vaccination method.

MIT scientists just made important progress toward a universal flu vaccine — an inoculation against all influenza viruses at once.

When we’re vaccinated against a flu, our immune system generates antibodies that target a protein on the virus called hemagglutinin (HA). It turns out that the difference between a seasonal flu shot and a universal vaccine could be which part of the HA protein a vaccine targets: the head, which rapidly mutates to cause seasonal strains of the disease, or the stem, which is far more consistent among different flus.

In other words, a vaccine that targets the stem would be able to protect against a wide variety of flu viruses rather than a single mutation.

Unfortunately, the immune system targets that mutated head much more easily than it does the stem due to the geometry of the virus itself, according to the team’s research, which was published Wednesday in the journal Cell Systems. But now, the researchers’ models might have identified a workaround.

“We don’t understand the complete picture yet,” Daniel Lingwood, study coauthor and Harvard Medical School professor, said in a press release, “but for many reasons, the immune system is intrinsically not good at seeing the conserved parts of these proteins, which if effectively targeted would elicit an antibody response that would neutralize multiple influenza types.”

The research showed how antibodies that target the mutated head bind more strongly to their targets than those that attack the stem, so that’s what our immune system prioritizes. But by making a vaccine out of HA stems that are similar but not identical to strains a patient’s immune system has already seen, their immune system might shift focus and make more generalized antibodies instead — a hunch that was verified by preliminary research on mice.

“The reason we’re excited about this work is that it is a small step toward developing a flu shot that you just take once, or a few times, and the resulting antibody response is likely to protect against seasonal flu strains and pandemic strains as well,” study coauthor and MIT chemical engineer Arup Chakraborty said in the press release.

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This Swimming Squid Robot Looks Absolutely Amazing

A team of engineers at the University of California San Diego have built a squid robot that can propel itself through water just like the real thing.

Squidbot

A team of engineers at the University of California San Diego have built a squid robot that can propel itself through the water untethered, just like the real thing.

“Essentially, we recreated all the key features that squids use for high-speed swimming,” Michael T. Tolley, co-author of the paper published in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics last month.

“This is the first untethered robot that can generate jet pulses for rapid locomotion like the squid and can achieve these jet pulses by changing its body shape, which improves swimming efficiency,” he added.

Expand Contract

Squids are some of the fastest swimmers in the ocean world. They generate special water jets by sucking in and expelling water through contractions of a muscular sac to propel themselves through the water.

The robot carries its own power source and is made out of a soft acrylic polymer and a few rigid, 3D-printed parts. It can also be outfitted with sensors and a camera for exploring underwater worlds. The intent of soft robotics is to ensure that underwater life is protected from bumps and scrapes.

The team was even able to steer it around a large aquarium among live fish and coral. The next step is to improve the robot’s efficiency by reworking the nozzle that expels the water.

READ MORE: This ‘squidbot’ jets around and takes pics of coral and fish [UC San Diego]

More on underwater robots: A New Deep-Sea Robot Can Shape-Shift Into an Autonomous Submarine

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Leaked Tesla Memo: Angry Employee Sabotaged Part of Factory

In an email, a Tesla executive warned workers that an anonymous employee

Under Attack

In a leaked email, Tesla’s vice president of legal and acting general counsel Al Prescott warned workers that an anonymous employee “maliciously sabotaged” part of a factory last month, Bloomberg reports.

“Two weeks ago, our IT and InfoSec teams determined than [sic] an employee had maliciously sabotaged a part of the Factory,” Prescott wrote. Thanks to the team’s “quick actions,” he wrote, further damage was prevented with production “running smoothly again a few hours later.”

Aftermath

Once they were shown “irrefutable evidence, the employee confessed,” according to Prescott’s email. The employee was fired on the spot.

It’s still unclear what the employee’s act of sabotage amounted to.

Bloomberg reports that the local Fremont police department was not contacted or called for assistance.

Trend Piece

The news comes weeks after Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed his electric car company’s factory in Nevada was the victim of a Russian national cyberattack.

Musk was also recently embroiled in a lawsuit by former Tesla employee Martin Tripp, who allegedly violated trade secrets and computer crime laws. In June 2018, Musk emailed all of Tesla, accusing Tripp of being caught conducting “damaging sabotage to our operations.”

READ MORE: Tesla Alleges Act of Employee Sabotage in New Internal Email [Bloomberg]

More on Tesla: Tesla’s Roof Flies Off While Driving Home From Dealership

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Russia Says It Successfully Tested a Hypersonic Nuke

Russia says it successfully tested its Zircon, a hypersonic nuclear missile that can travel nine times the speed of sound, on Tuesday.

Test Launch

On Tuesday, the Russian military successfully launched a hypersonic nuclear missile.

The Zircon missile, The Associated Press reports, was launched from the White Sea off the coast of Russia and successfully hit its target farther north in the Barents Sea. With the successful launch, which Russian President Vladimir Putin described as a “big event” for Russia, it seems we’ve now entered the era of operational nuclear weapons that fly too quickly to block.

Cruise Control

Last December, Russia announced that the Avangard, a hypersonic launch vehicle that can fly 27 times the speed of sound and evade anti-missile systems, was fully operational.

The brief Russian announcement didn’t mention the Avangard by name, but assuming it was used in the launch, it would seem that there’s now tangible evidence that the world’s first of a new class of weapons working as described.

Victory Lap

For now, details remain scarce. But Putin said in 2019 that the Zircon could travel 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) at nine times the speed of sound, the AP reports.

“Equipping our Armed Forces — the army and the navy — with the latest, truly unparalleled weapon systems will certainly ensure the defense capability of our country in the long term,” Putin said Wednesday.

READ MORE: Russia reports successful test launch of hypersonic missile [The Associated Press]

More on hypersonic weapons: The US Plans to Track Hypersonic Missiles With 1,200 Satellites

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The Moon Might Be Littered With Ancient Shrapnel From Venus

Astronomers suggest checking the surface of the Moon for ancient rocks that could have been blasted away from Venus during asteroid strikes.

Blast Zone

The surface of the Moon may be covered in rocks that came from Venus — potentially making it easy to study our hellish planetary neighbor.

Billions of years ago, Yale astronomers theorize, asteroids and comets impacting Venus could have dislodged chunks of the planet’s surface and send them careening through the stars. If they did, CNET reports, then some of these Venusian meteorites may have made their way to Earth or the Moon, giving easier access to samples from a planet where recent findings suggest extraterrestrial life could possibly be hiding.

Bullseye

It’s fairly speculative work, which the authors concede in their research, which was accepted for publication into the Planetary Science Journal. But the two astronomers behind the work suggest it’s worth keeping an eye out, given the possibility of obtaining material from Venus without having to actually go there.

“The Moon offers safe keeping for these ancient rocks,” study coauthor Samuel Cabot said in a press release. “Anything from Venus that landed on Earth is probably buried very deep, due to geological activity. These rocks would be much better preserved on the Moon.”

The Assist

The researchers are counting on more than random luck. They argue that the Earth and Moon’s gravitational pulls would be more than enough to draw in the Venusian meteorites.

“An ancient fragment of Venus would contain a wealth of information,” coauthor Gregory Laughlin said in the release. “Venus’ history is closely tied to important topics in planetary science, including the past influx of asteroids and comets, atmospheric histories of the inner planets, and the abundance of liquid water.”

READ MORE: Bits of Venus may be lurking on the moon, scientists suggest [CNET]

More on Venus: Scientists Speculate About How Life on Venus Could Have Begun

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Nobel Prize Winner on Falling Into a Black Hole: “I Would Not Want To”

American astronomer Andrea Ghez just won this year's Nobel prize in physics for her groundbreaking work on black holes, only the fourth woman to do so.

American astronomer and University of California professor Andrea Ghez just won this year’s Nobel prize in physics for her groundbreaking work on black holes.

But Ghez, who’s only the fourth woman ever to receive the coveted prize, isn’t taking the award too seriously. When asked what would happen if one were to fall into a black hole, she had a grim answer.

“So if you were to think about falling into a black hole feet first, the first thing that would happen is that the pull of gravity is so much stronger in your feet than your head that you would actually be torn apart,” she told Agence France-Presse.

“We wouldn’t feel anything because we wouldn’t exist, we wouldn’t survive it, we would be broken down into our fundamental pieces,” she added. “I would not want to do this.”

Ghez shares the prize this year with Reinhard Genzel, astrophysicist and co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.

Ghez and her team recently celebrated 25 years of studying the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, called Sagittarius A*, using the Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Thanks to the telescope’s detailed resolution, her work enabled us to follow the orbits of stars circling the black hole despite a massive shroud of interstellar gas and dust blocking our view. Her research gave us the most robust evidence that what’s lurking at the center of our galaxy is a supermassive black hole.

“What Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel did was one of the coolest things ever — revealing stars in the center of our galaxy orbiting a black hole too small to see with a telescope,” Peter Fisher, professor and head of MIT’s Department of Physics, said in a statement.

Every day studying black holes, Ghez says, is a mind-bender.

“It’s very hard to conceptualize a black hole,” Ghez told AFP. “The laws of physics are so different near a black hole than here on Earth, that the things that we’re looking for, we don’t have an intuition for.”

READ MORE: Nobel-Prize Winning Black Hole Researcher Holds a Map of Stars in Her Mind [AFP]

More on Sagittarius A*: Astronomers Detect “Bullets” of Gas Shooting Out of Our Galactic Center

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Physicist: There Were Other Universes Before the Big Bang

Sir Roger Penrose, who just won a Nobel Prize for discovering black holes, says that our universe was neither the first to exist, nor will it be the last.

Universe 2.0

Before the Big Bang, when our universe began to rapidly expand, there may have been a previous universe whose place we took.

Sir Roger Penrose, a University of Oxford mathematician and physicist who just won the Nobel Prize for work in the field of black holes, suggested that our universe was not the first to exist, The Telegraph reports. And, he added, it won’t be the last either.

“The Big Bang was not the beginning,” Penrose said, according to the paper. “There was something before the Big Bang and that something is what we will have in our future.”

Hard Reboot

In Penrose’s view, a universe will continue to expand until all of its matter eventually decays. And then, in its place, a new one will begin.

“We have a universe that expands and expands, and all mass decays away, and in this crazy theory of mine, that remote future becomes the Big Bang of another aeon,” he said, according to The Telegraph.

Hawking Points

The proof of his idea are what Penrose calls Hawking Points: the corpses of black holes from before the Big Bang that outlived their own universes but are now at the end of their lifespans, leaking radiation as they fade into nothing.

“So our Big Bang began with something which was the remote future of a previous aeon and there would have been similar black holes evaporating away, via Hawking evaporation,” Penrose added, “and they would produce these points in the sky, that I call Hawking Points.”

READ MORE: An earlier universe existed before the Big Bang, and can still be observed today, says Nobel winner [The Telegraph]

More on Penrose: You Could Generate Power By Dangling Crap Into a Black Hole

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We Could Cut Energy use in Half and Still Give 10 Billion People “Decent” Lives

Research suggests that restructuring global society could grant every human on Earth a decent quality of life while cutting energy use to 1960s levels.

Global Rebalancing

While politicians reject climate initiatives like the Green New Deal for their aggressive ambition, it turns out that it’s within our means as a species to cut global greenhouse gas emissions in half — and still provide a pleasant quality of life to every human on Earth.

New research found that, if we fixed inefficiencies and structural inequalities in global society, 10 billion people could enjoy a “decent” quality of life while only using as much energy as much as we did back in the 1960s, Earther reports, all of which could be provided by renewables. In other words, the researchers claim that slowing climate change is both possible and feasible.

Shifting Priorities

For much of the world, this quality-of-life-rebalancing would be an improvement, according to the research, which was published Tuesday in the journal Global Environmental Change. But for wealthy nations and especially the U.S., it would mean living in smaller homes and eating vastly less meat.

“We still get Duolingo, we still get laptops and internet, you can still… watch TV,” study coauthor Julia Steinberger, a sustainability researcher at the University of Leeds and University of Lausanne, told Earther.

Cleaning Up

Such changes are possible, but Steinberger says they would take a major cultural shift away from rampant consumerism in developed nations.

“There may be lower working times because we’re not working more hours to create more stuff for ever-expanding markets or to consume more,” Steinberger told Earther. “There may be more time for families, for leisure, for the things that, for many people, are what really matter.”

READ MORE: We Can Use Less Energy and Still Have Good Lives [Gizmodo]

More on carbon emissions: The Richest One Percent Emits Twice as Much Carbon as Half the World

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China Reveals Rocket to Send Astronauts to Moon

China just showed off a rocket that could send astronauts to the Moon — but when is still a big question mark.

Crewed Space

China just showed off a rocket that could send astronauts to the Moon — but when that will happen is still a huge question mark.

The rocket features three massive stages, including a central core, reminiscent of the United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy and SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, as Space.com points out.

There’s little we know about the unnamed rocket so far. It’s designed to carry a 27 ton spacecraft into trans-lunar injection and will weigh three times as much as China’s current largest rocket, the Long March 5, on the launch pad.

Race to the Moon

It’s part of a larger global trend of renewed interest in exploring space beyond Earth’s orbit.

“The world is seeing a new wave of lunar exploration, crewed or uncrewed,” Zhou Yanfei, deputy general designer of China’s human spaceflight program, told Chinese media. “International cooperation projects in crewed lunar exploration are intertwined and influencing each other.”

While the country has been excelling at sending unmanned probes to the Moon in recent years, sending humans into trans-lunar orbit is an entirely different kettle of fish.

Baby Steps

We don’t know when China is aiming to launch such a rocket or when it will take on its first test flights. The country will also still need a lander, according to Zhou.

Before China is ready to take humans to the Moon, it will largely focus on establishing a presence in low-Earth orbit. The first components of the country’s space station are set to launch some time next year.

The country is also working on SpaceX Falcon-9 style rockets that are capable of vertical take off and landing.

READ MORE: China is building a new rocket to fly its astronauts on the moon [Space.com]

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Pharma Companies Never Agreed What Makes a “Successful” COVID-19 Vaccine Trial

Pharamceutical companies have different definitions of success for their COVID-19 vaccines, making it hard to tell if the first vaccine will be the best.

Each of the different pharmaceutical companies working toward a COVID-19 vaccine has a slightly different definition for success.

The differences are small, Wired reports, and the FDA will also have controls in place to make sure it doesn’t approve a vaccine that doesn’t actually work. But the discrepancy risks introducing new confusion and doubts over what it actually means to have a successful vaccine — and whether the first one to be deemed a “success” is actually the one that’ll help the most people.

A robust phase III clinical trial, the final stage of testing before the FDA can approve a new pharmaceutical, takes tens of thousands of participants. But the way the statistics work out, Wired reports, Pfizer could declare its trial a success even if six of its participants take the vaccine and still catch COVID-19.

That’s not a warning sign that the vaccine doesn’t work, per se, but rather suggests that it’s possible for a pharmaceutical company to declare victory without enough evidence to say the vaccine does work.

“What you’d like, in this very small number of events, going to the planetary population, is to have the most confidence you possibly can,” Eric Topol, a molecular medicine expert at the Scripps Research Institute who’s been serving as a watchdog for ongoing vaccine trials, told Wired. “That would be suppressing the worst events, sickness that requires a hospitalization and anything worse than that.”

“What if those 26 events are headaches and sore throats? Would that give you great confidence we have an effective vaccine? It sure wouldn’t give me confidence,” Topol added.

Thankfully, nine drugmakers pledged to not push their vaccines until they’ve completed a robust clinical trial despite President Trump’s push to grant them an emergency authorization before tests are complete.

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DARPA Is Considering a Nuclear Rocket for Moon Missions

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency just handed out a $14 million dollar contract to develop a nuclear thermal propulsion system in space.

Nuclear Thermal Propulsion

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) just handed out a $14 million dollar contract to develop and test a nuclear thermal space propulsion system (NTP), Space.com reports.

The concept is simple: an on-board reactor generates heat, which is then pushed through a nozzle to produce thrust.

The contract, to a company called Gryphon Technologies, is meant to support DARPA’s Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) program — essentially a project investigating whether the extreme temperatures produced by nuclear reactions can be used as a propulsion system.

Covering the Distance

“A successfully demonstrated NTP system will provide a leap-ahead in space propulsion capability, allowing agile and rapid transit over vast distances as compared to present propulsion approaches,” Gryphon chief engineer Tabitha Dodsonsaid in a statement.

According to DARPA, an NTP system offers both 10,000 times the thrust-to-weight ratio compared to electric propulsion and two to five times the efficiency of chemical propulsion.

The agency is hoping nuclear thermal propulsion will allow the US to keep up with “maintaining space domain awareness in cislunar space.”

Game Changer

NASA is eyeing a similar system for propelling its own spacecraft. Last year, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine called NTP a potential “game changer” for the agency, with the potential to revolutionize space travel and enable trips to and the eventual settlement on Mars.

Such a propulsion system could even allow for the generation of artificial gravity during such long trips through outer space, according to NASA research dating back to 2014, to address the health concerns surrounding long-term exposure to zero gravity.

READ MORE: US military eyes nuclear thermal rocket for missions in Earth-moon space [Space.com]

More on nuclear propulsion: Nuclear Propulsion Could Be ‘Game-Changer’ for Space Exploration

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New Website Lets You Help NASA Find Alien Worlds

NASA launched a new citizen science project called Planet Patrol that asks for the public to help identify new exoplanets.

Call for Help

NASA just launched a new citizen science project — it wants the public’s help to find and identify brand new exoplanets.

The newly-formed Planet Patrol asks volunteers to look over images taken by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), Space.com reports, in which NASA suspects but isn’t sure whether there’s a new exoplanet hidden away. That way, NASA scientists can focus their efforts instead of sorting through the mountain of data themselves

Human Touch

This is the sort of work that technically could be automated with an algorithm trained to spot new worlds, Space.com reports. But it turns out that in this case, there’s no substitute for human judgment.

“Automated methods of processing TESS data sometimes fail to catch imposters that look like exoplanets,” Veselin Kostov, the NASA researcher leading the Planet Patrol project, said in a press release. “The human eye is extremely good at spotting such imposters, and we need citizen scientists to help us distinguish between the lookalikes and genuine planets.”

Crowded Space

Planet Patrol isn’t the only citizen science project poring over TESS data for signs of exoplanets, Space.com reports. Another initiative, Planet Hunters TESS, is working toward the same goal but analyzing the data in a different way.

“We’re all swimming through the same sea of data, just using different strokes,” NASA citizen science officer Marc Kuchner said in the release.

READ MORE: Volunteers wanted: NASA’s Planet Patrol wants your help to find alien worlds [Space.com]

More on citizen science: Astronomers Call on Quarantined Citizens to Hunt for Galaxies

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Elon Musk: Fusion Will Probably Be More Expensive Than Wind, Solar

In a recent tweet, Elon Musk argued that fusion energy will probably be more expensive than wind and solar. Experts are divided.

On Tuesday, a team of MIT researchers made a big splash when they announced that their “SPARC” compact fusion reactor is “very likely to work.”

The announcement, detailed in seven papers penned by dozens of scientists from a laundry list of research institutions, claimed that the researchers were on a straight path to achieving fusion power — generating power from fusing atomic nuclei together like the Sun, rather than splitting them, like a nuclear power plant. The promise is a never-ending source of clean power without running the risk of a nuclear disaster.

Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk says he’s impressed by the research — with one major catch: the cost.

“It’s cool and for sure can and should be done,” he tweeted about the fusion research,”but I suspect its best case will be more costly than wind and solar (aka big fusion reactor in sky).”

Fusion energy has been the holy grail for energy generation for over half a century. While the science and technology surrounding reactor designs have come a long way, Musk is right that it remains an elusive dream.

Cost isn’t the only issue facing it. As of right now, it’s simply not viable yet.

Despite all that, the people working on the next generation of fusion reactors are undeterred. The SPARC team at MIT is hoping to get to the point where their reactor puts out ten times the amount of energy it consumes.

But as we’ve heard many times before, the technology is still well over a decade away — their goal is to start generating electricity starting in 2035.

And then, like Musk said, fusion energy could be a costly endeavor. The price of wind and solar energy have plummeted over the years, giving them a more-than-healthy head start over fusion.

Developing a functioning and efficient fusion reactor is also proving to be an extremely costly process. The ITER fusion power plant, soon to be the largest of its kind in the world, is an international collaboration with a sky-high price tag: a whopping $22 billion — a conservative estimate, critics say.

The US Department of Energy has long been skeptical of ITER’s plans. Congress confirmed it had approved a $115 million investment in 2016, but support for the project dwindled throughout president Donald Trump’s first term. Only $50 million were set aside by the Department of Energy this year — including for both national and international fusion energy research and development.

Despite the lack of enthusiasm for ITER, US lawmakers haven’t given up on solar [fusion?]. Earlier this month, the US House of Representatives approved a fusion energy commercialization program to support a burgeoning industry of private fusion startups.

The hope is to make fusion a reality through public-private partnerships — very much in the same vain as NASA’s collaboration with SpaceX and other contractors.

By scaling down operations — who needs a multi-billion dollar, football field-sized reactor? — some startups are hoping to come up with their own solutions in achieving fusion energy.

“Fusion is poised for a ‘SpaceX moment,'” CEO of startup General Fusion Christofer Mowry told NBC last year.

A 2018 paper explored what the economy of fusion energy could look like in the coming decades. While the costs strongly depend on what the exact designs of the fusion reactors look like, the electricity price could become comparable to that of solar and wind, the paper’s authors argue.

But it may not be a question of either or — fusion is perhaps more likely to be just part of the solution. According to a study commissioned by a British fusion power startup, fusion may be a way to make up for electricity shortfalls in the renewable energy sector.

In other words, wind and solar alone won’t be enough to meet demands and keep climate change in check. Fusion could help by replacing current power generation from coal and natural gas.

More on fusion: MIT Researchers Say Their Fusion Reactor Is “Very Likely to Work”

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NASA’s New Space Toilet Is Heading to the Space Station For, Uh, Tests

NASA is about to send a $23 million space toilet up to the International Space Station — its first new toilet in 30 years — for a test run.

Delivering Cargo

NASA is about to ship a major, long-overdue upgrade up to the International Space Station (ISS) to handle one of the less savory sides of space travel: a $23 million titanium space toilet.

The toilet, the first one NASA’s installed in 30 years, is apparently going to undergo a months-long, well, field test, according to the Associated Press. Aside from being an important renovation project, the toilet is expected to accommodate increased traffic to the ISS expected in the near future, as well as being designed to be more inclusive.

Splash Landing

The existing toilet on the ISS — which isn’t being removed — was largely designed for men. Because of its inaccessible design, using it is an unpleasant ordeal for women, the AP reports, which the new design is supposed to fix.

If it does, and all goes well with the test, the design will also be used on the Artemis missions that seek to send astronauts back to the Moon.

Free Floating

The new design is meant to be more comfortable and to prevent spills through an elaborate air suction system, according to the AP. Solid waste is sealed off until landing, and liquids are filtered into drinking and cleaning water.

“Cleaning up a mess is a big deal. We don’t want any misses or escapes,” project manager Melissa McKinley of the Johnson Space Center told the AP.

READ MORE: Potty training: NASA tests new $23M titanium space toilet [Associated Press]

More on waste management: NASA Says It Needs a New Space Toilet for the Artemis Moon Missions

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