Monthly Archives: May 2021

Posted on May 6, 2021By EditorJunior Residents

Taylor Richardson | Photo Credit: Renee Parenteau

At only 17 years old, Taylor Richardson has already impacted the local community, the country, the world. She aspires to someday impact space.

Taylor is determined to visit Mars. A little Black girl walking around in an astronauts suit saying she wants to go to Mars was a very lofty dream. But she is doing the work to try to ensure that, said her mother, Latonja Richardson.

Taylors service and advocacy work began when she was 9 years old when she built a Mars colony, a project that earned her a stay at Alabamas Space Camp where she was the only Black girl of 500 attending. There, she was given the nickname Astronaut StarBright.

Most people know her for her philanthropy skills. In the last three years, Taylor has raised almost $250,000 for girls empowerment and STEM resources for girls, particularly girls of color, not just nationally, but internationally as well, said Latonja.

Through my work, the legacy I want to leave behind is to bring a sisterhood of warriors with me all the way to the stars by disrupting the status quo where Black girls like me have equal representation at the table, Taylor said. And her intention is not only to benefit Black girls, but all girls.

Taylor launched The Black Friend Challenge, hoping to distribute 100 copies of the book The Black Friend by Frederick Joseph as a way to prompt dialogue to combat racism. So far, shes raised over $22,000, and all 21 Jacksonville public libraries now have the book available, as do over 30 states and 40 US Embassies.

In June 2019, Taylor was the first Black girl and the youngest ever to receive an Aspiring EVE award by The Florida Times-Union. Though she is still too young to vote, in summer 2019, Taylor helped 150 Jacksonville youth register to vote. She has been interviewed on national news shows along with celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Mae Jemison, the first African American woman to travel through space.

Taylor has spoken at conferences around the world to push #RepresentationMatters. She has graced the covers of two scholastic science magazines. She was voted 2017 Girl of the Year for Women in Aviation, being the first African American girl to do so. She is featured in two documentary films that are doing well in festivals across the country. She has her own Wikipedia page, and a list of other accomplishments too lengthy to print.

As a young child, Taylor was bullied due to the color of her skin and to her diagnosis of ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). She changed the acronym to Abundantly Different Happily Divine, trademarked that name, and now sells ADHD apparel. The proceeds she donates to a local ADHD foundation and to space initiatives.

Taylor has proven that labels of any sort need not hold anyone back from following their dreams and achieving their goals. What Im most proud about with Taylor is not her successes but how she has handled her failures, how she has handled being bullied, said Latonja.

Despite her early setbacks, Taylor is currently a junior at The Bolles School, maintaining a 3.8 GPA while attending virtual classes. Her next step is college; she wants to be a physician, a scientist, and an astronaut. Then, its to Mars.

Kids are not the future; we are here now. We are not going to change the world someday; we are already doing it, Taylor said.

Taylor Richardson, The Black Friend Challenge, The Bolles School

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Taylor Richardson is reaching for the stars - The Resident Community News Group, Inc. - The Resident Community News

Japanese startup ispace Inc. will deliver a lunar rover under development by the United Arab Emirates to the Moon next year in what will be the Arab worlds first lunar mission.

Under the contract recently announced by the Tokyo-based space company and the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre, Dubais governmental space agency, ispace will also provide communications and power during the journey to the moon and on its surface.

The UAEs rover will be loaded onto a lunar lander that ispace plans to launch from Florida in the United States using a rocket made by SpaceX, officially known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and founded by tech billionaire Elon Musk.

The Rashid rover, weighing 10 kilograms and measuring about 50 centimeters in length and width and 70 cm in height, will be transported in ispaces lander currently under development. The project will mark ispaces first space mission since its establishment in 2010.

We are very honored that MBRSC has selected ispace to play a key role for this historic moment, Takeshi Hakamada, CEO and founder of ispace, told an online news conference. Furthermore, we are very pleased to advance our collaboration between the UAE and Japan in space exploration.

If the mission succeeds, ispace could become the first private Japanese firm to land on the moon.

The company has also been chosen by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration to join its project to collect lunar regolith from the Moons surface as part of NASAs Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.

Adnan Al Rais, MBRSCs senior director in its Remote Sensing Department who also attended the news conference, said that his nation chose the Japanese firm as its partner because of their capability, strong team and their leading in this field.

The Middle Eastern country is seeking to diversify its oil-dependent industrial structure by expanding its space exploration program.

In February, its Hope probe successfully entered the orbit of Mars after being launched from Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture, southwestern Japan, last July. The UAE also has a project to build a human colony on Mars by 2117.

The upcoming lunar mission will represent a milestone in the UAEs space sector as it is expected to provide valuable scientific data and information crucial for the long-term Mars initiative, said Al Rais, who also oversees MBRSCs Mars 2117 program.

Currently, only the United States, Russia and China have succeeded in putting a spacecraft on the surface of the moon.

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Japanese startup to carry UAE lunar rover to the moon in 2022 - The Japan Times

Over 50 years have passed since man first landed on the Moon, a feat that has remained an enduring symbol of human progress and technological ingenuity ever since.

But in the 21st century, private aerospace companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic have thrown open the door to the real possibility of human beings becoming an interplanetary species.

Despite this centurys massive leaps in making space travel more affordable, there remain huge logistical challenges to making this dream a reality. Chief amongst these is the need to sustain spaceflight and extraterrestrial colonies with a locally-produced oxygen supply.

Oxygen is a hot commodity in space. It will be vital not only for potential human settlements to breathe, but also to enable the combustion processes needed to propel rockets to and from celestial bodies.

Nowadays, its often the case that 70 per cent of a rockets cargo consists of the oxygen needed to launch the spacecraft, which must be carried with it from Earth.

One of the main challenges is the extraordinary cost of sending anything from Earth to the Moon, Jonathan Geifman, the co-founder of Israeli company Project Helios, told Euronews.

His company is currently developing a system to extract and produce oxygen and metals from lunar soil.

It's estimated in the area of $1 million (832,951) per kilogram, so running the numbers, you can immediately understand that this is not sustainable economically. In the long run, we must be able to utilise and use resources on site, he added.

Project Helios, which is backed by the Israeli Energy Ministry and the Israel Space Agency (ISA), has developed an electrochemical reactor capable of extracting oxygen, metals and silicon from moon soil in order to enable the eventual establishment of a permanent lunar base.

And while getting humans to eventually establish a sustainable presence on the Moon is the aim of NASAs Artemis programme, which was launched in 2017, the ultimate prize is sending a crewed mission to Mars.

Its a goal that some, like Jeff Bezos, believe will not be possible without first establishing a lunar base.

If youre gonna need a lot of supplies and fuel and bulk materials to go to Mars, youre much better lifting them off the Moon than you are lifting them off the Earth, Bezos said in an interview at the JFK Space Summit in 2019.

Its an illusion that you can skip a step, he added. Skipping steps slows you down, its seductive but wrong.

In any case, sustaining life on the Moon or Mars will depend on the kind of technology that Project Helios is developing. So, how does the process work?

We are using a process called molten oxide electrolysis, said Geifman.

Just like electrolysing water [where] you split hydrogen from oxygen, we're trying to do the same thing with molten lunar soil.

This process will work pretty well on the Moon, on Earth and on Mars, Mars and actually probably any other planetary body or moon that has soil, sand or whatever on it.

While the company remains focused on their extraterrestrial ambitions, Geifman believes the technology they have developed could also be put to good use here on Earth.

He points to the high polluting arms trade as one example of an industry that could benefit from a more environmentally-sound method of metal production.

Working on these technologies immediately puts us in a completely different frame that allows us to think of new ways of developing technology that must be super efficient environmentally. he said.

When we produce oxygen out of the lunar surface, the by-product we get [is] iron, we get silicon, etc. we can use the same process here on Earth to produce iron. And instead of carbon dioxide as a by-product, we get oxygen instead of carbon dioxide.

According to Geifman, Project Helios won the support of the Israeli Ministry of Energy precisely because they see the potential for a terrestrial application of the technology they are developing.

The challenge facing it - as is often the case for young companies - is scaling up the processes. This is the main focus of their work at the moment.

But Geifman is hopeful about the timeline for Project Helios technology to be up and running on the Moon.

I think that the most optimistic scenario - stars will align in the sky and everything will be just perfect and the whole value chain will function and work - that would be 10 years, he told Euronews.

Thanks to the privatisation of the space industry, companies like SpaceX, it seems more reasonable than ever before. I mean, things are moving faster and faster. And I'm optimistic.

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Out of thin air: This company has found a way to produce oxygen from soil on the Moon - Euronews

Elon Musk's mission to populate Mars seems to be always on trend, even when nobody is particularly talking about it. It's been several years since the announcement of such an endeavour, and in 2020 we've seen some stories about the first space crew for this grand mission (even though nothing has been finalised). Once they will set foot on Mars, there's no turning backother crews in batches will likely join them, and then colonies, cities and civilisations will be formed on the Red Planet, and it will cease to be one of the lonely occupants of our universe, hanging around through the passage of time.

At least, that's the plan, but as we all might have guessed, landing humans on Mars isn't the only difficult part of the mission. Living there is a greater challenge. Mars is not Earth, it has its own identitythe arid world doesn't compare to the bearer of about 75 percent water on its surface. So, the real mission is making Mars habitable for humans.

The first colonisers will be given the task of turning Mars into an environment which can sustain life. Simply put, they need to "terraform" Mars, which means the Martian atmospheric conditions need to be manipulated to make them more like that of Earth, so that humans can live, breathe and reproduce freely.

Surely, that is not going to be an easy undertaking. However, Robert Zubrin, in his celebrated book The Case for Mars, is able to a put the subject in an optimistic light. His argument is that if Earth could be made into a self-sustainable planet, the same can be done to Mars.

In its infancy, Earth did not have any oxygen and was barren, much like Mars is now. Only due to the presence of photosynthetic organisms, which used carbon dioxide up and gave out oxygen, the composition of Earth's atmosphere had evolved, leading to the evolution of human beings. So, if the atmosphere of Mars can be manipulated to make it denser and warmer, theoretically it could also support life.

We understand what needs to be done, but how exactly can we go about making Mars hospitable to humans? The answer may lie in the reservoir of carbon dioxide present in the ice caps or under the soil surface on Mars. Carbon dioxide, among other things, is infamous for being a greenhouse gas and contributing to global warming on Earth. We may not want Earth to heat up as a result of global warming more than it has already, but frankly, Mars could use some greenhouse gases. Zubrin points out that the release of carbon dioxide, methane and the production of chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs could lead to a thicker Martian atmosphere, which will be able to trap heat and make Mars warmer.

To accomplish such a feat, Zubrin proposes some innovative solutions. The first, is using orbiting mirrors to direct heat towards specific areas in Mars' south pole. A temperature rise of five degrees (in Kelvins) would be able to cause the dry ice to evaporate, releasing carbon dioxide. The mirrors could also be used to melt the ice to form liquid water, which can be used in biological reactions. Another far-fetched idea is to build factories which can release halocarbons into the Martian atmosphere. However, setting up factories that can generate a substantial volume of the gases requires a substantial amount of money as well, which is why such a project does not seem feasible to the layman. The third solution is to contaminate Mars with photosynthetic microorganisms such as bacteria. This would lead to the release of ammonia and methane as waste products, which would contribute to the greenhouse effect.

If any of these ideas or even a combination of them can be realised on Mars, it could become less hostile for humans. However, if people dream of walking around Mars without special suits and masks, they need to come up with a plan for oxygenating the atmosphere. For this, simple organisms will not be enoughlarge volumes of oxygen are required to support advanced life forms. Genetically engineered plants that can carry out photosynthesis in harsh Martian conditions can provide a solution. The idea is to increase the volume of gases in the atmosphere bit by bit, and as it warms up it can support more advanced plant life. This goes on in a cycle that can be continued until the conditions are suitable for humans.

However, this process would take centuries if the plan is to terraform Mars completely. Instead, "Paraterraforming" can provide a solution for the moment. Here, domes can be built to form an enclosed space that humans can live in. Microbial reactions with the carbon rich Martian soil that can give off oxygen will occur in that restricted region, but out of that enclosed sphere, life would not be supported. The advantage here is that less time and resources will be used. Carrying such a project out is not impossible; in fact, a few years ago, scientists at a company called Techshot had successfully used microbes to create a self-sustaining ecosystem within a localised region that mimics Mars' harsh atmospheric conditions.

Theoretically, everything seems possible, and recent news about the conversion of carbon dioxide on Mars to oxygen by NASA's Perseverance rover is giving us hope that theories can be put to practice. At this point, landing a spacecraft on Mars with humans is a challenge, judging by the sheer amount of time it takes to complete the journey. The first humans to land on Mars will have to build the "biodomes" where further experiments can be carried out and crops can be grown under controlled conditions. Also, resources that are not readily available on Mars need to be made on Earth and imported to Mars. Are we going to be able to devote vast amounts of resources and time to such an endeavour? Will the money required for such a venture be better spent if we were to spend it on Earth? These are some of the questions that could be asked before we take on the challenge of turning Mars into another Earth. We need to keep in mind that the first step a human takes on Mars will be just thatthe first step. There is a long way to go from there, and it will be interesting to see how that story unfolds in the near future.

Protiti Rasnaha Kamal holds a BA in Neuroscience from Mount Holyoke college, USA. She can be reached at protitirasnaha@gmail.com.

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Will Mars ever be habitable? - The Daily Star

Back in 2014, Andy Weirs The Martian became a surprise hit novel, and then an inevitable hit Matt Damon movie. The story of a man accidentally abandoned on Mars and his fight to survive by sciencing the shit out of his impossible situation was immediately captivating. Weir followed this up with Artemis, about a mystery on a moon colony, and now hes back with an interstellar thriller, Project Hail Mary.

I went into this book a near-tabula rasa. All I knew was that it involved an interstellar journey by an astronaut on a last-ditch mission to save Earth. Now, heres the thingif you havent read the book, I recommend you go into it with as rasa a tabula as possible, because this sucker is so crammed with plot twists and reversals that the less you know the more fun its going to be.

To be clear, theyre not gratuitous plot twists. Much as he did in The Martian, Weir sets up a couple base problems and then works through them, inexorably. Sometime there are solutions, sometimes not, and sometimes the solutions breed new problems that need to be dealt with. You can practically hear him backing his main character, Ryland Grace, into new and more difficult corners, then asking, OK, how do I get him out of this? This is the fun of the book.

Without getting into details (for now), Project Hail Mary becomes three or four different books over the course of its plot. While it suffers from some clunky sections, and more exposition than it needs, its also an engaging thriller with some genuine heart and emotional heft. If you enjoyed The Martian and/or Artemis I think youll love it. But to really dig in, to paraphrase Mark Watney, Im gonna have to spoil the shit out of this. If you havent read it, you should bail out now.

For the rest of you, lets get spoilery:

SPOILERS AHOY!!!

Book #1: A Martian-esque survival thriller! This is probably the second strongest thread. As in The Martian, Weir sets his stakes very high and then ratchets them up to incredibly stressful levels. We learn very quickly that our Sun is dimming because of an alien element called Astrophage. This means that Earth is doomed to another Ice Agewith only about thirty years to prepare. Were pretty much fucked. To try to cope, all the Earths major governments band together for Project Hail Mary, studying the Sun, diagnosing the problem, and building a ship to try to solve it. One of the joys of the book is seeing everyone set their differences aside to work together as a species. As Grace travels into space, deals with the Astrophage, and tries to figure out ways to send life-saving info back to Earth, each solution he comes up with has drawbacks, risks, downsides, consequences. He almost dies, a lot.

Book #2: A surprisingly heartwarming First Contact story! Heres where those of you who have read the book are nodding at my decision to bury this under a spoiler line. I had no idea there were aliens in this sucker? Im just reading along, like, gosh, is Grace going to figure out the Astrophage? Will there be any way to get home, or is he really doomed? And then WHAM! Alien ship! Right there! And here again, Weir thinks of a problem: what if Grace has to handle First Contact, alone in space, with no backup, and no obvious way to communicate? How would a person work through that kind of stress? I loved watching Grace and the alien he comes to call Rocky gradually build communicationthough I do think it was a little too easy at some points. And I loved Rocky. But for me the element that really got to me was thinking about Rockys intense bravery. To be alone for as long as he was, see an alien ship, and make the terrifying choice to reach out to an alienespecially as Weir lets us learn about his intensely communal species, and just how lonely and terrified he must have been. I also appreciated the fact that this First Contact story casts the human as well-meaning but not always heroic, allowing the alien to be the real star of the show for sections of the book.

Book #3: The ongoing taxonomy of an alien species! Ryland Grace is the first person to meet an alien who is sentient by our definition of the term. He has to describe Rocky, work through how he thinks, eats, sleeps. He has to try to help him when hes injuredand his efforts are somewhat disastrous. He has to deduce ideas about Rockys planet, civilization, and cultural history. And Weir does all that, and gives us a bunch of worldbuilding of an alien civilization, through conversations and monologues between characters in a three-room spaceship.

Book #4: A story about Earth apocalypse! This one is, I would argue, considerably weaker. I never had a sense of how much time was spent on Project Hail Mary. While I liked Graces boss Stratt being a merciless hard ass who has to do an impossible job, I think more time could have been spent making her real and complicated, and showing her character rather than telling us about it via Graces snarky monologues. The catastrophe that face humanity was so enormous that I thought Weir needed to check in on it a bit more often, and with more in-scene action. For instance, the idea of an environmental scientist nuking Antarctica is terrifying, and I think spending more time on that, building up to that scene, would have been much more effective than the later monologue Weir gives to Stratt. Hearing her outline how much of a hell the Earth is about to become, and hearing her justify her attempts to give humanity a chance, was a fun twist on a classic villain speechbut it would have been far more powerful if we had seen more of Earths collapse along the way. Also, just the throwaway line that Stratt fully expects to live through Earths collapse in a prison cell after all the governments prosecute her for all the laws she brokein a way shes as doomed as Grace is, and I think playing with that more, and in more subtle way, would have served the story better and added to the tension in Book #5. Speaking of

Book #5: Both is and isnt the book I hoped we were getting! As soon as its clear that Grace has woken up with amnesia, and keeps talking about how much he wished he could remember leaving Earth, I began to suspect that the truth of his heroic mission was more complicated than he thought. I love that Weir went with Grace was literally drugged, kidnapped, and sent to his doom after saying no rather than heroic schoolteacher acts heroic. Its such a great thread to weave through, when even Rocky refers to both of them as good people because of their sacrifices, to have the rug pulled out from under Grace and the reader. I especially like the idea that here is a schoolteacher who could be seen as kind of a riff on (actually heroic) Christa McAuliffewe want to believe that this cool teacher is a renegade scientist who makes a huge sacrifice. Instead, Grace is a promising academic who fled his field rather than challenge himself. Hes a cool teacher, but he throws his kids under the bus and claims he needs to stay on Earth to teach them how to survive an apocalypse, which is absurd. He knows for months that hes coma resistant, but never discusses it with Stratt or offers to go. He jeopardizes the whole mission with his refusal to join, even though it will, at best, only buy him about a decade of increasingly shitty life on an unstable planet.

All of this is great. My one issue with it is that I think, again, Weir should have let Grace, and us, sit with that discovery for a while longer. Im personally pretty unsure of my own capacity for heroism, but I know that if Id spent a few months thinking I was a hero, while piecing my whole life together after amnesia, and then found out I was actually a coward who almost doomed my planet? Id be catatonic for a while.

But having said that, how great is it when Grace realizes exactly what he and Rocky did wrong, and how, even if he makes it back, Rockys doomed after all? The whole fantastic rollercoaster of Grace thinking hes a dead man walking, discovering he can go home after all, realizing that he was a coward but that now he gets to go home to a heros welcomeonly to realize that he has to actually make the heroic sacrifice to save Rocky and the Eridians?

Project Hail Mary is available from Ballantine Books

Leah Schnelbach might be coming around on the whole going to space idea. Come talk to them about interstellar travel on Twitter!

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Earth in the Balance: Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary - tor.com

I

f youve always harboured a yen to spot the innermost planet of the Solar System, then this is the month to tick it off your bucket list. Shy Mercury is putting on its best evening display of the year, and we even have a signpost to help you find it, in the shape of Venus, the brilliant Evening Star.

Look west after sunset and you cant miss glorious Venus. Wait until the sky gets almost dark, around 9pm, and youll spot another star above it, about ten times fainter. Thats your quarry. And you can rightly feel smug. Its rumoured that the sixteenth-century Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who said that the Sun rather than the Earth is the centre of the Solar System, wasnt able to observe Mercury because of the mists rising from the nearby River Vistula.

Even a powerful telescope isnt going to reveal much on this tiny planet, hardly larger than our Moon. Fortunately, its surface has been scanned in close-up by two visiting Nasa spacecraft, Mariner 10 and Messenger. They have revealed a barren surface, almost completely disfigured by craters of all sizes.

Mercury has scarcely any atmosphere. Its surface is blasted by solar radiation and by the Suns heat during the daytime, at least. The nightside is exposed to the total chill of space, so temperatures at the equator swing from 430C during the day 170C at the dead of night. Mercury rotates so slowly that its day from noon to noon is actually twice as long as its year.

Another oddity is Mercurys extreme density. Unlike the Earth, it cant be made mainly of rock. Instead, almost the whole planet consists of a huge iron core, with just a veneer of rocky crust over its surface. Astronomers dont why. According to one theory, most of the crust was stripped away by a giant cosmic impact early in the planets history. Or it may just have been born so close to the young Suns intense heat that rocks remained as a gas while iron condensed into a giant metallic blob.

Scientists hope to learn the answer when the European BepiColombo arrives in 2025 and slips into orbit around Mercury to investigate the planets remaining mysteries. Even more intriguing than its birth is that fact that, at its poles, this scorched planet has craters harbouring vast amounts of ice.

Yes, frozen water on the closest planet to the Sun! Its hidden in the depths of craters at Mercurys poles, where the Sun never rises and conditions are perpetually dark and cold. Astronomers first detected the ice in 1991, using powerful radar based on the Earth, and the Messenger spacecraft has revealed theres up to a trillion tonnes of ice, in places possibly 20m deep.

This discovery opens up the possibility of astronauts voyaging to the innermost planet, and living on Mercury. Theres water aplenty for drinking, and for growing crops in pressurised domes. More than that, colonists could use the power of the intense sunlight to split the water into oxygen for breathing, and to burn with hydrogen as a rocket fuel.

With Venus far too hot for habitation, and the outer planets so remote and cold, some space scientists are saying that after Mars Mercury is mankinds next natural home in space.

Whats up

The brilliant Evening Star, Venus, hangs low in the northwest as the sky grows dark, outshining all the stars.

As Ive mentioned above, near Venus you can locate Mercury. The innermost planet never strays far from the Sun in the sky and this month provides our best opportunity for seeing this elusive world in 2021: after Venus has set, we have the unusual treat of seeing Mercury so long after dusk that the sky is dark.

The night sky at around 11pm this month

(Nigel Henbest)

At the beginning of May, Mercury lies to the left of the famous Seven Sisters star cluster, the Pleiades. By 9 May, this little world has moved upwards and Venus is close to the Pleiades. Mars, shining a distinctive ochre hue, lies to the upper left of Mercury, and considerably fainter.

Were in for a lovely sight on 13-15 May, as the crescent Moon moves in turn past Venus, Mercury and Mars.

If youre up in the wee small hours, look out for the bright giant Jupiter and its fainter sibling Saturn, rising in the southeast around 3 am.

Well all certainly be looking towards the sky on the evening of 26 May, for the biggest and brightest full moon of the year. Its just 357,314km away from the Earth, and appears 30 per cent more brilliant than the faintest full moon. People around the Pacific Ocean will experience a total lunar eclipse.

Diary

9 May: Venus near the Pleiades

11 May, 7.59pm: new moon

13 May: Moon near Mercury and Venus

14 May: Moon between Mars and Mercury

15 May: Moon near Mars

16 May: Moon near Castor and Pollux

17 May: Mercury at greatest elongation east

19 May, 8.12pm: first quarter moon near Regulus

23 May: Moon near Spica

26 May, 12.14pm: full moon near Antares; supermoon; lunar eclipse

28 May: Mercury near Venus

Philips 2021 Stargazing (Philips 6.99) by Heather Couper and Nigel Henbest reveals everything thats going on in the sky this year

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Stargazing in May: Is there life on Mercury? - The Independent

Weve all heard the expression blockchain can change the world. But maybe thats not ambitious enough. Why stop at Planet Earth?

Because for its next magic trick, blockchain is going to space.

Maybe this shouldnt be surprising because the overlap in the Venn diagram of Crypto Bros and Space Heads rivals that of Crypto and Burning Man. These are very closely aligned groups, says George Pullen, co-author of Blockchain and The Space Economy. If you are a blockchain devotee, then you have willingly projected forward a vision of the future that 95% to 99% of your peers dont understand and dont get. Space is the same way.

The flashiest example is Elon Musk, whose tweets are a mix of SpaceX updates and jokes about dogecoin. And then theres Jeff Garzik, an early Bitcoin Core developer whos also the co-founder and CTO of SpaceChain, a project whose mission is to integrate space and blockchain technologies. Im a big sci-fi nerd, says Garzik, who has been hooked on space ever since his father took him to Cape Canaveral back in the 1980s to watch NASA shuttle launches.

George Pullen and Adam Back will appear at Consensus by CoinDesk, our virtual experience May 24-27. Registerhere.

Thanks largely to the private sectors surge of interest what some call Space Race 2.0 Garzik predicts that within 10 years well have Antarctica-style bases on the moon. Regular supply runs will keep these lunar bases stocked. A three-day journey to the moon will be pretty normal, he says. And once we have a true foothold on the moon its just another hop to Mars because the shuttles will no longer need to fight earths gravity or atmosphere. The moon in 10 [years], Mars in 20. Thats very realistic, says Garzik.

So how does blockchain fit into all of this? I am one of those first companies in the 1800s heading west, laying down railroad tracks, says Garzik. Blockchain is plumbing. Blockchain is infrastructure. To mix the metaphors a bit, if Antarctica-style bases are to be built on the moon, then well need the equivalent of cellphone towers to make those bases functional.

Every cellphone tower (or the space equivalent), every supply run to the moon, every launch of a satellite, and every video streamed from a Mars rover needs to be financed. In the glory days of the space race, that tab was paid for by NASA and the taxpayer. Today, the space economy is increasingly fueled by the private sector, and that capital doesnt come from just one person. (Sorry, Elon.) Not even billionaires want to write a check for a billion dollars, says Garzik, explaining that space innovation will require a complicated system of fundraising, cooperation across multiple parties (who might not trust each other), and an alignment of economic incentives, which are all things at which blockchain is good.

No dollar can survive the vacuum of space. No ones taking dollars in space.

SpaceChains network of smart contracts (using Ethereum) is designed to let multiple parties potentially in adversarial countries conduct transactions in that classic trustless feature of blockchain. Blockchain is kind of a neutral referee between multiple parties, says Garzik. Thats the key concept that I like to worm into peoples brains.

Space Race 2.0, says Pullen, might be less of a race than we think. We keep seeing a narrative of Space Race 2.0, with people asking, is it going to be the U.S., China or Russia? Thats a story that makes people click but Space Race 2.0 is probably going to be a relay race, with people passing the baton back and forth, he says, as the sprawling challenges will create a sharing economy. And the best way to set up a sharing economy is with blockchain. And then, if we succeed in setting up colonies in space? They will need a currency. No dollar can survive the vacuum of space, says Pullen. No ones taking dollars in space. Bitcoin or pick your favorite cryptocurrency could be the logical solution.

Then theres the flip side to this coin. While SpaceChain uses blockchain technology to advance space exploration, others are using space to improve blockchain technology. This brings us to Blockstream. Founded by longtime cypherpunk Adam Back (inventor of Hashcash, a precursor to Bitcoin), Blockstreams network of satellites allows anyone, anywhere on the planet, to transact in bitcoin. No internet required.

Those new to bitcoin often ask the question, What happens if the internet goes down? After all, outages happen. Equipment can malfunction. So if the internet breaks? Theres a Bitcoin satellite network broadcasting the bitcoin blockchain that continues to work, even when large parts of the internet are damaged and offline, says Back. Or lets imagine a nation with political strife, where an authoritarian government muzzles the internet. In this event, says Back, being able to transact with bitcoin could become of critical importance to pay for daily goods in a disrupted market, where card networks may cease to function, or to pay for emergency transport to a less dangerous locale.

Bitcoin-via-satellite offers a few other advantages. Blockstream Satellite brings bitcoin users more privacy as it is a passive, receive-only service, says Chris Cook, who heads up the Blockstream Satellite project. Unlike with the Bitcoin [peer-to-peer] network, there are no other peers that can discover your IP address and potentially geo-locate your house address via mapping services.

It could also improve energy consumption. Blockstream leverages its satellites for their own mining operations both as a backup connection to the Bitcoin network, and for remote areas where they cant connect to the internet. That could be a glimpse of the future. Blockstream eventually aims to launch a satellite-based mining service, which will let anyone run a mining farm in a remote location. We hope this will allow miners to access stranded and isolated energy that may be unused, or used inefficiently, says Cook. In theory, this could spark new investments in renewable energy. For example, if you have solar panels and a Blockstream satellite connection, you could mine bitcoin in the middle of the desert.

From the desert to the outer cosmos, its possible blockchain is ideally positioned to facilitate the new economics of space. One knock on blockchain is its a solution in search of a problem a way to create an idyllic financial model when the old one still kind of works, more or less. Banks have their flaws but the system is functional, or at least quasi-functional for many. But in outer space? Theres no economic model yet. In space there is, quite literally, a void.

Why couldnt that void be filled by blockchain? This could be, as Garzik puts it, science fiction becoming science fact.

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Consensus 2021: To Boldly Go Where Bitcoin Has Never Been - CoinDesk - CoinDesk