Daily Archives: September 8, 2021

The Below & Beyond DLC for Surviving Mars launched today on Steam. The DLC lets players explore and expand their colony into the caves and lava tubes of the Martian surface. Surviving Mars is a sci-fi builder about colonizing Mars and surviving the process. Mining resources and building structures are some of the many things players will have to do to ensure the survival and improvement of the Colony.

With the DLC, players will be able to go below the surface and mine resources, construct special rocket-propelled buildings, and find exotic minerals and data samples. Besides the new areas, players will now be able to unlock additional buildings, vehicles, upgrades, and locales. They will also be able to unlock asteroid mining and tunnel colonization.

The Surviving Mars Below & Beyond DLC brought some free updates for players, improving the UI, balancing some mechanics, and more, so players will have a better experience overall. If you want to read the full patch notes you can go to the official game website. There you will find all the information you need.

Surviving Mars is available now on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

- This article was updated on September 7th, 2021

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Any current review of Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space is inherently incomplete, since the five-part Netflix docuseries is aiming to debut in real time alongside the event its depicting: the Sept. 15 launch of SpaceXs Inspiration4, which will be the first all-civilian flight to orbit the Eartha feat itll accomplish multiple times during its three-day journey, at speeds of 17,500 mph and at a height greater than that of the International Space Station. Consequently, the only episodes available to press at the moment are its first two prologue installments (premiering Sept. 6); chapters three and four will hit the streaming service on Sept. 13, and a feature-length finaledetailing the actual missionis set to land in late September, shortly after the Inspiration4 touches back down on Earth.

Those concluding segments will no doubt deliver up-close-and-personal footage from inside the Inspiration4 Crew Dragon capsule that will house its four amateur astronauts, who will be launched into space via a previously used Falcon 9 rocket. In its maiden passages, however, Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space is basically a long-winded promotional video crafted to stoke excitementand offer justificationsfor the endeavor, which just about everyone here touts as a history-making project that will help us get closer to answering the most profound questions about existence and serve as the first step in mankinds quest to become a multi-planetary species. Its an aggressive sales pitch masquerading as a typical Netflix non-fiction venture, helmed by The Last Dances Jason Hehir with all the dewy-eyed melodrama, swelling music, and rousing headshots that a 45-minute episode can contain.

Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space insistently pushes its message from the get-go. According to Times chief science editor Jeffrey Kluger, Inspiration4 is a hinge point in history, and will kick the doors open to space for the rest of us. Thats because, by sending non-professional astronauts into space, the undertaking will pave the way for more commercial flights, as well as further the goal of reaching deeper into the cosmos, where we might someday colonize distant worlds. This is a goal of dubious worth, but its one that Hehirs docuseries champions with a chin-held-high sort of confidence. At the same time, it also has SpaceX founder Elon Musk address the main criticism of the Inspiration4 flight, and similar ones recently spearheaded by Richard Branson and Jeff Bezosnamely, that these are joy-ride stunts designed to feed the egos of billionaires.

I think we should spend the vast majority of our resources solving problems on Earth. Like, 99 percent-plus of our economy should be dedicated to solving problems on Earth, says Musk in one of his few obligatory on-screen appearances. But I think maybe something like 1 percent, or less than 1 percent, could be applied to extending life beyond Earth. His motivation is colonizing Mars, and the exciting, inspiring future of multi-planetary habitation. After all, he proclaims, If life is just about problems, whats the point of living? In this context, Inspiration4 isnt just an expensive lark; its the next big pioneering phase in mankinds evolution, and thus deserving of the private investment required to make its Jetsons-style dreams a reality.

Musks brief comments aside, however, Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space does very little to take a critical look at this enterprise. At least in its initial pair of installments, the docuseries plays like a PR product, casting everything in glowing terms, including its portraits of the missions four astronauts. That group is led by Jared Isaacman, a billionaire whose history of entrepreneurship, risk-taking and fighter jet-piloting made him the ideal driving force behind Inspiration4. Isaacman is an amiable and eloquent guy whose every comment is tailor-made to hit on a particular talking point and, as he explains, a guiding motivation behind his SpaceX relationship was an initiative he developed with St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital to raise $200 million for cancer research. Putting his money where his mouth is, hes already given his own, separate $100 million donation to the organization.

St. Jude also provided Inspiration4 with two of its passengers: Hayley Arceneaux, a pediatric cancer survivor and current St. Jude physicians assistant, and Christopher Sembroski, who won his ride by entering into a raffle promoted by SpaceXs Super Bowl commercial. The fourth crew member is Sian Proctor, a 51-year-old entrepreneur (whod previously trained for space flight) who earned her spot through a viral-video competition. Together, as Isaacman explains, they represent the four pillars of the Inspiration4 mission: Leadership (Isaacman), Hope (Arceneaux), Generosity (Sembroski), and Prosperity (Proctor). This is as cheesy as it sounds, like something produced for a marketing brochure and a press release. And though all four of these individuals seem genuinely thrilled about their opportunity, the docuseries vignettes on their backstories are as cornily handled as the scenes in which they announce to friends (in person, and via Zoom) that theyre going to spacemoments that awkwardly strain for astonishment and euphoria.

This is as cheesy as it sounds, like something produced for a marketing brochure and a press release.

One can imagine Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Spaces more timely later episodes supplying greater suspense. Yet in its early goingwhich involves repeatedly underlining SpaceXs connection to the history and ethos of the American space programthe entire affair mostly comes across as prepackaged corporate publicity. Some authentic emotion does occasionally sneak in, as with a brief snapshot of Sembroskis wife breaking down in nervous tears while visiting SpaceXs Cape Canaveral HQ to watch the Crew-2 flight take off in April 2021. Yet even the shows discussion about the dangers of space travelreplete with recaps of the 1986 and 2003 space shuttle disastersseem less interested in grappling with the cost/benefit of these missions than in raising the proceedings suspenseful dramatic stakes.

Those hazards are, of course, real, and theyll certainly be front-and-center as Inspiration4 makes its way from the planning stages to the launchpad. The notion that Netflix viewers will get a front-row seat for this journeybe it a triumph or a failureremains an intriguing prospect. Yet one hopes that, as its subjects enter orbit, Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space quiets down about its own importance, and lets its action speak for itself.

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Netflix Strokes Elon Musk's Otherworldly Ego With 'Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space' - The Daily Beast

The increasing frequency of both natural and man-made catastrophes such as worldwide pandemics and climate catastrophes has re-validated the urgency to establish humanity as a multi-planet species. Indeed, the founding ethos of Elon Musk's private spaceflight company SpaceX was to make life multi-planetary, partly motivated by existential threats such as large asteroid strikes capable of wiping out life on our planet. However, one of the biggest challenges to making this dream a reality is how to get to distant stars and planets within a human lifetime.

Consider that with conventional fuel rockets, it takes about seven months just to get to Mars, and a ridiculous 80,000 years to get to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, using our fastest rockets. This means that ordinary rockets are simply out of the question for interstellar travel, and something a little bit more out there is needed.

Luckily, we might now have the answer to this space travel conundrum.

Once the exclusive province of science fiction films, space colonization has been moving closer to becoming a reality thanks to major advances in astronautics and astrophysics; rocket propulsion and design, robotics and medicine. Trekkies, along with the otherworldly technology featured in the Star Trek series, have helped define the science fiction universe. One of the most mind-boggling of these technologies from those shows is the "Impulse Drive," a propulsion system used on the spaceships of many species to get across the galaxy in amazingly short timeframes measured in months or a few years rather than centuries or millennia.

And now scientists have unveiled the Holy Grail of Space Travel: A real-life Impulse Drive system able to achieve sub-light velocities using zero fuel propellants. After 30 years of tinkering and fine-tuning, a pair of scientists might finally be close to turning science fiction into science fact.

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And, NASA is taking the idea seriously.

MEGA Drive

Conventional spaceships burn rocket fuel to achieve escape velocities, maneuver, and even land, in the case of SpaceX rockets. But what if you could build a spaceship that runs entirely on electricity?

That's exactly what the Mach Effect Gravity Assist (MEGA) drive does.

Jim Woodward, a physics professor emeritus at California State University, Fullerton, and Hal Fearn, a physicist at Fullerton, have developed the Mach Effect Gravity Assist (MEGA) Drive propulsion based on what they say is peer-reviewed, technically credible physics.

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With the help of a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant, the two scientists have developed MEGA Drive based on the physics described in Einstein's theory of relativity. MEGA Drive--which is showing excellent promise in early testing and is already in phase two testing--is pretty much the holy grail of space travel and space science because it could power not only local travel within our solar system, but also interstellar travel that is currently undoable using available technologies.

So, how does MEGA Drive work?

It's a well-known Newtonian law that an object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion at a constant speed unless an external force acts on it. All objects resist changes to their state of motion or rest due to inertia.

In 1872, Austrian physicist Ernst Mach made a conjecture that these forces of inertia result from the gravity of objects in the distant universe. This became known as the controversial Mach's principle. While most experts have now dismissed it, Woodward and Fearn think the idea is simply misunderstood and have built their impulse engine based on it.

The MEGA Drive applies the Mach principle. There are several textbook definitions of the Mach principle; however, the two scientists think of it as the ability of distant matter to influence things up close. To get your head around it, they use this old analogy of how matter bends space-time.

If you put a heavy object on a trampoline, it falls in and curves the rubber sheet. Now, if you roll a ball on the trampoline, it will keep orbiting the heavy mass in the center. That's how a planet behaves when it's attracted by the gravity of a star. The thing is, for the rubber sheet to act that way, it has to be stretched or under tension. So these scientists are basically saying that the distant matter of the universe is what's pulling the space-time and making it taut and causing it to act like a stretched rubber sheet loaded with potential energy. And according to the team's understanding of the Mach principle, so is space-time, meaning they think there's a big gravitational potential out there, and the MEGA Drive can actually tap into that potential energy.

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The MEGA Drive works by making a stack of piezoelectric crystals alternately heavier and lighter by applying electric current to them. Actually, this is not some kind of New Age healing crystals; piezoelectric crystals do expand and contract under the influence of electricity, essentially interacting with what Einstein says are universal inertial fields in the universe, caused by gravity. By making an object heavier one instant and lighter the next, you can create thrust by using the very same Newtonian every-reaction-causes-an-equal-and-opposite-reaction principle used by rocket engines by throwing matter behind them to move forward.

MEGA Drive's main kicker: Unlike a conventional rocket that ejects burnt gases to create thrust, the MEGA Drive does not permanently lose its energy-producing crystals by actually throwing them away; You simply push them when heavy, and pull them back when light, thus creatingmomentum to move forward.

"If you now have a double frequency mechanical oscillation, you can push on it when it's more massive and pull it back when it's less massive. You've got propelling, but you don't have to throw it over and say goodbye. You get to throw it over when it's more massive and then because of this interaction with this inertial gravitational field, you can let it become less massive and then pull it back in," says Woodward.

Woodward says each Mach Effect drive unit can generate about a hundred millinewtons of force. As currently built, the Mach Effect engines are six-centimeter cubes just over two inches per side. By making them more efficient, Woodward says you'd get more power from each. And, by stacking as many of them as you want on your ship, you can generate enough forward momentum to power your ship.

Then it's just a question of how much electricity you can feed the drives, with a nuclear power plant mooted as a possible source of electricity.

According to Woodward, you can generate ~10 newtons of force for every kilowatt of electricity fed into the Mach Effect engines. Early applications would be in satellites used in chemical rockets to maintain orbits and alignment with the engines fueled by electricity, vastly extending their useful lifespans. Indeed, in this case, solar panels could provide all the necessary energy to power the drives.

Another interesting finding: The team has calculated that the smaller the device, the larger the force it can generate. So instead of scaling up, they hope that arrays of thousands of tiny MEGA Drives powered by a nuclear battery could one day be deployed to accelerate large probes into interstellar space. Indeed, the scientists claim that the drives are sufficient to power a human-crewed starship to nearby stars such as Proxima Centauri located some 4.25 light-years away from the sun and back in some reasonable fraction of the human lifetime.

That sounds pretty futuristic, of course, and relies on peer review and replication of Woodward's results. To be clear, it will take a healthy dose of dogged persistence to replicate Woodward's feat. Indeed, Mike McDonald, an aerospace engineer at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory contracted by NASA to verify Woodward's work, gives it a rather unnerving 1 in 10 to a 1 in 10 million chance --but it's a shot, nevertheless.

And if MEGA Drive proves viable, it will become one of the rare instances when science fiction is vindicated and transformed into scientific fact.

By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com

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Water is one of the most valuable resources when it comes to survival and in order to find a permanent human presence on the Moon, water is one of the most important resources. Humans need water to drink, to wash, to bathe, and everything that we do here on Earth. This mission is very crucial for NASA as it plans to make exoplanetary colonization a reality. The Artemis program is NASAs effort to find a permanent human presence on the Moon, as noted in a report by Engadget which simply means that we could soon be living on the Moon but that plan is way ahead in the future and this mission by NASA is very crucial in taking that first step.

NASAs scientists and researchers are planning to send the first lunar rover on Moons South Pole in search of water i.e., dihydrogen-monoxide deposits. Humans already know that there is a lot of water on the moon, especially in its north and south poles but it isnt in liquid form, as we already expect. Thus, this mission is set out to find water in different states of matter with hydrogen molecules as the most crucial element.

NASA has previously conducted multiple missions on the Moon including SOFIA, Prospector, LCROSS, and articulating the combined knowledge from these missions, scientists know that there are millions of gallons of water on the Moons surface combined with regolith which is the Moons soil or Moondust.

Now, scientists know that there is water on the Moon but are not sure about the distribution of water on the Moons surface, the form in which water will be available, and where exactly to look for water and this is why NASA is conducting its VIPER Mission (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) which is set course for 2023.

The VIPER, as it scouts over the Moons South Pole will use its NSS technology which is the Neutron Spectrometer System that will survey the regolith on the Moon in search for water molecules at depths up to 0.9 meters by considering and analyzing the energy losses at the molecular level, in cosmic rays that occur when hydrogen molecules strike, as mentioned in a report by Engadget. We already know one thing for sure, where there is hydrogen, there is water.

Anyhow, the VIPER Mission will not be NASAs first mission on the Moon, but it will be the organizations first autonomous mission on the Moon. As Engadget notes, the Moon has no atmosphere which makes the weather conditions extreme on the surface. If it is hot, it is too hot, and of if it is cold, it is too cold, and preparing the Lunar Rovers for such extreme conditions is a task for NASA.

Another challenge is regolith, the Moons electrostatically charged soil that can either pile up to be a mountain for NASAs VIPER or bury the rover deep into the surface. NASA notes that in order to prepare its lunar rover for the same, the team has programmed it to swim.

VIPER is being prepared for any extreme conditions that the rover might face on the Moon. NASA has confirmed that VIPER will not be running blind on the Moons surface and the space research organization is working on the production of a lunar road map that will ensure to guide the rover all the way up to the South pole. As mentioned in a report by Engadget, NASA is said to use its open-source Stereo Pipeline software tool along with its Pleiades supercomputer to assemble all the images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter using photoclinometry. The use of these technologies combined will help the VIPER to avoid pitfalls and other challenges such as craters on the lunar surface.

Furthermore, the VIPER is said to be installed with NASAs rocker-bogie suspension system. It will be powered with solar energy and will be able to move in any direction at any point in time, independent of where the rover is pointed at. Each of the four wheels of the VIPER lunar rover will have the capability to be steered independently.

This mission is fairly crucial for NASA as it will allow the scientists to study the Moons surface primarily to find water but much more. The study of Moondust a.k.a. regolith will be very significant in this mission. The VIPER Mission could be mans first step towards finding exoplanetary colonization and could be a major contributor to NASAs Artemis Mission.

What do you think, can humans imagine a life on the Moon? I think it can be a possibility in the future but not anytime soon, there is a lot more to know about our natural satellite before we can go live on it.

In another mission, NASA is also planning to launch a rocket on the Moon to bring back Moondust to Earth in order to test the soils endurance and capabilities, if it can be used for construction purposes. NASA is working tirelessly to bring the future to us and very soon, we could be living and colonizing Mars, the Moon, and maybe some other exoplanet.

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NASA will send its lunar rover to find water on the Moon in 2023 - Techstory