Category Archives: Space Travel

After traveling to all 193 United Nation-recognized countries, UNC professor Jim Kitchen has his sights set on the final frontier space.

Kitchens journey to all the countries in the world began over 30 years ago, when started his travel business as a student at UNC in Chapel Hill.

I never said no to a trip that came across my desk, Kitchen told 97.9 The Hills Aaron Keck.

His job took him all over the world and Kitchen said when he finally sat down to look at a map, he had about 100 countries left to travel to. The next years were spent completing the map, traveling to a half-dozen countries at a time. His journey was finally completed in 2019 when Kitchen traveled to Syria.

I had planned to finish it somewhere glamorous or somewhere where the family and friends could go and celebrate, but it ended up being in Syria when Lebanon was in full revolution. So it was a fitting end to that global expedition.

With all 193 countries down, Kitchen has his sights set on space through the Inspiration 4 Contest.

The contest was started by Jared Isaacman billionare and CEO for the payment processor company Shift4 Payment and will send four private citizens to low-Earth orbit via a SpaceX flight. Two of the four crew have been chosen: Isaacman and29-year-oldphysician Hayley Arceneaux.

The final two seats on the trip have yet to be selected. One of the seats will be chosen via social media the category that Kitchen is vying for.

For Kitchen, a trip to space would complete the journey he began years ago at UNC.

Funny enough, my junior year in college prior to starting my travel business, I met a guy that was selling space travel, he said. So I flew out to Seattle, Washington, met with him, and I started selling his trips called Project Space Voyage back in 1985. So I began my entrepreneurial journey selling space travel, started this travel business, went to every country, and now my dream is to see it all from space.

In addition to his potential journey to space, Kitchen is publishing a book that details the lessons hes learned from his years of travel. Kitchen said he never planned to publish A Bigger World, but found time during the pandemic to organize all of his notes.

During the pandemic, I had all of these lessons that I had learned along the way and I began organizing them into this book. Really, the story is about a guy trying to figure his life out.

Want to help Kitchen get to space? Hes competing against some of the biggest influencers on social media and needs retweets on his tweet (posted above). Liking and retweeting Kitchens post goes a long way in helping him get to space.

The odds are stacked against me, Kitchen said, but Im optimistic that maybe the story will shine through.

Jim Kitchen is a co-owner of Chapel Hill Media Group, which owns 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com.

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UNC Professor Jim Kitchen Aims to Get to Space. Here's How You Can Help - Chapelboro.com

LOS ANGELES, CA, March 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NewMediaWire -- US Nuclear (OTCQB: UCLE) and MIFTIs fusion power generator would be ideal to power spaceship propulsion, as its nuclear fusion power uses a lightweight, safe, and low-cost fuel, generating four times as much energy as nuclear fission, and 10,000,000 times as much as chemical rocket fuels.

On February 18, 2021, NASAs advanced Perseverance rover touched down on Mars and is now seeking evidence of native life on the red planet. Sooner than you think, human engineers and adventurers may be building the first town on Mars. While we have made great strides in robotics technology, the next step in the journey is sending humans to Mars. In order to send a crewed mission to Mars, NASA is focusing on nuclear electric or nuclear thermal propulsion systems for minimizing the time and fuel it takes to travel to Mars and back.

Jim Reuter, associate administrator of NASAs Space Technology Mission Directorate, said NASA is investing in technologies that could enable crewed missions to Mars, and looks forward to seeing what innovations industry offer in nuclear propulsion. NASA released a solicitation on February 12, 2021 asking the industry for preliminary reactor design concepts for a nuclear thermal propulsion system. Technology development has already begun for sending a crewed mission to Mars as early as the 2030s.

Nuclear power propulsion would allow the crewed mission to be completed with much less fuel and in a shorter time frame. NASA said that to keep the round-trip crewed mission duration to about two years, at a minimum, NASA is looking at nuclear-enabled transportation systems to facilitate shorter-stay surface missions. Nuclear fuels and power systems, such as the MIFTI fusion power generator, can deliver 10,000,000 times the work (or energy) per payload pound than the chemical rocket fuels traditionally used.

Nuclear fusion can be used for both thermal nuclear propulsion and electric nuclear propulsion, and it is estimated that it would only take 3 months to reach Mars using a fusion powered propulsion system. In addition, the fuel for fusion power can be generated anywhere there is water or ice, and unlike fission, is not dependent on the ready supply of enriched Uranium. Thermal nuclear propulsion gives high thrust and is especially important to shorten flight time for nearby missions to Venus, Mars, and the inner asteroid belt. Electric nuclear propulsion is high efficiency but lower thrust, and can give continuous acceleration for many years without refueling, thus building up to incredible speeds for trips to Jupiter, Pluto, and even to other stars.

NASA goes on to say that nuclear propulsion can enable robust and efficient exploration beyond the Moon and it will continue to develop, test, and mature various propulsion technologies. US Nuclear and MIFTI are just a few years away from building the worlds first fusion power generator which could later be used to power space travel.

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/nuclear-propulsion-could-help-get-humans-to-mars-faster

Safe Harbor ActThis press release includes "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ from expectations, estimates and projections and, consequently, you should not rely on these forward looking statements as predictions of future events. Words such as "expect," "estimate," "project," "budget," "forecast," "anticipate," "intend," "plan," "may," "will," "could," "should," "believes," "predicts," "potential," "continue," and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements involve significant risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results to differ materially from the expected results.

Investors may find additional information regarding US Nuclear Corp. at the SEC website at http://www.sec.gov, or the companys website at http://www.usnuclearcorp.com

CONTACT:

US Nuclear Corp. (OTCQB: UCLE)

Robert I. Goldstein, President, CEO, and Chairman

Rachel Boulds, Chief Financial Officer

(818) 883 7043

Email: info@usnuclearcorp.com

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Think About Taking Your First US Nuclear Fusion Powered Trip to Mars and Back - GlobeNewswire

Why do the worlds two richest men want to get off the planet so badly?

Elon Musk of Tesla and Jeff Bezos of Amazon have more than $350 billion in combined wealth and preside over two of the most valuable companies ever created. But when theyre not innovating on Earth, they have been focusing their considerable brain power on bringing a multiplanetary human habitat to reality.

For Mr. Musk, its through his other company, SpaceX, which has become an ever bigger player in the private space-technology arena. On top of satellite launches and other rocket innovations, the company announced it will send its first all civilian crew into orbit at the end of the year, in a mission called Inspiration4. SpaceX has already carried NASA astronauts to the International Space Station and is planning to transport more, as well as private astronauts, for a high price.

Most ambitiously, Mr. Musk has said that SpaceX will land humans on Mars by 2026. To do that, the private company will use a chunk of the close to $3 billion including $850 million announced this week in a regulatory filing that it has raised over the last year to finance this herculean effort.

While Mr. Musk might not be the first human to go to the red planet, he once told me that he wanted to die there, joking, Just not on landing.

Mr. Bezos, who is stepping down as chief executive of Amazon this year, is expected to accelerate his space-travel efforts through his company Blue Origin, whose tag line reads, in part, Earth, in all its beauty, is just our starting place.

Mr. Bezos most extravagant notion, unveiled in 2019, is a vision of space colonies spinning cylinders floating out there with all kinds of environments.

These are very large structures, miles on end, and they hold a million people or more each, he said, noting they are intended to relieve the stress on Earth and help make it more livable.

Musk has said that SpaceX will land humans on Mars by 2026.

The two NASA missions delivered this week the kind of awe-inspiring moments that make one look up from the wretched news spewing out of our smartphones toward the stunning celestial beauty of the endless universe.

The first was the batch of images from amazing high-definition cameras on the Perseverance rover, a car-size autonomous vehicle that touched down in the Jezero Crater on Mars last week. The photographs are so sharp that you can zoom in close enough to look at the holes in the rocks on the surface and even get a pretty good sense of the dirt itself. The larger panorama is just as arresting, a desert scene that is breathtakingly alien while also feeling quite familiar.

I found myself staring at the scenes for an hour, marveling that I can see the details of an elegant wind-carved boulder from a distance of 133.6 million miles. The $2.7 billion Mars mission includes a search for signs of ancient Martian life, sample-collecting and the flight of a helicopter called Ingenuity.

But the imagery from Mars was quickly topped by an even older NASA mission to Jupiter by the Juno space probe, which entered the planets orbit in 2016. It did some very close fly-bys recently that are yielding perhaps the most stunning photos that weve ever seen of the planet.

Color-enhanced by citizen scientists from publicly available NASA data and images, the images show delicately swirling jet streams that look like a painting of quicksilver created by some space-faring artistic genius. I wish I could be riding on Juno myself to see up close the vast cyclones gather and the angry clouds seethe.

It was just a year ago that Juno sent back another image of Jupiter, looking like the best marble ever made, which NASA titled Massive Beauty.

Perhaps the fact that life on Earth feels so precarious at this moment explains, at least in part, why Mr. Bezos and Mr. Musk want to find ways to get off it.

But its important to keep in mind that these two men are just two voices among billions of earthlings. It is incumbent on the rest of us to take more control of how we are going to move into the brave new worlds beyond our own gem of a planet.

We have handed over so much of our fate to so few people over the last decades, especially when it comes to critical technology. As we take tentative steps toward leaving Earth, it feels like we are continuing to place too much of our trust in the hands of tech titans.

Think about it: We the people invented the internet, and the tech moguls pretty much own it. And we the people invented space travel, and it now looks as if the moguls could own that, too.

Lets hope not. NASA, and other government space agencies around the world, need our continued support to increase space exploration.

I get that we have enormous needs on this planet, and money put toward space travel could instead be spent on improving lives here on Earth. But the risk to our planet from climate change means we have to think much bigger.

Keep in mind a hidden message that NASA engineers put onto the descent parachute of the Perseverance rover. The colors on the chute were a binary code that translates into Dare mighty things.

Coming from across the vast and empty universe, it was a message not meant just for Mr. Bezos and Mr. Musk. It was actually meant for all of us.

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Why are Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the world's richest men, so interested in space? - Economic Times

TAHLEQUAH In 1958, a Cherokee woman from Los Altos, California, appeared on the television game show Whats My Line and stumped panelists who attempted to guess her occupation. They wondered what relation she had to rockets and missiles.

Mary Golda Ross became a national icon for Cherokees and women for her work as the first Native American aerospace engineer.

Ross was born in 1908 in Park Hill, and is the great-great granddaughter of Principal Chief John Ross. At 16, she was enrolled at Northeastern State Teachers College in Tahlequah. She graduated in 1928 with a mathematics degree and later taught math and science for a few years, according a National Museum of the American Indian Newservice article.

In 1938, she earned her masters degree in mathematics at the University of Northern Colorado, according to an Engineer Extraordinaire profile. At the same time, she was working as a girls advisor at a boarding school in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

While earning her masters degree, Ross studied the stars in astronomy classes, and in 1942, she put her skills to work and answered the call for a mathematician at Lockheed Aircraft Corporation in California in the midst of World War II, according to the NMAI.

At Lockheed, Ross started out consulting on projects for a new type of airplane called the P-38 Lightning fighter plane. As the war progressed and ended, Ross was asked to stay on as an engineer, taking extension courses at the University of California-Los Angeles to earn a professional certification in engineering, and studied mathematics for modern engineering, aeronautics and missile and celestial mechanics, according to the NMAI.

When the space race began, Ross became the first woman engineer among a team of 40 engineers to work in the top-secret Lockheed Skunk Works program in 1952.

It was this missiles system groups research that led to preliminary design concepts of interplanetary space travel, manned and unmanned earth-orbiting flights, and other state of the advances in aerospace development, states a Society of Women Engineers biography.

In a Lockheed recruitment campaign, her work was described as crucial to the Agena rocket project.

She established major technical and operational requirements, providing data critical to the spaceships design. The versatile Agena recorded a number of space flight firsts, and was an essential step in the Apollo program to land on the moon. It marked a critical leap for Americas space program. And for that, Lockheed and the nation owe much to Mary Ross and her fellow engineers, states a former Lockheed campaign.

Ross retired from Lockheed in 1973 and continued to be an inspiration even after her death in 2008, just a few months shy of her 100th birthday.

Mary Golda Ross embodies what our Cherokee people and culture are known for using your gifts and education in service to others, Cherokee author Traci Sorell said. She took her whole self into spaces occupied primarily by white men at the time transformed them. She paved the way for so many women and Native people in STEM fields because of that.

Sorell was inspired to write a book on Ross and her many achievements, weaving Cherokee values into the written biography.

If you read Marys last interviewshe refers to those values, her education and her aptitude in math as the reasons for her success as an aerospace engineer, Sorell said. Aerospace engineering wasnt even a major in college at the time. It was a developing field, and Mary was right there in the middle of all the groundbreaking work being done. I love that and find it so incredible.

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Mary Golda Ross: Mathematician, engineer and inspiration | Education | cherokeephoenix.org - Cherokee Phoenix

NASAs mathematician Katherine Johnson is one of the nations hidden treasures as are so many in the Black community.

READ MORE: Eye on Film: Taraji P. Henson And Octavia Spencer Talk Hidden Figures

She made history as one of the first Black women to work as a NASA scientist. Johnson was brilliant as it pertained to numbers and formulas and in 1961 she put the calculations together that enabled astronauts to go into space.

For better than 30 years, she used her math capabilities to transform the possibilities of space travel.

As a tribute to her meticulous and downright breathtaking work, a space station supply ship named after her launched into the International Space Station on February 20th, celebrating the 59th anniversary of John Glenns historic orbit around the Earth.

Johnsons role in this endeavor was crucial as she verified the numbers needed to make a launch possible. Its safe to say her numbers were pretty accurate.

Its our tradition to name each Cygnus after an individual whos played a pivotal role in human space flight, and Ms. Johnson was selected for her hand-written calculations that helped launch the first Americans into space, as well as her accomplishments in breaking the proverbial glass ceiling after glass ceiling as a Black woman said Frank DeMauro, Vice President and General Manager at Northrop Grumman.

Northrop Grumman named the NG-15 Cygnus spacecraft, the S.S. Katherine Johnson, in celebration of Black History Month.

RELATED: Eye on Film: Hidden Figures Producer Pharrell Williams

Johnson was born August 26, 2018, in White Sulphuric Springs, West Virginia. She displayed an incredible math skillset at a young age, which allowed her to take an ax Leto oath in her academic studies. She even enrolled in college early and took every math course available to her, while also receiving mentorship from multiple professors. NASA even says she was mentored by the third Black person to earn a Ph. D. in mathematics, professor W.W. Schiefellin Claytor.

In 1937, she graduated with a bachelors degree in Mathematics and French. She was just 18-years-old. Upon graduation, she followed in her mentors footsteps as a teacher. She landed a job as a teacher at a Black public school in Virginia. She then became the first Black woman to attend graduate school at West Virginia University in Morgantown.

The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) hired Johnson as a research mathematician in 1953. That organization became NASA in 1958. Her work was instrumental in Alan Shepards mission Freedom 7, John Glenns orbital mission, and Apollo 11s flight to the moon.

In 2015 President Obama awarded Johnson the countrys highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal Of Freedom. In 2016, the Hollywood film Hidden Figures her contributions as a NASA mathematician. Taraji P. Henson played the lead role of Katherine Johnson.

READ MORE: TSL Black History Month in Focus: Hidden Figures

Johnson passed on February 24, 2020, at age 101. She left the world with several quotes that highlight the keys to success and significance. We always have STEM with us. Some things will drop out the public eye and will go away, but there will always be science, engine and technology. And above all, there will always be mathematics.

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Space Shuttle Named After Hidden Figures Mathematician - The Shadow League

On Thursday 18th February, the world held its breath as NASAs science rover Perseverance made its perilous descent onto the Martian surface. After over seven months of flight, the rover, alongside the small robotic helicopter Ingenuity, successfully landed on Mars and began its mission to study the planets habitability. This spectacular achievement sparked a worldwide interest in space exploration and the opportunities for humans, with the topic trending across the internet. Now it begs the obvious question: what comes next?

Humans have been trying to understand space for millennia, and whilst the concept of dark matter and energy still present a great deal of unknowns, weve come an exceptionally long way. Against all odds, the Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin made humanitys space debut in 1961, and the decade became even more exciting when Apollo 11 touched down on the moon in 1969. Although humans have not been to the dusty surface, or anywhere beyond the outskirts of the Earth, since 1972, hope is not yet lost.

Now, billionaire entrepreneurs like Elon Musk bring forth the promise of rockets fit for human travel, and the SpaceX CEO has said he is highly confident that the company will have humans on the Red Planet by 2026. Speaking at an award show webcast in 2020, Musk expressed his hopes for the projects future: if we get lucky, maybe even four years. SpaceX faces competition however, with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Virgin boss Richard Branson also vying to make space the next business frontier, in what has been coined the billionaire space race.

The promise of commercial space continues to grow, with the Russian space agency Roscosmos partnership with Space Adventures to create a new tourist destination aboard the International Space Station (ISS). In a statement about the contract, Space Adventures CEO and Chairman, Eric Anderson, stated we look forward to continuing to work with Roscosmos in the pursuit of opening the space frontier for all. Russias grand scheme to return into the space tourism business also offers a $40 million, five-star orbital experience with a dizzying view of the Earth from the ISS, providing the epitome of a luxury holiday.

Though sending humans to space remains an intriguing prospect, the importance of exploratory rovers is forever increasing. NASAs Perseverance, alongside its study of Mars, is also equipped to collect rock and soil samples, and there is potential to return these samples to Earth for further analysis something that has never been done in the history of space exploration. The European Space Agency also has big plans: the JUICE Explorer is set to launch in 2022, on a mission to explore three moons of Jupiter, as well as the Gas Giant itself.

Aditi Hrisheekesh, an avid space enthusiast, voiced her anticipation about upcoming space missions. Theres so much out there that we didnt think wed be able to see and experience, but its really exciting about how now theres the possibility of exploring and maybe inhabiting these planets. She went on to say how it was mesmerising to look at photos from space and learn about the fascinating discoveries made by scientists.

Whilst these views are echoed by people around the world, the future of space travel is not quite so rose-tinted. The costs associated with these expeditions are astronomical (no pun intended!) and oftentimes the funds granted by governments cannot support the aspirations of space agencies. Perhaps this is the reason why the international space stage is becoming slowly dominated by billionaire-owned companies like SpaceX.

Financial problems are not the only ones on the list; many in the space flight community believe we shouldnt begin the countdown to Mars before we make it to the Moon again. They say it is only logical to ensure we have the technology and competencies for further deep space missions and that a research station on the Moon is a beneficial next step in our exploration of space. NASAs announcement of plans to send the first woman and next man back to the moon by 2024 may mean that this goal, and all future ones, arent so out of reach.

The prospects for space travel certainly are exhilarating and with the eyes of the world on space agencies, the anticipation is tangible. Perhaps in the future, space flights will be the norm, with the possibility of a Martian holiday on the horizon, but only time will tell.

Article by Aashi Shah

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Space: what comes next? by Aashi Shah, The Henrietta Barnett School - This is Local London

For many people, space travel is better contemplated than attempted. Its costly, dangerous and nonessential. There are more problems to solve down here than up there. Dream about the heavens by all means, but please skip the risky rocket trip into the unknown.

That view, its safe to say, is going nowhere. More than any time since the Cold War space race in the 1960s, this planet is gripped by a wide-open contest to study and sample this solar system and beyond. Space exploration is more popular than ever.

This country is the runaway leader by any measure. Its launched more satellites, astronauts and deep space probes than any other nation. American footprints are the only ones on the moon. The U.S. now contracts rocket launches to private firms using reusable boosters, and theres a line of eager Earthlings vying to buy tickets on space voyages.

But the rest of the pack is catching up. China landed a dirt-digging probe on the moon that retrieved soil. Japan landed another mission on an asteroid and brought back samples. Russia, which shocked the world with its Sputnik satellite in 1957, is also in the game. Israel and India have programs that are well along.

The next phase will be the most challenging. It may take years, but the U.S. wants to set up a base on the moon as a staging spot for a human mission to Mars. Building such a spaceport means long-term crews, extra fuel, and the technicalities of landings and liftoffs. Theres speculation about mining, industrial work and the complications that go with setting up on an unclaimed astral body.

Those are distant concerns for now.

Space travel is a near-weekly occurrence as spy satellites blast off, relief crews travel to and from the 20-year-old International Space Station, and communications hardware is sent aloft to help with driving instructions, radio stations and weather predictions. Space exploration is no longer a luxury or scientific preoccupation. Its an everyday part of life on the ground.

The scale of it all can be daunting and worrisome. Rivalries are a problem as the U.S., China and Russia fill the sky with satellites, some of them suspected of being weaponry that can fire at earthly targets and one another. The Open Space Treaty of 1967 barred nuclear weapons or territorial claims, but it lacks a way to settle disputes or limit militarization. Several tries to update the treaty have stalled.

If that sounds gloomy, consider the next step proposed by the Trump administration. In debuting the possible Mars mission, it invited other nations to take part. The military-flavored Space Force, which it also pushed, isnt the only feature of the departing presidency.

That mission, known as Artemis, could be the new feature of space exploration: multinational, cooperative and even less costly as expenses are shared. The first leg to the moon will feature a female astronaut stepping down to the powdery surface alongside a male.

These next steps bring up the familiar questions about risk and opportunity. Is it worth all the trouble to drive deeper into space? The first era of human exploration is giving way to another more intriguing one. The big questions remain: Is there life out there, how will humans handle an unknown frontier and what can space voyages teach a struggling home planet? The quest for answers all but guarantees that the space race will intensify.

This commentary is from The Chronicles editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters.

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Editorial: Space exploration is surging, as are Earthly rivalries - San Francisco Chronicle

A multistage rocket that lost and jettisoned mass as it moved faster and faster would be required to ... [+] reach speeds approaching the speed of light, like the Super Haas rocket shown here. You must either posses a super-efficient type of fuel or gather more fuel along your journey to achieve relativistic speeds. In theory, a ship with constant acceleration could take us farther into the Universe than anything else we've hitherto envisioned.

Right now, there are only three things limiting how far our spacecrafts can take us in the Universe: the resources we devote to it, the constraints of our existing technology, and the laws of physics. If we were willing to devote more resources to it as a society, we have the technological know-how right now to take human beings to any of the known planets or moons within the Solar System, but not to any objects in the Oort cloud or beyond. Crewed space travel to another star system, at least with the technology we have today, is still a dream for future generations.

But if we could develop superior technology nuclear-powered rockets, fusion technology, matter-antimatter annihilation, or even dark matter-based fuel the only limits would be the laws of physics. Sure, if physics works as we understand it today, traversable wormholes might not be in the cards. We might not be able to fold space or achieve warp drive. And the limitations of Einsteins relativity, preventing us from teleporting or traveling faster than light, might not ever be overcome. Even without invoking any new physics, wed be able to travel surprisingly far in the Universe, reaching any object presently less than 18 billion light-years away. Heres how wed get there.

This launch of the space shuttle Columbia in 1992 shows that acceleration isn't just instantaneous ... [+] for a rocket, but occurs over a long period of time spanning many minutes. The acceleration that someone on board this rocket would feel is downward: in the opposite direction of the rocket's acceleration.

When we take a look at conventional rockets that we launch from Earth, it surprises most people to learn that they barely accelerate more rapidly than gravity accelerates us here on Earth. If we were to jump or drop from a high altitude, Earths gravity would accelerate us towards our planets center at 9.8 m/s2 (32 ft/s2). For every second that passes by while were in free-fall, so long as we neglect outside forces like air resistance, our speed increases in the downward direction by an additional 9.8 m/s (32 ft/s).

The acceleration that we experience due to Earths gravity is known as 1g (pronounced one gee), which exerts a force on all objects equal to our mass times that acceleration: Newtons famous F = ma. What makes our rockets so special is not that they accelerate at approximately this rate, as many objects like cars, bullets, railguns, and even roller coasters frequently and easily surpass it. Rather, rockets are special because they sustain this acceleration for long periods of time in the same direction, enabling us to break the bonds of gravity and achieve escape velocity from Earth.

British astronaut Tim Peake is seen on a video screen transmitted from the International Space ... [+] Station. Peake trained for and ran a 42 kilometer (26.2 mile) marathon in space onboard the (ISS) in 2016, but still required significant amounts of time back on Earth until he could reliably walk again under his own power. (Henning Kaiser/picture alliance via Getty Images)

One of the greatest challenges facing human beings who wish to take long-term journeys in space is the biological effects of not having Earths gravity. Earths gravity is required for healthy development and maintenance of a human body, with our bodily functions literally failing us if we spend too long in space. Our bone densities drop; our musculature atrophies in significant ways; we experience space blindness; and even the International Space Station astronauts who are most diligent about doing hours of exercise a day for months are unable to support themselves for more than a few steps upon returning to Earth.

One way that challenge could be overcome is if we could sustain an acceleration of 1g not for a few minutes, propelling us into space, but continuously. A remarkable prediction of Einsteins relativity verified experimentally many times over is that all objects in the Universe can detect no difference between a constant acceleration and an acceleration due to gravity. If we could keep a spacecraft accelerating at 1g, there would be no physiological difference experienced by an astronaut on board that spacecraft as compared with a human in a stationary room on Earth.

The identical behavior of a ball falling to the floor in an accelerated rocket (left) and on Earth ... [+] (right) is a demonstration of Einstein's equivalence principle. Measuring the acceleration at a single point shows no difference between gravitational acceleration and other forms of acceleration, something that's been verified many times over.

It takes a leap of faith to presume that we might someday be able to achieve constant accelerations indefinitely, as that would necessitate having a limitless supply of fuel at our disposal. Even if we mastered matter-antimatter annihilation a 100% efficient reaction we are limited by the fuel we can bring on board, and wed quickly hit a point of diminishing returns: the more fuel you bring, the more fuel you need to accelerate not only your spacecraft, but all the remaining fuel thats on board as well.

Still, there are many hopes that we could gather material for fuel on our journey. Ideas have included using a magnetic field to scoop charged particles into a rockets path, providing particles and antiparticles that could then be annihilated for propulsion. If dark matter turns out to be a specific type of particle that happens to be its own antiparticle much like the common photon then simply collecting it and annihilating it, if we could master that type of manipulation, could successfully supply a traveling spacecraft with all the fuel it needs for constant acceleration.

When a particle-antiparticle pair meet, they annihilate and produce two photons. If the particle and ... [+] antiparticle are at rest, the photon energies will each be defined by E = mc^2, but if the particles are in motion, the photons produced must be more energetic so that the total energy is always conserved. Scooping up particles and antiparticles (or dark matter) while traveling through space could enable an intergalactic journey.

If it werent for Einsteins relativity, you might think that, with each second that passes by, youd simply increase your speed by another 9.8 m/s. If you started off at rest, it would only take you a little less than a year about 354 days to reach the speed of light: 299,792,458 m/s. Of course, thats a physical impossibility, as no massive object can ever reach, much less exceed, the speed of light.

The way this would play out, in practice, is that your speed would increase by 9.8 m/s with each second that goes by, at least, initially. As you began to get close to the speed of light, reaching what physicists call relativistic speeds (where the effects of Einsteins relativity become important), youd start to experience two of relativitys most famous effects: length contraction and time dilation.

One revolutionary aspect of relativistic motion, put forth by Einstein but previously built up by ... [+] Lorentz, Fitzgerald, and others, that rapidly moving objects appeared to contract in space and dilate in time. The faster you move relative to someone at rest, the greater your lengths appear to be contracted, while the more time appears to dilate for the outside world. This picture, of relativistic mechanics, replaced the old Newtonian view of classical mechanics, but also carries tremendous implications for theories that aren't relativistically invariant, like Newtonian gravity.

Length contraction simply means that, in the direction an object travels, all of the distances it views will appear to be compressed. The amount of that contraction is related to how close to the speed of light its moving. For someone at rest with respect to the fast-moving object, the object itself appears compressed. But for someone aboard the fast-moving object, whether a particle, train, or spacecraft, the cosmic distances theyre attempting to traverse will be whats contracted.

Because the speed of light is a constant for all observers, someone moving through space (relative to the stars, galaxies, etc.) at close to the speed of light will experience time passing more slowly, as well. The best illustration is to imagine a special kind of clock: one that bounces a single photon between two mirrors. If a second corresponds to one round-trip journey between the mirrors, a moving object will require more time for that journey to happen. From the perspective of someone at rest, time will appear to slow down significantly for the spacecraft the closer to the speed of light they get.

A light clock will appear to run different for observers moving at different relative speeds, but ... [+] this is due to the constancy of the speed of light. Einsteins law of special relativity governs how these time and distance transformations take place between different observers.

With the same, constant force applied, your speed would begin to asymptote: approaching, but never quite reaching, the speed of light. But the closer to that unreachable limit you get, with every extra percentage point as you go from 99% to 99.9% to 99.999% and so on, lengths contract and time dilates even more severely.

Of course, this is a bad plan. You dont want to be moving at 99.9999+% the speed of light when you arrive at your destination; you want to have slowed back down. So the smart plan would be to accelerate at 1g for the first half of your journey, then fire your thrusters in the opposite direction, decelerating at 1g for the second half. This way, when you reach your destination, you wont become the ultimate cosmic bug-on-a-windshield.

Adhering to this plan, over the first part of your journey, time passes almost at the same rate as it does for someone on Earth. If you traveled to the inner Oort cloud, it would take you about a year. If you then reversed course to return home, youd be back on Earth after about two years total. Someone on Earth would have seen more time elapse, but only by a few weeks.

But the farther you went, the more severe those differences would be. A journey to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star system to the Sun, would take about 4 years to reach, which is remarkable considering its 4.3 light-years away. The fact that lengths contract and time dilates means that you experience less time than the distance youre actually traversing would indicate. Someone back home on Earth, meanwhile, would age about an extra full year over that same journey.

The stars Alpha Centauri (upper left) including A and B, are part of the same trinary star system as ... [+] Proxima Centauri (circled). These are the three nearest stars to Earth, and they're located between 4.2 and 4.4 light-years away. From the point of view of a relativistic traveler, fewer than 4 years would pass on a journey to any of these stars.

The brightest star in Earths sky today, Sirius, is located about 8.6 light-years away. If you launched yourself on a trajectory to Sirius and accelerated at that continuous 1g for the entire journey, youd reach it in just about 5 years. Remarkably, it only takes about an extra year for you, the traveler, to reach a star thats twice as distant as Proxima Centauri, illustrating the power of Einsteins relativity to make the impractical accessible if you can keep on accelerating.

And if we look to larger and larger scales, it takes proportionately less additional time to traverse these great distances. The enormous Orion Nebula, located more than 1,000 light-years away, would be reached in just about 15 years from the perspective of a traveler aboard that spacecraft.

Looking even farther afield, you could reach the closest supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* at the Milky Ways center in about 20 years, despite the fact that its ~27,000 light-years away.

And the Andromeda Galaxy, located a whopping 2.5 million light-years from Earth, could be reachable in only 30 years, assuming you continued to accelerate throughout the entire journey. Of course, someone back on Earth would experience the full 2.5 million years passing during that interval, so dont expect to come back home.

The Andromeda Galaxy resides in our local group, and is nearly twice as large in diameter as our ... [+] Milky Way. It is located 2.5 million light-years away, but if we constantly accelerated towards it at 9.8 m/s^2, turning around to decelerate halfway along the journey, we'd reach it after traveling for just 30 years from our frame of reference.

In fact, so long as you kept adhering to this plan, you could choose any destination at all thats presently within 18 billion light-years of us, and reach it after merely 45 years, max, had passed. (At least, from your frame of reference aboard the spacecraft!) That ~18 billion light-year figure is the limit of the reachable Universe, set by the expansion of the Universe and the effects of dark energy. Everything beyond that point is currently unreachable with our present understanding of physics, meaning that ~94% of all the galaxies in the Universe are forever beyond our cosmic horizon.

The only reason we can even see them is because light that left those galaxies long ago is just arriving today; the light that leaves them now, 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, will never reach us. Similarly, the only light they can see from us was emitted before human beings ever evolved; the light leaving us right now will never reach them.

Still, the galaxies that are within 18 billion light-years of us today, estimated to number around 100 billion or so, are not only reachable, but reachable after just 45 years. Unfortunately, even if you brought enough fuel, a return trip would be impossible, as dark energy would drive your original location so far away that you could never return to it.

If you wanted to travel to a distant destination and accelerated at 1g for the first half of the ... [+] journey and then turned your spacecraft around to decelerate at 1g for the second half, it would take you half the time indicated on the y-axis at left. For someone back home on Earth, they would have aged by one-half the amount on the right side of the y-axis by the time you arrived at your destination.

Even though we think of interstellar or intergalactic journeys as being unfeasible for human beings due to the enormous timescales involved after all, it will take the Voyager spacecrafts nearly 100,000 years to traverse the equivalent distance to Proxima Centauri thats only because of our present technological limitations. If we were able to create a spacecraft capable of a constant, sustained acceleration of 1g for about 45 years, we could have our pick of where wed choose to go from 100 billion galaxies within 18 billion light-years of us.

The only downside is that youll never be able to go home again. The fact that time dilates and lengths contract are the physical phenomena that enable us to travel those great distances, but only for those of us who get aboard that spacecraft. Here on Earth, time will continue to pass as normal; it will take millions or even billions of years from our perspective before that spacecraft arrives at its destination. If we never ran out of thrust, we could hypothetically reach anywhere in the Universe that a photon emitted today could reach. Just beware that if you were to go far enough, by the time you came home, humanity, life on Earth, and even the Sun will all have died out. In the end, though, the journey truly is the most important part of the story.

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How Far Could A Spaceship Go If We Never Ran Out Of Thrust? - Forbes

In the midst of the space race, Hereward Lester Cooke, the former co-director of the NASA Art Program, observed, Space travel started in the imagination of the artist.

If the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing was an opportunity to celebrate a remarkable technological achievement, its also a good time to reflect on the creative vision that made it possible.

Long before Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, artists and writers were crafting visions of extraterrestrial exploration that would make space flight possible.

For centuries, the dream of human travel into the cosmos has fired imaginations.

Ancient mythologies teemed with deities who suffused the skies, glimmered from stars and rode the Sun and Moon. Pythagoras, Philolaus and Plutarch each contemplated the Moon as a world of its own. Leonardo da Vinci famously imagined flying machines that would take their occupants skyward. Authors such as Cyrano de Bergerac whos credited with being the first to imagine a rocket being used for space travel fed a growing appetite for stories of celestial exploration.

In 1865, the French writer Jules Verne published his novel, From Earth to the Moon, followed five years later by its sequel, Round the Moon.

Vernes tale provides an uncannily prescient account of the development of space travel: Three astronauts blast off from Florida in a small aluminum capsule, fired from the end of an enormous cast iron gun. After orbiting the Moon and making observations with a pair of opera glasses, the three men return to Earth, splashing into the ocean as heroes.

Almost a century later, RKO Pictures would release a film inspired by Vernes adventure story, while a comic book version of the tale went through multiple printings between 1953 and 1971.

In the 1950s, the painter Chesley Bonestell further stoked the imagination of future space-farers with his visions of space stations, published in Colliers. Walt Disney would follow with three made-for-TV movies that illustrated the ways people might one day be able to fly into space and land on the Moon.

Story continues

In 1969, Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins would realize the vision that Verne and others had instilled in the minds eye of millions.

This accomplishment would, in turn, inspire artists anew.

Nothing will already be the same, reads the text along the right edge of Robert Rauschenbergs collage Stoned Moon Drawing. Published in the December 1969 issue of Studio International, Rauschenbergs work combined images of the Apollo 11 moonwalk, Cape Canaveral and the Gemini print shop. Rauschenberg wanted to draw attention to the deep collaboration required in the worlds of art and science, whether it was for print-making or lunar landings.

In the 1970s, the color field painter Alma Thomas explored what she described as the vastness and incomprehensibility of space in abstract paintings like Blast Off, Launch Pad and New Galaxy.

When I paint space, I am with the astronauts, she said.

The artist Red Grooms, who attended the Apollo 15 launch, turned to official NASA photographs to create a gigantic sculptural installation of astronauts David Scott and James Irwin exploring the lunar surface with cameras and a lunar rover.

I wanted, he explained, to do the sort of thing the [NASA] people were doing build something incomprehensible then try to get it off the ground.

What can be gleaned from this tale of outer space visionaries?

Perhaps, most simply, it is the power of the arts to cultivate the imagination to render possible in the mind what has not yet been tangibly realized. As the Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan observed in his 1964 classic, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man:

The artist is the [person] in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of [their] actions and of the new knowledge in [their] own time. [The artist] is the [person] of integral awareness.

In recent years, American education policy has increasingly emphasized the value of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, often at the expense of support for the arts.

At what peril does education policy drift away from the arts? What sort of navigational cues might go missing?

Scientists, the essayist Rebecca Solnit noted, certainly play an integral role in human discovery. They transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen.

But it is the artist, she writes, who gets you out into that dark sea in the first place.

It was artists who first envisioned and produced photographic technologies. It was artists who first foresaw a world in which individuals might fly. And it will be artists who continue to shatter the perceived limitations to our own intellectual frameworks.

In 2018, the Japanese tycoon Yusaku Maezawa paid an undisclosed sum of money to become the first person to orbit the Moon since 1972. If all goes according to plan, hell depart in 2023 with companions of his choosing.

I find his selection fitting: He intends to take along a group of artists.

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This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.

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Anne Collins Goodyear does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Long before Armstrong and Aldrin, artists were stoking dreams of space travel - Yahoo News

Bethany works closely with NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute to highlight European contributions to the Hubble mission

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In Christopher Nolans Interstellar, children in schools are taught that the Apollo moon landing was staged to bankrupt the Soviets. This is to prevent children from pursuing space science, which is considered excess in the movies post-truth, blight-ravaged world. Bethany Downer is the antithesis of the school teachers in Interstellar. As the European Space Agencys (ESA) public information officer, she simplifies space science and technology to the general public.

Bethany did not have a brainwave that steered her interests in space. She says she was always fascinated by it. Her parents engineering and science backgrounds must have been an influence. Interaction with the famous Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield also encouraged her pursuit.

After a master of science degree in space studies from the International Space University in Strasbourg, Bethany was selected as a scientist-astronaut to attend the training with Project PoSSUM, a suborbital research program, in Florida.

Hopefully I can [be an astronaut] one day! says Bethany via email. Im working hard to lay the groundwork to undertake a suborbital commercial spaceflight sometime in the next several years.

In her role as a public information officer for the Hubble Space Telescope for the European Space Agency, she manages public outreach and press for the Telescope on its European page, spacetelescope.org. She works closely with NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute to highlight European contributions to the Hubble mission.

It has been 30 years since the Hubble telescope was launched. The BBC film, Hubble: The Wonders Of Space Revealed, tells the story of how it revealed the awe and wonder of our universe. Hubble has contributed significantly to science and astronomy, says Bethany, The telescope itself is also a feat of engineering that has allowed for applications on subsequent astronomy projects. Because of this mission, we now have a much deeper understanding of the universe we live in.

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted astronomy like it did most other fields. The launch of NASAs successor to Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope, faces seven more months of delay. But Hubble continued its operations throughout the pandemic, says Bethany.

Space and astronomy have been topics of public interest since the days of the Space Race. Space tourism and Mars missions are the latest buzzwords. Of the former, she says, I dream that in the future, anyone who wants to go to space can do so. I think space tourism is an important step of opening the door to space travel to more people, but it will take a few more years for this to be a regular activity.

For now, however, Bethanys focused on her mission to simplify and spark interest in space science. Space technology is an essential component of our daily lives, and space science teaches us of our universe. I want to inspire young women and girls to pursue various STEM careers and opportunities and to share personal experiences of my journey thus far.

It is not surprising that one of her favourite space films is Theodore Melfis Hidden Figures. It has spread awareness of the pioneering work of women at NASA many years ago. This film has inspired many young girls around the world to pursue careers in aerospace. She also likes fictional ones. I loved The Martian for its storytelling, soundtrack, and humour. I think space movies like this or Star Wars are a fun way to dream and wonder about what the future could hold.

(Hubble: The Wonders of Space Revealed airs on January 3, 10 pm on Sony BBC Earth)

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ESA/Hubble public information officer Bethany Downer attempts to simplify space science - The Hindu