Category Archives: Transhuman News

SpaceX just popped another Starship test tank.

The Starship SN7.1 tank was destroyed on purpose Tuesday night (Sept. 22) at SpaceX's South Texas facilities, during a pressure test designed to take the stainless-steel hardware to its bursting point.

SpaceX has performed several other such tests, including one this past June that blew the top off the SN7 tank. Such trials inform future iterations of Starship, the 100-passenger spacecraft Elon Musk's company is developing to get people to Mars, the moon and other cosmic destinations.

Related: SpaceX's Starship and Super Heavy rocket in pictures

SN7.1's death clears the way for testing of the SN8 prototype, which could begin as soon as this weekend. If SN8 aces a series of checkouts and engine trials, it will attempt a 12-mile-high (20 kilometers) flight into the South Texas skies, Musk has said.

Two full-size Starship prototypes have already gotten off the ground SN5 and SN6, each of which got about 500 feet (150 meters) high during recent test flights. ("SN" stands for "serial number," in case you were wondering.)

The flights of both SN5 and SN6 were powered by just a single Raptor engine. SN8 will have three Raptors, as well as a nose cone and control-improving body flaps, further accoutrements that its predecessors lacked.

The final Starship will have six Raptors, which will make the 165-foot-tall (50 m) vehicle powerful enough to launch itself off the moon and Mars, Musk has said. But Starship will need help getting off our bulkier Earth, so it will launch from here atop a giant rocket called Super Heavy, which will be powered by about 30 Raptors of its own.

Starship and Super Heavy are both designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. Musk envisions the duo cutting the cost of spaceflight dramatically so dramatically, in fact, that ambitious feats such as Mars colonization become economically feasible.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

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SpaceX pops Starship tank on purpose in explosive pressure test - Space.com

y's world. He went on to argue that sci-fi writing, which has long been seen as nothing more than a little bit of lighthearted fun, will shape society's understanding of things like artificial intelligence and biotechnology more than any other sort of writing. Reading science fiction, and grappling with issues like AI replacing entire classes of workers, is an excellent way to help us determine how we really feel before we deal with the same issues in real life.

Fiction can be a powerful tool for helping individuals navigate the real world. Sci-fi is no different. In light of that, Stackerhas rounded up 100 of the best science fiction novels of all time.

Using sources like Goodreads, Amazon, and The New York Times Best Seller list, we've identified 100 books that had a powerful impact on readers. We've included books that fall under the hard sci-fi, cyberpunk, space opera, aliens, and utopia/dystopia categories while steering clear of books that are strictly fantasy (think "Lord of the Rings" and "Harry Potter"). We've also made sure to highlight books from authors of color, female authors, LGBTQIA+ authors, and authors from various countries and backgrounds, dispelling the myth that science fiction is only written for and by cis white males.

From comical takes on the genre like "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" to controversial titles like "Starship Troopers" to classics like H.G. Wells "War of the Worlds," dark tales like "Who Fears Death," and new titles like "How Long 'til Black Future Month?" there's sure to be something on this list for every taste.

Read on for100 of the best science fiction novels of all time.

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100 of the best science fiction novels of all time - Mooresville Tribune

Pheronym, Inc

The parasitic space worms are coming, and theyre ready to kill.

No, its not the tagline for some Tremors in Space B-movie monster flick. Instead, its the result of some research recently published in the journal npj Microgravity. And despite how it sounds, its actually good news. (Spoiler: its not us that theyre killing.)

Heres the issue: One of the many, many problems that need to be solved before space colonization can take place is what people are going to eat. Right now, astronauts rely on packets of dehydrated food that are launched into space either on their original journey or on top-up resupply missions.However, this isnt a viable solution when, for instance, colonists arrive on Mars. As Andy Weirs The Martian suggested, space agriculture is a distinct possibility for providing a continuous supply of sustenance.

But and this is getting ahead of ourselves it seems likely that crops in space could face the same problem of insect pests as crops on Earth.Thats not to suggest that theyll be fending off alien insects (at least, not aliens in the traditional sense), but that a steady stream of colonists from Earth could bring with them some of the same insects that already feed on our crops on terra firma.

Without proper pest control, farmers on Earth risk losing up to 80 percent of their crops. Needless to say, that kind of bad harvest could prove devastating for a developing space colony. Clearly some form of pest control is sensible to investigate. Since air quality is critical in space (being a limited resource, and it not being quite so easy to open a window to get clean air), it would also make sense if pest control methods were biological, non-toxic ones.

Thats where the worms enter, stage left. These tiny worms are what researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the biotech company Pheronym refer to as biocontrol organisms. Already widespread on Earth, these parasitic roundworms, called entomopathogenic nematodes, are not harmful to humans, but are great at controlling a wide variety of insect pests. This makes them a perfect natural bio-pesticide, midway between microbial pathogens and predators. They kill insects using a naturally occurring bacteria in their gut.

When humans are traveling in space and growing crops to sustain themselves, it may be inevitable that there will be pests attacking those crops, David Shapiro-Ilan, a research entomologist at the Southeastern Fruit and Tree Nut Research Station in Byron, Georgia, told Digital Trends. [We] wanted to determine if beneficial nematodes could be used as natural bio-pesticides to protect crops in space the same way they are used on Earth.

For this reason, the researchers delivered samples of the entomopathogenic nematodes to the International Space Station to see how they would fare. They were flown up to the ISS last year with the express goal of seeing whether they would survive and thrive in the space environment, principally in microgravity.

Killing insects in microgravity may sound like a straightforward question, but it is not a simple task, Fatma Kaplan, CEO of Pheronym, told Digital Trends. It seems like we are comparing one condition: gravity versus microgravity. However, microgravity changes several factors.

It turns out that microgravity does a lot more than simply make things float around in space. Water, for example, behaves very differently in microgravity, compared to how it does on Earth. Predicting how an agricultural biocontrol agent will behave in microgravity is tough because so many environmental factors are (no pun intended) up in the air from the behavior of water to the lack of buoyancy-driven convection to, as the researchers write, the required cooperation of two organisms to execute a multistep infection.

All of these could matter when it comes to entomopathogenic nematodes ability to do their job. If adapting to space is tough for humans, why wouldnt it be the same for tiny roundworms?

One part of the experiment was to see whether they could emerge out of the insect once they consumed the host, Kaplan said. One of the factors that control emergence is a pheromone signal. We did not know whether they could produce dispersal pheromone to emerge. The pheromone composition from this experiment will be compared to our product development on Earth.

Fortunately, it turns out that things are looking good. The samples taken to space were then frozen and returned to Earth for analysis. (Intriguingly, it seems that worms born on Earth could return unfazed, but worms that were hatched in space died when re-entry took place.)

As far as we can tell the nematodes performed in excellent fashion and were able to find, infect, and reproduce in insect pest hosts, Shapiro said. There may be other biological control tactics that could be used in space, but this was the first test of a natural enemy being used as a pest control agent in space. We think beneficial nematodes are a good candidate for space travel because they have wide host ranges [meaning that they] can kill lots of different pest species.

In the future, Shapiro continued, the researchers would like to delve further into the impact of microgravity, and the return to gravity on nematode physiology. The ultimate goal is to better understand how to protect crops in space. Our ancestors will thank them.

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The key to farming on Mars might be breeding parasitic space worms - Digital Trends

Lunar eclipse 2020: Dos and dont

Several scientists have previously revealed that space radiation is one of the most dangerous challenges astronauts should face during deep space missions. As the United States is now preparing to send astronauts to the moon again, the biggest dangers astronauts will face will be space radiation, as it could cause severe health hazards that include cataracts, cancer and, neurodegenerative diseases.

New Study Reveals Dangers

NASA had successfully landed humans multiple times on the moon in the 1960s and 70s as a part of their Apollo missions. These missions proved that humans could stay safely in the moon for a few days, but the United States space agency apparently did not take daily space radiation measurement which will help to understand how many days an astronaut could survive in space.

Now, a new study conducted by researchers using the data obtained by China's Chang'e 4 lander has found that the radiation in the moon is two to three times higher than the space radiation in the International Space Station.

"The radiation of the Moon is between two and three times higher than what you have on the ISS (International Space Station). So that limits your stay to approximately two months on the surface of the Moon. The radiation levels we measured on the Moon are about 200 times higher than on the surface of the Earth and five to 10 times higher than on a flight from New York to Frankfurt," Robert Wimmer-Schweingruber, an astrophysicist at the University of Kiel and the co-author of the study told AFP.

Moon Mission Dilemma

After analyzing the data obtained by the Chang'e 4 lander, researchers revealed that the radiation exposure on the Moon is 1,369 microsieverts per day which is 2.6 times higher than the radiation received in the International Space Station. According to experts, ISS is partially protected by the earth's magnetosphere, and it makes it less vulnerable to space radiation.

As NASA is considering the moon landing as a first step before the milestone Mars colonization mission, protecting astronauts from space radiation could be the most challenging task that will be faced by the space agency.

A few months back, Samantha Rolfe, an astrobiologist at the University of Hertfordshire had claimed that NASA's upcoming Mars mission could turn out to be suicidal. According to Rolfe, humans who walk on the Red Planet will be exposed to deadly radiations, as Mars does not have its own magnetic field.

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Moon Mission Chang'e 4 Finds Space Radiation on Moon Much Higher Than Previously Thought; Why is NASA in Dark? - International Business Times,...

An important part of the new SpaceX Starship spacecraft has passed the first test.This is a version of the conventional Raptor engine for use in space vacuum.It successfully passed the first fire tests at the SpaceX site in McGregor, Texas, as reported by company representatives on Twitter.

The vacuum Raptor passed this test about three weeks after it left the SpaceX rocket factory in Los Angeles on September 4, SpaceX announced that the new engine had been delivered to a Texas test site.In a tweet, the company described the firing tests as complete.Its unclear how long the burn lasted: the tweet only includes a 15-second video that dims to black while the vacuum Raptor is still running.

This variant of the Raptor is similar to the conventional version of the engine but has a much larger nozzle, which improves efficiency in space environments. According to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, Starship will use three Raptor engines of each variant.

These six engines will power the Starship 50 meters high, delivering it over long distances, for example, to the Moon or Mars.The transport ship will be powerful enough to lift off the surface of these two celestial bodies, but it will need help to escape from the Earths gravity well.Therefore Starship will leave our planet on a giant rocket called Super Heavy, which will be propelled by about 30 conventional versions of Raptor engines.

SpaceX said both Super Heavy and Starship can be fully and quickly reused.Musk suggests that the combination of a spacecraft and a super-heavy launch vehicle will reduce the cost of space travel so much that it will make ambitious plans like the colonization of Mars economically feasible.

SpaceX is working on the final version of Starship, rolling around a series of prototypes.Recently, single-engine SN5 and SN6 have passed test jumps to an altitude of about 150 meters, and a three-engine SN8 is preparing for its own flight to an altitude of 20 kilometers in the near future.

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Video: SpaceX first fired a vacuum version of the Raptor engine for Starship - Phone Mantra