[NEWS] Lockheed Wins the Contract to Build Six More Orion Capsules

READ THE FULL ARTICLE @https://www.universetoday.com/143528/lockheed-wins-the-contract-to-build-six-more-orion-capsules/

When NASA sends astronauts back to the Moon and to Mars, the Orion Multipurpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) will be what takes them there. To build these next-generation spacecraft, NASA contracted aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Martin. Combined with the massive Space Launch System (SLS), the Orion spacecraft will allow for long-duration missions beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) for the first time in over 50 years.

On Monday, Sept. 23rd, NASA and Lockheed Martin announced that they had finalized a contract for the production and operations of six missions using the Orion spacecraft, with the possibility of up to twelve being manufactured in total. This fulfills the requirements for NASA’s Project Artemis and opens the possibility for further missions to destinations like Mars and other locations in deep-space.

The Orion concept was unveiled on January 14th, 2004, shortly after the accident with the Space Shuttle Columbia. At the time, the Orion was known as the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV). It was intended to replace the aging Space Shuttle fleet and serve as a successor to the Apollo Command and Service Module (CSM) that took astronauts to the Moon between 1969 and 1972.

At present, NASA plans to use the Orion capsule to send the first woman and the next man to the Moon by 2024 (Artemis III). With the contract finalized for the delivery of the next six vehicles, this vision is one step closer to becoming a reality. Rick Ambrose, the executive vice president of Lockheed Martin Space, spoke glowingly about the contract and the partnership it represents in a recent company press release:

“This contract clearly shows NASA’s commitment not only to Orion, but also to Artemis and its bold goal of sending humans to the Moon in the next five years. We are equally committed to Orion and Artemis and producing these vehicles with a focus on cost, schedule and mission success.”

The contract NASA signed with Lockheed – the Orion Production and Operations Contract (OPOC) – is an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract specifying the delivery of 6 to 12 Orion spacecraft through to Sept. 30th, 2030. Initially, NASA ordered three Orion spacecraft to conduct Artemis missions III through V – crewed missions to the lunar surface occurring between 2024 and 2026 – for $2.7 billion.

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Further cost-reduction measures include advanced manufacturing technologies, material and component bulk buys, an accelerated mission cadence, and the fact that the Orion crew modules and systems are reusable. As Mike Hawes, Orion program manager for Lockheed Martin Space, attested:

“We have learned a lot about how to design and manufacture a better Orion – such as designing for reusability, using augmented reality and additive manufacturing – and we’re applying this to this next series of vehicles. Driving down cost and manufacturing them more efficiently and faster will be key to making the Artemis program a success. One must also appreciate how unique Orion is. It’s a spaceship like none other. We’ve designed it to do things no other spacecraft can do, go to places no astronaut has been and take us into a new era of human deep space exploration.”

Homni: The new superorganism taking over Earth

Is our species evolving into something new? Gaia Vince makes the provocative argument that humanity is transforming, and it is already having a huge effect on life on our planet.

    By Gaia Vince

2 July 2014

In Ancient Greek mythology, the Earth Goddess Gaia had nine titan sons, who attempted to control not just the Earth, but the entire Universe. I’d like to introduce another. It’s a new creature who emerged only in recent decades. But it’s a creature who is already as influential over life on the planet as the phytoplankton or forests that regulate global temperature, the weather and the air we breathe.

That new creature is us, or more precisely, what humanity is becoming. The entirety of our species, Homo sapiens, is evolving into a superorganism; I’ll call this new life force Homo omnis, or ‘Homni’.

We have now become the dominant force shaping our planet. Some say that because of our actions we have entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene, or the age of man. Homni is a product of this age, a product of human industrialisation, population expansion, globalisation and the revolution in communications technology, and he is immensely powerful. Homni can influence the biosphere, and has needs – currently, he uses 18 terawatts (trillion watts) of energy at any time, 9,000 billion cubic metres of water per year, 40% of global land area for farming, and a plethora of other natural and mineral resources.

Only time will tell if he will be a benign caretaker, or a monster that destroys life and with it himself. But there are clues, and here I will examine what Homni is, and what he means for our species, the planet and the rest of life on Earth.

Crowd power

To understand Homni, let me first take you down into the soil to consider one of the most simple and ancient single-celled organisms, an amoeba called a slime mould. It evolved some 600 million years ago, and occupies soils across the world, from Antarctica to the Arctic. For most of its life-cycle, the cell lives the unexceptional life of most amoeba. But sometimes, these single cells gather in their thousands to create an organism, encased in its own slime, that can creep, crawl, pulsate, grow tentacles and even negotiate a maze.

Scientists describe these slime moulds as ‘societies’ because of the way the individual amoebae work together towards a common cause, sometimes sacrificing themselves on the way. For example, if food is scarce in their soil patch, the amoeba coalesce together forming a tendril that creeps up to the light. Once it has reached the surface, a portion of them form a stalk above ground, by turning their bodies into hard cellulose – a process that kills them. The rest of the mould then climbs the stalk and waits in a blob at the top for a passing animal to transport them to new soils. All this, from the simplest organism.

The human brain is a bit like the mould. Each single brain cell, or neuron, cannot be described as conscious or sentient, and yet, when all 86 billion neurons are networked together, the human brain is far, far more than the sum of its parts, capable of thinking and processing ideas in original ways. We still don’t understand how thoughts or personality or behaviours are seeded and take root in this network, or how the neurons become organised to drive such processes, but somehow consciousness is created from the most prosaic building materials.

We can describe the intelligence, creativity and sociability of Homni as being comparable to the networked, linked-up, conversational accumulation of all the human brains, including those from the past who have left a cultural and intellectual legacy, and also the artificial ‘brains’ of our technological inventions, such as computer programs and Wikipedia. Homni is a global network of civilisations with a stream of knowledge already being channelled for human protection. Just as a cloud of starlings suddenly flips direction en masse, it is difficult to predict how Homni’s behaviour will play out.

But this is just one aspect of Homni.

'Artificial Man'

Not long ago, I sat in a rainforest in Belize, watching a troop of fire ants at work. Individually, each is a formidable beast, a few centimetres long but with a powerful bite. But together, they form what entomologist EO Wilson described as a superorganism of thousands of organised ants that systematically devours everything in its path, tearing down trees and crops and stripping the insulation off wiring and other electrical equipment. In some places the ants run a protection racket for other aphids and bugs, which supply them with nectar. And the superorganism has even figured out a way of surviving heavy rainfall, by clinging to each other and forming a floating life raft in times of flooding. Once they’ve exhausted their environment’s resources, the entire community ups and moves to pastures new. Ants are sophisticated farmers – pre-dating human farmers by more than 50 million years – and they also raise and milk livestock (aphids), they build complex residences, keep slaves, and wage massive battles that involve psychological warfare. The comparisons with humans are multiple.

Applying the idea of superorganisms to humanity is more complicated – individually, we are more autonomous than cells, or even ants. But over the centuries, the idea has emerged in many different guises. The Ancient Greeks imagined each of us as cells in the greater being. Others have referred to the roles that different parts of society play – such as generating energy or food – as analogous to organs in a body. The 17th Century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes also described society as forming an 'Artificial Man' that functions (through civilisation) in a way as to ensure its own survival.

Now, as we advance into the Anthropocene, we are seeing these ideas put into practice on an unprecedented scale. While individual humans or societies can exert a local or regional effect on landscapes, water flow or biodiversity, the impact of our superspecies is planetary. Homni now controls three-quarters of Earth’s freshwater supplies, has modified more than three-quarters of ice-free land surface, and modulates the planet's air, biodiversity, and oceanic chemistry and biology. Homni has even started littering space with telescopes, satellites and other artificial junk. Homni’s actions are like the environmental rampaging of Argentinian ants on a global scale.

Increasingly, individual people are less and less able to function independently in modern society – we rely on the superorganism to feed, clothe and power our many tools, to inform and heal us, even to help us reproduce through surrogacy or IVF. In coming decades, it is likely that access to the internet will have reached almost every part of the globe and, as we become more cohesive as a networked society, individuals who remain outside of the new superorganism will find themselves isolated culturally and technologically from what it means to be a human in the Anthropocene.

In the coming decades, it is also likely that access to electricity, sanitation and antibiotics will become near universal – thus, describing a human in the Anthropocene will increasingly assume a doubled lifespan and basic awareness of the scientific, geopolitical, cultural and social factors behind how the world operates. The result will be a new way of living that is almost akin to being a new subspecies. It is the new modern human that created the Anthropocene and gave rise to Homni, but it is Homni who now sculpts the new human.

Monster issues

And here lies an interesting paradox. Humans may have evolved through a process of natural selection – essentially outcompeting rivals to death – but as palaeontologist Tim Flannery says, this has led not to a "dog-eat-dog world", but to a cooperative society. He believes we are in the process of forming an interdependent global society with a set of shared beliefs – a "civilisation of ideas" – that will transform Earth into a more equitable and ecologically curated planet. It's an optimistic view of Homni, based on the fact that most people want to get on with each other and look after their neighbourhood environment. Whether, or to what degree, Flannery's altruistic view of humanity bears out is the big question.

Individuals may exert an influence over Homni to some degree, rather like the single neuron that fires off a signal, starting an original thought, which then progresses to a painting, song or an invention like the iPod. Or the individual who sends a single tweet that then becomes an internet meme propagating and evolving through the internet. The “tipping point” is thought to be low: just 10% are needed to hold a new belief before it spreads to the majority of the population.

Although individuals may be able to steer Homni to some level, it is far from obvious how we might do this to ensure our survival through the Anthropocene. Homni’s influence is already being seen in planetary changes unprecedented for millions of years, affecting humans and our relationship to the natural world. We are changing the climate by increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; we're reducing the planet's biodiversity, causing what scientists fear may be the sixth mass extinction in its history; and terraforming Earth's land surface with multiple megacities of concrete, steel and glass. Deciding as an individual to reduce freshwater waste, or cut my carbon footprint has negligible impact on the state of the world's rivers or global temperature.

Homni is essentially a concept – I invented him because our superorganism has characteristics that go beyond the simple accumulation of humans. In other examples from the animal world, like bee hives or ant nests, killing the queen results in the collapse of the entire colony. Homni has no single queen, though, and in this way he is as robust as a forest. It would take a catastrophe on an epic scale – an epidemic, massive environmental change, an asteroid impact, or nuclear war – to possibly kill Homni, leaving a straggle of human survivors.

But our impulse would always be to strengthen rather than kill Homni – we are social collaborators and most of our recent discoveries, inventions and successes have been born out of group effort. And the secret to ensuring a better Anthropocene is in recognising Homni's power, but also nurturing his human side, the side committed to improving relations with the neighbours and cleaning up the neighbourhood. Will we achieve this through global international agreements? Possibly. I think that increasingly, as we see through a network of eyes, in the form of the many powerful satellites and remote cameras that track individual trees in rainforests or reveal the extent of glacial carving, we will start to read Homni’s mind, and have more nuanced control over his actions.

Maybe then we will begin to use the power of Homni to restore and curate the planet. The alternative is too monstrous to contemplate.

as seen @ http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140701-the-superorganism-engulfing-earth

Space Colonies Will Start Out Like the Wild West, Grow Family-Friendly

DATE: 30/12/2016
SOURCE: SPACE.COM


The initial stages of colonization would most likely be conducted by workers who would build the necessary support systems, the panelists said. This idea led to a vigorous discussion about who those workers might be. An audience member asked if the first colonists would be the wealthy elite, but the panelists quickly dismissed this, saying the group would more likely rely on blue-collar workers skilled at hands-on labor.

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"Expect a working middle class for a while," Gannon said. "The wealthy will manipulate from safer, easier environments, and the poor are unlikely to have the necessary skill sets that warrant someone else paying a ticket for them."

~*~*~*~

Gannon named the biggest challenge facing a colony that aimed to grow independent from the people back home: the supply of volatiles, particularly oxygen and water. The first explorers would need to find a way for colonists to harvest those on the new world, Gannon said.

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 "The colony would ask the question early on what it values," Davis said. At that point, the colonists may seek to become fully independent from Earth, much like many of England's colonies did from the home country, Davis said. Each colony might approach its negotiations for materials differently, he said. "They'll find that out [what they value], and play political judo."

An effort to become self-sustaining would most likely affect colonial education. Instead of focusing on traditional schoolhouse learning, education might be more likely to follow family or professional lines, the panelists said.

The panelists named another requirement for full independence that Earth's colonists never had to worry about: genetic diversity.


~*~*~*~

 "If humanity doesn't have the 'right' to exist, who sits in judgment?" Davis wondered. He pointed to the survival instinct that has brought humans to their current state, and the possibility of an event that could kill off the human population, such as an asteroid or comet impact.

But humans could do even more damage than depleting a world of natural resources and leaving behind a barren wasteland. People could inadvertently kill off an undetected life-form, which raises important moral issues, panelist said.



READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE @

http://www.space.com/35179-space-colonies-for-future-humanity.html

Where does Jeff Bezos foresee putting space colonists? Inside O’Neill cylinders

DATE: 29/10/2016
WRITTEN BY: ALAN BOYLE
SOURCE: GEEKWIRE



SpaceX’s Elon Musk wants to settle humans on Mars. Others talk about a Moon Village. But Seattle billionaire Jeff Bezos has a different kind of off-Earth home in mind when he talks about having millions of people living and working in space.

His long-range vision focuses on a decades-old concept for huge artificial habitats that are best known today as O’Neill cylinders.

“We need to go into space if we want to continue growing civilization,” he explained. “If you take baseline energy usage on Earth and compound it at just 3 percent per year for less than 500 years, you have to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar cells. That’s just not going to happen.”

Some might say the limits to growth will force civilization into a static condition, but Bezos sees space industry as the frontier for continued growth.

“I predict that in the next few hundred years, all heavy industry will move off planet. It will be just way more convenient to do it in space, where you have better access to resources, better access to 24/7 solar power,” he said last weekend. “Solar power on Earth is not that great, because the planet shades us half the time. In space, you get solar power all the time. So there’ll be a lot of advantages to doing heavy manufacturing there, and Earth will end up zoned residential and light industry.”

The way Bezos sees it, in-space power generation and manufacturing is the answer, rather than sending a million people to Mars.

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE @ http://www.geekwire.com/2016/jeff-bezos-space-colonies-oneill/

What humans will look like in 100 years: Expert reveals the genetically modified bodies we'll need to survive

DATE: 23/12/2016
AUTHOR: HARRY PETTIT
SOURCE: DAILYMAIL


Genetic modification has given us the potential to make humankind stronger, faster, and more resilient to disease.

But each artificial enhancement humanity makes carries the risk of generating a new class of 'super humans'.

This, however, is the risk we need to take in order to survive the next mass extinction, according to one Harvard researcher.

Juan Enríquez argues that artificially enhanced genes, cells, and organs will be needed to get off Earth and on to another planet.

Mr Enríquez envisions a future in which human cells can repair themselves from radiation, fight off deadly viruses like HIV with ease, and even dodge bullets.

~*~*~*~


'If you believe that extinctions are common and natural and normal, and occur periodically, it becomes a moral imperative to diversify our species,' Mr Enríquez says.

'If Earth goes, all of humanity goes.'

The Harvard researcher explains how genetic modification could be used to upgrade the human genome over the next century.

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In the future nanobots - or tiny robots - will be suddenly integrated into our own bodies, enhancing our abilities,' it says.

'No longer will we be limited by own own physiology, but truly become a mixture of biology and machine on the inside.'

Meanwhile, designer babies will cause future generations to grow into intelligent, attractive and physically people.

'But while that will make us better smarter, stronger and better looking, such genetic similarity, or lack of human diversity, leaves room for a single new disease of the future, to wipe out the entire human race.'

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The study predicts that by 2050 a typical male worker, aged 35, will have red eyes, a smaller penis, a larger brain, advanced language skills and bioimplants to improve their performance

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE @http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4061132/What-humans-look-like-100-years-Expert-reveals-genetically-modified-bodies-ll-need-survive.html

Moon village concept attracts worldwide support

DATE: 02/12/2016
SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN


The ESA director general said the moon village was discussed by member state ministers meeting in Lucerne, Switzerland, to decide space funding.

At a press conference after the two-day meeting, Johann-Dietrich Wörner said: “We are now having a list of actors worldwide who would like to participate in this moon village concept. There are ideas of companies – not only ideas, projects of companies – to go to the moon, and they want to be part of this community.

“We are joining forces. There are companies offering payloads. There are public entities going to the moon and offering payloads. Even Nasa is part of this. So therefore the moon village was a part of our discussion at the very beginning.”

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE @ https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/dec/02/moon-village-concept-attracting-worldwide-support-european-space-agency-lunar-outpost

Let's Colonize Titan

DATE:25/11/2016
AUTHORS: Charles Wohlforth, Amanda R. Hendrix
SOURCE: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN



The idea of a human colony on Titan, a moon of Saturn, might sound crazy. Its temperature hovers at nearly 300° below zero Fahrenheit, and its skies rain methane and ethane that flow into hydrocarbon seas. Nevertheless, Titan could be the only place in the solar system where it makes sense to build a permanent, self-sufficient human settlement.

We reached this conclusion after looking at the planets in a new way: ecologically. We considered the habitat that human beings need and searched for those conditions in our celestial neighborhood.


~*~*~*~

For protection from radiation, Titan has a nitrogen atmosphere 50 percent thicker than Earth’s. Saturn’s magnetosphere also provides shelter. On the surface, vast quantities of hydrocarbons in solid and liquid form lie ready to be used for energy. Although the atmosphere lacks oxygen, water ice just below the surface could be used to provide oxygen for breathing and to combust hydrocarbons as fuel.

It’s cold on Titan, at -180°C (-291°F), but thanks to its thick atmosphere, residents wouldn’t need pressure suits—just warm clothing and respirators. Housing could be made of plastic produced from the unlimited resources harvested on the surface, and could consist of domes inflated by warm oxygen and nitrogen. The ease of construction would allow huge indoor spaces.

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE @ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/lets-colonize-titan/

Would it be immoral to send out a generation starship?

DATE: 20/12/2016
AUTHOR: NEIL LEVY
SOURCE: AEON



If human beings are ever to colonise other planets – which might become necessary for the survival of the species, given how far we have degraded this one – they will almost certainly have to use generation ships: spaceships that will support not just those who set out on them, but also their descendants. The vast distances between Earth and the nearest habitable planets, combined with the fact that we are unlikely ever to invent a way of travelling that exceeds the speed of light, ensures that many generations will be born, raised and die on board such a ship before it arrives at its destination.

A generation ship would have to be a whole society in microcosm, with hospitals and schools, living quarters and perhaps entertainment districts, a security force, maybe even a judiciary. It would need to be able to provide food for its crew, and that might require agriculture or aquaculture, perhaps even domestic animals (which might also be needed for the colonisation effort). Its design therefore presents a major challenge: not just to engineers but also to social scientists. How should the crew be selected and the environment structured to minimise interpersonal conflict? What size of population is optimal for it to remain committed to the single overarching project of colonising a new planet without too much of a risk of self-destructive boredom or excessive narrowing of the gene pool? Does mental health require that a quasi-natural environment be recreated within the ship (with trees, grass and perhaps undomesticated birds and small animals)?

As well as the technological and social challenges confronting the designers of such ships, there are fascinating philosophical and ethical issues that arise. The issue I want to focus on concerns the ethics of a project that locks the next generation into a form of living, the inauguration of which they had no say over, and that ensures their options are extremely limited.

A generation ship can work only if most of the children born aboard can be trained to become the next generation of crew. They will have little or no choice over what kind of project they pursue. At best, they will have a range of shipboard careers to choose between: chef, gardener, engineer, pilot, and so on. Given that allocation to roles must be tightly controlled, they might not even have that degree of choice, since once a sufficient number of people have enrolled in chef training, for example, there will be no more places available. They will not be able to choose a life of contemplation, of withdrawal into a religious community or (to take a role that is more common in the society their parents leave behind) of working in a service industry. They will not be able to choose part-time or full-time work, and so on.

READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE @ https://aeon.co/ideas/would-it-be-immoral-to-send-out-a-generation-starship

Space Colony On Mars; 180 Days Mock Test By China Successfully Completed

DATE: 15/12/2016
SOURCE: SCIENCEWORLDREPORT



Four Chinese volunteers successfully completed the Space Colony Experiment, in which they stayed inside a closed capsule for 180 days, without any outside resupply of food, water and oxygen. The experiment was designed to explore the physical, emotional and psychological changes that may occur when humans live in closed and isolated environments. Successful completion of this experiment has created optimism among space explorers regarding the plans of setting up human colonies in space.

The capsule was set up in the southern city of Shenzhen. Additionally, the capsule was specifically designed in a manner that it can create and maintain its own internal ecosystem, which involved recycling and regeneration of oxygen without being supplied from the outside, same as in space missions.

READ THE REST @
http://www.scienceworldreport.com/articles/54653/20161215/space-colony-mars-180-days-mock-test-completed.htm