Blog Archive

Report from the Starship Century Conference

Posted by Jon Lomberg on 2013/05/21 10:42 CDT | 2 comments

This week Jon Lomberg is attending the Starship Century conference, which brings together scientists, writers, and futurists to imagine the future of interstellar travel. The organizers are Greg and Jim Benford, and among the attendees are: David Brin, Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge, Joe Haldeman, Alan Steele, Geoffrey Landis, Freeman Dyson, Jill Tarter, Paul Davies, Nalaka Gunawardene, and Daniel Richter.

LPSC 2013: Future Planetary Exploration

Posted by Van Kane on 2013/03/26 12:20 CDT | 2 comments

Last week, planetary scientists gathered for the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Only a tiny fraction of the presentations at LPSC dealt with future missions. Even so, this is still one of the best sources for insights into details of missions under development. In this post, I’ll cover some of the abstracts for the presentations that give a flavor of the breadth of the proposals.

Brother, Can You Spare $1B for a Planetary Space Telescope?

Posted by Van Kane on 2013/02/20 12:29 CST | 2 comments

Imagine you had a Hubble-class telescope and could use in any way you wanted to explore planets. What would you do with it?

SpaceX's Grasshopper makes leap toward reusability

Posted by Jason Davis on 2012/12/26 01:18 CST | 14 comments

SpaceX's Grasshopper rocket passed its most ambitious test flight yet, rising 12 stories before hovering and settling gently back down onto its landing pad.

PlanetVac Sample Implementation with Lander

PlanetVac: Sucking Up Planetary Regolith

Posted by Bruce Betts on 2012/10/30 02:27 CDT | 3 comments

Learn about the Planetary Society’s newest project: PlanetVac, with Honeybee Robotics, aims to prototype and test in a huge vacuum chamber a new way to sample planetary surfaces that could be used for sample return or for in situ instruments.