What is going on at NASA? We have been hearing a lot lately about 3D printers. They seem to be getting bigger which allows them to make bigger parts. They have begun to print houses and being talked about as being installed on spacecraft which will go to other planets because they can be used to print parts which break down instead of having to carry a whole inventory of parts. NASA has mentioned the fact they may be able to use them in places like Mars to build habitats from local materials, and now they are going to be used to print rockets. A startup company wants to launch its almost entirely 3D printed rockets and is asking the United States Air Forces for permission to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The company is Relativity Space and was founded by SpaceX and Blue Origin alumni. Maybe it is because of my age, but I find the capabilities of the new 3D printers almost miraculous. What comes around sometimes goes around and steam power is one of those things. It is still around today in different forms, but amazingly enough it is being proposed for space travel. On the face of it this seems like we are going backwards, but NASA is funding the prototype. The name of it is “the World is not Enough.” A strange name for a strange craft. It is being said this engine would allow the craft to stay aloft forever, but I am skeptical about this. Maybe it would have been better if they said it could remain aloft much longer than anything else. The steam would be produced and used to push the vehicle much the same as a rocket is propelled. It is said it could hop from anywhere in the solar system where there is water. In simulations it was successful with extracting moisture out of soil to fill its tanks. This would solve the problem of our probes running out of fuel and having to end their missions. Black holes are one of the more amazing phenomenons in our universe and we just keep learning more about them even though none have ever been seen directly. We know they are massive and can suck stars and planets easily into them, we have also been told their gravity is so powerful even light cannot escape one, although there is an extremely rare instance of light being seen coming out of one. Now there has been a new discovery concerning a black hole. The black hole is about ten times more massive than our sun and is ten thousand light years away. A nearby star was just swallowed by the black hole and after the black hole shrank. After eating the star, the black hole’s corona had shrunk from about 62 miles to about 6 miles. Scientists are still baffled why this happened. I personally never liked the idea of putting nuclear reactors into space, but I can understand why NASA and maybe the military would want to do this. They offer a very long-term solution for power. NASA is building a tunnelbot which will be nuclear powered and power digging through the ice shell on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. The tunnelbot will have to dig through ice which has been estimated to be between 1.2 and 18.6 miles thick. This will be quite an undertaking. I can’t help but wonder if possibly some radiation might escape and disturb the very organisms we are trying to find. Anyway, besides looking for life the tunnelbot is going to sample the ice all the way down and this could lead to more discoveries. While all this sounds great, no tunneling mission has been scheduled yet by NASA. Scientists have held the position for a long time that Europa might be one of the best places to look for life since there is so much water. In our never-ending search for exoplanets we find some strange things and I guess there will always be something out there which will surprise us. This happened with the discovery of GJ3470b. The planet is Neptune sized. What makes this planet so unusual is the fact it is disappearing and in cosmological terms is doing it very fast. Evaporation is happening 100 times faster than on any other exoplanet yet discovered. It is believed in a couple of billion years half the planet won’t exist any longer. The planet is super-hot so life is not expected to exist there, but life is funny, it pops up in the most unexpected places. Speaking about life we have discovered an exoplanet which scientists think might have a very good chance of having some type of life on it. When scientists talk this way, they are usually talking about microbial life. Ross 128 B had the scientific community excited. The planet is about eleven light years away from us, making it very close, but not close enough to travel to yet. The star it is orbiting is a red dwarf as are many stars but this one has only minimal flare activity which is the reason the scientists feel this planet has a good chance for life. The planet is located in an area scientists like to refer to as the Goldilocks zone and is bigger than earth. Spectrographic tests have indicated it has all the elements for life. NASA has a new initiative, and it is to perfect a faster than light speed drive. It is called the Alcubierre Drive Initiative. There is a problem however, even though many scientists are involved and are studying things like warp drive, most do not think they are viable. They believe the physics of the universe will prevent these drives from becoming reality. It is too bad they do not believe in this project because I have always said thing go better when you have an open mind, but at least they are investigating the possibility of faster than light drive.
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