October 20, 2019

Is This How We'll Live on Mars? (Source: CNN)
What would a home on Mars look like? What sort of clothes would we wear on the Red Planet? And how would we grow our food? The answers to some of these questions are beautifully imagined in a new exhibition, "Moving to Mars," at London's Design Museum. The race is on for a successful manned mission to Mars, with NASA leading a pack of public and private institutions competing to be the first to land, including Elon Musk's Space X, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, Boeing, and the China National Space Administration.

NASA plans to launch a manned mission in the 2030s, a timeframe shared by other private groups, although this goal might be more aspirational than realistic. Many technologies required don't yet exist, including the spacecraft, which are either under development or at the prototype stage. What a Mars mission would look like is far from clear, with some teams planning to build a full-blown Martian habitat, while others foresee orbiting stations that could function as launch pads for limited trips to the surface. But it's not too early to dream, nor to start imagining how it will all take shape.

Centered on the role that design will play in sending humans to Mars, the exhibition is rich with historical materials but also more forward-looking or speculative elements, with a wide range of works by designers from various fields. Curator Eleanor Watson said the designs on show were response to questions about future Mars missions. "Such as what would microgravity clothing need to look like, what would a Mars habitat look like, very speculative questions on what the planet might look in 1,000 or even 10,000 years," said Watson in a phone interview. Click here. (10/18)

Guess What's On the Receiving End of More NASA Dollars for SLS? (Source: The Register)
Hint: It rhymes with 'throwing' as lawmakers balk at lobbing an unknown amount of cash into the 2024 lunar bonfire. It is expected that the next batch of rocket core stages will not suffer the same hideous cost overruns and horrendously drawn-out birthing process of the first build, which might finally fly in 2021 after years of delay.

While more ex-Shuttle RS-25 engines will be needed for dumping into the ocean after the non-reusable SLS is expended, NASA also wants Boeing to finally get on with building the Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) to be used from Artemis IV. The EUS is essential to send heftier payloads of the order of 45 tons into lunar orbit. The comparatively weedy Interim Cryogenic Propulsion stage will be used on the first three Artemis missions in NASA's headlong rush to get those boots on the surface to meet US President Donald Trump's 2024 deadline.

And that arbitrary 2024 date is causing some furrowed brows. At a hearing of the House Appropriations Committee's Commerce, Justice and Science subcommittee into NASA's proposal to bring the Moon landing forward from 2028, US lawmakers hauled the agency over the coals as the price tag for all the lunar japery remained unclear. Chair of the committee, José Serrano, had NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine squirming uncomfortably as he asked again for an estimate of how much the US taxpayer was going to have to cough up in order to accelerate the program. (10/19)

How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe? (Source: LiveScience)
For more than 100 years, astronomers have been observing a curious star located some 190 light years away from Earth in the constellation Libra. It rapidly journeys across the sky at 800,000 mph (1.3 million kilometers per hour). But more interesting than that, HD 140283 — or Methuselah as it's commonly known — is also one of the universe's oldest known stars.

In 2000, scientists sought to date the star using observations via the European Space Agency's (ESA) Hipparcos satellite, which estimated an age of 16 billion years old. Such a figure was rather mind-blowing and also pretty baffling. As astronomer Howard Bond of Pennsylvania State University pointed out, the age of the universe — determined from observations of the cosmic microwave background — is 13.8 billion years old. "It was a serious discrepancy," he said.

Taken at face value, the star's predicted age raised a major problem. How could a star be older than the universe? Or, conversely, how could the universe be younger? It was certainly clear that Methuselah — named in reference to a biblical patriarch who is said to have died aged 969, making him the longest lived of all the figures in the Bible — was old, since the metal-poor subgiant is predominantly made of hydrogen and helium and contains very little iron. It's composition meant the star must have come into being before iron became commonplace. But more than two billion years older than its environment? Surely that is just not possible. (10/19)