Last night, the CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk, presented his vision for ‘Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species’. If you missed it, you can see the full presentation here as it was streamed live, or check out the short animated overview below of The SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System. It’s an ambitious plan (you can download the slides here) and […]
Dr Sarah Bourke, co-founder of Dublin based space technology company Skytek Limited was announced as one of the winners of the 2016 EU Prize for Women Innovators at a ceremony in Brussels yesterday evening. The EU Prize for Women Innovators is the largest prize of its kind worldwide, and aims to raise public awareness of […]
Here’s the first of many videos we will bring you from Web Summit 2015. We spoke to Sandeep Ramchandani from Radix, the company behind some of the most tech’ and business friendly new Top Level Domains, including .TECH, .PRESS, .HOST, .WEBSITE, .SITE, .ONLINE, .SPACE and .PW. Registries agree that part of their job involves educating a public still unfamiliar with the […]
Just published by TED-Ed, this animated video tells the story of the International Space Station. [youtube]https://youtu.be/bJ3oTTm_Pdo[/youtube] TED-Ed: The International Space Station is roughly the size of a six-bedroom house and weighs more than 320 cars — it’s so large that no single rocket could have lifted it into orbit. Instead, it was assembled piece […]
I’m looking forward to The Martian, the new film starring Matt Damon which opens this week. The word is that if you like your science fiction with the emphasis on science, rather than fiction, it promises to be a rewarding experience. Yesterday, NASA announced the results of research which shows that liquid water has been observed on the surface […]
To say that something “can be seen from space” is to suggest that it’s big, although to be fair, it’s all a matter of magnification. Of course this video by Hyundai is a marketing stunt – but that’s not to say that it isn’t impressive. And for a 13 year old girl and her astronaut father, it’s […]
SpaceX, the commercial Space company founded by Elon Musk has created an account on Flickr and published over 100 pictures under a Creative Commons licence. In so doing they are apparently following NASA’s lead which has traditionally made photographs available in the public domain. Motherboard reports that SpaceX originally used an Attribution-NonCommercial licence but later […]
I’ve written about Mars One before. In principle it’s a reasonable idea. Sensationalist headlines have focused on the one-way, lifetime commitment required of the participants but, under the right circumstances, it doesn’t seem like an unreasonable sacrifice in order to make history. That’s probably what Dr Joseph Roche was thinking when he signed up. A serious scientist, Joseph was in it for […]
One of the topics in our house this weekend was the possibility of interstellar travel using generation ships, among other things (it’s that kind of house). We had watched a documentary about the planets discovered by the Kepler mission, which prompted the question: how would you even get there? My eldest was horrified at the prospect of a […]
The Philae landing craft successfully landed on Comet 67P yesterday as part of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission. Scientists at Mission Control in Darmstadt, Germany celebrated as they received the signal from Rosetta confirming the landing. At a press briefing later, the news was confirmed, although it was also revealed that the harpoon mechanism designed […]
