Good thing I still have my nuclear protection brolly!
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Looks like this one will probably pass us by:
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I really don’t want Musk running the show but this guy isn’t wrong in saying that SLS, in its current form, is unsustainable so this isn’t very surprising:
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Fuck space X. They are making space WORSE. I fucking hate this stupid timeline.
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Pretty much every fucking thing about it, man.
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Former TV correspondent Lauren Sanchez – also the fiancee of Bezos – and TV host Gayle King will also be on the 11th human spaceflight for the company. Sanchez “brought the crew together” to launch on the New Shepard rocket, according to Blue Origin.
The six-person crew – all women – is rounded out by Amanda Nguyen, Kerianne Flynn and Aisha Bowe.
Flynn is a film producer, while Nguyen is a civil rights activist who was instrumental in drafting the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act, which as signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2016. Bowe is a former NASA rocket scientist and an advocate for women and girls in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers.
So, there is this going on…
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DARPA seeks ideas for ‘large bio-mechanical space structures’
Original description:
Given recent advances in metabolic engineering for rapid growth, extremophiles with novel properties, biological self-assembly properties of tunable materials, and emergent mechanical design principles of biological systems, DARPA is interested in exploring the feasibility of “growing” biological structures of unprecedented size in microgravity. Rapid, controlled, directional growth to create very large (500+ meter length) useful space structures would disrupt the current state-of-the-art and position biology as a complimentary component of the in-space assembly infrastructure. Some examples of structures that could be biologically manufactured and assembled, but that may be infeasible to produce traditionally, include tethers for a space elevator, grid-nets for orbital debris remediation, kilometer-scale interferometers for radio science, new self-assembled wings of a commercial space station for hosting additional payloads, or on-demand production of patch materials to adhere and repair micrometeorite damage.
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How would that save us from hauling the building materials up from Earth? Living things aren’t magic, they still follow conservation of mass. 
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Space trees feed entirely on sunlight, everybody knows that.
Or maybe they are thinking of some sort of space lobster that eats burnt out upper stages or something.
Lame jokes aside, there is both matter and energy up there, and who says that something that grows needs to be organic? I could see nanobots modelled on microorganisms doing something useful with what’s available. Accreting materials on a molecular level as the first tiny building blocks to be processed by larger machines into usable materials.
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Lots of energy but Earth receives dust on the order of 30 micrograms per m2 per year, so unless you’re planning to scavenge other launches I hope you’re willing to be very patient.
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Hmmmm…
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Yeah, that’s the scavenging I mentioned. But then you’re not talking about some sort of passive collection, you’re talking about some sort of propelled craft able to find big debris and match orbits with it so that it encounters it at reasonable speed. Is that any better than providing material up from earth? If your goal is to recycle old things then definitely, but if your goal is to build new stuff I’m not so sure.
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