space travel Archives | Moss and Fog

Architecture

Plans for a Permanent Moon Colony from SOM

July 6, 2021 Architecture

After decades of sitting quietly in space, the Moon is suddenly the talk of the town again, with NASA, private industry, even entrepreneurs and artists talking about visiting it in the near future.

Ideas and aspirations are fine, but plans and designs for those visits are more impressive, especially when award-winning architecture firms get involved.

Skidmore Owings, and Merrill (SOM), one of the biggest and most influential architecture firms in the world has released plans for the European Space Agency, along with engineering university MIT. Their Moon Village consists of inflatable habitats and a system of energy capture and production to create a permanent home on the lunar surface.

Five decades after humans first set foot on the Moon, a new initiative is underway to bring us back—and this time, the aspiration is to settle there on a permanent basis. Today, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM), in partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has released a design for the “Moon Village,” a concept presented by ESA Director General Jan Woerner for the first full-time human habitat on the lunar surface. With ESA and MIT, SOM is master planning, designing, and engineering the settlement. -SOM

This design, along with NASA’s commitment to another moon mission, makes us excited for a colony that would permanently call the moon home. And aside from being just a fun headline, the SOM design represents some serious engineering and planning efforts, with some of the brightest minds in the world at MIT at work.

The master plan envisions a Moon Village sited on the rim of Shackleton Crater in the south polar region, on the “peaks of eternal light” which receive near-continuous daylight throughout the lunar year. This strategic location supports the goal of a self-sufficient settlement. Sunlight can be harnessed for energy, while in-situ resources can be used to generate consumables and other life-sustaining elements. Frozen volatiles and water stored in the permanently shadowed craters near the South Pole would be extracted to create breathable air and rocket propellant for transportation and industrial activities. The settlement would be clustered and expanded along strategic sites, rich in resources and scientific interest.

Future

Designer Imagines Future SpaceX Travel Card

May 18, 2021 Future

Imagining future space travel is fun, especially when companies like SpaceX seem to be bringing us so much closer to the possibility of visiting our solar system.

Designer Arun Raj has a clever mockup of a SpaceX TravelCard, where you simply tap on your destination, and a ticket is issued.

Obviously we are a few years off from moon trips and mars voyages, but it’s a fun thought experiment.

Future

SpaceX Poised to Send Astronauts to the Space Station for the First Time

May 26, 2020 Future

It’s been nearly a decade since the last Space Shuttle mission left earth, bound for the International Space Station. Since then, no American rocket has carried astronauts, and they’ve relied exclusively on Russian Soyuz rockets to reach orbit.

Now, after many years of preparation and testing, SpaceX, the private company founded by Elon Musk, is set to carry two American astronauts, using the Crew Dragon capsule.

Veteran astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will take the inaugural flight, in SpaceX’s custom new spacesuits, and brand new capsule.

The launch is set for May 27 at 4:30 pm Eastern, and if successful, will be a monumental achievement for the private company, which is under a multi-billion contract from NASA to bring astronauts to the space station.

Make sure to tune into the launch for this historic event.

Animals

Jade Rabbit 2 Currently Exploring The Far Side of the Moon

January 4, 2019 Animals

In a world first, the Chinese have successfully landed a rover on the ‘dark side’ of the moon, a place no human has gone before, and the side of the moon we have very few pictures of.

The 308-pound rover is named Yutu-2, or Jade Rabbit 2. We see in photos the rover rolling off of it’s lander, into the soft surface of the moon. After testing all functionality of the rover, it will begin it’s full mission January 10, carrying out mineral, biological and radiation tests ahead of a future base that China hopes to build on the moon.

Via Gizmodo:

Yutu-2 and its accompanying lander will carry out mineral, biological and radiation tests ahead of a future base that China hopes to build on the moon.

In a somewhat extravagant/ominous note, the Chinese government released a statement:

“It’s a small step for the rover, but one giant leap for the Chinese nation,” Wu Weiren, the chief designer of the Lunar Exploration Project, told CCTV. “This giant leap is a decisive move for our exploration of space and the conquering of the universe.”

Future

SpaceX’s BFR To Whisk You Around the Globe

September 30, 2017 Future

SpaceX, run by Elon Musk, has serious plans for getting humans to the Moon, and Mars. But in order to fund these insanely ambitious operations, they’ll need to raise an insane amount of cash. One option? Use their developed rocket technology to transport people all around the globe with amazing speed. Indeed, they claim their new BFR (Big F-ing Rocket, no joke), will whisk people from New York to Shanghai in 39 minutes. 24 minutes from Los Angeles to Toronto. 30 minutes from New York to Paris. These unbelievable travel times would come with a hefty price tag, which would then help fund the more ambitious plans for interplanetary travel. Check out the brief video below for a look at the future of intercontinental travel. Via SpaceX:

SpaceX BFR — The tiny white speck is a human, showing the scale of the BFR.

Documentary Film

Float Your Way to Space in a Balloon

April 5, 2017 Documentary Film

With a growing number of companies on the verge of sending private citizens into space on rockets, there’s a movement to send people to space on a….slower pace. World View Enterprises has plans (and a high tech balloon) to start sending people on commercial flights to the edge of space starting in 2018. With a mission to give people a true “global perspective” on our planet, the experience sounds like the ride of a lifetime. Check out this fascinating video on their mission to take people over 100,000 feet above Earth. Via Mashable:

Art

Adventuring the Solar System

November 30, 2014 Art

This inspiring short film by Erik Wernquist paints a beautifully exuberant picture of our solar system, showing adventurers exploring the cliffs of Europa, skydiving off of Mars’ peaks, and so much more.

The narration is a speech by Carl Sagan, and it wraps the whole piece up in a beautifully nostalgic yet futuristic vibe. Great work.

Outer Space

35 Years Ago Today We Got Our First Look at an Alien World

October 21, 2010 Outer Space

Via Gizmodo:

Thirty five years ago yesterday, we could only imagine the view from the surface of another world. But Russia’s Venera 9 probe changed all that, beaming back the first ever photo of another planet—25 million miles away.

By 1975, the moon was no longer a frontier. It had been landed on, hopped across, analyzed, filmed, photographed, and dug into. The next step wasn’t the tiny rock orbiting us, but a real, giant planet, just like our own. Russia set its sights on Venus—our closest cosmic neighbor, despite being tens of millions of miles away.

We’d been looking at Venus for hundreds of years—thousands, really, since it’s often the brightest point in the at night, easily visible with the naked eye. But to be there in some sense, and to make something so distant and so foreign seem attainable, we needed eyes on the ground. And since nobody was in any shape to send humans to do the job (and sure won’t be for a long time), robot eyes had to do the trick.

The Venera 9 probe provided those robo-eyes, consisting of a massive, enormously heavy craft (four times the heft of Russia’s previous generation). It came in two parts—a large, bulbous orbiter that transmitted info back to earth and measured the toxic clouds of Venus (sulfuric acid and hydrogen sulfide, blech!)—and, more importantly, the lander. After parachuting to the rocky, volcanic surface of the planet, the Venera 9’s landing pod had to quickly chill itself against the 860°F surface temps with coils pre-packaged coolant, allowing for only a scant 53 minutes to operate before it went dead.

But before that point, Venera 9 snapped the money shot: a 180 degree panoramic vista of Venus. Russia had hoped for a full 360, though malfunctioning cameras foiled the plan. Nonetheless, 180 degrees of another planet was more than enough. It revealed a sharp, cloudy, rather unfriendly looking swath of terrain. NASA says the Russians described it “as bright as Moscow on a cloudy day in June.” But no matter how dour, it was another planet, straight from the source, for the first time ever. We didn’t have to hypothesize or draw—Venus wasn’t the realm of sci-fi anymore, but science. More recent Mars rovers have delivered imagery that greatly trumps Venera’s—but with decades of advanced tech on their side. And whether high or low res, in color or not, both the Venera 9 and its successors are feeding our curiosity to not just see planets as posters in a classroom, but to, as best we can, stand there ourselves.