h+ Magazine

Tom Nugent is a busy man. When I contact him to ask him about his new company, LaserMotive, he tells me that he’s in the middle of some optical modeling.

As announced at the end of March, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories has upgraded the Opportunity rover (already stationed on Mars) with artificial intelligence firmware, code-named AEGIS.

“I think it very likely — in fact inevitable — that biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of the universe,” writes Paul Davies a British-born theoretical physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist, and SETI scientist at Arizona State University.

Marc Millis, former head of NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, has designed ion thrusters, electronics for rocket monitoring, cryogenic propellant equipment, and even a cockpit display to guide free-fall aircraft flights.

InterOrbital Systems (IOS) is -- in the words of their website -- "a rocket and spacecraft manufacturing company" that locates itself at the Mojave Airport and Spaceport in Mojave, California.

The ability to either easily recover the moon's existing water, or to convert its seemingly plentiful hydrogen and oxygen concentrations into air, water and fuel, will have a huge impact on the future direction of NASA's Space Program..

We asked several scientists, technologists, and SF writers for their reflections on the 40th anniversary of the 1969 moonwalk. Here are the results.

On September 26, 1991 eight men and women climbed inside a domelike enclosure about the size of two and a half football fields to stay for two years. Intended to function as a closed, human life sustaining ecological system, the place was a human constructed biosphere — a Biosphere 2.

In fact, it may already be supporting life, and that’s one of the main things we need to find out before we do anything

A new study published by Paul Higgs and Ralph Pudritz at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada suggests that ten of life's twenty carbon-based amino acids may be shared wherever life exists.