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Full Title: Buzz Aldrin developing 'master plan' to begin colonies on Mars by 2040 as he launches partnership with university Buzz Aldrin, 85, is partnering with Florida Institute of Technology. The Buzz Aldrin Space Institute will open in The Fall and focus on Mars Astronaut, the second man to walk on the Moon, has devised plan to get to the red planet using 'cycling pathways' and base on Mars's moon Phobos The second man to walk on the Moon is teaming up with Florida Institute of Technology to develop 'a master plan' for colonizing Mars within 25 years. Buzz Aldrin,...

Senator Hutchison cool to SpaceX's Falcon 9 launch; concerns remain about Obama NASA policy June 5, 8:25 AMHouston Space News ExaminerMark Whittington Falcon 9 Courtesy NASA The near universal acclaim that SpaceX has acquired for the successful launch of the first Falcon 9 is not shared within the United States Congress, which is still skeptical of many aspects of the Obama space plan, which includes reliance on companies like SpaceX for Earth to Low Earth Orbit transportation. The reaction illustrates for all the technical triumph that SpaceX has accomplished with the Falcon 9 launch, it still faces political problems. Typical...

Barry Matsumori, formerly the senior vice president of sales and business development at SpaceX, has joined Virgin Galactic's satellite launch team. With Virgin Galactic, Matsumori holds the title of senior vice president of business development and advanced concepts for LauncherOne, the company's small satellite launch vehicle. Prior to SpaceX, Matsumori held a leadership role at Qualcomm as vice president of wireless connectivity where he was responsible for the development of mobile telecom module products as well as satellite communication infrastructure and terminals. He has held positions at Space Systems Loral (SSL) and General Dynamics, and has experience with early-stage technology...

One day 3D printers will be able to churn out working electronics and fully-functional machines, instead of just plastic parts. And that day is now slightly closer with MIT CSAIL’s MultiFab 3D printer that can use ten different materials to build working devices in a single print run. For 3D printers to fully realize their Star Trek ‘replicator’ potential they can’t just be one part of the manufacturing process, they need to do it all. The holy grail of 3D printing is to one day let anyone recreate any device with a simple button press. We want to be able...

Crony Capitalism: Not content with the billions it gets in government help, Tesla Motors now wants tougher fuel economy standards that would cripple its competitors. Is this what passes for entrepreneurship today? In 2012, President Obama announced a new "Corporate Average Fuel Economy" standard that will require all the cars each automaker sells to get an average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. Given the lead time that automakers need to design and test new cars, they now have only a few years to figure out how to achieve that goal. And since there are only a couple non-plug-in cars...

A global robotic arms race "is virtually inevitable" unless a ban is imposed on autonomous weapons, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and 1,000 academics, researchers and public figures have warned. In an open letter presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aries, the Future of Life Institute signatories caution that "starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control". Although the letter, first reported by the Guardian, notes that "we believe that AI has great potential to benefit humanity in many...

Transcend Lighting, one of the more unconventional startups accepted into Y Combinator’s latest cohort, is launching out of beta today to bring its energy-saving LED lights to indoor farmers everywhere. Founder Brian Bennett, an optical engineer by training, invented the first Transcend prototype after his father challenged him to build some LED lights for the family farm in upstate New York. When the lights he designed were successful, Bennett entered a business plan competition at Columbia, won some money to continue developing the idea, and was accepted into Y Combinator’s Spring 2015 class. “Farms today, generally speaking, use high pressure...

The problem of limited range has been an important factor curbing the wide-spread adoption of electric cars. But scientists in South Korea have developed a new technology which could solve the problem. The lithium-ion batteries used in most of the current generation of electric cars have limitations. They are expensive and store insufficient power for the needs of many drivers, requiring frequent top-ups. And when they have to be recharged the charging process is time consuming. The technological breakthrough could solve these problems. And in the process, Dr Lu Wu of the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South...

Traveling to the Moon just got a whole lot cheaper. A NASA-funded study (PDF) has found that the cost of lunar missions could be reduced by a factor of 10 using a number of techniques – and it could also have implications for getting humans to Mars. The extensive NexGen Space study by the National Space Society (NSS) and the Space Frontier Foundation (SFF) said that partnerships with private companies could return humans to the Moon for $10 billion (£6.4 billion), rather than the previosuly estimated $100 billion (£64 billion) that had turned off potential suitors. Utilizing fuel sourced from...

Tesla Motors has earned more than $295 million in state cap and trade-type emission credits during the past three years for a battery-swapping technology customers weren’t getting, a Watchdog investigation reveals. In fact, the electric car company, owned in part by billionaire Elon Musk, may have earned credits up to nearly half a billion dollars in value from the 11 states that use the Zero Emission Vehicle barter as part of a green auto industry mandate. California created the program and leads the pack, doling out $173 million in credits to the Silicon Valley-based Tesla. Tesla claimed the credits between...

The names of the tech workers in this story have been changed.Ten thousand miles from Silicon Valley, in a room near the Black Sea, Yegor Karpenchekov dreams of money. At night, while the rest of Odessa sleeps and cocaine smugglers drift in and out of the port under cover of darkness, Yegor logs onto FaceTime and talks to a 70-year-old woman in San Francisco. Her name is Sally Faubion, and five months ago she recruited Yegor from the freelancer marketplace UpWork to code her apps. She believes "divine intervention" brought them together; for Yegor, it was likely $20 per hour...

Self-repairing pipes. Printed organs. Bulletproof t-shirts. Seriously?In April I was asked to speak at the annual TED conference in Vancouver (following Bill Gates…gulp) on the topic of 3D printing production and its implications. I have detailed my thoughts on why the shift to 3D printing production is not only likely but inevitable in articles one, two and three in this series for Forbes. Now, let’s take a step into a fascinating future, where daily life will be shaped by several powerful forces directly related to 3D printing production. What it will be like to live in a 3D-printed world? Imagine...

Toyota has been very vocal about its lofty plans for the new Mirai. After severing ties with Tesla in 2014, Toyota has shifted its focus toward fuel cells and away from all-electric cars. On Wednesday, Toyota announced that the Mirai had achieved an EPA-estimated range of 312 miles. That’s the longest range of any zero-emission vehicle on the market today, including electric vehicles. “Toyota realized in the early 90’s that electrification was key to the future of the automobile,” said Toyota’s North America CEO Jim Lentz in a statement “Just as the Prius introduced hybrid-electric vehicles to millions of customers...

As of early Monday morning, founder Elon Musk tweeted, no cause had been determined after ”several thousand engineering-hours” of review, meaning more than 100 engineers were working to investigate the problem. Investigators were using software to recover the "final milliseconds" before the explosion, he tweeted. Officials have said that all nine of the rocket’s engines had fired normally and that the rocket's trajectory was “right on target.” The Dragon capsule, which contained the cargo, was “healthy” and sending data back for “some time” after the incident, officials said. The rocket was about 28 miles above Earth when it broke up....

Musk, Schmidt, Simons and billionaire buddies build empire based on climate and energy BS Elon Musk and his fellow barons of Climate Crisis, Inc. recently got a huge boost from Pope Francis. Musk et al. say fossil fuels are causing unprecedented warming and weather disasters. The Pope agrees and says Catholics must “ask God for a positive outcome” to negotiations over another UN climate treaty. It matters not that the predicted calamities are not happening. There has been no warming in 19 years, no category 3-5 hurricanes making US landfall for a record 9-1/2 years, indeed none of the over-hyped...

Besides food and experiments, the Dragon cargo ship ordered up by NASA holds a new docking port, or parking place, for future commercial crew capsules. Liftoff is scheduled for 10:21 a.m. Sunday. Good flying weather is forecast for SpaceX's unmanned Falcon rocket. This shipment is especially critical because the space station has lost two deliveries since fall. A Russian supply ship spun out of control shortly after liftoff in April and burned up on re-entry with all its contents. In October, an Orbital Sciences Corp. cargo carrier was destroyed in a Virginia launch explosion. Once again, SpaceX is picking up...

Once again, SpaceX will try to recover a very expensive part of its rocket after launching it into space. If SpaceX succeeds in recovering the first stage of its rocket after its 10:21 a.m. ET launch on Sunday at Florida's Cape Canaveral, it will be a historical achievement. It will push space travel further toward a future in which people, satellites and other items can be inexpensively launched into orbit.

n an op-ed published in Florida Today on Wednesday, Jeff Kottkamp, a former lieutenant governor of Florida, and Rich Ramos, a Florida businessman, proposed a new justification for sending humans to Mars. A Mars program would serve, in their view, as a means to foster national unity of the sort that is rarely achieved outside times of war. Some recent polling data suggests that they may be on to something.

According to a Tuesday piece in Motherboard, Noam Chomsky, a philosopher and political commentator, and Lawrence Krauss, a physicist and cosmologist, had a public dialogue about space exploration. Being both men of the far left, they concluded that space travel should be best left to robots and conducted by governments. The conclusions are the exact opposite of what the prevailing trends are in space policy.

The first thing to notice is how rapidly Elon Musk's SpaceX is altering the market for government-sponsored rocket launches. Witness how frequently the words "to compete with SpaceX" appear in industry statements and press coverage. To compete with SpaceX, say multiple reports, the United Launch Alliance, the Pentagon's traditional supplier, is developing a new Vulcan rocket powered by a reusable engine designed by Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin. Because of SpaceX, says Aviation Week magazine, Japan's government has instructed Mitsubishi to cut in half the cost of the Japanese workhorse rocket, and China is planning a new family of kerosene-fueled Long...