Microsoft and NASA have teamed together to create Be a Martian, a new website where you can help contribute to our understanding of Mars. By participating in the site—which largely consists of combing through the vast quantity of Mars images and classifying them, as well as participating in surveys and discussions—you can earn badges and "Reputation Points". But more importantly, you can help our understanding of our red neighbor... the knowledge you help provide may give some indication of where to look for microbial life, past or present. It may help find suitable locations for manned missions or even long-term colonies.I haven't had a chance to do much other than view a few videos so far, but it looks very interesting, and I've bookmarked it so I can return this weekend and spend some time contributing to Getting There...

Read More »

Congratulations go out to Jordin Kare, Tom Nugent, and the rest of the LaserMotive team for claiming a $900,000 prize in the Power Beaming Challenge of the Space Elevator Games. In order to claim this prize, their climber, which was powered by lasers, had to climb to the top of a 1 kilometer long cable at a speed between 2 and 5 meters per second (their climber averaged about 3.9 meters per second).There are two sides to the Space Elevator Games: the Power Beaming Challenge and the Tether Challenge. The purpose of the Power Beaming Challenge is to build the fastest robotic climber to reach the top of a cable, with all energy received via beamed power (in the past they allowed solar reflectors and spotlights, but this year all power was supplied by lasers). The purpose of the Tether Challenge is to build the strongest tether, one capable of beating the "reference" tether....

Read More »

This is the first progress report for Getting There From Here... and since the site was only brought online on three days ago, there's not much to report yet! Obviously there is still a lot of work to do, but at least we're started!FinancialsNot much to talk about here, as we were only running for the last three days of October and had very little traffic. We did have four total visitors to the site, which means there were at least a couple of people other than the site operators who visited. Traffic has crept up slowly day after day, which is a good sign, as long as it keeps up.October Income: $0October Expenses: $0Total Cash On Hand: $0What We've DoneIn the first few days, we have set up the basic site structure, added The Plan, set up a blog, and put the forums in place. Not a lot of activity so far, but we have our first registered user already, so we're off on the right foot!You should easily be able to tell by looking that we have added...

Read More »

At the basic level, governments will never succeed in exploring and developing space. Oh, they've done a pretty good job so far, but it's too hard to get people to agree on what the goal is and, when you do, an election or a revolution comes along and the priorities change. Even if we could overcome that problem, government is too inefficient and bloated. All it takes is one look at the way the politicians in the U.S. Congress have treated NASA as a jobs program for their districts to realize that the priorities of the people calling the shots are not the same as the priorities of the people doing the work or the people who are frustrated by the glacial pace of progress.We used to think that non-profits like the National Space Society and the Mars Society were the answer, but it seems that they spend their time (and the money of their members and donors) lobbying Congress to try to get the government to do something. If you consider the amount that has been spent by all of the non-profits on their outreach, education,...

Read More »

Congratulations to Masten Space Systems on successfully completing their qualifying flight for the $1 million prize in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge X-Prize. They join Armadillo Aerospace in qualifying for this prize.To qualify, both companies had to demonstrate control of their vehicle by flying to an altitude of more than 50 meters, flying laterally for 100 meters, and landing on a simulated lunar surface complete with craters and boulders. After doing so, they vehicle had to take off from the simulated lunar surface and return to its starting point (with the option of refueling the vehicle between flights). And, oh yeah, they had to complete all of this (including any necessary refueling) in less than two-and-a-half hours.Another team, Unreasonable Rocket,...

Read More »

Getting There From Here is now up and running on the Internet. There is still much to do, including adding content to most of the pages (like detailing the Plan), but in the meantime, the Blog and Forum should be working like a champ. So click the link above and to the right that says "Register" and get started discussing how we go about Getting There From Here.

And thanks to our generous and most excellent web host, Advanced Hosting Solutions for getting us up and running before they even focused on their own website. They're giving us a whole year of DotNetNuke hosting for free, so you can't beat that. Hopefully within a year, we'll be making enough money to afford to pay for hosting!