June 2021
China’s ascending commercial space sector
... in January 2021, following a design and construction period of just 429 days. The fact that such a sophisticated plant was built in Wuhan, over a 429-day period that included a pandemic lockdown, is nothing if not impressive. The...
October 2021
Russia and China – a new space axis
... and plasma instruments will fly on China’s Zheng He mission to asteroid Kamooalewa in 2024. Soyuz 5 rocket and Progress plant, Samara, Russia. Ultimately, a Russia-China axis on the one hand and a US-led axis on the other will...
February 2022
Extremophiles as a blueprint for universal life
... showing that perchlorate salts, which are widely found in Martian regolith and are toxic to the growth of plants, under conditions of low temperature increase the activity of the enzyme α-chymotrypsin. This may suggest that cryophiles...
February 2022
Building space-qualified detector chips
... land-surface temperatures derived from evapotranspiration (evaporation from the land surface combined with transpiration from plants). The detector due to be deployed for this task, which will play a key role in the Copernicus Land...
May 2022
Design architecture for 3D printing a lunar habitat
... tested in Europe, the USA and Asia and progress has been shown for improving the efficiency of plant cultivation, hydroponics, animal protein production, micro-algal and lettuce production of oxygen and carbon dioxide to gaseous...
June 2022
Patent protection for space manufacturing
... to patent law that manufacturers of all goods could take advantage of. Although the prospect of full-scale manufacturing plants orbiting the Earth just to avoid patent infringement does seem to be delving into the realms of science fiction...
