Martian air and water might be all that’s needed to store energy on the Red Planet, according to a recent discussion on the NewMars forums.  Solar power, perhaps in the form of a Solar Power Tower, is one of the strongest contenders for a system to generate energy for a pioneering Martian settlement. However, solar power systems only generate energy when the Sun is shining.  This creates a need to store energy to keep the lights on at night.

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Reposted from Space News

The recent amazing success of the Falcon Heavy launch offers America an unprecedented opportunity to break the stagnation that has afflicted its human spaceflight program for decades. In short, the moon is now within reach.

Here’s how the mission plan could work. The Falcon Heavy can lift 60 tons to low Earth orbit (LEO). Starting from that point, a hydrogen/oxygen rocket-propelled cargo lander could deliver 12 tons of payload to the lunar surface.

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Reposted from National Review.

At the recent Space Foundation conference held in Colorado Springs, NASA revealed its new plan for human space exploration, superseding the absurd Asteroid Retrieval Mission (ARM) championed by the Obama administration. Amazingly, the space agency has managed to come up with an even dumber idea.

In the early months of the Trump administration, some lunar advocates spread the rumor that the new president would seek a return to the Moon within his first four years,

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Reposted from National Review

In National Geographic’s new TV series, Elon Musk reaches for the stars.

In 1955, Werner von Braun teamed up with Walt Disney to produce a three-part TV series laying out America’s spacefaring future. With a record-smashing viewership of 40 million people for its first episode, “Man in Space” played a decisive role in putting the challenge of sending men to the Moon squarely in the mind of the nation.

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Reposted from The Guardian

Overall it’s a very good movie, and while there are mistakes in it, it is the first genuine Mars movie. It is the first movie that attempts to be realistic and that is actually about human beings grappling with the problems of exploring Mars, as opposed to various movies set on Mars that are essentially either shoot ’em ups or horror films.

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The exploration and settlement of Mars is one of the great challenges of our time — a point strongly underlined by Monday’s announcement of the discovery of potentially life-holding liquid water on that planet — so it is not surprising that there have been many good novels investigating its possibilities. There have, however, been no worthwhile movies on the subject. True, there have been a fair number of big-budget extravaganzas that nominally involve Mars,

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Reposted from National Review.

If we could put a man on the Moon, why can’t we put a man on the Moon?

“We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills,

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