Carnival of Space 317

The Carnival of Space 317 is up at Urban Astronomer.

Too Hot to Swallow: New Chandra results help explain why gas near the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole is so faint in X-rays.

Nextbigfuture space submissions

A ten thousand person colonization space ship design is proposed with a focus on how the community and living spaces should be designed. People are assigned area with the density of the city of Seattle and standard mixed use living areas. Everyone has 50 square meters of living space. There is agricultural and other green areas.

Spiderfab has gotten a phase 2 NASA NIAC $500,000 funding. Here are the detailed designs from the phase 1 project

Billionaire Peter Thiel is famous for his early investment in Facebook. He also was a cofounder of Paypal which was then merged with Xcom which was started by Elon Musk.

Positron Dynamics has seed funding from Paypal billionaire Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs. Initial simulations show that as much as 10 micrograms of positrons could be produced each week with a linear accelerator says co-founder Ryan Weed, PhD, a physicist and former cryogenic engineer for Jeff Bezos’s space flight company Blue Origin. We could see the beginning of the age of commercial antimatter within five years.

Six phase 2 NASA NIAC projects were announced. Propellant-less Spacecraft Formation-Flying and Maneuvering with Photonic Laser Thrusters was one of the six projects

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