SPACE/COSMOS
Putin envoy says Russia could supply a small nuclear power plant for Musk's Mars mission
Thu, March 27, 2025
The head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund Kirill Dmitriev speaks after the U.S.-Russia talks in Riyadh
(Reuters) - Russia could supply a small nuclear power plant for a mission to Mars planned by billionaire entrepreneur and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, President Vladimir Putin's international cooperation envoy said on Thursday.
The envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, said Moscow could discuss the offer with Musk by video conference. It was the second time Dmitriev has spoken of potential cooperation with Musk this month.
The proposal comes after U.S. President Donald Trump launched talks with Russia aimed at reviving bilateral ties which were languishing at their lowest level in decades due to Russia's war in Ukraine. Moscow is seeking to develop economic cooperation with Washington, even as U.S. sanctions against Russia over the conflict remain in place.
Musk, a close Trump associate, said earlier this month that his Starship rocket would blast off for Mars by the end of next year despite various failures in tests and amid scepticism from some space experts about Musk's projected timeline.
In a post on X, Musk said human landings could take place as early as 2029, but that "2031 was more likely." He spoke last year of plans to build a "self-sustaining city in about 20 years" on Mars, something that would need a power source.
Speaking in Murmansk on the sidelines of an Arctic Forum, Dmitriev, who is also head of a fund that works to attract foreign investors, said Russia could contribute a lot to a potential Mars mission.
"Russia can offer a small-sized nuclear power plant for a mission to Mars and other advanced technological capabilities," the state RIA news agency cited him as saying.
"We believe that Russia has a lot to offer for a mission to Mars, because we have some nuclear technologies that I think could be applicable," he added, saying Russia regarded cooperation with Musk, whom Dmitriev hailed as a "great visionary", as important.
Yuri Borisov, the then head of Russia's Roscosmos space agency, said last year that Russia and China were considering putting a nuclear power plant on the moon from 2033-35, something he said could one day allow lunar settlements to be built.
Russia said in 2022 it would start work on its own Mars mission after the European Space Agency (ESA) suspended a joint project after the start of the war.
(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
SpaceX reportedly has a secret backdoor for Chinese investment
Rebecca Bellan
Wed, March 26, 2025
Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX has allowed Chinese investors to buy stakes as long as the funds are routed through the Cayman Islands or other offshore hubs, according to reporting from ProPublica.
SpaceX is a defense contractor for the Pentagon, one that handles sensitive work like building a classified spy satellite network. Investment from China raises national security concerns, as it could grant a foreign adversary access to sensitive military technology, intelligence, or supply chains.
The insight into SpaceX’s investment approach surfaces new questions around Musk’s own ties with China, particularly amid reports that the Pentagon briefed Musk on a potential war with China. The billionaire executive who is leading the charge to gut federal spending has regularly met with Communist Party officials in China to discuss his business interests. Tesla’s Shanghai gigafactory builds about half of Tesla’s cars, and the country makes up a significant (if shrinking) chunk of its sales.
The details of how SpaceX allows Chinese investors to buy into the company came to light through the testimony of its CFO, Bret Johnsen, and major investor Iqbaljit Kahlon during a recent corporate dispute in Delaware.
The dispute centered around an aborted 2021 deal with a Chinese firm that had planned to buy $50 million of the company’s stock. When the news became public, SpaceX executives pulled out to avoid potential problems with national security regulators.
Kahlon testified in December that SpaceX finds it “acceptable” for Chinese investors to buy into the company through offshore vehicles, which are often used to keep investors anonymous.
Experts who spoke to ProPublica said this practice is troubling because it’s a potential sign that the company is taking active steps to conceal foreign ownership interests. It’s unclear exactly why SpaceX does this; the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
While passive, noncontrolling stakes from foreign investors are welcome, it is the Trump administration’s position that adversaries like China use concealed investment strategies to obtain technologies, IP, and leverage in strategic industries. As a result, typically such investments would be vetted by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).
There’s no public record of SpaceX undergoing a formal CFIUS review. TechCrunch has reached out to CFIUS and SpaceX to learn more.
ProPublica’s reporting follows an investigation from the Financial Times that found that Chinese investors are using special-purpose vehicles to quietly funnel millions into Musk-controlled companies, including SpaceX, xAI, and Neuralink.
Researchers develop new design and fabrication method to make lightsails for interstellar travel
Brown University
image:
A process for designing ultra-thin membranes with billions of nanoscale holes may one day help small spacecraft reach the stars.
view moreCredit: Norte lab, TU Delft/Bessa lab, Brown University
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Since its launch in 1977, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has traveled over 15 billion miles into deep space. That’s a long way — but it’s not even 1% of the distance to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to the sun. If humans are going to send ships to the stars, space travel will have to get a lot faster.
One promising way to pick up that kind of speed is a “lightsail” — a thin, reflective membrane that can be pushed by light much the same way that wind pushes a sailboat. Lightsails have the potential to reduce flight time to nearby stars from several thousand years using current propulsion systems to perhaps just a decade or two.
Now, a team of researchers from Brown University and Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands has developed a new way of designing and fabricating ultra-thin, ultra-reflective membranes for lightsails. In a study published in Nature Communications, the researchers describe a lightsail membrane that’s 60 millimeters (about 2.4 inches) wide by 60 millimeters long, but with a thickness of just 200 nanometers — a tiny fraction of a human hair. The surface is intricately patterned with billions of nanoscale holes, which help to reduce the material’s weight and increase its reflectivity, giving it more acceleration potential.
“This work was a joint effort between theorists at Brown University and experimentalists at TU Delft making it possible to design, fabricate and test a highly reflective lightsail with the largest aspect ratio recorded to date,” said Miguel Bessa, an associate professor in Brown’s School of Engineering who co-led the research with Richard Norte, an associate professor at TU Delft. “The experimental breakthrough of Richard’s team proves their fabrication process is scalable to the dimensions needed for interstellar travel and can be done in a cost-effective manner. Simultaneously, my team is very enthusiastic to see the essential role of our latest optimization method guided by machine learning in solving such an interesting and difficult engineering problem.”
The research is a significant step toward realizing goals like those of the Starshot Breakthrough Initiative, founded by entrepreneur Yuri Milner and the late physicist Stephen Hawking. The goal is to use ground-based lasers to power hundreds of meter-scale lightsails carrying microchip-sized spacecraft. This new lightsail design could be scaled up to meter scale fairly easily, the researchers say, and with a manageable price tag.
For their design, the team used single-layer silicon nitride, a lightweight and high-strength material that’s well suited for lightsail design. The researchers then worked to maximize its reflectivity while minimizing its weight. The reflectivity of the surface determines how much light pressure is created behind the sail, which in turn determines how fast it can accelerate. At the same time, a lighter material requires less force to accelerate, so less mass equals more speed.
The optimization process involved designing a pattern of nanoscale holes — billions of them across the material’s surface with diameters smaller than the wavelength of light. Bessa’s team, including Brown Ph.D. student Shunyu Yin, used a new artificial intelligence method they developed to optimize the shape and placement of the holes for increased reflectivity and decreased weight.
Once they had an optimized design, a team led by Norte at TU Delft went to work fabricating it in the lab.
“We have developed a new gas-based etch that allows us to delicately remove the material under the sails, leaving only the sail,” Norte said. “If the sails break, it’s most likely during manufacturing. Once the sails are suspended, they are actually quite robust. These techniques have been uniquely developed at TU Delft.”
Fabricating this design with traditional methods would have been expensive and taken as long as 15 years, the researchers say. But using Norte’s techniques, fabrication took about a day and is thousands of times less expensive. The result is a membrane that the researchers believe has the highest aspect ratio — centimeter-scale length but with nanoscale thickness — of any lightsail design to date. The researchers hope that their methods will not only help humans reach the stars, but also push the limits of nanoscale engineering.
“The new machine learning and optimization techniques we used here are very general,” Bessa said. “We could use them to create lots of different things for different purposes. This is really just the beginning. We might be on the verge of solving engineering problems that have remained unsolvable up to now.”
The research was funded by the European Union (ERC, EARS, 101042855) and a Limitless Space Institute I2 Grant.
A process for designing ultra-thin membranes with billions of nanoscale holes may one day help small spacecraft reach the stars.
Credit
Norte lab, TU Delft and Bessa lab, Brown University
Journal
Nature Communications
Article Title
Pentagonal photonic crystal mirrors: scalable lightsails with enhanced acceleration via neural topology optimization
Article Publication Date
25-Mar-2025
Atmospheres of new planets might have unexpected mixtures of hydrogen and water
Water and gas react under intense heat and pressure in the atmospheres of young Earth-to-Neptune-sized planets
University of California - Los Angeles
Key takeaways
- Planets can be extremely hot when they are born, and new computational experiments show that such planets would have an atmosphere composed of a homogenous mixture of hydrogen and water. As the planets age, their temperature decreases, and the hydrogen and water begin to separate.
- The subsequent rainout of water could not only generate an unexpected amount of heat deep inside these worlds but reshape the composition of atmospheres and evolution of these planets for billions of years.
- The work has implications for potentially habitable exoplanets with a hydrogen atmosphere overlying a water ocean, depending on the planets’ internal temperatures.
All planets are made of gas, ice, rock and metal, and models of how planets form usually assume that these materials don’t react chemically with each other. But what if some of them do? UCLA and Princeton planetary scientists asked that question and got a surprising answer: Under the intense heat and pressure of newborn planets, water and gas react with each other, creating unexpected mixtures in the atmospheres of young Earth-to-Neptune-sized planets and a “rainfall” deep inside the atmospheres.
Recent studies show that the most common type of planets in our galaxy, those between the sizes of Earth and Neptune, typically form with a hydrogen atmosphere, resulting in conditions where hydrogen and the planet's molten interior interact for millions to billions of years. Interactions between the atmosphere and the interior are thus crucial to understanding the formation and evolution of these bodies and what might lie beneath these atmospheres.
But the temperatures and pressures involved are so extreme that laboratory experiments to study them are nearly impossible. The researchers took advantage of UCLA and Princeton supercomputers to conduct quantum mechanical molecular dynamics simulations to investigate how hydrogen and water — two of the most important planetary constituents — interact over a wide range of pressure and temperature in planets Neptune-sized and smaller. The results are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“We usually think of basic physics and chemistry as being known already,” said study co-author Lars Stixrude, a UCLA earth, planetary and space sciences professor. “We know when things are going to melt and when they're going to dissolve and when they're going to freeze. But when it comes to the deep insides of planets, we just don't know. There’s no textbook where we can look these things up, and we have to predict them.”
The researchers set up simulations of a system split into hydrogen and water, with several hundred atoms of each, and calculated how they interact with each other at the quantum level. The atoms responded in a natural way, as they would in a laboratory experiment under the same conditions.
Planets can be extremely hot when they are born or if they are very close to their parent stars, and these computational experiments showed that such planets would have an atmosphere composed of a homogenous mixture of hydrogen and water. But as the planets age, their temperature decreases, and the hydrogen and water begin to separate. The subsequent rainout of water could not only generate an unexpected amount of heat deep inside these worlds but reshape the composition of atmospheres and evolution of these planets for billions of years.
“Over time, as the planet cools down, in the outer regions of the atmosphere, clouds begin to form as water condenses out,” said first author Akash Gupta, who conducted the research as a UCLA doctoral student and is now a 51 Pegasi b and Harry H. Hess Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University. “Shortly thereafter, water and hydrogen would begin to separate deep within the atmosphere — a pivotal event, given that the majority of the planet’s hydrogen and water reserves lie in these depths. This would then lead to a ‘rainfall’ deep inside the planet’s atmosphere as heavier water sinks while the lighter hydrogen rises, resulting in an outer, hydrogen-rich envelope and an inner, water-rich one.”
The finding could also help solve the mystery of why Uranus emits much less heat than Neptune even though these planets are very similar in size.
“Rainout of water may have so far occurred to a greater extent in Neptune than in Uranus, thus generating more internal heat within Neptune,” Gupta said. “This could explain why Uranus exhibits significantly lower heat flow compared to Neptune.”
The work has implications for planets outside our solar system, such as K2-18 b and TOI-270 d, which have been argued to be potentially habitable worlds with a hydrogen atmosphere overlying a water ocean. However, the internal temperatures of such exoplanets, if high enough, could lie entirely in the regime where hydrogen and water can’t separate, so that they would consist of a single homogeneous hydrogen-water fluid.
“If water and hydrogen are indeed substantially mixed throughout a planet’s interior, the structure and thermal evolution of Earth- and Neptune-like exoplanets can be substantially different from the standard models typically used in the field,” said Hilke Schlichting, study co-author and UCLA earth, planetary, and space sciences professor.
“On the other hand, planets that are colder could have a separate layer enriched in water, possibly in liquid form.”
The research thus further provides a physics-inspired framework to narrow the search for planetary systems in our galaxy in which water-rich exoplanets could have water oceans or if they might have atmospheres where hydrogen and water are completely mixed and uncovers what possibly governs this bifurcation.
The research was funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation and Princeton University.
Journal
The Astrophysical Journal Letters
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