Using natural language programming (NLP), the software agents can read special English language technical documents on control methods. This gives the vehicles advanced guidance, navigation and feedback capabilities to stop them crashing into other objects and the ability to adapt during missions, identify problems, carry out repairs and make their own decisions about how best to carry out a task.

Professor Veres, who is leading the EPSRC-funded project, says: “This is the world’s first publishing system of technical knowledge for machines and opens the way for engineers to publish control instructions to machines directly. As well as spacecrafts and satellites, this innovative technology is transferable to other types of autonomous vehicles, such as autonomous underwater, ground and aerial vehicles.”

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Professor Veres adds: “We have invented sysbrains to control intelligent machines. Sysbrain is a special breed of software agents with unique features such as natural language programming to create them, human-like reasoning, and most importantly they can read special English language documents in ‘system English’ or ‘sEnglish’. Human authors of sEnglish documents can put them on the web as publications and sysbrain can read them to enhance their physical and problem solving skills. This allows engineers to write technical papers directly for sysbrain that control the machines.”

Instead of focusing on building a better shield, engineers should design spaceships that can hop in and out of passing asteroids, argues study author Gregory Matloff, an adjunct professor of physics at the New York City College of Technology.

The asteroid itself could then block cosmic rays during the voyage—astronauts could pull a Millennium Falcon and park their ship in a crater, or they could use on-board mining tools to tunnel into the rock. (Related: “Obama’s New Plan for NASA: Why Go to an Asteroid?”)

According to Matloff’s calculations, to be published in the March-April 2011 issue of the journal Acta Astronautica, the asteroid “taxi” would need to be about 33 feet (10 meters) wide to provide enough shielding. It would also need to pass close enough to both planets—within a couple million miles—to make the trip feasible.

Already there are five known asteroids that fit the criteria and will pass from Earth to Mars before the year 2100, based on a database of 5,500 near-Earth objects (NEOs), or comets and asteroids whose orbits take them near our planet.

The asteroids 1999YR14 and 2007EE26, for example, will both pass Earth in 2086, and they’ll make the journey to Mars in less than a year. The trouble would be getting home: Because of their wide orbits, it’d be five years before either asteroid would swing around Mars as it heads back toward Earth.

Matloff did find a third space rock that will travel from Mars to Earth—but it makes the journey too early, in 2037. For now it seems a space taxi to Mars would be a one-way ride.

However, the number of NEOs has increased since the database was compiled, Matloff said. There are now more than 7,000 known NEOs, so more potential rock taxis could exist.

Ideally, astronauts would divert an asteroid so that it cycles permanently between Earth and Mars on a well-timed orbit. Humans could nudge an asteroid into the desired path using a solar sail or gentle propulsion. (See “Solar Sail Hybrid Launches From Japan.”)

Once the asteroid is in a stable orbit, Matloff said, “you’d just jump on it. You could store provisions and spare parts on it and use it for shielding. … ”

Humanity has the power to fill outer space with life. Today our solar system is filled with plasma, gas, dust, rock, and radiation – but very little life; just a thin film around the third rock from the Sun. We can change that. In the 1970’s Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill with the help of NASA Ames Research Center and Stanford University showed that we can build giant orbiting spaceships and live in them. These orbital space colonies could be wonderful places to live; about the size of a California beach town and endowed with weightless recreation, fantastic views, freedom, elbow-room in spades, and great wealth. In time, we may see hundreds of thousands of orbital space settlements in our solar system alone. Building these settlements will be an evolutionary event in magnitude similar to, if not greater than, ocean-based Life’s colonization of land half a billion years ago

before actually sending out a generation starship, a necessary first step is to assemble the habitat section, populate and provision it, and boost it out to the Earth-Sun L2 point (a stable solar orbit in Earth’s shadow, about 1.5 million Km further out from the sun). L2 is a good proxy for interstellar space — it’s in perpetual shadow and very cold — and if we can run a self-contained and unreprovisioned habitat there for a century, then we can probably strap a propulsion system to it and run it for a century-long interstellar cruise. On the other hand, it’s close enough to home that if the biosphere crashes due to some obscure micronutrient cycle going nuts, it (and its inhabitants) can be brought back to Earth orbit.

In results just published in the journal Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, they have devised a system no bigger than a large desk that uses the same energy as an electric kettle. Two mini-magnetospheres will be contained within two mini satellites located outside the spaceship. Should there be an increase in solar wind flux, or an approaching cloud of energetic particles from a flare and/or coronal mass ejection (CME), the magnetospheres can be switched on and the solar ions are deflected away from the spacecraft.

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Prof. Bob Bingham, a theoretical physicist at the University of Strathclyde, gives a graphic account as to why this technology is important:

“Solar storms or winds are one of the greatest dangers of deep space travel. If you got hit by one not only would it take out the electronics of a ship but the astronauts would soon take on the appearance of an overcooked pizza. It would be a bit like being near the Hiroshima blast. Your skin would blister, hair and teeth fall out and before long your internal organs would fail. It is not a very nice way to go. This system creates a Magnetic Field Bubble that would deflect the dangerous radiation away from the spacecraft.” –

Operated by the Air Force 20th Space Control Squadron and created by Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, Space Fence is a multistatic radar system capable of detecting almost everything that moves in orbits up to 18,641 miles (30,000 kilometers). From the Hubble or the International Space Station down to the four-inch long metal shards that resulted from the collision of a commercial Iridium communications satellite and a defunct Russian satellite in 2009, this thing can track anything.

The modules, which have never been launched, were built as part of Almaz, a Soviet military programme that sent astronauts into orbit to take reconnaissance photographs of Earth. But Excalibur has also bought four reusable Almaz spacecraft, including one that was flown twice, which might be used much sooner.

Indeed, the firm’s immediate goal is finding ways to get passengers into orbit. Before this is possible the spaceships will need to be refurbished and modernised. However, Excalibur will attempt to preserve many of their “workhorse” components, including the heat shield, parachute system, solid rocket motors, and an escape system that can jettison a crew to safety if a rocket malfunctions.