THE GURU'S LAB

 

  IMAGE SOURCE BOEING image caption Artist's concept of the Boeing Starliner craft travelling in Earth orbit Boeing's Starliner is one of two US spacecraft tasked by Nasa with transporting astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS). The vehicle is expected to help usher in a new era of private "taxi services" operating just above the Earth. When the space shuttle was retired in 2011, Nasa became reliant on Russia for transporting its astronauts to the ISS. In the meantime, Nasa worked on handing this job over to US companies. The space agency chose Boeing and SpaceX to develop new vehicles with the intention of purchasing seats on them for its crew once they started flying. Starliner has an Apollo-like design  with conical sides - a shape that's stable when the capsule is plummeting at high speed through the Earth's atmosphere. But it has more autonomy than either the Apollo spacecraft or the shuttle. Boeing's vehicle travels to the ISS a

  IMAGE SOURCE SPACEX image caption Starship prototype SN9 during its flight test at Boca Chica, Texas, in January 2021 Elon Musk is developing a vehicle that could be a game-changer for space travel. Starship, as it's known, will be a fully reusable transport system capable of carrying up to 100 people to the Red Planet. The founding ethos of Elon Musk's private spaceflight company SpaceX was to make life multi-planetary. This is partly motivated by existential threats such as an asteroid strike big enough to wipe out humanity. Settling other planets would place some of the eggs in other baskets, sparing human civilisation if one of them were to experience a cataclysm. In 2016, the  entrepreneur outlined his rationale  at an international conference in Mexico: "History is going to bifurcate along two directions. One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event," he said. "The alternative is to become a spacefaring civil