Private space mogul wants to skip the moon and go right to Mars

By Matthew Jackson, Source: Blastr.com

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is an ambitious guy. He’s the one who said he can get commercial flights to Mars up and running a decade or so from now, but what about humanity’s return to the moon? Well, if you ask Musk, the moon’s little more than old news.

Musk has been making the rounds to talk up his company a lot these days as part of the lead-up to a (hopefully) historic SpaceX launch next week. On April 30 the company will launch an unmanned Dragon capsule to dock with the International Space Station.

Scientists say there are killer dinosaurs in space waiting to eat us

By Marc Bernardin, Source: Blastr.com

Manned missions into the cosmos were always going to be a dicey affair, given the multitudes of things we don’t know (and the fact that NASA’s funding is a fraction of what it should be). But if there are actually hyper-intelligent dinosaurs waiting for us, maybe we should just stay home.

The theory is, the amino acids that formed the building blocks of life came to Earth on an asteroid some 4 billion years ago. And given that those acids came from somewhere else, they also exist somewhere else.

Could there be ‘billions’ of habitable planets in our galaxy?

By Trent Moore, Source: Blastr.com

We may not have to look too terribly far to find a habitable alien planet out there. It turns out, there could be a few billion just in our own neighborhood. According to a new study, there are likely a lot more rocky – but habitable – planets out there orbiting red stars within our Milky Way galaxy.

The only problem? They can be tough to spot. We’ve managed to find a few, but scientists are now saying there are probably quite a lot more out there that we’re missing. Even better, many of them are solid candidates to house extraterrestrial life.

Scientists warn that a real-life Star Trek warp drive would be killer

By Nathalie Caron, Source: Blastr.com

If you’ve all been waiting for scientists to finally come up with a Star Trek-like warp drive—so that you could finally start building your very own Starship Enterprise in your basement/garage/backyard—then you’re outta luck.

Scientists have just theoretically determined that the whole thing would prove to have a deadly, catastrophic effect on perhaps the entire Universe. (Insert sounds of doom here.)