One step closer to a sci-fi reality—NASA announces funding for a quantum dot solar sail and a levitating train on the Moon

Hands up those of you that thought we'd be living in a far more science fiction-like future by now. Yep, me too. Still, it seems like some futuristic ideas that could be ripped straight from the pages of an Arthur C. Clarke novel might be in the works, as NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program has announcedproject, or SCOPE.

While deep-space exploration is a noble goal, I have two words for you that cause my inner child to gasp in wonder: Space. Train. Well, lunar train, to be more precise. That's the goal of theproject , which aims to be the first lunar railway system to provide reliable autonomous payload transportation on the Moon.

The track is being designed to unroll on the Moon's surface to avoid construction issues, and a large scale version of the system is said to be capable of moving up to 100,000 kgs of cargo multiple kilometres in a day, with a top speed of around 0.5 m/s., a"fluidic telescope" designed to be a space-based optical observatory, and a radioisotope thermoradiative cell power generator.

Andy built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 12, when IDE cables were a thing and high resolution wasn't. After spending over 15 years in the production industry overseeing a variety of live and recorded projects, he started writing his own PC hardware blog for a year in the hope that people might send him things. Sometimes they did.

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