NASA is funding ideas for a Titan seaplane and faster deep space travel

There are also observatory "swarm" concepts and self-growing Martian habitats.

NASA is always willing to fund unusual concepts in its attempt to advance space exploration. The agency is distributing initial study grants of $175,000 to 14 projects that could be useful for missions in and beyond the solar system. The highlight could be TitanAir, a seaplane by Quinn Morley of Planet Enterprises that could both fly through the nitrogen and methane atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan and navigate its oceans. The "flying boat" would collect methane and complex organic matter for study by sucking it through a porous leading edge.

A project by Artur Davoyan of UCLA, meanwhile, could speed up missions to the outskirts of the solar system and even into interstellar space. His design (shown in the middle) would propel a spacecraft by producing a "pellet beam" of microscopic particles moving at very high speeds (over 74 miles per second) using laser blasts. The concept could significantly shorten the time needed to explore deep space. Where Voyager 1 took 35 years to reach interstellar space (the heliopause, about 123 AU from the Sun), a one-tonne spacecraft could reach 100 AU in just three years. It could travel 500 AU in 15 years.

< p>Artur Davoyan

Other efforts are sometimes just as ambitious. MIT's Mary Knapp has proposed a deep-space observatory that would use a swarm of thousands of tiny satellites to detect low-frequency radio emissions from the early universe, not to mention the magnetic fields of Earth-like exoplanets. Congrui Jin of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln has envisioned self-growing habitat building blocks that could save space on missions to Mars, while Peter Curreri of Lunar Resources has designed pipelines that could carry the oxygen between the lunar bases.

These are all very early initiatives that are not guaranteed to lead to real-world testing, let alone missions. However, they illustrate NASA thinking. The administration is now funding the projects in the hope that at least one will eventually bear fruit. If there is even partial success, NASA could make discoveries that are impractical using existing technology.

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