lunar rail system

A collage of artist renderings highlighting the innovative approaches proposed by 2 NIAC Phase 2024 grantees for possible future missions. Credit: From left: Edward Balaban, Mary Knapp, Mahmooda Sultana, Brianna Clements, Ethan Schaler

Straight out of science fiction: NASA promotes six futuristic space technologies

Each completed the first phase of NASA's accelerator program, in which it showed that its future ideas — such as a lunar rail system and liquid-based telescopes — might provide perspectives