Friday, January 20, 2006

More spacecraft biomimicry:

Europeans studying spacecraft that bleed

The promise of self-healing spacecraft opens up the possibility of longer duration missions. The benefits are two-fold. Firstly, doubling the lifetime of a spacecraft in orbit around Earth would roughly halve the cost of the mission. Secondly, doubling spacecraft lifetimes means that mission planners could contemplate missions to far-away destinations in the Solar System that are currently too risky.



2 comments:

razorsmile said...

How is biomimicry different from biomimetics?

Mac said...

Maybe "biomimicry" is applied only when dealing with adaptive techniques in nature. "Biomimetics" might more accurately apply when our machines do it.