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Sweet – Virgin’s passenger spaceship completes first rocket test flight:

The spaceship and its carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo, took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port at 7 a.m. PDT (10.00 a.m. EDT), heading to an altitude of about 46,000 feet, where SpaceShipTwo was released.

Two pilots then ignited the ship’s rocket engine and climbed another 10,000 feet, reaching Mach 1.2 in the process. Additional test flights are planned before the spaceship will fly even faster, eventually reaching altitudes that exceed 62 miles.

“Going from Mach 1 to Mach 4 is relatively easy, but obviously we’ve still got to do it. I think that the big, difficult milestones are all behind us,” Branson said.

Posted on April 29th, 2013 under Science & Engineering, Space Commerce, Space Technology. Tags: richard branson, spaceship two, virgin galactic. Comments Off

Sorta… Lee Hutchison at Ars Technica has two new articles on efforts to resurrect and/or evolve the F-1 engine:

New F-1B rocket engine upgrades Apollo-era design with 1.8M lbs of thrust

How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life

The former details the efforts by Pratt & Whitney and Dynetics to evolve the F-1/F-1A designs into the F-1B: a new engine derived from the old, using modern manufacturing methods and control systems where beneficial. It’s especially interesting because I’ve long thought calls by laypeople and Congressmen and the like to bring the Saturn V into production would (if heeded) lead to exactly this…by the time you take advantage of the cost-saving technological improvements (and the loss of certain outmoded manufacturing capabilities) since 1960, you may end up with a machine that looks and performs much as the original, but shares only a partial pedigree with it. The temptation/opportunity to make it better is too great, and one would be foolish not to do so. Efforts on the F-1B are an impressive example of this.

The latter is an example of something I think we need a lot more of: hands-on experience for younger engineers. Building something new or reverse-engineering something old, doesn’t matter, it’s a great opportunity for learning that simply making CAD models and PowerPoints of “paper rockets” will never get you.

And check out those welds – wow.

Posted on April 15th, 2013 under Moon-Mars Plan, Orion, Rocket Science, Science & Engineering, Space Technology. Tags: Dynetics, Engine, F-1, Pratt & Whitney, Pyrios, Rocketdyne, saturn, SLS. Comments Off

I could see me doing something like this: Dad Builds Homemade Spaceship For Son in Backyard

What? For the kids? Forget the kids – I’d do this for me! I’m still amused that while working on Orion I got to play in personally inspect Apollo 17′s CM, a Soyuz trainer, and two different Orion CM mockups.

Posted on April 13th, 2013 under Entertainment, Orion, Science & Engineering. Tags: Entertainment, spaceship, toys. Comments Off

So, who thinks Carl and I were too sporty with the diggers and other robots in In the Shadow of Ares?

The humanoid robots are a little creepy in an uncanny valley way, but quite impressive for what they can do if even part of it is autonomous (it looks to me like the Petman demo involves someone driving the device in realtime, possibly by mean akin to motion capture, yet still with autonomous responses/reflexes at work in maintaining its balance). I found the robotic pack-mule the most impressive, probably because it (and the hexapod thing near the beginning) appears to be the most versatile and mature design – one can already imagine a production version being used in the field for a variety of applications (with or without cinder-block-tossing appendages). Or, imagine a future Mars “rover’ based on a similar platform, able to wander into more interesting areas of the planet’s surface than the current wheeled designs can reach.

The hexapod device really caught my attention, partly because Carl and I dreamed up a similar device a few months ago for Ghosts of Tharsis – more sophisticated of course, but something that is recognizable as a 40-year evolution of the device shown, augmented with the wholly-fictional (?) simulacrum intelligence technology. And if you thought the diggers were dangerous…

Posted on April 1st, 2013 under Entertainment, In the Shadow of Ares, Science & Engineering, Science Fiction, Useful Technology. Tags: Boston Dynamics, DARPA, robot, Science Fiction. Comments Off

Thanks to a cheap promotional airfare and some friends willing to go on a weekend trip to the Arctic north, in the winter, on a lark, I now know what Iceland looks like in the dark.

Something like this…

…which reminded me of the agricultural bubbles at the Green in In the Shadow of Ares.

In fact, they’re a set of agricultural greenhouses in the town of Hveragerði, and despite their size are each about a tenth as wide and about 1/15th as long as their fictional counterparts.

CLARIFICATION: No, we did not actually go to Iceland on a lark. We used an airplane.

Posted on January 26th, 2013 under In the Shadow of Ares, Science & Engineering, Science Fiction, Settlement, Useful Technology. Tags: Iceland, In the Shadow of Ares, Science Fiction. Comments Off

Kids aren’t going into technical trades anymore, at least not at the levels needed, and not with the proficiency in foundational skills they need to start off well.

I agree that the problem really does stretch back to at least the Reagan era – I entered junior high in 1981, and even then “the trades” in the form of shop classes were looked down upon. (And don’t get me started on the counterproductive-verging-on-malpractice “guidance counselor” advice I received urging me to go into social science instead of engineering.) While I abhor the straitjacket elements of the German educational/career system (the part about making your life’s career choice at thirteen and being stuck with it, in particular), they do seem to have the right idea in exposing students to industrial work early and in the intensive training in trades those with interest and inclination in them receive. Even the German engineers I’ve worked with have had what to me seems like an extensive trades-level education in relevant areas as part of their engineering program — it’s embarrassing to call myself an engineer around them, given that they typically have extensive hands-on experience with machining and lab work and the like that I somehow managed to obtain a BSME without. (Sadly, I have far more hands-on experience from my summer internship in Germany and my various at-home engineering projects than I obtained even in fifteen years of employment with Lockheed Martin.)

What the article seems to overlook (consciously or otherwise) is the reason for pushing more kids into college prep courses and then into college, regardless of inclination or ability: status consciousness.

As noted above, the trades path was looked down upon even in the early 1980s. It was considered low-class, something the poor or dumb kids did – the ones too dumb to get into the military, which career was held in similar low regard at that time. Those of us in the “gifted and talented” sham track were most certainly conditioned to see ourselves as “better” than that, as destined for college and white-collardom, and therefore above getting our hands dirty with shop classes or candystriping or the like even if they might later enhance higher-status careers like engineering or medicine. And no doubt this was pushed on the parents as well – my hometown at that time was extremely status/class conscious, so imagine the horror of your average doctor or lawyer parent being told by a teacher that their brilliant little snowflake has an aptitude and potential interest in something as crude as a trade: “No, no, my little Johnny is going to college, to be a doctor/lawyer like me, or at least something white-collar or academic enough that I won’t be embarrassed when the boys at the Country Club ask about his career. Tradesman just won’t reflect well on my status at all.”

One essential element in turning this situation around needs to be a change in perspective on the economic status of trades. This seems to be happening, given the trend in articles over the past several years musing on how plumbers and electricians and the like are making good use of their scarcity to rake in white-collar-level incomes (on top of often being independent small businessmen, something that in itself should afford one a healthy economic status anyway). Once these SWPL parents realize that Johnny’s choice nowadays is between fixing plumbing, running wires, programming a CNC machine, etc. and making a decent and productive living at it, or putting both himself and them on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt to fund a college-level credential in a trendy niche subject whose job prospects consist exclusively of fast-food management, telephone customer service, stripping for truckers, or a futile chase after increasingly scarce Non-Hierarchical General Assembly Facilitator positions at what’s left of the local Occupy squat, they may find new competitive value among their status peers in aggressively pushing their kids in the former direction.

(Note that “Johnny” here is your average kid – many kids have certain aptitudes, for instance in STEM subjects, which make it economically worthwhile and personally rewarding to go on to college and then compete for comparatively scarce career positions. The problem is treating all kids like this by default, forcing them onto the white-collar college track when there are insufficient career positions to support such a policy and when they as individuals may have other – or no – inclinations and talents. It’s just as unfair to the “Johnnys” as it is to the kids with aptitude but fewer resources, who bear the opportunity cost of indifferent kids getting unwanted and unusable credential degrees instead of the useful educations the latter might have obtained in their place.)

Hat tip to Rand Simberg, who observes: “The entire educational establishment in this country is a disaster, from top to bottom.” Indeed.

Posted on January 9th, 2013 under Economics, politics, Science & Engineering. Tags: career, education, employment, trades. Comments: 1

Technology Review has a short article on what has been learned since the meltdowns last year – What We Learned About Nuclear Safety From Fukushima:

Reactors and radioactive materials at Fukushima Daiichi were destabilized by back-to-back beyond design-basis events. First was the magnitude 9.0 earthquake that felled the plant’s power lines, triggering diesel generators to maintain cooling of its reactor cores and spent fuel rods. Less than an hour later, the generators along with some of the plant’s last-resort battery power backup were gone, knocked out by a 14-meter tsunami wave that crested the plant’s seawall.

Human error and design limitations quickly compounded the impact of the loss of power. Operators mistakenly shut down battery-driven cooling on one reactor for three hours, for example. Within 24 hours of the tsunami, nuclear fuel in three reactors was melting down, and superheated fuel was generating hydrogen gas, whose ignition would blow open three reactor buildings in the days ahead, impeding response efforts and exposing elevated pools holding spent nuclear fuel.

So, that’s what we know happened. What’s surprising is that some of the obvious shortcomings of the plant’s design and operations weren’t recognized and dealt with well before the disaster.

What’s interesting and not surprising is that Fukushima is a textbook engineering failure, in that it wasn’t one flaw in design, execution, or operation that led to the meltdowns but a cascade of such failures, the absence of any one of which might have significantly limited the disaster or prevented it from happening altogether. Even with the beyond design-basis earthquake and the large tsunami following it, he plant might have remained under safe control had, for instance, the power lines not been knocked out for an extended period, or had the backup generators been out of reach of the tsunami.

The response from the US nuclear power industry has been to stage emergency equipment such as generators at strategically-located depots in anticipation of unanticipatable events. New nuclear power stations (yes, there are actually new ones under construction in the US) will use advanced passive safety features to safely shut down reactors in the event of an emergency and buy time for outside emergency response. Naturally such measures aren’t good enough for the Union of Concerned Scientists Anti-Anything-Nuclear Activists, cited later in the article, for whom no degree of risk can ever be small enough.

Posted on March 8th, 2012 under Enginastery, Science & Engineering, Useful Technology. Tags: disaster, engineering, fukushima, nuclear power. Comments: 1

Well, maybe not all that soon – they’re predicting 10-20 years, which would fit nicely with our timeline for In the Shadow of Ares: Scientists Prepare Test-Tube Burger

Starting with bovine stem cells, the Dutch researchers have grown muscle fibres up to 3cm long and 0.5mm thick. The fibres are tethered and exercised as they grow, like real muscles, by bending and stretching in the culture dishes. They feed on a broth of vegetable proteins and other nutrients, equivalent to the grass or grain diet of cattle.

 

At present the fibres are a pallid yellowish-pink colour, rather than the red of raw ground beef, because they do not contain blood, but Prof Post plans to improve their appearance.

Hopefully not by adding a bunch of dye to it.

The comments on the linked article are disappointingly luddite (and predictably smug  and preachy in the case of the vegetarians/vegans), but they did prompt me to wonder just how “natural” such synthetic meats might end up being. It’s a fair point that if you’re eating all the hormones and such required to grow the meat in vitro, it’s probably going to be less healthy for you than the real thing.

Posted on February 20th, 2012 under In the Shadow of Ares, Luddism, Science & Engineering, Space Technology, Useful Technology. Tags: food, In the Shadow of Ares, luddites, synthetic meat, vat meat. Comments Off

This could certainly be useful in martian and lunar settlements, and perhaps moreso on the way to and from them – Researchers successfully treat previously lethal doses of radiation:

“The fact that this treatment can be administered up to a day after radiation exposure is so important,” said Millie Donlon, DARPA’s program manager for this effort. “This is because most of the existing treatments we have require they be administered within hours of exposure to potentially lethal radiation – something that might not always be possible in the confusion that would likely follow such an exposure event.”

The treatment – a combination of two readily-available and stockpileable pharmaceuticals – increases in mice the survival rate from a normally lethal dose to 80%, and there are indications it could be even more effective in humans. Note that it appears to treat only the immediate effects (“radiation sickness”) and there’s no mention of whether it reduces rates of long-term medical problems stemming from the exposure, such as cancers. Of course, one mustn’t be too greedy — I’m sure someone exposed to a lethal dose of radiation would consider the potential for cancer later in life an okay tradeoff to not dying a rapid and horrible death.

What might come of this discovery, if it does work as indicated?

• Long-term space activities outside LEO (including transportation to and from deep space destinations) might be perceived as less risky if solar flares or other high-exposure events are less of a problem;
• Spacecraft, stations, and surface facilities could be made simpler and lighter – if it’s accurate to consider this treatment as effectively raising the lethal dose (and again ignoring the long-term consequences in favor of short-term survival), structural countermeasures for extreme events don’t need to block quite as much radiation, and lighter or larger “storm cellars” become possible;
• Nuclear power accidents become less hysteria-inducing (but then so might nuclear weapons use – c.f. Michael F. Flynn’s The Washer at the Ford)

Interesting.

Apparently, Resveratrol also has some anti-rad properties.

Posted on January 7th, 2012 under Science & Engineering, Settlement, Space Technology, Useful Technology. Tags: cancer, medicine, radiation, treatment. Comments Off