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As people I know start filtering back into New Orleans on salvage missions, I’m starting to hear some interesting stories about what the city is like nowadays.
Continue reading Stories From Inside New Orleans
Peter Diamandis has announced a new sport, of sorts — the Rocket Racing League:
Similar to auto racing organizations, the RRL will organize, host and run competitions across the United States, with the finals taking place each year at the X PRIZE Cup in New Mexico. The league also plans to produce nationwide tours of its rocket planes and pilots to answer the public’s demand for high-excitement entertainment. A video game based on the RRL is slated to launch in late 2007…
Rocket races will operate much like auto races, with the exception that the “track” is up in the sky. Courses are expected to be approximately two miles long, one mile wide, and about 5,000 feet high, running perpendicularly to spectators. The rocket planes, called X-Racers, will take off from a runway both in a staggered fashion and side-by side and fly a course based on the design of a Grand Prix competition, with long straight-aways, vertical ascents, and deep banks. Each pilot will follow his or her own virtual “tunnel” or “track” of space through which to fly, safely separated from their competitors by a few hundred feet.
Highly skilled X-Racer pilots will employ state-of-the-art differential GPS technology to ensure minimal chances of physical contact between the racers.
Upon take-off, onlookers will easily follow the race as the rocket planes remain in view and sport 20-foot rocket plumes. Fans can also track their favorite pilots’ progress via large screen televisions and hand-held GPS tracking devices using WiFi to stream video of the cockpit, live “on-track” shots, “side by side” views and wing angle views.
Fans at home will be treated to a three-dimensional course where the “tracks” pilots are following can be seen. Special effects for lap completions, barrier violations and penalties will also be a part of the show.
It’s not quite Sri Kanda (yet), but LiftPort has tested a climber on a 1000-foot ribbon:
This week’s testing involved a 12-foot (4-meter) diameter balloon. Safety lines held by team members kept the balloon from floating away. The ribbon dangling from the balloon was made of composite fiberglass, with the robot lifter running up and down the tether.
“This lifter is much smarter than our previous versions. It’s our 18th version,” he said, with the Mark VII robot named Sword Over Damocles or “Sword” for short. The belt-driven robot is battery-powered, featuring two motors and an expanded cargo area due to increased intelligence built into the device, he said.
During the day, the highest altitude reached by the balloon/ribbon/robot combination was 1,000 feet (305 meters). “It gives us complete confidence that the mile goal is well within reach,” Laine said.
Laine said that the Federal Aviation Administration has been very supportive and helpful in orchestrating their test flights.
“We are cleared up to 1 mile high, off of a tethered helium balloon,” Laine said. “Our series of tests are designed to gain in altitude as we go, as we test our communications, range sensors, global positioning system satellite gear, along with temperature and camera systems.”
What’s interesting is that they have a potential non-elevator product line available to them to support development of the elevator itself:
LiftPort has been busy at work on the space elevator idea for over two years.
Furthermore, the company has created LiftPort Nanotech in Millville, N.J. That company is delving into mass production of nanotubes, focused on creating super-strong materials, ?because, ultimately, that?s what leads to a long and strong ribbon in the sky,? Laine said.
?We?re not a PowerPoint company anymore ? we?re a hardware company,? Laine concluded.
Indeed…diversification and cashflow are useful things.
This post made me curious as to what sorts of space activities Global Network might actually favor, seeing as how they seem to be against the military use of space, the commercialization of space, the use of space technology developed for military use in non-military applications, and the use of nuclear power systems that allow for meaningful civil exploration missions beyond the orbit of Mars or human settlement of space.
So, I wrote to Bruce Gagnon, and asked him for his criteria for judging what space activities are “peaceful” or not. He forwarded me the following from Global Network:
Continue reading “Keep Space For Peace”?
While Bruce Gagnon has evidently been too busy bellyaching about Katrina and working the moonbat vaudeville circuit to do anything constructive to help hurricane victims, his comrades at Veterans for Peace have been active…bickering amongst themselves instead of distributing the aid entrusted to them.
Hmm. Turf battles and personalities getting in the way of disaster relief…why does that sound so familiar?
Jim Aikin, whose The Wall at the Edge of the World is one of my all-time favorite books, and whose Walk the Moon’s Road is up there with Dune in the world-building department, is finally, at long last, putting out a new book: The Leafstone Shield.
Regrettably, for my personal taste, it is fantasy, but as with Tolkien I’ll just have to set aside my general distaste for the genre. It’s Jim Aikin, after all…
The ever-irritating Jeff Bell came out with another snarky space essay, but no one else seems to have noticed. Or cared. One of the two.
I’ll leave it to Rand to ridicule Bell’s “everybody knows” arguments against reusability — assuming he has nothing better to do with his time. But I will myself deign to point out a particular error:
The very last VentureStar concept took the drastic step of eliminating the internal payload bay and carrying ISS supply modules externally. [emphasis added]
Nope. Sorry. That happened at least four configurations prior to the cancellation of the program. Nor was an external payload carrier a “drastic step”, but rather the end result of a gradual design evolution.
Looks like the Mars Homestead guys have started a startup.
It may seem a bit premature to be planning for this kind of thing now, what with even the as-yet-potential Mars missions under the VSE not scheduled for at least another twenty years, but you just never know what the emerging private space industry might do in the meantime.
What makes me skeptical about this is that it involves some of the same hyper-planners I was complaining about a couple of weeks back. Sure, there may eventually be a market for sending materials from Mars back to orbital stations and lunar colonies, but that seems much further off even than the proposed NASA Mars missions…there must first be orbital stations and lunar colonies to ship those items back to, and transportation costs must be such that materials from Mars beat out alternatives from elsewhere. (Perhaps they cover their business plan in more detail at their website, but I wouldn’t know because the site won’t let you in without Flash enabled.)
And while the holistic planning and business model have me skeptical, this has me shaking my head:
It will be many years before 4Frontiers is mining Mars and doling out mineral rights to Martian prospectors. So the company has several moneymaking schemes for the near term.
One plan is to build a full-scale version of the planned Mars settlement and charge visitors to tour the “Mars Settlement Research and Outreach Center.” 4Frontiers hopes to have a site selected for the center by the end of this year, said company co-founder and CEO Mark Homnick.
“We’ve narrowed the search to New Mexico, Central Florida or Colorado,” he said.
Never mind the notion that this venture will be “doling out mineral rights” it doesn’t have a legal claim to, the “theme park” idea seems corny in the extreme…sorta like these guys.
Something’s happening at KAPL:
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has pulled the plug on a $65 million nuclear propulsion research program at Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, leaving 150 employees in limbo.
“NASA and Naval Reactors have mutually agreed to terminate their partnership to work on Prometheus,” as the program was called, a Knolls spokeswoman said Friday afternoon. “NASA has been changing its priorities. I don’t have many details on this,” she added.
It’s not clear what this means yet, but since Prometheus was to be an electric propulsion system powered by a large new nuclear power system, it doesn’t sound good — that nuclear power system had other potential applications.
The next Shuttle flight may be delayed until May.
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