Joe Katzman explains why environmentalists should be grateful for technology in general, and incandescent bulbs in particular.
And be sure to turn on all your lights at the appointed hour. As Iain notes, in North Korea, as you can see from the satellite image, it’s Earth Hour 24/7/365.
…less traveled. I think that if we ever do see practical fusion, it will be from one of the alternate approaches, not the big-budget conventional wisdom. Sort of like practical spaceflight.
In this case, it’s a good thing. Back during the campaign, when John McCain proposed an automotive prize, then-Senator Obama derided it:
Explaining that “when John F. Kennedy decided that we were going to put a man on the moon, he didn’t put a bounty out for some rocket scientist to win,” Obama believes that to speed alternative fuel development and increase fuel-efficiency, the full power of the government must be combined with the “ingenuity and innovation of the American people.”
But now, Jonathan Adler says that Obama has his eye on prizes:
Earlier this month, with little fanfare, the Obama Administration took a small but significant step toward encouraging greater technological innovation. On March 8, the Office of Management and Budget issued a guidance to federal agencies on the use of challenges and prizes to spur technological innovation. This memorandum seeks to “strongly encourage” federal agencies to “utilize prizes and challenges as tools for advancing open government, innovation, and the agency’s mission.” It further explains that many federal agencies have sufficient statutory authority to create technology inducement prizes with existing funds and spending authority.
This is particularly good news for NASA, because Centennial Challenges needs an infusion of funds. Fortunately, the current NASA administration is very supportive of this sort of thing, and can be expected to support new prize activities if they get the budget for it.
Diana Hsieh seems to have set up an interesting new web site.
Well, technically, it’s upper atmospheric diving (only twenty-three miles altitude), but it should provide a lot of useful data for actual spacedivers as Armadillo and others start offering elevator service to a hundred kilometers. It’s actually kind of surprising to me that Kittinger’s record has stood so long.
Life extension through telomere reprogramming?
Faster, please.
I’d upgrade to a fifty-plus incher
But if you buy one from the link, it will help me get one, too. Not to mention buy my next bowl of gruel…
And it’s nice to see electronics continue to drop in price, even if space access doesn’t.
I’ve never been a big fan of nuking asteroids, but this test should cause some concern:
Don Korycansky of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Catherine Plesko of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico simulated blowing up asteroids 1 kilometre across. When the speed of dispersal was relatively low, it took only hours for the fragments to coalesce into a new rock.
“The high-speed stuff goes away but the low-speed stuff reassembles [in] 2 to 18 hours,” Korycansky says. The simulations were presented (pdf) last week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas.
So you have to have a big enough bomb to really do the job. I think there are better, more controllable ways.
Every time there’s a test of a scramjet, there’s associated overhype about how great it will be for space access. The upcoming X-51 flight is no exception:
Ms. Waldman said in her report that as scramjet technology is developed testers believe that in the near future it could be used to aid warfighters as a weapons delivery system. She said officials believe that in the future the scramjet technology will make space access easier.
“The application really is all about space lift,” Mr. Brink agreed, and said, “This is the one, I think, in the Air Force Research Lab we’re most excited about.”
Mr. Brink pointed out that they currently transport payload into space with the shuttle, which has to carry all of its oxidizers for the propulsion concept. He said the shuttle is a pure rocket system and said if they can incorporate scramjet engine technology into the space lift systems, they wouldn’t have to carry the oxidizers and could carry more payload instead.
Yeah, if there’s any payload left after you count the weight of the engines, which have terrible T/W compared to rockets, and all of the extra drag you incur staying in the atmosphere to collect the oxygen. I’ve discussed this more than once in the past. I’ve never seen a hypersonic airbreathing conceptual vehicle design that was an improvement in performance over a rocket for a space transport, at least if there was any analysis more serious than the above performed on it. Scramjets have plenty of utility for military applications. I wish that people selling the program didn’t always feel the need to oversell it. And if we had a smarter space media, they’d get called on it.
A review, by Glenn Reynolds, over at Popular Mechanics. A commenter claims that the engine development is having certification problems, but I don’t know how credible the commenter is.
I found this interesting:
Honda is also saving development money by taking advantage of modern computer power. Fujino notes that it’s possible to do serious design work on a laptop nowadays, where not long ago it took an expensive engineering workstation. And Honda is making heavy use of simulations, with a sophisticated whole-aircraft simulator that allows real parts to be swapped in and tested against virtual parts and vice versa, allowing many stages of refinement before parts ever reach the test-flight stage.
I wonder why these kinds of development-technology savings aren’t making their way into the spacecraft design world. But they probably are, actually. It’s one of the reasons that SpaceX has accomplished so much for comparatively little money. And when you’re on a cost-plus contract, you can always find other ways to spend the money.