The J-2X engine before installation at the Stennis Space Center. Credit: NASA/SSC
Cool tech at NASA cutting manufacturing time from 9 months to 9 days. This is for the STS Senatorial(pork) Transportation System that I’ve no love for but proving tech like this is one of the ways that government R&D tax dollars provide broad value since success is not squirreled away as a trade secret.
Wired, Danger Room piece on after the aircraft carrier.
The Montford Point landing platform is essentially a cut down supertanker ( the predecessors of today’s Ultra Large Crude-oil Carriers, ULCC) which can ballast down and ‘lean’ so hovercraft can come aboard in open sea. One option is to similarly use this type of craft or similarly modified commercial hulls as cheap almost disposable carriers as needed. A sub divided double hull tanker is very hard to sink and the hull plates are sufficient to keep out small arms and splinters. Plus armoring and fire fighting kits are available and cheap today. The ‘fighting’ bit’ would essentially be a mod kit (a skin) that can be updated, moved around, even stored ready for war, the hull could be almost any commercial large bulk carrier. Heck large container ships are very fast today as are some RoRos, so you don’t even lose much strategic deployment speed.
Image: Don DeBold/Flickr
Apparently cliff swallows are selecting for car avoidance, at Wired.com. It would be good if squirrels, chipmunks and raccoons would either get quicker or smarter as well.
Magazine ad, America’s Independent Electric Light and Power Companies
Why Silicon Valley Is Winning the Robocar Race
By Virginia Postrel Mar 17, 2013 6:30 PM ET
Good short piece, I think it’s pretty obvious but needed saying. Articles out of ‘Detroit’ talk about decades, about lawyers killing it, about the joy of driving, no the joy of striving. In fact this is another area where differential change is required, relative change, change suited to the specific here and now of the individual or local group, not society writ totalitarian.
Meagan McArdle, Asymmetrical Information at The Daily Beast making sense from the noise as usual. If you care about Social Security, Retirement Accounts, 401Ks, today or tomorrow, liberal or conservative, read the article, it’s possible we’ve actually got a reasonable (i.e. maybe the best distributed risk coverage that’s possible in an imperfect world) system, we just need to understand it’s on our shoulders to use it well.
From EDN(electronic Design News) a fascinating history of a WWII bomber remote control gunsight, and it’s failure, repeatedly, while the bureaucrats insisted on pushing it forward. Great things were done during WWII but not without cost and not without clearly showing the strengths an weaknesses of the bureaucratic ‘blue model’ way of doing complex programs (at the time the only practical method of management.)
Good article on close in work on and using 3D Printing in Macine Design, a favorite of mine since the ’70s (my dad’s read at home magazine.)
Went to the Midwest ReRap Faire in Elkhart today, cool gear, lots of info, lots of enthusiasts.
Some photos:
From AWST Ares blog, (read the whole thing) a rescue robot-drone, actually a bit disturbing looking, but then again it’s rare that a specialist-optimized machine ends up looking like something you’d like to drink a bear with.
SAE tech article, interesting, 30 minutes of competitive performance! What’s that doodling back and forth to work?
This World and Others 