Dream Chaser in a captive carry flight over the Mojave. (Credit: Sierra Nevada Corporation
Dream Chaser you have to like the name
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Category Archives: Future
10 story Grasshopper does a little daring
Slashgear.com : SpaceX Rasshopper aces side tracking reusable rocket test go check out the video at the link way cool as always!
Even more exciting, there’s some more details on the next steps!
Of course, the system will have to go significantly higher if it’s to be of use to NASA. SpaceX plans to introduce a second version of Grasshopper – known as v1.1 – sometime after October 2013, which will stand 160 feet tall and use nine of the engines from the Falcon 9-R rocket, rather than Grasshopper v.1′s single engine.
When testing begins, Grasshopper v1.1 is expected to eventually fly to heights of 300,000 feet, launching from a specially constructed pad at Spaceport America, New Mexico.
WoT me worry?
From the Lebanese (you know, the Lebanon, between the Mediterranean, Syria and Israel), The Daily Star || Rami G. Khouri || Blame those who brought Al-Qaeda to life
Excellent short piece, I agree that the WoT (war on terror) has gone AWOL and the drone wars are nothing but a bloody patch, rapidly passing their use by date. Drones have been shown to be a fundamental game changer along with precision weapons but its still state sanctioned murder (with the unintentional slaughter of innocents reduced but not eliminated) at first and still when used appropriately as part of a strategy with operational planning and support tactics they were/are a success but today they are fireworks pressed up to make like policy.
Our strategic and operational thinking & planning long ago died a dusty death and now the wonks blow things up by the numbers…this is LBJ/McNamara’s #’s game bombing Vietnam all over again.
Don’t get me wrong I doubt we’re killing indiscriminately and our operators are doing the best they possibly can but without the proper and appropriate strategy, planning and tactics, we cannot win, we cannot kill our way out of this. I am concerned that like with antibiotics, misused medicine eventually makes the disease much more dangerous.
NYT// Micro (observation) Satellites, new niche, new snitch?
Microsatellites: What Big Eyes They Have
By ANNE EISENBERG
Published: August 10, 2013
Kelley Alwood, project manager, worked on the SkySat-1 satellite in Skybox Imaging’s clean room. Matt McDonald
Can’t resist this piece of this article….Man Triggered Rain Forest
Read the whole article, Seven Surprising Truths about the World : A lot of the bad news you think you know is wrong, but this piece of it made me grin for a change:
Local Biodiversity Is Increasing
Ascension Island is about as isolated as a piece of land can get, sitting in the Atlantic Ocean about midway between Africa and South America. When the British claimed authority over the uninhabited, barren hunk of stone in the early 19th century, it was frequently likened to a “cinder” or a “ruinous heap of rocks.” The new owners named Ascension’s central peak White Mountain, after the color of the bare rocks of which it was composed.
In 1846, botanist John Hooker from the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew visited and decided to try transplanting a wide variety of plants onto the island. A century and a half later, the result has been an “accidental rainforest.” White Mountain, now renamed Green Mountain, is covered with an extensive cloud forest consisting of guava, banana, wild ginger, bamboo, the Chinese glory bower and Madagascan periwinkle, Norfolk Island pine, and eucalyptus from Australia. Because of the man-made micro-climate, what used to be a desert island now features several permanent streams.
Ascension Island undercuts the conventional ecological wisdom that tropical rainforests are supposed to take millions of years to form. And what happened on Ascension has been happening all around the world, as people have moved thousands of species from their native habitats to new locales, increasing species richness. Wherever human beings have gone in the past two centuries, we have increased local and regional biodiversity.
PopSci | Comfortable Light Weight Space Suit for Commercial Space Travel
Private space company Final Frontier Design shows off the latest orbital fashion.
Read more at: PopSci : New for Space Tourists: A Light Comfy Space Suit
England takes a bet on Space
The Sabre air breathing rocket and the Skylon single stage to orbit craft grow more real with time. We should all remember that England was a hot bed of jet engine development in the early years and is still a leader (Rolls Royce.)
The announcement late last month that the Chancellor, George Osborne, is planning to put a chunk of the country’s meagre resources for capital expenditure behind a British project to develop a revolutionary jet engine for a reusable space plane, suggests the government has high hopes of the space engineering sector.
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The Chancellor’s interest in Skylon centres on the hybrid air-breathing rocket engine, known as SABRE, which would power it into orbit in a single stage. The engine relies on an entirely new pre-cooling technology that allows it to function at extremely high speeds, at plus Mach 5. The project has no competitor. If successful it would offer a uniquely lightweight and therefore more affordable means of reaching space. It has already completed a series of tests and the next stage is to build a full-scale prototype.
Read more: The Engineer : Career opportunities in the UK space sector
Also the company developing the tech: Reaction Engines 
Uh, Guys, the ‘scope’s pointed in the wrong direction?!
An artist’s rendering of the proposed telescope on the Malapert crater on the moon. Moon Express/ILOA
Read more at: Wired: The Private Plan to Put a Telescope on the Moon
So yes you need an Earth link but I think Earth would be below the local horizon and a mast with a laser or smaller high frequency antenna would provide that link. I imagine the picture was marketing/art departments idea and it is cool.
The whole mission concept is cool and seems to make a lot of sense.
One thing we forget in this ‘later’ more ‘modern’ age is that historically science and scientific instruments were private, and they were not inexpensive it was a rich man’s game and often rich patron’s egos that got us to to the beginning of the twentieth century.
Looks like a great application of a ‘striped down’ mod of a SpaceX Dragon vertical lander…
To the Moon Gracie!
AWST Staff: Source: Aerospace Daily & Defense Report : NASA Calls For Private Lunar Lander Partners
Piggybacking on the Google Lunar X Prize and various commercial endeavors, NASA has offered its expertise and test facilities to potential lunar-lander partners who might be able to help mount scientific missions to the Moon’s surface as early as 2018.
A request for information published July 2 seeks concepts for “an industry-developed robotic lander that can be integrated with a launch vehicle for the purposes of supporting commercial (and potentially future NASA) missions.”
The U.S. space agency is interested in landers that can put two classes of payload on the lunar surface — 30-100 kg. (70-220 lb.) and 250-450 kg. Potential missions “of interest to NASA” include prospecting for volatiles at the Moon’s poles, sample return and setting up geophysical networks.
“U.S. industry is flourishing with innovative ideas based on NASA’s pioneering work to explore space, including low-Earth orbit and the Moon,” said William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations (HEO) in Washington. He suggested that, data from commercial lunar landers, like space station research, could aid the agency’s plans to explore an asteroid and Mars.
“New robotic commercial capabilities on the Moon could extend that research in important ways, just as NASA expertise could help advance commercial endeavors to reach the Moon.”
The HEO directorate is proposing no-exchange-of-funds partnerships under Space Act agreements or other mechanisms, offering its technical expertise, unique test facilities, and some hardware and software to private companies willing to put up funding for lander development.
“NASA envisions that an integrated team comprised of NASA civil servants and the industry partner personnel could work together to design, develop and test landers,” the RFI says.
Responses to the RFI are due Aug. 2. Interest in private lunar landers has soared over the past three years after Google offered $30 million in prizes through the X Prize Foundation to teams that can land a robotic spacecraft on the lunar surface, have it move at least 500 meters, and send back video, images and data. Presently 22 teams worldwide are in the running, working against a deadline of Dec. 31, 2015.
‘Nuff said, really cool stuff
It proves I’m a geek to say I want one even if I’m not quite sure what I’d do with it
Read more at: FPGAs, LEDs, tools and wearables, new products in the Maker Shed
…FPGAs are intimidating beasts to most makers, including myself. Thankfully, Justin Rajewski’s insanely popular Kickstarter project caught our eye. The entire goal of the Mojo is to make getting started with FPGA and digital design as easy as possible. An FPGA allows you to design digital circuits (basically a bunch of logic gates connected together to perform a specific task). The designs that you create can range from something as simple as a counter to blink an LED to something as complex as a multi-core processor (or an Audio Visualizer).
With a microcontroller (like an Arduino), you write software that gives you control of the the built-in peripherals but is limiting in that you can often only complete one action at a time. With FPGAs you are not creating software; you’re designing the hardware. Instead of writing code to run on a fixed processor with fixed peripherals, you get to design your own circuit.
Justin’s done a fantastic job of releasing new tutorials for getting started with Electronics, Logic and the Mojo on the Embedded Micro website. He’s also began work on an IDE specifically for the board, to make it even easier to develop for. Read more about this flexible, powerful board and pick one up from the product page. …
…and the other stuff they highlight is cool to!
This World and Others 