For the past 70 years, most of humanity’s rockets have been chemical rockets- with either liquid or solid fuel. However, it may be possible for future rockets to use different fuel sources.
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The Defense Department expects to stand up its first battalion of Stryker vehicles outfitted with high-powered laser weapons by some time next year, Army officials say.
“Expect to have the first battalion fielded in 2021 with four battalions by 2023,” U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command chief Lt. Gen. Dan Karbler told the audience at the virtual Space Missile Defense symposium on Tuesday.
The so-called “laser battalion,” as Defense One described it, would eventually deploy the new 50 kw Directed Energy-Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense (DE-MSHORAD) Stryker that the Army is working to field by 2022, a ten-fold power increase over the 5 kw-class system that artillery soldiers have been testing in Germany since early 2018.
The phrase “too much of a good thing” may sound like a contradiction, but it encapsulates one of the key hurdles preventing the expansion of renewable energy generation. Too much of a service or commodity makes it harder for companies to sell them, so they curtail production.
Usually that works out fine: The market reaches equilibrium and economists are happy. But external factors are bottlenecking renewable electricity despite the widespread desire to increase its capacity.
UC Santa Barbara’s Sangwon Suh is all too familiar with this issue. The professor of industrial ecology has focused on it and related challenges for at least the past two years at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. “Curtailment is the biggest problem of renewable energy we are facing,” said Suh, who noted it will only escalate as renewable energy capacity increases.
During a Twitter conversation about the future of space travel, the SpaceX CEO confirmed that the Starship vehicle and the Super Heavy booster used to lift it away from Earth will “will mostly launch from ocean spaceports long-term.” Musk later clarified that “occasional flights from land are ok, but frequent (daily) flights probably need ~30km / 18 miles clear area for noise.”
The comments illuminate SpaceX’s thinking around the Starship, which is designed to transport up to 150 tons, or 100 people, into space at a time. The reusable ship measures some 400 feet when paired with its booster. It is expected to take on missions currently completed by the existing Falcon 9 satellite launches, and to enable more ambitious missions, like crewed trips to the Moon and Mars. Its use of liquid oxygen and methane fuel means a crew could feasibly visit Mars, harvest resources from the planet to refuel, and either return home or perhaps venture even furthe.
SpaceX is planning to put its Starship launch pads somewhere in the ocean, far away from city centers.
Circa 2011
This gorgeous, stainless steel and bronze toy car is simply named Toy Car, which seems an appropriately stripped-down name for such a minimalist vehicle. Without a body, or even a cover over the engine, you can see exactly how the car works.
It’s essentially a fancy version of the pull-back-and-go cars found in cereal boxes and kids’ fast-food “meals” everywhere. Pull the car backwards while pushing down and the motion of the turning wheels is stored as energy in a coiled spring inside the big central toothed wheel. Let go and it unwinds, propelling the machine forward. When the spring has fully sprung, a clutch disengages and lets the car roll free.
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“We will not have an active exoskeleton with servomotors tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow. That’s science fiction,” Sergei Smagluk, of the EO-1 design team told Russian newspaper RIA Novosti. He adds that as soon as a suitable power source is available, it will create a boom in exoskeleton development, one which his company is well-placed to lead.
While America’s ambitious attempts to build Iron Man-style powered armor are making little progress, Russia is already fielding modest but effective unpowered military exoskeletons.
A historic French brand is set to return with one of the most extreme hypercar designs ever. The new holders of the Delage brand are squarely focused on the Nurburgring lap record with the monstrous D12 and its 7.6-liter, naturally aspirated V12.
Miami-based French entrepreneur Laurent Tapie has leased the rights to the Delage name, with an option to buy, and is building the first Delage car in some 64 years. And how! With backing from “four deeply invested billionaires” according to an interview with Robb Report, he’s fulfilling his dream of an F1 car for the street.
The D12 is a wasp-waisted monster whose dart-shaped cabin is so separated from the front wheels that it might as well be an open-wheeler. Its colossal mid-mounted V12, developed in-house, will put power down through an eight-speed single-clutch transmission with an electric motor built in to form a hybrid system.
Fleet operator SES on Aug. 20 said it selected SpaceX to launch four recently ordered O3b mPower broadband satellites.
SES’s four-satellite expansion order, announced Aug. 7, further increased its launch needs.
SES has now grouped the satellites into trios for the first three Falcon 9 launches, scheduled for the third quarter of 2021, the first quarter of 2022, and the second half of 2022. The last two satellites are projected to launch in the second half of 2024. Each mission will take place from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The O3b mPower constellation is designed as a multi-terabit global network capable of aiming gigabits of Ka-band capacity at customers in aviation, government, energy and other sectors. The constellation builds off of SES’s current O3b fleet of 20 satellites built by Thales Alenia Space.
WASHINGTON — Fleet operator SES on Aug. 20 said it selected SpaceX to launch four recently ordered O3b mPower broadband satellites.
The agreement means SpaceX will launch all 11 of SES’s O3b mPower satellites to medium Earth orbit across four Falcon 9 launches. Boeing is building all 11 mPower satellites.
SES chose SpaceX in 2019 to launch seven O3b mPower satellites on two Falcon 9 missions in 2021. As the O3b mPower program matured, however, SES realized a max of three O3b mPower satellites could fit on a single Falcon 9, necessitating at least one more launch.
