Good at finding diesel submarines. My verdict is out for now.
VIDEO: This drone is seaworthy.
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Category: military
SpaceX started with a plan to send mice to Mars. It got crazier from there.
In late October 2001, Elon Musk went to Moscow to buy an intercontinental ballistic missile. He brought along Jim Cantrell, a kind of international aerospace supplies fixer, and Adeo Ressi, his best friend from Penn. Although Musk had tens of millions in the bank, he was trying to get a rocket on the cheap. They flew coach, and they were planning to buy a refurbished missile, not a new one. Musk figured it would be a good vehicle for sending a plant or some mice to Mars.
Ressi, a gangly eccentric, had been thinking a lot about whether his best friend had started to lose his mind, and he’d been doing his best to discourage the project. He peppered Musk with links to video montages of Russian, European, and American rockets exploding. He staged interventions, bringing Musk’s friends together to talk him out of wasting his money. None of it worked. Musk remained committed to funding a grand, inspirational spectacle in space and would spend all of his fortune to do it. And so Ressi went to Russia to contain Musk as best as he could. “Adeo would call me to the side and say, ‘What Elon is doing is insane. A philanthropic gesture? That’s crazy,’” said Cantrell. “He was seriously worried.”
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Whenever the military sets up operations in isolated and hostile locations like Iraq or Afghanistan, one of the biggest challenges is ensuring troops get reliable power.
Until now, that often has meant trucking in vast amounts of diesel to power generators, a strategy that isn’t all that environmentally friendly and is vulnerable to attack or other problems like a driver strike or mechanical breakdown.
But what if military bases could produce their own power?
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ANNAPOLIS, Md. (April 15,2015) U.S. Naval Academy Midshipmen work together during last year’s Cyber Defense Exercise hosted by the National Security Agency. A new report from the Government Accountability Office finds the Defense Department’s chain of command is unclear for responding to domestic cyber attacks. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communications Specialist 2nd Class Tyler Caswell/RELEASED)(Photo: Navy Media Content Services)
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For info about divesting from nuclear weapons companies, go to http://responsibleinvest.org/
Thanks to the Future of Life Institute for helping support this video http://www.futureoflife.org (in particular, thanks to Max Tegmark for guest narrating and Meia Chita-Tegmark for her feedback)
And thanks to everyone who supports MinutePhysics on Patreon! http://www.patreon.com/minutephysics
Link to Patreon supporters here: http://www.minutephysics.com/supporters.html
Music by Nathaniel Schroeder, http://www.soundcloud.com/drschroeder
References
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DARPA’s new “Spectrum Collaboration Challenge” with a $2million prize for who can motivate a machine learning approach to dynamically sharing the RF Spectrum.
WASHINGTON, March 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-iReach/ — On March 23rd, 2016 DARPA announced its next Grand Challenge at the International Wireless Conference Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada. Program Manager, Paul Tilghman of DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office (MTO), made the announcement to industry leaders following the conferences Dynamic Spectrum Sharing Summit. The challenge will motivate a machine learning approach to dynamically sharing the RF Spectrum and has been named the “Spectrum Collaboration Challenge.” A top prize of $2million dollars has been announced.
While mostly transparent to the typical cell phone or Wi-Fi user, the problem of spectrum congestion has been a long standing issue for both the commercial sector and Department of Defense. The insatiable appetite for wireless connectivity over the last 30 years has grown at such a hurried pace that within the RF community the term spectrum scarcity has been coined. RF bandwidth, the number of frequencies available to communicate information over, is a relatively fixed resource, and advanced communication systems like LTE and military communications systems consume a lot of it. As spectrum planners prepare for the next big wave of connected devices, dubbed the Internet of Things, they wonder where they will find the spectrum bandwidth they need to support these billions of new devices. Equally challenging, is the military’s desire to connect every soldier on the battlefield, while using these very same frequencies.
DARPA has chosen Barone Consulting to help develop the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge to address these critical infrastructure and military operation needs. In the tradition of other DARPA Grand Challenges, the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge provides an opportunity for experts across a wide variety of disciplines to devise groundbreaking strategies and systems and compete in open competition to win prizes, while advancing the state-of-the-art and seeding new technology communities. For the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, the tasks are to combine distributed sensing techniques, innovative RF transmit and receive technologies, and cutting edge machine learning algorithms to create radio networks capable of learning to collaborate with other unknown radio networks, in real time.
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Hypersonic technology vehicles could revolutionize the way that we get around the globe. Research and testing is currently being carried out by several companies.
There are several hypersonic crafts under development, and they could greatly alter the way that we travel. Indeed, many of these designs have already provided valuable insights into how we can quickly and efficiently get from one side of the globe to the other.
For example, the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2) is a prototype for an unmanned military aircraft, and the DARPA team behind the tech claims that it is the fastest ever built. According to Lockheed-Martin, the speeds that this craft was designed for are remarkable. They assert that, “at HTV-2 speeds, flight time between New York City and Los Angeles would be less than 12 minutes.”
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Astronomers have for the first time seen a shockwave generated by a star’s collapsing core and captured the earliest minutes of two exploding stars.
An international team of scientists found a shockwave only in the smaller supernova, a finding that will help them understand these complex explosions which create many of the elements that make up humans, the Earth and the Solar System.
“It’s like the shockwave from a nuclear bomb, only much bigger, and no one gets hurt,” says Brad Tucker from the Australian National University (ANU).
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Hmmm; could I set up a subcontracting firm full of top gun gamers/ pilots working with the US DoD? We see privatized Army, etc. And, with drones it’s more about the skills of a gamer meets military strategy as a former pilot. Maybe some possibility with the right funding and clearance checks in place on drone pilots.
But in many ways this is not like most other aircraft. The MQ-9 Reaper is the U.S. Air Force’s most advanced drone or “remotely piloted aircraft” in use today.
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