Peter Gabriel – Solsbury Hill
An evening pause: I love it when the performers are clearly have fun!
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman
Tag: commercial
The first sex in space!
The competition really heats up! A porno company has started a crowd-sourcing campaign to raise $3.4 million so it can shoot a porno film in space by 2016.
This project is even sillier than Mars One and a bigger publicity stunt. And I think it probably has a better chance of happening!
The truth about bottled water
An evening pause: Tonight’s pause is a bit different, in that it has a newsy aspect to it, illustrating the uncertainty of knowledge that makes science so difficult. It is also incredibly entertaining and funny, almost like the 1960s TV show Candid Camera. Would you be fooled like these people were?
Hat tip Phillip Oltmann.
A compilation of robots falling down at the DARPA Robotics Challenge
More information here. It seems that on the dry run prior to the start of competition, not many robots fell over. Then on Day 1, when the competition was for real, a lot had problems standing up.
The impressive thing about these falls is that, although they look pretty bad, the robots were just fine (well, most of them). After humans got them back on their feet and gave them a reboot, the machines were ready to run again. Team IHMC’s Atlas fell twice during their run and it still scored 7 points (of a maximum of 8). Team MIT’s Atlas had a bad stumble out of the vehicle and also went on to complete most of the course. So it’s a good thing that robots are falling at the DRC Finals—that’s how we’re going to make them better.
SpaceX begins planning a 4,000 satellite internet constellation
The competition heats up: SpaceX has filed papers with the FCC to begin testing the design and construction and launch of a constellation of 4,000 satellites for providing global internet access.
Musk’s FCC filing proposes tests starting next year. If all goes well, the service could be up and running in about five years. The satellites would be deployed from one of SpaceX’s rockets, the Falcon 9. Once in orbit, the satellites would connect to ground stations at three West Coast facilities. The purpose of the tests is to see whether the antenna technology used on the satellites will be able to deliver high-speed Internet to the ground without hiccups.
It appears to me that Musk’s constellation will be made up of cubesats, small and cheap to build, and easy to launch in large numbers as secondary payloads on every Falcon 9 launch. In other words, as long as SpaceX can get customers to pay for launches of large satellites on its Falcon 9, Musk will be able to launch and maintain his constellation of cubesats for free.
The collapse of Russian scientific innovation
Link here. This report documents much of what I have been seeing in the Russian space industry: an aging workforce, a lack of innovation, and concentration of power to Moscow and the central government, and an exodus of the best minds to other countries.
It appears that all of the solutions that have been imposed by Putin’s government are exactly the worst things you could do and will only make the problems grow with time.
Debussy – The Girl with the Flaxen Hair
An evening pause: Mary Elizabeth Bowden on trumpet and Naomi Woo on piano.
Hat tip Danae for suggesting the music.
Google and Facebook cancel satellite plans
The competition cools down? Facebook and Google have both cancelled their plans to build satellite systems to provide global internet access.
It appears Google pulled out earlier this year, while Facebook’s decision was revealed today. Google however remains a partner in Skybox, a space imaging company, as well as O3b, which is trying to provide internet using satellites.
Parks and Recreation – “Thoughts For Your Thoughts”
An evening pause: For anyone who has ever listened to NPR, it will be hard to distinguish the satire here from reality, since the skit so well captures public radio’s often empty-headed blather disguised as profound intellectualism, framed by a strong desire to promote anything the government wants done.
Hat tip to John Harman.
Problems at Stratolaunch
In the heat of competition: Stratolaunch and Orbital ATK have quietly parted ways as problems have developed in building Stratolaunch’s giant first stage aircraft.
The company went with a radical engineering idea — using a giant airplane as their first stage — which might turn out great but could just as easily become a disaster and failure. Such ideas are by their nature filled with many unknowns.
In a sense, this story validates SpaceX’s approach to developing new space technology, which is to take known engineering and to upgrade it while refining the production methods for building it to lower costs. With this approach, you lower risks by reducing the number of unknowns you have to deal with.
LightSail successfully deploys solar sail
Engineers have confirmed that the cubesat prototype LightSail has successfully deployed its solar sails.
This is I think only the second time a solar sail has successfully deployed in space. More significant to me is the fact that it is the first time this kind of complex engineering test has been tried using a cubesat. If cubesats can begin to handle these kinds of tasks, unmanned satellite technology is going to take a gigantic leap forward.
SpaceShipTwo debris from crash almost hit two truck drivers
Immediately after SpaceShipTwo crashed Doug Messier happened to come upon the cockpit crash site where he interviewed two drivers who had just passed each other when the debris hit the road behind them.
The odds of such a thing happening are gigantic, but obviously not zero.