Tag: commercial

Russian rocket now garden furniture in England

5:36 pm

A British businessman has purchased a discarded Russian rocket and installed it in his garden as decoration.

Almost 40ft long and weighing five tonne, the rocket was first flown in 1991 after being built by the Russians in collaboration with NASA at a cost $10 million. For ten years it held the record for the fastest ever made-made machine before it was jettisoned as archaic.

Somehow it ended up at a car auction at South Marston where it was spotted by Mr Sweet while checking out vintage motors. Mr Sweet, who runs the Cirencester-based computer company Zycko, said: “I saw it for sale at a car auction and decided to buy it, not really knowing what I was going to do with it.”

I am curious how the rocket had ended up being owned and offered for sale by a UK company that “specializes in car restorations.” I also wonder if this might be a major new profit center for the struggling Russian rocket industry.

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NSF to help fund the development of implantable antennas

1:47 pm

What could possibly go wrong? The National Science Foundation (NSF) is providing funding for the development of an implantable antenna for health care, including the possibility for “long-term patient monitoring.”

The project is being financed in collaboration with the National Research Foundation of Korea to create a high frequency antenna that can be permanently implanted under a person’s skin. “Antennas operating near or inside the human body are important for a number of applications, including healthcare,” a grant for the project said. “Implantable medical devices such as cardiac pacemakers and retinal implants are a growing feature of modern healthcare, and implantable antennas for these devices are necessary to monitor battery level and device health, to upload and download data used in patient monitoring, and more.”

The grant said that an implantable device could be used for “long-term patient monitoring” and “biometric tracking,” or using technology to verify a person’s identity.

Without any doubt there are many very useful applications for such an implantable device. Monitoring battery life on pacemakers is an obvious one. There will be a problem, however, if anyone but the patient can do the monitoring. I can see too many possible misuses occurring should it be in anyone else’s hands. At a minimum, there are big privacy concerns.

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Solar sail experiment stymied by software crash

10:14 pm

The Planetary Society’s LightSail solar sail test mission, launched as a secondary payload on last week’s Atlas 5 X-37B launch, has fallen silent because of a software problem.

The communications problem occurred before the mission could achieve its main engineering goal of testing the deployment of the solar sail. They still hope to regain communications, but time is limited as the cubesat is in a low orbit that will decade relatively quickly.

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Air Force finally certifies SpaceX

10:02 pm

The competition heats up: The Air Force on Tuesday certified SpaceX to permit it to bid and launch military payloads.

This puts big pressure on ULA, which no longer has a monopoly on all military launches. In order to gain contracts they are going to have to compete, lowering their prices to match SpaceX’s.

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New world record for longest hoverboard flight

9:04 am

The inventor of a hoverboard designed to be flown by an individual standing on the board has set a new world record, flying more than 900 feet.

Canadian inventor Catalin Alexandru Duru traveled a distance of 275.9 m (905.2 ft) on a propeller-based hoverboard he created himself. The machine was reportedly designed and built over the course of 12 months. “I wanted to showcase that a stable flight can be achieved on a hoverboard and a human could stand and control with their feet,” Duru is quoted as saying to Guinness World Records, which has recognized the feat.

Video of the flight is below the fold. It appears he essentially scaled up a drone to carry human weight.
» Read more

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UAE establishes space agency

8:31 am

The competition heats up: The United Arab Emirates (UAE), in conjunction with its goal to send an unmanned probe to Mars, has announced the formation of its own NASA-like space agency.

Reading the long official press announcement at the link above will make you realize that a lot of this is public relations fluff being pushed by the UAE’s sheiks. Stripping that away, what I find left is mostly a program to educate students.

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Corruption in the Russian space industry

8:52 am

A slew of stories in the Russian press today illustrate again the deeply ingrained problems that country has, both in corruption and in its ability to produce a quality product.

The last story describes the overall scale of the corruption, which is not confined just to the space sector, but can be found in many industries. The aerospace industry just happens to be the most visible outside Russia, and thus the most embarrassing. Yet,
» Read more

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