Tag: engineering
How to make a potato gun
An evening pause: News you can use!
Two new skyscrapers being built in Milan are designed to allow trees to grow on the outside of every floor.
A vertical forest: Two new skyscrapers being built in Milan are designed to allow trees to grow on the outside of every floor.
A toy company has designed building blocks that make it possible to combine multiple brands, from Legos to Tinkertoys.
A toy company has designed building blocks that make it possible to combine multiple building block brands, from Legos to Tinkertoys.
By downloading free designs and using a 3D printer, you could have your very own pieces to connect ten different brands of building toys to each other and construct even more elaborate contraptions and structures.
As the first commenter on the webpage noted, “This is the next singularity.”
Crossing the Wabash Cannonball Bridge
An evening pause: Driving across the Wabash Cannonball Bridge going from Indiana to Illinois. The bridge is single lane, with a wooden deck, and over a hundred years old.
What’s really cool is how the driver is able to drive while holding his camera overhead through his sun roof.
The first Russian weather satellite, launched in 1969, is about to burn up in the atmosphere.
Some history comes to Earth: The first Russian weather satellite, launched in 1969, is about to burn up in the atmosphere.
Not only that, but the U.S. research satellite Explorer 8, launched in 1960, is also about to come down.
Want a job designing and building spaceships? Scaled Composites is holding a jobs fair and open house at the Mohave Air and Space Port.
Want a job designing and building spaceships? Scaled Composites is holding a jobs fair and open house at the Mohave Air and Space Port.
Cameron has safely returned to the surface
James Cameron has safely returned to the surface after completing the world’s deepest solo dive.
Boeing vs Boeing.
The story describes how Boeing is considering upgrading the X-37B to become a manned ferry to ISS, thus putting it in direct competition with the company’s other manned capsule, the CST-100.
At the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’s Space 2011 conference in November, Boeing’s Arthur Grantz revealed that the company is studying a new derivative of the Boeing/USAF X-37B. The new X-37C would be 65-80% larger than the current B version. Launched by an Atlas V rocket, X-37C could carry pressurized or unpressurized cargo or 5-6 astronauts. Grantz is chief engineer in charge of X-37 at the Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems Experimental Systems Group .
Hat tip to Clark Lindsey.
James Cameron has set a new record for the deepest solo dive, a depth of 35,756 feet.1James Cameron has set a new record for the deepest solo dive, a depth of 35,756 feet.
James Cameron has set a new record for the deepest solo dive, a depth of 35,756 feet.
And he is still down there at this moment.
Hovering in what he’s called a vertical torpedo, Cameron is likely collecting data, specimens, and imagery unthinkable in 1960, when the only other explorers to reach Challenger Deep returned after seeing little more than the silt stirred up by their bathyscaphe. After as long as six hours in the trench, Cameron—best known for creating fictional worlds on film (Avatar, Titanic, The Abyss)—is to jettison steel weights attached to the sub and shoot back to the surface. Meanwhile, the expedition’s scientific support team awaits his return aboard the research ships Mermaid Sapphire and Barakuda, 7 miles (11 kilometers) up.
The effort of a private company to salvage a communications satellite stranded in the wrong orbit has been rejected by the company that owns it. Instead, the satellite will be de-orbted today, buring up over the Pacific.
The effort of a private company to salvage a communications satellite stranded in the wrong orbit has been rejected by the company that owns it. Instead, the satellite will be de-orbted today, burning up over the Pacific.
Last night a piece of space junk missed ISS, but not by much.
Last night a piece of space junk missed ISS, but not by much.
The debris was only 8.7 miles from the station when it zipped by at about 16,000 miles per hour. That is very close, and had it hit, it would have done very significant damage.
The fragment was from an old Russian satellite, Cosmos 2251, that collided with an Iridium satellite in 2009, producing hundreds of fragments more than two inches across.