Lifeboat Foundation

A BAE railgun system is undergoing multi-shot rep-rate operations at Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren, in Virginia. Railgun firing test will continue over the next three years. The railgun system has been tested at Dahlgren’s railgun advanced research facility since November. The Navy has successfully tested a next-generation 32-megajoule railgun.

The US Navy is gradually increasing the railgun firing rate and energy level.

Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on seapower and projection forces, said * the pulsed power units, the batteries are getting smaller and are getting more efficient * more shots are being fired without having to replace the barrel.

Continue reading “Railgun science and technology phase completing by 2019” »

Space-based solar power has had a slow start, but the technology may finally take off in the next few decades. Since its inception, solar power has had a severe limitation as a renewable energy: it only works when the Sun is shining. This has restricted the areas where solar panels can be effectively used to sunnier, drier regions, such as California and Arizona. And even on cloudless days, the atmosphere itself absorbs some of the energy emitted by the Sun, cutting back the efficiency of solar energy. And let’s not forget that, even in the best of circumstances, Earth-bound solar panels are pointed away from the Sun half of the time, during the night.

So, for over half a decade, researchers from NASA and the Pentagon have dreamed of ways for solar panels to rise above these difficulties, and have come up with some plausible solutions. There have been several proposals for making extra-atmospheric solar panels a reality, many of which call for a spacecraft equipped with an array of mirrors to reflect sunlight into a power-conversion device. The collected energy could be beamed to Earth via a laser or microwave emitter. There are even ways to modulate the waves’ energy to protect any birds or planes that might wander into the beam’s path.

The energy from these space-based solar panels would not be limited by clouds, the atmosphere, or our night cycle. Additionally, because solar energy would be continuously absorbed, there would be no reason to store the energy for later use, a process which can cost up to 50 percent of the energy stored.

Continue reading “NASA Wants to Collect Solar Power Directly From Space” »

Drones. Drone is a word you see pretty often in today’s pop culture. But drones seem to be an extremely diverse species. Even flightless vehicles are occasionally referred to as drones. So what exactly is a drone?

In this video series, the Galactic Public Archives takes bite-sized looks at a variety of terms, technologies, and ideas that are likely to be prominent in the future. Terms are regularly changing and being redefined with the passing of time. With constant breakthroughs and the development of new technology and other resources, we seek to define what these things are and how they will impact our future.

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An anesthetic injection, delivered by a shot to the neck, is thought to alleviate symptoms better than traditional efforts. A $2 million study will be the first large-scale randomized control research into their use.

DARPA has unveiled a system that transforms its unmanned aerial systems (UAS) into warfare machines capable of conducting different missions without human intervention.

Prior to the announcement, the compact drones were only able to carry a single-function payload, which limited their abilities to one specific task in the field.

Continue reading “DARPA ‘transformer’ drones change their mission hardware mid-flight” »

Base jump safely in virtual reality!

Peace and love on this Memorial Day to those who served and gave their lives for freedom. My interview a while back with Express is still right on.track about the future of military and how most human soldier casualties will be a thing of the past.

THERE will be no longer be human casualties of war from wealthy countries within 10 years as advanced militaries will begin sending MACHINES to warzones, an expert has claimed.

The research agency hopes its XS-1 jumpstarts a whole new industry of very-low-cost satellite launches.

Boeing did such a good job plotting out the commercial future of a reusable satellite-launching plane that they’re going to get to build it — and just maybe, launch a whole new low-cost satellite industry.

Continue reading “DARPA Picks Boeing To Build Its New Space Plane” »

Rethink Robotics co-founder and CTO, former CSAIL director and all-around robot luminary Rodney Brooks joined the Disrupt New York stage this afternoon to tackle some complex questions, ranging from robots place in the living room to the battlefield.

Brooks has a fair bit of experience in both categories, as a cofounder of iRobot, whose product offerings have ranging from vacuuming to bomb diffusion. And while his current company deals more in the realm of factory automation, a number of these ethical issues still clearly weigh heavily on the Australian roboticist.

It was a question about whether robots should be considered unfit for any human tasks that really caused Brooks to ponder their place in the world.

Continue reading “‘A robot doesn’t have to shoot back,’ Rodney Brooks says of machines in the military” »