Lifeboat Foundation

(CNN) — Startup Relativity Space sent what it’s calling the “world’s first 3D-printed rocket” toward space on Wednesday, vaulting it into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Though, it suffered an engine issue after launch and failed to reach orbit.

Terran 1, a 110-foot-tall (33.5-meter) vehicle designed to haul lightweight satellites into orbital space, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Florida’s eastern coast at just before 11:30 pm ET. The rocket, powered by super-chilled methane and oxygen, burned a bright blue-green against the night sky.

After the first stage of the rocket — the bottommost portion of the rocket that gives the initial thrust at liftoff — expended its fuel, it detached from the rocket’s upper stage. But the engine meant to propel that portion appeared to ignite only briefly, leaving the rocket without enough power to reach orbit.

The animation shows a subset of more than 1,500 light curves collected by the Large Area Telescope over nearly 15 years in space.

NASA has released an intriguing animated video of the sky in gamma rays, the “highest-energy form of light”. Captured by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) aboard NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the animation shows activity during observations from February 2022 to February 2023.

According to a press release, the “pulsing circles represent just a subset of more than 1,500 light curves – records of how sources change in brightness over time – collected by the LAT over nearly 15 years in space”. The LAT detects gamma rays with energies ranging from 20 million to over 300 billion electron volts.

😗 year 2021.

A term MEG refers to motionless electromagnetic generator circuit which is designed to generate electrical energy without using any moving components or involving any kind of mechanical stages.

The device is made solely through a strategic placement and interaction of permanent magnets, coils and a ferromagnetic core. The specialty of this device as claimed by the inventors and researchers lies in its potential to generate an output power much higher than the induced input triggering power.

Designing, building, and launching a spacecraft is hugely expensive. That’s why NASA missions to Mars are designed with the hope that they’ll last as long as possible — like the famous Opportunity rover which was supposed to last for 90 days and managed to keep going for 15 years. The longer a mission can keep running, the more data it can collect, and the more we can learn from it.

That’s true for the orbiters which travel around Mars as well as the rovers which explore its surface, like the Mars Odyssey spacecraft which was launched in 2001 and has been in orbit around Mars for more than 20 years. But the orbiter can’t keep going forever as it will eventually run out of fuel, so figuring out exactly how much fuel is left is important — but it also turned out to be more complicated than the NASA engineers were expecting.

Odyssey started out with nearly 500 pounds of hydrazine fuel, though last year it looked as if the spacecraft was running much lower on fuel than had been predicted.

Recorded on February 10th, 2023.

Historian Stephen Kotkin became the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution in 2022. He taught at Princeton for more than 30 years, and is the author of nine works of history, including the first two volumes of his biography of Joseph Stalin, Paradoxes of Power, 1,878 to 1928 and Waiting for Hitler, 1929 to 1941. He is now completing the third and final volume. Since the war in Ukraine broke out a year ago, Kotkin has appeared regularly on Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson to offer his unique perspective on the Russian aggression and answer five questions for us. This is the third installment.

Continue reading “A Historian of the Future: Five More Questions for Stephen Kotkin” »

A newly developed electric vehicle battery not only can store up to four times more energy than current batteries but is also a safer alternative.

The researchers hope to develop strategies to stop or at least restrict growth at the negative pole.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research have focused on the life cycle of solid-state batteries, and their research could lead to longer-lasting batteries.

The so-called “solid-state batteries” are considered the “Holy Grail” of battery development. They no longer have a liquid core, like modern batteries, but rather a solid substance. This has various benefits, including the fact that these batteries may be produced on a smaller scale and are trickier to ignite.

Continue reading “New research on solid-state batteries could lead to longer-lasting batteries” »

A team of physicists and material scientists at the University of Colorado has developed a way to better insulate double-paned glass used for windows by adding a transparent aerogel. In their paper published in the journal Nature Energy the group describes how their aerogel is made and how much of a boost in energy efficiency can be expected from windows using the material. Nature Energy has also published a Research Briefing in the same journal issue that outlines the work done by the team.

Since most homeowners prefer to have windows that allow them to see outside, heat loss is inevitable. Over the past several decades, heat loss from windows has been improved by adding a second pane of glass —the two panes are typically separated by a gap of insulating air. Still, such windows do not provide nearly the same degree of insulation as insulated walls. In this new approach, the team in Colorado has come up with a way to improve the insulation properties of double-paned glass.

To make the aerogel (a gel with pockets of air in it), the research team soaked nanofibers of cellulose extracted from wood in water. Next, the wood nanofibers were removed and were then dunked in an ethanol solution. Once saturated, the nanofibers were heated in a pressurized oven—this forced the ethanol pockets to be replaced with air. Next, the nanofibers, which were transparent, were coated with a water-repellent material to prevent condensation when situated between panes of glass.

I really love this.

Boeing and NASA have teamed up to radically redesign wings on commercial airliners.

The Transonic Truss Based Wing is about 50 percent longer and much thinner, improving fuel efficiency by 10 percent, and reducing the cost and emissions of future airliners.

Continue reading “NASA/Boeing Team to design a Radical New Airliner” »