Picture Credit: Smithsonian Magazine
“Thanks to her, all’s gala in the galaxy.” John Frederick Nims on gravity
Smithsonian Magazine just released its 2016 Ingenuity Awards (here) and there are a couple of surprises though not including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, cited for space pioneer Blue Origin.
The Daily Mail, in its characteristic way, offers a picture-rich profile of the Bezos and Mush fight over reusable rockets.
After years of secrecy, Blue Origin and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos finally unveiled their New Glenn ‘megarocket’ earlier this month. Now, Bezos has revealed the latest progress on the project with a series of wind tunnel pictures showing the ‘New Glenn’ in different configurations, taking a leaf out of Elon Musk’s book. Named after the first US astronaut to orbit Earth, the ‘New Glenn’ launcher is larger than SpaceX’s future Heavy rocket and is set to visit the final frontier by the end of the decade.
A second picture revealed the bottom of the rocket. Called ‘New Glenn’, this launcher comes in two stages that makes it larger than SpaceX’s future Heavy rocket.’New Glenn 3-stage’ is 23-feet in diameter and stands 313 feet tall.
Bezos, left and Musk, right are locked in a battle to create reusable rocket systems. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic performed the first test flight for its latest spacecraft last week, SpaceShipTwo, which will conduct public trips into space and charge customers a fee.
SpaceX propulsion just achieved first firing of the Raptor interplanetary transport engine pic.twitter.com/vRleyJvBkx
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 26 September 2016
However, in the same week, the world watched in horror when SpaceX’s Falcon 9 burst into flames on the Cape Canaveral launch pad during a routine check for its long awaited trip. But Bezos appears to be hopeful in today’s announcement – ‘our vision is millions of people living and working in space, and New Glenn is a very important step,’ he wrote in an email to the Washington Post (which Bezos owns and uses as his public media campaign).
Blue Origin and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has unveiled a new rocket that will launch payloads and people into orbit. Called ‘New Glenn’, this launcher comes in two stages that makes it larger than SpaceX’s future Heavy rocket. ‘New Glenn 3-stage’ is 23-feet in diameter and stands 313 feet tall. And ‘New Glenn 2-stage’ is also 23-feet in diameter, but measures 270 feet tall. Each stage lifts off with 3.85 million pounds of thrust from seven BE-4 engines. A single vacuum-optimized BE-3 engine, burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, will power New Glenn’s third stage. However,the booster and the second stage are identical in both variants. Blue Origin plans to fly New Glenn by the end of the decade from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
It’s been years in the making and now, Blue Origin and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has unveiled a new rocket that will launch payloads and people into orbit. The ‘New Glenn’ rockets are larger than SpaceX’s future Heavy rockets and will fly by the end of the decade. Blue Origin has always aimed at moving its vehicles into the space tourism market and the New Glenn, named in honor of astronaut John Glenn, are key players for this plan. Both stages are 23-feet in diameter, but the ‘New Glenn 3-stage’ is 313 feet tall, whereas ‘New Glenn 2-stage measures 270-feet. And each stage lifts off with 3.85 million pounds of thrust from seven BE-4 engines. A single vacuum-optimized BE-3 engine, burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, will power New Glenn’s third stage, according to Bezos. However,the booster and the second stage are identical in both variants.’New Glenn is designed to launch commercial satellites and to fly humans into space,’ Bezos wrote.
Blue Origin’s announcement comes at a crucial time for the commercial space industry. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic performed the first test flight for its latest spacecraft last week, SpaceShipTwo 9pictured), which will conduct public trips into space
Reusable rockets would cut costs and waste in the space industry, which currently loses millions of dollars in jettisoned machinery after each launch. Russia, Japan and the European Space Agency are also developing similar technology and are in testing stages. Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com and owner of The Washington Post newspaper, said last month that Blue Origin expects to begin crewed test flights of the New Shepard, the company’s flagship rocket, next year and begin flying paying passengers as early as 2018. SpaceX has managed to land four rockets from space back on Earth, three on sea and one on land, while Blue Origin’s New Shepard successfully completed a third launch and vertical landing in April this year. The Indian space agency also hopes to develop its own frugal shuttle, as it seeks to cash in on a huge and lucrative demand from other countries to send up their satellites, after a successful test launch last month.
SpaceX has test fired its a prototype of its new Raptor engine (pictured). The rocket engine is three times more powerful than those used in the company’s Falcon 9 rockets. The new engines also use methane rather than kerosene. Blue Origin plans to fly New Glenn by the end of the decade from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. And will use these rockets solely to launch commercial satellites and fly humans into space, Bezos writes.’Our vision is millions of people living and working in space, and New Glenn is a very important step,’ he shares.’It won’t be the last of course. Up next on our drawing board: New Armstrong. But that’s a story for the future.’
Picture credit: Afflictor.com
In looking into advanced energy propulsion systems, IAI finds it surprising that commercial free energy programs have not really emerged – maybe excepting what we know about Elon Musk’s Mars Mission and Jeff Bezos’ planet settlement programs. Musk, the CEO of SpaceX (and Tesla Motors), has said he wants to “live and die on Mars, just not on impact” and SpaceX won a contract from NASA to carry U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station as soon as next year. CNN points out that Musk started “SpaceX with a Mars mission in mind, and he has forecast that the company will achieve its first unmanned mission to Mars within two years, and its first manned mission by 2025.” One examination of “private spaceflight” quipped that Bezos won a trip to Marshall Space Flight Center by writing an essay on the “microgravity of flies” and has talked enthusiastically about space colonization on par with physicist Gerard O’Neill. Bezos’ Blue Origin space tourism company was founded in 2000 in a Kent, WA NASA parts facility and is promising to launch private spaceflights in 2017 and is building engines for other launch firms to reduce reliance on Russian-supplied engines.
An interesting book was released in 2013 called”NASA at 50: Interviews with NASA’s Senior Leadership.” But, there are other sources “less scrubbed”…To put these efforts in an historical context, Dr. Steven Greer’s Disclosure Project has collected a large number of documents about the “secret” space program that emerged post World War II. Anyone interested in history knows about Operation Paperclip during which the U.S. military extracted a number of Nazi engineers including the famous Werner von Braun who led the NASA precursor to develop the heavy lift Saturn rocket which was the workhorse of the Apollo space program. But, wait, there was a LOT more:
The majority of the scientists, numbering almost 500, were deployed at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, Fort Bliss, Texas and Huntsville, Alabama to work on guided missile and ballistic missile technology. This in turn led to the foundation of NASA and the US ICBM program. Much of the information surrounding Operation Paperclip is still classified. Separate from Paperclip was an even-more-secret effort to capture German nuclear secrets, equipment and personnel (Operation Alsos)-started in fall 1943 as the precursor to The Manhattan Project). Another American project (Operation TICOM) gathered German experts in cryptography. The United States Bureau of Mines employed seven German synthetic fuel scientists in a Fischer-Tropsch chemical plant in Louisiana, Missouri in 1946 (Operation LUSTY).
TICOM’s original documents have been usefully captured by Scribd. And, of course, another project critical to post-war aeronautics programs in the UK was spawned by Nazi scientists was called Operation Surgeon, declassified in 2006.
Andrew Johnson conducted a series of interviews in 2014 with advanced military engineer Edgar Fouche who work in the DOD and intelligence agencies from the early ’60s to mid ’90s at Edwards Air Force Base in California and Groom Lake, Nevada (aka Area 51) and other facilities as a project remedy lead. Johnson also includes an extended interview dating from 1998 in which Fouche discussed “quasi-crystals” – the power source behind the TR3B nuclear interstellar platform in 1998- 13 years before Dr. Dan Shechtman won the Nobel Prize in 2011 for “discovering” them. Dan Shechtman is the Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, an Associate of the US Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, and Professor of Materials Science at Iowa State University. In an April, 2013 education profile of the Technion, the New York Times detailed:
Conceived by the Zionist Congress in 1905, in part as a response to the exclusion of Jews from engineering studies in Europe, the Technion finally opened in 1923, when there were no Hebrew words for most of the technical terms needed to teach a basic engineering class. Since then, the university has come up with more than just translations for “aerodynamic” and “nuclear.” “I can say without exaggeration that Israel could not have been built without the Technion,” says Yossi Vardi, who has founded or helped build more than 60 companies in Israel and has five degrees from the Technion.
Credited with discovering them in 1982, materials science has been rocked by quasiperiodic crystals which are finally opening up opportunities for new applications including camouflage due to tunable photonic band gaps displayed by these crystals which are used in the Lockheed nuclear transatmospheric vehicles like the TR3B (recent video) which was first reported in flight in Belgium in 1990 (Mach 9 speed, 600′ diameter, 60K rotations/min, 250K atmospheres, mercury plasma reduces mass by 89%):
Source: http://www.iycr2014.org/
Basically, a quasicrystal is a crystalline structure that breaks the periodicity (meaning it has translational symmetry, or the ability to shift the crystal one unit cell without changing the pattern) of a normal crystal for an ordered, yet aperiodic arrangement. This means that quasicrystalline patterns will fill all available space, but in such a way that the pattern of its atomic arrangement never repeats. (University of Michigan chemical engineers Sharon) Glotzer and (Michael) Engel recently managed to simulate the most complex quasicrystal ever, a discovery which may revolutionize the field of crystallography by blowing open the door for a whole host of applications that were previously inconceivable outside of science-fiction, like making yourself invisible or shape-shifting robots.
Shlectman teaches a popular course called “Technological Entrepreneurship” at the Technion and the link points to a nice Technology Innovation Management Review of the TE literature since the early 1970s literature.
Source: AZquotes.com
There’s a lot to explore here in future posts:
And I welcome reader’s suggestions…
Picture Credit: Amazon
Update: The massive denial of service attacks last week were traced to a takeover of smart home devices by a Chinese firm according to Anthony Mongeluzo from Pro Computer Services as he detailed on Fox Business here. Internet traffic company Dyn told CNBC it faced continued DDoS (denial of service) attacks on 21 October, 2016 were “well planned and executed, coming from tens of millions of IP addresses at the same time.” What is more worrying is the CIA claim that more DDoS attacks are “planned” for election day, according to Carmen Medina (?), the former CIA Deputy Director of Intel who’s talking points were broadcast across the main stream media repetitively since the third debate ended last Wednesday.
Like the Red Sox’s Hanley Ramirez, Amazon is on a roll. It has the online e-commerce market in a vice hold and the fast shipping and benefits of its Prime service are compelling to repeat customers. Frankly, unlike Wal-Mart or KMart or Target (stupid bathroom absurdity), Amazon has choice, price advantage and convenience. IAI is a customer and repeat buyer for these reasons but we can, in fact, ask Jeff Bezos to avoid the mistake their Internet brethren have made in their social media and Virtual Reality (VR) ventures – that is, don’t censor or manipulate or indoctrinate or lie or invade the privacy of your customers. In fact, the biggest threat to privacy lies in the Internet of Things (IoT) being hacked (which it has been and will) as something as basic as a Samsung TV communicates actively with up to 200 IoT devices in your home, oh, and records and videos activity inside your home ! That must be buried in the “usage agreement” written by a team of lawyers who declare you lose your privacy for “free services.” But IoT is forecast to be a $290B market by 2017, maybe larger.
So, let’s look carefully at the current Amazon hit – “the Echo” which is a voice-activated device (much like ones from Apple, Google [Home] and Microsoft [Cortona] offerings) that is “always on” and “logs every sentence spoken to it,” according to the London Telegraph. But wait, my British chums, it logs every sound it hears and is a continuous transmission device relying on serial inference and contextual awareness. In fact, “voice-activated smart home systems” are all the rage and are the enablers of the IoT takeover of homes from “dumb humans.” /S But, as Slate points out, just trust the – completely…
Five things you can do with the Echo
- Control your music by saying “Alexa, play some Adele” without having to pick up your phone or walk over to your laptop
- Ask for weather information by saying “Alexa, what’s the weather?”
- Get other handy information such as the time and traffic on your commute
- Alexa can also help out in the kitchen by answering questions such as “Alexa, set a timer for 25” minutes
- Third party compatibility with Alexa means that you’ll soon be able to order a pizza or book a taxi by calling out
The story of Echo actually starts with Amazon’s acquisitions of Alexa (website rankings & “actionable analytics” – 1999) and Evi (artificial intelligence – 2013) combined with the construction of a customer-centric shopping database and the development of a massive cloud computing capability. Even though the Amazon “Fire Phone” was a late-to-the-party fail, it did get Amazon thinking creatively about bunding devices with content using the lure of a “Prime” customer relationship which has translated into customer loyalty. Consumer Intelligence Research Partners reported that the Prime customer base grew 43% by H1 16 to 63M (over half of its customer base) with a annual spend differential of $1200 (Price) to $500 (non-Prime). Unlike dumb Siri which often routes drivers into traffic or gets them lost (try the smarter Google Waze), the Echo is quite efficient and represents a precursor of an animated robot assistant for the household or business applications. The Telegraph nails it as a platform for the introduction of artificial intelligence devices into every aspect of society.
Amazon’s software also seems more reliable. The company’s prowess in cloud computing – which has spawned the colossal Amazon Web Services unit – means that the Echo has access to the near-infinite computing resources of the company’s servers: it can hear a question, send it to be processed, receive an answer and relay it in milliseconds. And Amazon’s underrated artificial intelligence chops, honed using years of shopping data and developed at an R&D base in Cambridge, have allowed it to sneak under the radar.
Waay back in April 2014, WIRED called IoT “far bigger than anyone realizes.” To dig in deeper, the research shop of the article, Burrus Research, operates with “a philosophy of helping clients understand and profit from the driving forces of technology-driven change, enabling them to gain new competitive advantage as they create new products, markets, services and careers.” Hardly a Johnny-Come-Lately, futurist Dan Burrus has hung his shingle since 1983 and he does not see IoT as simply ‘increased machine-to-machine (M2M) communication.
When we talk about making machines “smart,” we’re not referring strictly to M2M. We’re talking about sensors. A sensor is not a machine. It doesn’t do anything in the same sense that a machine does. It measures, it evaluates; in short, it gathers data. The Internet of Things really comes together with the connection of sensors and machines. That is to say, the real value that the Internet of Things creates is at the intersection of gathering data and leveraging it. All the information gathered by all the sensors in the world isn’t worth very much if there isn’t an infrastructure in place to analyze it in real time. Cloud-based applications are the key to using leveraged data. The Internet of Things doesn’t function without cloud-based applications to interpret and transmit the data coming from all these sensors. The cloud is what enables the apps to go to work for you anytime, anywhere.
In closing, try to think of hapless astronaut Dave when his onboard mainframe HAL refuses his commands in the classic 1968 sci-fi movie “2001: A Space Odessey.” Legendary film critic Robert Ebert explained,
What (Director Stanley Kubrick and author Arthur C. Clarke) had actually done was make a philosophical statement about man’s place in the universe, using images as those before him had used words, music or prayer. And he had made it in a way that invited us to contemplate it — not to experience it vicariously as entertainment, as we might in a good conventional science-fiction film, but to stand outside it as a philosopher might, and think about it. Life onboard the Discovery is presented as a long, eventless routine of exercise, maintenance checks and chess games with HAL. Only when the astronauts fear that HAL’s programming has failed does a level of suspense emerge; their challenge is somehow to get around HAL, which has been programmed to believe, “This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.”
IAI leaves you with this classic scene: “Open the pod bay doors, HAL” – [Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDrDUmuUBTo%5D
In future posts, I’ll direct some attention to:
IDEAS ABOUT INNOVATION! 