“What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” The Power of You !

Picture Credit: The TR3B from DARPA

“What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” asks Regina Dugan, then director of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In this breathtaking talk she describes some of the extraordinary projects — a robotic hummingbird, a prosthetic arm controlled by thought, and, well, the internet — that her agency has created by not worrying that they might fail. (Followed by a Q&A with TED’s Chris Anderson)

Regina’s best quotations, in IAI’s opinion:

Now I should be clear, I’m not encouraging failure, I’m discouraging fear of failure. Because it’s not failure itself that constrains us. The path to truly new, never-been-done-before things always has failure along the way. We’re tested. And in part, that testing feels an appropriate part of achieving something great. Clemenceau (the post WWI Germany smasher) said, “Life gets interesting when we fail, because it’s a sign that we’ve surpassed ourselves.”

[Like IBM on the demand for mainframe computers] In 1895, Lord Kelvin declared that heavier-than-air flying machines were impossible. In October of 1903, the prevailing opinion of expert aerodynamicists was that maybe in 10 million years we could build an aircraft that would fly. And two months later on December 17th, Orville Wright powered the first airplane across a beach in North Carolina. The flight lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet. That was 1903.

DARPA’s hypersonic test vehicle (theFalcon) is the fastest maneuvering aircraft ever built. It’s boosted to near-space atop a Minotaur IV rocket. Now the Minotaur IV has too much impulse, so we have to bleed it off by flying the rocket at an 89 degree angle of attack for portions of the trajectory. That’s an unnatural act for a rocket. The third stage has a camera. We call it rocketcam. And it’s pointed at the hypersonic glider. This is the actual rocketcam footage from flight one. Now to conceal the shape, we changed the aspect ratio a little bit.

Hummingbird Drones: If a Mach 20 glider takes 11 minutes and 20 seconds to get from New York to Long Beach, a hummingbird would take, well, days. You see, hummingbirds are not hypersonic, but they are maneuverable. In fact, the hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backwards. It can fly up, down, forwards, backwards, even upside-down.

Picture Credit: Audubon Society’s Ruby-throated hummingbird

Gecko Man at Stanford: Failure is part of creating new and amazing things. We cannot both fear failure and make amazing new things — like a robot with the stability of a dog on rough terrain, or maybe even ice; a robot that can run like a cheetah, or climb stairs like a human with the occasional clumsiness of a human. Or perhaps, Spider Man will one day be Gecko Man. A gecko can support its entire body weight with one toe. One square millimeter of a gecko’s footpad has 14,000 hair-like structures called setae. They are used to help it grip to surfaces using intermolecular forces.

Lightning GPS for Real Time Tracking: From the smallest wisp of air to the powerful forces of nature’s storms. There are 44 lightning strikes per second around the globe. Each lightning bolt heats the air to 44,000 degrees Fahrenheit — hotter than the surface of the Sun. What if we could use these electromagnetic pulses as beacons, beacons in a moving network of powerful transmitters? Experiments suggest that lightning could be the next GPS.

The Power of You (video): Now I want to say, this is not easy. It’s hard to hold onto this feeling, really hard. I guess in some way, I sort of believe it’s supposed to be hard. Doubt and fear always creep in. We think someone else, someone smarter than us, someone more capable, someone with more resources will solve that problem. But there isn’t anyone else; there’s just you. And if we’re lucky, in that moment, someone steps into that doubt and fear, takes a hand and says, “Let me help you believe.”

Free Energy and Anti Gravity Space Vehicles (and tracking the development of 70 year old programs)

 

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:

• Free energy (let’s start with the basics)
• Quasi-crystals (Professor Shechtman discusses them)
• X43A- Mach 10 vehicle (over 7000 mph)
• Private space travel (Bezo’s New Sheperd spacecraft featured)
• Moon “Far Side” bases and Mars bases  (In Mr. Cooper’s 1989 lecture and affidavit, he states that the U.S had first landed on Mars on May 22, 1962 and that, by the time the U.S./NASA public space program landed on the moon in 1969, the U.S. already had a moon base there, since the mid-1950s.)

And I welcome reader’s suggestions…