Rob, I was thinking more about funding, but you bring up an important point: effective PR and the images it portrays. PR is often considered to be a dirty word by engineers, but that's what drives a lot of perception, in this case, by the public, aka voters. Not only did landing on the moon end one vision, or image, but the USSR's fall ended the vision of competing with the Soviets.
I agree, Ann. I think there has been a lack of clear vision for NASA. By clear, I mean a vision the voters can understand and get behind. The last clear vision was getting on the moon by the end of the 60s. That vision was tied to the fear of the USSR getting ahead of us in space. Once we landed on the moon, the vision was gone. Maybe the next vision is paid space travel, the ultimate amusement park.
I agree with Rob, Clarke's timetable made a lot of sense back in the day. I'm not surprised we didn't meet it, though, seeing as how NASA's funding for the fun stuff dried up some time ago.
Yes, TJ, it's a shame we didn't meet Clarke's timetable. Back in 1967, Clarke's timetable actually seemed plausible. While much of the technology advancements (especially the Internet, military, and medical technology) have been impressive in the past few decades, exploration of space has been a disappointment. Perhaps it needs to be monetized to really leap forward -- in which case Branson may be on the right track.
Yes, Beth, this is that spaceship. There are very few details about how composites have been used in SS2 on any of the websites I checked. However, both SS2 and WK2 are consistently described as "all-carbon- composite" which seems to mean the shell. It's also worthwhile to note that Scaled Composites, which built and tested previous-version vehicles, and did the same for the SS2 and WK2 prototypes, makes "speciality composite structures," so I'm guessing that the airframe structures are also made of composites. In other words, there are probably even more than in the 787.
Apparently, if you have enough money, as Branson does, you can fund all kinds of things.
This is great. It's good to see that one crazy guy -- Richard Branson -- can take the dream of space flight and move forward on his own without a government sponsored organization. He's getting closer and closer to making this dream happen. Rock on, Richard.
Is this a prototype of the space vehicle Richard Branson is behind, which would take average citizens (albeit those with big fat pocketbooks) into space flight? Any sense of how different the all-composite approach is on this craft compared to what Boeing accomplished with the Dreamliner 787?
A new battery design, which replaces lithium with abundant and low-cost elemental sulfur, is still in its nascent stages but shows real promise for giving batteries more energy potential.
PTC will offer a virtual desktop environment for its Creo product design applications, potentially freeing engineers to run them from remote desktops on a variety of operating systems and mobile devices.
The push to achieving more intelligent, integrated manufacturing is putting a strong focus on networking and connectivity as key enabling technologies.
Now that solar and wind harvesting technologies are a thriving market, researchers are seeking other environmentally related energy sources for which they can create harvesting devices.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
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For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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