Unlike commercial airliners, modern military aircraft are subjected to ever-changing flying conditions—from high-thrust takeoffs to flying at altitude to combat maneuvers. So why are they outfitted with engines that perform optimally in only one of those flight envelopes? For the next iteration of the F-35 Lightning II, Pratt and Whitney is developing an engine that performs at its best no matter what’s required of it.
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What do you get when you outfit a Caterpillar forklift with a gigantic telescopic arm, remote controls, and the ability to bully both vehicles and houses smaller than itself? The LAPD’s ultimate bomb disposal tool: BATCAT.
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In the early 1960s, when the Apollo missions were underway and America was hellbent on reaching the moon, NASA researchers faced a nearly endless litany of technical hurdles and engineering obstacles nobody had even dreamed of up to that point. Chief among them: Once you shoot three guys across 238,900 miles across space at an orbiting body with just a fraction of the mass of Earth, how do you put them safely on the surface? That answer: lots and lots of practice in this gangly hardware simulator.
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While winds may die and clouds may obscure the sun, nothing can stop the rhythmic lapping of ocean waves. Now, an Australian company hopes to harness that power and covert it to usable electricity with the most powerful wave-energy generator ever created. And this is just their small-scale prototype.
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So the post-Space Shuttle era isn’t going quite as splendidly as we’d initially hoped it would back when we retired the fleet back in 2011. Sure we can still deliver supplies to the ISS thanks to privately developed modules like the Dragon Capsule, but getting crews up there is still only possible with the the Russian Space Agency’s increasingly exorbitant launch assistance.
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Sure the MI-24 Hind
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Coal mining is a dirty, dangerous business. Even with modern safety equipment protecting workers from black lung, plenty of other dangers await them underground. Like, say, mixing easily ignited coal dust with hot machine surfaces. That’s why GE has invented a mine-car engine that keeps its cool to prevent setting off a raging inferno.
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Reports of the USS Zumwalt‘s christening being delayed until next spring have been greatly exaggerated. In a surprise move, the US Navy instead launched the next-generation destroyer from its berth in Bath, Maine early this morning.
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When it comes to orbital launch positioning, the Earth has something of a sweet spot: the equator. Like a gigantic planetary baseball bat, rockets jump off the Earth’s center-line with ease, able to enter geostationary orbits using a fraction of the energy required anywhere else on the planet.
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The MQ-1 Predator UAV is one of America’s most prolific and productive drones, having notched more than a million hours of flight time since its introduction in 1994. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for continued improvement to the platform. In fact, General Atomics has also been hard at work with a slightly less deadly version that can fly for twice as long.
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