Hasta La Gadget!

Spacelog provides fascinating searchable text transcripts for NASA missions originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Dec 2010 09:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Spacelog  | Email this | Comments

You’re probably familiar with supersonic planes like the SR-71 Blackbird pictured above, which managed to fly at over three times the speed of sound, but imagine this: NASA set aside $15 million to develop a hypersonic plane that could exit our atmosphere at speeds between Mach 5 and Mach 20. The US space agency’s not expecting to build it quite that cheaply, of course, and it’s not holding out hope for a contractor to build the entire plane just yet — the organization intends to fund some sixteen smaller science and engineering projects (ranging from “how to build a Mach 8+ engine” to “predicting hypersonic fluid dynamics”) and letting would-be government contractors pick and choose. Know how to quantify baseline turbulent aeroheating uncertainty in a hypersonic environment? You’ve got until November 23rd to get your proposal in.

Update: As some have pointed out in comments, hypersonic flight isn’t unprecedented — NASA spent eighteen years developing and testing the X-15 space plane starting in 1951, which reached Mach 6.7 using a rocket engine.

[Thanks, Gadi]

NASA budgets $15 million for hypersonic flight originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Nov 2010 04:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Popular Science, Fast Company  |  NASA (PDF)  | Email this | Comments

International Space Station marks ten years of continuous habitation originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  NASA (1), (2)  | Email this | Comments

She called it a date, but as far as we can tell, the meeting between MSNBC reporter Stephanie Pappas and soon-to-be the first humanoid robot in space Robonaut 2 was a bit of a one-sided affair.

A joint project between General Motors and NASA, Robonaut 2 is expected to help astronauts perform repairs and other maintenance on the International Space Station. This model, Robonaut 2B will travel on the very last Space Shuttle mission; Originally scheduled a November 1 launch, fuel leaks have delayed the Shuttle Discovery blast-off until Tuesday of next week.

Pappas, who met the robot at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, reports that the 330 pound automaton was a little intimidating and looked as if it might be “ready to throw a punch.” It does look a tiny bit like a giant version of one of those punching puppets (our favorites were always the nun and ET) . Though only a torso, Robonaut 2 can replicate human hand and arm movement and perform tasks such as drilling and painting. During Pappas’ date, however, Robonaut didn’t paint, throw a punch, speak or even move. To be fair, Pappas’s date is not the robot heading into space. The final model, Robonaut 2B, has new fire-proof skin and a few space-ready parts. Plus, as Pappas notes, it doesn’t have any smell. (Now you know the answer to the age-old-question, “Do things still smell in space?”).

As Pappas’ date neared its conclusion, the reporter did manage to make brief contact with the humanoid robot’s arm. She reports that it felt like a “cross between a memory-foam pillow and a well-muscled human arm.”

We’re taking bets on whether or not Robonaut will call Pappas, or at least text her.

If human space exploration is going to extend to celestial bodies farther away than the moon or even Mars, we need to develop a tremendous amount of new technology in order to do it. At this weekend’s Long Now-sponsored “Long Conversation” event, NASA Ames Director Simon “Pete” Worden outlined what the agency is doing to create that future.

“The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds,” Worden explained. “Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.” Worden himself was fired by President George W. Bush.

The most important near-term development is electric propulsion. The chemical rockets we use to launch shuttles into space are too expensive and inefficient for longer trips; the current generation of propulsion devices we use for deep-space probes and satellites are too slow.

“Within a few years we will see the first true prototype of a spaceship that will take us between worlds,” Worden said.

Worden also thinks development of a high-power, high-efficiency electric propulsion system could have huge implications for air travel here on earth. Given the rapidly accelerating growth of travel in the developing world and the environmental impact of current airplane technology, the status quo is unsustainable.

“The long-term answer is a ‘Tesla in the air’,” Worden said, “using high-density batteries powered off ground-based solar grids, so your airliner stays plugged in overnight, and it’s got an electrical engine rather than a chemical engine. I think within ten years we’ll have small-scale business-level ones, and within 20, they’ll be the airliners. If we don’t, I think aviation’s through.”

Other technology in NASA Ames’s research pipeline (both near- and long-term) includes microwave thermal propulsion, to remotely generate power that can be transmitted to a spaceship using 140 GHz beams; synthetic biology to help human beings survive on other planets; and a new DARPA-funded “Hundred Year Starship” program to develop long-distance space travel technology.

“We also hope to inveigle some billionaires to form a Hundred Year Starship fund,” Worden added.

One of those billionaires might be Google’s Larry Page, who is keenly interested in space travel and NASA Ames’s research.

“Larry asked me a couple weeks ago how much it would cost to send people one way to Mars and I told him $10 billion, and his response was, ‘Can you get it down to 1 or 2 billion?,’” Worden told the Long Now audience. “So now we’re starting to get a little argument over the price.”

Image: Microwave Thermal Propulsion. Credit: NASA Ames / Kevin Parkin. Story via Kurzweil AI. Thanks, Meredith!

See Also:

• NASA's Puffin Is Way Cooler Than a Jetpack
• NASA's New Jumbo Jet Keeps Giant Eye on Heavens
• Why NASA Is Sending a Robot to Space That Looks Like You
• Launching a Shuttle: NASA Countdown to Blastoff
• NASA's Mini X-Plane Completes Initial Flight Testing
• SpaceX Rocket Achieves Earth Orbit on First Flight
• Caribbean Island to Offer Rides Into Space
• The Beginning of the End of the Space Shuttle
• Video from NASA's Biggest Party Ever
• Elon Musk Is Betting His Fortune on a Mission Beyond Earth's Orbit