Interestingly, Joeseph Kittenger (now 84), the man who set the previous record in 1960 was heading up Baumgartner's ground team.

^{That's one giant leap. Period.}

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Nazi-Acquired Buddha Statue Came From Space

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Two of the Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes gleefully report on an interesting project at the AIAA-Houston section newsletter which is undertaking a reprint and analysis of the famous series of articles published in  8 issues of Collier's Magazine in the 1950s titled Man Will Conquer Space Soon.

The series laid out a very forward thinking vision of space exploration that included detailed plans for exploring both the Moon and Mars. The plan, developed largely by Wherner Von Braun and Wley Ley was, surprisingly sound technically (if not fiscally). Scott Lowther, who publishes the superb Aerospace Projects Review, is overseeing the republishing of the articles in high resolution which is particularly significant given the art by Fred Freeman and Chelsey Bonnestell. The ads have been replaces with short aerospace articles relating to the series that include some technical analysis of what they got right and wrong. Upcoming issues of AIAA-Houston will do the same for the remaining 8 installments of the old series.

Here's a sample:

^{For all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these "it might have been."}

On a related note,Volume 3 Issue 1of Aerospace Projects Review has a extensive article on Von Braun's Ferry rocket.

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...had a happy ending.

Curiosity has landed on Mars.

^{Oh...well then...}

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One of The Brickmuppets Crack Team of Science Babes comes to us with news of a most interesting comet.  How interesting you ask?

It must have had a very unusual origin and might even have formed in another solar system probably very different from our own.

 

For Northern hemisphere observers, the comet is unobservable before perihelion, but is viewable near the end of the month when it also appears low down in the evening sky. It remains observable although rapidly fading in brightness into August.

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Via Transterrestrial Musings comes an interesting story on the differences between languages expression of colors. One thing that interested me, the old story I'd been told about Japanese stoplights (that they were red and blue prior to 1945) is probably false.

...But in Japanese, vegetables are ao-mono, literally blue things. Green apples? They’re blue too. As are the first leaves of spring, if you go by their Japanese name. In English, the term green is sometimes used to describe a novice, someone inexperienced. In Japanese, they’re ao-kusai, literally they ‘smell of blue’...

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Via Cdr Salamander comes this interesting and somewhat disturbing TED talk on algorithms.

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It is November.
It is 56 degrees.
If you are a mosquito in the city of Portsmouth VA you are wrong.
There seems to be considerable confusion on this point.

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One of the Brickmuppets Crack Team of Science Matangos  brings us some intriguing news from the manned space field.

...The only problem was, it didn't work. At the Space Access conference in April, Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's president, admitted: "We have recovered pieces of the first stages." The first stages weren't even getting as far as deploying their parachutes – they were breaking up during atmospheric re-entry...

^{Good Choice of BGM}

Scott Lowther, who, unlike me, is an aerospace engineer, comments.

...it looks reasonably practical, with a minimum of ridiculocity… no wings, scramjets or need for advanced materials. The basic concept is more than forty years old, going back to not only Phil Bono’s Saturn S-IVB stage recoverability concepts, but even further to Chrysler Mercury-Redstone  recoverability concepts. Ditching parachutes entirely is a ballsy move, but if your rockets are sufficiently reliable – maybe Xcor rockets on the capsule – then chutes aren’t needed.

It is different. To my layman's eye the second stage recovery seems a bit more iffy simply because it will need a lot of heat shielding. OTOH it will be almost empty so perhaps its low sectional density will sufficiently assist. Even if that is a failure (and people with more Letters than me are signing off on this)  economical reuseability of the first stage and the spacecraft itself is a very big deal.

In other space news China has launched its first space station successfully.

^{Strange choice of BGM}

Dutch Formula One Tycoon Michiel Mol has teamed up with Dutch Airline KLM as well as XCOR Aerospace to put together a suborbital space tour operating out of the Dutch island of Curacao in the Caribbean. They will be using XCOR's  Lynx spacecraft. Mol and KLM also have more ambitious suborbital plans.

Today was the 54th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik by the USSR. While an admirable and historic achievement, one thing that historians tend not to stress is that it proved to all the world that a nation that had murdered millions of its own citizens and defined peace as an absence of opposition to world communism could in theory then place an atomic warhead anywhere in the world. 
Bummer...
OTOH it was humanities first step into space...so Yay! Sputnik!

Rand Simberg has thoughts and reflections.

_{Science 'Matango' is, of course, Ritzu from K-on!}

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UPDATE: I'm not finding much in the way of debunkery of this story online. Car and Tech blogs seem to be pretty sanguine about lasering thorium to power cars and one site that focuses on rare metals seems to think the lasing thing makes sense with Thorium.

HOWEVER...
I found little about the Doctor Charles Stevens mentioned in the many articles I perused below. However, I went to the Laser Power Systems site, which is pretty spartan unless one registers...I mean spartan as in there is NOTHING there. Well, I registered hoping to find patent, tech or business info.
Boy Howdy.
After registering, if one clicks  on "patents"one is taken to a page called the
Galactic Governments Patent Office
...which seems to be a separate website that is railing against new patent legislation....but has no patents. And there isn't much there. On the "News Feed"....I saw "Brickmuppet Registers" as the most recent news. The other site is LaserTurbinePower.com. Registering there takes one to a screen that is labeled Registered Users Area, but that's it...no links...nothing just a page that one has to register to access....with no info or business plan or catgirls or anything

I did track down this powerpoint online...which is an Laser Power Systems pitch from 2009  that contains a host of spelling errors and a working diagram that rivals the U.S. Department of Innovation's Logo for functionality.

One other thing (scarcely worth mentioning I'm sure).
Another Dr. Charles Stevens (who has the same contact phone number) is the founder of Helyxzion, LLC. This is claimed to be a genomics company and my undergraduate biology tells me that his biddness plan is...dubious. I also note that both of these Dr. Charles Stevenses (who share he same phone number) have been working in their respective fields since the mid-80's. I guess that apartment is just full of mad science...Wait...maybe its not an apartment...I'm now envisioning something along the lines of Conjectural Technologies.

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1 I think they probably meant 250 kilowatts, not 250 megawatts. 250 megawatts is enough to power a decent sized town.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Mon Sep 26 19:03:41 2011 (+rSRq)

2 Good catch!

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Mon Sep 26 19:36:34 2011 (EJaOX)

3 Unfortunately, the physics behind this is dubious at best.  You can't trigger radioactive decay with heat; unless you hit the nucleus directly with something (a neutron, at a stretch a very-high-energy gamma ray), it will sit there until it decides otherwise.  Thorium's natural decay process releases alpha particles, which are easy to shield, but a block of pure thorium is just going to sit there unless you heat it up enough to melt, in which case it will just puddle there.

In brighter news, you have a kaiju drop waiting for you on Billy.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tue Sep 27 02:33:44 2011 (PiXy!)

4 It sounded  dubious to me at first.

I first heard something about this roughly a year ago and it sounded awfully like the hafnium silliness. I didn't blog about it then because it seemed quite unlikely. Now though, this has at the very least got a lot of smart people interested.

As I understand it this involves getting the Thorium to lase, and what they are saying is that thorium lases strongly in the infrared. The heat it gives off is sufficient to generate enough steam to turn a generator that creates enough power to do work AND power the accelerator for the lasing of the thorium. This degrades the thorium over time.

The LPS power plant, for all its whiz-bang properties, isn’t a complete departure from traditional power generation: the thorium is lased and the resulting heat flashes a fluid and creates pressurized steam inside a closed-loop system. The steam then drives a turbine that turns an electric generator.

The same General Electric article also mentions that at least some radioactives like uranium have this property but that thorium lases without cryogenics.

This isn't a regular nuclear reaction though it seems that the lasing property is somehow tied to Thorium's radioactivity.

Most importantly they seem to have reproduced it and gotten the thorium part to work....the current hurdle is reported to be the closed cycle turbo-electric plant.

GM was actively pursuing this until 2009 (that may mean it was dropped when the Govt. bought them out).

 It may not pan out either for technical or political reasons. Hell it could be cold fusion 2. We'll see.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tue Sep 27 08:20:43 2011 (EJaOX)

5 Hafnium isomers are real, just not very useful.  The problem is in trying to stimulate the collapse of the excited isomer to the ground state - no-one's found an effective way to do that yet.  They managed it with a tantalum isomer, but that required more energy than they got back.  (I did some research on this for a sci-fi story I want to write.  The idea remains tantalisingly plausible, but wildly impractical.)

The thorium stuff, though, looks like several unconnected things that have been incorrectly juxtaposed.  You just can't get energy out of thorium that way.  If you can make it lase (quite possible, lots of things can be made to lase) that doesn't produce energy, just focuses it.  In fact, the process will lose energy (and convert it into heat).  The only way to get energy out of thorium is through natural decay, which is far too slow, stimulated fission, which they're specifically not doing, or by setting it on fire.  It does burn nicely, but it's not really an improvement over regular fuels.

I hate to rain on the nuclear-car parade, but the whole thing looks like a scam, hoax, or old-fashioned crackpot.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tue Sep 27 09:04:43 2011 (PiXy!)

6 It might also be that one of the writers just got confused, and the others sourced the mistakes from the first one.  It could all be an honest mistake.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tue Sep 27 09:10:20 2011 (PiXy!)

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One of the Brickmuppets Crack Team of Science Babes takes a moment from her...research...to relay this news from exotic Canukistan.

^{It's...technical...}

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CDR Salamander says what needs to be said.

I've long thought that Bachmann is vastly and disturbingly closer to the medias image of Palin than Palin herself is. I'd actually been meaning to write about why she bothered me...but I didn't and now there is no need as she seems to have self-immolated the other night.

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Next Year this time I plan to be in Japan sightseeing and doing interviews for a teaching job. I hope to start Next August (unlikely) or in January or April of 2013.

TIME magazine suggested the machines may threaten the jobs of some of the 20,000 to 30,000 foreign English teachers in Korea. It also named the robots one of the 50 best inventions of 2010.

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The Brickmuppets Crack Team of Science Babes resident helicopter expert has been following up on the weekends news with considerable interest. It seems that during the mission that ultimately resulted in a certain mass murdering buttweasel becoming chum, there was one notable mishap.

The United States lost a helicopter over Bin Laden's compound. The troops destroyed it before they left, but the tailboom was outside the compound and inaccessible.
 Now that has been photographed and has generated a LOT of interest. It seems that this was a bigger mishap than initially let on as the tail boom has all sorts of stealth features and the photos are all over the net...so completely out of the bag is the ninja chopper that I feel no guilt in linking to it. 

There is commentary about this here, here, here and here. As I type this, there is also a thread on this topic at the generally superb Secret Projects Forum, but the first thread on the topic had to be shut down due to an outbreak of crazy-ass deathers.

 

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Electric cars are good for urban niche applications. However, there are certain problems with them. Range and charging time can be easily dealt with if one lives in an urban environment with a set schedule and is a homebody. The battery life issue is trickier as it carries with it the dual problems of considerable expense for the consumer and the environmental hazards of disposing of huge toxic batteries. Within certain niches, these are not insurmountable issues.
  Now, one of the Brickmuppet's crack team of science babes brings us another complication...discovered after long hours of research.Fire!

^{It's nice to find people who enjoy their work.}

...The couple's garage, where they parked their new Chevrolet Volt hybrid, was on fire. Firefighters were able to put out the blaze. A firewall built between the home and the garage saved their home.Investigators with the state fire marshal's office and the couple's insurance company, at the time, suspected the hybrid car have had something to do with the blaze.On Monday morning, firefighters were called back to the home when the car caught fire again...

Well, it is a Chevy Volt. Of course it could be a wiring defect in the house. This story would just be an oddity if not for the combusting Chinese taxicab.

A Zotye Langyue/Multipla EV serving as a taxicab burst into flame Monday afternoon in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, prompting the city to halt all electric taxis on safety concerns.

Firefighters rushed to the scene in minutes but couldn’t do much as the car quickly turned into a big fireball, and then ashes and an empty, back shell. No one was injured; the driver and two passengers in the vehicle got out in time...

This is really odd. EVs are not terribly practical but we've been operating the damned things since the 1890s and I can't recall this being a widespread problem, yet now we have 2 such incidents in a matter of weeks.

There have been a lot of changes in electrics of late so this might bear watching.

Wait! This is a mystery. It involves cars, electric cars. Why, this looks looks like a job for Jeremy Clarkson!

Of course alternative fuels are of considerable interest to those of us at Brickmuppet Blog so we leave you with this non-disastrous bit of ecotech that is four different kinds of cool.
1: It's Finnish!
2: It is a wood burning car with a range of 800 miles.
3: It is an frickking ElCamino...which means that...
4: No Bo-Bo would be caught dead in this.

Given the range, I think this must be a dual fuel engine. Several European cars can run on natural gas and petrol so that would be both plausible and make the thing almost practical. It is definitely awesome.

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Up to 10,000 passengers pierside, 8400 at sea.
I'm not at all sure how serious a proposal this is. I am absolutely sure it is awesome.

As a cruise ship it seems at first blush too large to be practical. For instance, if it shows up in the Caymans the Caymans would be overrun. However,  in SE Asia it might have a niche.

The size of the vessel has other possibilities for development.  The sheer number of passengers (~11 times that of the largest airliner) is intriguing. Despite its slow speed (20 kts) on short runs between Japan, China, the Philippines and S.E. Asia, this might conceivably compete respectably with airlines through volume of tickets and greater fuel efficiency per passenger, especially given the current skyrocketing cost of fuel. If the proportion of second class passengers was increased those numbers would only be improved.  

While this is too slow to be an effective transatlantic liner, a developed version given the ability to do 30-35 knots (like the old SS United States) would cross the Atlantic in 4-5 days and reach Toulon or Naples in 5-6.  On the Atlantic route, the efficiency perk would be complimented by the ships relative immunity to volcanic ash, especially given that Icelands volcanoes may be heading into a period of increased activity like was experienced in the 18th century.

Notwithstanding such speculations it is really cool to see someone thinking this big.

Awesomness...

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