Orbital Assembly and the Gateway Foundation are working on a reasonable set of plans and steps to build a space station that is 488 meters in diameter. They would start with a hub that is 78 meters wide. The National Space Society has the goal of 100-meter wide space station that weighs 8500 tons. It …
Elon Musk SpaceX BFR and Jeff Bezos Blue Origin are targeting fully reusable rockets. The reusable rocket age should have started in the 1980s. However, cost-plus contracts and political bureaucracy split manufacturing of the space shuttle into 50 states. The plan was for space shuttle flights to happen once a week and for the cost …
Iran’s official unemployment rate is 12% and oil exports have declined by about half a million barrels a day and might decline even further as the effect of the renewed U.S. American sanctions increases. Iranian people have no confidence in their leaders and are frustrated with the economy, lack of economic reform and high unemployment. …
Star Wars needs to be saved. Fans loved Star Wars a New Hope and from the Empire Strike Back and the Clone Wars and Rebels animation series. Return of the Jedi was disappointing with Ewoks but it still had a reasonable closure for Luke, Vader and the Emperor. There were some good things to love …
Cellulose is the most abundant and broadly distributed organic compound and industrial by-product on Earth. The bottom-up use of cellulose to fabricate 3D objects has had big problems that prevented printing wood for practical applications. Use in combination with plastics has lacked scalability and has had high production cost. Researchers in Singapore have demonstrated the …
Aedes mosquitos, responsible for the spread of diseases like Zika, dengue and yellow fever, do not disperse for more than 100 meters in their lifetime. They are also fragile, and high-altitude releases by airplanes can damage their wings and legs. Drones are being used to spread millions of sterile mosquitos a week. Sterile mosquitos were …
Dr. Abraar Karan has developed a nearly perfect 72-hour mosquito repellent where 98 percent of the mosquitoes did not land and of those two percent that landed, 100 percent did not bite. * Tests show the repellent stay on parts of the skin for 72 hours or even longer * It is not absorbed into …
China National Petroleum (CNPC), the largest state-owned producer of oil and natural gas in the China, reportedly plans to nearly double natural gas production from shale sources this year and wants a five-fold increase in such production by 2020. China has a lot of natural gas reserves but it has tougher geology than the USA …
Israel is investing more than $2 billion for new weapons for a possible attack against Iran. They are getting a new long-range missile and new refueling aircraft. A new IAI/IMI Rampage missile has about 150-kilometer range and is a fire and forget missile. There are reports by the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida that Israeli F-35 fighter …
The Pentagon has been directed to establish a Space Force as a new military branch. Just as the marines are an hybrid offshoot of the Navy and Army, the Space Force would be splitting the Space components that Air Force, Army and other branches. The Space Force idea has endorsements by the Joint Chiefs’ office …
Tokamak Energy of the UK has built the ST40 prototype fusion reactor and they aim to reach 100 million degrees celsius by the end of 2018. They have already reached 15 million degrees. Tokomak Energy UK is using high-temperature superconductors to make far stronger magnets in order to make compact commercial nuclear fusion. After the …