The New York Magazine describes how President Trump offered some people at NASA to imagine and propose an Apollo-style crash program to get humans to Mars. NASA described getting to humans to Mars in the 2030s. Trump asked if the first humans to Mars could be achieved by 2020 or 2024 with an unlimited budget? …
Elon Musk explained to Popular Mechanics why SpaceX switched to a 300 series alloy of stainless steel. Advanced carbon-fiber structure made very slow progress and the cost per kilogram was $135. There is a lot of cutting and they would lose 35 percent of the material in processing. It has to have a lot of …
Going to nuclear power and uranium would be many times faster than replacing fossil fuels with renewables. There is a constant stream of death and sickness from fossil fuels. Japan and Germany went to more coal. Renewables can be better but are far from perfect. Nuclear can be a net gain for the environment and …
Fixing CO2 is a harder problem than fixing soot and air pollution. Carbon dioxide is a gas. It is harder to split the carbon dioxide out of a smokestack than it is to filter out soot and particulates. Carbon dioxide that is already in the atmosphere will stay there for decades or centuries but soot …
This article looks at the mid-2020 timeline for micro-reactors which has strong Department of Defense interest. Nextbigfuture has been interviewing the project lead, Venkat Rao, for what was the Los Alamos Megapower micro-reactor. Nextbigfuture will also be talking to Westinghouse about the eVinci reactor which is their commercial evolution of Megapower. They are working on …