Futurist Foresight - Applied Technotopia

An interesting “what if” scenario:

WHAT IF other planetary bodies orbited our world at the same distance as the moon?

(via science-isinteresting)

A look at 3D printing in the aerospace industry.

txchnologist:

Big Data Meets Industrial 3-D Printing

by Tomas Kellner, GE Reports

Even in the lofty world of aerospace components, GE’s new 3-D printed jet engine fuel nozzle is a rare bird. Workers build it as a single piece by welding together bits of superalloy dust with lasers. The new nozzle is 25 percent lighter and as much as five times more durable than the current nozzle made from 20 different parts.

But here’s the rub. 3-D printing is so new that engineers have to develop new quality-control methods before jumping into mass production. “We are dealing with a microscopic weld pool that’s moving at hundreds of millimeters per second,” says Todd Rockstroh, a mechanical engineer at GE Aviation. “Every cubic millimeter is a chance for a defect.”

Read More

(via laboratoryequipment)

Goodluck to Expedition 36/37 en route to the International Space Station (ISS).

jtotheizzoe:

Fast-Track to Orbit: Expedition 36/37

A Russian Soyuz capsule launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Glorious Kazakhstan this afternoon, carrying U.S. astronaut (and space veteran/mechanical engineer) Karen Nyberg along with cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and Italian astronauta Luca Parmitano to their rendezvous with the ISS. They will spend a mere six hours catching up with the space station before they dock later tonight, a new pedal-to-the-metal path to orbit recently adopted by ISS-bound craft. In addition to lots and lots of science, the crew of six that will be aboard the ISS will take part in the Winter Olympic torch relay later this year.

Will Karen Nyberg entertain us like Chris Hadfield did with his gorgeous photos and video experiments (and his great Tumblr)? We’ll see. But word on the street is she’s more of a Pinterest fan.

Godspeed, Expedition 36/37. Here’s to six of you being great of behalf of seven billion of us.

P.S. - Howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com is correctly showing “6”, in case you’re wondering.

(via fuckyeahspaceship)

Another look at a rather special 3D printer.

prostheticknowledge:

MATAERIAL

A 3D Printing system that can create forms without the hindrance of gravity - video embedded below:

A brand new method of additive manufacturing. This patent-pending method allows for creating 3D objects on any given working surface independently of its inclination and smoothness, and without a need of additional support structures. Conventional methods of additive manufacturing have been affected both by gravity and printing environment: creation of 3D objects on irregular, or non-horizontal surfaces has so far been treated as impossible . By using innovative extrusion technology we are now able to neutralize the effect of gravity during the course of the printing process. This method gives us a flexibility to create truly natural objects by making 3D curves instead of 2D layers. Unlike 2D layers that are ignorant to the structure of the object, the 3D curves can follow exact stress lines of a custom shape. Finally, our new out of the box printing method can help manufacture structures of almost any size and shape.

More at the project’s website here

This list offers a look at the apps currently available for Google Glass. I particularly like the news apps.

thisistheverge:

Google Glass apps: everything you can do right now

We test every Google Glass app so you don’t have to

(via futuresagency)

The problem of space junk or space debris is increasing. And with out greater dependence on satellites is a grave problem.

spaceplasma:

There’s a lot of debris floating around in space, and researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab are using supercomputers, optical sensors and other technology to track even small objects that could damage important satellites.

John Henderson, a space scientist at LLNL, explains:

“Everybody uses GPS to get from here to there. We have satellite television, we have weather reports, farmers use satellite data for monitoring crops. If you have a piece of satellite debris whacking into a satellite, in the worst case you now lose that capability.  In February of 2009, that actually happened where there was an Iridium communications satellite that collided with a dead Russian Kosmos satellite and so that basically took out a $100 million dollar satellite.

There’s somewhere between 100,000 to 200,000 pieces of debris that we would like to be tracking. And so the supercomputing capabilities that we have here at Livermore are one way to keep track of that.”