Lifeboat Foundation

SpaceX appears to have more or less broken ground on a new, even bigger ‘high bay’ assembly facility at its Boca Chica, Texas Starship factory.

Barely one year ago, SpaceX erected the first prefabricated steel sections of what eventually become its Starship factory ‘high bay’ – a spartan 81m (~265 ft) tall designed at the most basic level to shield final Starship and Super Heavy booster assembly from the elements. Situated near the southernmost tip of Texas and just a few miles west of the Gulf of Mexico, those “elements” can be less than pleasant at SpaceX’s primary Starship factory, ranging from sauna-like heat and humidity and mosquitoes the size of quarters to regular downpours, thunderstorms, tropical conditions, and even hurricanes.

While a great deal of work at Starbase is still done out in the open with little more than an umbrella as protection, SpaceX has nevertheless worked to find a middle ground where the most sensitive work (mainly structural welding) can be mostly shielded from wind and rain. First, SpaceX built a (relatively) tiny ‘windbreak’ too small for much of anything. Two years later, the windbreak is partially used for Starship nose section assembly – when a nose cone is stacked on and welded to a separate stack of four steel rings.

“Stay safe friends,” astronaut Megan McArthur says.

As parts of the U.S. northeast brace for Hurricane Henri to make landfall in New York today (Aug. 22), astronauts and satellites are tracking the historic storm from space.

Continue reading “Astronauts and satellites watch Hurricane Henri from space as US Northeast braces for storm” »

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California has achieved a major breakthrough in the quest to develop nuclear fusion power.

The NIF is the world’s largest inertial confinement fusion (ICF) device and contains the world’s largest laser. Its 192 beams are housed in a 10-story building the size of three football fields. When combined, these can generate over a million joules of energy, or about 0.1% the amount of a lightning bolt.

Scientists have been using the immense power of this laser to heat small capsules of deuterium and tritium (isotopes of hydrogen) in an effort to reach “ignition” and kickstart thermonuclear fusion. This process, the same reaction that powers our Sun, could one day provide a limitless source of clean energy.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3zLFLotBFbA

Do you remember the Zuckerland metaverse? (Yes, I know he borrowed the word, but when you are president of a digital country, does anyone dare challenge Zuck the First, Le Roi Numérique?)

Palantir Technologies (the Seeing Stone outfit with the warm up jacket fashion bug) introduced a tasty bit of jargon-market speak in its Q22021earnings call:

Continue reading “Silicon Valley Neologisms: The Palantir Edition” »

AIR

Adaptive Air Control

Whether it is located in snowy mountains, scorching deserts, or smoggy cities, the Greenery S farm’s robust insulation and complete suite of climate control components work together to recreate the perfect growing environment 365 days a year.

Determining if particular extreme hot or cold spells were caused by climate change could be made easier by a new mathematical method.

The statistical method, developed by physicists at the University of Reading and Uppsala University in Sweden, looks at the characteristics, or “fingerprints,” of a specific extreme weather event of interest, like a heatwave, in order to ascertain whether it can be attributed to natural climate variability of the climate or is a unique product of global warming.

The method also allows predictions to be made about how likely extreme climate events will be in the future.

Three groundbreaking ideas for the future of high-speed rail travel in Europe have been proposed by a number of companies. Hyperloop, Maglev trains and a single European railway area have been suggested as climate-friendly options to transform mobility on the continent in years to come. Spanish company Zeleros want to build a scalable hyperloop system capable of connecting cities in a matter of minutes, achieving speeds of 1,000km/h with zero emissions. Maglev trains have been suggested by Polish company Nevomo as a more imminent European rail transformation, with the aim of implementing hyperloop once the technology is ready.

“A new study suggests that if Europe planted trees across all the land suitable for reforestation, it might not only sequester carbon but also partially ameliorate the increasingly dry European summers predicted by climate change models.”

Plant more trees! This message has been one of the cornerstones of the European response to worsening climate change. A new study published in Nature Geoscience suggests that if Europe planted trees across all the land suitable for reforestation, it might not only sequester carbon, but also partially ameliorate the increasingly dry European summers predicted by climate change models. In all, mass reforestation could increase summer rainfall by an average of 7.6%.

“When planned carefully, reforestation could result in additional benefits in regions where it is implemented,” said Ronny Meier, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH Zürich), and lead author on the study.

Continue reading “Reforestation holds promise for Europe’s increasingly drier summers” »