Lifeboat Foundation

The first thing many media seem not to understand is the methodology followed by Space X, which is completely different from what the traditional aerospace builders do. While the latter prefer to spend their money on a long project life cycle, including long requirements discussion, and meticulous and detailed test engineering and integration phases, Space X opts for a methodology closer to the experimental scientific method: draw essential requirements, build a prototype, test, fail, learn from failures, build a new improved prototype, and try again. Each reiteration adds quality to the project, up to a point when the prototype is working well, and Falcon 9 (as a sample) becomes the space workhorse with any more competitors in the world. Is that so hard to be understood, for journalists?When a traditional project fails, many billions are wasted, and many years of work are canceled. When a “normal” failure occurs during Space X’s reiterative project development, very less resources are wasted. And, after all, during the expendable rockets’ age, all the rockets were always wasted, at every launch! The difference is incomparable. Another advantage of this method is its high flexibility. If a project lasts 10 years, it is difficult to take advantage of the technological advances: switching to new technology in a project initiated many years ago forces heavy requirements reviews and unavoidable delays. In a fail-and-repeat project, new technologies and new ideas can be adopted more easily and more quickly, as demonstrated by the thousands of changes and improvements applied to the different starships, super-heavy boosters, and raptor engine prototypes throughout history. Despite the misfortune bearers and the envious, the methodology works. The success of Space X in the launchers market doesn’t lie.

Starship 28 and the Super-Heavy Booster 10 made most of the expected work, and even more than what was expected: while the suborbital altitude was planned, the Starship spacecraft reached 230 km, a low Earth orbit altitude at more than 26,200 km/h. several tests were conducted after the engine cutoff, including a propellant transfer demo and payload dispenser test.

Only two operations have failed. The booster couldn’t make it to descend vertically on its engines, since only 3 of them reignited, and splashed in the Mexican Gulf at little more than 1,000 km/h. The Starship failed during the re-entry in the atmosphere, in the Indian Ocean. We could observe many insulating tiles flying away from the Starship’s body during the first part of the re-entry. At an altitude of 65 km, telemetry from Ship 28 was lost, and the vehicle was destroyed before splashing in the sea.

Since November 2023, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending a steady radio signal to Earth, but the signal does not contain usable data. The source of the issue appears to be with one of three onboard computers, the flight data subsystem (FDS), which is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth by the telemetry modulation unit.

On March 3, the Voyager mission team saw activity from one section of the FDS that differed from the rest of the computer’s unreadable data stream. The new signal was still not in the format used by Voyager 1 when the FDS is working properly, so the team wasn’t initially sure what to make of it. But an engineer with the agency’s Deep Space Network, which operates the radio antennas that communicate with both Voyagers and other spacecraft traveling to the Moon and beyond, was able to decode the new signal and found that it contains a readout of the entire FDS memory.

The FDS memory includes its code, or instructions for what to do, as well as variables, or values used in the code that can change based on commands or the spacecraft’s status. It also contains science or engineering data for downlink. The team will compare this readout to the one that came down before the issue arose and look for discrepancies in the code and the variables to potentially find the source of the ongoing issue.

Bellevue, Wash.-based Lumen Orbit, a startup that’s only about three months old, says that it’s closed a $2.4 million pre-seed investment round to launch its plan to put hundreds of satellites in orbit, with the goal of processing data in space before it’s downlinked to customers on Earth.

The investors include Nebular, Caffeinated Capital, Plug & Play, Everywhere Ventures, Tiny.vc, Sterling Road, Pareto Holdings and Foreword Ventures. There are also more than 20 angel investors, including four Sequoia Scouts investing through the Sequoia Scout Fund. “The round was 3x oversubscribed,” Lumen CEO and co-founder Philip Johnston told GeekWire in an email.

Johnston is a former associate at McKinsey & Co. who also co-founded an e-commerce venture called Opontia. Lumen’s other co-founders are chief technology officer Ezra Feilden, whose resume includes engineering experience at Oxford Space Systems and Airbus Defense and Space; and chief engineer Adi Oltean, who worked as a principal software engineer at SpaceX’s Starlink facility in Redmond, Wash.

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A researcher at The University of Texas at Austin has developed a mug-sized device that can clean water using only a small jolt of electricity. The device could be used to help get drinking water to people left stranded by extreme weather events.

Dr. Donglei “Emma” Fan — an associate professor in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Cockrell School of Engineering — along with her research team, was able to create the device using a specially designed “branched” electrode, now patented.

The electrode, when electrified, created a field that E. coli and other bacterial cells are attracted to, causing them to “swim” into the electrode branches. In lab experiments, the device successfully removed 99.997% of E. coli bacteria from water samples in just 20 minutes.

Gas stoves emit nanocluster aerosol that may get deep into your respiratory system, study shows. Cooking on your gas stove can emit more nano-sized particles into the air than vehicles that run on gas or diesel, possibly increasing your risk of developing asthma or other respiratory illnesses, a new Purdue University study has found.

Combustion remains a source of air pollution across the world, both indoors and outdoors. We found that cooking on your gas stove produces large amounts of small nanoparticles that get into your respiratory system and deposit efficiently, said Brandon Boor, an associate professor in Purdue’s Lyles School of Civil Engineering, who led this research.

Based on these findings, the researchers would encourage turning on a kitchen exhaust fan while cooking on a gas stove.

Researchers observe the quantum coherence of a quintet state with four electron spins in molecular systems for the first time at room temperature.

In a study published in Science Advances, a group of researchers led by Associate Professor Nobuhiro Yanai from Kyushu University’s Faculty of Engineering, in collaboration with Associate Professor Kiyoshi Miyata from Kyushu University and Professor Yasuhiro Kobori of Kobe University, reports that they have achieved quantum coherence at room temperature: the ability of a quantum system to maintain a well-defined state over time without getting affected by surrounding disturbances.

This breakthrough was made possible by embedding a chromophore, a dye molecule that absorbs light and emits color, in a metal-organic framework, or MOF, a nanoporous crystalline material composed of metal ions and organic ligands.

The next generation of wireless communication not only requires greater bandwidth at higher frequencies – it also needs a little extra time.

Cornell researchers have developed a semiconductor chip that adds a necessary time delay so signals sent across multiple arrays can align at a single point in space, and without disintegrating. The approach will enable ever-smaller devices to operate at the higher frequencies needed for future 6G communication technology.

Continue reading “3D reflectors help boost data rate in wireless communications” »

Scientists from the University of Rochester have developed new electrochemical approaches to clean up pollution from “forever chemicals” found in clothing, food packaging, firefighting foams, and a wide array of other products. A new Journal of Catalysis study describes nanocatalysts developed to remediate per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances known as PFAS.

The researchers, led by assistant professor of chemical engineering Astrid Müller, focused on a specific type of PFAS called Perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), which was once widely used for stain-resistant products but is now banned in much of the world for its harm to human and animal health. PFOS is still widespread and persistent in the environment despite being phased out by US manufacturers in the early 2000s, continuing to show up in water supplies.