VASIMR Magnetic Plasma Rocket Could Send Humans To Mars In Just 39 Days

As reported by HuffPost Science: A new type of rocket that could send humans to Mars in less than six weeks instead of six months or longer may be one step closer to reality.  

NASA has selected Texas-based Ad Astra Rocket Company for a round of funding to help develop the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket, or VASIMR. The new rocket uses plasma and magnets, not to lift spacecraft into orbit but to propel them further and faster once they've escaped the planet's atmosphere.

“It is a rocket like no other rocket that you might have seen in the past. It is a plasma rocket," Dr. Franklin Chang-Díaz, a former shuttle astronaut and CEO of Ad Astra said in a video describing the rocket. "The VASIMR engine is not used for launching things into space or landing them back but rather it is used for things already there. We call this ‘in-space propulsion.'"  

While missions near Earth would be able to use solar energy to power the rocket, a mission to Mars would require something far more powerful -- most likely nuclear power, which the company has called "an ideal power source in space."  

In ideal conditions, the rocket could propel a spacecraft to Mars in just 39 days.  

So far, a non-nuclear prototype has been able to fire for less than a minute at a time:

The NASA contract, worth about $10 million over three years, would go toward creating a prototype that could operate at high power for a minimum of 100 hours, the company said in a news release.  

The project is being funded as part of the space agency's Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships program. The goal is for the prototype to reach a technology readiness level (TRL) greater than 5 on NASA's 9-level scale.

A level 5 is described by NASA as:

TRL 5 System/subsystem/component validation in relevant environment: Thorough testing of prototyping in representative environment. Basic technology elements integrated with reasonably realistic supporting elements. Prototyping implementations conform to target environment and interfaces.

“We are thrilled by this announcement and proud to be joining forces with NASA in the final steps of the technology maturation,” Chang-Diaz, who took part in seven shuttle missions, said in a news release. “We look forward to a very successful partnership as we jointly advance the technology to flight readiness."  

An image provided by the company shows a schematic view of the VASIMR:

Critics have called VASIMR unrealistic, with Mars Society president Robert Zubrin saying last year that to bring humans to Mars, the rocket would need "nuclear electric power systems with 10,000 times the power and 1/100th the mass per unit power as any that have ever been built."

Megawatt All-Electric Race Car to Compete at Pikes Peak

As reported by Electric Autosport: Drive eO announces the arrival of eO PP03, world’s first one megawatt all-electric race car. Designed and built in Latvia, the 1020 kW (1368 hp) powerful vehicle is to compete at the annual Pikes Peak International Hill Climb in the United States of America on June 28, 2015. “We want to become the first overall winner with an electric vehicle,” said Kristaps Dambis, project director at Drive eO.  

Drive eO is an engineering company specialized in the design and manufacture of electric and hybrid electric prototype vehicles. The eO PP03 is a result of years of development. The Latvian based company was the first to enter and complete the demanding Dakar Rally with a hybrid electric vehicle. This project was followed by the creation of eO PP01, a purpose built fully electric prototype race car to participate at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb competition. Last year, they were the first to enter this race with a modified Tesla Roadster.

The newly created all-wheel drive eO PP03 has a 50 kWh lithium-ion battery pack and is propelled by six YASA-400 electric motors with in-house developed eO controllers. This package provides a peak power of an impressive 1020 kW, peak torque of 2160 Nm and could reach 260 km/h. The kerb weight is targeted at just 1200 kg.

Pikes Peak International Hill Climb is the second oldest motor racing event in the United States of America. The race is run on a challenging twenty-kilometer (12.42 mile) course with 156 turns. It begins at 2,792 meter (9,160 feet) and finishes at the 4,301 meter (14,110 feet) summit of the Pikes Peak mountain in Colorado Springs.

Kristaps Dambis, project director at Drive eO, said: “We are hugely excited about building world’s first one megawatt electric race car. We have built the car from the ground up and the majority of the components and design has been constructed in-house. We know that racing with a state-of-the-art vehicle comes along with new challenges, but we are well prepared after our Dakar Rally adventure and the two previous times we participated in the race at Pikes Peak. With great pride we’ll soon present the vehicle to the public and hopefully it will surprise everyone. Winning the event is our goal.”

The eO PP03 is currently being assembled at the workshop in Ogresgala Pagasts, near Latvia’s capital city Riga, and is expected to undergo first testing in May. The experienced driver piloting the one megawatt electric race car will be announced in April. The race takes place on Sunday, June 28, 2015 in Colorado Springs, USA.

eO PP03 technical specifications:

• All wheel drive
• Six YASA-400 electric motors with eO controllers
• Peak power 1020 kW / peak torque 2160 Nm
• 50 kWh lithium-ion battery pack with BMS
• Single reduction gear / limited slip axle differentials
• Steel tubular spaceframe with carbon fibre body
• Electrically assisted power steering
• 4-way adjustable shock absorbers
• Ventilated brake discs Ø378 mm front / Ø330 mm rear
• 320/710 R18 slick tyres / 13” × 18” wheels
• Kerb weight: 1200 kg
• Top speed: 260 km/h

China Launches New-Generation BeiDou Satellite

As reported by Inside GNSS: China’s Xinhua news agency has announced the launch a new-generation BeiDou satellite at 9:52 p.m. Beijing time March 30, 2015.  This is the first of five next-generation BeiDou that China will launch this year, Jianyun Chen, a deputy director of the China Satellite Navigation Office (CSNO), told a Munich Satellite Navigation Summit last week.

Launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in the southwestern province of Sichuan, the satellite was boosted by a Long March-3C carrier rocket developed by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.

The 17th satellite for the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) marks the beginning of expanding the regional BDS to global coverage, according to Xinhua. Although China has not said which type of spacecraft was launched Monday, Spaceflight Now reported that the flight path taken by the Long March rocket indicates the satellite was destined for one of the BeiDou system’s inclined geosynchronous orbits.

The latest satellite will test new Phase III BDS navigation signals and inter-satellite links, among other innovations.

Xinhua reported that the new satellite was developed by the Shanghai Engineering Center for Microsatellites, a non-profit organization established by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Shanghai Municipal Government.

The BeiDou launch was the fourth such GNSS acheivement during the past week, following the March 25 GPS Block IIF satellite launch, a March 27 dual Galileo launch, and  deployment on March 28 of a new Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System spacecraft. 

An Autonomous Car Just Drove Across the USA

As reported by Wired: An autonomous car just drove across the country.

Nine days after leaving San Francisco, a blue car packed with tech from a company you’ve probably never heard of rolled into New York City after crossing 15 states and 3,400 miles to make history. The car did 99 percent of the driving on its own, yielding to the carbon-based life form behind the wheel only when it was time to leave the highway and hit city streets.

This amazing feat, by the automotive supplier Delphi, underscores the great leaps this technology has taken in recent years, and just how close it is to becoming a part of our lives. Yes, many regulatory and legislative questions must be answered, and it remains to be seen whether consumers are ready to cede control of their cars, but the hardware is, without doubt, up to the task.

What’s remarkable isn’t the fact Delphi completed this trip, but the fact several companies could have done it. Google, Audi, or Mercedes would have had little trouble handling this level of autonomous highway driving. The news here isn’t that this was possible, but that it was so easy.

“The technology is not what is most notable from this trip,” says Jeff Miller, an associate professor at the University of Southern California who works on autonomous driving. “The fact that they drove as far as they did and had a lot of publicity will help the technology more than any programming or hardware on that vehicle.”

The speed with which the technology has reached this point is stunning. Just 11 years ago at the 2004 Darpa Grand Challenge, the most advanced autonomous vehicles of the day attempted to complete a 150-mile course. The best any of them could do was 7.32 miles—and that vehicle got stuck and caught fire. The next year, five vehicles completed a 132-mile course, but took seven hours to do it. Autonomous vehicles have made enormous strides since then, which is especially remarkable when you realize the auto industry typically spends five to seven years developing a new car.  

Today, most of the world’s major automakers are working on autonomous technology, with Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Volvo leading the pack. Google may be more advanced than anyone: The tech giant says its self-driving cars are so far along, they can recognize and respond to hand signals from a cop directing traffic.

Most automakers are taking a slow and steady approach to the technology and plan to roll it out over time. Most expect to have cars capable of handling themselves in stop and go traffic and on the highway within three to five years. Cars capable of navigating more complex urban environments will follow in the years beyond that, while fully autonomous vehicles are expected to be commonplace by 2040.

Propelling Us Toward the Day Humans No Longer Hold the Wheel

Companies like Google, which has racked up more than 700,000 miles with its autonomous vehicles, and Audi, which recently completed a road trip from Silicon Valley to Las Vegas, get all the love when it comes to robo-cars. But Delphi is doing just as much work behind the scenes, propelling us toward the day when humans no longer hold the wheel.

One of the auto industry’s biggest suppliers, Delphi has a solid record of innovation, from the first electric starter (1911), to the first in-dash car radio (1936), to the first integrated radio-navigation system (1994). For the past 15 years, it’s been working on active safety features (think active lane keeping and blind spot monitoring). Lately, it has been consolidating all this hardware into a holistic system that lets the car handle itself.

Delphi installed it all in a 2014 Audi SQ5, which Delphi engineers chose simply because they think it’s cool. Seriously. It has windshield-mounted camera spot lane lines, road signs, and traffic lights (in color). Midrange radars that see 80 meters sit on each corner. There’s another radar at the front, and a sixth at the back, plus two long-range units on the front and back. The front corners have built-in LIDaR.

The cross-country trip was meant to generate some publicity, yes, but Delphi also wanted to expose the system to variable real-world conditions and collect terabytes of data to further refine the technology. This car was built within the past year, but it takes advantage of tools that have been in the works for at least 15 years.


“It was time to put it on the road and see how it performed,” says Delphi CTO Jeff Owens. “It was just tremendous.”

The Delphi caravan (the self-driving car, a follow car with more personnel, and a Winnebago full of PR, photo, and video folks) followed a southern route, largely to avoid snow. Apart from the shock of realizing just how long it takes to drive across Texas, the biggest scare of the trip came while crossing a double-decker steel bridge on the drive from Philadelphia to New York. “I saw that bridge coming, and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is gonna be a grab the wheel moment,'” says Katherine Winter, a Delphi software engineer. That’s because being surrounded by metal plays hell on radar by making it difficult to discern what’s a threat and what isn’t. But Delphi’s refined how its software understands the radar data and uses the other sensors to augment it. “It actually outperformed what we thought it would do,” Winter says.

Building the car helped Delphi hone the hardware and software automakers will want and need as they begin producing autonomous vehicles, and test it in a variety of situations. That included rain, hot weather, construction zones, and tunnels. “It didn’t miss a lick,” Owens says.

The team celebrated the arrival in New York with high-fives, but Delphi’s not surprised by the accomplishment. It knew before setting out it could handle the miles. It just needed to show us it could.   

The six engineers who cycled through the driver’s seat only took control of the car when it encountered a situation they weren’t confident of handling safely, like a construction zone with zig-zagging lane lines, or to make an aggressive lane change to get around a cop car on the shoulder. They obeyed the speed limit and avoided night driving.

There’s no indication that it’s capable of handling the road with far more skill than a human. You’d have to look twice to spot the cameras and LIDaR around the car; the radars are hidden behind plastic body panels. Even the trunk looks ordinary, which is quite a feat—Delphi packed all the necessary computers in the spare tire compartment. That was intentional, Owens says. “We were kind of going for the remarkably unremarkable look.” The reason for this modesty is any tech Delphi pitches to automakers has to be unobtrusive and production-ready.

That is the ultimate goal here. This car won’t be in showrooms. But the stuff that makes it work certainly will be. Delphi makes all the stuff automakers don’t (or can’t) make themselves. The plan is to offer everything an automaker might need to make a fully autonomous car. It’s an off-the-shelf solution anyone can use.

“This drive is one more marker on the exciting road toward automated vehicles,” says Bryant Walker Smith, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and affiliate scholar at the Center for Internet and Society. He studies autonomous vehicles and says Delphi’s accomplishment raises public awareness “by previewing what will someday be possible.” That’s a good thing, as long as the conversation includes “what was required, what was hard, and what remains to be done.”

Delphi will take a few weeks to dissect and digest all the data it gathered and everything the engineers noticed, like the car’s skittishness around tractor trailers, and adjust the system as needed. Then it might be time for a trip through Europe, where Delphi does a lot of business and automakers are keen on both active safety and autonomous features. 

For now, though, the company is pleased with the progress it’s made, and it confident it will play a significant role in the coming shift to self-driving cars, Owens says. “Delphi can march at the same speed as Silicon Valley.”

Electric Propulsion Gives Cube-Sats Mobility in Space

As reported by MIT Technology Review: Natalya Brikner, CEO of the startup Accion Systems, holds an impossibly small spacecraft thruster in the palm of her hand. It looks more like a computer chip than a rocket—a gold-coated square of silicon the size of a dime.

Accion’s thruster has 480 barely visible nozzles etched into the surface of that silicon. It relies on a type of electronic propulsion that to date has only been used on a few space missions. An electric field is used to accelerate charged particles, normally using ions generated from a gas propellant, to create thrust.

Accion’s thruster has 480 barely visible nozzles etched into the surface of that silicon. It relies on a type of electronic propulsion that to date has only been used on a few space missions. An electric field is used to accelerate charged particles, normally using ions generated from a gas propellant, to create thrust.

Dozens of Accion’s thrusters can be packaged, along with a fuel tank, into a space propulsion system about the size of a deck of cards. Brikner says the technology, which will be launched into space on its first satellite in July, will make it practical to add propulsion to low-cost satellites that are as small as a tissue box, making them considerably more useful.

Microsatellites have largely been used for research, but commercial applications are gaining traction (see “Startup Plans Constellation of Tiny Monitoring Satellites”). The commercial potential of the technology was highlighted last year by Google’s $500 million acquisition of Skybox, whose small imaging satellites weigh 5 percent as much as conventional ones.

The capabilities of such satellites have been limited in part because they typically cannot maneuver themselves. Propulsion systems have proved difficult to shrink. Conventional thrusters tend to lose efficiency and power at small sizes, and they can double the size of a small satellite, making it too expensive to launch into space.

The systems normally used to ionize gases for electronic propulsion are also typically bulky. But Accion eliminated some of this bulk by using an ionic liquid (a salt that’s liquid at room temperature). “We don’t have to do any ionization in space; it’s done already on the ground,” Brikner says.

Adding propulsion to microsatellites could allow clusters of them to fly in formation, allowing them to mimic the performance of much larger and more expensive satellites for applications such as imaging. Propulsion could also help microsatellites maintain orbit instead of slowly deorbiting, allowing them to last up to 10 times longer.

Other companies, including Aerojet Rocketdyne and Busek, are also developing miniaturized thrusters for small satellites. “It’s a micro space race to see who will launch these things into space first,” says Paulo Lazano, director of MIT’s Space Propulsion Lab, where the basic technology behind Accion was developed.

Drive from Europe to the U.S.? Russia Proposes World's Greatest Superhighway

As reported by CNN: London to New York City by car?  It could happen if the head of Russian Railways has his way.

According to a March 23 report in The Siberian Times, Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin has proposed a plan for a massive trans-Siberian highway that would link his country's eastern border with the U.S. state of Alaska, crossing a narrow stretch of the Bering Sea that separates Asia and North America.

The scheme was unveiled at a meeting of the Moscow-based Russian Academy of Science.

Dubbed the Trans-Eurasian Belt Development (TEPR), the project calls for a major roadway to be constructed alongside the existing Trans-Siberian Railway, along with a new train network and oil and gas pipelines.

"This is an inter-state, inter-civilization, project," the Siberian Times quoted Yakunin. "The project should be turned into a world 'future zone,' and it must be based on leading, not catching, technologies."

"Are we there yet?"
The road would run across the entirety of Russia, linking with existing road systems in Western Europe and Asia.

The distance between Russia's western and eastern borders is roughly 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles).

Yakunin said the road would connect Russia with North America via Russia's far eastern Chukotka region, across the Bering Strait and into Alaska's Seward Peninsula.

The road would likely enter Alaska some distance north of the town of Nome, where the famed Iditarod sled dog race ends.

How would drivers span the ocean gap between Siberia and Alaska? Ferry? Tunnel? Bridges?

The report didn't offer specifics on the route across the sea.

The main route of the Trans-Siberian railway runs from Moscow
to Vladivostok and covers 9,258 kilometers.

The shortest distance between mainland Russia and mainland Alaska is approximately 88 kilometers (55 miles), according to the Alaska Public Lands Information Centers.

A theoretical drive (as fancifully calculated by CNN) from London to Alaska via Moscow might cover about 12,978 kilometers (8,064 miles).

Relatively isolated even by Alaska standards, no road connects Nome with the rest of the state's road system.

About 836 road-less kilometers (520 miles) across desolate terrain separates Nome from the closest major city and road network in Fairbanks, the unofficial northern terminus of the Alaska Highway.

From Fairbanks, Canada and the 48 contiguous U.S. states can be reached by road.

Assuming a road to Nome were ever built (the idea has been studied by the state of Alaska), a fantasy road trip from London to New York might cover a grueling but presumably photo-op-laden 20,777 kilometers (12,910 miles).

Facebook posts from forlorn Siberian rest stops might alone make the trip worthwhile, though the journey would also easily establish irritating new records for "Are we there yet?" gripes from the kids.

Who's gonna pay for this thing?

Yakunin has been described as a close friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Some sources have speculated that he could be Putin's likely successor as president.

TEPR would reportedly cost "trillions of dollars."

According to Yakunin, however, massive economic returns would more than make up for the massive cash outlay -- about which the report also included no details. 

Watch SpaceX Test its Amazing SuperDraco Rockets from a Few Feet Away

As reported by The Verge: The Space Shuttle was cool in action, but on paper it sounded like a particularly capacious way to get to work in the mornings. Spaceships should really have cooler names. Elon Musk's SpaceX understands this — the private company's newest Dragon craft is equipped with four SuperDraco pods, each with two engines that belch vast plumes of fire that could help the manned module separate in the case of emergency. Were it up to NASA, I bet they'd have called SpaceX's upcoming craft "the Big Flying Bus," or "Sky Subway."



It's those SuperDraco engines being tested in the video above. SpaceX captured its abort procedure in a Vine, showing both engines firing up with a movie-esque woomph, before flaring out in a puff of fire. NASA — which plans to use the SpaceX Dragon craft to ferry its astronauts into space from 2018 — says the successful performance of the engines will ensure the safety of the craft and the precious human cargo it contains.