When it Comes to a Moon Base, the FAA says it Takes a Global Village

As reported by Space News: A Federal Aviation Administration advisory committee has recommended that the FAA start discussions with the European Space Agency about commercial participation in an international lunar base concept promoted by the agency’s leader.

The FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) unanimously approved a recommendation that the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation begin discussions with ESA on ways American companies could participate in what’s known as “Moon Village.” The vote was conducted by email after COMSTAC held a meeting via teleconference on the topic Dec. 10, committee chairman Mike Gold said Dec. 15.

The recommendation states that the FAA, “after consulting with the appropriate U.S. agencies, engage directly with ESA in support of the ‘Moon Village’ concept, with the goal of fostering the participation of U.S.-based commercial entities in the planning and creation of the ‘Moon Village.’”

The Moon Village concept is a proposal by ESA Director-General Johann-Dietrich Woerner, and is something he has discussed prior to become the head of the agency in July. It would involve the development of an international lunar base, with countries providing different elements or services to support it.

Woerner, who participated in the COMSTAC teleconference, said he was open to participation by companies as well as countries. “We are putting together different users, different competencies, be it private or public,” he said. Companies in both the U.S. and Europe have already contacted him about ways they can take part, including using the base for tourism and mining.

FAA officials have already expressed an interest in supporting a commercial role in the concept. “Private industry has the potential to play an important role, and it need not be exclusively as a government contractor,” said George Nield, FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation at an October COMSTAC meeting here.

COMSTAC members expressed support for a private-sector role in such a concept, even if some were skeptical that it could be commercially viable. “It might be hard in the near term to think of a profit-making venture that can work on the moon such that it would be in the time horizon of a rational investor,” said Mike Griffin, the chairman and chief executive of Schafer Corporation and a former NASA administrator. However, he said, commercial ventures could support a government-led facility there by transporting cargo.

The Moon Village concept is, for now, just that: a concept without a specific technical design, budget or schedule. “It’s an open situation,” Woerner said at a Space Transportation Association luncheon here Dec. 10. “It depends totally on what the different entities would like to provide and at what time.”

Woerner reiterated that at the later COMSTAC teleconference. “There are people trying to convince me already about the architecture” of the facility, he said. “For me, the more important thing is that we together decide on a global, international scheme.”

California Drafts Road Rules for Autonomous Cars, Upsets Google

As reported by Gizmag: To many, the concept of self-driving cars will still seem absurd. In California, however, they are very real. Not only has testing been allowed on its public roads since last year, but the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has now drafted regulations for the public use of autonomous cars.  

California issued its first permit for testing an autonomous vehicle on its public roads to Audi in last September. Only this week we reported on its most recent license for testing, awarded to Ford. Now, though, the DMV is looking to set down what will be required in order for members of the public to operate autonomous cars as a matter of course.

The DMV says the "draft regulations are intended to promote the continued development of autonomous vehicle technology in California, while transitioning manufacturers from testing to deployment of self-driving cars." Among the issues that the regulations seek to address are vehicle safety, certification, operator responsibilities, licensing and registration, privacy, and cyber-security

The regulations will not simply be dictated from on high, however, but will be publicly consulted on first. Workshops will be carried out to gather input from industry, consumer and public interest groups, academics and the public.

"The primary focus of the deployment regulations is the safety of autonomous vehicles and the safety of the public who will share the road with these vehicles," says DMV director Jean Shiomoto. "We want to get public input on these draft regulations before we initiate the formal regulatory rule making process."

Key points

The DMV has outlined four key facets of the regulations. Firstly, manufacturers must certify that their autonomous cars comply with safety and performance standards and must allow the vehicles to undergo an independent performance verification carried out by a third-party.

If approved, manufacturers will be awarded three-year provisional permits. As part of the licensing, they will be required to report regularly on the performance, safety and usage of their vehicles. The provisional permits are described as a "first step towards the full deployment of autonomous vehicles in California," and the data collected will be used to inform subsequent regulations by the DMV.

With regards to privacy and cyber-security, not only must manufacturers let the DMV know if any information is to be collected other than that required to safely operate their autonomous cars, they must also seek permission to collect the additional information. The vehicles must also be able to detect and respond to cyber-attacks or other unauthorized intrusions, alert the operator and allow for an operator override.

Finally, a licensed driver, or "operator," must be in the vehicle when it is in use and able to take control of it in the event of a problem. Cars designed to be completely driverless, like that being tested by Google, are to be initially excluded from being granted licenses until their safety and performance can be further evaluated and the regulations revised accordingly.

Google "disappointed"

As you would expect, this final point appears not to have gone down well with Google. The New York Times reports that Google spokeswoman Courtney Hohne wrote in an emailed statement: "Safety is our highest priority and primary motivator as we do this. We're gravely disappointed that California is already writing a ceiling on the potential for fully self-driving cars to help all of us who live here."

Google will no doubt take the opportunity to make its opinions known during the consultation period and the regulations may yet be altered before they are set in stone. Even then, of course, there may be opportunities for the regulations to be revised to allow for the roll-out of fully driverless autonomous cars on California's roads. If not, Google may have to consider keeping the steering wheel and controls with which it's been testing its cars for an initial public roll-out.

Two public workshops addressing the draft regulations will take place at California State University in Sacramento on Jan. 28 and at the Junipero Serra Building in LA on Feb. 2.

The full text of the draft regulations can be found on the California DMV website.

The First Person to Hack the iPhone Built a Self-Driving Car. In His Garage.

As reported by The Verge: Bloomberg Business has a profile this week of George Hotz — better known to some as "Geohot," a pioneer in the early iPhone jailbreaking scene that let owners put custom apps on their devices for the first time. Now, he's got a very different hobby: making an autonomous car based on an ordinary Acura ILX sedan. It seems to actually work, sort of, which is especially incredible considering that he's working on it alone and he just started on the project in October.

Hotz, a prodigy who has spent years bouncing between high-tech jobs that he hasn't found intellectually satisfying, is going it alone with a company he calls comma.ai. His goal is to take down Mobileye, a supplier of driving assistance systems that helps power Tesla's Autopilot system, among others in the auto industry. Intriguingly, Bloombergreports that Hotz's work has caught the attention of Elon Musk himself, who had offered him a job working on homegrown Autopilot software — "I'm happy to work out a multimillion-dollar bonus with a longer time horizon that pays out as soon as we discontinue Mobileye," Musk is said to have emailed — but Hotz declined, citing Musk's ever-changing deal terms.

HE TURNED DOWN A JOB AT TESLA WITH A "MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR" BONUS

Hotz says his system is substantially different from those on the market today, because he doesn't rely on preprogrammed rules about driving; everything his system knows is through artificially intelligent deep learning that it gathered by "watching" Hotz drive. (He says he'll be driving Uber for a few months to train the system rapidly.) The problem may be that an optimal self-driving car doesn't always behave like a human driver — humans make mistakes, and many of us simply aren't very good drivers in the first place — but perhaps substantial learning from a wide set of drivers would even it out over time.

There's no immediate plans for commercialization; Hotz just started working on this a few weeks ago, after all, and the interior of the ILX looks like a mess of computers, modules, and wires. But longer term, he'd like to sell his system to automakers or as a kit directly to consumers for about $1,000 (California-based Cruise is trying to do something similar). In a few months, he plans to film a video of his system "outperforming" a Model S in Autopilot mode across the Golden Gate Bridge, which Tesla's system apparently struggles with due to poor lane markings. After that, perhaps Musk — or any one of the dozens of other companies going full-bore on autonomous tech — will make him an offer he can't refuse.

Hyundai Fuel Cell Vehicles Testing Autonomous Driving Features in the US

As reported by GizMag: After receiving the all clear from the state of Nevada, Hyundai has commenced testing a pair of fully autonomous Tucson Fuel Cell vehicles on the state's public roads. The program is aimed at gauging the cars' performance in real-world conditions and fast-tracking the Korean automaker's autonomous driving technologies.  

Tae-Won Lim, Vice President, Central Advanced Research and
Engineering Institute of Hyundai Motor Group
with Deputy Administrator of Nevada Department
of Motor Vehicles, Robin Allender in front of a fully autonomous
Tucson FCV

Although this is the first test of a fully-autonomous Fuel Cell vehicle on public roads in the US, but Hyundai has been testing the capabilities of its autonomous Tucson Fuel Cell in Korea since November 2014. In that time it has covered more than 10,000 mi (16,100 km) of highways, city streets and private test tracks to assess how the car handles traffic signals, signs, pedestrians, cyclists and other hazards.  

Equipped with an around view monitor, GPS, blind spot radar, cruise control radar, ultrasonic sensor and LIDAR, the self-driving Tucson Fuel Cell boasts four main autonomous features. These include the ability to drive autonomously on controlled roads, track the vehicle in front amongst moderate to high traffic at up to 37 mph (60 km/h), pull over to the side of the road in case of emergency and autonomously guide itself through narrow roads.  

"A great deal of research and rigorous product testing will need to be undertaken in order to make the 'self-driving car' a reality," says Tae-Won Lim, Vice President, Central Advanced Research and Engineering Institute of Hyundai Motor Group. "Thanks to this license we will be able to accelerate the testing of our latest autonomous technologies. We are confident that our latest innovations, both for partially- and fully-autonomous driving, will ultimately make driving safer for all road users."

Hydrogen Could Solve Drones’ Flight Time Issues

As reported by SlashGear: Intelligent Energy has introduced a new hydrogen fuel cell prototype for drones that tackles one of UAVs' biggest problems: flight time. Presently, quadcopters and similar drones have flight times counted by minutes due to the limitations of batteries and weight. The prototype, which will be showcased at CES 2016 in a few weeks, extends drones’ range by providing longer flights times and making it a quick ordeal to refuel (compared to battery charging, that is).

This hydrogen prototype is described as “ultra lightweight,” and it works in conjunction with a battery to extend a drone’s flight range up to several hours. When the fuel cell runs low, the refueling process takes about two minutes, whereas recharging a battery takes an hour or longer, excluding select fast charging technology.



The company cites commercial drone usage possibilities that expand with such range boosts; though drones themselves could be — and are — used for many things, they can’t travel too far from home and can’t stay in the sky too long. Uses include aerial photography, delivering items to remote locations, more precise agriculture, inspections, and more.  

Intelligent Energy says it has tested both fuel cell-battery hybrid systems and sole fuel cell systems with drones over the last 14 months; in the case of aerial photography, the systems didn’t result in unsteady imagery. Said Julian Hughes, a director with the company, “Given we also have the ability to tailor solutions to customer requirements, this could completely revolutionize the potential of drone technology.”

US Drone Operators Must Register with the FAA by February 2016

As reported by Engadget: If you fly a drone, the Department of Transportation's Federal Aviation Administration wants to know about it. The FAA's online drone-registration program goes live on December 21st, and anyone who's ever operated an aircraft between the weights of .55 pounds and 55 pounds needs to sign on before February 19th. There will typically be a $5 fee for each registration, but the FAA is making it free for the first month, through January 20th. 

"We expect hundreds of thousands of model unmanned aircraft will be purchased this holiday season," FAA administrator Michael Huerta says in a press release. "Registration gives us the opportunity to educate these new airspace users before they fly so they know the airspace rules and understand they are accountable to the public for flying responsibly."

Registration requires the operator's name, home address and email address, and it's valid for three years. The process results in a certificate that includes a unique identification number, which must be noted on the drone itself. If you don't register a drone, you risk civil penalties of up to $27,500, or criminal penalties of up to $250,000 and/or three years imprisonment.

The new online-registration rules apply to hobbyist or recreational drone operators only, for now. The FAA plans to roll out online registration for a wider range of drone operators, including commercial uses, by spring 2016. For now, business-centric drone operators have to register using the paper-based process, the FAA says.

Germany Fires Up Bizarre New Fusion Reactor

As reported by Science Mag: On 10 December, Germany’s new Wendelstein 7-X stellarator was fired up for the first time, rounding off a construction effort that took nearly 2 decades and cost €1 billion. Initially and for the first couple of months, the reactor will be filled with helium—an unreactive gas—so that operators can make sure that they can control and heat the gas effectively. 

BBC UPDATE: The nuclear fusion experiment has produced helium plasma - a cloud of loose, charged particles - lasting just a tenth of a second and was about one million degrees Celsius.  The stellarator's plasma was created on Thursday using a microwave laser, and just 10mg of helium.

At the end of January, experiments will begin with hydrogen in an effort to show that fusing hydrogen isotopes can be a viable source of clean and virtually limitless energy. Here's a feature we ran on the machine earlier this year:

If you’ve heard of fusion energy, you’ve probably heard of tokamaks. These doughnut-shaped devices are meant to cage ionized gases called plasmas in magnetic fields while heating them to the outlandish temperatures needed for hydrogen nuclei to fuse. Tokamaks are the workhorses of fusion—solid, symmetrical, and relatively straightforward to engineer—but progress with them has been plodding.

Now, tokamaks’ rebellious cousin is stepping out of the shadows. In a gleaming research lab in Germany’s northeastern corner, researchers are preparing to switch on a fusion device called a stellarator, the largest ever built. The €1 billion machine, known as Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X), appears now as a 16-meter-wide ring of gleaming metal bristling with devices of all shapes and sizes, innumerable cables trailing off to unknown destinations, and technicians tinkering with it here and there. It looks a bit like Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon, towed in for repairs after a run-in with the Imperial fleet. Inside are 50 6-tonne magnet coils, strangely twisted as if trampled by an angry giant.

Although stellarators are similar in principle to tokamaks, they have long been dark horses in fusion energy research because tokamaks are better at keeping gas trapped and holding on to the heat needed to keep reactions ticking along. But the Dali-esque devices have many attributes that could make them much better prospects for a commercial fusion power plant: Once started, stellarators naturally purr along in a steady state, and they don’t spawn the potentially metal-bending magnetic disruptions that plague tokamaks. Unfortunately, they are devilishly hard to build, making them perhaps even more prone to cost overruns and delays than other fusion projects. “No one imagined what it means” to build one, says Thomas Klinger, leader of the German effort.

W7-X could mark a turning point. The machine, housed at a branch of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) that Klinger directs, is awaiting regulatory approval for a startup in November. It is the first large-scale example of a new breed of supercomputer-designed stellarators that have had most of their containment problems computed out. If W7-X matches or beats the performance of a similarly sized tokamak, fusion researchers may have to reassess the future course of their field. “Tokamak people are waiting to see what happens. There’s an excitement around the world about W7-X,” says engineer David Anderson of the University of Wisconsin (UW), Madison.

Adapted from IPP by C. Bickel and A. Cuadra/Science

Wendelstein 7-X, the first large-scale optimized stellarator, took 1.1 million working hours to assemble, using one of the most complex engineering models ever devised, and must withstand huge temperature ranges and enormous forces.

Stellarators face the same challenge as all fusion devices: They must heat and hold on to a gas at more than 100 million degrees Celsius—seven times the temperature of the sun’s core. Such heat strips electrons from atoms, leaving a plasma of electrons and ions, and it makes the ions travel fast enough to overcome their mutual repulsion and fuse. But it also makes the gas impossible to contain in a normal vessel.

Instead, it is held in a magnetic cage. A current-carrying wire wound around a tube creates a straight magnetic field down the center of the tube that draws the plasma away from the walls. To keep particles from escaping at the ends, many early fusion researchers bent the tube into a doughnut-shaped ring, or torus, creating an endless track.

But the torus shape creates another problem: Because the windings of the wire are closer together inside the hole of the doughnut, the magnetic field is stronger there and weaker toward the doughnut’s outer rim. The imbalance causes particles to drift off course and hit the wall. The solution is to add a twist that forces particles through regions of high and low magnetic fields, so the effects of the two cancel each other out.

Stellarators impose the twist from outside. The first stellarator, invented by astro-physicist Lyman Spitzer at Princeton University in 1951, did it by bending the tube into a figure-eight shape. But the lab he set up—the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in New Jersey—switched to a simpler method for later stellarators: winding more coils of wire around a conventional torus tube like stripes on a candy cane to create a twisting magnetic field inside.

In a tokamak, a design invented in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, the twist comes from within. Tokamaks use a setup like an electrical transformer to induce the electrons and ions to flow around the tube as an electric current. This current produces a vertical looping magnetic field that, when added to the field already running the length of the tube, creates the required spiraling field lines.

Both methods work, but the tokamak is better at holding on to a plasma. In part that’s because a tokamak’s symmetry gives particles smoother paths to follow. In stellarators, Anderson says, “particles see lots of ripples and wiggles” that cause many of them to be lost. As a result, most fusion research since the 1970s has focused on tokamaks—culminating in the huge ITER reactor project in France, a €16 billion international effort to build a tokamak that produces more energy than it consumes, paving the way for commercial power reactors.

But tokamaks have serious drawbacks. A transformer can drive a current in the plasma only in short pulses that would not suit a commercial fusion reactor. Current in the plasma can also falter unexpectedly, resulting in “disruptions”: sudden losses of plasma confinement that can unleash magnetic forces powerful enough to damage the reactor. Such problems plague even up-and-coming designs such as the spherical tokamak (Science, 22 May, p. 854).

Stellarators, however, are immune. Their fields come entirely from external coils, which don’t need to be pulsed, and there is no plasma current to suffer disruptions. Those two factors have kept some teams pursuing the concept.

The largest working stellarator is the Large Helical Device (LHD) in Toki, Japan, which began operating in 1998. Lyman Spitzer would recognize the design, a variation on the classic stellarator with two helical coils to twist the plasma and other coils to add further control. The LHD holds all major records for stellarator performance, shows good steady-state operation, and is approaching the performance of a similarly sized tokamak.

Two researchers—IPP’s Jürgen Nührenberg and Allen Boozer of PPPL (now at Columbia University)—calculated that they could do better with a different design that would confine plasma with a magnetic field of constant strength but changing direction. Such a “quasi-symmetric” field wouldn’t be a perfect particle trap, says IPP theorist Per Helander, “but you can get arbitrarily close and get losses to a satisfactory level.” In principle, it could make a stellarator perform as well as a tokamak.

The design strategy, known as optimization, involves defining the shape of magnetic field that best confines the plasma, then designing a set of magnets to produce the field. That takes considerable computing power, and supercomputers weren’t up to the job until the 1980s.

The first attempt at a partially optimized stellarator, dubbed Wendelstein 7-AS, was built at the IPP branch in Garching near Munich and operated between 1988 and 2002. It broke all stellarator records for machines of its size. Researchers at UW Madison set out to build the first fully optimized device in 1993. The result, a small machine called the Helically Symmetric Experiment (HSX), began operating in 1999. “W7-AS and HSX showed the idea works,” says David Gates, head of stellarator physics at PPPL.

That success gave U.S. researchers confidence to try something bigger. PPPL began building the National Compact Stellarator Experiment (NCSX) in 2004 using an optimization strategy different from IPP’s. But the difficulty of assembling the intricately shaped parts with millimeter accuracy led to cost hikes and schedule slips. In 2008, with 80% of the major components either built or purchased, the Department of Energy pulled the plug on the project (Science, 30 May 2008, p. 1142). “We flat out underestimated the cost and the schedule,” says PPPL’s George “Hutch” Neilson, manager of NCSX.

IPP/Wolfgang Filser

Wendelstein 7-X’s bizarrely shaped components must be put together with millimeter precision. All welding was computer controlled and monitored with laser scanners.

BACK IN GERMANY, the project to build W7-X was well underway. The government of the recently reunified country had given the green light in 1993 and 1994 and decided to establish a new branch institute at Greifswald, in former East Germany, to build the machine. Fifty staff members from IPP moved from Garching to Greifswald, 800 kilometers away, and others made frequent trips between the sites, says Klinger, director of the Greifswald branch. New hires brought staff numbers up to today’s 400. W7-X was scheduled to start up in 2006 at a cost of €550 million.

But just like the ill-fated American NCSX, W7-X soon ran into problems. The machine has 425 tonnes of superconducting magnets and support structure that must be chilled close to absolute zero. Cooling the magnets with liquid helium is “hell on Earth,” Klinger says. “All cold components must work, leaks are not possible, and access is poor” because of the twisted magnets. Among the weirdly shaped magnets, engineers must squeeze more than 250 ports to supply and remove fuel, heat the plasma, and give access for diagnostic instruments. Everything needs extremely complex 3D modeling. “It can only be done on computer,” Klinger says. “You can’t adapt anything on site.”

By 2003, W7-X was in trouble. About a third of the magnets produced by industry failed in tests and had to be sent back. The forces acting on the reactor structure turned out to be greater than the team had calculated. “It would have broken apart,” Klinger says. So construction of some major components had to be halted for redesigning. One magnet supplier went bankrupt. The years 2003 to 2007 were a “crisis time,” Klinger says, and the project was “close to cancellation.” But civil servants in the research ministry fought hard for the project; finally, the minister allowed it to go ahead with a cost ceiling of €1.06 billion and first plasma scheduled for 2015.

After 1.1 million construction hours, the Greifswald institute finished the machine in May 2014 and spent the past year carrying out commissioning checks, which W7-X passed without a hitch. Tests with electron beams show that the magnetic field in the still-empty reactor is the right shape. “Everything looks, to an extremely high accuracy, exactly as it should,” IPP’s Thomas Sunn Pedersen says.

Approval to go ahead is expected from Germany’s nuclear regulators by the end of this month. The real test will come once W7-X is full of plasma and researchers finally see how it holds on to heat. The key measure is energy confinement time, the rate at which the plasma loses energy to the environment. “The world’s waiting to see if we get the confinement time and then hold it for a long pulse,” PPPL’s Gates says.

Success could mean a course change for fusion. The next step after ITER is a yet-to-be-designed prototype power plant called DEMO. Most experts have assumed it would be some sort of tokamak, but now some are starting to speculate about a stellarator. “People are already talking about it,” Gates says. “It depends how good the results are. If the results are positive, there’ll be a lot of excitement.”