Circa 2018
Lockheed Martin has won a nearly quarter-billion dollar NASA contract to develop a plane capable of supersonic speed without creating the deafening sonic boom that comes with breaking the sound barrier.
The cost-plus NASA contract, valued at $247.5 million, will allow the defense contractor’s secretive Skunk Works division to continue development of Lockheed Martin’s Quiet Supersonic Technology (or QueSST) aircraft. This is “NASA’s first X-plane in a generation,” a Lockheed Martin spokesperson told CNBC on Tuesday.
“We look forward to applying the extensive work completed under QueSST to the design, build and flight test of the X-plane, providing NASA with a demonstrator to make supersonic commercial travel possible for passengers around the globe,” program manager Peter Iosifidis said in a statement.
An all-Princeton research team has identified bacteria that can detect the speed of flowing fluids.
Many kinds of cells can sense flow, just as our skin cells can feel the difference between a gentle breeze and a strong wind. But we depend on feeling the force involved, the push-back from the air against us. Without that push, we can’t distinguish speed; when the windows are closed, our skin can’t feel any difference in air force whether we are sitting in an office, a speeding car or a cruising airplane. But now, a team of Princeton researchers has now discovered that some bacteria can in fact detect the speed of flow regardless of the force. Their paper appears in the online journal Nature Microbiology.
“We have engineered bacteria to be speedometers,” said Zemer Gitai, Princeton’s Edwin Grant Conklin Professor of Biology and the senior author on the paper. “There’s an application here: We can actually use these bacteria as flow sensors. If you wanted to know the speed of something in real time, we can tell you.”
To clean up the aviation industry, NASA-funded scientists are working to develop an all-electric aircraft powered by cryogenically-liquified hydrogen fuel.
The University of Illinois scientists behind the project nailed down $6 million over three years from NASA to develop the tech, according to a university-published press release — tech that could, if the project pans out, revolutionize the aviation industry.
It may not be the Millennium Falcon, but United Airlines plans to a debut a plane with a Star Wars look this fall.
During Star Wars Celebration in Chicago, United Airlines announced it will introduce special Star Wars-themed airplane to its fleet to promote the release of The Rise of Skywalker, the latest Star Wars movie.
The Star Wars livery will be on one of United’s Boeing 737–800 planes, according to the company. Along with the Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker logo, other artwork on the plane includes imagery of Star Wars vehicles such as a TIE fighter and an X-Wing.
Robotics ground controllers in NASA’s Mission Control Center at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston successfully replaced a failed Main Bus Switching Unit (MBSU) on the International Space Station with a spare using robotic operations on Thursday, May 2. The operation to replace the failed unit was conducted using the station’s Canadarm2 and Dextre, both part of Canada’s contribution to the International Space Station.
Using complex robotic work to perform critical maintenance allows astronauts to spend more time working on scientific experiments and helps develop better technologies and procedures for future human and robotic exploration beyond low-Earth orbit.
“Developing new robotic systems is extremely important to get our astronauts back to the Moon by 2024,” Robotics Operations Systems Officer Mike Ferullo said. “The techniques and methods that we are developing with Dextre and Canadarm2 are directly applicable to future missions, and the construction and repair of any Moon-based mission will be done with robotics wherever possible. It’s an extremely exciting time to be involved in space robotics.
This box could make your car autonomous for just $1,000. (from 2016)
Comma.ai’s system will add Autopilot-like abilities to many standard vehicles.
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The car is lower to the ground, with large, narrow wheels closer to the front and back ends of the car, all of which are expected to improve the car’s range, per The Guardian.
Dyson CEO and namesake James Dyson sent an email out to all the staff members urging secrecy around the project, but defended the decision to file these new patents, writing that the car would “include fundamentally new technologies and make some inventive leaps,” according to the Guardian.