Cosmic Log
The speediest team from SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s first Hyperloop pod competition has done it again: WARR Hyperloop from Germany’s Technical University of Munich won today’s second contest by sending its magnetic-levitation pod through a nearly mile-long test tunnel at a peak speed of 201 mph.
Musk announced WARR’s victory to a crowd in the stands at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., and on Twitter as well.
Teams from the University of Washington and more than 20 other universities and colleges around the world are converging on SpaceX’s Southern California headquarters this weekend for the company’s second Hyperloop pod competition.
Like many sequels, this contest could well be more intense than the original.
Hyperloop I, which was conducted in January, scored the contestants on multiple scales, including design and safety ratings. In contrast, the Hyperloop II competition on Aug. 27 will be judged solely on the basis of which team’s pod is the fastest.
This week’s total solar eclipse ranked among history’s most widely documented celestial events, thanks to streaming video and social media. NASA and its media partners announced today that 12.1 million unique viewers watched the spectacle via NASA.gov’s live stream, and millions more saw it by other means – including their own cameras and their own eyes.
Most of the pictures focused on the blacked-out sun and the delicate corona surrounding the disk, but there were lots of other perspectives on the first coast-to-coast, all-American total eclipse to take place in 99 years.
Bill Nye the Science Guy, a veteran of tussles over climate change and evolution, has just sparked a legal battle over math – specifically, the millions of dollars he says Disney and its associated ventures owes him from airings of his TV show for kids.
If Nye succeeds with his lawsuit, which was filed on Aug. 24 in Los Angeles Superior Court, Seattle’s public television station, KCTS-TV, could benefit as well. KCTS is named as one of the participants in a partnership that was allegedly short-changed.
Nye says Disney’s Buena Vista Television and other subsidiaries provided incorrect accountings of how much was made from distributing his Emmy-winning show, titled “Bill Nye the Science Guy.” He also says Disney misapplied the formulas laid out in its contract to determine how big a share Nye, KCTS and other partners should have received.
The 28-page filing first came to light in a report by the Deadline website.
SpaceX chalked up another successful satellite launch and booster landing today, putting Taiwan’s Formosat-5 Earth observation satellite into orbit in the process.
The company’s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 11:51 a.m. PT from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base at the opening of a 44-minute launch window.
Minutes later, the rocket’s second stage separated to send the 1,050-pound Formosat-5 satellite into a nearly pole-to-pole orbit for Taiwan’s National Space Organization.
The satellite, a successor to Formosat-2, is designed to send down high-resolution Earth imagery for five years. Formosat-5 also carries a plasma sensor that will monitor the effect of space weather on Earth’s ionosphere.
EVERETT, Wash. – House Speaker Paul Ryan came to a town hall with workers at Boeing’s biggest airplane factory today to talk about taxes, but he also had to address another T-word: Trump.
The moment came when a Boeing worker noted that her company put a high value on respect, transparency and ethical behavior.
“I don’t know that every person sees that from our president right now. So my question for you, Speaker Ryan, is: How do you see yourself personally influencing, and are you confident that you can influence the president?” she said.
“It’s a day-by-day deal,” the Wisconsin Republican said. “I’m kind of joking.”
Then he turned more serious, lambasting “repulsive bigotry and racism in this country.”
“We can never get normal with this,” Ryan said. “We must always, every single time, stand up and repudiate it and condemn it unequivocally, every time.”
While Amazon continues testing drone delivery systems for popcorn and other consumer goods, a startup called Zipline is expanding its fully operational medical drone delivery system from Rwanda to Tanzania to serve a desperate global health need.
Among the effort’s backers is the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Today Tanzanian health officials announced that they’ll launch what may well rank as the world’s largest drone delivery service in the first quarter of 2018.
When the system is up and running, fixed-wing drones will make up to 2,000 deliveries a day to more than 1,000 health facilities that serve 10 million people, according to a news release issued by California-based Zipline.
OceanGate says it’s completed assembly of the core pressure vessel for its Cyclops 2 submersible vehicle, which is due to take on the first crewed scientific expedition to the Titanic shipwreck in years.
The privately held company, based in Everett, Wash., said in a news release that it’s finished bonding two titanium rings to the ends of a 56-inch-wide, 100-inch-long carbon-fiber cylinder, thus forming the core of the pressure vessel.
Tony Nissen, OceanGate’s director of engineering, said bonding the rings to the cylinder marked a “major milestone” in the construction of Cyclops 2.
“The precision we achieved guarantees that we have a solid foundation to work with as we continue assembly of the sub,” he said.
Not everything turned out the way pre-teen sisters Rebecca and Kimberly Yeung expected when they sent their Loki Lego Launcher balloon platform into the shadow of a solar eclipse. But that in itself was a big lesson for the stratospheric science team from Seattle.
The Yeung family – including 12-year-old Rebecca and 10-year-old Kimberly as well as their parents, Winston and Jennifer Yeung – drove westward from the launch site in Wyoming after the Aug. 21 eclipse and were due back in Seattle late tonight.
“There are many lessons that we learned, and we are continuing to talk about them as we continue our long drive home (our car ride home always seems to be our mission debrief session),” the girls wrote today on their blog.
The total solar eclipse was a teachable moment for the Yeungs as well as other citizen scientists participating in the Eclipse Ballooning Project.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BYIPmEFAIIn/
The spacesuit designed to be worn aboard SpaceX’s Dragon capsule turns up the coolness dial for spaceflight, as befits a company that’s a corporate cousin of the Tesla electric-car venture.
“Was incredibly hard to balance esthetics and function,” Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of both companies, said today in a first-look Instagram post. “Easy to do either separately.”
Musk said the suit has already gone through rounds of pressure tests in a vacuum chamber. “Worth noting that this actually works (not a mockup),” he wrote.