Month: March 2018

When we met up with former astronaut Scott Kelly last month, we didn't waste all of our time playing Kerbal Space Program. Kelly is most famous—as I'm sure pretty much everyone has heard at this point—for spending more than a year in orbit aboard the International Space Station. So we had a great idea: why not trick him aboard a rocket, maroon him on the station again, and then force him to give us an awesome tour of the joint?

But while we were elbows-deep into working out the logistics of acquiring a rocket with a crew capsule and then tricking Scott Kelly onto it (possibly using a giant bear trap and the astronaut equivalent of a "free bird seed" sign), we had an even better idea: why not skip the rocket and the kidnapping and instead fake it with visual effects? It would certainly help keep the production budget under control, and we figured it would probably be safer, too.

Kelly was game, and so after our Kerbal shenanigans, we got the astronaut situated in our jury-rigged space simulation chamber and, with a little movie magic, instantly transported him back to the tiny, cramped world in which he'd been confined for a full year of his life. Fortunately, astronauts are made of pretty stern stuff because instead of moaning "oh no not again" or cowering under a table, Kelly launched into a detailed, informative, room-by-room, module-by-module description of the most expensive and exclusive chunk of real estate in existence. From the Russian section to the US section, from Zvezda to PMA2, we invite you to sit back and watch as Kelly describes the sights, sounds, and smells (yes, the ISS does have some of its own odors) of the world's highest-flying laboratory.

GKN

The engineering company GKN might not be instantly recognizable, but it has been a leader in the world of four- and all-wheel drive for decades. In recent years, it has been working as much with electric motors as mechanical systems, and it has just revealed its latest work, which it calls All Twinster. It's an all-wheel drive system designed for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and GKN says it's the first such system to be capable of all-wheel torque-vectoring.

To create the GKN Technology Demonstrator 18, the company started with a Mercedes-AMG GLA, then ditched the front power-transfer unit, prop shaft, and rear axle. Up front, the GLA kept its gearbox, but it now uses GKN's Twinster torque-vectoring system in place of the existing final drive and differential.

Barron Trump appears with his parents, President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump, at the 2017 Easter Egg Roll. (credit: Whitehouse.gov / Joyce N. Boghosian)

Last week, President Donald Trump tried to shift some of the blame for recent school shootings on video games and other entertainment, saying that "something has to be done" because "the level of violence on video games is shaping more and more people's thoughts." Trump expanded on those thoughts in a discussion with a bipartisan group of lawmakers Wednesday, bringing his own young son's experience with violent media into the debate.

"The video games, movies, the Internet stuff is so violent," Trump said during the livestreamed meeting with lawmakers, in response to parental concerns passed on by Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn (relevant section begins at 1:12:20). "It's so incredible. I get to see things that you wouldn't be—you would be amazed at. I have a very young son who I look at some of the things he's watching and I say, 'How is that possible?'"

How that's possible in the Trumps' case, of course, is that President Trump allows his "very young son" to watch and play these violent "things." Trump didn't make any mention of any media diet restrictions he put in place after seeing those "incredible" violent images his 11-year-old son Barron is watching, suggesting he's not personally worried Barron will be one of the "more and more people" whose thoughts he says can be "shaped" by such media.

Enlarge / If we ever want to land on places like the Chasma Boreale on Mars, we're going to need advanced technologies. (credit: NASA)

Even though Congress has yet to formally consider President Trump’s new budget for NASA, the space agency is already moving swiftly to implement some of its core principles. Among those is a White House desire to end a separate program within the agency focused on the development of advanced new spaceflight technologies intended to keep NASA at the cutting edge.

With an annual budget that has varied between $500 million and $1 billion, the Space Technology Mission Directorate was created in 2010 to develop the kinds of technology NASA needed to explore deeper into space, such as advanced propulsion and power systems, in-space manufacturing, and new means of landing on far-off worlds. If humans really were to really expand beyond low-Earth orbit, research and development of these new technologies was deemed critical.

The President’s fiscal year 2019 budget for the space agency seeks to realign the space technology program by folding it into NASA’s “Exploration” program, which is managing development of deep space hardware Congress has directed the space agency to build—the Space Launch System rocket, Orion spacecraft, and ground systems at Kennedy Space Center.