Month: March 2021

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

"Ironic" probably isn't the right word to describe the lack of public information about Sergey Brin's airship company. Who better to know the worth of staying private than one of the co-creators of a search engine that changed the world, after all. But to those who know where to look—like eagle-eyed journalist Mark Hughes—some details about LTA's plans have made it out into the open. Hughes spotted a rather revealing job opening at the company for someone to manage a hydrogen fuel cell program.

The really interesting part of the job posting shows up in the list of primary responsibilities:

Engineering hydrogen fuel cell propulsion system through configuration of 1.5MW airship propulsion system including H2 storage, fuel cells, H2O capture, batteries, stern drive, and smaller electric motors and gear trains and retrofit of 750KW fuel cell system on existing airship

Yes, you read did that correctly, LTA is indeed looking to configure a 1.5 MW fuel cell system. For context, the hydrogen fuel cell that powers the Toyota Mirai was just bumped from 113 kW to 128 kW in November, making it a thousand times less powerful than the system sought by LTA. Even the 500 kW class-8 tractor-trailers that Toyota is testing as drayage trucks at the Ports of LA and Long Beach only use a pair of Mirai fuel cell systems to generate power, and the most-powerful hydrogen fuel cell that's taken to the air so far is a 250 kW fuel cell in the ZeroAvia ZA-600, a 20-seat plane with a range of 500 miles (800 km).

Enlarge / The launch of Flight Three of the Falcon 1 rocket looked promising at the beginning. (credit: Chris Thompson/SpaceX)

This is an excerpt from chapter eight of the book LIFTOFF: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by our own Eric Berger. The book will be published on March 2, 2021. In this excerpt, it is the summer of 2008, and SpaceX has attempted to launch the Falcon 1 rocket twice already, failing both times. As the company's engineers prepare for a third launch attempt from tiny Omelek Island in the Kwajalein Atoll, time and money are running out...

By the time of Flight Three, the SpaceXers had grown accustomed to their visits out to the central Pacific Kwajalein Atoll for launches. Over the course of three years, they learned how to survive in the tropical environment and even enjoy island life. Some of these lessons were hard won, however.

Fairly early on during the Kwaj experience, engineer Brian Bjelde missed the evening boat back to Kwajalein. It happened. He and a few others slept under the stars, passing a perfectly pleasant night. But the next morning, Bjelde lacked a change of clothes. So he grabbed a T-shirt from a package of Falcon 1 swag items that had shown up in Omelek. The vacuum-packed, white T-shirt may have been wrinkled, but at least it was clean, and it kept the sun off his back. Bjelde went through massive quantities of sunscreen every day—any piece of skin exposed to the tropical sun was covered. Throughout that day, as he slathered himself in it, Bjelde noticed the T-shirt’s wrinkles straightening beneath the island’s heat and humidity.

Enlarge / Miraculously, the video at issue did not accuse wind turbines of causing cancer. (credit: Pictures Alliance / Getty Images)

Our editor-in-chief obviously hates me. That's the only conclusion I could reach after he asked me to watch an abysmal attack video targeting renewable energy—a video produced by a notorious source of right-wing misinformation.

But despite its bizarre mishmash of irrelevancies and misdirection, the video has been widely shared on social media. Perhaps you've seen it, or maybe you just to want to be ready when a family member brings it up in an argument. What, if anything, is true in this farrago of bad faith?

Yes, it’s awful

The video is hosted by "Prager University." My only previous exposure to the organization's videos had been this excellent one on the Confederacy by Colonel Ty Seidule, a professor of History at West Point who has since been placed on the Pentagon commission that will examine bases named after Confederate generals. Seemed legit!