Technology – Page 8 – Outrun Change

Cool stuff on the open frontier of technology

A few fun things I’ve seen lately. Amazon opens its 7th fulfillment center in California. Animated short that is close to photo quality. GIF showing how applications have displace everything on a circa 1990 work station.

3/15 – Behind the Black – Check out this animated video. Consider the question raised by Behind the Black – with this quality of animation, how soon until human actors aren’t needed because an apparently live action movie can be 100% animated?

[youtube=https://youtu.be/nPrWo5pEvyk]

3/30 – DailyBulletin (Inland Empire area of LA) – New Amazon fulfillment center coming to San Bernardino, to add 1,000-plus jobs – This will be the seventh facility in California. San Bernardino is about 60 miles east of downtown LA. Amazon locations in the state: Continue reading “Cool stuff on the open frontier of technology”

Open frontier of drone technology

Developments in the drone world are amazing. A few articles recently that caught my eye.

2/9 – Behind the Black – Oregon as seen by a drone – Watch the eye-popping video produced by a drone. No helicopter could produce those views. This is a foretaste of what drones will do:

[youtube=https://youtu.be/-STzCakG7VQ?t=24]

2/1 – Popular Mechanics – Dutch Police Are Teaching Eagles How to Capture Renegade Drones –

Continue reading “Open frontier of drone technology”

Update on the government players in the wide open frontier of space exploration

Cutting edge tech from 1981, above, will update the Saturn V for the new Space Launch System from NASA. Photo courtesy of DollarPhotoClub.com — Cutting edge tech from 1981, above, will update the Saturn V (cutting edge in 1960s) for the new Space Launch System from NASA. Photo courtesy of DollarPhotoClub.com

The subsidized, politicized government players in the space race are still in the game. A few articles of interest: the directly subsidized ULA approach, the hidden subsidies in the European approach, NASA’s rolling forward the cutting edge Saturn V technology, and China expanding GPS coverage from their country to worldwide.

1/28 – Behind the Black – McCain and Air Force question ULA military arrangement – ULA receives a payment even if there aren’t any launches in a year. This is to give ULA sufficient funds to keep a critical national defense resource open.

I vaguely remember reading that during the Cold War, big defense contracts would be given to one of the major contractors merely because they didn’t have enough work to keep all their production lines open.

While those approaches made sense 10 or 30 years ago, the concept doesn’t work quite so well when there are multiple private companies developing their own launch vehicles and manned capsules.

Continue reading “Update on the government players in the wide open frontier of space exploration”

China is a competitor in the open frontier of space exploration

Previously mentioned a lot of players are involved with cutting edge efforts for space exploration. Russia is still a player. So is China. Here are a few articles on the Chinese efforts:

1/11 – Behind the Black – China has big plans in space in 2016 – Summary of the following article. Recap says China has the goal of launching a new space station in 2016 and put staff on it along with initial launch of two new rockets.

1/11 – Parabolic Arc – China Plans Space Station & New Booster Launches in 2016 – Article gives a few more details on China’s plans for spaceflight in 2016: Continue reading “China is a competitor in the open frontier of space exploration”

More illustrations of disruption from technology

While tech innovations have opened up new frontiers, innovation is disrupting some fields. Here are a few articles making this point that I’ve accumulated recently: newspaper circulation continues to collapse, higher ed is increasingly vulnerable to disruptions, and accreditation agencies (which illustrate regulatory capture) show why disruption is needed.

1/20 – Richard Tofel at Medium – The sky is falling on print newspapers faster than you think – Author pulled together circulation numbers from March 2013 and September 2015 for the 25 largest newspapers in the country.

Guess what? Circulation is collapsing.

Here are just a few of the numbers he accumulated: Continue reading “More illustrations of disruption from technology”

More news on military drone operations

A few articles on military drone operations.

12/27 – Wall Street Journal – Air Force Looks Beyond Officers to Boost Drone-Pilot Ranks – USAF is moving towards having enlisted troops fly drones. To this point rated pilots had to be at the controls. The increased demands for joint operations combined with staffing limits along with the dreariness of the work has created a shortage of qualified pilots. To fill a gap, USAF may use enlisted pilots.

Continue reading “More news on military drone operations”

Blue Origin launches and recovers a previously used booster rocket

New Shepard booster above was launched a second time and recovered a second time. Photo courtesy of Blue Origin. Used with permission.

Fun news on one space competitor competing and one non-competitor lollygagging.

1/23 – Instapundit and Behind the Black – Blue Origin reflies and lands New Shepard again – Blue Origin successfully recovered a booster last November. They have now successfully relaunched the booster and again recovered it.

A reused booster. Extremely cool.

As BtB says, the competition heats up…

Check out the video, Launch. Land. Repeat. January 22, 2016:

[youtube=https://youtu.be/74tyedGkoUc]

(Video courtesy of Blue Origin.)

In the opening frame of the video above, it is noticeable to me that it landed something in the range of 10 or 15 feet from dead center.

Continue reading “Blue Origin launches and recovers a previously used booster rocket”

With all the radical technology changes over the last few decades, have the essentials remained the same?

Unless you have gunpowder and a delivery system for it, I suggest you not mess with this guy and his buddies. Image courtesy of DollarPhotoClub.com — Unless you have lots of gunpowder or thousands of buddies , I suggest you not mess with this guy and his 6,000 buddies. Image courtesy of DollarPhotoClub.com

My friend John Bredehoft provides a different perspective on technology change. On 1/22 at his blog tymshft, he asked Do the essentials change?

He discusses a podcast comparing life today to about 35 years ago. For perspective, that puts us in 1981, or the range of the first year of the Reagan administration.

One of many points I draw from the discussion is related to Jon’s last comment:

But the speed of the processing chip in my smartphone is relatively meaningless.

Phrased differently, the smart phone in your hand may have an operating speed that is thousands or millions of times faster than 30 years ago but that increase doesn’t have an impact on your life in proportion to the increase in speed. Increased operating speed in the last decade probably hasn’t affected your life much at all.

Continue reading “With all the radical technology changes over the last few decades, have the essentials remained the same?”

Fun news on the incredibly wide open frontier of private space exploration – 1/18

SpaceX Dragon capsule in orbit. Photo by SpaceX released to public domain.

If you want to know why I remain so optimistic for our future even though the national political, geopolitical, and economic news is so depressing, check out the space news I’ve noticed in the last week. As Behind the Black often says, the competition is heating up.

One bit of not-so-great news. From Space.com: Video Shows SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket Land on Droneship, Then Fall Over and Explode. The video is here. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 landed almost dead center on the drone floating 200 miles south of Vandenberg. The engine cut off which means it was landed successfully. Then one of the legs gave out, the rocket tipped over, then exploded. Preliminary guess is that something (a lockout collet?) iced over while on the launch pad.

1/14 – Behind the Black – Orbital ATK and SpaceX win Air Force contracts – ULA does not have engines for its rockets and thus must rely on Russian engines to get our military launches into space. Orbital ATK and SpaceX both have contracts to develop new engines.

The obvious story line here that gives me such encouragement is two new-on-the-scene, privately owned space companies have been called in to help the mega-contractor ULA get out of its mess.

Another big contract:

Continue reading “Fun news on the incredibly wide open frontier of private space exploration – 1/18”

Long distance travel times now and 100 years ago

Standard travel in 2016. Image courtesy of DollarPhotoClub.com — Boeing 747. Standard method of long distance travel in 2016. Image courtesy of DollarPhotoClub.com

Max Roser sent the following tweets on January 7:

Max Roser ?@MaxCRoser [1 of 2] Travel times from London in 1914

to California 10-20 days

to Nigeria: ±20 days

to Sydney: 30-40 days pic.twitter.com/iAqvPynUqr

State of the art travel in 1912. Image courtesy of DollarPhotoClub.com — H.M.S. Titanic. State of the art long distance travel in 1912. Image courtesy of DollarPhotoClub.com

Continue reading “Long distance travel times now and 100 years ago”

Stretching my brain on the commercial space launch business

Ariane 5 liftoff for VA227 launch. Credit: Arianespace.

One of the major reasons I blog is to learn. Nothing stretches me more than reading a fascinating article and commenting in public on it. Putting my thoughts out on the never-to-go-away Internet requires a very careful reading of articles.

So if you want to stretch your brain too, stay tuned while I comment on Space News’s coverage on January 6 of a press conference: Arianespace Surpassed SpaceX in Commercial Launch Orders in 2015.

Launch rates

The organization’s CEO provided the following count of commercial orders for 2014. I think this is the count of launches into geo-stationary transfer orbit:

9 – Arianespace
9 – SpaceX

Article says that reflects Arianespace catching up with SpaceX.

Here is the count of 2015 contracts for geostationary launches: Continue reading “Stretching my brain on the commercial space launch business”

Update on the open frontier of private space exploration; recovery of booster

Launch of Orbcomm mission on top of Falcon 9 booster. Photo courtesy of SpaceX released to pubic domain.

A few more articles on the wide open frontier of space:

12/23 – Popular Mechanics – Two Quick Illustrations to See How Badly SpaceX Beat Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos may have gone for the glory, but he only had a fraction of the challenge – Blue Origin may have been the first company to nail landing of a reusable booster. SpaceX had a far more difficult challenge as illustrated by two graphics in the article.

Recovery of booster. Photo courtesy of SpaceX released to pubic domain.

Continue reading “Update on the open frontier of private space exploration; recovery of booster”

Cost to construct energy facilities

I am trying to collect reference points for the cost to construct different types of facilities. Here are a few data points I’ve noticed lately and some data points I’ve mentioned before.

Remember to discount all the construction costs below by the 15% to 30% capacity rate. That means backup natural gas or coal plants are needed for the 70% or 85% of the minutes each day the facilities aren’t producing.

Offshore oil

I haven’t paid attention to offshore drilling so I’m not familiar with production levels or costs. Here is one data point I just saw:

11/25/15 – Wall Street Journal – Italy’s Eni Plans to Pump Arctic Oil, After Others Abandon the Field – An Italian oil company, Eni SpA, will continue its work 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Their Goliat platform will start pumping in 2015.

Goal is to produce 100,000 bopd. Cost is estimated at $6 billion. Field is expected to be productive for 15 years.

For context, you could probably drill 1,000 wells in North Dakota for $6B.

Solar

3/17/15 – Million Dollar Way – Here we go again – solar project in the dead of winter in a northern latitude state. – Standing Rock Reservation will construct 636kW solar project for $2M, of which $1M will be from federal government. Continue reading “Cost to construct energy facilities”

Why I am so optimistic – 3

The future is so bright we need sunglasses. Image courtesy of DollarPhotoClub.com

The number of people working in manufacturing has been declining for many years. Those job losses will continue at the same time as technology disrupts other industries causing the loss of more jobs.

This is not a new concept. Technological advances have devastated farm employment over the last 150 years.

(Cross-post from my other blog, Nonprofit Update.)

Prof. Thomas Tunstall pondered Where the New Jobs Will Come From. Sub headline on his 11/4/15 article said:

In 2007 iPhone application developers didn’t exist. By 2011 Apple had $15 billion in mobile-app revenues.

Consider the percentage of the population employed in agriculture over time: Continue reading “Why I am so optimistic – 3”

SpaceX successfully lands a first stage booster

[youtube=https://youtu.be/ZCBE8ocOkAQ?t=6]

Space.com provides the great news: Wow! SpaceX Lands Orbital Rocket Successfully in Historic First. On December 21 SpaceX successfully launched 11 satellites into orbit. The secondary objective was to recover the first stage.

On the third attempt to do so, they successfully landed the first stage booster on land. After (not if, but when) they figure out how to do this routinely the cost of a space launch will drop radically. Article says the drop in cost could be in the range of a factor of 100.

One of the commenters on the following video gave this comparison: The flight on 12/21 is like launching a pencil over the Empire State Building, slowing down, and landing softly inside an area the size of a shoe box.

Continue reading “SpaceX successfully lands a first stage booster”