Month: July 2006

As we reported earlier this week, Robert Bigelow was planning to launch a test inflatable structure in space as the first stage of his planned hotel in space. The launch happened on Wednesday and the flight and inflation was a success. The Genesis flew aboard a Cold War-era ballistic missile launched from a pad in Russia’s Ural Mountains.

In a mission update released yesterday by Blowfeld…er… I mean Bigelow himself, he said:

“All Systems are operating within expected parameters. Temperature, avionics, solar arrays and battery power all remain positive. All of our initial orbits have had direct sunlight, which has helped in charging the main battery to maximum capacity.

“Pressure onboard the spacecraft has remained constant at 7.5 pounds per square inch (PSI). We have had multiple contacts with the ship, and received several data streams. While most of these current communication streams are dedicated to command and control of the spacecraft, we have downloaded several small images from the onboard cameras and hope to get more as more bandwidth in the data stream becomes available.”

Is it just me or does this look like something that should have stayed on the drawing board? And as Matt Groening once pointed out about such Gernsbackian bubble cars o’ the future: you’d fry like a freakin’ egg in there on a hot sunny day!

The amazing thing about this electric goofmobile is that it can go up to 112 mph, which, as the Sci-Fi Tech blog point outs, is so you won’t have to hear the derisive laughter of those you pass by on the street.

The not-so-good news for Sony and its Playstation 3 machine just keeps on coming. The latest is found via an interview with Tom Reeves, VP of semiconductor and technology services at IBM, conducted by Electronic News. In it, he reveals that the initial yields for the Cell chip, used in Sony’s forthcoming game machine, are currently between 10 to 20 percent. They’re hoping to improve that to 40% But in high-volume chip fabrication, that’s still an unsettlingly low number. The lower the yield (i.e. usuable chips on a silicon wafer), the more expensive the processor. Not good news for a consumer electronics device that already looks in danger of being priced out of a competitive range.

[Via CNet News]

We held our collective breath last week as that aging relic of ’70s technology, the Space Shuttle, limped its way into space. (You know your spaceship is old when, after you’ve climbed out of Earth’s gravity well, you have to inspect the entire craft to make sure it arrived with all of its parts.) But the real action in space is taking place later on this week, and later on this fall, as a number of private space efforts take to the sky.

First off the pad is Vegas hotelier Robert Biglow’s test flight of the first component for his proposed space hotel. On July 14, a subscale model of his planned inflatable space modules will be launched from a pad in Russia. If successful, he plans on starting to launch the actual inflatable modules which will eventually go together to create the first hotel in space. Biglow thinks big, hoping to start turning down the upright sleeping bags in your sub-luxury space birth by 2012 (that’s right, less than SIX years from now). The next next-gen space event will take place in the fall, at the X Prize Cup Expo in Las Cruces, Mexico. Fifty teams have signed up to participate in making attempts at suborbital flights (unmanned, of course) and two teams will show off vertical take off and landing vehicles.

But wait, there’s more! SpaceX, founded by PayPal’s Elon Musk, will make another attempt with their Falcon rockets, the only serious contender in the field to possibly sending humans or sats into space via private rocketry in the next few years. That flight is scheduled for October as well. And, if all stays on schedule, we might see another Virgin Galactic flight by year’s end too.

So, all and all, an exciting year for private space flight. Let’s just hope that the Mr. Magoo of Low Earth Orbit, the Shuttle, doesn’t drive up onto the median strip or otherwise wreck the ol’ pile o’ heat tiles on the way home.