Scientists Weigh in on Biofuels vs. Food Debate

I'm blogging for PopSci.com from the first annual BioMass conference in Minneapolis. Latest post here.

Biofuel Diversity at the University of North Dakota

Yesterday I visited a research facility in North Dakota creating jet fuel out of vegetable oil, and I've posted a report on popsci.com.

DARPA Turns 50

I've just posted my reporting on last night's 50th anniversary celebration for the Defense Advanced Research Projects agency on the Popular Science website at PopSci.com.

DARPA's bionic arm project

One of the fascinating projects I'm researching for my book about DARPA is the Revolutionizing Prosthetics program. I recently spoke with DARPA's program manager for the project, Army Colonel and intensive care unit doctor Geoffrey Ling, who filled me in on how the program came to be and his goals for it.

Ling was on a tour of duty in Afghanistan when he treated a young boy who'd lost an arm and a leg to a Russian land mine. That's what planted the seeds in his mind for what became Revolutionizing Prosthetics. That, and an encounter with a young American soldier in Iraq who wept when Ling told him his million-dollar wound would get him sent home.

As Ling explained it to me, the goal of his program is a "brain-controlled arm that functions at the level of capacity of an arm, that looks like an arm, that weighs like an arm, and also gives you sensory feedback just like your arm would, and we want it within four years."

The clock started ticking in 2005 and now the arm is due in 2009. The work is going on at the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University. That's a prototype the group produced last year. I'll get a full update on current progress at a massive, convention-style meeting of all the participating researchers in Maryland later this month.

Meanwhile, just to hedge his bets and get something in the pipeline even faster, Ling created a two-year arm project, now finishing up work at Dean Kamen's DEKA Research (of Segway Human Transporter fame).

Ling calls this one the strap-and-go arm."You wake up in the morning, you put it on, and off you go. It doesn't require hooking up to your brain or anything like that, it's a strap-and-go arm. So we recognize that the strap-and-go arm will not be as dexterous and as functional as the brain controlled one but it needed to be a whole lot better than the hook that's available today--you know, the thing out of Peter Pan?"

I reported on DEKA's arm last year, and I'm due for an update. Ling says progress since then has been amazing. "It's a fantastic arm," says Ling. "Mike, you have to see it to believe it." I'm there.

My XCOR story on PopSci.com

Yep, it's a suborbital spaceship. Check out my story on the unveiling of XCOR's new Lynx spacecraft, along with embedded video, on popsci.com.

"Big announcement" coming from XCOR Aerospace

The folks at XCOR Aerospace tell me that the company is planning a press event on March 26 in Los Angeles. These guys are not prone to frivolous or gratuitous PR, so I'm most definitely intrigued.

Come to think of it, I don't think XCOR has ever held a press conference in the time I've been following them, since 2004. The engineers, technicians, and managers at XCOR prefer to keep their heads down, do their work, and let their deeds speak for themselves.

They've already built and flown a rocket powered airplane, a 7,500-pound-thrust methane rocket engine for NASA (through prime contractor ATK), novel piston fuel pumps designed to replace million-dollar turbo pumps in high-powered rocket engines at a tiny fraction of the cost, and built countless rocket engines to show again and again that liquid fueled rocket engines can be safe, reliable, and affordable enough to become part of our everyday lives.

But the company was founded to get people into space, and the founders have never lost sight of that prize, wrangling contracts from the Department of Defense, NASA, and private companies to build components of their planned suborbital spaceship as well as fund components of the ship for which they don't have customers.

A mysterious project has been underway on the XCOR shop floor behind a black curtain for some time now, and the company has been incredibly successful lately, with contracts and money rolling in faster than ever before. In fact, XCOR made Inc. magazine's list of 500 fastest growing companies in America last year.

Are we about to witness a new private spaceship unveiled?

I'm going to blog the XCOR press event for the Popular Science website at www.popsci.com. Look for a link from here on March 26.

Orion Propulsion wins space habitat contract

I've just had a note from Tim Pickens, CEO of Orion Propulsion, pointing me to the latest news posed on his company's website announcing a contract from Bigelow Aerospace. Orion will build thrusters for Bigelow's planned first commercial space station.

Bigelow's booming along on an excellerated schedule to launch its Sundancer space station by 2010. Orion's focus is on "selling shovels to the miners," as Pickens puts it, i.e., providing the means for other companies to reach space quickly and affordably to find whatever profits they may find there--or not to profit at all; Orion is also building thrusters for NASA's next planned crew launcher, the Ares 1, through a contract with prime contractor Boeing.

To get the Bigelow contract, Orion built and tested a prototype thruster and sent it to Bigelow along with a written proposal. Given Robert Bigelow's impatience with paper designs created at the expense of actual working hardware, that seemed a prudent move on Orion's part, but it also reflects the way Orion prefers to do business too.