An Avatar in Every Garage
It’s a concept well known to sf fans: an artificial stand-in for your biological self that’s stronger and longer lasting than you are. See the movie Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis and James Cameron’s movie Avatar, for example. If a Russian entrepreneur has has way, that reality will come to be by 2045. Hence the name of his 2045 Initiative. The organization that Dmitry Itskov...
Read MoreRapid Innovation
I’ve posted a new, free paper on my website, called “Rapid Innovation on the Cheap: Lessons from DARPA and the Commercial Space Age.” This distills lessons learned from my reporting (ten years this year!) on some of the most extraordinary technology breakthroughs on the planet. As I’ve written about commercial space travel, the Defense Advanced Projects Agency, robotics,...
Read MoreDental surgeon by day, asteroid hunter by night
On Friday, February 15, 2013, an asteroid the size of half a football field—50 meters or so in diameter—will come within a hair of hitting Earth. At closest approach, it will pass a mere 17,000 miles away, well within the orbit of our geosynchronous communications satellites. Depending on its composition, if asteroid 2012 DA14 were to hit us, it could wipe out a major city, blasting out a...
Read MoreBigelow and the Inflatable Space Station
Like a lot of revolutionary ideas, it seems crazy at first glance: a space habitat that rides to orbit in a compressed state, and then inflates to full size when it gets there. But NASA worked seriously on the idea, pegging it for a future Mars mission before canceling it in the late 1990s. The program, called TransHab, was snapped up by Las Vegas real estate developer Robert Bigelow at the...
Read MoreNano Engineering on a Massive Scale
It’s a good thing I took a wrong turn on the way to Albany International Airport a few weeks back. Turning off the highway prematurely, I came face to face with the NanoTech Complex at the State University of New York. I was amazed at how big this facility is: some half-dozen buildings adding up to 800,000 square feet, with more being built, I found out later. The place will enclose 1.5...
Read MoreX-51A crash investigation in Popular Mechanics
The phrase “keeping a match lit in a hurricane” acquired new meaning to me over the last 24 hours as Hurricane Sandy whipped through Woodstock, where I live and work. The phrase is also a metaphor for the extreme challenge presented by hypersonic air-breathing aircraft. That is, jet-propelled airplanes that can travel five times the speed of sound and above. The most advanced such...
Read MoreDARPA’s Robot Challenge in Popular Mechanics
DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has opened a competition to build humanoid robots to aid in disaster recovery efforts. My Popular Mechanics story on the DARPA Robotics Challenge, posted on Thursday, gives the particulars of the two year race, which offers more than $3 million in prize money to a first-place finisher. As I point out in the article, DARPA says it isn’t...
Read MoreMy August PopMech cover story: asteroid mining
When I got the call from a new company called Planetary Resources about their mad scheme to mine asteroids, I pitched it immediately to my editors at Popular Mechanics. The rapid-fire response: “Hell yes!” I banged out a Web story and a short Tech Watch piece that was slammed into the very next issue of the magazine. The next issue after that had my feature story on the cover. Dunno...
Read MoreMoonbots in my Scientific American article and on the radio
The April 2012 issue of Scientific American has my article on the Google Lunar X PRIZE, the $30 million contest to land the first private robot on the moon. I got to spend time with leading team Astrobotic to craft the story and was very impressed by their potential for a win. I first met team leader Red Whittaker while I was covering the DARPA Urban Challenge autonomous vehicle race in 2007....
Read MoreEric Anderson, extraterrestrial outfitter: my Air & Space cover story
In case you missed it on the magazine racks, you can read the complete text of my March cover story for Air & Space magazine at airspacemag.com. Eric Anderson pioneered the commercial space flight industry, before anyone knew it could be a real business. His company, Space Adventures, brokered the deal that launched the first citizen to pay his own way into space. Before Dennis Tito headed...
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