In the past few years, what marketers and venture capital firms term “artificial intelligence” but is more often an advanced predictive text model of some sort has started taking people’s jobs and threatening others. But not tedious jobs that society might like to have automated away in the first place. These AI tools have generally […]
It’s not unusual for redundant satellites, rocket stages, or other spacecraft to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere. Usually they pass unnoticed or generate a spectacular light show, and very rarely a few pieces make it to the surface of the planet. Coming up though is something entirely different, a re-entry of a redundant craft in which […]
Hundreds of years from now, the story of humanity’s inevitable spread across the solar system will be a collection of engineering problems solved, some probably in heroic fashion. We’ve already tackled a lot of these problems in our first furtive steps into the wider galaxy. Our engineering solutions have taken humans to the Moon and […]
The popular press was recently abuzz with sad news from the planet Mars: Opportunity, the little rover that could, could do no more. It took an astonishing 15 years for it to give up the ghost, and it took a planet-wide dust storm that blotted out the sun and plunged the rover into apocalyptically dark […]
On the face of it, powering most spacecraft would appear to be a straightforward engineering problem. After all, with no clouds to obscure the sun, adorning a satellite with enough solar panels to supply its electrical needs seems like a no-brainer. Finding a way to support photovoltaic (PV) arrays of the proper size and making […]