Space, and How to Get There.

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Its looking like Obama is planning on canceling the Ares program. Almost a shame, but its probably for the better, but only if Obama has a better plan, and based on the above, it doesn't look like he has one. Instead, our main path to space will be with the commercial space industry.

Commercial space flight. SpaceShipOne does not count, it can't quite make it to space for a long period of time. SpaceX is probably the front runner in the commercial space flight industry. They already have a contract to resupply the International Space Station once the shuttle is retired, and they are the only commercial company to successfully launch a rocket into space using only private funds. In fact, they are prepping to test their heavy lift rocket, Falcon 9, and its reusable spacecraft, Dragon, sometime this year. Upon successful completion of the test flight, Falcon 9 and Dragon will be the craft that resupply the ISS. Another company is Orbital Sciences Corporation. They have one rocket that is being used to transport stuff to space, and the are working on another, larger rocket.

All this is cool and stuff, but it is not the inspirational space exploration that makes kids want to become astronauts and study math and science. But what are the realistic options? Continue with the Ares program? As cool as Ares is, I don't think it was the right option to pursue. It is just an update of technology that has existed since the 60s/70s. It's a shame that Ares was the course we took for NASA, and now it looks like the whole program will be canceled. A waste of time and money, but you can't change the past.

So the future, whats up with that? I fully support the commercial space flight industry. For near Earth stuff commercial space flight is perfect. But getting beyond near earth orbit? For that we need NASA. NASA needs a well developed plan for returning the US to the moon. We are already doing a lot of prep work for that, with LCROSS and the LRO missions. Setting up a moon base should be a goal of NASA's. It will be expensive, prohibitively so, which is why it needs to be done by NASA. To me that is the point of the organization: to spend money on things that are far to expensive for the commercial space industry to pay for. Like going to the moon. Or Mars.

How cool would going to Mars be? Obama, take us to Mars. It only took the Apollo program eight years to get us to the moon. Lets get on this, don't make NASA useless, only doing things NOAA and the Air Force can do now.

Hey guys, guess what!

I fixed the DX 7! Finally!

I finally had the motivation to do it. I took the thing apart again and bent the metal contacts back into place. All keys work. for the first time since I bought the it.

Now all I need to do is learn how to play it.

Lesson: Be careful when putting the keys back in. Thin bits of metal bend easy.

On to the next project.

Ginormous Surprise Box

I ordered one. It will come full of fun. I also ordered two of these, because you never know when you will need two military grade gyroscopes.

Steorn

Steorn has been all over the internets the last few years. Most things said about it are negative. For good reason too. Some background first.

Sreorn claims to have made an "overunity" device, called the Orbo, that outputs more energy that is inputted into the system. They have been working on this thing for years now, and so far all demos have very successfully shown nothing at all.

"We are interested in the development community"

That is a quote from a series of six Youtube videos recently posted. Go watch them. the video demo starts OK, but during the Q&A session it seems as if he is just talking BS. He keeps comparing his device to manufacturing HDDs, that it requires precision technologies and a large plant to produce the devices. He claims that people can not reproduce it because it requires precision technologies to make. I am suspicious. I would almost categorize this as a non-reproducible result. Instead of actually explaining how the Orbo works he says that it is too complicated to explain. Right.

In the next week they will have live demos of the Orbo to prove that it works. I think that the only thing the device will show is that it is really good at slowly draining a battery, but I guess time will tell. It would be really cool if the Orbo does work, but the physics don't work out. There is no such thing as free energy.

The quote posted above to me says one thing: I want your money. It would be incredibly evil if this was just a con, but that is exactly what I'm thinking it is right now.

Magic forces read zero. Until a better explanation on how this thing works comes out, it is just magic (or wishful thinking).

Robots!

I just discovered that the Electronic Goldmine has cheap robot kits.

I'm in. Totally going to build a robot. I like this one.

They also have boxes of random stuff. Will probably buy one next week. I'll post what I get.

CAD

Whenever someone mentions CAD around me I immediately have a flashback to middle school where we had a tech course and learned how to use a CAD program; I think it was AutoCAD, but there is a good chance I am making that name up. That was my only experience with a CAD program for many years.

Something Useless

Watch!

I must build.

I have most of the necessary bits to build it, I jsut need a box and a servo. I should work out a way that it triggers a thing that shouts "NO" when you flip the switch.

I would link to the instructions, but it appears that Instructables has recently been attacked by some Nazi malware or something about bigfoot. I wasn't really paying attention. I'll post as soon as they pop up on the internet again.

Two more pictures

DX 7, still working on it.

Phase Royal, completed.

Phase Royal

Hi.

So I got a Phase Royal for Christmas. Or...I got a kit to build one. So I built it! (It won the poll BTW)

The build wasn't that hard, but soldering thing together is a ton of fun. I really enjoy it for some reason.

So here are some pictures of the build:













The tricky part was getting it to work properly. There is a trim pot that you need to adjust to get the thing to phase right. This controls the bias for a LFO. It will phase if it is not properly adjusted, but it won't sound that great.


I spent a good deal of time adjusting the trimpot. Probably 20 minutes a night for four nights until it sounded good. Now it sounds good! In fact, I'm going to go play through it now.