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NASA today announced plans to return to the Moon and set up a permanent base by 2024, as per the goals and objectives laid out in “A Renewed Spirit of Discovery” issued by the White House in 2004. That document directs the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to undertake various initiatives in space to include renewed human exploration of the Moon no later than 2020, and of Mars and “other destinations” at some unspecified future date.

NASA’s announcement of today is fairly general and utilizes the yet-to-be-built Ares launch vehicle and Orion crew capsule. They go on to describe plans for about 40 landings on the rim of Shackleton Crater near the Moon’s south pole, in order to construct the aforementioned base and habitat. The main benefits provided by that particular location are moderate temperatures, high levels of sunlight and low delta-v requirements.

NASA hopes to have a fairly mature operation in place at the Moon base by 2025, supporting long-duration missions with near self-sufficiency. Plans become vague beyond that timeframe, with “Humans to Mars” occupying a single bullet point in the NASA presentation – however, we were fortunate to have NASA Administrator Michael Griffin forward the attached graphic to us, showing what a future Mars colony might look like)

Why The Moon - NASA News Release, 12.04.06

Posted in Aerospace ~ 1 Comment

Well, the results are in for the 2006 L’Automobile Piu Belle del Mondo, aka the World’s Most Beautiful Car, with the winner in the sports car category being the Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano. The Fiorano is a nice looking car, albeit excessively Corvette-like.

In a field of questionable & mildly-disappointing appointees, such as the Renault Twingo, we gotta go with the winner in the limousine category, the Bentley Continental GTC as the best-looking auto of 2006.

The $265K price tag for the GTC buys a 6L W12 engine that gets you from 0-60mph in 4.8 seconds.

Auto piu belle del mondo 2006 – Autoblog

Posted in Automotive ~ 2 Comments

Hummer & ‘green’ in the same sentence? … apparently so…

The 2006 Los Angeles Auto Show which ends Dec 10 produced a number of concept cars, including the General Motors Hummer O2. The GM Hummer O2 won the Design Challenge portion of the show in the category of environmentally friendly cars by virtue of producing more oxygen than it consumes. The oxygen production is thanks to photosynthesis in body panels that are filled with a solution of algae and water – just add sunlight. And while most cars are getting an oil change, the Hummer O2 would be going in for an algae change.

While we’re good with the algae part, it’s the green-colored tires that push the O2 categorically over the top and into the decidedly whimsical…we’ll wait for the results of full frontal crash test before considering one…

LA Auto Show Design Challenge – website

Posted in Automotive ~ No Comments

In a wordy article, the normally to-the-point Economist burns up 2388 words in the course of which they extrapolate on the future of the cell phone. Basically they say that phones of the future will be similar to, but much better than, the phones of today, unless of course they’re totally different in an unexpected way. See 5G Predictions for the condensed version.

The phone of the future – The Economist, Nov 30th 2006

Posted in Phones ~ No Comments

The Financial Times reports that Ken Kutaragi, Sony’s brains behind the PlayStation series of game consoles, has been kicked upstairs and that Sony Computer Entertainment is undergoing a management shuffle. In corporate-speak, the changes are described as strengthening SCE’s position on a go-forward basis, restructuring internal lines of communication in a proactive manner, as well as empowering SCE management to apply best-of-breed paradigms to provide added value while thinking outside the box … or something like that.

A direct consequence of the above announcement is that further development of the next-gen Sony PlayStation 4 game console has been suspended. However, Sony has been kind enough to forward an image of a prototype PS4, shown attached.

Sony sidelines PS3 mastermind Kutaragi – Financial Times, December 1 2006

Posted in General ~ No Comments

Clockmakers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a more accurate atomic clock, one based on strontium, that ticks 430 trillion times per second. This new clock is 40000 times more accurate than the current-gen cesium clocks which lose a totally unacceptable 1 second in 20 million years.

Good work – but what the world needs right now are more and better atomic clock jokes.

Strontium Atomic Clock Demonstrates Super-Fine Ticks – JILA News Release, Nov 30 2006

Posted in General ~ No Comments

We get a lot of questions about our Blackberry service. The most common one we see is usually phrased something like this:

“Why do I need your Blackberry service if I already got one from my provider? – I even got an email address that works on my Blackberry” Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in mail2web.com ~ 3 Comments

The Return to Abalakin by Alexander Preuss is a nice piece of computer graphics depicting life aboard a future giant torus circling the earth. Nicely done, but a bit too back-to-the-womb. Shame if one of those depicted struts ever were to fail.

Whew…thank goodness that the design was completed in time to provide a way to escape Earth as per the recent urging by Stephen Hawking viz “Move to new planet“…

Abalakin – website

Posted in General ~ No Comments