Solar-powered plane crossing Pacific: Live telemetry
solarimpulse.com
solarimpulse.com
Anyway, the upshot was that there are a few things to really keep your eye on, known unknowns more or less. One is any process with a long term trend of improvement, like GDP growth, computation growth and anything that seems to be following such a trend. Another is energy sources.
It used to be popular to think of technological progress as a history of energy sources. Human power followed by beasts of burden for agriculture and transport. Charcoal for smelting followed by coal. The old wind and water powered mills followed by the coal fired mills, steam engines etc. Oil, combustion engines. Each energy source enabled a sort of technological revolution. I think this model of tech-history was at its giddiest when nuclear seemed to hold more promise (the 50s?). Nuclear Power, the space age energy.
Any feats of energy sources are worth keeping an eye on.
I spent the rest of the spring designing and developing this new damping approach. Basically it amounts to a very sensitive array of sensors that are all hooked into a computer which is able to watch the data streams in real time to diagnose these phenomena. The computer is then able to apply precisely timed forces to the apparatus at key locations to get rid of these vibrations. I got the idea by reading an article on identifying and eliminating the vibrations that happen in the beams of big particle accelerators like CERN and the Large Hadron Collider.
Now entering commercial production as http://www.velkess.com/VelkessLDatasheet.pdf and http://www.velkess.com/VelkessADatasheet.pdf
If energy storage can get onto a rapid improvement path, all sorts of options might suddenly be feasible. But I have to say that the idea of a flywheel storing enough energy to power a house sounds scary, never mind anything bigger. What happens if the stabilisation fails somehow?
update: there's a bad weather front on the way to Hawai, so the pilot is holding his position.
In other words it's another form of energy storage.
Well according to the cockpit chatter they had issues with their GPS.
The refueled endurance record is crazy. 65 days in a Cessna, refueling from a pickup truck.
I'd love to see all the instruments during the scheduled 14:00 UTC landing.
Looks like they're actually attempting a trip around the world...