Tag: answers with joe

Did The US Accidentally Blast A Manhole Cover Into Space?

In 1957, the United States began testing nuclear weapons underground in the desert outside of Las Vegas, Nevada as part of Operation Plumbbob. One underground test, Pascal B, may have put the first manmade object into space.

Robert R. Brownlee engineered the Pascal A underground test to measure the amount of fallout that would occur from underground nuclear explosions. It involved digging a 485 foot shaft into the ground and capping it with a heavy steel plate.

The explosion blew the steel plate off the ground and caused Brownlee to wonder how fast it propelled the object, so he set up a second nuclear test, Pascal B, to measure the speed of the steel cap.

The high-speed camera only recorded the plate in one frame, which led Brownlee to conclude that it must have been traveling at more than 125,000 miles per hour, or 5 times the escape velocity of Earth. The plate was never found, and this has led many to believe it was jettisoned out into space.

If this is true, the steel plate from Pascal B beat Sputnik to space by 2 months and would be the fastest human-made object of all time.

There are many who believe this couldn’t possibly be true though because at that speed the plate would have vaporized in the atmosphere just like a meteor or satellite re-entering the atmosphere at orbital velocity. So the mystery of Pascal B carries on.

Bigelow Aerospace Is Building The World’s First Space Hotel

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Robert Bigelow became a billionaire as the owner of Budget Suites of America hotels. But now he wants to build hotels in space. And his company Bigelow Aerospace is getting closer with their inflatable habitats.

Robert Bigelow grew up in Las Vegas in the 1950s, and saw the nuclear testing that took place nearby. This spurred a love of science that he carries with him to this day.

He vowed to one day spend $500 million to create the first commercial space station, and established Bigelow Aerospace in 2000.

Their focus would be on inflatable habitats, a technology that NASA developed while working on the Transhab module for the International Space Station that was eventually cancelled. Bigelow Aerospace bought NASA’s patents and began working on their own versions.

The first program, GenesisI1 and Genesis II, were unmanned inflatable habitats that tested the technology. The habitats were functional for 2 and a half years and performed well enough that NASA contacted Bigelow to test an inflatable module on the ISS.

Bigelow created BEAM – the Bigelow Experimental Activity Module, which was installed on the ISS in 2016. It has performed perfectly, getting its original 2-year mission expanded beyond 2020, and has shown to stand up to micrometeorite impacts and radiation as well as the rest of the ISS.

Bigelow’s next step is to launch the B330, a 300 cubic meter inflatable habitat that is the centerpiece of their plans. Bigelow wants to use multiple B330s to create commercial space stations in orbit. B330s may even be used as habitats on the moon.

Beyond that, Bigelow plans to build the B2100, a massive habitat with 2 and a half times more volume than the ISS. These would be the first space hotels.

The Oort Cloud: The Solar System’s Disaster Factory

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My Prediction About Autonomous Cars

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You’ve been hearing a lot about autonomous, self-driving cars lately. Here I take a look at where we are, when we’ll get there, and how it will change the world.

Our transportation system is due for a massive disruption and it’s coming in the form of self-driving cars.

Autonomous cars have been in the works for a while now, with semi-autonomous options like collision avoidance, traffic-aware cruise control, and lane keeping becoming more and more common in even mid and low-price cars.

But thanks to companies like MobileEye, Cruise Automation, and Tesla, we are on the cusp of full Level 4 autonomy in the next few years. In fact, Ford, GM, Honda, Toyota, Nissan, and more carmakers are planning to release fully autonomous cars in the years 2021 to 2025.

Ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft stand the most to gain by this transition, which, according to technologist Tony Seba, will see the end of individual ownership of cars and become a Transportation as a Service model, where almost all travel is carried out through autonomous, shared vehicles.

And when these companies begin buying up fleets of self-driving cars, the cars they will lean on will be electric vehicles, due to the cheaper cost of electricity and the lower maintenance costs, as shown by the company Tesloop and their Tesla Model X that recently hit 350,000 miles.

Combine that with the lower cost of solar PV panels and Lithium-ion batteries, and we are setting the stage for a disruption of our transportation system like we’ve never seen before.

The Condition That Makes People’s Faces Disappear

Prosopagnosia is a rare condition, usually brought on by some kind of damage to the brain that causes people to lose the ability to recognize faces.

This is a type of visual agnosia, which prevents people from recognizing objects or shapes.

People with these conditions are functional in every other way, with normal intelligence and mental aptitude, but must adjust their way of perceiving through the world by relying on other senses, much like blind people.

With a little extra planning and care, these people can go on to live relatively normal lives.

Hydrogen Fuel Cell Cars Aren’t The Dumbest Thing. But…

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Hydrogen fuel cell technology was touted as the energy of the future in the 60’s and 70’s after NASA used fuel cells to power their spacecraft. But with improvements in battery technology and electric cars surging in popularity, did hydrogen miss its opportunity? Or is there still a place for fuel cell technology?

ULA’s Delta, Atlas, And Vulcan Rockets – The Past And Future Of Space Travel

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United Launch Alliance, or ULA, was formed in 2006 but their pedigree goes back to the earliest days of the United States space program. Their Delta and Atlas rockets pioneered both manned and commercial flight, and their Vulcan rocket will lead them into the future.

The Plague That Makes You Dance To Death

The Dancing Plague of 1518 was an event that caused more than 400 people to dance in the streets of Strasbourg, France for 2 months, leading to the deaths of dozens of people. This really happened.

Some of the solutions for the Dancing Plague include ergot poisoning, mind-controlling parasites similar to toxoplasma gondii or the cordyceps fungus, and mass hysteria, also known as mass psychogenic illness. Many also attribute the Dancing Plague to St. Vitus, and have called it the Plague of St. Vitus.

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