Daily Archives: August 14, 2023

WESTMINSTER Kurn Hattin Homes for Children recently finished its latest summer program: Tech Week.

The one-week program immersed participating students into a dynamic world of technology to foster creativity, critical thinking and problem-solving in young minds, preparing them to thrive in the ever-evolving tech-driven landscape, according to a release.

The students delved into projects like building robots within the VEX Robotics Continuum while on teams, their objective to deliver payloads to a destination in a model Robot City. They had hands-on experience with Snap Circuits and Circuit Maze while they learned all about the fundamentals of electrical engineering. They used empathetic design and created a model Mars colony base together using a variety of analog and digital tools, and they competed in a 3D orienteering and teamwork challenge in "Minecraft Education."

Kurn Hattin Homes' students were challenged to use Design Thinking to create visual representations of their ideas using any medium in the SmartLab that aligned with the criteria and constraints. They practiced empathy to consider what the astronauts would need to live happy, healthy, safe and productive lives on Mars. Students ideated together, drew blueprints, and then created a habitat complete with comfort items, pets, an aquaponic farm, a laboratory, an observatory and a model airlock with moving doors.

"On all of these challenges, campers did an amazing job, practicing the 4 Cs of the modern working world; Communication, Collaboration, Creativity, and Critical Thinking. My hope is that this introduction and exposure will kindle interest in the program during the school year, and as the SmartLab is all about student agency and choice, it can really help to know what your options are in terms of fields of study. There is a lot of potential in this implementation of the SmartLab, and I can't wait to see what it can become," said Technology Facilitator Benjamin Weiner in a statement.

Follow this link:

'Tech Week' summer program concludes at Kurn Hattin Homes for ... - Brattleboro Reformer

Make batteries instead of engines, they said! Itll be fun and perhaps even profitable, they said! Toward the end of the previous decade, and on the heels of the industry-upending mess that was Dieselgate, we saw a ton of automakers and brands announce these sorts of pivots to electric vehicles. At the time it almost seemed simplehow hard could it be for the 100-year-old auto industry to move to one focused on batteries and software, right?

This years proving to be the year where they all learnand show their investorshow hard that really is. Call it the reality check era of EV adoption. Ford and General Motors have been going through versions of this. On todays morning roundup, well see what the German luxury brands are up to on this front.

Beyond that, we have some good news for Mazda; heat over the United Auto Workers contract negotiations in Detroit; and also why Tesla losing a CFO is a cause for concern. Lets jump in.

My take on the auto industrys great transition, now that were more than midway through 2023, is this: its more than likely going to be a battery-powered future, getting there will be very complicated and expensive, not all brands will survive it, and adoption will not be some magic up-and-to-the-right thing until all the gas cars are gone. Its going to be weird and rocky, basically. But things are moving in that direction.

Automotive News has a breakdown of the approaches taken by the three big German luxury automakers, all of whom have a high-dollar, tech-savvy, first-adopter buyer base and have gotten their lunches eaten to various degrees by Tesla over the years. Theyre all well-positioned to make this pivot, in other words. Heres how theyre doing and what theyre telling investors right now:

Mercedes is the most aggressive brand, vowing to go all-electric globally by 2030. From 2025 forward, every new product architecture will be electric-only, the company said. Mercedes is expanding its U.S. portfolio of battery-powered crossovers and sedans with zero-emission versions of its CLA coupe and GLC crossover.

But Mercedes acknowledges that the pace of EV adoption will be uneven worldwide. The brand expects electric vehicles to account for 40 percent of its new-vehicle sales in the U.S. by 2026 and 70 percent by 2030.

Uneven worldwide is key, especially when you remember how many Mercedes-Benzes across the globediesel taxis in Morocco, stuff like thatare harder to transition. BMW, on the other hand,urges even more patience as it electrifies the top and bottom of its range. (And its actually doing really well with all of this so far.)

BMW is taking a more cautious approach, estimating that about half of its global sales will be fully electric by the start of the next decade.

[] BMWs EV offensive in the U.S. surges in 2026 with several X-line battery-powered crossovers plan-ned. The automaker will produce many of them in Greer, S.C., where it is investing $1.7 billion to produce at least six battery-powered crossovers.

BMWs small car brand Mini views electrification as the path to renewed relevance. A battery-powered Countryman will be the first of several new electric Minis globally starting next year. Two China- made EVs a small crossover and a Cooper SE replacement will come to market next year, but Mini has not confirmed them for the U.S.

As a two-time former Mini owner myself, I hope the brand finds a way to stay afloat (and relevant) in the United States. From what Ive heard internally, a lot of Minis future EV plans for this country are TBD. But theres an air of caution with both of these announcements that feels different from all the rosy optimism weve heard in the past. Making cars is hard, as we say, and making electric cars is even harder; more and more automakers are being open about the challenges here.

Meanwhile, lets talk Audi, once an early leader in this space with the e-tron cars and a marque that is now struggling with the same cost and software issues as parent company Volkswagen. It also wants to go all-electric by 2033, but the plan in the meantime seems to be the same cars it makes now but with electric twins that have different names. Emphasis mine below.

Audi, part of Volkswagen Group, says it will end development of new gasoline engines in 2026. That means most of its popular combustion vehicles should have at least one more product cycle left before they are replaced with battery-powered alternatives.

To delineate between powertrains, Audi is temporarily altering its alphanumeric model naming system. It will keep the A prefix for sedans and Q for crossovers, but future electric models will adopt even numbers, while combustion models remain with odd numbers. The switch is expected to take place gradually as vehicles are redesigned.

The brand will expand the EVs on its PPE architecture, which will slowly merge with other platforms into a unified EV platform across the group.

Even for electric, odd for internal combustion. Somebody write that down!

After writing that subhed, now Im envisioning the Tesla version of Succession. Who gets to take the reins at Tesla after Elon Musk decides to retire to rule over his Mars colony? Tom Zhu? His old friend Peter Thiel? Kanye West? Catturd? One of his kids named after math equations? The mind swirls at the possibilities.

It wont be Zach Kirkhorn, whos stepping down as Chief Financial Officer after 13 years under Musk (which mustve felt like 500 human years.) Kirkhorn was known as one of the more level-headed guys in Teslas comparably small C-suite; Bloombergs Dana Hull describes him as a calm, steady presence and regularly spoke at length with investors, even playing the role of Musks surrogate the time he skipped Teslas earnings presentation.

Its not often that losing a CFO makes big headlines in the auto industry, but you know how closely watched Tesla is. Its new CFO, Vaibhav Taneja, is a native of India who currently serves as chief accounting officer. For now, at least, Taneja is serving in both roles, which is considered unusual in business.

More importantly, Kirkhorn was seen as a possible Tesla CEO someday. Who runs Tesla without Musk? What is Tesla without Musk? Thats a very tough question that more and more investors are asking, especially with the EV competition heating up and Musks attention seemingly so heavily focused on his social media platform. From Bloomberg:

Musk, the richest person in the world, oversees six companies: Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly known as Twitter), Boring Co., Neuralink and xAI, his most recent venture. Musks many interests and the competing demands for his time have long raised concerns about whether Tesla is too dependent on a single individual.

The EV maker has just four executive officers: Musk, Drew Baglino, the senior vice president of powertrain and energy engineering; Tom Zhu, senior vice president of automotive; and now Taneja.

Musk is still relatively young at 52 and, barring any Zuckerberg-related combat accidents, is probably not going anywhere anytime soon. But Tesla without Musk is now an even bigger question than Apple without Jobs ever was and somebodys going to need to figure that out someday.

Okay, fine; I will do it. I will be the CEO of Tesla. Time to log on, baby.

I still want to see Mazda move faster on EVs and hybrids, but in the short-term, everybodys favorite manufacturer of the Miata is doing pretty well at the moment. Automotive News reports it swung back to a Q2 profit thanks to the more upscale, more profitable crossover-focused lineup. It seems its grand plans to become a kind of Japanese BMW are workingso far. Recovering from the supply chain crisis is a big help too:

Operating profit rang up at 30.0 billion yen ($207.5 million) in the companys fiscal first quarter ended June 30, wiping out an operating loss of 19.5 billion yen ($134.9 million) a year earlier, the company said in a statement.

Net income more than doubled to 37.2 billion yen ($257.3 million), from 15.0 billion yen ($103.8 million), as revenue climbed 72 percent to 286.0 billion ($1.98 billion) in the three-month period.

Global sales expanded 32 percent to 309,000 vehicles in the quarter, soaring on the wings of a 61 percent jump in North American shipments to 128,000 vehicles.

Shipments were especially brisk in the U.S., where the CX-90 and CX-50 anchor a refreshed lineup of crossovers. Mazda expects its U.S. sales momentum to gain speed on increased supply following the start of two-shift production at its Alabama assembly plant in July.

Also:

Mazda wants the CX-90 to upshift existing customers into a higher price bracket while also siphoning off customers from premium brands with a lower price point.

We see it steadily growing share week by week, Guyton said of the CX-90, adding that it has already outstripped the market penetration of its CX-9 predecessor nameplate.

I still owe you a review of the CX-90 hybrid! Its good and its stealing customers from other brands for a reason. Anyway, this is all fine news. No profits means no future Miatas and such. We want profits and we want Miatas. Good luck to all involved.

Weve been telling you for a minute that the UAW contract negotiations are a big deal, in their own ways as big a deal as the Hollywood strikes happening right now. Both involve big fights over new technologies and the role of workers in them as the corporate entities up top post record profits but face uncertain futures. And the UAW isnt on strike but negotiations could go sideways and this union is one thats eager to send a message.

The Detroit News is tallying up the supposed costs of their demands and the tab is big:

The United Auto Workers contract demands of the Detroit Three automakers could surge per-person labor costs to more than $100 per hour in wages and benefits, according to three sources familiar with the situation, potentially outstripping North American profits over the life of a new contract.

Now, its unclear who those three sources are here; given the storys framing my guess is theyre automaker sources, so take that with a grain of salt.

That number seems astronomical for manufacturing jobs that are already relatively well paid, said Sam Fiorani, vice president of global forecasting for AutoForecast Solutions LLC. In order to get anywhere near those (wage increase) numbers, other things will have to come off the table, including profit sharing, other benefits, any number of things in order to just get this one thing. If this is not done, youre absolutely going to see employment reductions from the Detroit Three.

The total calculation would be nearly double the estimates of what foreign automakers operating in the United States pay their workers in wages and benefits. The gap would be even wider for employees at electric vehicle maker Tesla Inc. The result could challenge the automakers competitiveness and valuation, risk UAW jobs and potentially send work to other countries, experts say.

But the workers say theyve been left behind by rampant inflation even as their post-bankuptcy (minus Ford, obviously) companies rake in record profits and cars cost more than ever:

In a Facebook livestream this week, UAW President Shawn Fain called the demands audacious and ambitious because the working class has been left behind by the profits achieved by the automakers for more than a decade. This is the workers chance, he said, to gain back what was lost amid the Great Recession and automotive bankruptcies.

Overall, the starting pay for a Big Three worker today is almost $21,000 less than it was in 2007 when adjusted for inflation, Fain told The Detroit News in a statement Friday, reprising his criticism of the automakers profitability and CEO pay. UAW members made enormous sacrifices to save the automakers during the Great Recession, but weve never been made whole. These massively profitable companies can afford our demands. Our message is clear: record profits mean a record contract.

Still, this is how union negotiations go; you aim for crazy stuff, management flips out, and then hopefully after weeks or months, you reach a deal without a strike nobody wants:

Scott Houldieson, a Ford electrician and co-chair of the Unite All Workers for Democracy Caucus that endorsed Fain for president, said the communication for leaders is a mind-blowing sea change that gives workers confidence their union is fighting for them.

We aim for extraterrestrial Mars, said Houldieson, who isnt involved in the negotiations, and if we fall short, at least we made it to the moon.

Theres Musk-esque quote for us all to end on.

You tell me; What is Tesla without Elon Musk?

In some ways to me, Tesla already feels like the post-Jobs era of Apple does now: still strong, in control of market share, but not quite the innovator and game-changer it once was. More steady than anything else. And Ive been wrong when it comes to Tesla before, but it doesnt feel like the Cybertruck changes that equation.

Follow this link:

The 'Reality Check' Era Of The EV Transition Is Upon Us - The Autopian

The last time that a human set foot on the Moon, it was December 1972 when the crew of the Apollo 17 mission spent a few days on the surface before returning to Earth. Since then only unmanned probes have either touched down on the lunar surface or entered orbit to take snapshots and perform measurements.

But after years of false starts, there are finally new plans on the table which would see humans return to the Moon. Not just to visit, but with the goal of establishing a permanent presence on the lunar surface. What exactly has changed that the world went from space fever in the 1960s to tepid interest in anything beyond LEO for the past fifty years, to the renewed interest today?

Part of the reason at least appears to be an increasing interest in mineable resources on the Moon, along with the potential of manufacturing in a low gravity environment, and as a jumping-off point for missions to planets beyond Earth, such as Mars and Venus. Even with 1960s technology, the Moon is after all only a few days away from launch to landing, and we know that the lunar surface is rich in silicon dioxide, aluminium oxide as well as other metals and significant amounts of helium-3, enabling in-situ resource utilization.

Current and upcoming Moon missions focus on exploring the lunar south pole in particular, with frozen water presumed to exist in deep craters at both poles. All of which raises the question of we may truly see lunar-based colonies and factories pop up on the Moon this time, or are we merely seeing a repeat of last century?

Despite the often triumphant tone and chest beating around the Space Race and getting the first boots on the Moon, its hard to not see it as much more than a brief excursion to flex some geopolitical muscle, amidst significant tragedy. For the Soviets this tragedy struck early on, when they lost their equivalent to Werner von Braun in 1966, when Sergei Korolev died in hospital after worsening health problems. After this, many aspects of the grand Soviet space program floundered and began to disintegrate, including the ambitious Zvezda (Russian: , meaning star) Moon base.

This would have been a modular base somewhat akin to the International Space Station, with nine modules that provided the 9-12 person crew with both living and working areas, with resources such as water extracted from the soil and power provided from radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) and a nuclear fission reactor. When the required superheavy N1-L3 Moon rocket failed to materialize, the Zvezda project died along with it.

After this, attempts were made to revive the Moon base idea based around new launchers, such as the Lunar Expeditionary Complex from 1974 and the Energia Lunar Expedition from 1988. Yet none of these would progress past the concept stage, as the USSR simply didnt have the funds necessary for further lunar exploration.

On the US side of the curtain, concepts for Moon bases have been drawn up since the 1950s, with a strong interest from the military. During the 1980s and 1990s, plans were floated to have a permanent lunar colony by the 2000s, but none got the level of funding needed. Finally in 2017 NASA was able to launch the Artemis program, which will involve increasingly complex robotic and crewed missions before landing astronauts on the lunar surface in 2025.

But once again, the United States isnt the only country in the game. The Chinese Lunar Exploration Program (CLEP) has a lunar robotic research station planned as well as a subsequent manned station. The latter manned station is called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), which as the name suggests, would be open to other nations.

Meanwhile India has just launched its second attempt at performing a soft landing on the Moons south pole with the Chandrayaan-3 mission, which is part of its larger Chandrayaan program. Much like Chinas current series of Change Moon missions, these are intended to explore, probe and analyze the Moons surface, as well as its geological and other features, although India has so far not yet managed to proceed to the stage of human spaceflight, leaving only China, the US and potentially Russia to fulfill the dream of colonizing the Moon by the 2030s, over half a century after Zvazda was planned to have been operational.

A potentially very useful aspect of having a permanent presence on the Moon is the ability to construct and run scientific equipment like radio and optical telescopes on the far side of the Moon. Since these would face away from the Earth, theyd be shielded from most of the RF and other radiomagnetic radiation beamed out from Earth, whether from natural or human causes. One such project is the suggested NASA Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT) which would turn an entire lunar crater into a massive, 1 km diameter radio telescope.

LCRT is still being developed at JPL, with the idea being that itd be constructed by robots, which would be delivered from Earth together with all of the materials. The tantalizing thought here is of course that if we were to have manufacturing capacity on lunar soil, much of this material for the LCRT and similar instruments could be manufactured in-situ, saving enormous costs in launching tons of materials to the Moon. When considering the Moon as a jumping off point for further space exploration, this too might be a useful feature, along with the Moons low gravity to make launches a snap.

After the Chinese Change 5 mission returned the first lunar samples since the 1970s, analysis of the material found tiny glass beads containing significant amounts of water, presumably from asteroid impacts. This suggests that water may be more prevalent in the Moon than previously assumed, and also more widely available across the surface as well. Clearly, before we can set up manufacturing facilities on the Moon there is still a lot we have to learn, but rather than just a dusty rock in space, it would appear that its perhaps not as desiccated and empty as once assumed.

Much of the current and upcoming Moon missions seem to be focused on this type of exploration for probably just that reason. Which materials are available on the Moon, and in what quantities? How hard would it be to process them for ISRU, and what would be the cost-benefit between launching materials to the Moon, as well as Moon-based manufacturing and sending it to Earth? For both the Chinese (CLEP) and Russian (Luna-Glob) Moon programs, the initial focus is on setting up a robotic lunar base, which would be used for research on In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) and manufacturing techniques.

Although the Moon is littered with Sun-faded national flags, it is hoped that no Earth nation would be able to claim something like mining rights on the Moon, let alone parts of it. This reflects the attitude towards the continent of Antarctica, which has so far been protected by the 1961 Antarctic Treaty. Yet because the very similar Outer Space Treaty (OST) is focused primarily on the use of outer space for weapons and military purposes, the 1979 Moon Treaty was created, that establishes that jurisdiction outside Earth would default to international law, with no possibility of national claims on lunar resources.

To this day, enthusiasm for the Moon Treaty has been lacking with neither the US, nor China or Russia signing it which might signal brewing issues if a rush for lunar resources were to commence in earnest. While over the intervening half century the Moon has been left mostly alone, the Chinese program is ambitiously eyeing the end of this decade for a small robotic research base, while India and private companies are also trying their luck at lunar exploration.

Due to current geopolitical considerations, the Russian Moon program with the Luna 25 through Luna 27 landers have been postponed, and may not fly at all, depending on Roscosmos future. In a sense the curse on Soviet Moon exploration does seem to have remained in place.

Even if water is more plentiful on the Moon than initially assumed, the lunar poles have a major advantage over the rest of the lunar surface in that these do not face the same brutal lunar day. One rotation of the Moon takes about a month, resulting in about two weeks of darkness and two weeks of sunlight. This means that solar power is really only a realistic option at the poles, with some areas experiencing almost continuous illumination.

For any mining and research bases elsewhere on the Moon, this would mean the use of nuclear reactors and RTGs, much as was planned for the Zvezda base. The Kilopower project, in development by NASA and the US Department of Energy (DOE), aims to produce a range of reactors which can be used on the Moon or Mars. As for why so many Moon missions target the lunar south pole rather than the north pole, this can be explained based on the suspicion of water ice in shadowed craters, of which the lunar south pole has significantly more than the north pole.

With little to differentiate both poles, and the rest of the lunar surface having been explored in more detail already by both the Apollo and various robotic missions, the south pole was an obvious exploration target, and due to the presence of more sunlight might be more suitable for a human outpost.

See the rest here:

Humanity's Return To The Moon And The Prospect Of South Pole ... - Hackaday