Category Archives: Futurism

B.W.O - Barcelona (Shane 54 Myon Retro Futurism Remix)

By: Thomas Daly

See original here:
B.W.O - Barcelona (Shane 54 & Myon Retro Futurism Remix) - Video

Artist conception of Boeing CST-100 approaching the ISS. (Credit: Boeing)

Update on September 16 at 4:32 EDT: NASA has officially awarded both Boeing and SpaceX these commercial crew contracts. You can read the full story about the awards here.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that Boeing is likely to be the primary winner of NASAs Commercial Crew contract. This contract, which is worth billions, is being awarded for the final phase of development for a manned spacecraft that can take astronauts to the International Space Station and serve as a replacement for the Space Shuttle. That contract is expected to be awarded this month.

There are currently three contenders for the Commercial Crew contract: Boeing, which is developing a manned capsule currently named the CST-100; SpaceX, whose unmanned version of its Dragon capsule has made several trips to the space station, and Sierra Nevada Corporation, whose winged Dream Chaser spacecraft will be capable of landing on a runway.

According to the WSJ report, a growing consensus of experts in industry and government believe Boeing will win the primary award of the contract, due to a belief that the veteran aerospace company is the least risky option. The report also notes that there is likely to be a smaller award to develop an alternative to Boeings CST-100, and that award is likely to go to SpaceX.

One thing that may have clinched the deal for Boeing, according to Reuters, is an unexpected assist from Jeff Bezos. According to that report, Bezos commercial space venture, Blue Origin, will be working with the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture United Launch Alliance to develop a new rocket engine to replace the currently Russian-built RD-180 engine.

Blue Origin is currently developing what it calls the BE-3 rocket engine for flights of its planned New Shephard space capsule. This liquid hydrogen fueled engine had its first successful full-cycle test in December of last year.

Blue Origin tests its BE-3 rocket engine. (Credit: Blue Origin)

Boeings CST-100 is designed to be lifted into orbit on a ULA Atlas 5 rocket, which features the RD-180 engine. However, a number of government officials have expressed concerned about ULAs reliance on the Russian engines, particularly because ULA is currently the only launch provider for the military and other government agencies. Earlier this year, the Russian Deputy Prime Minister threatened that the country would halt the export of RD-180 engines to the U.S. However, engine deliveries since have so far continued uninterrupted.

ULA has stated that it currently has a two year supply of the engines, and last week the company announced that it was finalizing details related to the development of a replacement engine with a U.S. aerospace partner. If these reports are correct and the partner referred to is Blue Origin, this may be what tipped the decision in their favor.

See original here:
Reports: Boeing To Beat Out SpaceX For NASA Contract - Thanks To Jeff Bezos

Julian Assange is currently answering questions in a live chat over at Gawker, promoting his new book, When Google Met Wikileaks. One of the most interesting exchanges for readers of Paleofuture actually comes from a question by Matthew Phelan who writes the Gawker subdomain Black Bag.

Phelan asks about the culture of Google and whether its vision of the future aligns with more retro notions of technology, information and politics seen in cultural artifacts like Star Trek.

Question from Matthew Phelan of the Gawker subdomain Black Bag:

There was a piece in Slate last year about Google, that I kept thinking about with respect to this book, about how Google's internal culture and goals are bound up in Star Trek. For example: Amit Singhal, the head of Google's search rankings team, told the South by Southwest Interactive Festival that "The destiny of [Google's search engine] is to become that Star Trek computer, and that's what we are building."

It makes sense to me in that there's a real Camelot-era liberal pro-statist ideal underlying Star Trek's vision of the future, and I'm curious what your sense was as to whether or not Eric Schmidt really buys into that. AND/OR I am curious to know how your idealized vision of the future differs from that Google Star Trek model.

From Julian Assange:

I hadn't seen that piece. At a glance, it reminds me of the discovery that the NSA had had the bridge of the Enterprise recreated. In my experience it is more reliable and fairer to look at peoples interests and expenditure rather than try to diagnose their inner mental state, as the latter often lets people project their own biases. As I say in the book, I found Eric Schmidt to be, as you would expect, a very sharp operator. If you read "The New Digital Age", the apolitical futurism of Star Trek seems to fit what Schmidt writes quite well. I also quite liked this summary of Google's vision for the future: "Google's vision of the future is pure atom-age 1960s Jetsons fantasy, bubble-dwelling spiritless sexists above a ruined earth."

It's interesting to see Assange describe Star Trek futurism as apolitical, especially because from Phelan's question (and any critical reading of Star Trek's quasi-utopian, post-scarcity values) Star Trek is presented as far from apolitical. Even "atom-age 1960s Jetsons fantasy" doesn't seem to quite nail it.

If anything, this exchange shows that we're grasping at imperfect utopian analogies for the future dredged up from the past when what we really should be looking at are the dystopias.

Continued here:
Julian Assange Says "Apolitical Futurism of Star Trek" Fits Google

Video will begin in 5 seconds.

The bigger iPhone screen unveiled by Apple could have happened much sooner, according to deputy technology editor Ben Grubb. Illustrated by Rocco Fazzari.

I can only imagine that my personal invite to Apple's Festival of Shiny Things went missing in the post. I stood by the letter box every day waiting for Tim Cook to write. When the day arrived and I found myself abed, asleep, when I should have been in the front row knocking mugachinos with Jony and the boys, I was, to quote the internet, disappointed but only with the post office for losing my invite. Never with Tim.

Unlike every tech journalist ever, I wasn't disappointed with the new phones or the Apple Watch. They were cool, if a little bemusing.

The iPhone has always been a compact device, but these latest versions are what Americans call big-ass and insanely big-ass. The Plus-sized model will fit nicely into a man bag. (Don't you judge me it's not like I'm wearing pocket squares). But it will look bizarre, like a silicon boogie board, strapped to your arm when you're out running or at the gym, which is how millions of people currently use their phones every day.

Illustration: Glen Le Lievre.

The Apple Watch, meanwhile, is beautiful and amazing, but in the way that visions of retro-futurism from 1975 are beautiful and amazing. It would look totally right, for instance, if worn by Barbara Bain, to match her spankyest bell-bottomed jumpsuit while Moonbase Alpha is blown out of Earth's gravity in the pilot episode ofSpace 1999.

Advertisement

While I'd have happily accepted Tim's invite to hang out at the Flint Centre, it was a lucky thing that having been spurned, I didn't get up at quarter to three in the morning like some other addicts. (One hopeless iJunkie of my acquaintance is a gentleman farmer, who probably curdled the milk of his moo cows cursing at the stuttering video and unexpected Chinese voice-over Apple pushed out to his iPhone at omigod-thirty in the morning). Apparently a couple of lines of wonky code on the website trashed the live stream of the event for millions of viewers around the world. Yes, a phone launch rates like Wimbledon now but then so do web casts of video game tournaments you've never heard of, or YouTube updates from some guy walking across the jaggy, 8-bit world of Minecraft. It's like William Gibson quipped, the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.

The future seems to have finally caught up with ageing Sith Lord Rupert Murdoch, despite his best efforts at creeping just out of reach. Rupe took to the Twitterz this week, genuinely baffled about whether his life long crusade for the truth was helped or hindered by running a bit of scruff on page three of his tabloids.

Read this article:
Insanely big-ass iPhone future is already here

[1080p]DJMax Trilogy - Futurism / 6KeyHD

By: Kuzuhara

Visit link:
[1080p]DJMax Trilogy - Futurism / 6KeyHD - Video

In the year 2013, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere particularly carbon dioxide increased at its fastest rate in 30 years. According to the World Meterological Association, concentrations of CO2 have reached new highs higher, in fact, than theyve ever been since humans first evolved. That continued increase of CO2 emissions is, in turn, a major contributor to climate change and ocean acidification.

The problems of carbon dioxide emissions and the resulting climate change are too big to have one solution. Theyll require multiple solutions from business, government, and other institutions.

Liquid Light, a New Jersey-based startup, believes it has one of those solutions. The company announced today that it has raised $15 million in series B financing to take their chemical process to an industrial scale. That process? Theyre turning carbon dioxide emissions from industry into commercially useful chemicals like the precursors used to create the plastic in your soda bottle.

A very basic overview of Liquid Lights process. (Credit: Liquid Light)

Most industrial organic chemicals, like those used in plastics, are composed of just three atoms in different combinations: carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Liquid Lights process uses CO2 as the base of its chemical synthesis, along with different co-feedstocks of other chemicals which can include the waste products of other industrial processes.

Of course, that chemistry isnt new plenty of scientists are working on ways to reuse carbon dioxide. What differentiates Liquid Lights product involves both reducing the amount of energy needed for the process by the use of its catalysts and utilizing cheap waste CO2 from industrial processes rather than more expensive sources of chemicals used for industrial organic chemistry such as corn or oil. Those combine to make the process extremely cost-efficient. So far, their methods have been validated in the lab, and a research team at Princeton University confirmed it in a paper published in July.

With the new investment money coming from investors such as Sustainable Conversion Ventures, VantagePoint Capital Partners, BP Ventures, Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital, and Osage University Partners, the company hopes to scale up their process to validate results on a larger level, both in terms of the process itself and the plastics that result. If theyre successful, that information can be used to produce tons of organic chemicals per day at the plant level.

Although the process can be used to create different organic chemicals, Liquid Light is setting its sights on just one for right now the production of ethylene glycol. Ethylene glycol is used as the base material for the production of polyester, plastic bottles, and other products. The company estimates that the size of that market is about $87 billion.

If theyre successful at scaling up, Liquid Light could become a serious contender in its industry. The company claims that its carbon feedstock cost to make a ton of ethylene glycol could be around 20% of the cost of more traditional methods. If that holds, they could be profitable pretty quickly while at the same time providing a potential solution to help prevent the worst predicted effects of climate change.

Follow me onTwitterorFacebook. Read my Forbes bloghere.

View post:
Liquid Light Raises $15 Million To Convert Carbon Emissions To Chemicals

Studio-X-Neo-Futurism
Dj Fido Studio-X-Neo-Futurism descargar set completo http://www.mediafire.com/download/dx4b7rant5apn52/Dj+Fido+Studio-X-Neo-Futurism%282%29.mp3.

By: Dj Fido Gonzlez Chile

Go here to see the original:
Studio-X-Neo-Futurism - Video

Virgin's SpaceShip2 in flight (Credit: MarsScientific.com and Clay Center Observatory)

NASA announced on Monday that it has awarded four American suborbital space companies to carry payloads to the boundary of space.

According to NASA, each of the four selected companies will receive an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract for integration and flight services. The contracts are worth a minimum of $100,000, have a duration of three years and include two year extension options.

The four companies selected for the contracts are:

Virgin Galactic, which is best known for developing its space tourism business with its SpaceShipTwo craft. However, in addition to carrying passengers, the company is also actively working to offer the use SpaceShipTwo for scientific research. The company is also developing LauncherOne, which will aim to deliver small satellites into orbit.

Masten Space Systems, which is working to develop vertical takeoff, vertical landing unmanned spacecraft. The company is probably most famous for winning the $1 million Lunar Lander X-Prize in 2009. It was also recently awarded a contract from DARPA to work on developing a reusable spaceplane.

UP Aerospace, which focuses on developing suborbital rockets for the delivery of research payloads. The company most recently launched a suborbital rocket for NASA in November of 2013, and its next launch is scheduled for October 7, 2014.

Paragon Space Development Corporation, which has developed hardware for over 70 space flight missions. Paragon is partnered with another company, World View Experience, which aims to use balloons to take commercial passengers to the edge of space about 120,000 feet above the surface.

Weve made tremendous progress in working toward the goal of regular, frequent and predictable access to near-space at a reasonable cost with easy recovery of intact payloads, NASAs Michael Gazarik said in a press release. These proven flight service providers will allow for payloads from organizations including NASA, industry, academia, and other government agencies to be tested on flights to the edge of space before being committed to demonstration in the harsh environment of space itself.

Follow me onTwitterorFacebook. Read my Forbes bloghere.

Read the original post:
NASA Awards Contracts To Virgin Galactic And Other Suborbital Providers

On Sunday night at 11:22pm EDT, a Chinese Long March 4B satellite lifted off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center. This marks the second Chinese launch in the month of September and was, like the first launch, not publicly announced until after its completion.

The Chinese news outlet Xinhua reports that the rocket was carrying two satellites. Both satellites were placed into sun-synchronous orbit.

The first was the Yaogan-21 remote sensing satellite. According to the Xinhua and Chinese government, this satellite is intended to be used for scientific experiments, natural resource survey, estimation of crop yield and disaster relief.

The second satellite is the Tiantuo-2, a small 67kg satellite which is equipped with four video cameras and is able to track and record moving targets in real time. Its reported primary purpose is to be used with a system thats capable of tracking the location of ships at sea.

However, according to space industry analyst Bill Ostrove, the purpose of both of these satellites is widely believed by Western sources to be spy satellites aimed at providing intelligence to the Chinese military.

This is the second announced launch of the Long March 4B rocket since one experienced a third stage failure in December of 2013. That rocket was carrying the CBERS-3 satellite, which was part of a series of Earth imaging satellites as part of a joint project between China and Brazil. The next satellite in the series, CBERS-4, is tentatively scheduled for launch in December 2014.

To see what has launched and whats planned to launch this month, please see ourSeptember launch schedule.

Follow me onTwitterorFacebook. Read my Forbes bloghere.

Read the rest here:
China Launches Two More Satellites Into Orbit

An Ariane 5 rocket in flight. (Credit: Arianespace)

Today, European commercial launch provider Arianespace has announced that it has signed four new commercial launch contracts. This marks an impressive 11 launch contracts signed so far this year for the company, with two current contracts under negotiation to be completed by the years end.

According to the company, these four contracts bring Arianespaces total launch backlog to 38 satellite launches for 29 different customers. The value of these combined orders exceeds $5.82 billion. The company claims to now hold 60% of commercial launch market.

All four launches satellites are between 3,300 and 3,500kg and will be launched by an Ariane 5 rocket with other, heavier satellites, whose launches are already on the books. The Ariane 5 is capable of delivering 10,000kg of payload to geosynchronous transfer orbit, over twice as much as its competitor SpaceXs Falcon 9 rocket. This ability to lift two larger satellites at once helps the company stay competitive with other providers.

Dual manifesting allows Arianespace to be very competitive on price, a company spokesperson told me. It is part of our business model.

The Optus 10 satellite being prepped for launch at Arianespaces launch center. (Credit: Arianespace)

In 2016, Arianespace will be launching communications satellite JCSAT-1 for its customer SKY Perfect JSAT Corporation. The satellite will be used to broadcast TV signals for its customers. This will be the 29th satellite that Arianespace has launched for SKY Perfect since 1989.

For Korean satellite communications provider, KTSat, Arianespace will be launching Koreasat 7. This satellite, to be launched in 2016, will provide communications services to customers in Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia and India. This will mark the third KTSat launch performed by Arianespace.

In 2017, Arianespace will be launching the telecommunications satellite Hylas 4 on behalf of its customer, the London-based Avanti Communications. Hylas 4 will be builtd by Orbital Sciences and will provide TV and data services to Africa, Europe and Latin America.

During the third quarter of 2016, Arianespace will launch IntelSat 36 on behalf of telecommunications service provider Intelsat. This will be the 55th satellite that Arianespace has launched for Intelsat. The satellite will deliver data services to customers in Asia and Africa.

View post:
Europe's Arianespace Claims 60% Of The Commercial Launch Market