Short Takes – 10-30-23

Blue Origin’s chief architect lifts the veil on stealthy moon startup at Pathfinder Awards. GeekWire.com article. Pull quote: ““We aim to be the first company that harvests natural resources from the moon to use here on Earth,” Lai told an audience of about 400 banquet-goers on Saturday night. “We’re building a completely novel approach to extract those resources, efficiently, cost-effectively and also responsibly. The goal is really to create a sustainable in-space economy.””

Sci-fi inspired tractor beams are real, and could solve a major space junk problem. LiveScience.com article. Pull quote: “The electrostatic tractor "should be able to produce the forces necessary to move a defunct satellite" and "certainly has a high potential to work in practice," Carolin Frueh, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Purdue University in Indiana, told Live Science in an email. "But there are still several engineering challenges to be solved along the way to make it real-world-ready."”

They went hunting for fossil fuels. What they found could help save the world. CNN.com article. Pull quote: “This was surprising, Pironon said. It indicated the presence of a large reservoir of hydrogen beneath. They ran calculations and estimated the deposit could contain between 6 million and 250 million metric tons of hydrogen.”

Kicking the LNG tank car down the road. LinkedIn.com article. Pull quote: “The most recent letter does, however, acknowledge an important and fundamental truth about PHMSA: It is by design a safety agency, not an environmental agency. During my time as PHMSA Administrator, I was privileged to observe first-hand as a genuinely gifted team of federal employees, engineers, and regulatory specialists, worked tirelessly to improve transportation safety with a relentless laser-like focus to develop a superior tank car with significant and proven safety enhancements. As they went about their work, the team, with their many years of experience in tank car design and engineering, and characteristics of LNG transportation, was concentrated on one thing, and one thing only – public safety.”