8 Keeling brothers

Some interesting things occuring here at Nasa

Hello All,

Just thought I'd give you a little update of some of cool stuff that's happening here. I had a really good chat with one of the top people here about what they're getting up to. 

One of the things that's being worked on is a plan is to bring back the age of the Airship. The concept is that using new designs and engineering processes an Airship could comfortably carry over 500 tonnes of weight. An example given to me is that the blue berries that are eaten in the spring in California have to be transported from Chile. This is obviously quite a long way and what Nasa is proposing is that rather than having a multitude of different transport stages (say truck to lorry to plane to lorry etc), you would just dump the whole load on an airship and then use that to carry the cargo all the way up to California in one trip (they go about 120 -150 mph). He pointed out that as the airship wouldn't have to go through the time consuming continual process of unloading and loading, the overall journey time would be about the same. More importantly though it's carbon footprint would be an order of magnitude lower than any other type of transport.
 
Also with the advent of new technology in solar power cells, within a few years, a decade at most, the airships and their journeys could be made completely carbon neutral. This would be done by covering the airship with solar panels and using electricity to power the engines. Other ideas for the airships could be floating emergency hospitals which could go straight to a scene of a catastrophe, or just huge floating cruise ships. You could carry up to 5000 people on some of the designs Alan's team has looked at.
Other applications could be on placing renewable devices such as hugh wind turbines on top of normally inaccessible mountains, or transporting huge water turbines straight to a dam in the middle of beautiful habitat without ripping up the area to makes roads etc. All the materials could be carried straight from the factory to the intended site, completely negating the problem of the inhospitable locations or poor transport infrastructure.
 
One more application he mentioned was transport in Afghanistan. I laughed as the idea of a huge big target for all the Talabani to have a pop at flying fairly slowly across a battle field frankly struck as me as ridiculous. He admitted that it was slightly bizarre but said a few bullets holes really wouldn't make much of a difference, and that it was possible to create the skin of an air ship to be self healing. Later this month they are apparently going out into the dessert with an air ship and are going to start shooting it with guns and missels and see how long it lasts!
 
He really sold the whole thing to me which is not surprising as two weeks ago he sold it to Congress and they were so impressed they doubled his budget to about 20 million. It looks like the sky will soon be darkened by the bloody things!
 
The next thing he enlightened me on  was the giant breakthrough that has just been made in the science of batteries. at the moment a battery produces 200 kwph/kg. This compares to petrol which has an energy of 12000 kwph/kg (kilowatt per hour per kg), though one needs to remember that you then put this through a combustion engine of about 25% efficiency and are left with 4000 kwph/kg. Japanese scientists at AIST believe (and it's widely reported on the internet) that they have created a battery that has an energy of between 25000 and 50000 kwph/kg! This is obviously huge and if it's true, which everyone here is positive it is, it will completely transform transport. Literally. You'll be driving along at the same speed as a normal car, and when you need to 'refuel' you just pull into a fuel station and pull out your battery cassette and swap it for a full one. The battery would then be taken away to re-charged.

Another way to look at it is if you take the battery in your laptop. The same sized battery using the new technology would power the laptop for 1000 hours. Or a battery the size of the nail on your little finger would power your laptop for the usual 4 hours. Everyone here is literally buzzing with excitement.

Anyway I better get back to work but just thought you'd be interested in these developments!
 
Harry

FIRST KEELING IN SPACE?

Harry is off to California soon, working for NASA again. He was there last year too. If he plays his cards right he could be the first Keeling in space. Granny told me about this and I asked Harry for the story. It follows. Sadly he hasn't sent me real pictures yet, so I invented one, it's a bit further down.

Granny told me that John Ryan has died aged nearly 90. He created the fabulous Captain Pugwash cartoons (also pictured).  I knew his daughter Isabel very well and him slightly. You can read the obit on the Times here.

And apparently David has got the dreaded swine flu. Oink oink, recover quickly. They say it's quite mild if it doesn't kill you.

Here's what Harry said:
As to what I'll be getting up to this year, i'm not sure but i imagine it'll be similar to what I got up to last year.

Last year I was working in the Small Satellite Research and Development Unit...which is a bit of a mouthful. If you imagine every satellite engineering project has 5 stages, 1) design concepts, 2) design in better detail, 3) manufacture, 4) launch, and then 5) post launch, we working on the design pre concept. so pre stage 1). it was very preliminary stuff. We'd draw up a load of powerpoints which we would then present to some senior boffs and if they said yes another team would then start stage 1.

Last year when i arrived the team were already looking at a project to send a satellite to an asteroid called Apothis which has a chance, albeit tiny, of hitting Earth in 2036. The satellite would have headed out to the asteroid and then measured its trajectory exactly so we could either go phew, or go bugger and start to do something about it.

Another project we had a look at was a lunar lander and I've got some pretty cool videos of them experimenting with the thrusters in this giant cage.

I think the last project we had a look at was for a satellite to measure co2 levels in the atmosphere. Unsurprisingly all the money is now in doing research into global warming.

there were some amazing things on the base though. there was the fastest super computer and largest wind tunnel in the world. the wind tunnel was so large you could park a 737 inside it.

it was quite weird working there as I was foreign national. this meant i was one rung up the ladder from being a spy, and was treated accordingly. one of the departments i worked in had white tape around my desk, and if wanted to leave it, to say go to the loo, i had to raise a hand and be escorted. Alan who's dad's friend and a bigwig there took me over to the lockheed martin part of the base which shares the runway and it was ridiculous. apparently they make spy satellites there so not only did an armoured humvve drive along behind us to run us over if we made a run for it, there were signs every saying you will not be warned before being shot! pretty hairy stuff.

I did 6 and a half weeks last year, and I'm doing ten this year. It's an amazing place about 40mins south of San Francisco.
sorry if this is boring but i could literally drone on about it for hours.
is there anything else you want to know, or have i completely turned you off the idea! i think i've got a few pictures i could send to you if you wanted them.
anyway hope everything is good with you and hopefully hear from you soon.