Due in part to the ballooning U.S. deficit, America’s replacement for the shuttle program, Constellation, has been cancelled.
Once the last space shuttle mission is completed this summer (circa 2011), American’s will be riding on Russian rockets to get to the International Space Station. 6 Comments Even thought the economy is sluggish, there are sectors that boom by benefiting from breakthrough technology that generate consumer demand.
The creation of transformational technologies on mobile platforms and the resulting growth of wireless data networks provides an example of a sector poised to boom. Since early breakthroughs in electrical distribution leading back to Edison and Tesla, electricity has taken the burden off of human muscle power for household chores, granting us appliance-created leisure time. It has lit the dark of night with the flick of a switch. By powering global communications networks, it has lit our minds, as well. With few keyboard inputs, we have access to more information than any previous generation in history.
Unfortunately, the current power grid is a dinosaur tracing its roots back to early grid projects in the late 1800s. From that time on, the U.S. power grid grew in something of a haphazard, piecemeal fashion — but did it grow! We often take technological change for granted. Many of us would not be here to read this if it weren’t for new medical breakthroughs.
We can see the change in other fields as well. Computing power and software that were once only the musings of science fiction writers are now commodities. Intel founder Gordon Moore first described this technological ramping-up back in the 1960s. I would like to provide you a heads-up regarding an important and fascinating new technological convergence.
For a majority of my career, I worked in the technology industry and facilitated the convergence of communications technology with computing technology. Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford’s car company, is certainly associated with Detroit.
However, there is another Ford story. Mr. Ford also cranked out cars in Pittsburgh. There are very exciting developments in electric cars that could put battery-powered vehicles in driveways of Americans in the very near future; and the technology fueling the transition could send shares of a carmaker significantly higher in the near term.
Here is everything you need to know to find gains in the electric car vehicle market right now. A giant leap to provide new access to space may actually be just around the corner. Within the past few months (circa November 2010), PayPal founder Elon Musk’s space exploration company, SpaceX, moved us closer to that goal. It did so by successfully launching a medium-lift rocket into low Earth orbit.
SpaceX was the first company to launch a privately funded rocket, Falcon 1, into orbit in late 2008. Other rockets being used by the defense industry are privately manufactured, of course, but they are the product of taxpayer funding. The Falcon is the first orbital platform that adheres to what we could consider an effort of free market entrepreneurship. Computer processing power, as you know, has been growing exponentially for decades. Our means of interacting with computers, however, have changed little since they first appeared.
Computer still convey information to users almost exclusively through sight and sound, speakers and screens. We still give information to computers mostly through keyboards, track pads and mouse devices. It has long been predicted that this would change. Nanotechnology is at the heart of a great number of breakthroughs that will power the future economy. Materials that will be manufactured using atomically precise technologies will offer performance and prices far superior to conventional materials.
For example, the state of the art in semiconductor technology is photolithographic manufacturing. Photolithography uses light to remove material on a chip wafer, layer by layer. It has been done that way for decades even as the chip density has increased and chip size has decreased. | Mike FarrellFormer rocket engineer and management consulant undergoing a "reset" to generate multiple income streams. 
|
RSS Feed