Solar Building Automatically Shades Itself From The Sun [pics]

The Devonshire Building is a very green building, that automatically opens and closes banks of shades on it’s south facing façade. The “intelligent” system tracks the amount of sunlight entering the windows, and takes into account the time of day and season.

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NASA Plans Bigger Moon Base, Sporty Rovers for Future Missions

The next astronauts to work on the moon will likely live in larger habitats and drive sporty new rovers capable of two-week treks, NASA officials said Thursday. Rather than assembling a lunar outpost over time from a multitude of small, separately launched modules, NASA is now hoping to land up to three large habitats on fewer flights to build a beachhead on the moon, the space agency said.

Doug Cooke, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for exploration systems, said that the space agency’s revised lunar plan calls for the launching of larger habitats to the moon on unmanned cargo flights. That way, the first new lunar astronauts could begin to reap science rewards faster than if they had to haul smaller habitat sections and hardware to the moon on each flight, then combine them into a larger base to support long-duration expeditions.

“We want to get scientific return. We want to get information that will help, potentially, space commerce and we want to get international participation early,” Cooke told reporters in a teleconference. “All of these objectives we want to address as early in the flights as we possibly can by getting the outpost up and running quickly.”

Cooke and other NASA officials detailed the agency’s revised lunar plan at the Space 2007 Conference of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) in Long Beach, California. NASA aims to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 using its space shuttle successor — the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle and the Ares I booster — as well as the Ares V heavy-lift rocket.

“There is some great science to do on the moon,” said Laurie Leshin, director of sciences and exploration NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, adding that future astronauts will help better understand the moon’s environment and interior.

NASA has eyed the moon’s Shackleton Crater near the lunar south pole as a possible moon base site because of its proximity to permanently lit and shadowed regions that could be key for solar power stations and the hunt for water ice. But Cooke said that Shackleton is not the only candidate for a moon base, especially since the revised plan calls for mobile habitat modules that could move between science targets or gather together in a sort of lunar spare parts depot.

Data from NASA’s unmanned Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, set to launch next year, and other international probes will help pin down future landing sites, Cooke added.

Lunar hot rod

Once astronauts return to the moon, NASA does not expect them to simply stand around their landing craft collecting nearby rocks.

Astronaut Mike Gernhardt, NASA’s lead for extravehicular physiology systems and performance projects, said the agency is now planning to send a pair of pressurized rovers that will allow spaceflyers to explore more of the lunar surface while retaining the relative comfort of a shirt-sleeve environment.

“They’re basically habitats on wheels,” Gernhardt said, adding that the new vehicles would be about the same size as the unpressurized rovers driven by astronauts during NASA’s Apollo moon landings. “If you can picture this thing, it’s kind of a combination between a spacesuit and a sports car.”

Both rovers would be deployed together, each with a crew of two astronauts. If one rover failed, all four spaceflyers could pile into the remaining vehicle to return to their lunar base, Gernhardt said. Current plans call for a 5,000-pound (2,267-kilogram) pressurized vehicle with seats that fold into beds for longer trips.

The two-person rovers would be equipped to handle three-day, seven-day and two-week excursions on the moon with exterior-mounted spacesuits that could be donned by climbing through a shared hatchway, Gernhardt said. It could take just 10 minutes to step into the spacesuits and onto the lunar surface, he added.

Short jaunts could cover about 25 miles (40 kilometers) with the two-week trips roving across 596 miles (960 kilometers) across the lunar surface, he added.

As to how much the rovers may cost, Gernhardt could only offer an estimate.

“I will only say that it will be more than a Ferrari,” he said.

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Mind-Boggling Visualization: One Quintillion United States Pennies

Value in U.S. dollars = $10,000,670,883,840,000.00 (Ten quadrillion, six hundred seventy billion, eight hundred eighty-three million, eight hundred and forty thousand dollars and zero cents).

Now we’ve stepped up another factor of 1,000. One quintillion pennies. This many pennies, if laid out flat like a carpet, would cover the surface of the earth – twice. If you look hard,myou can still see the Sears Tower and other buildings at lower right. Another way to see it is to realize that Mt. Everest (29,000 ft.) is only 1,700 feet taller than this 27,300-foot cube.

This is as far as we will go. Three trillion tons of pennies is quite enough. To imagine larger cubes, (stepping by factors of 1,000), just imagine cubes roughly ten times larger than the last one. For instance, one quintillion pennies makes the cube above – about 5 miles on each side. If you step up to one sextillion, imagine a cube about 50 miles wide tall and thick.

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Sci-fi inspired Spaceport in New Mexico

Next time that you’re waiting for your trip to space, you’ll be able to do so in style. Well fine, space travel is still a few decades away for us meager mortals, but at the very least, we can marvel at the beautiful and science-fiction inspired designs for the New Mexico Spaceport Authority building from Foster + Partners which not only aim to make you get into the mood for space travel, they will also meet LEED platinum standards when finished.

The winning team, led by Foster + Partners and which includes URS, SMPC Architects, PHA Consult, Balis and Company and Exploration-Synthesis Partners, worked hard to provide a setting which would capture the drama of space flight, something which, I think that we can all agree, they succeeded on all counts.

But here at Inhabitat, we like to think that pretty pictures and great design should go hand in hand with incredible environmental performance, and this particular building does, in spades. The entire building was dug into the natural landscape to better use the thermal mass provided by the ground. It has also been designed with reducing not just its energy usage by using skylights and natural ventilation, but to diminish the actual embodied energy of the building materials as much as possible (something which you’ll be hearing much more from the more cutting-edge designs as they come down the line).

We hope that future spaceport developments look at this design, not as the best that they can do, but rather, as a minimum from where to start their work from. We are sure that they can figure it out, after all, they will have a building full of rocket scientists to do so.

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