Ideas and Innovations Newsletter – 202608.22

Welcome to the second week of the Ideas and Innovations newsletter. I chose six articles and papers to feature this week. Along with a follow-up on one of last week’s selections, this week covers an even wider breadth of topics than usual. I don’t read a lot of papers in the biomedical fields, but I happened across a handful this week which intrigued me enough to merit an entry here.

Chinese Private Rocket Landing

Rocket reuse is not the straightforward boon it might seem at first glance. It does not necessarily save money, and it diminished the lift capability of the rocket in question. Its greatest advantage is its effect on launch rate. For the past several years, SpaceX has been effectively demonstrating just what kind of cadences can be enabled by efficient landing and reuse of first stage rockets; if I recall the figures correctly, they’ve launched more mass to orbit per year than the rest of the world combined, they’ve launched a rocket on average every 1.5 days, they’ve done launches within less than a day back-to-back, and they’ve turned around the same booster for another flight in days. From a time when most people scoffed at the notion of reusable rockets, we’ve now reached a time where customers would prefer a flight proven booster to a new one. China has secured a couple significant milestones in rocket reuse in the last few weeks, including with a successful soft landing of a commercial medium lift vehicle fairly similar in scope and approach to the Falcon 9. Successful and effective rocket reuse will be vital to support the Chinese push after several proliferated constellations.

Failed Rescue

If you’ve been following the updates in the link I shared last week, you already know this one. NASA and Katalyst have decided not to proceed with docking to a boosting SWIFT based on the LINK vehicle’s responses to its several attitude control anomalies. Both NASA and Katalyst sought to spin the fact they will be conducting RPO, and that they got this far, as a success, but the truth is that this means SWIFT will deorbit in a couple months, and the mission only real claim to distinguish itself is the rate at which it was prepped and launched. Given what happened after launch, this may prove a setback for more responsive and dynamic approaches to spacecraft engineering and development. I expect we’ll eventually get some additional details about what happened, but most of the information regarding the anomaly is likely to remain proprietary.

Not Enough Indigo?

Did you know there’s a myopia boom? I didn’t, which could reflect metaphorical nearsightedness, but more likely reflects that it’s not something I’ve investigated statistically. In this paper from Grytz et al., they report the possibility that an increase in myopia in humans is a result of a lack of exposure to indigo light, based on experiments conducted in tree shrews. Now, it is worth emphasizing that this was not clinical work and was not done in humans or even in one of the common human analog animals used in labs, so don’t go strapping on indigo goggles just yet. This is best viewed as preliminary work supporting hypothesis development. Still, it’s interesting to consider and should prompt some fascinating future research.

CME Geometry

Last week, I featured a paper on the use of machine learning and statistical methods to predict an aspect of solar weather. Those methods are useless without data, though, and the more data we have, the more complexity can be revealed and understood. This paper shows the advantage of having more source of data with different instruments and different perspectives on the sun by synthesizing those data into a high-resolution model of the unexpectedly complex geometry of a coronal mass ejection. Now, CMEs are a bit easier to predict and provide warning about than solar flares, because they travel slower than the speed of light (taking hours to reach Earth instead of minutes), but understanding them more thoroughly is still vital to improving our understanding of our space weather environment.

TENG Pacemaker

The most surprising thing about this paper is that no one has built one of these before. Papers about implants powered by the triboelectric effect were some of the first to clue me into the potential of this particular phenomenon, and I’m mostly featuring it here because I continue to explore the different ways the effect can be utilized.

Hot Hydrogen Invasion

Atomic hydrogen is difficult to contain under the best of circumstances. The small size of hydrogen atoms compared to other atoms and especially the gaps between other atoms in larger molecules means that hydrogen can invade the substance of other materials, leading to embrittlement and other material degradations. Rockets fueled by hydrogen must address this problem, but in most cases the containment is for a short enough time period that the material effects are not too significant, and the cryogenic maintenance of the hydrogen also limits its invasive abilities. Hot hydrogen is a different matter. This paper sets out to characterize how high temperature hydrogen damages a particular alloy.

That’s all for this week. If you have questions or have a subject you’d like me to cover in more depth, let me know in the comments.