cryptogon.com

The U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center in Warren, Mich., will host an official groundbreaking ceremony for the lab Aug. 17. Army, government and industry leaders are scheduled to be on hand for the event.

The GSPEL will be a one-of-a-kind research and testing laboratory complex. Eight different labs will be housed in the 30,000-square-foot facility and they are being designed as the cornerstone for the Army’s next generation of power and energy initiatives. The facility will provide scientists and researchers with the ability to integrate hybrid-electric and fuel-cell technologies into advanced military vehicles.

TARDEC worked with the Southwest Research Institute, an independent, nonprofit applied research and development organization in San Antonio, Texas, to develop the demanding equipment and facility specifications necessary to make the GSPEL a reality.

One state-of-the-art piece of equipment to be installed in the GSPEL is AeroVironment’s AV-800 Power Processing Unit. The unit, delivered to TARDEC in June, is the highest power-level power-processing unit in the United States. The AV-800 uses power from a grid to test batteries and vehicles, and is capable of returning energy back to the grid at more than 90-percent efficiency.

The amount of energy generated by the system makes it ideal for testing the Army’s next-generation fleet of hybrid-electric manned and unmanned tactical vehicles, officials said. The unit is also used for assisting with the development of stationary devices, such as grid-connected batteries and fuel-cell systems by simulating application-specific load profiles.

As both the Army and the automotive industry look for ways to improve fuel efficiency and reduce energy consumption, TARDEC is working to be a leader in energy security and the development of hybrid-electric technology for ground vehicle systems.

The system also has a version for music players, inserting commercials that come with an audible prompt to press a particular button to verify the listener’s attentiveness.

The inventors say the advertising would enable computers and other consumer electronics products to be offered to customers free or at a reduced price. In exchange, recipients would agree to view the ads. If, down the road, users found the advertisements and the attentiveness tests unendurable, they could pay to make the device “ad free” on a temporary or permanent basis.

Would anyone have guessed that Apple, so widely revered, would seek patent protection of a gimmick not unlike one used to sell vacation timeshares? (Agree to attend the sales seminar and get a free weekend getaway!) Or could anyone have predicted that the Apple of 2009, a company with premium products, would file a patent application that could make it a latter-day descendant of Free PC and ZapMe, companies that in 1999 gave away PCs engineered to always display on-screen ads?

What the application calls the “enforcement routine” entails administering periodic tests, like displaying on top of an ad a pop-up box with a response button that must be pressed within five seconds before disappearing to confirm that the user is paying attention.

Gold production from the Witwatersrand, the biggest known gold field in the world, peaked at around 1,000 tonnes in 1970 and has declined ever since. Hartnady says that while initially (1970-1975) the decline was “quite precipitous”, it has been interrupted by only short periods of slight trend reversal (1982-1984 and 1992-1993).

In it, Zuppero confirms everything – bad, weird, insane, amusing or simply astonishing – you might have always suspected about US government crazy weapons and the world of aerospace.

“Tony Zuppero, one of [a few] would-be nuclear rocketeers, tells those stories as he recalls them, with sometimes alarming candor, humor, and disappointment,” opined Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists after linking to the memoir on his secrecy blog.

Zuppero’s dream begins in 1968 with the scientist inspired by one of Freeman Dyson’s well-traveled crackpot ideas – that of powering a spaceship to the nearest star at one per cent of the speed of light, using atomic bombs. (Sci-fi authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle famously employed one in their alien invasion novel, Footfall.)

Working for a government lab, Zuppero asks to view the classified plans, called Orion, for the Dyson space ship.

“I was scrutinizing the drawing [of the space ship],” he writes. “It showed a really dinky and clearly horribly inefficient atomic bomb propulsion device. Nothing like what Freeman Dyson drew… The design seemed to be really dumb, like something one of my fraternity brothers would draw up inbetween periods of getting drunk.”

With the bloom only slightly off the rose, Zuppero visits a bunker full of thermonuclear bombs to see the basis for his dream’s propulsion. But the bombs are way too big, he observes, and there’s no way to get three million of them on a spaceship to the stars. Freeman Dyson should have seen the bomb room, Zuppero writes.

To continue his work on the Orion rocket, Zuppero needs it justified by attachment to weapons analyses. A boss first asks if it’s possible to tow an unshielded nuclear reactor behind an airplane so it spews radioactivity over the Soviet Union or Vietnam. The scientist’s mind freezes and he’s asked to analyze a different project.

Would it be possible to blow up the entire Soviet Union with a launch-to-arrival time of two minutes, so there could be no possibility of retaliation on warning?

This would be 5000 megatons or more, something the weapons shops of the United States could actually build, even though it would be monstrously large.

The technical dilemma was how to get it there fast. Using even more atomic bombs.

The reader immediately sees where this is going. Impractical.

Zuppero is blunt, often humorously so, immediately describing one of his bosses as a Nazi. The scientist is so frank because he is an “Aspie”, he explains – “Autistic, Like Mongoloids and Other Weird People” according to one subchapter. Likening himself to Mr Spock, he concedes that he sometimes says things which are inappropriate.

In the context of the book, it is a bit of an understatement.

After this preamble, Zuppero is “fired” into a job on spy satellites, one meaningless to his undying goal, to design a rocket which can get out into the solar system.

To do this, Zuppero needs fuel and gas stations in space, and the answer to that is water. With a nuclear-heated steam rocket, he can travel the solar system, filling up at near Earth comets. He even provides a map of them.

This puts him in contact with more interesting people, in particular the delightfully named Crazy Roger, a colonel in the US Air Force who pays Zuppero for an analysis based on his rocket idea.

Roger was head of Timber Wind, a special Strategic Defense Initiative project to build nuclear-powered rockets. The Federation of American Scientists uncovered Timber Wind in the early Nineties and the outcry over it – including a proposed test launch out of Vandenberg which, if it misfired, could potentially toss a nuclear reactor into New Zealand – eventually killed it.

It is retold in the chapter, “Crazy Roger’s Secret Nuclear Rocket”. In effect, this was a flying nuclear reactor, one that some assumed would be an orbiting radioactive garbage scow, raining down waste in places with unfortunate luck.

Even though space travel of the kind dreamed about decades ago had died, To Inhabit The Solar System is perfectly suited for movie-making, possibly as art house fare.

Replete with unusual characters and characterizations, good portions of it are laugh out loud funny, sometimes unintentionally so. One learns that being in space is a bummer, spaceships a bit like combined orbiting vomitoriums/outhouses.

“This is not sci-fi,” Zuppero tells readers right off.

Zuppero presents the reader with a collection of photos of ice moons he thinks humans could inhabit but believes “we are still the wrong species”: it’s too expensive and “we’re broke”. In the end the dream passes him by, but he clearly had a hell of a time chasing it.

Al Jazeera’s correspondent James Bays, who was among those who inspected the facilities on Sunday, said Bagram, unlike its Guantanamo counterpart, was clearly not going to be shut down soon.

“The new prison wing cost some $60 million to build … and is meant to be part of a new era of openness and transparency,” Bays said.

“But we were not shown the detainees. Human-rights lawyers say that, while the environment for the prisoners may be changing, their legal situation is not … not having been charged. Nor has any civilian lawyer ever been allowed inside.”

Bays said the extended prison could hold up to 1,000 detainees, but was at present holding around 700 inmates, including 30 foreign prisoners.

General Mark Martins, who runs detention operations at the airbase, said the US military was improving its treatment of detainees and had learnt many lessons since occupying the country in 2001.

“Detention, if not done properly, can actually harm the effort. We are a learning organisation … we believe transparency is certainly going to help the effort, and increase the credibility of the whole process,” Martins said.

However, Clara Gutteridge, an investigator of secret prisons and renditions from the human rights organisation, Reprieve, said Bagram is seen as “Guantanamo’s lesser-known evil twin”.

“All this talk about transparency, and the US government still won’t release a simple list of names of prisoners who are in Bagram,” she told Al Jazeera.

“None of them have had access to a lawyer … and that just seems very unfair.

“We at Reprieve see this as the next big fight after Guantanamo Bay.

“But one thing that the US government is saying is that Afghan prisoners in Afghanistan have less rights than any other prisoner which just seems absurd.”