History Of Forgotten Moon Bases

June 16, 2025 by Al Williams 37 Comments

If you were alive when 2001: A Space Odyssey was in theaters, you might have thought it didn’t really go far enough. After all, in 1958, the US launched its first satellite. The first US astronaut went up in 1961. Eight years later, Armstrong put a boot on the moon’s surface. That was a lot of progress for 11 years. The movie came out in 1968, so what would happen in 33 years? Turns out, not as much as you would have guessed back then. [The History Guy] takes us through a trip of what could have been if progress had marched on after those first few moon landings. You can watch the video below.

The story picks up way before NASA. Each of the US military branches felt like it should take the lead on space technology. Sputnik changed everything and spawned both ARPA and NASA. The Air Force, though, had an entire space program in development, and many of the astronauts for that program became NASA astronauts.

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Retrotechtacular: Arthur C. Clarke Predicts The Future

June 16, 2025 by Al Williams 22 Comments

Predicting the future is a dangerous occupation. Few people can claim as much success as Arthur C. Clarke, the famous science and science fiction author. Thanks to the BBC and the Australian Broadcasting Company, we can see what Sir Arthur thought about the future in 1964 and then ten years later in 1974.

Perhaps his best-known prediction was that of communication satellites, but he called quite a few other things, too. Like all prognosticators, he didn’t bat a thousand, and he missed a wrinkle or two, but overall, he has a very impressive track record.

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Big Chemistry: Seawater Desalination

June 16, 2025 by Dan Maloney 40 Comments

For a world covered in oceans, getting a drink of water on Planet Earth can be surprisingly tricky. Fresh water is hard to come by even on our water world, so much so that most sources are better measured in parts per million than percentages; add together every freshwater lake, river, and stream in the world, and you’d be looking at a mere 0.0066% of all the water on Earth.

Of course, what that really says is that our endowment of saltwater is truly staggering. We have over 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of the stuff, most of it easily accessible to the billion or so people who live within 10 kilometers of a coastline. Untreated, though, saltwater isn’t of much direct use to humans, since we, our domestic animals, and pretty much all our crops thirst only for water a hundred times less saline than seawater.

While nature solved the problem of desalination a long time ago, the natural water cycle turns seawater into freshwater at too slow a pace or in the wrong locations for our needs. While there are simple methods for getting the salt out of seawater, such as distillation, processing seawater on a scale that can provide even a medium-sized city with a steady source of potable water is definitely a job for Big Chemistry.

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Watkin’s Tower: London’s Failed Eiffel Tower

June 13, 2025 by Maya Posch 8 Comments

The city of London is no stranger to tall constructions today, but long before the first skyscrapers would loom above its streets, Watkin’s Tower was supposed to be the tallest structure in not only London but also the entirety of the UK. Inspired by France’s recently opened Eiffel tower, railway entrepreneur and Member of Parliament [Sir Edward Watkin] wanted to erect a structure that would rival the Eiffel tower, as part of a new attraction park to be constructed near the Middlesex hamlet of Wembley. In a retrospective, [Rob’s London] channel takes a look at what came to be known as Watkin’s Folly among other flattering names.

The first stage of Watkin's Tower at Wembley Park. The only to be ever completed. (Source: Wikimedia) — The first stage of Watkin’s Tower at Wembley Park. The only to be ever completed. (Source: Wikimedia)

After [Gustave Eiffel], the architect of the Eiffel tower recused himself, a design competition was held for a tower design, with the Illustrated Catalogue of the 68 designs submitted available for our perusal. The winner turned out to be #37, an eight-legged, 366 meter tall tower, much taller than the 312.2 meter tall Eiffel tower, along with multiple observation decks and various luxuries to be enjoyed by visitors to Wembley Park.

Naturally, [Watkin] commissioned a redesign to make it cheaper, which halved the number of legs, causing subsidence of the soil and other grievances later on. Before construction could finish, the responsible company went bankrupt and the one constructed section was demolished by 1907. Despite this, Wembley Park was a success and remains so to this day with Wembley Stadium built where Watkin’s Folly once stood.

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End Of An Era: NOAA’s Polar Sats Wind Down Operations

June 12, 2025 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

Since October 1978, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has operated its fleet of Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites (POES) — the data from which has been used for a wide array of environmental monitoring applications, from weather forecasting to the detection of forest fires and volcanic eruptions. But technology marches on, and considering that even the youngest member of the fleet has been in orbit for 16 years, NOAA has decided to retire the remaining operational POES satellites on June 16th.

NOAA Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite (POES)

Under normal circumstances, the retirement of weather satellites wouldn’t have a great impact on our community. But in this case, the satellites in question utilize the Automatic Picture Transmission (APT), Low-Rate Picture Transmission (LRPT), and High Resolution Picture Transmission (HRPT) protocols, all of which can be received by affordable software defined radios (SDRs) such as the RTL-SDR and easily decoded using free and open source software.

As such, many a radio hobbyist has pointed their DIY antennas at these particular satellites and pulled down stunning pictures of the Earth. It’s the kind of thing that’s impressive enough to get new folks interested in experimenting with radio, and losing it would be a big blow to the hobby.

Luckily, it’s not all bad news. While one of the NOAA satellites slated for retirement is already down for good, at least two remaining birds should be broadcasting publicly accessible imagery for the foreseeable future.

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Crowdsourcing SIGINT: Ham Radio At War

June 12, 2025 by Al Williams 18 Comments

I often ask people: What’s the most important thing you need to have a successful fishing trip? I get a lot of different answers about bait, equipment, and boats. Some people tell me beer. But the best answer, in my opinion, is fish. Without fish, you are sure to come home empty-handed.

On a recent visit to Bletchley Park, I thought about this and how it relates to World War II codebreaking. All the computers and smart people in the world won’t help you decode messages if you don’t already have the messages. So while Alan Turing and the codebreakers at Bletchley are well-known, at least in our circles, fewer people know about Arkley View.

The problem was apparent to the British. The Axis powers were sending lots of radio traffic. It would take a literal army of radio operators to record it all. Colonel Adrian Simpson sent a report to the director of MI5 in 1938 explaining that the three listening stations were not enough. The proposal was to build a network of volunteers to handle radio traffic interception.

That was the start of the Radio Security Service (RSS), which started operating out of some unused cells at a prison in London. The volunteers? Experienced ham radio operators who used their own equipment, at first, with the particular goal of intercepting transmissions from enemy agents on home soil.

At the start of the war, ham operators had their transmitters impounded. However, they still had their receivers and, of course, could all read Morse code. Further, they were probably accustomed to pulling out Morse code messages under challenging radio conditions.

Over time, this volunteer army of hams would swell to about 1,500 members. The RSS also supplied some radio gear to help in the task. MI5 checked each potential member, and the local police would visit to ensure the applicant was trustworthy. Keep in mind that radio intercepts were also done by servicemen and women (especially women) although many of them were engaged in reporting on voice communication or military communications.

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Reconductoring: Building Tomorrow’s Grid Today

June 11, 2025 by Dan Maloney 65 Comments

What happens when you build the largest machine in the world, but it’s still not big enough? That’s the situation the North American transmission system, the grid that connects power plants to substations and the distribution system, and which by some measures is the largest machine ever constructed, finds itself in right now. After more than a century of build-out, the towers and wires that stitch together a continent-sized grid aren’t up to the task they were designed for, and that’s a huge problem for a society with a seemingly insatiable need for more electricity.

There are plenty of reasons for this burgeoning demand, including the rapid growth of data centers to support AI and other cloud services and the move to wind and solar energy as the push to decarbonize the grid proceeds. The former introduces massive new loads to the grid with millions of hungry little GPUs, while the latter increases the supply side, as wind and solar plants are often located out of reach of existing transmission lines. Add in the anticipated expansion of the manufacturing base as industry seeks to re-home factories, and the scale of the potential problem only grows.

The bottom line to all this is that the grid needs to grow to support all this growth, and while there is often no other solution than building new transmission lines, that’s not always feasible. Even when it is, the process can take decades. What’s needed is a quick win, a way to increase the capacity of the existing infrastructure without having to build new lines from the ground up. That’s exactly what reconductoring promises, and the way it gets there presents some interesting engineering challenges and opportunities.

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