Wings in Orbit: Scientific and Engineering Legacies of the Space Shuttle, 1971-2010

The Space Shuttle is an engineering marvel perhaps only exceeded by the station itself. The shuttle was based on the technology of the 1960s and early 1970s. It had to overcome significant challenges to make it reusable. Perhaps the greatest challenges were the main engines and the Thermal Protection System. The program has seen terrible tragedy in its 3 decades of operation, yet it has also seen marvelous success. One of the most notable successes is the Hubble Space Telescope, a program that would have been a failure without the shuttle's capability to rendezvous, capture, repair, as well as upgrade. Now Hubble is a shining example of success admired by people around the world. As the program comes to a close, it is important to capture the legacy of the shuttle for future generations. That is what "Wings In Orbit" does for space fans, students, engineers, and scientists. This book, written by the men and women who made the program possible, will serve as an excellent reference for building future space vehicles. We are proud to have played a small part in making it happen. Our journey to document the scientific and engineering accomplishments of this magnificent winged vehicle began with an audacious proposal: to capture the passion of those who devoted their energies to its success while answering the question "What are the most significant accomplishments?" of the longestoperating human spaceflight program in our nation s history. This is intended to be an honest, accurate, and easily understandable account of the research and innovation accomplished during the era

High-Tech Trash

High-Tech Trash: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure maps an archaeology of failure in a culture seemingly ill-equipped to deal with it. To better understand failure, Kane argues, we must abstract from our subjective, personal disappointments and see them as meaningful symbols of a broader human struggle. By connecting twenty-first century digital aesthetics to critical issues in the history of high-tech, the book elucidates what it means to be an error-prone, fallible human in an age of hyper technology; to fail again and again without recourse to anything but repetition

High-Tech Trash

High-Tech Trash analyzes creative strategies in glitch, noise, and error to chart the development of an aesthetic paradigm rooted in failure. Carolyn L. Kane explores how technologically influenced creative practices, primarily from the second half of the twentieth and first quarter of the twenty-first centuries, critically offset a broader culture of pervasive risk and discontent. In so doing, she questions how we continue onward, striving to do better and acquire more, despite inevitable disappointment. High-Tech Trash speaks to a paradox in contemporary society in which failure is disavowed yet necessary for technological innovation.  “Leonard Cohen sang ‘There’s a crack in everything…that’s how the light gets in.’ Here, Carolyn Kane teaches us how to see that light, one crack at a time.” FRED TURNER, author of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties  “Kane profiles art practices and media discourses that exploit and celebrate, rather than filter or suppress, all kinds of errors and noises. A welcome intervention in a number of discursive fields.” PETER KRAPP, author of Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture  “An original work of scholarship that addresses some of the most pervasive phenomena and foundational questions in the contemporary media environment.” ROBERT HARIMAN, coauthor of The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship  CAROLYN L. KANE is Associate Professor of Communication at Ryerson University and author of Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code

An integrated systems approach to remote retrieval of buried transuranic waste using a telerobotic transport vehicle, innovative end effector, and remote excavator

Between 1952 and 1970, over two million cubic feet of transuranic mixed waste was buried in shallow pits and trenches in the Subsurface Disposal Area at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory Radioactive Waste Management Complex. Commingled with this two million cubic feet of waste is up to 10 million cubic feet of fill soil. The pits and trenches were constructed similarly to municipal landfills with both stacked and random dump waste forms such as barrels and boxes. The main contaminants are micron-sized particles of plutonium and americium oxides, chlorides, and hydroxides. Retrieval, treatment, and disposal is one of the options being considered for the waste. This report describes the results of a field demonstration conducted to evaluate technologies for excavating, and transporting buried transuranic wastes at the INEL, and other hazardous or radioactive waste sites throughout the US Department of Energy complex. The full-scale demonstration, conduced at RAHCO Internationals facilities in Spokane, Washington, in the summer of 1994, evaluated equipment performance and techniques for digging, dumping, and transporting buried waste. Three technologies were evaluated in the demonstration: an Innovative End Effector for dust free dumping, a Telerobotic Transport Vehicle to convey retrieved waste from the digface, and a Remote Operated Excavator to deploy the Innovative End Effector and perform waste retrieval operations. Data were gathered and analyzed to evaluate retrieval performance parameters such as retrieval rates, transportation rates, human factors, and the equipment`s capability to control contamination spread

Realist Magic

Object-oriented ontology offers a startlingly fresh way to think about causality that takes into account developments in physics since 1900. Causality, argues, Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), is aesthetic. In this book, Timothy Morton explores what it means to say that a thing has come into being, that it is persisting, and that it has ended. Drawing from examples in physics, biology, ecology, art, literature and music, Morton demonstrates the counterintuitive yet elegant explanatory power of OOO for thinking causality

NASA Tech Briefs, May 1995

This issue features an resource report on Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a special focus on advanced composites and plastics. It also contains articles on electronic components and circuits, electronic systems, physical sciences, computer programs, mechanics, machinery, manufacturing and fabrication, mathematics and information sciences, and life sciences. This issue also contains a supplement on federal laboratory test and measurements

Obiter Dicta

"Stitched together over five years of journaling, Obiter Dicta is a commonplace book of freewheeling explorations representing the transcription of a dozen notebooks, since painstakingly reimagined for publication. Organized after Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, this unschooled exercise in aesthetic thought—gleefully dilettantish, oftentimes dangerously close to the epigrammatic—interrogates an array of subject matter (although inescapably circling back to the curiously resemblant histories of Western visual art and instrumental music) through the lens of drive-by speculation. Erick Verran’s approach to philosophical inquiry follows the brute-force literary technique of Jacques Derrida to exhaustively favor the material grammar of a signifier over hand-me-down meaning, juxtaposing outer semblances with their buried systems and our etched-in-stone intuitions about color and illusion, shape and value, with lessons stolen from seemingly unrelatable disciplines. Interlarded with extracts of Ludwig Wittgenstein but also Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy as well as Roland Barthes, this cache of incidental remarks eschews what’s granular for the biggest picture available, leaving below the hyper-specialized fields of academia for a bird’s-eye view of their crop circles. Obiter Dicta is an unapologetic experiment in intellectual dot-connecting that challenges much long-standing wisdom about everything from illuminated manuscripts to Minecraft and the evolution of European music with lyrical brevity; that is, before jumping to the next topic.

Landscape performance : the development of a performance philosophy practice

PhD ThesisThis practice-based thesis presents a body of work comprised of four performance projects conducted by the author. Each project occupies a separate chapter and is articulated in a manner appropriate to the specific nature of that project’s activity and outcomes. Whilst the performances themselves are not part of this PhD submission, documentation of making and events has been included throughout to give the reader an indication of the type of work and context from which this thesis was written. Presentation of the four projects supports a critical dialogue around a lineage of Heideggerian phenomenologies of landscape. The thesis is supported by appendixes, which include material from the development of each project as well as further documentation and a number of talks and publications relating to the author’s body of work. The research offers new insights into performance as a philosophical practice by looking specifically at how performance thinks in relation to landscape. The projects are understood as part of a developing ‘landscape performance’ practice situated within the field of performance philosophy, and defined in direct relation to the projects presented. Within this practice-based research landscape is considered in relation to the staging of a performance event, as a geographical context in which performance is made, as a philosophical framework for the development of a performance practice, and as a performing agent in and of itself. Each of the four projects employs an expanded practice of close reading to work with text, place, scenography and sound. Articulation of this close reading approach supports the thesis’ discussion of phenomenological notions of landscape as follows: Alice in Bed (2008-2013): a production of a play by Susan Sontag surrounded by a programme of talks, symposia, workshops, gallery installations and a photography 5 exhibition. The first project chapter is a reflexive account of how staging of the play was developed in relation to a close reading of Sontag’s implied philosophy. Project R-hythm (2013-14): a yearlong performance-led research process undertaken in partnership with a resident of a tidal island, which concluded with a daylong public walking performance. Presented here as a series of project narratives that offer an account of working with a landscape that was experienced as primarily temporal rather than spatial. Sounds & Guts (2014-15): a studio performance written and directed by the author, which toured to arts and community venues around the UK. Sounds & Guts is presented as an annotated script, which reveals the philosophical bearing of the making process. The thesis’ discussion of this project employs Heidegger’s notion of ‘things’ as a framework for examining the phenomenological foundations of the work’s landscape. Time Passes (2008-2017): a performance project that takes Virginia Woolf’s landscape writing as a starting point. The final project chapter is an articulation of how Time Passes is informed by the work that precedes it, and addresses broader philosophical implications of Woolf’s writing in relation to phenomenology, landscape and Heidegger’s notion of ‘things’. The central contributions of this thesis are as follows: The research speaks to the growing field of performance philosophy in its consideration of the philosophical bearing of performance making. Focusing on the making process from the artist’s perspective, each chapter presents a different relationship between performance and philosophy. The thesis articulates how new understandings of landscape emerge out of philosophically oriented performance making. Articulation of the making process offers performance practitioners and researchers practical insights into how performance works with landscape, how a philosophical enquiry into the nature of landscapes can form the basis of a body of work, and the nature of performance as research. 6 The research’s definition of ‘landscape performance’ offers new perspectives on performance practices that have an emphasised concern for space, place or landscape. Building upon established notions of ‘site-specificity’, the thesis reveals the workings of performance in relation to landscapes that are understood as more-than-geographical and more-than-representational. This research has used performance practice to conduct an integrated and in-depth inquiry into a particular lineage of thinking on landscape. The inquiry is presented in this thesis through discussion on the philosophical framework of Sontag’s theatrical landscape, phenomenological conceptions of landscape from a variety of disciplines, Heidegger’s notion of ‘things’, and the landscape philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s fiction writing. In its approach to articulating how that inquiry was conducted the thesis offers re-readings of various source materials and models of performance-led and practicebased research.UK AHRC KE Hub for the Creative Economy (ref: AH/J005150/1 Creative Exchange) and Newcastle Universit