How To Make A Lunar Landing Pad

OK, I’m not as interested in landing on the moon as I am on other targets (“Ice worlds, Ho!”)  But we do have to go back to the moon, if only to show that we can.  I mean, a handful of landings, and then 50 years of nothing?   That’s just not right.

One thing we’ve learned about the moon is that it’s really dusty.  This has lots of implications, and is one of the challenges that has to be met by any new visitors.

One of the problems is that rockets landing and taking off generate huge plumes of dust, creating all kinds of hazards. The bigger the rocket, the more stuff will be kicked up, endangering the lander and anything near the landing site.

On Earth, launch pads feature heavily engineered vents that channel the exhaust off to the side, protecting the rocket and infrastructure at the pad.  It would be nice to have these on Luna, too.  Of course, we have yet to send people or machines to make them.

This winter students at ten Universities report on a design for a 3D printed landing / launch pad [1].  The idea is to fabricate a structure with a flat surface on top and vents underneath.  On Earth, they demonstrator uses concrete laid down by a gantry-style 3D printer.  On Luna, locally source materials—dust and rock!—would be used to create the concrete.

The design has a lot of flexibility, with a variety of channels and baffles.  In principle, there also could be fans that recover some of the energy of the exhaust.  And there must be provision for instrumentation embedded to monitor the structure, and mechanisms to clean out residual dust.

The thing that caught my eye is the elegance of the structures.  They are flower like, all symmetrical curves in 3D.  This is a classic case of, “if it looks good, it must be right”:  the designs are driven by the physics of the exhaust, but the results are beautiful.

These studies are a great start.  A model structure will be tested this month.  And there is a lot of work on all the details of fabrication for the moon.  We want it to be as automated as possible, as fool proof as possible, and it needs to work in lunar conditions (low gravity, extremes of cold and heat, lots of dust, etc.)

Caption: Der Platz (im Bild) soll bei der Landung turbulente Staubstürme reduzieren (Bild © ICON). (From [3], (Prototype lunar pad under construction in Texas. IMAGE: ICON)

Nice work all.

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1. Andres Campbell, Helen Carson, Miriam De Soto, Kristen English, Michael Fiske, Luke Martin, Vincent Murai, Fernanda Ramirez, Ethan Romo, Kayla Schang, and Kaveon Smith, Lunar PAD – On the Development of a Unique ISRU-Based Planetary Landing Pad for Cratering and Dust Mitigation, in AIAA Scitech 2021 Forum. American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2021. https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2021-0356
2. Jeremy Hsu, Students’ Lunar Pad Could Help NASA Return to the Moon, in IEEE Spectrum – Aerospace, March 9, 2021. https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/space-flight/students-lunar-pad-could-help-nasa-return-to-the-moon
3. Remziye Korner, Studenten entwickeln mit 3D-Druck herstellbaren und recycelbaren Landeplatz für sicherere Mondlandungen, in 3D-Druck-News, January 27, 2021. https://www.3d-grenzenlos.de/magazin/zukunft-visionen/lunar-pad-mondlandeplatz-aus-3d-drucker-27656633/
   

Interesting “DIY LED Dress”: Google Tries to Play Nice With Girls

Many Makerspaces and Fab Labs now feature active “fabric” and “fashion” tech activities, including DIY sewing projects that incorporate inexpensive LED’s and other electronics in clothing. These days, a well rounded Maker knows how to sew as well as solder.

Google has appropriated these local efforts into it’s “Made With Code” site.

Made With Code is explicitly designed to entice girls and young women to learn to code through projects designed to appeal. The example projects present “cool” girls doing Fangirl-y things: story telling, healing, helping, cooking, and, of course, sewing. The narrative is that all these cool things have code in them, and girls can and should learn code so they can express their creativity.

The “Made With Code” projects teach you coding (or anyway, mean to do so), via a web based graphical programming scheme. The web site walks you through simple programming projects by dragging and dropping components with immediate visual feedback. It’s a cool interface, and damn impressive. Whether this is actually programming or not, I dunno. (For example, I was unable to write bad code or produce a runtime error, which is 90% of programming, as far as I’m concerned.)

The project that caught my eye is the LED Dress: Code + Fashion.  This lets you create a Little Black Dress with blinking moving LED patterns. The “program” lets you set the base pattern, translate and scale it, animate it, and set the color. The animation of the right shows what your dress should look like. Pretty cool.

I’m a little disappointed that there isn’t any way to download either the code that I wrote or the pattern to actually make the dress. I’d like to download it and make it at my local fab lab, fer instance. When the design is finished, there is a vague message about “your design may be selected to be made”.

I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing that all the designs go in a database (controlled by Google, naturally), out of which some are selected. This is pretty mysterious, since they didn’t get my name, nor did I give permission for them to have my data, let along manufacture it.

I’m especially disappointed that I can’t see the “code” that I supposedly wrote. The interface is basically a fancy way to fill in a form, and I can see how there are some simple generative algorithms inside here. But not only did I not code the algorithms, I don’t even know what they are. Whatever “code” is in this design, we never touch it. This ain’t programming.

Is this really what we want to teach new programmers? Coding without algorithms? Coding without the possibility of writing bad code? Coding without debugging, for heavens sake!

(I’ll leave out the opaque ownership situation. Part of the point of learning to code is learning to create code that you own, and can share or sell as you wish.)

Grumble, grumble. Stop being so negative, Bob! If kids (girls or boys) get excited and create interesting things and maybe end up learning real coding, then its all good.

I should note that this project is endorsed by Friend of the Blog, Maddy Maxey who really is walking the walk. If Maddy is involved, then it must be cool!

Just watching her video wears me out. 🙂

 

Draft White Paper: Community Fab Lab Experience and Perspectives

Here is a draft of a White Paper I’ve been working on this year.  This is a review and analysis of the Champaign Urbana Community Fab Lab.  This is a much longer and deeper treatment of the points made in my presentation at HASTAC.

The Fab Lab is something you DO, not something you talk about, so this document is incomplete and will need to be revised in the coming months.

Here is the abstract and an excerpt.  See the draft at the link below.

Abstract

Digital technology is enabling new forms of community, new forms of expression, and changes in the living culture of contemporary life in many ways. One example is the emergence of local community-based fabrication spaces.  This paper discusses one such space is the Champaign Urbana Community Fab Lab (CUCFL), which deploys a combination of technical, human, and social resources to develop local technological capabilities and opportunities. The CUCFL community is also connected to a network of like-minded Fab Labs and Maker spaces across the planet, as well as global markets and opportunities. These digital connections enable broad knowledge sharing, exchange of designs, and discovery of expertise.

The success of the CUCFL and similar labs depends on a combination of technology, a local community organization, and an open culture of learning, teaching, and sharing. All these elements are critical. These community labs also have significance beyond the local users and specific technologies, they are models of democratized technology, and harken back to earlier humanist workshop traditions, reintegrating technology, art, business, and community.

The paper discusses the technical and social background of personal fabrication, and the emergence of local community maker spaces. Then we consider one example of a local community-based Fab Lab in some detail, and then concludes with implications of this phenomenon.

1. Introduction

Digital technology is enabling new forms of creative and scholarly communities, new forms of expression, and augmenting the living culture of contemporary life in many ways. Contemporary technology enables enhancements to existing techniques, some new methods (such as pattern recognition and data mining), new forms of expression, and the adoption of new approaches to old problems of creation, dissemination, and communication. Many of these ubiquitous digital technologies have reached wide audiences beyond traditional engineering, scholarship, and art, opening the way for “humanistic” practices which are reintegrating with the living culture of contemporary life in many ways.

One such reintegration has emerged around digital fabrication technology, especially in the form of personal fabrication and local community fabrication spaces. This technology is widely viewed as revolutionary, potentially transforming the global industrial and consumer economy. The availability of personal fabrication technology, for design and realization or products, opens the way to the same transformations as seen in the realm of “bits”, now in the realm of “atoms”, including global scale peer-to-peer sharing, and the exploitation of “fat tail” phenomena.

As with any revolution, we will find evidence of it in local communities. This paper considers a local community-based Fab Lab which combines several technical and social approaches to we are developing an approach to fostering collaboration and creativity. The Champaign Urbana Community Fab Lab (CUCFL) combines technical, human, and social resources into a community-building process to develop local technological capabilities and opportunities. The CUCFL provides access to a suite of digital technologies access to knowledge necessary to use the technology that were not previously available to people, outside relatively privileged settings such as University labs.

The CUCFL is building a community of makers, dedicated to learning and teaching, with a consciously inclusive ethos. The lab has successfully welcomed many into our community of makers through an active learning environment within a supportive and friendly environment. The volunteer ethos in which everyone, not just a privileged elite, is a creator, a learner, and a teacher has encouraged people to discover just how much they know, and how much then can contribute. The CUCFL community is also connected to a network of like-minded Fab Labs and Maker spaces across the planet, as well as global markets and opportunities. These digital connections enable broad knowledge sharing, exchange of designs, and discovery of expertise.

The success of the CUCFL depends on a combination of technology, a local community organization, and an open culture of learning, teaching, and sharing. All these elements are critical, and to date, have sufficed to sustain the lab. Community fab labs have broader significance, beyond their local users and specific technologies. They are models of democratized technology, which may have profound social, education, and personal effects that change communities, economies, and individuals. Interestingly, it can be argued that a community fab lab harkens back to earlier humanist workshop traditions, reintegrating technology, art, business, and community.

The paper is laid out as follows. Section 2 discusses the technical and social background of personal fabrication, and the emergence of hundreds of local community maker spaces. Section 3 considers one example of a local community-based Fab Lab in some detail. Finally, Section 4 concludes with some implications of this phenomenon.

Download the full White Paper [PDF]

HASTAC 2013, Toronto

Just back from HASTAC 2013 in Toronto (http://hastack2013.org)

I was only there for one day (Saturday), so I can’t talk about the whole conference.

HASTAC is heavy with digital humanities, especially media studies topics.  This isn’t really my stuff, so a little bit goes a long way for me.  I hope I was not excessively rude when my interest and patience wandered.

I went to this conference under the banner of the Champaign Urbana Community Fab Lab, encouraged and supported by the Institute for Computing in the Humanities Arts and Social Science I-CHASS, part of the Illinois Informatics Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.

At the conference, I visited and chatted at the joint exhibit by several Canadian makerspaces. We exchanged secret “maker” handshakes :-), and showed other people about making and makerspaces. They had several demo projects going on the table, including the archetypical activities such as “make a 3D sculpture of your face, using kinnect scanner and a 3D print” (go to any maker space, you’ll see this), and the Makey-Makey “banana keyboard” kit (also to be seen at practically any makerspace).

I also encountered several (mainly Canadian) folks who are working to set up or recently have set up maker spaces.  The CUCFL have been in business quite a while now, comparatively, so they had a lot of questions about how to start, and how to succeed. I gave out cards and invited them to contact the CUC Fab Lab..

The reason for going was to present a short paper about the Champaign Urbana Community Fab Lab mainly about how it works and why it is important.  (Abstract)  Of course, the Fab Lab is something you DO, not something you talk about, so it’s kind of irrelevant to give 15 minute presentation about it.

My session also featured a talk by Mark McDayter (Western University) about social reading (Abstract), and Abigail De Kosnik and Andrea Horbinski (UC Berkeley) about analysis of online Fan Fiction, utilizing “big data” style analytics (Abstract).

McDayter discussed computer interfaces to support and encourage “social reading”, in which the readers circulate a shared text, adding annotations as part of a group discussion.  He looked back to 17^th century coffee houses as a model for such shared annotation (paper based), and imagines computer (screen based) versions of texts to do similar readings.  (It was not clear how much of this is realized in software.)

Horbinski discussed their FanData project, which is analyzing archives of Fan Fiction that, in some cases, dates back to the 1990s.  She showed some data which they have assembled about fan fiction related to the X-files TV series and Harry Potter books and movies.  The data is messy and inconsistent, but there is quite a bit to be learned about temporal patterns and social networks in these communities.

At first, I could not see any strong reason why these papers were in a session together.  But, by the end, I figured out that the theme of the session was “digital communities”, and, in fact, digital communities that are direct descendents of important pre-digital communities.

McDayter specifically referred to and discussed the historical precedents for the “social reading” he invoked, and the Q&A discussed other precedents.  Horbinski’s work is clearly about activities and communities that exist off-line and have existed before the internet (though the fans had little way to intereact with each other in most cases). The Q&A wondered about such earlier precedents, such as the Baker Street Irregulars, and many other earlier cases of “fan fiction”.  I would add that telling stories around the campfire undoubtably was a scene for the earliest fan fiction, which an “amateur” story teller would be moved to tell a new story inspired by the “classic” tales told by the pros.

Finally, the Fab Lab and makerspaces hark back to two historic communities, the DIY/craft movements, and earlier artist/mechanics workshops, e.g., of the Renaissance.  The contemporary fab lab or maker space is multidiscipline and not purpose built (i.e., it is not a factory or lab dedicated to a specific mission), the participants are multi-generational and non-professional, the techniques are eclectic, including “art”, “science”, “high technology” and “business”, among other categories.

So, the program committee juxtaposed three apparently different “digital communities”, with some provocative similarities.  Kudos to perceptive insight of the unnamed, shadowy powers of HASTAC!

So, what might be learned from this juxtaposition?  Looking at the digital fabrication labs, there are a number of interesting points to note.

For one, there is a lot of “fan fabrication” that happens in makerspaces.  There are technological fads, of course.  Makers and Fabbers have their own fan space of tools and technologies that insiders are familiar with and can discuss in detail.  (E.g., Arduinos and Raspberry Pis, Makerbots, and so on.)  But they also use the techniques to realize “Fan Fiction”.  In our lab, we have seen many projects that lovingly recreate Star Trek artifacts and Tardises, and other popular fictional universes.  Note that the digital plans for these creations can, in principle, but published as a form of “fan fiction”, enabling others to remix them in their own labs. In the future, the FanData may be able to include digital traces of these non-digital artifacts.

The digital design tools used in makerspaces and fab labs open the way to “social design”, akin to “social reading”.  The fab lab is a community workspace in many senses, including a very real social community who “make things together”.  The digital design tools make the sharing not only easier, but enable the direct sharing of knowledge, in the form of executable plans for making.  But, to date, we have no good genre or form of text, digital or otherwise, for representing or conducting these conversations about design, making, remaking, criticizing, revising, etc., of physical objects.  This would be a very interesting topic to develop.

In other sessions, I saw two talks by colleague and sensei,  Alan Craig.  One was a standard spiel about XSEDE, specifically how humanities folks can use HPC resources (hint: contact Alan). (Abstract) The second was a short version of his stump speech about Physical and Virtual (Abstract). Also, see Alan’s forthcoming book, Understanding Augmented Reality (recommended).

Gripes.

As usual, there was discussionabout tenure processes, i.e., only books and articles count toward tenure and promotion, which makes it difficult for digital and media scholarship to thrive.  As one of the 99+% who has never been eligible for tenure, I don’t consider this the most important problem in the world.

The conference was terribly set up, with the (not especially great) hotel located (in noisy and snarled) downtown and the meetings at York U., which is a 30-minute bus ride.  With shuttles only available in the morning and after dinner, we were locked into the conference for the whole day.   No food, no restaurants, and no way to leave. Not really the right way to do it.