When you transmit information through turbulence—motion in the atmosphere caused by turbulent cells or “wind”—it’s distorted just like the information coming from the light reflected off a distant, twinkling star to your eye. It’s fuzzy. You have to overcome that by using adaptive optics to rectify the distortion and get a better quality signal.

That’s what Dr David Hughes, from the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, says. He claims that the technology has been tested successfully with both stationary and flying situations, which means that they can easily implement it in the battlefield, with not too much effort. [The Register]

According to the USAF, the driver lost control of the truck because a “large insect” landed on the driver’s back. The truck was hauling Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile parts from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. Fortunately—and unlike other recent incidents that originated at the Minot Air Force base—the crash didn’t involve live nuclear parts. Or Mothra. [Danger Room]

The International Space Station and the space shuttle Discovery almost had to dodge some deadly space debris yesterday. Again. NASA is not installing any lasers soon, but the US Air Force is moving forward on their own object defence plan.

The USAF is working with various companies to develop a system that will allow to track the more than 600,000 pieces of space debris that are orbiting the planet. It may seem like a small number compared to the immensity of space, but the fact is that things are getting quite hairy up there. Especially after last February, when two communication satellites—a Russian Cosmo and an American Iridium—collided at 113,000km/h, 790 kilometres above Siberia.

The system is called the Space Situation Awareness, or Space Fence, and will consist of three networked football field-sized S-band radars distributed all across the world. The radars will track every single dangerous piece of debris orbiting the planet, keeping it in a continuously updated database. If there is any collision danger, the alert will break, and the astronauts will live to see another day in their shiny white space suits.

Unfortunately, the $US2 billion system won’t be operational till 2015.

The IBM SAGE spoke to me. It was old, but unlike other machines from the era, with crude punch interfaces, it had a GUI, a light gun, and hell an ashtray. And a big yellow screen. The ashtray was so operators didn’t have to leave their posts for cigarette breaks. Spotting incoming planes from the Soviet Union was precise work that needed constant attention.

You see, after World War II, it was believed that bombers were invincible; That their high altitude, distanced attacks from above and multiple engines would allow them to drop their deadly payloads and fly away without any resistance. It was believed that the only way to intercept these attacks was by having planes in the air at all times.

SAGE stood for Semi-Automatic Ground Environment and its sole purpose was to analyse radar data in real time and relay targeting information to fighter planes’ autopilots. It was built by IBM in 1954 based off of MIT technology and was a forebearer of additional *amazing futuristic ideas* like magnetic core memory, networking, and modems to facilitate communication between the 27 bases. Each of those bases had a SAGE. And a backup that could be hot swapped. The entire system had a then impressive 99.6% uptime in an age when most computers would blow a vac tube at every day or so. The computer’s console referred to a much larger back end that was 300 tons and took up an entire floor of a usually faceless concrete building. The software was written by the Rand corporation because IBM didn’t know what they’d do with 2000 in house programmers after the project was done, something they admitted was a part of their historically out of touch vision of just how important programmers would eventually become to big blue. The code itself was 250,000 lines long. Nothing compared to a modern operating system on even your phone, but it was the most complex of its time, employing 20% of the world’s programming force at the time.

What’s sad is that these glorious machines, even at their best and earliest warnings of incoming missiles, would only be informing the United States of the inevitable: there wouldn’t have been enough time to scramble jets and intercept a real threat, I would guess because the US is geographically too large to defend. Thank god for the great vastness of the Pacific, the Atlantic, Canada and Mexico.

The SAGE was retired in 1983 when ICBMs rendered them even more obsolete. But before then, adding shame to uselessness was the fact that in the end, the only place to get SAGE replacement tubes was from the Soviet Union itself. The industrial war machine is a complex and non nonsensical thing.

[Computer History Museum, Wikipedia]
The Computer History Museum is a wonderful place. If you’re in northern CA, I recommend you find a way to stop by. We’ll be running pieces from their collection as an ongoing series. Special thanks to Fiona Tang, John Hollar and the amazing Dag Spicer for showing me around.

The US Air Force said yesterday that they are going to buy an arsenal of these bombs, which will be incorporated into the B-2A bomber fleet. Manufactured by Boeing, they are designed to destroy any bunker buried under ground, so you know these are designed for the Kim Jong-Ils, Bin Ladens, and Ahmadinejads of this world. If you fall into any of these three categories, mark your calendars now: The Holmes will reach operational status in June 2012.

The GPS-guided GBU-57A/B has a 2.7 metric ton high explosive warhead, and can penetrate 200 feet (60 meters) of 5,000 psi reinforced concrete, 26 feet (8 meters) of 10,000 psis reinforced concrete, or 130 feet (40 meters) of moderately hard rock. [The Dew Line and Wikipedia]

DARPA is now aiming for a US$1.5 billion plant that will make 100,000 barrels of fuel per day, while producing zero CO2 emissions and using only 0.5 kilograms of water per kilogram of coal converted–I’m clueless about this, but it seems like an awful lot of water to me, specially compared to the alternative of not flying the airplanes so much. The cost for each gallon of JP-8 jet fuel would be US$3.

Together with extensive tests on alternative synthetic fuel mixes, the US military wants to make its air machinery as green and cost-effective as possible, since petroleum-based fuels are becoming too expensive. Coal reserves in the US, however, can fix this. [Aviation Weekly]

They are much higher performance and a much more demanding environment. That was just another risk reduction step to prove the aircraft was not leaking fuel and the engines were behaving nominally. We asked them [the pilots] point-blank if they noticed any difference in performance and they said it was a “non-event”. In other words, they couldn’t tell the difference. The aircraft behaved the same.

The test this time started with a 50-minute ground test, pushing the engines to full afterburner. In the flight, the pilots put the F-15 to Mach 2.2, approximately 2,350mph. Hopefully, this experiments will also change the civilian airline industry, all in the name of costs and a cool looking environmentally-friendly brochure. [Defense Tech]