The Washington Nationals used a drone to photograph spring training. Real estate agents use them to show off sprawling properties. Martin Scorsese hired one to film a scene in “The Wolf of Wall Street.” So where does this leave the FAA, which insists that commercial drone use is illegal? Way behind — and facing turbulence as drone use explodes.
Thanks to falling prices, spotty enforcement and the fact that it’s almost impossible to spot the devices being used, the FAA is often powerless to halt the growing drone swarm. Retailers freely sell the tiny planes, quadcopters and hexacopters for as little as a few hundred dollars, and entrepreneurs continually come up with creative uses like wedding photography and crop monitoring — along with delivering beer and dropping off dry-cleaning.
The result, observers and drone users warn, could be a Wild, Wild West in the nation’s skies. As small drone operators grow used to flying them without the FAA’s permission, they could become less inclined to obey any rules the agency puts in place. And with the cost of the technology continuing to drop, the drones could eventually become far too ubiquitous for the agency to police. Meanwhile, the FAA is lagging in meeting a congressional mandate to allow commercial drones to share the skies legally. (2/27)
Florida Aerospace Sales Take Off at Singapore Air Show (Source: Miami Today)
While Florida aviation and aerospace parts suppliers as well as maintenance and repair companies expect to make millions in sales from their just-completed visit to the Singapore Air Show, this year’s financial outcome isn’t as high as in previous years.
The Singapore Air Show, which is held every second year, yielded an aggregate of about $32.5 million in sales for the Florida companies that attended – about $4.5 million in actual sales and another $28 million in expected sales – said Paul Mitchell, regional manager of international trade and development for aviation/aerospace and defense industries at Enterprise Florida Inc.
After the 2010 trip, 12 Florida companies reported a total of $35.5 million in expected sales and another $8.7 million in actual sales; and after the 2012 trip, the 12 Florida companies that attended reported an expected sales figure of $67.4 million, Mr. Mitchell said. (2/26)
Former NASA Official Says Crewed Mars Flyby is Feasible by 2021 (Source: Space Congress)
A crewed Mars flyby mission proposed last year by space tourism pioneer Dennis Tito could conceivably launch in 2021 provided that NASA immediately begins spending money on a large new upper-stage rocket engine and crew-habitation module that currently are not on the agency’s development plate, a former NASA official told lawmakers Feb. 26.
“I believe that 2021 is possible if the focus is placed on getting that mission on our books,” Doug Cooke, former associate administrator of NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate and now a private consultant, said during a hearing of the House Science Committee. “It would take a commitment to develop the full upper stage in the timeframe that we’re talking about. We would [also] need a small [habitation module], perhaps using an existing structure.”
The mission, which was the subject of the hearing, was originally proposed by a Tito-led group calling itself Inspiration Mars, in early 2013 as a privately funded venture. It was subsequently reformulated to take advantage of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion Crew capsule NASA is developing. (2/26)
U.S.-Japan Precipitation-measuring Satellite Reaches Orbit (Source: Space News)
The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) successfully launched the joint U.S.-Japan Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) core satellite Feb. 27 aboard an H-2A rocket from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center. NASA confirmed that GPM’s solar arrays deployed around 2 p.m. Eastern time, about 23 minutes after launch.
The satellite will measure global rainfall and snowfall levels from 400 kilometers above Earth using its GPM Microwave Imager and the Japanese-built Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar. With a launch mass of 3,850 kilograms, GPM is was the largest satellite ever assembled at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. GPM is a successor to another NASA-JAXA collaboration called the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, which launched in 1997 and is still operating. (2/27)
No comments:
Post a Comment