House of the rising Moonglum

And on the creepy robot invasion front, the Air Force has started its first unmanned air attack wing. This wing will use a combination of old school predators, and the souped up version as well, which holds three times as many missiles and bombs. Interestingly the entire wing of 70 aircraft will cost less that three piloted attack aircraft. This wing will also have the best maintenance record in the Air Force, given the current uptime of the Predator in the field. This is the future of the Air Force, and it is going to piss a lot of people (in the Air Force) off. The era of the billion dollar attack airplane is over, and in my opinion, the era of the billion dollar fighter will be over soon as well. Planes are shockingly easier and cheaper to build when you don’t have to worry about holding a person in them. The biggest problem I foresee is the fact that this will make the generals from afar even more likely to intervene in situations where they really don’t know what is happening because they are not in situ. (Read “A Good Day to Die” by Sean Naylor if you don’t know what I am talking about, but be prepared to be depressed by the idiocy of the upper levels of the chain of comand.)

The MIT aeronautics team (among others) has built a 20 kPa, mechanical counter pressure suit. While that’s not quite enough pressure for the space environment it has a lot of uses here on earth. Particularly in physical therapy and rehab type work. I have been excited about mechanical counter pressure space suits for years (OK I am odd) and it is really exciting to see someone finally making progress on it. It should make preparing for EVA much easier and faster. More importantly it will drastically reduce the danger of EVA by both reducing the consequence of suit failure, and increasing astronaut mobility. I would think these features should combine to reduce the time required for any individual EVA. Due to the simple nature of the engineering involved I would also think that the cost of the suit should be dramatically lower than current models as well.