What you see above is a laser beam striking and tracking a point at the front of a rocket to destroy it mid-flight. The beam is from Lockheed Martin’s newly developed ADAM high energy laser (HEL) system which is taking out that rocket from a range of 1.5 km, as you will see in the video below.

The rocket is completely destroyed as you can see in the image:

ADAM or Area Defense Anti-Munitions is a system capable of nullifying attacks from unmanned aerial vehicles or rocket attacks from the ground. It can track short-range target from a distance of 5 km to destroy it when it’s in a range of up to 2 km. It could be very useful for protecting assets like military bases near the battlefield.

The video shows an ADAM prototype destroying a “Qassam-like” rocket. You will be able to clearly see the laser striking and tracking the rocket to eventually take it out.

It’s, of course, being developed to protect humans and military stuff from missiles, but why should they fire a rocket in the first place. It’s sad to remember that this will deal mostly with war. Why don’t they develop and keep this tech for some good use in the future, like helping NASA and Harry Stamper to take care of an extra-terrestrial threat.

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Watch any space-based Sci-fi program and there will be some engineer complaining to the captain that “the last photon torpedo disrupted the nuclear fusion reactor” or “if we reverse the polarity of the nuclear fusion generator we can travel back in time and get some whales to save earth!”.

Nuclear fusion pops up so often in popular culture, that we forget that researchers are actually working on it at this moment. In fact research is going so well that a unique nuclear fusion test will take place this summer.

Researchers from the University of Washington, with funding from Nasa, are working on a new type of plasma encapsulated in a magnetic field. This material is so powerful that just one grain produces as much energy as a gallon of traditional rocket fuel.

The team behind the research believe that using nuclear fusion to power rockets and space stations would be cheaper and simpler, but also faster with a trip from the Earth to Mars taking just 30 days rather than 4 years if we were to use current fuel methods.

Of course, don’t expect this to happen anytime soon. Still, the potential is there. What do you think?

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NASA isn’t exactly getting the same level of funding that it once did, but that does not mean that you can’t perform some exploratory rocket missions of your own. Have you ever wanted to have your own homemade rocket that could then record and collect data about its flight onto an on-board Apple iPhone? With this tutorial, now you can. It starts with a relatively straightforward model rocket, complete with parachute for re-entry, but it has also been equipped with a TI Bluetooth low energy SensorTag and and iPhone 4S. That’s because while the iPhone has an accelerometer and such, but it can only record to +/-2G. That’s not good enough for a rocket, so the TI SensorTag is included in the rocket. Remember that the rocket can pull up to 8Gs during the boost phase of the flight.

There are two options for recording. You can keep your iDevice on the ground and record the data remotely or, if you’re feeling brave, you can actually attach your iPhone 4S (the instructions will have to be modified if you want to use an iPhone 5) to the rocket’s payload. And this works in tandem with the techBASIC app. Get the full tutorial on how to build your rocket, equip it with the Sensor Tag, and get it all working with your on-board iPhone by visiting byteworks.us. Yes, you can be a “scientist” too.

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According to North Korea, the Taepodong-2 missile was carrying a weather satellite when it was launched at 7:39am local time this morning. The trajectory had it flying over the Yellow Sea, with the first stage landing in the sea 165km west of Seoul. Sometime thereafter, according to South Korea, the rocket was disintegrated into about 20 pieces. Boom. No more.

Yes, the official word from North Korea was that this was a peaceful rocket for the purposes of launching a satellite into orbit, but skeptics will tell you this was a “poorly-disguised missile test.” This “Unha” classification of carrier rocket reportedly has the same delivery system as the Taepodon-2 long-range ballistic missile.

To make matters worse for the new North Korean leader, this is the third failure in as many attempts to launch a long-range missile. Now, we just have to question whether these attempts are really for peaceful purposes or if they have a military-minded objective.

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What are some of the things you can do with a Nexus One smartphone? Surf the web? Check your email? Play games? How about launching it 28,000 feet into the atmosphere, piggybacked on a rocket while recording the whole thing on video? Crazy, right? Well, that’s exactly what a group of rocket enthusiasts decided to do somewhere in the Nevada desert. The Mavericks Civilian Space Foundation strapped the Nexus One to the outside of an Intimidator-5 rocket and propelled the thing way up into the air.

Why would they do this? As it stands, satellites are far too big, far too bulky, and way too expensive. The idea is to find a low-cost satellite solution by using off the shelf products and components. According to Mavericks Foundation chairman Thomas Atchison, “The radio, processing power, sensors and cameras in smartphones potentially have the same capability as those in satellites.” With this test, the enthusiasts are better able to understand how a phone like the Nexus One can withstand the high-G environment, the vibrations associated with the rocket, the differences in temperature, and so forth.

A video of the rocket spiraling upwards into the outer atmosphere, then descending with a parachute:

Another video with Matthew Reyes explaining a SmallSat evolution from Maker Faire 2010:

[Gadget Lab, RocketMavericks via Make]
Photo: jurvetson/flickr

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