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According to some tech-watchers, 3-D printing will be the Next Big Thing. Load a bunch of raw material into your home mini-factory, download a 3-D CAD file, fire up the machine, and voilà, out comes a replacement part for your refrigerator or a copy of your door key (running to the hardware store is so 20th century).

The SULSA: Taking homebuilts to a new level (University of Southampton)

Aerospace manufacturers are looking into 3-D printing for making airplane parts, but a team at the University of Southampton just did them one better. They printed an entire airplane that can snap together in 10 minutes, no tools or conventional fasteners required, then fly away at 90 miles per hour—which is just what their five-foot-wingspan SULSA (Southampton University Laser Sintered Aircraft) did on June 8 over a field in southern England.

Andy Keane, a professor of computational engineering at Southampton, says the parts list for SULSA amounts to just 14 pieces: four structural parts, an avionics tray, a propeller with motor, two batteries, four servos, a receiver and an autopilot/aerial. The structural parts were printed by a laser sintering machine that uses heat to fuse nylon powder, layer by layer, into the desired solid shape.

According to Keane, “The entire design project, from inception to flight test, took four weeks for a team of six people, none of whom was working on this project full time.”

New Scientist has video of the flight:

While the Pentagon’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter continues its struggle with budget politics, the test program marches along. On Wednesday the F-35C—the version designed for aircraft carriers—made its first catapult launch during a ground test at Naval Air Systems Command in Lakehurst, New Jersey, with Navy test pilot Lt. Chris Tabert at the controls. Ship trials are expected to start in 2013.

An Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker may haul more than 31,000 gallons to refuel other aircraft, but for long-haul missions, it needs to watch every drop of its own fuel. That’s why, when a KC-135 crew flew from Washington state to Kyrgyzstan over the North Pole last month, the Air Force brass was pumped.

It wasn’t because they were overflying the airspace of their former Cold War enemy. The Air Force hardly mentioned the military significance of these new routes over Russia and Kazakhstan when they opened in November.  The focus instead was on all the money that would be saved.

A view from the KC-135 Stratotanker as it crossed the Arctic on June 22. Photo: USAF/Capt. Kathleen Ferrero

The Pentagon called the June 21 mission “historic” because its shorter route saved $54,000 and 4.5 hours of flight time compared with previous flights over England, which also required a day of crew rest in each direction. Fleet-wide savings to the fuel tab may run $133 million per year.

Two weeks before the KC-135 flight, a C-5M Galaxy crossed the Pole as it flew from Dover, Delaware, to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. The new agreements allow up to 4,500 flights yearly over Russian and Kazakh airspace, including the delivery of munitions and other lethal supplies.

Civilian airlines have been crossing the Pole since 1998 with a choice of four routes. Now the polar routes will shorten the time and bill connecting continental U.S. airbases to the front lines in Afghanistan. Air Force aircraft based in Ramstein, Germany, still need to detour around Iran.

For decades, defending against the threat of either country sending a military aircraft “over the top” was costly and all-consuming. Vast lines of early warning and defensive equipment flanked U.S. and Soviet borders. Today the budgetary threat is just as important, since the Air Force burns more fuel than any other branch of the Department of Defense. Air Mobility Command, which operates the tankers, absorbs 60 percent of that bill.

In the 1960s the Distant Early Warning, Pine Tree, and Mid-Canada radars watched for a Cold War attack "over the top." Photo: NORAD

The Transportation Security Administration has finally faced the naked truth. After the agency’s advanced imaging technology (AIT) airport scanners stirred controversy by exposing too much of a passenger’s human form, the TSA will switch to new software that makes the images less realistic.

Screening agents—who had been isolated in a remote closet to view the revealing images but will now return to face the public—will see a simplified stick figure, or what the TSA prefers to call “a generic outline.” New automated target recognition software also will show a generalized outline of any suspicious objects. Passengers will earn a simple OK and walk on, or be set aside for an invasive search.

Sample image from the ProVision automated target detection system. Photo: L3 Communications

If the new software is a success, the TSA says it will also convert its backscatter machines, although it’s not clear whether “success” is defined as catching more bad guys or cutting the number of complaints about privacy.

The TSA is still reeling from revelations in a Government Accountability Office report this spring that it repeatedly failed to SPOT terrorists—its acronym for “Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques.” At least six suspected terrorists strolled by airport agents using SPOT to flag potential threats by watching for certain behaviors. The GAO concluded that TSA behavior detection officers (BDOs, of course) had been placed nationwide with no “scientifically valid basis”  for the SPOT method.

In recent weeks the TSA has added training and a new database. Part of BDO training now is to watch video of real subjects who slipped through screening and were later charged or pleaded guilty to an offense.

“Such recordings could provide insights about behaviors that may be common among terrorists or could demonstrate that terrorists do not generally display any identifying behaviors,” said the GAO.

The space shuttle has been well eulogized in recent weeks, and we’ve already said our own farewells in print and on the web. So no need for another Grand Tribute.

Still….I can’t resist a couple of parting thoughts on this final day of the 30-year shuttle program.

The safety of the shuttle can be debated, particularly when public attitudes about risk have changed since the time the vehicle was designed in the 1970s. But here are the final numbers: Out of 852 astronauts carried into orbit, 14 were lost, giving a 1.6 percent fatality rate for this particular mode of space travel. Compare that to Apollo, which, if you count the Apollo 1 fire (and why wouldn’t you?) had a fatality rate of 8 percent (3 out of 36 crew members). Are these kinds of safety figures meaningful? In 2009, 816 construction workers died from job-related accidents in the United States alone. What’s an acceptable amount of risk for astronauts? How safe is safe? That, and the question of how much we’re prepared to spend, remain central to the future of the U.S. space program.

On their last full day in orbit, the STS-135 astronauts waived their private consultations with the NASA doctor on the ground, which is up to the crew’s discretion. “Thank the Surgeon for coming in,” radioed Commander Chris Ferguson, “but I think we’ll pass.”

I like to think it’s because they were feeling so good. This crew—Ferguson, Doug Hurley, Sandy Magnus, and Rex Walheim—worked hard for two weeks, but they also seemed joyful and alive to the fullness of the moment. Ferguson, who was asked “How do you feel?” more than anyone should have to endure, answered each reporter’s question with patient grace. In fact, the entire astronaut corps deserves a hand for trying—sincerely, as far as I could tell—to communicate their experiences to the public.

Sandy Magnus makes a memory in the space station Cupola.

On their last night in space, no one was around to bother them, and I hope they all took time, even gave up sleep, to look out the window. Ferguson said he reminded his crew to “make a memory, because you’re never going to see anything like this again.” The Apollo astronauts often say that their time on the moon went by too fast, due mostly to the tyrannies of the timeline. Big mistake. If we send people into a new environment, they need time to experience it. Otherwise, what’s a human spaceflight program for?

The shuttle’s end came 42 years and a day after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. Back in 1969, Gene Kranz and crew celebrated that triumph with cigars, but smoking isn’t allowed in Mission Control any more, and today they had cake and flowers instead. The Apollo era is over, and now the shuttle era has ended too. What follows is uncertain. But it can be every bit as exciting and courageous as the last space age, if that’s what we really want.