Laid off by NASA, Shuttle Engineers Build a Rocket-Inspired, Street Legal Trike

The Treycycle via Discovery News

In the shadow of Launchpad 39A--where the Space Shuttle Atlantis once stood ready for orbit--a team of former NASA engineers laid off when the shuttle program ended are building a rocket-inspired street legal tricycle. And it’s not just for kicks. Treycycle Gold--as the company building the bikes is now known--aims to employ more than 100 people within the year, breathing new life into the Space Coast’s engineering economy.

The company started with roughly 15 NASA engineers facing imminent termination and a little help from the Emerging Growth Institute, a non-profit that works with emerging technology companies. They decided to flip their vast experience in vehicle design into a new breed of tricycle that is part car, part bike, and all muscle, accelerating from 0-60 in just 3.6 seconds.

The Treycycle packs a Chrysler 300 3.5-liter engine that supplies the vehicle with its 260 horsepower all packed inside a molybdenum alloy frame offering more strength than the average motorcycle. Unlike three-wheeled motorcycles with their high centers of gravity, the low-to-the-ground Treycycle’s long wheel base makes it extremely difficult to roll over while cornering.

All that may seem like novelty, but people are lining up to buy the vehicles--specifically, 150 people who are already on the wait list. The company is even developing a three-seater “family” trike. For now the company will roll out two Treycycles every three weeks, but as demand dictates they will grow the company further--perhaps to as many as 130 people within a year. That’s good news for a region packed with engineering talent but without enough industry to employ all the smart people falling out of NASA programs.

For career Space Coasters, finding new ways to apply their know-how is a matter of pride. Hence the specialized serial number plates, which also read: “Made on the Space Coast in the Sunshine State.”

Remains of satellite may never be found, NASA says

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Sun Sep 25, 2011 9:38am EDT

- A six-ton NASA science satellite crashed to Earth on Saturday, leaving a mystery about where a ton of space debris may have landed.

The U.S. space agency said it believes the debris ended up in the Pacific Ocean, but the precise time of the bus-sized satellite's re-entry and the location of its debris field have not been determined.

The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, or UARS, ended 20 years in orbit with a suicidal plunge into the atmosphere sometime between 11:23 p.m. on Friday and 1:09 a.m. EDT on Saturday (0323 to 0509 GMT Saturday), NASA said.

The satellite would have been torn apart during the fiery re-entry, but about 26 pieces, the largest of which was estimated to have weighed 330 pounds (150 kg), likely survived the fall, officials said.

As it fell to Earth, UARS passed from the east coast of Africa over the Indian Ocean, then the Pacific Ocean, across northern Canada and the northern Atlantic Ocean to a point over West Africa. Most of the transit was over water, with some flight over northern Canada and West Africa, NASA said.

"Because we don't know where the re-entry point actually was, we don't know where the debris field might be," said Nicholas Johnson, chief orbital debris scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "We may never know."

Stretching 35 feet long and 15 feet in diameter, UARS was among the largest spacecraft to plummet uncontrollably through the atmosphere, although it is a slim cousin to NASA's 75-tonne (68,000 kilogram) Skylab station, which crashed to Earth in 1979.

Russia's last space station, the 135-tonne (122,000 kilogram) Mir, crashed into the Pacific Ocean in 2001, but it was a guided descent.

NASA now plans for the controlled re-entry of large spacecraft, but it did not when UARS was designed.

The 13,000-pound (5,897 kg) satellite was dispatched into orbit by a space shuttle crew in 1991 to study ozone and other chemicals in Earth's atmosphere.

It completed its mission in 2005 and has been slowly losing altitude ever since.

With most of the planet covered in water and vast uninhabited deserts and other land directly beneath the satellite's flight path, the chance that someone would be hit by falling debris was 1-in-3,200, NASA said.

"The risk to public safety is very remote," it said.

The satellite flew over most of the planet, traveling between 57 degrees north and 57 degrees south of the equator.

UARS was one of about 20,000 pieces of space debris in orbit around Earth. Something the size of UARS falls back into the atmosphere about once a year.

Can NASA predict natural disasters?

Humans aside, our planet is a pretty violent place. What we call natural disasters is just our planet going through its natural changes on its own schedule. Understanding that schedule and what makes our planet tick is something that has eluded us since the dawn of time. We've made great strides in the past century, and some of that progress is due to the contributions of a government agency most people associate withMars, Jupiter and even the moon, but not Earth.

What you may not be familiar with are some of the ways this agency is putting its resources and the knowledge it's gained studying other worlds to good use by helping us learn more about our own world.

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Because most of the objects NASA(National Aeronautics and Space Administration) studies are extremely far away, it excels at what's called remote sensing, or using technology to see details in things far away. When you consider that "close" on NASA's scale means getting to within a few thousand miles of a distant moon or planet, it should come as no surprise that pointing those devices at our planet from a couple hundred miles away produces some extremely detailed information. It's exactly that level of information that's proving crucial in understanding the natural processes on Earth and in outer space that can cause natural disasters.

Now, let's take a look at some of the more significant ways NASA improves this understanding in order to help us predict when the "next big one" might be heading our way.