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The Mojave Desert: Home of the New Machine Movement (bloomberg.com) 48

pacopico writes: Most people think of the Mojave Desert as a wasteland located somewhere between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. For decades, though, Mojave has served as something of an engineering playground for people in the automotive and aerospace industries. Bloomberg has produced a documentary that looks at what's taking place with these engineers in 2016. There's a dude trying to make a flying car, Richard Branson with Virgin Galactic, a group called Hackrod using artificial intelligence software to make a car chassis, and the hacker George Hotz taking his self-driving car along the Las Vegas strip for the first time. One of the cooler parts of the show has a team of students from UCSD sending up a rocket with a 3D printed engine -- the first time any university team had pulled something like this off. Overall, it's a cool look at the strange desert rat tinkerers.
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The Mojave Desert: Home of the New Machine Movement

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  • then i read tfs and was disappointed.

    Sorry, if you dont tell me that someone builds skynet I gotta have to do it myself. Idiots. It will happen one way or another, because if it doesn't happen, it will travel back in time to make it happen.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 29, 2016 @05:46AM (#52605261)

    As someone who has spent significant time in the Mojave, trust me when I say its not a wasteland.

    It will become one, once these hipsters finish with their tire tracks, disposable water bottles and condom wrappers.

    • by MercTech ( 46455 )

      "As someone who has spent significant time in the Mojave, trust me when I say its not a wasteland.
      It will become one, once these hipsters finish with their tire tracks, disposable water bottles and condom wrappers."

          You mean the kind of people that have had someone helicoptering over them all their lives and go douchebag stupid when not constantly monitored?

  • by v1 ( 525388 ) on Friday July 29, 2016 @06:25AM (#52605365) Homepage Journal

    when not surrounded by people that want very badly to tell you what you're not allowed to do near them

    • It seems to me like this is what deserts are for. We should be trying to reclaim as much of them as possible, but we ought to use them while we have them.

      Which reminds me... Not that I've ever gone or will go, but it's tragic what burning man has to pay for permits now, especially when it takes place on land that supposedly belongs to all of us.

      • by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Friday July 29, 2016 @06:59AM (#52605433)

        it's tragic what burning man has to pay for permits now, especially when it takes place on land that supposedly belongs to all of us.

        That is because Burning Man treats the land like it is theirs and theirs alone. That event is mostly the "man" and long left whatever it once stood for. Now it's just a way for 20-30 somethings to burn through mad amounts of cash, all while feeling like they're somehow counter cultural. When the event is over the land looks and smells like human waste and takes an insane amount of resources to reclaim, clean, and restore it to some remote resemblance of what state it use to be in. If there's anything tragic about Burning Man, it's what it has become.

        • That is because Burning Man treats the land like it is theirs and theirs alone.

          It's a fucking desert. One does need to clean up, but they have cleanup crews for that. That's where most of the non-permit money apparently goes.

          Now it's just a way for 20-30 somethings to burn through mad amounts of cash, all while feeling like they're somehow counter cultural.

          When was it anything else? The ratio of cool shit on fire to people just getting wasted may have changed. But I know many longtime burners. They went for entertainment, not to make a statement. Some of them have deluded themselves since about it, but it's bullshit.

          When the event is over the land looks and smells like human waste and takes an insane amount of resources to reclaim, clean, and restore it to some remote resemblance of what state it use to be in.

          Which helps explain why payroll is the single largest expenditure at burning man.

          • I'm 100% on board with you - it was always about entertainment. Having fun, connecting with others similarly fun-oriented and motivated to seek it out. Showing off your creative side, being the weirdest version of yourself in public. I think his point was Burners used to be their own clean up crews. The attitude that someone else will do the cleanup is why there's a problem. The money does go there, but a lot of it lines pockets - the Man is profitable, and that's on purpose.

            That's how these thing
    • by grumling ( 94709 )

      Engineers are good at making useful things out of worthless land and discarded raw materials. Edison looked at a small village in the California desert and thought it would be a great place to produce his new moving pictures. I'm sure plenty of people thought he was nuts, but look how that turned out.

    • by kc7rad ( 925634 )

      when not surrounded by people that want very badly to tell you what you're not allowed to do near them

      ... but sucks harder when a government van shows up and feds arrests you for unknowingly breaking an environmental law or accidently crossing into a military area or just generally looking suspicious with a large rocket or robot or some funny electrical box with twinkling LEDs. Groups like UCSD, Tripoli and others who use the Mojave legally need to go through a considerable amount of red tape to legally do their experiments.

      Unfortunately it isn't as easy as driving out there and running your newest AI

  • by Anonymous Coward
    Let me guess, the "3d printed engine" is a regular engine, but they printed the stickers out on a 3d printer.
    • by OzPeter ( 195038 )

      Let me guess, the "3d printed engine" is a regular engine, but they printed the stickers out on a 3d printer.

      And you would be wrong. VULCAN-1 [sedsucsd.org]

      • by dj245 ( 732906 )

        Let me guess, the "3d printed engine" is a regular engine, but they printed the stickers out on a 3d printer.

        And you would be wrong. VULCAN-1 [sedsucsd.org]

        It is a stretch to call powdered metal laser sintered Inconel 718 "3d printed". If we as a society are going to apply the term "3d printed" so such processes, then the term is just a stand-in phrase used by idiots to mean "any CNC manufacturing process that I don't know anything about".

        As an aside, Inconel 718 is pretty awesome stuff. The entire Inconel family (625, 82, etc) has excellent properties, but 718 is my go-to material for high strength, high temperature, high erosion environments. The peopl

        • by OzPeter ( 195038 )

          It is a stretch to call powdered metal laser sintered Inconel 718 "3d printed". If we as a society are going to apply the term "3d printed" so such processes, then the term is just a stand-in phrase used by idiots to mean "any CNC manufacturing process that I don't know anything about".

          Why is it a stretch to cal it it 3D printing? It's an additive process. The laser is directed from a 3D model. The process prints out the result section by section. Sure sounds like a duck to me.

        • It's no stretch. Maybe you've made the mistake of thinking that 3D printing is just squirting hot plastic out of nozzles. That's just low-end consumer 3D printing.
        • 3D printing is additive manufacturing, sintered powder is 3D printing. "CNC" is typically seen as subtractive manufacturing, but 3D printers are still CNC machines.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center & JPL
    Edwards Air Force Base
    Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake
    Fort Irwin National Training Center
    Bicycle Lake Army Airfield
    Mohave Valley Raceway
    Skunk Works
    &
    One formerly excellent Mexican restaurant in Rosamond

  • And I had some initial misgivings, seeing the thing's hosted by Bloomberg and all. Yet turns out to be a well-done piece of video-reporting. Best part, to me, was the rocket part. Hard to find anything that gets my engineer's heart jumping up and down more than the combination of innovation & rocketry.

  • The Mojave Desert is the perfect place to test dangerous prototypes such as rocket cars [youtube.com].

  • They use to have real jet races (usually F-86, the best a civilian could buy) around the pylons back in the middle 70s. Even at subsonic (though near sonic) speeds the sound lagged behind the plane a bit.

  • There's a dude trying to make a flying car

    News is when there's nobody trying to make a flying car.

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