Cashing In On the Red Planet Download PDF

To land humans on the Red Planet, NASA will need new equipment, fresh thinking, and advanced technology. These companies are preparing for mankind’s next giant leap.

Attention, people of Earth: We are going to Mars. This is no sci-fi fantasy; for the past two years, NASA has been gearing up to meet the Bush administration’s goal of landing humans on Mars by around 2030. The agency plans to set up a base on the Moon by 2020 to act as a staging area; that effort alone is projected to cost at least $104 billion. Throw in the round-trip voyage to Mars, and John Edwards, space systems analyst at Forecast International, estimates that the total cost of the program will top $400 billion—making it history’s largest government-backed science project. Continue reading →

Computer, Heal Thyself Download PDF

IBM is developing computer systems that monitor themselves and repair glitches as they arise—which could dramatically cut the cost of network maintenance.

Computer networks are fragile and temperamental creatures. They’re prone to unpredictable software glitches and mechanical failures. They’re vulnerable to traffic bottlenecks and hostile intrusions. They’re difficult to diagnose when things go wrong. They’re also extremely expensive, because it takes a lot of people to keep all those finicky machines humming. According to the Standish Group, tech department salaries account for as much as 45 percent of the total cost of running large computing clusters—the labyrinth of application servers, workstations, storage systems, and peripherals that lies at the heart of all networked businesses.

Researchers at IBM think there’s a better way to keep these systems running. “If the demand for IT management continues at the current rate, soon everyone will be a systems administrator,” jokes Robert Morris, director of IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose. Morris believes that tedious, labor-intensive tasks such as updating software, modifying settings, formatting drives, recovering lost data, and optimizing network traffic should take place automatically, behind the scenes, in much the same way that the human autonomic nervous system monitors and adjusts the activity of the heart, lungs, and circulatory system without any conscious effort. With that idea in mind, IBM has launched an ambitious initiative to develop hardware and software systems that can take care of themselves. Continue reading →