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

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.

Comments

Read headline: thought it was people making skynet

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Hardy a wasteland - rich, fragile ecosystem

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hardy a wasteland - rich, fragile ecosystem

[Khyber]

"All deserts are wastelands--if they weren't they would have more value"

You say that while I'm looking at desert properties worth more than a million dollars per acre. Guess what they have? Gold, platinum, gemstones, and more.

Re:Hardy a wasteland - rich, fragile ecosystem

[Khyber]

"I'm going to guess those high priced properties are near cities"

Not even close.

" have utilities"

Nope.

" As for natural resources, I'm going to guess that those are also not representative of a desert in general and is only valid for land on which a geological survey was done."

Landsat/ASTER access is free, and you can overlay on Google Earth. Nobody needs to survey anymore, we've got satellites that do all that for us.

What makes them so expensive is the fact they're patented land - ie you own the land AND the mineral rights underneath it. What, you thought when you bought land that you OWNED it? Nope, only the first 18-24 inches of topsoil! I can lay claim to minerals under your property and you'd have no choice but to give me right of way to those minerals.

Re:Hardy a wasteland - rich, fragile ecosystem

[MercTech]

"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?

Re: Read headline: thought it was people making sk

[Anonymous Coward]

Two? They been one and the same. It's just waiting to become strong enough to call itself properly.

it's amazing what you can accomplish

[v1]

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

Re:it's amazing what you can accomplish

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:it's amazing what you can accomplish

[slack_justyb]

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.

Re:it's amazing what you can accomplish

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:it's amazing what you can accomplish

[grumling]

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.

Re:it's amazing what you can accomplish

[prograsm]

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 things happen. It's popular, there are more of us motivated weirdos making an effort to party in the desert than ever, and there's more groups than just us weirdos. We still stand out - probably even more than ever now that newcomers who just want to pay the fee and see the sites helped make the Man a well known event... but some people always want things to go back to the way they were, or a romanticized way they weren't but might have been in an ideal memory.

I compare the Man's changes to a backyard BBQ to point this out to people that don't like how it's changed. Invite your friends over, they'll all take care of their own mess. You can supply the drinks and food, they have a great time and everything is an easy cleanup at the end of the day. Next year, you have more people wanting to enjoy the BBQ. The neighbors house becomes part of the party, his friends come and they love it, despite not being anything like your friends, and everybody makes new friends. 5 years later, it's a block party people are making trips from nearby states to come see. It's huge. You can't afford to supply the beers and burgers any more. The garbage situation is beyond your ability to handle yourself, and too many people either don't clean up or can't find an empty can/bag if they want to try. You have to start charging and hiring crews to take care of this, or the city is going to shut you down.

That's the Man, how I see it anyway. Complain about the growth if you like, it changed and it can't go back to what it used to be. Embrace the newcomers, they're still awesome, they've always been different, and you don't have to dislike the differences if you don't want to.

Re:it's amazing what you can accomplish

[kc7rad]

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 experiment or shooting off a rocket. :-)

3d printed engine?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:3d printed engine?

[OzPeter]

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

Re:3d printed engine?

[OzPeter]

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.

Re:3d printed engine?

[jeffmflanagan]

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.

Re:3d printed engine?

[prograsm]

3D printing is additive manufacturing, sintered powder is 3D printing. "CNC" is typically seen as subtractive manufacturing, but 3D printers are still CNC machines.

A barren wasteland... and also:

[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

Re:Patroling the Mojave

[Salgak1]

No need. We have a Little Ice Age in progress, based on the sunspot numbers for the past few years. Depending how long it lasts, the Mohave may stop being a desert, or at least less arid. . .

Didn't know "Hello World"

[vikingpower]

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.

Perfect test environment

[Yvan256]

The Mojave Desert is the perfect place to test dangerous prototypes such as rocket cars.

The Mojave airshows were better than Reno

[fustakrakich]

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.

Really?

[Deadstick]

There's a dude trying to make a flying car

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