SpaceX Lands Then Burns, Hyundai Doubles Down on Fuel Cells and Europe Gets Serious About Tech
SpaceX’s torrid lunch rate continues, and last week the test vehicle was Starship serial number 10, which rose to 10 km before settling down on his landing pad. A post landing fire destroyed the vehicle, but SpaceX has already rolled out the next test vehicle for possible flight this week. The speed with which SpaceX flies is unprecedented in the space launch industry. If it works, the company may have a credible competitor to NASA’s more conventionally developed space launch system. Whatever happened to fuel cells? Well, despite the rapid development of pure electric vehicles worldwide, there is still interest, development and production of hydrogen fuel cells for transportation use. Hyundai has broken ground on their first foreign fuel cell production facility, HTWO Guangzhou, in China. At over 2,000,000 ft.², it’s big and will handle both R&D; and series production for light vehicles, trucks and buses. The European Union perceives a growing gap between Europe and the rest of the world in several critical 21st century technologies. The European Council has released a plan for a continental digital strategy called the Digital Compass, a strategy to rapidly increase the penetration of high-tech hardware and software across all European states with surprising speed, by 2030. It’s broad in scope, and with a very aggressive timetable, and it includes a goal that Europe manufactures 20% of the world’s critical semiconductors. Access all episodes of This Week in Engineering on Engineering TV along with all of our other series.