For those of you who want an electric car and a trip to the Kennedy Space Center, head on down to Sam's Club.
The club store branch of Wal-Mart Stores is selling a 2007 lithium-powered smart car from Hybrid Technologies this year as part of its once-in-a-lifetime packages. For $35,000 you get the car along with a trip to the NASA Kennedy Space Center to watch a shuttle launch. Some of the technology inside the car comes from NASA. That's the connection.
George Clooney owns one of these. Sam's Club will put the car on sale on November 8.
Let's go drive over to see Paula Deen.
(Credit: Hybrid Technologies)If you're down there picking up a case of Swiffer wets and some Hungry Jack buttermilk pancake mix, why not get a car? That's my thinking.
Last year, Sam's Club offered a $2.7 million Cessna Citation aircraft. It sold in 60 seconds.
Here are some other packages for 2007:
For $75,000, you can get a four-person package to the Beijing Olympics. It comes with exceptional seats for the opening ceremonies and other events.
For $24,000, you can get a travel-sports package to go to the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series in Charlotte, N.C. Richard Petty will come by to meet you. No word on if it comes with a flame-retardant suit to take home. If you bought the car too, you could maybe race him in it. There's a family memory for you.
And for you cheapskates, there is the $3,800 package where you go to Savannah, Ga., and meet Food Network star Paula Deen and eat lots of food with mayonnaise in it. That woman loves mayo.
If you can imagine a plane that can stay in flight for years at a time and refuel itself autonomously, then you're thinking like a government agent (or at least a science fiction writer).
Last week, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research and development arm of the U.S. Department of Defense, began soliciting bids from the private sector to design a plane that can remain aloft for five years with a 99 percent probability.
Called the Vulture Air Vehicle Program, possibly after the vulture's ability to sail on thermal streams, the project "will research and develop technologies and systems which will enable the military to deliver and maintain a 1,000-pound airborne payload for an uninterrupted period exceeding five years," according to a statement from DARPA released May 16.
Vulture's technical challenges include "environmental energy collection, high specific energy storage, extremely efficient propulsion systems, precision robotic refueling, autonomous material transfer, extremely efficient vehicle structural design, and mitigation of environmentally induced loads," according to DARPA.
Translated, the project calls for planes powered from solar or fuel cells, among other options. But DARPA said it's specifically not interested in planes that would use radioactive energy or forms of buoyant flight, i.e., blimps.
The government blog Tech Insider speculated about a few potential contenders, including AeroEnvironment, a Monrovia, Calif.-based maker of electric-powered planes. Scaled Composites, the Mojave, Calif.-based company that's working with Richard Branson on his commercial spaceflight venture, might also be an option given that its owner, aerospace engineer Burt Rutan, designed the Voyager plan that flew around the world without refueling in the '80s.
DARPA didn't specify the mission of Vulture, and a representative wasn't immediately available for comment. But the agency said that it will be accept bids for the project at a Vulture information day in Arlington, Va., on June 7.
"It is envisioned that this program will, at a minimum, develop and demonstrate advanced reliability technologies for air vehicles," DARPA says. "Other advanced technologies may also be developed and demonstrated depending upon the nature of the architectures proposed by offerers."
- prev
- 1
- next
