This book covers the topic of On-orbit repair and servicing of spacecraft. Putting a communications satellite in synchronous orbit will set you back 100’s of millions of dollars. Once on orbit, you hope it survived the launch environment, and operates correctly. You further hope it works at least for its design lifetime, and as long as possible. This approach, based on good engineering design practices, lessons learned, and hope, it the equivalent of buying a new Tesla with non-rechargeabl...

This book is an overview of the Civil War ironclads and other ships that changed Naval Warfare forever. It focuses mainly on those ships designed and deployed on inland rivers.Another topic is that of Union and Confederate submarines. The most popular sub was the CSS Hunley, which sank a Union warship, but never returned to base. In fact, the North and the South produced and deployed dozens of different submarine designs.

This book covers the topic of the storage and communications of digital data for STEM. It is addressed to the teacher, providing information and pointers to information for developing a curriculum on this topic.

In the last 11 years, a lot has changed in this field. That's to be expected in a technology that is driven by Moore's Law, where complexity doubles every 18 months or so. So we have a factor of 7 or so, but actually the rate of change is increasing.Where we are today is machines built with multiple cores on one chip, each core being a complete computer. The same communication schemes discussed in this book are used, with the same trade-off's, shared memory or communication channel....

This book discusses alternating the environment of a planet to be more Earth-like for human habitation. We will focus on the planets (and moons) of our solar system. There's enough work there to keep us busy for a while, before we consider planets around our neighbor stars.

This book covers the topic of the technology and applications of Embedded Graphics Processing Units. We first discuss what a graphics processing unit is, and how they have taken over the high performance computing market. We take a look at massively parallel microprocessor-based systems, an evolution from parallel mainframes, and see how this is applied to GPU's. Then, we take a look at embedded processors, derived from CPU's. We can then see how all of this practice was rapidly applied to...

Let me be clear at the beginning – when I say crewed spacecraft. I mean spacecraft with humans aboard. Young, or old, male or female, space travel is an equal opportunity hazardous endeavor. As of this writing, three spacefaring nations have put 559 humans into space, the Soviet Union/Russia, the United States, and China. Numerous astronauts from many other nations have hitched a ride. We are going to discuss historical, ongoing, and future efforts of getting people to space. We will menti...

This book is about trains and railroads, canals and roads, and the industries that relied on them. It spans more than a 265 year period, from 1854 through the current day. The discussion is centered geographically on the City of Cumberland, Maryland, in Allegany County, near the western end of the State. Cumberland is called the Queen City of the Alleghenies. This discussion does not focus on the equipment or operations of any one particular railroad. Many different forms of locomotion are...

This book is intended as an introduction to the topics of computer virtualization and the cloud. We will see how the topics come together.The book includes extensive reference and background material. It will not teach you to be an expert in virtualization or cloud technologies. It will teach you to understand and appreciate these topics, and how they fit into the big picture of computing. The best way to learn these technologies is to use them.

This book covers the topic of Weather in the context of STEM Education. The observation and forecasting of weather brings together a lot of science and math skills. Background information, sources of information, and suggested student involvement projects are included. This book is targeted to the STEM educator, and includes a section on resources, and some suggested student projects.

This is a work about the Georges Creek Valley in Allegany County, Western Maryland. The Georges Creek Valley is defined by Dan’s Mountain to the east, and Savage Mountain to the West, part of the Appalachian range. Portions of Savage Mountain form the Eastern Continental Divide, separating watersheds draining to the Ohio River and those draining to the Potomac River. The history of the settlement of the Georges Creek Valley is the history of coal. George Washington was familiar with the ar...

This book traces the history and technology of several Irons works in pre-colonial Maryland, starting with the Colony of Maryland. The collected information is the result of a long chain of research by tireless researchers in dingy colonial era archives, and in dismal swamps.