WASHINGTON - NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate is inviting teams of undergraduate and graduate students throughout the country to participate in the fourth annual Systems Engineering Paper Competition. Participants in the competition will submit a paper on an Exploration Systems mission topic.

The deadline to register for the competition is April 16. Papers are due April 23. The winning teams will be announced in May. Awards include up to $3,500 in cash scholarships and VIP invitations to attend a future space shuttle or rocket launch at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The competition is designed to engage students in the science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, disciplines critical to NASA's missions.

For information about the competition and how to apply, visit: http://education.ksc.nasa.gov/esmdspacegrant/SystemsEngineering.htm

For information about NASA's education programs, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/education

Source: NASA

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Madrid - Admiral Di Paola, Chairman of the Military Committee, talking to the students and staff of CESEDEN (Centro Estudios de la Defensa), confirmed that the Strategic Concept will be short, sharp and simple.

"In few words, this new document will have to explain clearly to the man and the woman [in the street] which strategic direction the Alliance intends to take in the years to come." The Strategic Concept and its development are one of the main issues of interest for the Alliance on its way to the Summit in Lisbon, next fall.

Source: NATO News

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Broken seats in commercial aircraft are more than just inconveniences, and while a defective seat by itself cannot cause a major safety issue inside a plane, it is often an indication of a bigger, ongoing problem.

The seats used by every passenger on commercial aircraft are quite sturdy things: They are designed to resist fairly high G-forces and the weight of an adult for hours at a time. They are easy to clean and modular, so that if something fails it can be repaired or replaced between flights. However, seats are today being, literally, overwhelmed by big fannies.

Indeed, lack of maintenance can cause problems in seats too, and it is easy to associate that with the quality of service in an airline, but overweight passengers make repairing and maintaining things more difficult and costly. If you consider that just a brand-new, aircraft-grade seat belt could cost about seventy dollars, imagine what costs to actually repair a whole seat.

The average weight of an adult human in an aircraft has been calculated years ago at 77 kg - this is an ICAO standard. Aircraft are normally designed with tolerances of 30% or so, meaning that you can have people of up to 100 kg or so sit safely for a variety of reasons that go from the resistance of the seat materials to weight and balance distribution in the aircraft.

But here is where problems begin: Aircraft have not been designed in this fashion so that obese people would fit better inside, but due to safety concerns as well as flight mechanics: Indeed, when a plane flies it is subjected to increased "Gs" at times. This means that during those phases of flight, the plane "weights" more or less than it really weights. For example, if something that flies suffers 2G, even for an instant, its weight doubles and the structure suffers two times the stresses than normal. Thus, if you consider that today, people in some countries like the US are averaging about 92kg, it is easy to see that things are reaching the limit in terms of safety.

New aircraft are indeed being designed taking into account the new parameters but there are many vehicles - not just old aircraft - that still offer only the older standards. It would be nonsensical from a financial point of view to force every manufacturer and operator to change things just because people don't eat well. Moreover: Since the average weight of adults actually tends to increase and is expected that in a few years it will go beyond 92 kg. Such changes would not result in any long-term positive solution. Making sturdier seats usually means leaving less space inside the fuselage of ain aircraft or the body of a car, bus, etc. which means higher transportation costs per passenger because the vehicle will be forced to carry less people or cargo.

In the case of small aircraft it usually means replacing the whole fuselage, something prohibitively expensive unless the plane is yours and you are desperate to fly without paying much attention to weight loss. Indeed: you can get wider fuselages for little planes like a Piper Cub, but that means losing a lot in the power-to-weight ratio as well as aerodynamics, so the trade-off may not be acceptable for everyone.

Anything that goes beyond the tolerances must be deemed as unsafe locally - i.e. the seat will likely break - and globally -i.e. such overweight will alter the weight and balance of the plane and put it outside the safety envelope. Since you cannot modify aircraft easily or quickly, the only sensible solution to the problem is unfortunately to leave overweight people in the ground.

This is why sometimes pilots choose to leave obese passengers behind; it is not a matter of discrimination, but physics.

Source: Pablo Edronkin, Andinia.com

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