Stoke Space: shades of "The Expanse" hardware

[helium]

I searched and could not find this video on the PA forum. But if it exists somewhere maybe the mods could move this post into the proper thread.

Here's a nice inside look at a small company doing some pretty cool stuff.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=EY8nbSwjtEY

Their website: https://www.stokespace.com/

No need to read further but I thought I'd provide some background to explain my enthusiasm for the Stoke hardware.

A very long time ago I did a stint at Rocket Research in Redmond, WA. They designed and manufactured small thrusters for satellites. One of my areas of expertise is in computer data acquistion, dating back to before such a thing existed. That is, before the PC was capable of streaming raw sensor data to a hard disk (hard disks did not exist then).

My real interest in developing data acquisition hardware way back then was to record EEG and polysomnograms for use in sleep research, specifically lucid dream and OBE research. If I wasn't old and worn the f*** out I'd be on that manufacturing floor at Stoke right now. Their design is extraordinary.

In the 80's we used paper and ink multi-channel chart recorders at the UW to record sleep. That meant the end result of one night's sleep was 60lbs. of fanfold paper that took days to scroll through to 'score' sleep stages and analyse the EEG channels with raw eyeballs (definately raw by the time you've come to the final page).

At the time I struggled to afford the chips necessary to design and build circuit boards for crude computer data acquistion. A decade or so later I could fit an entire night's sleep on an 8.5x11 page (landscape). The data on that sheet is analyzed automatically by the PC such that the printout shows not only sleep stages but also slow and fast eye movements, EEG power spectrum up to 200hz (gamma1 and gamma2, not standard at the time but essential for lucid dream studies), sleep spindles, k-complexes, movement artifact, and many other essential parameters. I incorporated state-of-the-art wavelet processing and used the Hilbert transform rather than Fourier transforms to best preserve EEG phase information. Most of the university academics were perplexed by the software I'd written. Of course they didn't know what a lucid dream was, let alone what it would take to research it.

When I finally decided that I had to cease being a student (six years of humanistic and transpersonal psychology) I took a job at a large testing lab in Seattle (now defunct). The only military contract I ever worked on entailed my design and construction of a sixty channel data acquisition system to test the structural integrity of the Titan IV rocket launchpad (Martin Marietta). The Air Force generals were wowed by my use of two monitors on one PC, which was an unheard of hack at that time. More advanced PC's and over-the-counter data acquisition hardware were in their infancy then.

So I found myself fully funded for whatever I wanted to purchase to complete the project. And I was chastised for not spending enough! The end result is that I was able to leverage my new-found federally funded knowledge and skills to design and build relatively compact, portable systems that we used for our lucid dream research, as well as to put this advanced technology into the hands of undergrad students. Teaching was a secondary obsession for me.

I grew up within a few miles of what became the Boeing Space Center in Kent, WA. Actually, I remember when the land they built the Boeing Space Center on was farms and swamp. Stoke Space is in the same general area. I feel a bit of pride in the fact that as a kid in the 60's I knew many of the aerospace engineers in the Kent/Renton area. And today, thanks to Stoke, there are hints of realistic access to space emerging from that legacy of 707's, 727's, and the SST (supersonic transport) project that were developed in my back yard by those role models from my childhood.

I'd certainly love to be on that Stoke team as a test technician, outfitting their test stands and flight-ready hardware with sensors and actuators.

This sort of high-tech stuff was my day job. It kept me alive to do the important stuff - sleep research and teaching.

Stoke is leveraging SpaceX knowledge and experience, and it sure looks like the future to me. If cooler heads prevail and the nukes don't fly, that is. I'd like to feel optimistic, but it's not easy to do.

The kind of relaxed, matter-of-fact attitude you see in those Stoke engineers and techs is so typical of the industries I've worked in. Creativity thrives when suits and ties are left at home.

My enthusiasm runneth over, I suppose. It always did.