30/04/2016 Click - Short Edition

minutes, but first it's Click.

Our dreams of exploring the great beyond have always been

governed by very earthly concerns.

Things like resources.

And safety.

And money.

I want go there.

I think it's a dead pixel, actually.

The problem, of course, with sending stuff into space is

that it is exceedingly expensive.

Since Nasa was founded back in 1958, they have spent more than $800

billion on it.

One of the reasons is that most things space-related get sent up

and either stay up, or burn up.

If we ever want to get out here, things are going to have to get

a lot cheaper, for a start.

And one way to make things cheaper is to reuse them.

Nasa gave that a go with the shuttle programme, a reusable spacecraft

that was meant to get things off world at a fraction of the cost.

The aim was to get it down to tens of millions per flight,

but you know how these things go.

Maintenance and stuff.

The shuttle programme was retired in 2011,

and now the gauntlet has been passed to the commercial outfit Spacex.

They have been trying to make their rocket reusable

for some time now, and it has not been without its challenges.

But in April this year, they finally did it, succeeding in touching

down on their autonomous drone ship, Of Course I Still Love You.

That is the name of the ship, by the way.

I do still love you, though.

The next step is to actually reuse the thing.

Something that Elon Musk, founder of Spacex, says they plan do

in the near future, if it passes a battery of tests.

But what if you didn't care if your spacecraft broke?

Well, that is the driving force behind an idea recently backed

by a host of very smart minds, including Mr Mark Zuckerberg

and Professor Stephen Hawking.

It is called the Starshop Project, and the plan is to launch thousands

of tiny spacecraft that are little more than circuit boards.

If one of them breaks, that is fine, there are plenty of others that can

still do the job.

Even better, the hope is that because they are each so tiny,

we can propel them to extraordinary speeds, possibly as fast

as a quarter of the speed of light.

That is more than 1,000 times faster than the fastest

spacecraft there has ever been.

That we know of.

The universe is a big place.

So if we are to have any chance of understanding it, it may be that

swarms of miniature craft like these are the only realistic way to do it.

This is Michael Johnson.

We first met him back in 2014, when we followed his project to send 100

Kickstarted spacecraft into orbit.

Well, since then, he has been busy working with Imperial College

London, on the next wave of crowd-funded space exploration.

I can't ignore the fact I am leaning on an

incredibly sexy desk at the moment.

Look, there is proper science on this desk.

Look, we have flashing stuff, we have -

tell me this is actual Mars soil?

I wish I could.

I am afraid it is South Kensington's finest builders' sand, and I threw

away the genuine fake lunar dust, which was the cement, because I

thought it was too dangerous.

What that is, that is our cheapskate Mars yard.

So we are working on a Mars lander concept.

So this is a mixture of thin film devices,

so basically a Mars weather network, so try and drop a few hundred

weather stations all round Mars.

By weather stations, you are talking about a variation

on your pocket spacecraft idea, thin film printable circuits.

Yes, that is right.

This would be about 20 microns thick, so that is

one 50th of a millimetre thick.

Onboard, they would have the radio, the computers, temperature sensors,

humidity sensors, all the bits and pieces you would have

in a very basic weather station.

Cube sats are relatively cheap to make, but you still have to put them

on a rocket and get them into space, but you have

a plan to make them up there, rather than down here, don't you.

That is right.

So depending on where you are going, it can take from a couple

of years to a decade to reach another planet in the solar system

for something launched from earth.

What we would like to do is take the spacecraft

printers that we currently have in the lab, put them in cube sats,

and you can print the spacecraft in orbit around Mars or around

Europa, or somewhere like that.

That means if you want to design a new space mission,

rather than waiting for several years, you can go file, print on

your laptop, and then a few minutes or a few hours later, out pops a new

mission in an interesting place.

You are printing spacecraft in orbit,

around another planet or a moon?

That is what we would like to do.

It will take a while, but we will have our first

prototypes flying hopefully towards the end of this year.

I am happy to wait.

That just sounds insanely brilliant.

Why are we seeing so much activity round small

spacecraft like cube sats now?

So, up until ten years ago, when you bought a launch

for a spacecraft, you actually designed your spacecraft go to be

a specific rocket.

And then along came the cube sat standard, which

suddenly decoupled the shape of your spacecraft from the type of rocket

it was going to be launched from.

So you can go shopping to lots of different launch providers and see

what is offering the best deal, who is going in the right direction.

OK, thank you for your time.

I am going to play with your little Mars yard for a bit.

This week saw the release of a brand-new product by British

design and engineering firm Dyson.

I was invited down to its HQ in advance to find out just what it

might be.

I had a feeling it might have something to do with air.

Because from innovation in the field of vacuum cleaning -

sucking, if you will - Dyson has moved on to blowing, with handdryers

and those fans with the whole load of nothing in the middle.

Something that still weirds me out, if I am honest.

Well, it turns out the next logical frontier to air is hair.

The new product - a hairdryer.

Welcome to Dyson's hair laboratories.

Yes.

They have spent ?50 million on this set up.

And they have on site 1,010 miles of hair.

Not all of it from the same person, I hasten to add.

The result is something called the Dyson Supersonic.

So take a few seconds to think about what

a Dyson hairdryer might look like.

And I bet you are probably right.

Five years in development, and after a lot of work with all that

hair, Dyson believes its offering can overcome what it sees as the

problems with existing hairdryers.

Ones that I, for one, had not noticed as being problems but then

again, well, look at my hair!

The Supersonic's temperatures is regulated 20 times a second,

which should mean your hair can't be damaged by overheating.

Something that cheaper models are apparently guilty of.

The device is said to be quieter, lighter, and crucially,

it claims to offer more powerful and more controlled airflow,

which should make drying quicker.

Most of these advantages come from the motor technology at its heart.

This is a conventional hairdryer motor, so it is big, heavy,

lots of copper, turns slowly.

This is the new Dyson supersonic motor.

So it is as small as a two pence piece.

Where is it?

That is so small we have been able to put that inside the handle.

I see.

So...

So it sucks in air there at the bottom.

Blows it up there.

Because it is small, it can be located in the handle,

hence the hollow centre.

That is weird, you can do that with a hairdryer.

What is happening, how it works, this motor generates

a large amount of air pressure.

We are getting that air to blow round that channel there, and that

causes the air to accelerate.

When it accelerates, it sucks in a load more air

from the back, through this hole.

So in a similar way your fans work.

Absolutely, yes.

On average, there is about three times more

airflow coming over the outside of this and through the middle.

That then, as they say, is the science bit, but what you really

want to know is does any of this make a blind bit of difference?

Well, meet Lily, who has kindly volunteered to get her air done, all

all in the name of science, and George,

hairdresser to the stars, with a dazzling resume of past clients.

Kirk Douglas, who I was very keen to talk to, about Spartacus, Ulysses,

various other films.

He was much more interested in the hairdressing business than

Hollywood.

Wonderful, charming man.

Let me know when you are ready to dry, George.

Ready.

Now George reckons it would normally take about 30 minutes to dry Lily's

hair with his normal hairdryer, so certainly long enough

for a bit of a chat.

What is your first impressions about it?

It is much lighter than a conventional hairdryer.

Airflow is good for what I am doing now, which is just taking most

of the moisture out of the hair.

I like it.

Lily, how much does this cost?

?299.

?299.

It is a lot more expensive than the most expensive conventional

hairdryer, I would say.

Possibly double the price, if not more, but - hey.

That, then, is the main question.

Is it worth several times the cost of a salon-quality hairdryer?

Yes, we all spend, I don't know, 20 or 30 minutes a day doing

our hair, don't we?

Every morning, you use it an awful lot.

Beauty is very important, doing your hair so it is glossy

and smooth and undamaged, and done quickly, because this is

quicker than those hairdryers.

That is important.

Yes, I believe people will pay for that.

Let us have hairdryer wars!

And we will leave it there for now.

Next week, we will hear more from Sir James Dyson and his lovely hair.

He got me!

And that is it from Dyson's HQ.

If you are wondering what this is, this is what the engineers got

James Dyson on his 60th birthday.

I would be rather annoyed if they did this to my car.

There you go.

That is from us, @BBCClick on Twitter throughout the week, please.