In the early morning of Saturday, the MEGA van factory in Chanas, South of Lyon, France was destroyed by fire.

MEGA is a brand of the Aixam microcar company which produces minivans which fall under the ’sans permis’ category in France. The vehicles are available either with a fuel efficient Kubota diesel or a completely battery-electric drive train. The vehicles are exported to several countries in the EU including the UK.

While the entire MEGA line has been destroyed by the fire, the other Aixam lines at other sites remain in operation. As for the MEGA line, Aixam certainly aren’t sitting around crying about it. They’ve already rented a new building and intend to set up the MEGA line there as soon as possible. In the mean time they claim extensive stocks will help them to overcome any supply issues.

The Official Aixam-MEGA Press Release:

A fire occurred Saturday Dec. 1, at six o’clock in the morning on the
site of Chanas in France. The MEGA production plant was totally
destroyed. Nevertheless, the offices and other plants have not been
damaged.
An investigation is underway to determine the causes.
This plant consisted of two assembly lines: the MEGA line and a small
AIXAM line of about twenty vehicles a day.
The company has a large stock and the site of the AIX-LES-BAINS – which
usually manufactures 50 vehicles AIXAM per day - will increase its
production. Thus there will be no impact on the delivery of AIXAM
vehicles to the end customer.
Arrangements have already been taken by AIXAM MEGA board: a building
located in Chanas area has already been rented and the assembly line MEGA
will soon restart there. The AIXAM assembly line will follow but anyhow
AIX-LES-BAINS will offset its forecasted production. No technical
unemployment is scheduled on site.
Once permission is given, the site will be cleared away, a permit shall
be deposited in order to rebuild a new building.
The company AIXAM MEGA continues its vehicle production to meet still
better the needs of its customers.

Now, I’m always suspicious when something bad happens to Electric Vehicles, like when the General Motors EV-1s were recalled and scrapped against the customer’s wishes. Although there’s always the chance that some malicious ‘oil-lobby’ vested interest could be responsible, I’m sure there is a more mundane explanation such as a stray cigarette-end or even arson(!)

It will be interesting to see what the fire investigation turns up, that is, if I can even find out the outcome. Indeed, the only source I have for information on this fire is the Aixam-MEGA press release. I’ve been all over looking for another news source (Google News France etc). If anyone happens to find another source, please let me know.

I hope that the MEGA line gets back to full swing as soon as possible as what the world needs right now is more super-efficient and battery electric vehicles to compensate for the ever increasing cost of oil. Hopefully, the relative simplicity of the MEGA design will help with the swift recover.

The Telegraph online edition today carries a story describing how the UK Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith believes that British police officers should be issued with 50,000 volt cattle prods.

We are, of course, talking about Taser guns which are already used by the British police firearms teams. The type issued to UK police fires two darts which embed themselves in the target person and provide a conductive path from the gun for an electrical charge to be administered. This charge is meant to incapacitate the target person through a combination of muscle spasms and pain.

In 2005 West Midlands Police firearms unit used the Taser with great skill to apprehend a suspect in relation to the July 21st bombings in London. The fully armed officers made a split second decision to use a Taser unit instead of a firearm in order to take the suspect into custody rather than kill them. Obviously, it’s much easier to question and gain information from a suspect who hasn’t been shot dead.

The West Midlands Police firearms unit is an intensively trained, specialist weapons team. However, the Home Secretary intends that the Taser weapon be issued to every police officer.  Obviously, it will not be possible to offer the same level of intensive training to every British police officer (because the government would never fund it) so we could end up with a situation as seen across the Atlantic where the Taser gun goes from being the ‘weapon of last resort’ to the ‘weapon of least resistance’.

Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, said it was “pretty clear” that the weapons were more effective for subduing suspects and caused less harm than traditional batons.

Of course, they also leave little by the way of visible evidence even when the subject dies after administration. The worry is that a Taser gun could be used in laziness as we have seen in many videos from the US. Between about 70 and 150 people have been estimated to have died after being shocked by a Taser unit used by police in the US.

For the Taser gun to go on general issue in the UK, the police would need a massive continuous weapons training program to ensure the weapons were only used correctly and as a weapon of last resort against genuinely dangerous/violent suspects in all cases. I’m quite sure that this government would provide no adequate funding for such training.

I would consider it reasonable to generally arm many police with firearms too if the police force could be given the funding necessary to be trained to excellence in  every case but I won’t hold my breath waiting for that funding to materialize.

NASA.gov, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s public-facing website has had a full makeover.

The new design is very “Web 2.0″ with (smoothly!) moving widgets and easy access to multimedia such as NASA’s picture of the day and NASA TV. The front page does convey a certain feeling of the site ‘dumbing down’ or at least trying to appeal to the widest audience possible, even giving fairly major prominence to the kids section and accessibility for the public at large is very important but what we really don’t want is the science itself dumbing down and this appears not to be the case (yet!).

In other NASA news, the ISS crew has been chasing a minor atmosphere leak which is suspected to be around the new Harmony module’s mating vestibule. I was somewhat irritated to find a story on slashdot with the poster asking: “While this is yet another technical issue with the ISS, when will this end?” which makes me feel like screaming “It’s not like a trip to the shops you know!” but people like this rarely, if ever, comprehend. There is nothing trivial, tried, tested or particularly safe about space exploration in general and the ISS is no exception. Travelling around the globe 200 miles up and 17,500mph in a vacuum is never going to be easy but like someone once said, we choose to do these things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard..”

Space Shuttle flight STS-122 is scheduled for launch on Thursday 6th December at 21:31:44ZULU and will see Atlantis carrying the European Columbus module to the International Space Station. Let’s hope Columbus’ mating structure seals properly!

Don’t forget, you can watch the launch live over the web on NASA.TV as usual.