Matterbeam.
Author of the ToughSF blog. Original SuperNerd.
Ex-Kurzgesagt Duck. Freelance writer.
Discord https://discord.gg/nXvRPcE7uU
ToughSF
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The RS-25 engine has a chamber pressure of 20.64 MPa and a nozzle expansion ratio of 78:1, delivering a vacuum Isp of 452s.
What if it got a proper vacuum-optimized nozzle, with an expansion ratio of 250? Isp would climb to nearly 470s.
The Solar Cruiser, a NASA project for a 1672 m^2 solar sail that would visit the Sun's poles. It was supposed to launch last year.
#space #art by Lee Kolb.
www.artstation.com/artwork/QX11g4
HAMR heads can generate hotspots just 51 nanometers wide out of an 800 nm laser wavelength, which is sub-diffraction-limited performance, thanks to metallic surface plasmon waveguides, enabling Plasmonic Near Field Transducers to record 5 TB/in^2 of data:
www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...
MBDA has been awared $422m to install 50 kW DragonFire lasers aboard 4 Royal Navy destroyers by 2027:
www.gov.uk/government/n...
These were recently tested against 650 km/h drones at sea.
It'll be the first European 'high power laser weapon' in service.
The Concorde looks so futuristic for a plane that first flew in 1969! Its vortex-generating S-curve delta wing for low-speed lift and high-speed efficiency is still a marvel.
#art by Julien Lepelletier.
lepelletier.artstation.com/projects/aR0...
Engineering and inboard cameras for the STS-4 launch:
youtu.be/o-LH8M6IgSI
In slow motion we can clearly see the boundary of flow separation moving down and out of the RS-25 nozzles.
Since the Concorde, these private companies failed to get a supersonic passenger jet flying:
-Aerion Corporation (AS2)
-Exosonic (Horizon)
-Virgin Galactic (SJP)
-Spike Aerospace (S-512)
Now it's Boom Supersonic's turn.
Video
Capillaries are smaller than the red blood cells passing through them, requiring them to deform significantly to pass through.
So, they appear like this under a microscope:
youtu.be/dO8P9Qzhv2s
Everyone knows the Bell X-1 that first broke the sound barrier.
But the Douglas D-558-2 Skyrocket was developed practically in parallel, using the same XLR-11 rocket engine, getting dropped by a modified B-29 (a P2B-1S patrol bomber) to achieve Mach 2 for the first time.
Combining JWST and ALMA observations to explore the early Universe:
arxiv.org/abs/2601.04314
For example, by uncovering that carbon emerged earlier than 350 million years after the Big Bang, making it the first metal (in the astronomical sense).
