New military and commercial craft aim to go far higher than jumbo jets and stay there for months, offering a more flexible alternative to satellites.
SpaceX’s veteran Falcon 9 booster, B1058, made its 16th launch on Sunday. This was the 216th successful mission for the series and a record-breaking event for the company.
On the night of July 9, 2023, SpaceX made space history with yet another successful Falcon 9 rocket launch. Blasting off from the Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, the rocket carried a payload of Starlink satellites before landing its first stage booster on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.
This is pretty much par for the course for SpaceX, but what is more incredible is that this was the 16th launch and landing of its B1058 Falcon 9 rocket booster. The company now hopes to be able to use the same booster… More.
Continue reading “SpaceX breaks record for Falcon 9 with 16th launch of booster B1058” »
Russia has successfully conducted tests on parts of its next-generation “Poseidon” nuclear-capable torpedo, according to reports.
Testing of reactors for the Poseidon unmanned nuclear-powered underwater drones shows “their operability and safety have been confirmed,” Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported on June 23. The report was also shared on Russian-language social media channels.
“They are ready to work as intended,” the Kremlin-backed outlet quoted an unnamed source “in the military-industrial complex.” The first “sea tests” are scheduled for this summer.
Sky Elements Drone Shows set a Guinness World Record for its Fourth of July drone show in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas. Sky Elements Drone Shows produced 40 shows during the extended holiday weekend using more than LED-equipped 10,000 drones, including 1,002 just at the show in Texas.
The show near Dallas set the record for the largest aerial sentence formed by multirotor drones and the 10-minute display illustrated critical moments in American history through precisely choreographed movements.
Wind turbine maintenance is an important yet unheralded task. But drones have arrived to spice things up.
RigiTech is a Swiss drone manufacturer and operator boasting some of the most extensive beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) flight authorizations in the industry. And it just completed a landmark test of its Eiger delivery system, flying spare parts to the Anholt Offshore Wind Farm, located 20 sm (17 nm) off the coast of Denmark. But there’s a catch—the drones didn’t need to land.
The tests marked the rollout of RigiTech’s prototype precision dropping system, which autonomously releases cargo from a few feet in the air when it detects the drone has reached its destination. That’s a game-changer in the case of offshore wind turbines, which typically do not have landing pads.
Research into AI is experiencing a boom, so we have rounded up the best of news from the past month to help you keep up to date.
Now that’s cool. I’d like one to keep harass me cats and dog haha actually it be useful. Am wondering what ever happened to the indoor Amazon security drone.
Advanced family robots from Moorebot.
A prototype drone developed at Imperial College London is able to withstand temperatures of up to 200°C for 10 minutes.
The so-called FireDrone (Opens in a new window) is designed to fly into burning buildings or forest fires and provide “crucial first-hand data” otherwise unavailable to first responders. For example, identifying where people are trapped in a burning building without fire fighters needing to perform a room-by-room search.
Science fiction often paints a terrifying picture of the future—think aliens decimating humanity, à la The War of the Worlds. But sometimes the future becoming the present can be pretty amazing—who doesn’t love successful space launches majestically catapulting humans skyward?
Or take Earth’s oceans, which are currently in the middle of a technological revolution that, outside of some very nerdy circles, has gone largely unnoticed.
“We’re at the cusp of a proliferation of lots of autonomous vehicles in the ocean,” said Alex De Robertis, a biologist at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “Things that were science fiction not so long ago are kind of routine now.” That includes saildrones, which look like oversized orange surfboards, each with a hard, carbon-fiber sail (called a wing) and a stash of scientific equipment.
Cybertruck release candidates (i.e. near-production versions that may have a few faults) are due in August, with customer deliveries targeted for the end of Q3 2023. Given that likely equates to an end-of-September delivery event, it makes sense that Tesla is already gearing up for mass production.
A leaked video also gave a brief preview of Cybertruck production in action. Check out the below tweet for more.
