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Category: space travel

It is rocket science: New method to more rapidly evaluate heat shields

From the tragedy of the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003 to the now-routine return of commercial spacecraft, heat shields—formally called thermal protection systems—are critical for protecting vehicles from the intense heat and friction of atmospheric reentry or traveling at many times the speed of sound.

Now, a team of engineers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed ways to rapidly evaluate new thermal protection materials for hypersonic vehicles. Their three-year research project combined computer modeling, laboratory experiments and flight testing to better understand how heat shields behave under extreme temperatures and pressures, and to predict their performance much faster than before.

Hypersonic flight means traveling at speeds of at least five times faster than the speed of sound, or more than 3,800 miles per hour. Other vehicles, such as ballistic missiles, can travel this fast, but hypersonic vehicles are far more maneuverable and unpredictable, making them harder to intercept. Unlike reusable spacecraft, the thermal protection systems used on U.S. hypersonic missiles—which solely deliver conventional weapons—are designed for a single use.

Elon Says SpaceX Going To $100T!! (Moon Base)

🚀 Q: How will SpaceX reduce launch costs for space data centers?

A: SpaceX plans to build a lunar mass driver that will launch massive data centers into deep space at lower cost than using Starship rockets, with the mass driver eventually becoming the cheaper and more efficient method after initial Starship-based launches establish the infrastructure.

🏭 Q: What facilities will SpaceX build on the lunar base?

Analyzing Bill Ackman’s SpaceX IPO Offer w/ Tesla Larry

🔹 Q: What specific cost advantages does SPARC offer beyond eliminating underwriting fees? A: SPARC reduces friction, cost, and time by bypassing the traditional investment banking process entirely, eliminating promotional fees and creating a cleaner, more transparent process than traditional SPACs.

🔹 Q: How would Tesla shareholders get early access to SpaceX shares through SPARC? A: Tesla shareholders would receive special rights to acquire SpaceX shares at the IPO price before the public, potentially through warrants at a discounted price, allowing them to benefit from SpaceX’s future growth.

🔹 Q: What advantage does SPARC provide Tesla investors over traditional IPO allocation? A: SPARC enables more equitable allocation of SpaceX shares to Tesla investors, avoiding the traditional gated process that benefits Wall Street bankers’ friends and their preferred clients.

🔹 Q: How could SpaceX share access impact Tesla’s stock price? A: The SPARC structure allowing Tesla shareholders to receive warrants for SpaceX shares at discounted prices could potentially boost Tesla’s stock price by providing unique value to existing shareholders.

Pricing Control.

🔹 Q: Who controls pricing in SPARC versus traditional IPO? A: SPARC allows the public to set the price rather than banker control, giving SpaceX more control over pricing decisions compared to traditional IPO where investment banks determine valuation.

Continue reading “Analyzing Bill Ackman’s SpaceX IPO Offer w/ Tesla Larry” | >

Anode-free battery can double electric vehicle driving range

Could an electric vehicle travel from Seoul to Busan and back on a single charge? Could drivers stop worrying about battery performance even in winter? A Korean research team has taken a major step toward answering these questions by developing an anode-free lithium metal battery that can deliver nearly double driving range using the same battery volume.

A joint research team led by Professor Soojin Park and Dr. Dong-Yeob Han of the Department of Chemistry at POSTECH, together with Professor Nam-Soon Choi and Dr. Saehun Kim of KAIST, and Professor Tae Kyung Lee and researcher Junsu Son of Gyeongsang National University, has successfully achieved a volumetric energy density of 1,270 Wh/L in an anode-free lithium metal battery. This value is nearly twice that of current lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles, which typically deliver around 650 Wh/L. The article is published in Advanced Materials.

An anode-free lithium metal battery eliminates the conventional anode altogether. Instead, lithium ions stored in the cathode move during charging and deposit directly onto a copper current collector. By removing unnecessary components, more internal space can be devoted to energy storage, much like fitting more fuel into the same-sized tank.

Engineering the first reusable launchpads on the moon

Engineers need good data to build lasting things. Even the designers of the Great Pyramids knew the limestone they used to build these massive structures would be steady when stacked on top of one another, even if they didn’t have tables of the compressive strength of those stones.

But when attempting to build structures on other worlds, such as the moon, engineers don’t yet know much about the local materials. Still, due to the costs of getting large amounts of materials off of Earth, they will need to learn to use those materials even for critical applications like a landing pad to support the landing / ascent of massive rockets used in re-supply operations.

A new paper published in Acta Astronautica from Shirley Dyke and her team at Purdue University describes how to build a lunar landing pad with just a minimal amount of prior knowledge of the material properties of the regolith used to build it.

Inside SpaceX’s Pre-IPO Share Buyback and Who Gets Access

SpaceX is preparing for a potential IPO by buying back shares from institutional holders and allowing existing shareholders to sell shares, while its affiliate company Tesla is making progress in autonomous driving technology with plans to launch robo-taxis in multiple cities ## Questions to inspire discussion.

SpaceX Investment Access.

🔐 Q: How can individual investors access SpaceX shares before the IPO?

A: Investors must be accredited with liquid net worth over $1M (excluding home) and can access shares through special purpose vehicles (SPVs) that charge upfront fees and 10% carry on returns.

💰 Q: What is the minimum investment required to buy SpaceX shares directly?

A: Direct SpaceX share purchases require $50M-$1B investments due to SEC’s 2,000 shareholder cap for private companies, making SPVs the only option for smaller investors.

Continue reading “Inside SpaceX’s Pre-IPO Share Buyback and Who Gets Access” | >

For the 1st time ever, a person who uses a wheelchair will fly to space

Blue Origin will make history when it sends the first person who uses a wheelchair past the Kármán line, an internationally recognized boundary of space that’s 62 miles above Earth.

On its next mission, a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket will take Michaela “Michi” Benthaus, an aerospace and mechatronics engineer who suffered a spinal cord injury after a mountain biking accident, along with five others, on a journey past the Kármán line. New Shepard rockets are fully reusable spacecraft that Blue Origin says require less maintenance between flights, saving money and reducing waste.

The NS-37 mission will be the 16th human flight for Blue Origin, which has taken 86 people — 80 individuals — above the Kármán line.

Time might not exist — and we’re starting to understand why

Consider two events, A and B, such as flashes of light made by two sources in different places.

Cause and effect means there are three possibilities: 1) Flash A happened before flash B, and via some mechanism, could have triggered B; 2) Flash B happened before Flash A and could have triggered it; 3) Neither one could have triggered the other because they are too far apart in space and too close in time for a triggering signal to have been sent from one location to the other.

Now, Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity states that all observers, no matter how fast they’re moving relative to each other, see light travelling at the same constant speed.

This strange but simple fact can lead to observers seeing events happening in different orders.

For option above, two observers moving relative to each other close to the speed of light might disagree on the ordering of flashes.

Thankfully, there’s no danger of an effect coming before its cause (known as a ‘violation of causality’) since the events are too far apart for either to cause the other.

However, what if options and coexisted in a quantum superposition? The causal order of the two events would no longer be fixed.

Continue reading “Time might not exist — and we’re starting to understand why” | >

RAM is so expensive, Samsung won’t even sell it to Samsung

More hints that the Singularity really has begun: and more importantly: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/12/after-years-of-resisti…ublic-why/

The second article is how Elon is going to have SpaceX go public at $1.5 trillion so he has more money to put into AI. Of course, Elon is not the only one putting money into AI and $1 trillion will be spent on AI data centers next year.

Due to rising prices from the “AI” bubble, Samsung Semiconductor reportedly refused a RAM order for new Galaxy phones from Samsung Electronics.

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