Devon Smith @DevonShmitty

Hey @grok why are the governments of the world telling people to start prepping?

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. “If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.” - Niels Bohr

Module 9 done. Standing tall again at LC-36! The Vehicle Access Tower is fully assembled, with every module repaired and back in place. This was a monumental effort. Proud of Team Blue.

NEW: A U.S. startup's plan to deploy up to 50,000 satellites capable of reflecting sunlight onto Earth at night is facing growing opposition from astronomers and environmental groups. Reflect Orbital recently demonstrated the concept near Mount Whitney, California, using powerful ground-based lights to illuminate desert terrain during nighttime search-and-rescue exercises. The company plans to launch its first experimental orbital mirror, equipped with a 59-foot reflector, to test directing sunlight toward selected locations on Earth. Potential applications include emergency response, extending solar energy production after sunset and illuminating remote areas. However, environmental groups have petitioned the FCC to reconsider its authorization, warning that artificial nighttime illumination could disrupt wildlife, human sleep and astronomical observations. Reflect Orbital says it is working with scientists and regulators to minimize potential impacts and avoid sensitive locations. The California test simulated the technology using terrestrial spotlights. Sunlight delivery from orbit has not yet been demonstrated.

Outer Space Today @outerspacetoday

7 days ago

JUST IN: A California space startup has illuminated a section of desert near Mount Whitney at night, demonstrating how future satellites could deliver sunlight to Earth on demand. Reflect Orbital conducted the October 10 test using powerful ground-based spotlights to simulate

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JUST IN: Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is targeting a return to New Glenn launch-pad operations in November, following a catastrophic rocket explosion that damaged its Cape Canaveral launch complex in May. According to Aviation Week, Blue Origin has completed reconstruction of its 430-foot Vehicle Access Tower at Launch Complex 36, a major milestone toward resuming launches. The May 28 explosion occurred during a preflight engine test, destroying the rocket and damaging critical ground infrastructure. Blue Origin subsequently traced the failure to an oxygen-valve issue in one of its BE-4 engines. Rather than rebuilding the original launch configuration, the company is introducing a new system that integrates rocket stages horizontally before lifting the vehicle onto the launch pad. Blue Origin is still targeting a return to flight before the end of 2026, although no launch date has been confirmed. The recovery is critical to New Glenn's growing commercial and government launch commitments, including NASA's Artemis lunar program.

It’s kinda crazy to me that we melt sand down, clean it to 99.99999% purity, literal wizards have to draw it slowly into an ingot, we cut it, inscribe a hundred billion little on/off switches on it, and when you run electric current through it you can do basic arithmetic, which when you do enough of it can do any math on the planet, and which describes reality well enough that we can teach it the ontological meaning of words and their distance from each other on a high-dimensional space, and if you ask, it can tell you what word comes next and that apparently is powerful enough that if you do it a hundred billion times it’s the smartest thing to ever exist oh yeah and we use this primarily for email

BREAKING: The Pentagon has announced a $150 MILLION conditional loan commitment to Stoke Space, backing the development of a second launchpad at Cape Canaveral for its next-generation fully reusable rockets. The financing, announced through the Department of War’s Office of Strategic Capital, would support infrastructure for Stoke’s larger Nova Block 2 rocket. Nova Block 2 is designed to deliver 15 metric tons to low Earth orbit with both rocket stages fully reusable, targeting rapid turnaround and lower launch costs. Stoke is pursuing two major milestones: • Nova Pathfinder: First orbital launch targeted for 2027. • Nova Block 2: First launch targeted for 2029, supported by the proposed new launchpad. The company also announced a $1 billion private funding round in September, bringing total capital raised to $2.3 billion. The Pentagon says expanding domestic launch capacity is critical to supporting military satellite deployments and reducing dependence on limited launch infrastructure. The $150 million commitment remains conditional on financial, technical and legal requirements. No loan funds have been confirmed as disbursed.

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JUST IN: The U.S. Air Force has tested a SpaceX $SPCX spacecraft carrying military supplies through space, advancing plans to deliver critical equipment anywhere on Earth in as little as one hour. On October 20, a SpaceX Falcon 9 launched the Starfall reentry capsule carrying experimental cargo pods developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory. The pods contained communications equipment, batteries, survival supplies, medical equipment and a water desalination system. Sensors monitored temperature, shock and vibration to assess how military equipment withstands launch and atmospheric reentry. The Pentagon's longer-term Rocket Cargo program aims to transport tens of tons of supplies to remote or contested locations, potentially reaching military forces without access to runways or roads. AFRL confirmed the test flight, but has not published detailed cargo-performance results or demonstrated operational point-to-point delivery. The technology could eventually allow rockets to complement conventional military transport aircraft during emergencies or combat operations.

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Bunch of 20 year olds just doing an S Tier Airplane style bit randomly at their party.

444 @sadngkid

4 days ago

When they started opening the fridge i lost it

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I should point out that both @Peter_J_Beck and @elonmusk come from the southern hemisphere, so the US lunar program has the necessary experience to deal with this at the highest level.

Scott Manley @DJSnM

23 hours ago

Because NASA is targeting the south pole of the moon the astronauts landing there are going to see the Earth 'upside down'.

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🟠 PALMER LUCKEY chased a decommissioned AIRCRAFT CARRIER being towed for scrap with its transponders OFF, and landed a drone on its deck the tow crew radioed "military operation, stay clear." then went silent as he got closer his team launched a drone off his own ex navy SEAL boat and did a touch and go on the kitty hawk's runway landing back on the boat failed. so he jumped in the ocean and held the drone up to save the memory card he says they got the video genius or insane?

Geoffrey Hinton once noticed that the tellers at his bank kept changing. When he asked one of them why, the teller didn't know, only that they got moved around a lot. Hinton guessed the reason... if staff never work with the same people for long, it's much harder for a few of them to team up and cheat the bank. That thought became one of the most useful tricks in deep learning. While a neural network trains, you randomly switch off about half its neurons at every step. No neuron can lean on a particular partner, so each one has to learn something useful on its own. The trick is called dropout, and it helped AlexNet win the 2012 ImageNet contest, which set off the modern AI boom. It's still built into many of today's networks.

A jet engine that has spent 10 of the last 30 years in the air. The fan blades spin ninety-four times a second, the blade tips at 1,070 miles per hour. 28,800 g's of centripetal acceleration For a decade. Fewer countries have built a commercial airliner than gone to space.

Roll out solar arrays will be installed during next week's spacewalk. You can see two of them folded and ready to be installed and you can also see how they look when they are installed (look in front of the big ones - the new ones are smaller and slightly tilted).

Full duration 33-engine static fire for the Super Heavy booster preparing for Flight 15

Physicists in Okinawa have floated a diamond about a centimetre wide and pushed it up and down using nothing but the spins of electrons inside it, pumped by pulses of green laser light. That object is roughly a hundred million times heavier than anything moved by spin force before. So, a quantum force now shows up directly on something heavy enough for gravity to matter.

we absolutely should in fact genetically engineer bioluminescent plants & trees and then completely eradicate the affront to God that is LED street lights from the face of the Earth

Zy @ZyMazza

4 days ago

How come it's always war and never like road work. Can we genetically engineer some giraffes for construction projects?

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You don’t have to pick one passion. Learn philosophy. Paint. Write. Build things. Study the stars. Disappear into the woods for a while. Then get obsessed with something completely random next year. A single lane is for cars, not for people. Chase a life full of curiosity.

Breaking: NASA wants to speed up Artemis… while also replacing the SLS program head. They just posted the SLS Program Manager job — handling the rocket’s budget, schedule, and mission assignments. Senior member of the Artemis team, salary around $220k. After looking into SpaceX, did NASA finally realize that a single RS-25 engine costs more than an entire Starship flight… and fire the previous SLS lead?

if I won the lottery I wouldn't say anything but there would be signs:

CNSPACE @CNSpaceflight

3 days ago

Longyuan Space isn’t the first Chinese startup to test booster recovery with turbojet models, but the video they shared is easily the funniest!

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