Astrobotic today announced the successful hot fire test of its Chakram rotating detonation rocket engine (RDRE) at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Two Chakram engine prototypes completed eight successful hot-fire tests, accumulating more than 470 seconds of total run time without any discernible damage to the engine hardware. The campaign included a 300-second continuous burn, which is now believed to have set the record for longest duration hot firing of an RDRE engine to date.
During testing, each engine produced more than 4,000 pounds of thrust, making Chakram one of the most powerful RDREs ever demonstrated.
Finally! CAn’t wait. – The first flight of the Block 3 Starship took a major step forward following the successful Static Fire tests for both Booster 19 and Ship 39.
LOL @ Culture Catz – The flat earth internet community never fail to amaze me with the unique ideas they have. Let us dive into some of the worst arguments they have ever presented to the world.
From YouTube – rctestflight explores the potential of low disc loading to improve drone efficiency by designing and building a custom quadcopter with oversized, variable-pitch rotor blades. Using 3D-printed parts and belt-driven motors, the project investigates whether this unique propulsion configuration can offer a viable alternative to conventional, high-RPM multirotor designs.
A sad day for everyone involved, and a HUGE fail for NASA at the time – On February 1, 2003, the Columbia mission STS-107 underwent a total disintegration during the reentry phase into Earth’s atmosphere, an event that claimed the lives of its seven crew members. Subsequent investigations identified the presence of structural failures, as well as an organizational inability to respond effectively in an emergency situation. In order to understand with precision how the events unfolded, this video presents a detailed technical analysis that reconstructs the sequence of events and identifies the causes that led to the accident.
One of the MANY reasons that I deleted my FB account.
From 80,000 Hours.-
Meta’s own internal documents show the company was aware it was profiting from $16 billion a year in scam ads — and that its leadership chose not to act. If this is how a social media company behaves when the stakes are ad revenue, how much should we trust AI companies when the stakes are far higher?
Leaked documents from Meta reveal that 10% of the company’s total revenue — around $16 billion a year — came from ads for scams and goods Meta had itself banned. These likely enabled the theft of $50 billion dollars a year from Americans alone. But when an internal anti-fraud team developed a screening method that halved scam prevalence from China, the documents suggest it was shelved after Zuckerberg was briefed. The team was disbanded, the freeze on fraudulent Chinese ad agencies was lifted, and within months fraud had bounced back to near its previous level. Meta also developed a global playbook for “managing” regulators — including altering its own ad library so that scam ads were removed from results whenever regulators came looking.
Host Rob Wiblin breaks down what the documents show and what they reveal about the limits of voluntary corporate self-regulation — then turns to the bigger question: How much do you trust companies like this — ones willing to put a dollar value on acceptable harm — to handle AI systems capable of making decisions about your healthcare, your finances, and your government?
