NextBigFuture.com

DARPA has selected Aurora Flight Sciences to build a full-scale X-plane to demonstrate the viability of using active flow control (AFC) actuators for primary flight control. The award is Phase 3 of the Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) program. The X-65 flight is controlled by using jets of air from a pressurized ... Read more

Starlink Direct to Cellphone supports about 7 Megabytes per beam and the beams are very big. Starlink v2-Mini satellites have three downlink antennas and one uplink antenna, each capable of eight beams and two polarizations. This means that each satellite has a total of 48 beams down and 16 up. It is unclear how many ... Read more

Here is a review of Tesla FSD 12.1. FSD 12.1 has single-stack end-to-end neural nets trained with millions of video clips for the driving controls. The car drives more like a human. You're driving in the fast lane (left) of a two-lane highway because slower cars stay in the right lane. Then a faster car ... Read more

Tesla beat q4 deliveries with 484k. 1% over analysts who were at 480k. The other cars category is S, X, Semi and cybertruck. This has almost 5k more sold than produced. This means they sold inventory on the high end. This will mean about $100 million more for net income in Q4. This helps margin ... Read more

The main problem holding back reusable hypersonic planes is that traditional ramjet engines become very inefficient over mach 2 while hypersonic engines do not work well below mach 4. There is the need to solve the hypersonic speed gap between mach 2 and mach 4. Rotating Detonating Engines can be more efficient up to mach ... Read more

The Tesla 4680 production ramp has taken about two years longer than Tesla first planned. Most of the analysis has been based upon monthly or quarterly percentage increases in production. This has been while the technical problems were being solved. The 4680 technical problems should be completely solved by mid-2024. The second Texas line was ... Read more

On March 4, 2024, most of the original team of South Korean LK99 Room Temperature and atmospheric pressure superconductors researchers will have a short 12 minute presentation at the American Physical Society conference. Abstract: A16.00002 : Partial levitation, type-II-superconductor characteristic, at room temperature and atmospheric pressure in PCPOSOS 8:12 AM-8:24 AM Presenter: Hyun-Tak Kim (College ... Read more

HTD (Hydrogen terminated diamond) is a candidate topological Mott material. The ARPES measurements on HTD were done with low energy resolution of 100meV and could not resolve a possible Dirac cone for which higher resolution ARPES measurements at low temperatures are needed in the future. Diamond is an insulator in the bulk and has both ... Read more

Anduril Industries is a new American defense company that specializes in autonomous drone systems. They excel at artificial intelligence, software, drones and robotics. Anduril's major products include unmanned aerial systems (UAS), counter-UAS (CUAS), semi-portable autonomous surveillance systems, and networked command and control software. Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey created the Oculus Rift which was sold to ... Read more

Humanity needs to simplify the technology and products for our civilization but make them fully scalable and self-replicating. The technologies that we pick to scale need to be ones that we can increase to a thousand times our current levels with manageable pollution and side-effects at those scales. We will soon have billions or trillions ... Read more

Earth orbiting satellites have the speed to counter the Earth's gravity. The mean orbital velocity needed to maintain a stable low Earth orbit is about 7.8 km/s (4.8 mi/s), which translates to 28,000 km/h (17,000 mph). However, this depends on the exact altitude of the orbit. A statite, or static satellite, would use a solar ... Read more

1. AGI could be achieved or we will get even closer. There will OpenAI releasing GPT5 and updates of Google LLM like improved Gemini. Definition's for AI AGI = artificial general intelligence = a machine that performs at the level of an average (median) human. ASI = artificial superintelligence = a machine that performs at ... Read more

Scientists at the forefront of hypersonic weapons research in China say they have a more powerful revolutionary air-breathing engine. The revolutionary" air-breathing engine could lift an aircraft from a runway to more than 30km (18.6 miles) into the stratosphere and continuously accelerate it to 16 times the speed of sound. The longest intercontinental flights would ... Read more

Perseus Materials is reinventing composites manufacturing as it is currently known. Perseus Materials wants to build bigger, faster, anywhere. They are developing and applying a proprietary composite fabrication processes to the manufacturing of oversize load-bearing structures for buildings, bridges, wind turbines, and other applications in infrastructure and energy. They will bring to market a new ... Read more

In 2022, Drew Lilley and Ravi Prasher, both at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, used an alternative ionocaloric refrigeration' scheme. Instead of applying a field externally, they used the electrochemical binding between the ions in a salt (in this case sodium iodide) and a solvent (ethylene carbonate). When the salt is added to ... Read more

Canada's GDP growth has been flat or weak throughout 2023 despite growing population by 3.5%. Early data points to 0.5% growth in final quarter of 2023. There was no growth from May to October 2023. The mayor of Vancouver proposed pro-growth rules to reduce the barriers to building and streamlining regulations. Ken Sim released a ... Read more

SpaceX had the fifth Falcon Heavy of 2023 Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. It is carrying the US Space Force X-37B spaceplane.

Factory and electric car expert Sandy Munro says the Teslabot can perform all factory assembly line tasks. He says based upon what I saw. Sandy Munro has been given special tours of the Tesla factories. He says he thinks Teslabot will on the real Tesla production lines later in 2024. IF this is true then ... Read more

All systems are looking good and weather is 90% favorable for tonight's Falcon Heavy launch of USSF-52. Launch should be in less than an hour. All systems are looking good and weather is 90% favorable for tonight's Falcon Heavy launch of USSF-52. The webcast will go live ~15 minutes ahead of liftoff https://t.co/bJFjLCiTbK pic.twitter.com/vO0Cl3UVdy ... Read more

Tony Seba describes the cost charts where supercheap electric cars become dominant. He observes that $11500 non-subsidized electric cars with over 300 kilometers of range exist now in the form of the BYD Seal. There needs to be more production expansion for electric cars to reach 80+% of all new cars and then to expand ... Read more

DARPA support Microsoft and PsiQuantum to make utility scale quantum computers. DARPA has selected Microsoft Corporation and PsiQuantum to move to the next phase of US2QC (Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing), which recently kicked off and is expected to run through March 2025. These researchers are working extraordinarily hard, presenting solid technology descriptions and ... Read more

A Harvard-led, DARPA supported team developed novel logical qubits to enable scalable quantum computers. A team of researchers working on DARPA's Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum devices (ONISQ) program has created the first-ever quantum circuit with logical quantum bits (qubits), a key discovery that could accelerate fault-tolerant quantum computing and revolutionize concepts for designing quantum ... Read more

The Vulcan 3D printed home construction system is comprised of the Vulcan printer and the Magma portable mixing unit that prepares ICON's proprietary building material, Lavacrete, for printing. All of this hardware is driven by the BuildOS software suite. BuildOS generates and prepares architecture for printing, then controls the robotic hardware on-site to turn digital ... Read more

Teslascope tracks Tesla software and they confirm that Full Self-Driving (Beta) V12.1 has now rolled out to Wave1, which including 15,000+ personally-owned. The release notes for FSD beta v12.1 appear to show just a single paragraph detailing the change, which Teslascope expects will be added to before its public release to non-employees. We can confirm ... Read more

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, recorded ignition of a full-scale Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine combustor, which was fired for a record 251 seconds and achieved more than 5,800 pounds of thrust. NASA has stated their intention to create a 10,000 lbs thrust engine. Rotating detonation engine could be up to 25% more ... Read more

Bloomberg reports that Tesla will mass produce a refreshed Model Y starting in mid 2024. Tesla has already refreshed the Model 3. The New Model 3 started production at the China factory. Above rendering of a new Tesla Model Y based upon the upgrades shown in the Model 3 Highland. The assumption is that the ... Read more

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced that the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) was successfully inserted into lunar orbit at 16:51 (Japan Standard Time, JST) on December 25, 2023. The lunar orbit of SLIM will be inserted into an elliptical lunar orbit connecting the Moon's north and south poles with a period of ... Read more

The U.S. military's X-37B space plane is set to launch Thursday, Dec. 28 in the evening on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. The spacecraft has a four-hour window starting at 7 p.m. to take off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The SpaceX Falcon heavy is at pad 39A to prepare for tomorrow's launch. Falcon ... Read more

The US Space Force and military will spend $15-30 billion over the next 5 years to deploy next generation satellites, drones, ground sensors and other global systems to track and monitor and defeat hypersonic missiles. Hypersonic missiles will go two to six times faster than regular missiles. Hypersonic missiles will move at 1.5 to six ... Read more

After its record-breaking 19th mission, Falcon 9 B1058 tipped over on the droneship during its transport back to Port Canaveral due to high winds and waves. B1058 was the only booster with NASA's logos because of its maiden launch, Demo-2 (the first crewed orbital spaceflight launched from the U.S. since the Shuttle program), and it ... Read more

Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi militia claimed responsibility for a missile attack on Tuesday on a container ship in the Red Sea, and for an attempt to attack Israel with drones. MSC (Maersk) Mediterranean Shipping said there were no injuries to its crew from the attack on its ship, the United VIII, en route from Saudi Arabia ... Read more

China has designed the world's first large containership with a nuclear Molten Salt reactor. The design was developed by Jiangnan Shipbuilding, a division of the Chinese state-owned China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC). They reported that DNV issued an Approval in Principle (AiP) certificate for the design. Nuclear commercial ships would save a lot of on ... Read more

Superior Tesla performance in 2024 can come from surprising scaling of the Tesla Megapacks and 4680s. Tesla will just need to replicate the fully ramped each of the first Megapack and 4680 production line to a ten or more lines each. Tesla will like have ten Megapack lines fully ramped by the end of 2024 ... Read more

Google just launched VideoPoet, and literally ChatGPT for: - Text-to-Video - Image-to-Video - Inpainting - Video Editing Videopoet has not been released yet but will be available soon from the Google research site. 1. Image to Video: Mona Lisa yawning. pic.twitter.com/dBzH04TCvM - Poonam Soni (@CodeByPoonam) December 26, 2023 2. Text to Video A skeleton drinking ... Read more

Batteries that exploit quantum phenomena to gain, distribute and store power promise to beat conventional chemical batteries in certain low-power applications. University of Tokyo and other researchers have takne advantage of an unintuitive quantum process that disregards the conventional notion of causality to improve the performance of so-called quantum batteries. Quantum batteries are still laboratory ... Read more

1. Vladan Vuletic (MIT professor and QuEra Co-founder) had a scientific and technical presentation at the 2023 Q2B conference today. The main part of the talk came on the last slide where Vladan laid out his projection for how QuEra and its research partners will be able to advance their breakthrough Quantum Error Correction work. ... Read more

Factories in Space (www.factoriesinspace.com) has tracked space solar power and wireless power transfer companies since 2018. There are 52 primarily commercial entries as of September 2023, which makes it one of the largest public lists. Survey of Space Based Solar Power Efforts as of 2023 In this survey, the range of solutions and applications is ... Read more

The current interest in Space Based Solar Power (SBSP) is opening the way to an eruption of projects. The permanent sun illumination met in Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) could enable the cost per continuous watt to be competitive with ground based like solar and wind. There have been a number of assumptions made in the ... Read more

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe announced $80 million for the Saskatchewan Research Council (SRC) funding to demonstrate the Westinghouse eVinci micro nuclear reactor in Saskatchewan. SRC will apply the research and knowledge gained from the licensing and deployment of an initial microreactor to support the Saskatchewan nuclear industry to better understand this type of technology and ... Read more

Estimated global data center electricity consumption in 2022 was 240-340 TWh, or around 1-1.3% of global final electricity demand. It is really hard to quantify how much demand is needed for things like ChatGPT," David Groarke, managing director at consultant Indigo Advisory Group, said in a recent phone interview. By 2030 AI could account for ... Read more

A new, elevated sensor architecture is required to detect, identify, and track a spectrum of maneuvering missile threats with sufficient quality to support missile defense fire control. These threats combine high speeds, unpredictable, non-ballistic trajectories, and large raid sizes to stress legacy defense designs. SpaceX has already place over 5000 Starlink satellites into orbit. Placing ... Read more

Nearly 136,000 light-duty EVs were sold in September 2023 - up 67 percent from last September. After months of light-duty EV sales hovering around 10 percent, September brought us an EV market share of 11 percent for new sales. The US surpassed one million EVs sold in 2023. U.S. consumers purchasing new light-duty cars or ... Read more

SpaceX's Starlink has been a game changer for cruise lines when it comes to connectivity. As of December 12, 2023, there are an estimated 454 ocean-worthy cruise ships worldwide. Starlink Maritime offers three packages as of early 2023. 50 GB $250 per month, unlimited mobile data inland, and best for low bandwidth applications 1 TB ... Read more

Hyperloop One (aka Virgin Hyperloop or Virgin Hyperloop One) was an American transportation technology company that worked to commercialize the high-speed travel concept called the Hyperloop, a variant of the vacuum train. Hyperloop One had raised $450 million to develop a hypersonic train concept. The high speed vacuum train concept was originally by Elon Musk ... Read more

Microsoft Director and Kymeta board member, Tren Griffin, asked about my estimation of active SpaceX Starlink capacity. Here is my clarification of my process and analysis using an estimation of theoretical orbital communication capacity as a metric for snapshot analysis of the Starlink network and global user capacity. There are 5147 work Starlink Satellites in ... Read more

Japan approved a record 7.95 trillion yen or $55.9 billion defense budget for Fiscal Year 2024, which begins on April 1 next year. This is a 16.5 percent increase from FY2023's budget of 6.8 trillion yen or $47.7 billon. The plan is to increase until it reaches 8.9 trillion yen or $62.5 billion in FY2027. ... Read more

Canada's realtime population is 40.73 million people and Canada will add another 30,000 people to reach 40.76 million by the end of 2023. This was almost a 3.5% population increase. As of December 19, 2023, the US population is 334,914,895, which is a 0.5% increase from 2022. Canada is growing at seven times the US ... Read more

SpaceX will finish 2023 short of the 100 Falcon launches with 92 launches so far and the two Starship orbital launch attempts. SpaceX could add three or four launches between now and the New Year if the weather and all other factors were good. Starlink has over 2.3 million active Starlink customers. There has not ... Read more

The Bureau of Economic Analysis gave their PCE )Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) Price Index) report and it came in better than expectations. However, the financial markets had mostly been expecting a report with no inflation. The Bond and stock market are already been pricing in a Federal Reserve interest rate cut in March 2024. Inflation ... Read more