NextBigFuture.com

Rocket Labs is launching its Electron rocket for payloads of about 200-300 kg. They will try to launch 22 missions in 2024. They will continue developing a new engine and new rocket to reach a reusable Neutron, Falcon 9 class rocket. It is looking the engine program is a bit behind schedule and the first ... Read more

The future is almost here, and nothing is creating more interest, more disruption, more profits, and more intrigue than the AI revolution and the potential for artificial intelligence warping into general AI. Open AI, effectively now a subsidiary of Microsoft, lays out that future, and Brian Wang looks at the impact of Sam Altman's words. ... Read more

NASA and Sierra Space intentionally burst an inflatable space station in ground testing. It surpassed the 63 PSI goal and is stronger than normal steel space stations. The test article reached over 77 PSI before failing. The inflatable station has nine layers of material for the walls. There is an inflatable module on the space ... Read more

Axiom Space is the leading provider of human spaceflight services and developer of human-rated space infrastructure. Axiom Space operates end-to-end missions to the International Space Station today while developing its successor, Axiom Station - the world's first commercial space station in low-Earth orbit, which will sustain human growth off the planet and bring untold benefits ... Read more

Sierra Space will soon launch the Dream Chaser, a reusable lifting-body spaceplane and inflatable space stations. The cargo Dream Chaser is designed to resupply the International Space Station with both pressurized and unpressurized cargo. It is intended to launch vertically on the Vulcan Centaur rocket and autonomously land horizontally on conventional runways. A proposed version ... Read more

India's lucrative crypto market is a prize that's coveted by many blockchain projects. Gaining a presence in the country is rarely straightforward, though, given its government's sometimes antagonistic stance on cryptocurrency. Orbs Network has succeeded where other projects have failed, however, in having its token listed on CoinDCX, one of India's leading exchanges. India's Complicated ... Read more

Relativity Space built and launched the world's first 3D printed rocket, Terran 1, and is building the Terran R, a reusable Falcon 9 class launch vehicle. As of April 2023, Relativity Space has raised $1.6 billion in funding from investors including BlackRock, Sand Hill Angels, and Mark Cuban. Relativity Space has a backlog. SpaceX Falcon ... Read more

New York, U.S.A., January 22nd, 2024, Cyberwire Memcyco will showcase its solutions at Deloitte's annual Cyber iCON event, demonstrating how organizations can build effective defenses to protect their customers against digital impersonation fraud Memcyco Inc, the real-time digital impersonation detection and prevention solution provider, and Deloitte, the leading consulting, advisory, and audit services firm, today ... Read more

Launch and early orbit phase of Barry-1 is going very slowly, but it is progressing. Rogue Space Systems Corporation's is working toward preparations for the Quantum Drive's first test. No exact date yet. Rogue Space Systems and IVO are working closely together to collect a solid baseline of orbital data before firing up the Drives ... Read more

Coherently tiled titanium:sapphire laser amplification provides a relatively easy and inexpensive way to surpass the current 10-petawatt limit. By adding a 2*2 coherently tiled titanium:sapphire high-energy laser amplifier in China's SULF or EU's ELI-NP, the current 10-petawatt can be further increased to 40-petawatt and the focused peak intensity can be increased by nearly 10 times ... Read more

Here we have the first of many Tesla FSD Beta V12.1.2 drives from a new customer. This is for a customer who is not a Tesla employee. The drive is flawless on city streets in San Francisco. This also has a nighttime drive in the rain.

Tesla has been testing Full Self-driving Beta V12.X with 50,000 employees for a few weeks but has now begun staged rollout for Tesla FSD buyers with HW4. Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) v12 is a milestone in autonomous driving technology. It uses end-to-end neural networks, which are AI networks that can be used for everything from ... Read more

Sinead Griffin, a theoretical physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and other experimentalists at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have reviewed the work from Chinese labs working on room temperature and near room temperature superconductors. The evidence is not yet conclusive but her intuition is that the room superconductivity claims will pan out. The Chinese ... Read more

The Landspace did a hop test and reached an altitude of 350 meters and flew for 60-seconds flight before landing area. The landing had an accuracy of about 2.4 meters. The test is part of the development of the stainless steel Zhuque-3 rocket first announced in November 2023. The company is aiming for the first ... Read more

META CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Instagram that META is dumping more than $10 billion into the computing infrastructure to develop AGI. AGI is AI that can match or surpass humans across a range of cognitively demanding tasks. Meta's two AI research efforts are brought closer together to support the long-term goals of building general ... Read more

Humanoid bot company Figure announces blockbuster partnership with BMW following amazing demo of bot autonomy. Brett Adcock is CEO and founder of Figure, an AI Robotics company developing autonomous general purpose humanoid robots. Figure will be fully hardware ready (actuators, sensors, perception and compute on board) in the first half of 2024 to do useful ... Read more

Figure CEO, Brett Adcock, revealed their plans for real-world humanoid robots. There will be more details in a video coming tomorrow. Excited to share: Figure has entered into a commercial agreement with BMW They hope to ship in 2024. Figure's humanoid robots will automate difficult, unsafe, and tedious tasks throughout the manufacturing process. This ... Read more

Caresoft, a company similar in some ways to Munro Associates, tear down vehicles in order to reverse engineer and perform cost analysis. The CEO of Caresoft analyzed the legacy assembly line, the Tesla model Y assembly line and the Tesla next generation line. Tesla unboxed parallel modular manufacturing process will reduce costs by over 30% ... Read more

CATL has new rectangular LFP batteries which will be available in 6 months. The Iron LFP EV battery price will be less than $56 per kWh within six months. It is a bigger rectangular battery with each one being like six Tesla 4680 batteries. Tesla also buys Iron LFP batteries from CATL and those are ... Read more

Taiwan has one hundred times the area of Gaza. Over 13976 square miles versus 140 square miles. Taiwan has at least two hollowed-out mountains. They are to place hundreds of airplanes and thousands of missiles in those underground facilities. They have tunnels connecting military and government facilities throughout the island. Imagine Gaza 100 times bigger ... Read more

This is the year when the US Air Force will choose who will build the airfrome for the NGAD (Next generation air dominance, 6th gen fighter). There will also be a selection of the engine maker. There are two competitors for the airfrome, Lockheed vs Boeing. There are two competitors for the engine, Pratt and ... Read more

Nextbigfuture has a weekly video review of the big stories in science and technology. The later part of the video discusses laser pushed sails for fast missions around the solar system and then interstellar missions. We have the laser technology that is sufficient to be used for laser pushed sail missions. They need to be ... Read more

Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is saying that the LLAMA 3 large language model will be providing open source AGI. Zuckerberg feels that people will wear glasses to hold their connection to AGI. Glasses will provide the video and audio connection from people to AGI. Mark joins OpenAI Sam Altman as promising AGI will here very ... Read more

Using first-principle lattice simulations, researchers demonstrate that in the background of a strong magnetic field (around 10^20 Tesla - 100 million trillion Tesla aka 100 quintillion), the electroweak sector of the vacuum experiences two consecutive crossover transitions associated with dramatic changes in the zero-temperature dynamics of the vector bosons and the scalar Higgs particles, respectively. ... Read more

Mark Zuckerberg plans on acquiring 350,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs to help Meta build a next-generation AI that possesses human-like intelligence. Zuckerberg mentioned the figure today as he announced his company's long-term effort to develop an artificial general intelligence (AGI), or an AI that can learn and be used to perform a variety of tasks. By ... Read more

Japan managed to soft land a spacecraft on the surface of the moon, this makes them the 5th nation to accomplish this feat. They did not land on the spacecraft's feet and instead rolled, probably ending up inverted with the solar panels in the wrong orientation. Two rovers have deployed and we hope to see ... Read more

Tesla's CEO @elonmusk agreed with a X post that having 1 billion humanoid robots doing tasks for us by the 2040s is possible. Farzad made some observations which Elon Musk tweeted agreement. The form factor of a humanoid robot will likely remain unchanged for a really long time. A human has a torso, two arms, ... Read more

We don't know the final fate of the Japan SLIM lander. There seemed to be a touchdown but then communication was lost. Scott Manley believes that it may have landed and rolled. There may have been too much lateral velocity. The lander could be partially functional even if it was on its side. So my ... Read more

PayloadSpace estimates the costs of SpaceX Starship now and in a few years. Their estimate is a $90 million build cost now and a future build cost of $20 million. SpaceX would likely charge customers twice those amounts. Those are estimates of internal costs. In a cost per kilogram of payload basis, a single use ... Read more

There is oppression all over the Middle East. The countries in the region are generally dominated by an ethnic or religious minority. There were 483 million people in the middle east in 2023 and there will be about 500 million in 2024. The largest socioethnic groups in the region are Arabs, Turks, Persians, Kurds, and ... Read more

In 1989, the NASA Voyager team showed false color images of Neptune so that we could see the clouds in the atmosphere. NASA did also show the unaltered images at the same time in 1989. The research paper showed black and white photos and again showed one false color image. The deep blue false color ... Read more

There have been full scale nuclear thermal rocket engines built and tested on the ground since the 1960s. The US had the NERVA project. The attraction is that the ISP would be up to triple the ISP of chemical rockets. Nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) systems work by heating up a gas, usually hydrogen or ammonia, ... Read more

U.S. Air Force's B-21 Raider stealth bombers are now conducting test flights from Edwards Air Force Base in California. The first B-21 flew for the first time November, 2023. Six pre-production B-21 have been built and one flew a sortie from Edwards today. Edwards has also received significant physical upgrades in recent years to support ... Read more

BMW has chosen to use Figure AI humanoid robots in BMW car factories over the next 12-24 months.

Pakistan has launched missile strikes into Iran, killing nine people, after Iran carried out strikes in Pakistan late on Tuesday. Pakistan said its strikes had hit terrorist hideouts in Iran's south-eastern Sistan-Baluchestan province. Iran condemned the attack, which it said killed three women, two men and four children who were not Iranian. Pakistan's foreign ministry ... Read more

China's overall population fell by 2.08 million in 2023, while births declined by 5.6 per cent to 9.02 million. The population collapse is global. Over 80% of the world population is in countries with declining populations or where births have dropped below replacement. Even India and Bangladesh have dropped below replacement. Once a country drops ... Read more

Sam Altman believes that AGI will be created soon. He talked about a vision of an AGI World of More. He predicts AGI will not replace as many jobs as people believe and the world will change less than people believe. It will be an incredible tool for productivity and is magnifying what people can ... Read more

A few months ago, Nextbigfuture reported that NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observed a planet, K2-18, showing the presence of chemicals that indicate possible life. The carbon-bearing molecules including methane and carbon dioxide. Webb's discovery adds to recent studies suggesting that K2-18 could be a Hycean exoplanet, one which has the potential to possess ... Read more

Elon Musk says @SpaceX will release Starlink Mini later in 2024. It will be small enough to fit in your backpack. The outdoor use case also requires the power requirements for Starlink to be muchless. You will be able to pull the terminal out of your backpack in the middle of nowhere and connect to ... Read more

SpaceX's Starlink has launched a new Community Gateways program to deliver gigabit-speed and even 10 gigabit speed for internet connectivity to remote and underserved areas. It is for internet service providers (ISPs) and cost a $1.25 million upfront cost and $75,000 per month per gigabit per second. Ten gigabits per second would costs $750,000 per ... Read more

Joe Tegtmeyer spoke with Ellie in space about the SpaceX factory ramp. Joe has been a professional large project manager who has managed detailed management of large projects. He has been closely monitoring the construction and expansion of the Tesla Gigafactory in Austin. Joe gives his projection of how he expects the SpaceX Starfactory to ... Read more

Impulse Space has x-SpaceX founders and has $45 million of funding to develop space tugs that would move payloads to higher orbits. Founded in 2021, Impulse Space is providing agile, economical space logistics services. With a near-term focus on Low Earth Orbit (LEO), services include in-space transportation to custom orbits, in-space payload hosting and space ... Read more

Shell Oil and Southern Electric utility company had a 2021 research paper that explored if nuclear batteries could be economical for generating power. (Above - (a) MIT's conceptualization of a nuclear battery (NB) with integrated gas turbine; (b) LANL's Megapower; (c) NASA and LANL's KRUSTY/Kilopower reactor using Stirling engine technology for space applications; (d) Westinghouse's ... Read more

The Council of Foreign Relations states the difficulties that China would have attacking Taiwan. Taiwan is a nearly perfect island to defend. China would need to shift military assets to its eastern coast and undertake other visible preparations for an invasion, which Taiwan and the United States would likely be able to detect. Even if ... Read more

SpaceX is expanding the Starship Factory to increase production to one Starship every 72 hours. This would mean production would increase to over 100 per year. Elon has discussed the need to increase Starship production to over one per day.

Nextbigfuture has covered Elon mentioning that a future SpaceX Starship could be 20% longer BUT now it is reported that SpaceX is designing a 150 meter longer Starship. Felix Schlang at What about It? describes the new version 3 Starship work. This would be up to 95 feet longer than the current 120 meters. The ... Read more

CATL has new rectangular LFP batteries. The LFP EV battery price will be less than $56 per kWh within six months. It is a bigger rectangular battery with each one being like six Tesla 4680 batteries. The LFP battery price in China is currently $70 per kWh. China's EV makers (CATL, BYD) are targeting two ... Read more

Jan 8, 2024, China Startup Betavolt New Energy Technology announced the successful development of a miniature atomic energy battery. It uses nickel-63 nuclear isotope decay and China's first diamond semiconductor (4th generation semiconductor) module to successfully realize the miniaturization of atomic energy batteries. It has modularization and low cost. The battery can provide power for ... Read more

Most people do not contextualize what is happening in the Ukraine War or the Gaza War with what they expect to happen in a war between China and Taiwan. Ukraine and Russia have been fighting their larger expanded war for nearly 2 years. Both sides still have weapons and are continuing to hit each other ... Read more

Satya Nadella, Chairman & CEO, Microsoft joins Bloomberg's Brad Stone for a conversation at Bloomberg House at Davos. Nadella talked about using AI to break the Google Search Monopoly and replace Apple iPhone and the entire app store. AI can be the Universal App. Currently, individual use dozens or even over a hundred apps. IF ... Read more