A China research team on Sunday successfully captured the laser return signal from the retroreflector of the Tiandu-1 satellite, which is approximately 130,000 km away from the Earth, using the newly upgraded near-infrared lunar laser ranging system of an 1.2-meter telescope. This is the world’s first daytime satellite laser ranging in the Earth-moon space, marking …
In 2014, the US Navy installed its first prototype SSL (solid state laser) capable of countering surface craft and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on a Navy ship. The Navy since then has been developing and installing additional SSL prototypes with improved capability for countering surface craft and UAVs. Higher-power SSLs being developed by the Navy …
There has been huge progress on laser pushed sails. Laser pushed sails appear to be a path to sending probes up to 20% of the speed of light when we can make 1 gram sails that are one to two meters on a side. There is still work needed to make the sail area about …
What kind of future energy does humanity really need to develop? We need a lot more energy than you think. We need to build faster and it needs to be cheap. There is vastly more electrical energy that is needed. The world has added about 700 TWh per year in electricity in 2022 and in …
The NT Times had a recent article discussing laser nuclear fusion. Nextbigfuture has spoken with all of the nuclear fusion companies listed in the NY Times article as they all attended the 2023 International Conference on Inertial Fusion Sciences and Applications conference. Nextbigftuure covered detailed National Ignition Facility presentations six weeks ago at the 2023 …
Miniaturized FSO breakthrough unlocks high-speed wireless communication anywhere Researchers from Nanjing University (NJU) have developed a miniaturized FSO system that promises to revolutionize high-speed wireless communication. As reported in the Gold Open Access journal Advanced Photonics Nexus (APNexus), this remarkable system achieved an astonishing communication bandwidth of 9.16 gigabits per second (Gbps) over a 1-kilometer …
The US Navy combat laser program is getting stalled with $55 million per year for prototypes but no combat deployment. The US Navy does not want to start spending billions to deploy small numbers of lasers that will probably live up to expectations of effectiveness. When the US Navy says a weapon system is too …
Google has spun out a new laser communication company called Aalyria. It will manage a hyper-fast, ultra-secure, and highly complicated communications networks that span land, sea, air, near space, and deep space. Aalyria will “radically” enhance satellite communications, airplane Wi-Fi, and other forms of cellular connectivity. It is also stated that the spinout has already …
There are three main types of nuclear fusion and PB11 (hydrogen-boron) is the most desired. PB11 nuclear fusion would have almost no neutron radiation but it takes 1 billion degree temperatures instead of 100 million for deuterium tritium or about 500 million for deuteriurm-deuterium. The PALS laser facility in Prague has reported a major advance …
The Limitless Space Institute is reviewing the work of Interstellar grant recipients. It is feasible but very difficult to make a laser pushed sail reach 20% of the speed of light. The general parameters are for an array of lasers with 100 Gigawatts of power to push a 1 gram solar sail that has 4 …
Philip Lubin and his team are continuing to make progress toward laser pushed sails. This is a way to achieve significant fractions of the speed of light for interstellar missions and a way to beam power for movement within the solar system at high speeds. One of the key aspects to this work is phase …