Despite the $100 million Breakthrough Starshot pledge, public accounting shows less than $10 million spending. Philip Lubin (UC Santa Barbara, laser propulsion) received ~$200,000 over eight years. This was less than his NASA grants for similar work. There is an estimate of 30 contracts totaling $4.5 million. Scientists viewed this as a kickstart. Breakthrough’s name …
The DARPA Persistent Optical Wireless Energy Relay (POWER) program achieved several new records for transmitting power over distance. The team recorded more than 800 watts of power delivered during a 30-second transmission from a laser 8.6 kilometers (5.3 miles) away. Over the course of the test campaign, more than a megajoule of energy was transferred. …
In 18 months, Israel deplayed an anti-drone system which intercepted dozens of targets throughout the war. There is a laser division in the Israeli Air Force which is operating new laser system built by Rafael. Israel is working on Iron Beam which is Israel’s next-generation interception system that was scheduled to become operational by year’s …
The US Navy released a new photo of USS Preble (DDG-88) firing her HELIOS laser weapon. It is a 60 kilowatt combat laser. badass pic.twitter.com/i3thc0dH6H — CommonSenseOnMars (@CommonSenseMars) February 3, 2025 The USS Preble is the first U.S. Navy vessel equipped with HELIOS, a 60-kilowatt-class directed energy laser weapon developed by Lockheed Martin. It is …
The economics for AI chips has to work for Chip builders System builders Data center operators Application builders Paying customer (end users). The bigger large language models are at 400 Gigabytes or more and mixture of experts is at 1.8 terabytes. TechTechPotato interviews AyarLabs and makes the case that optical connections between chiplets is needed …
SpaceX satellites built for the US Space Development Agency demonstrated direct satellite to satellite laser communications in space using optical terminals compliant with military standards. U.S. Space Development Agency (SDA) director Derek Tournear said Sept. 4. that two SpaceX-built satellites successfully exchanged data using optical communications terminals. The satellites, part of SDA’s Tranche 0 experimental …
The US Army has used lasers to take down hostile drones in the Middle East, Doug Bush, the Army’s head of acquisitions. It’s the first time the Defense Department has acknowledged that such weapons have been used in combat. The US is not the first country to use lasers in actual combat. Starting in 2020, …
LightSolver, creator of a new laser-based computing paradigm, announced a breakthrough in quantum-inspired high-performance computing. Its LPU100 system unleashes the power of 100 lasers to solve the toughest optimization problems, challenging the processing times of quantum and supercomputers. The LPU100’s laser array represents 100 continuous variables, and can tackle problems with up to 120^100 combinations, …
In late 2023, NASA tested a new hybrid laser/radio antenna to downlink data from 20 million miles (32 million kilometers) away at a rate of 15.63 megabits per second – about 40 times faster than radio frequency communications at that distance. On Jan. 1, 2024, the antenna downlinked a team photograph that had been uploaded …
Chairman of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and Chairman of Breakthrough Initiatives, Dr. Pete Worden, discusses the Breakthrough Starshot work on the laser propelled solar sail to Proxima Centauri. Billionaire Yuri Milner committed $100 million for Breakthrough Starshot. They probably had about $10 million worth of contracts around the world to answer these three questions. 1. …
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 …