SpaceX has completed a static firing for a Falcon 9 rocket with the crew Dragon capsule. They are targeting a February launch. If this flight is successful then there will be a flight abort test in May and then the crewed flight in June, 2019. Static fire test complete—targeting February launch from historic Launch Complex …
Fifty-mile per winds broke the moorings and blew over the SpaceX Starhopper. It will take a few weeks to repair according to Elon Musk. The SpaceX Starhopper is designed to test three new Raptor engines. Raptor engines are nearly twice as powerful as current SpaceX Merlin engines. After the Starhopper performs a series of tests …
Isotropic Systems is developing breakthrough satellite and satellite receiving technology. They recently received $14.4 million dollars in series A funding in a round led by Boeing HorizonX Ventures. Isotropic Systems now has received a total of $25.4 million in funding. An isotropic antenna is a hypothetical antenna radiating the same intensity of radio waves in …
Nextbigfuture was emailed a correction for TAE Technologies. In a video, the CEO of TAE Technologies said that TAE Technologies would commercialize within 5 years. TAE Technologies clarified in an email that they would begin commercialization efforts by 2023. This clarification makes the race and claims for potential commercial nuclear fusion far closer. TAE Technologies …
Elon Musk explained to Popular Mechanics why SpaceX switched to a 300 series alloy of stainless steel. Advanced carbon-fiber structure made very slow progress and the cost per kilogram was $135. There is a lot of cutting and they would lose 35 percent of the material in processing. It has to have a lot of …
Buildingtesla.com has pictures from the European Space Agency – Sentinal 2 from December 17, 2018 to January 21, 2019. The satellite pictures from Sentinal 2 show some new roads and a white pad. The white pad could be cement. Sentinel-2 is an Earth observation mission from the EU Copernicus Programme that systematically acquires optical imagery …
TAE Technologies will bring a fusion-reactor technology to commercialization in the next five years, its CEO Michl Binderbauer announced recently at the University of California, Irvine. UPDATE- I was emailed by TAE Technologies and they say they will begin commercialization in 2023. TAE Technologies next fusion device will be called Copernicus and it is designed …
This article looks at the mid-2020 timeline for micro-reactors which has strong Department of Defense interest. Nextbigfuture has been interviewing the project lead, Venkat Rao, for what was the Los Alamos Megapower micro-reactor. Nextbigfuture will also be talking to Westinghouse about the eVinci reactor which is their commercial evolution of Megapower. They are working on …
The Clean Energy Research Foundation has discovered a method of manufacturing the worlds strongest and toughest materials. Fused double-walled carbon nanotube (DWNT) fibers were made with a strength of a 700 GPa Young’s modulus. This strength was seen in prior experiments, in 2010 and 2011, where electron beams welded DWNTs in microscopic bundles together and …
Pegasus is the first fundamental change in D-Wave’s architecture since the D-Wave One. The D-Wave Two, 2X, and 2000Q all used the Chimera architecture, which had unit cells of K4,4 graphs. D-Wave machines added more qubits but the cells and architecture were mostly the same. The Pegasus graph allows each qubit to couple to 15 …
