Hermeus seems dead keen on fast-tracking its way to hypersonic passenger flight. Its uncrewed subsonic Quarterhorse Mark 1 prototype has completed its maiden flight in the skies over Edwards Air Force Base in California on May 21, 2025.
Hypersonic flight looks to be the flavor du jour of the aerospace world these days, which isn’t surprising. Not only is it poised to revolutionize warfare, it also has the potential to alter civilian cargo and passenger travel in ways far beyond what Concorde and its kin promised but never delivered in the 1960s.
The tricky bit is how to, pardon the pun, get it all off the ground. Since its founding in 2018, Hermeus has been pursuing a novel development strategy. Instead of the conventional approach of working directly on a final aircraft preceded by, perhaps, a flying prototype or two that approximate the performance of the ultimate aircraft, the company has been working on highly specialized prototypes designed to specifically test various systems without any pretense of being anything like a hypersonic plane.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force has ordered two additional Global Positioning System satellites from Lockheed Martin. The $509.7 million contract covers GPS III satellites 21 and 22, which are part of the advanced GPS III Follow-on constellation designed to provide enhanced positioning, navigation and timing services to both civilian and military users worldwide.
Delivery of the two satellites is scheduled by 2031, according to a contract announcement May 28.
The order was placed under an existing 2018 contract that allows for up to 22 spacecraft. With this procurement, the Space Force has now exercised options for 12 satellites, bringing the total value of the contract to $4.1 billion.
A US startup is looking to our closest satellite to fill a resources gap here on Earth. Helium-3 is rare on terra firma, but is thought to be abundant in the regolith of the Moon. Interlune has now revealed a full-scale excavator prototype that forms a key component of its lunar Harvester.
The shortage of helium-3 – a stable isotope of helium important for applications ranging from energy production to medical research – was first identified in the US toward the middle of 2008. The US government officially recognized the issue in early 2009, and mitigation efforts put in place.
“The United States supply of 3He comes from the decay of tritium (3H), which the Nation had in large quantities because of our nuclear weapons complex; however, the tritium stockpile has declined in recent years through radioactive decay and is expected to decline in the future because of reduced demand for tritium,” read the intro to a National Isotope Development Center newsletter from 2014.
China is performing better in the artificial intelligence arms race than many Americans understand, according to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission’s Michael Kuiken.
One of the most terrifying things about Dune is the fact that it rather accurately predicted what the next front of warfare will look like: genetic warfare. In twenty twenty five, gene manipulation is the biggest threat in the theatre of war, because one gene-altering weapon can render an enemy force infertile at best, and terribly mutated at worst. But that’s not something that happens to the products of breeding programmes in the Dune-verse, at least on a physical level. In this video, we will take a look at every breeding programme in Frank Herbert’s creation, and talk about their horrifying histories in detail.
By popular request we’ve begun adding playlists of the show as Podcasts on Youtube Music, I’ll try to add a new one every 2–3 days till we have most of our inventory up there, but given today’s Episode is *Cities of the Future*, a collection of all of those seemed a good idea https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LuyCbYUhy-79RQKkOXonmx4 These are the (tentatively named) upcoming playlists/podcasts list I’ll be adding, in no particular order: Megastructures & Extreme Engineering The Fermi Paradox & Alien Civilizations Space Colonization & Habitats Post-Scarcity & Future Civilizations Transhumanism & Human Evolution Propulsion & Interstellar Travel Terraforming & Planetary Engineering Mind, Machines & Alien Intelligence Future Warfare & Defense Strange Worlds & Alien Life.
France’s armed forces are on schedule to develop battle-ready robots by 2040, according to participants in a test bringing together the military with engineers, researchers and defense contractors.
