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SpaceX ignited engines on both the first and second stages of its Starship launch system on Wednesday, signaling that it is getting closer to a test flight of the massive rocket later this year.

On Monday evening at 5:20 pm local time in South Texas, engineers ignited a single Raptor engine on the Super Heavy booster that serves as the rocket’s first stage. This is the first time the company has conducted a static fire test of the booster, which will ultimately be powered by 33 Raptor rocket engines.

About three hours later, on a separate mount at its “Starbase” facility in Texas, SpaceX ignited two engines on the Starship upper stage of the rocket. The company later shared a short video on Twitter of the evidently successful test.

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A battle for mainstream GPUs could start later this year.

Intel has released 48 benchmarks that show its upcoming Arc A750 GPU should be able to trade blows with Nvidia’s RTX 3,060 running modern games. While Intel set its expectations low for its Arc GPUs last month, the company has now tested its A750 directly against the RTX 3,060 across 42 DirectX 12 titles and six Vulkan games.

The results look promising for what will likely be Intel’s mainstream GPU later this year. Intel has tested the A750 against popular games like Fortnite, Control, and Call of Duty: Warzone, instead of the cherry picked handful of benchmarks the company released last month.

Continue reading “Intel shares 48 benchmarks to show its Arc A750 can compete with an RTX 3060” | >

A perovskite solar cell developed by engineers at the University of California San Diego brings researchers closer to breaking the ceiling on solar cell efficiency, suggests a study published Aug. 10 in Nature.

The new solar cell is a lead-free low-dimensional perovskite material with a superlattice —a first in the field. What’s special about this material is that it exhibits efficient carrier dynamics in three dimensions, and its device orientation can be perpendicular to the electrodes. Materials in this particular class of perovskites have so far only exhibited such dynamics in two dimensions—a perpendicularly orientated solar cell has never been reported.

Thanks to its specific structure, this new type of superlattice solar cell reaches an efficiency of 12.36%, which is the highest reported for lead-free low-dimensional perovskite solar (the previous record holder’s efficiency is 8.82%). The new solar cell also has an unusual open-circuit voltage of 0.967 V, which is higher than the theoretical limit of 0.802 V. Both results have been independently certified.

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I find the following interesting because Firefly Aerospace is just a few miles from my house plus it is an example of one more company pulling out of Russia for good. Russia’s economy will be much weaker by the time this war is over and their space industry will be decimated.

Northrop Grumman is moving production of the engines and structures for its Antares rockets to the U.S. from Russia and Ukraine, a move that will have cascading effects throughout the space industry.

The aerospace giant said Monday it will move Antares production fully to the U.S. through a partnership with Texas-based Firefly Aerospace. Northrop Grumman had purchased Russian RD-181 engines to power the Antares 230+ series, and the rocket’s main body was manufactured by Ukraine’s Yuzhmash State Enterprise.

The new arrangement mainly resolves the break in Antares manufacturing caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. But in addition to salvaging the Antares rocket series, the cost-sharing deal also helps ensure NASA’s cargo missions to the International Space Station keep flying regularly and brings muscle to Firefly’s plan to build a larger rocket called Beta.

Continue reading “Northrop Grumman moves Antares rocket work to U.S. from Russia and Ukraine with Firefly partnership” | >

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Since 2016, engineering firm NuScale has been working toward getting approval for a first-of-its-kind nuclear reactor, and late last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) gave it the green light. The company’s pint-sized nuclear reactor has numerous safety benefits over larger reactors, and the small size makes it possible to build them at a centralized facility before shipping them to their final destination.

Nuclear power seems to flip between savior and boogeyman every few years. As climate change escalates due to the use of fossil fuels, nuclear is seen as a way to reduce carbon emissions while maintaining high electricity generation. However, all it takes is one accident like Fukushima or a reminder that Chernobyl is still incredibly dangerous decades later to make people second-guess the construction of new fission generators.

NuScale, which has been anticipating approval of this design since the last technology review in 2020, says its small modular reactor (SMR) addresses these concerns. It’s based on a “Multi-Application Small Light Water Reactor” developed at Oregon State University in the early 2000s. It has a compact uranium nuclear core along with helical coil steam generators inside the same steel reactor vessel. So, it generates power through the same mechanism as a traditional reactor (no fancy uranium or thorium salts here), but each SMR only produces about 50 MWe (megawatts electrical) compared with 1,000 or more in existing reactor designs.

Continue reading “US Regulators to Certify First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Design” | >

* FBL67: Jacob Ward – How AI Shapes Our Choices & Bad Habits * Future of funerals? Startup develops ‘holographic conversational video experience’ that allows mourners to have conversations with the dead * Police Used a Baby’s DNA to Investigate Its Father for a Crime.

* The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score * ‘Starbucks fired me for being three minutes late’ * Amazon starts selling private 5G, plants flag on pricing * We Need To Stop Cheerleading Change.

* Breaking Analysis Further defining Supercloud W/ tech leaders VMware, Snowflake, Databricks & others * Thriving in Uncertainty | Shashank Agarwal | TEDx * Why the Space Industry Needs New Role Models | Bianca Cefalo | TEDx.

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Musk responded to a question on Twitter as to whether he’d launch his own site by simply tweeting “X.com” on Tuesday. The comment came after it was revealed that the billionaire had sold 7.92 million Tesla shares worth $6.9 billion ahead of the very real chance he could be forced to purchase Twitter.

“In the (hopefully unlikely) event that Twitter forces this deal to close *and* some equity partners don’t come through, it is important to avoid an emergency sale of Tesla stock,” Musk said about the sale on Twitter.

It’s not the first time that the billionaire has hinted at launching a direct competitor to Twitter. Ahead of his Twitter takeover offer, Musk told Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal he had considered creating his own platform.

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