An SSTO spaceplane design featuring: -combined turbo-ram/scramjet propulsion, switching to LOx-augmented scramjet then pure rocket mode -slush LH2 fuel -conformal graphite-epoxy tanks -SiC heatshield -gold-platinum insulation -2.5% payload fraction arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2...

Endurance faces Gargantua; an impressive piece by Virileth-Arts depicting a scene from Interstellar. #space #art www.deviantart.com/virileth-art...

The deepest recovery of a Voyage Data Recorder was from -4600m: safety4sea.com/how-the-el-f... After 10 months of effort and 3 attempts, the USNS Apache found the wreck of the USS El Faro cargo ship, with 26h of data aboard, used to write this NTSB report: www.ntsb.gov/investigatio...

The Panther I and Panther II mine-clearing vehicles, based on an M60 and M1 Abrams respectively, were stripped of their turrets, loaded with a 3 ton blade or 8.1 tons mine roller and installed with radio remote control to operate without crew abord. tanks-encyclopedia.com/us-modern-m6...

This is the state a Vanguard-class submarine returned to port in after 195 days out at sea: youtu.be/4k4WA--t5hM Corrosion, marine growth, likely exacerbated by loitering on the sea bed.

A fusion-powered worldship with a rotating habitat that can support 1000 passengers indefinitely and a powerful engine to go anywhere. Up front is a regenerating dust shield to take impacts from hypervelocity debris. #space #art by Michel-Lamontagne. www.deviantart.com/michel-lamon...

Bussard Ramjets have a special place in classic SciFi, as they were once thought capable of endless 1g acceleration - enough to roam the Universe. Some took it further and worked out the details of Bussard Ramjet *combat* at relativistic speeds: www.projectrho.com/public_html/...

The famous Sombrero Galaxy looks quite different in infrared (JWST) than in optical (HST): esahubble.org/images/sci24...

A solar cell based on single-layer TMDCs like Molybdenum Disulfide would have an efficiency of 12.87%, excellent radiation resistance and a power density as high as 220 kW/kg! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"The Hexagon" by byrner201. This was done in Blender! #space #art www.deviantart.com/byrner201/ar...

R-LEMA: vaporize a spot on an asteroid using a pulsed laser generating 10 MW/m^2 intensity, then use the light of that hot spot to perform spectroscopy on the ejected material to uncover the asteroid's composition from a distance. www.deepspace.ucsb.edu/wp-content/u...

Recreating the famous Hertzsprung-Russell diagram from actual Hubble observations of the stars in globular cluster Omega Centauri: science.nasa.gov/asset/hubble...

A beautiful visualization of EX Hydrae's white dwarf pulling material from its companion star and radiating highly polarized X-rays from its accretion disk: www.nasa.gov/image-articl... Article: news.mit.edu/2025/first-l...

A dumbbell-shaped space station that I think spins end-over-end to generate 1g gravity in its habitation modules. #space #art by byrner201 www.deviantart.com/byrner201/ar...

The Azure Dragon, a generation ship headed to Epsilon Eridani. It's essentially an O'Neill cyclinder rendered mobile by a massive engine (complete with mag-nozzle and radiators!) and protected by a debris shield. #space #art by Coopooptroop. www.deviantart.com/coopooptroop...

Can a black hole turn white? Yes, when its mass is lower than 2.45 x 10^19 kg (~0.0000041 Earths); at that point Hawking radiation will raise its effective temperature to >5000K making it appear visually white. But very dim, as it'd be just 0.000073 mm across.

It's fascinating to watch the smoke and steam from Starship Flight 3's launch vibrating with shockwaves and turning orange from nitrogen oxides being formed by prolonged exposure of the air to hot exhaust: youtu.be/cLNitilyOII

The French government page on their nuclear Ballistic Missile Submarines (SSBN/SNLE) with details on Le Triomphant, Le Téméraire, Le Vigilant and Le Terrible, each 138m long, 14,200t submerged and armed with 16xM51 SLBMs: www.defense.gouv.fr/marine/marin...

The Godiva Device, an unshielded pulsed test reactor, and the Fat Man implosion-type bomb, were held together by screws made of uranium. This is likely to simplify the neutron transport and criticality design+calculations by not introducing hetegenous materials.

Nuclear-reactor laser programs did achieve their goal of >1 kW output, with the Soviets even reaching 2 kW by pumping a Helium-Xenon mix: ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19... Alternate configurations like an N2-CO2 neutron-excited laser were tested, but the dream was a UF6 gas-core laser.

ISRO is developing the SE-2000, an oxidizer-rich staged combustion kerolox rocket engine with 2030 kN thrust and 335s vacuum Isp. It's meant for the LVM3 medium-lift launch vehicle. Development started in 2013; a Hot Fire Test Article made several 60% runs on the ground in 2025.

This RL10C-2 burns brightly for Artemis II's Trans-Lunar Injection. It's the long-lasting descendant of a Pratt&Whitney design from the 1950s! #space #art by okan170. www.deviantart.com/okan170/art/...

The longest direct-fire tank-to-tank kill is the 1991 Challenger 1 shot at a T-55 from over 4.7 km combatoperators.com/history/long... But it's not so much farther than the WWII record of an M36 GMC manually aiming at a Panther from 4.2 km and hitting it twice! www.ww2armor.org/blog-discuss...

Some ancient treeship doodles

The spectacular star-forming region of Sharpless 305, 13,000 lightyears away: www.flickr.com/photos/markm... Also captured is the protostar RAFGL5232, 11 solar masses and 13,000 times brighter than our Sun. via @badastronomy.beehiiv.com.web.brid.gy

A tour of the Moon in 4K using Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data, with a zoom-in on the Apollo 17 landing site... the last human mark left there: youtu.be/nr5Pj6GQL2o

A detailed cutaway view of NASA's X-59 QueSST: postimg.cc/QVcyTdZG It's got parts from an F-16 and a T-38, including the cockpit.

The 108 ton Hard Mobile Launcher was meant to carry a MGM-134 Midgetman missile and withstand the blast wave from a nearby nuclear detonation by literally digging into position, ensuring it could retaliate after an enemy first strike.

Gagarin Station in 2093, a 4 km diameter Stanford Torus, flanked here by a Tereshkova-class shuttle. They didn't forget the radiator arrays necessary to get rid of all the heat generated by the population aboard! #space #art by Lilly Harper. beaconsinthedark.wordpress.com/2024/01/19/g...

The first crewed interstellar starship ready to go, with a pristine debris shield and tanks full of antimatter. 10 tons of antimatter is enough to set an entire hemisphere on fire from orbit so it's dangerously close to Earth here! #space #art by Louis_Rtr blenderartists.org/t/interstell...

If you were able to turn the entire Milky Way into a photon thruster, and focused that light onto our Solar System, you'd produce 3.3x10^27 N of thrust, enough to accelerate at 1.67 mm/s^2. The Sun could be sent to Andromeda 2.5 million lightyears away in merely 239k years.

The heart of the Phantom Galaxy, 32 million lightyears away, captured in infrared by JWST and added to previous optical Hubble observations: www.esa.int/Science_Expl...

Project Daedalus was a BIS design for an interstellar probe that would reach 0.12C on the way to Bernard's Star and deliver 450 tons. Two stages, each propelled by DHe3 fusion pulse units, adding up to 54,000 tons at launch (of which 92.6% is fuel): youtu.be/9ym494x_Wi0

A civilization doesn't strictly need to leave its home system to reach KIII power output. If it can create 9 x 10^20 quark-sized black holes (total 0.25 solar masses), each radiating 1113 TW, it can sustain 10^36 Watts for 4258 years by feeding the rest of the Sun into them.

Magnetically assisted slip casting can turn a solution of nanoparticles into a programmable structure under the influence of a magnetic field: www.nature.com/articles/nma... Bioinspired materials like bone or complex shapes like a tooth are demonstrated as possible to make.

The Th'Nor command cruiser from Babylon 5, rendered and turned into a printable model. #space #art by Sergey Ivanov www.artstation.com/artwork/rJ0GgE

SAPA's tracked vehicle transmissions, like the ACT 1075 that can handle 1500 horsepower and has 32 gears, weighs nearly 2 tons! A modern lightweight transmission for a Leopard 2/M1A2-class tank is still as much as a large truck on its own! sapatransmission.com/wp-content/u...

Bono's 1969 "Saturn Application Single-Stage-to-Orbit" design used a giant 6.6m wide plug-nozzle aerospike engine with 1.55 MN of thrust that could take 2.8 tons into orbit then turn around and use the nozzle as a heatshield for a propulsive landing: projectrho.com/public_html/...

A NASA technical paper on Gas-Core Nuclear Rockets shows their Isp scaling to 6500s if they can retain the uranium plasma at 2000 bar: ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19... At the 12 GW scale, they'd reach 58 kW/kg. 7.5% of reactor output becomes waste heat at 1400K to be removed by radiators.

A 1 km long accelerator nestled between Alcubierre rings, cooled by glowing radiator spines, protected by dielectric mirrors and Whipple shields, propelled by a DT fusion torch. An excellent HardSSF space warship inspired by Atomic Rockets! #space #art blenderartists.org/t/warship/14...

Matte paintings for Space Marine II, depicting planets Avarax and Kadaku under assault. #art by Kevin Decatoire. www.artstation.com/artwork/WXB4kN

Genetically engineered techno-Samurai on the Moon! The worldbuilding behind @solshogunate.bsky.social is quite original and the rotating colonies embedded in the surface are a great bit of realism. youtu.be/ji3eOxiOsao

This is Melodysheep's beautiful cinematic tribute to Artemis II: youtu.be/SGxz4LQfRpo Whoever just watched the launch live and then didn't return for later footage is really missing out.

Why does Russian ordnance have such unconventional calibers? 76.2 mm? 122mm? The origin is the liniya unit of 0.1 inches or 2.54mm. So 30 liniya is 76.2mm. Artillery got designed to 42, 48, 50 liniya standard and so on. The English line is 0.0833 inches though.

Why did it take 1.5 billion years for eukaryotic cells to evolve multicellularity? The answer likely lies in the adaptations required to survive Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth, specifically metabolic energy consumption scaling in groups vs single cells: royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

Cross-section view of the Eurocopter Tiger, an Airbus-manufactured twin-engine multirole helicopter. 180 have been built since 1991.

The Shuttle Training Aircraft was a Grumman Gulfstream II modified to simulate a gliding Shuttle orbiter: youtu.be/pCcdxhBddDI It still needed to drop gear and reverse thrust to match the terrible L/D of the orbiter on descent.

Taking a turbojet to Mach 7 with MHD bypass: ayuba.fr/pdf/ajax/bla... Make the inlet air conductive with an electron beam, allowing it to be electromagnetically braked. Recover that energy and return it to the exhaust, allowing a conventional turbojet to operate in between.

The smooth blue of Uranus with its rings made visible. Low-energy transfers to this gas giant tank 12-16 years. #space #art by sirgerg. www.deviantart.com/sirgerg/art/...

There's only about 8.6 Moon's worth of moons in the Solar System. (7.3e22 kg vs 6.3e23 kg)