Out of the 63 countries with positive organic population growth in the world, 42 are in Africa. Many of its cities have seen incredible expansion in the past decades, multiplying 10x, 30x or 90x over their size in 1950.

Returning 100 kB of data from Proxima Centauri, when you have only a 1 gram probe with 10 mW of power, is about a BILLION times more difficult than communicating with New Horizons past Pluto.

Here is how the nuclear rocket engine will work: youtu.be/eDNX65d-FBY A NASA/AEC animation for a regeneratively cooled nuclear-thermal rocket with graphite-uranium core, from 1958.

Under the overpass, in the glow of neon lights. #art by Matvey Radkov. www.artstation.com/artwork/4Nn1nW

According to the For All Mankind official 2004-2012 timeline, 'Iridium' has become the unobtanium that justifies the space economy, Mars habs above ground are protected by magnetic shielding and there's an interplanetary illegal immigration problem with stowaways: youtu.be/sjQmbeoiMOM

Quaia is an all-sky quasar map showing over 1.2 million active supermassive black holes detected by the Gaia mission: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3... It's the catalog with the "largest total volume of the universe mapped".

Carbon has a metastable BC8 form that's tougher than diamond. Its compressive strength may be 30% higher! However, it would have to be grown as nanocrystals condensing out of liquid carbon at insane 5000K and >1500 GPa conditions. pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Kitbashing industrial equipment together to create spaceships is not a terrible approach. #space #art by Stanislav Verbitsky. www.artstation.com/artwork/yk8qaR

Xcimer Energy is developing a commercial DT fusion reactor that's like a highly modernized NIF: a 10+ MJ Krypton-Fluoride 248 nm excimer laser (>5% efficiency) as driver and capsules shot by EM gun into a HYLIFE III chamber with molten FLiBe in the walls xcimer.energy

Solar sails with a modest lightness ratio of 0.1 can transfer to Venus or Mars and become "quasi-pole-sitters", orbiting indefinitely less than 30° from the planet's poles: www.researchgate.net/publication/... Thinner sails with better lightness ratios can become perfect 0° pole sitters.

A simulation of a neutron star merger by the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics that would explain the GW170817 gravitational wave observation by ‪@LIGOVirgo‬, followed by a gamma ray burst: youtu.be/xIthgcx-axs

Cinematics, environment and mood concepts for Battlefield 6. #art by Jakub Kowalczyk. www.artstation.com/artwork/Zl8PwX

Sunlight reflects off the thin spread of gas and dust throughout the Solar System, creating a very fait glow opposite our Sun. It's called Gegenschein.

CSBA report on the "inadequacy of Western munition stocks" and how the "U.S. military has encountered difficulties meeting its PGM demands in nearly every campaign since their adoption". csbaonline.org/uploads/docu... It then goes through multiple scenarios to detail how bad it gets.

A Cold War interceptor with two turbojets and one massive ramjet, inspired by the French Leduc 0.22. The pilot sits inside the intake cone. #art by AST21. www.artstation.com/artwork/JrJ3kZ

"In fact, the art of computer programming was essentially invented for SAGE." MIT Lincoln Lab's page on the US's first air defence system; the 'Semi-Automatic Ground Environment' ADS, built in a panic over nuclear-armed Soviet bombers flying over the Arctic: www.ll.mit.edu/about/histor...

Hotspot impact ignition of fusion fuel: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... A spherical capsule of DT has a plastic cone inserted into it. When blasted by a laser pulse, a piece of fuel is flung into the sphere's center where its impact generates ignition conditions for the rest of the fuel.

"Sous-Marin Nucléaire Lanceur d'Engins de Troisieme Génération", the next French nuclear ballistic submarine, expected to operate from 2035 to 2090. #art by Nikausse. www.artstation.com/artwork/JrNXzD

A great basic introduction to how space nuclear reactors work, their challenges and their potential performance at their current level of development: ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20...

"The Expanse: Future Worlds" was a series of behind-the-scene segments that featured crew, cast and creatives interviews plus worldbuilding details for the main show. Here's the first one: youtu.be/mBikjImHxKg

Concept art for Balde Runner 2049, by Kamen Annev. #art www.artstation.com/artwork/80A3q www.artstation.com/artwork/3W9Z2 www.artstation.com/artwork/P0Dk1 www.artstation.com/artwork/L6m2K

Am I reading this right? The Type 091, China's first nuclear submarine, spent its first *15* years without any torpedoes installed? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_09... And those torpedoes, Yu-3s, took 23 years to develop?

Warcraft Wednesday #hibourverse #space #scifi

oh this one is even better

The Harrier from SpaceSolar is a 360° power beaming tech demonstrator, part of their CASSIOPeiA space-based solar power satellite: youtu.be/jGd8x8d2n3M It's 0.5m wide and being tested in on the ground, for a 1.7km wide final design operating at GW scale from GEO.

The Yanera-Class Interstellar Cargo Ship. Debris shield, container stack, glowing radiators... it's got most of the right pieces for a realistic starship! #space #art by aaunaa. www.artstation.com/artwork/x3EVB1

A liquid sheet radiator: ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citation... Similar to liquid droplet radiator, and matching power density, but a thin continuous film of liquid is used to radiate heat. The flow was always stable in physical testing up to 11 m/s.

A really good attempt at rendering Werka's Afterburning Fission Fragment rocket design, one of the few nuclear propulsion systems that can achieve 30-50,000s Isp without an electric conversion step or explosive chain reactions: forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?to...

The 1000+ bases of the United States across the world: geoawesome.com/top-14-maps-... About a third of American troops are always stationed overseas.

Radioisotope microbatteries using diamond Schottky barrier diodes to directly convert Beta decay into electricity: www.researchgate.net/publication/... There's some potential of 4-6% conversion efficiency, but only 0.6% has been demonstrated at a paltry 0.000000003 W/cm^2 using Ni63.

The Synod battleship from EVE: Frontier. No regard for realism, but the aesthetics make up for it. #space #art by Long Pham. www.artstation.com/artwork/2BXwWy

The many warheads of the Minuteman missile: minutemanmissile.com/nuclearwarhe... It started with 1 Mt W59s and 1.2 Mt W56s, then evolved into a MIRV launcher with much more accurate but lower yield 170 kT W62s and 300 kT W87s.

NASA got John Rhys-Davies (Lord of the Ring's Gimli) to present about their 'Fellowship of the Telescopes': youtu.be/M8FklyI2IEo The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the Habitable Worlds Observatory should soon join them.

One of the concepts for the Discovery from '2001: A Space Odyssey' was an Orion drive spaceship, based on documents handed to Kubrick as soon as the propulsion system was declassified: youtu.be/rDkk_qar5wI By Nick Stevens.

A fancy split-wing Ekranoplan design with a twin catamaran hull and six massive missile launchers. #art by "E wo kaku Peter". www.artstation.com/artwork/4eJrL

A 45mm Combustion Light Gas Gun demonstrator achieving 2.77 km/s muzzle velocity with 200g projectiles using a H2-O2 propellant mix at 20% efficiency: apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/A... It's subscale for a 155 mm L/70 Navy gun with 400 km range, supplied by onboard electrolysis.

Interplanetary, not interstellar, science with JWST; CO2 and H2O2 detected on Charon: link.springer.com/article/10.1... This means the ices on its surface are chemically interacting with faint solar UV and cosmic rays via photolytic/radiolytic processes, plus carbon ion implantation.

Systems Engineering of the B-2, also a deep dive into how the stealth bomber was designed and built: apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA... It actually uses asymmetric thrust instead of split rudders for yaw control during 'penetration mode' to maintain stealth. MTOW 152t, payload 20t.

Five years ago #Mars #Perseverance 🧪🔭

Concepts for the Weyland-Yutani Heavy Loader in Predator: Badlands. #art by @dofresh.bsky.social www.artstation.com/artwork/5WzbGJ

There's official ITER comics, with 8 volumes since 2019: www.iter.org/publication-...

"Projectile, Atomic, Supercaliber 279mm XM388" loaded with the W54 nuclear warhead based on Ted Taylor's Scarab device, launched by the Davy Crockett recoilless rifle, was meant to release a very 'dirty' 20 ton yield at 2-4 km range.

'Balios-A' arriving at Jupiter. Having a transparent debris shield is great visuals. #space #art by @gtgraphics.bsky.social cara.app/post/8d87427...

The PM-2A 'portable' reactor installed in Camp Century used 93% enriched U235 and was designed for "9.2 MW-years at 10 MW", paired with a 7-stage steam turbine to generate 1.98 MWe. Shielding was provided by a water tank plus lead bricks: radiationeffects.org/wp-content/u...

Where does it *feel* the coldest in the Solar System? Based on heat conduction, it's Titan by far.

Ho’oleilana, a billion-lightyear-wide structure that already breaks the cosmological homogeniety principle, may be an echo of the early Universe's density distribution, called a Baryon Acoustic Oscillation: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

Zero-zero testing for the F-111 Aardvark's crew module escape system: youtu.be/F7O5lL8gPw0

If Artemis went nuclear: a Mars Transfer Vehicle with Exploration Command Module departing Earth. #space #art by BrickMack. www.deviantart.com/brickmack/ar...

This is JWST's NIRCam image of MoM-z14, the most distant galaxy detected so far. science.nasa.gov/asset/webb/c... It has a redshift of z=14.44, meaning it formed extremely early at just 280 million years after the Big Bang (13.53 Gya), and is 33.8 billion lightyears away from us.

Some advanced less-known radiator concepts: -Inflatable roll-out fins -Telescoping heat pipes -Liquid rotating belt -Spinning liquid film on disk Also described are Curie-point, liquid droplet, inflatable bag radiators and more: www.researchgate.net/publication/...