If there is a minimum length (Planck length) √(hG/c^3) and a minimum time (Planck time) √(hG/c^5) then there is - a maximum energy density (collapse into black hole) -a maximum power radiated c^5/4G = 0.9x10^51 Watts -a maximum force exerted c^4/4G = 3x10^43 Newtons

So @gbruhaug.bsky.social reminded us on the ToughSF Discord server of Winterberg's proposal to dig through the Moon's crust and mantle. This is your brain on nuclear bombs:

A great intro to the science communication challenge facing interstellar travel, from 'Dust Guy' @a-j-higgins.bsky.social at @irg-space.bsky.social: youtu.be/10Zx67TmHa4 The FAQ has been compiled here: interstellarflight.space/faq/

Hills and mountains on Titan take their names from Tolkien's Middle Earth. We find Arwen Colles, Gandalf Colles, Misty Mons, and yes, Mount Doom. science.nasa.gov/resource/mou...

General Electric working with NASA’s Electrified Powertrain Flight Demonstration project to develop MW-scale hybrid aircraft propulsion, starting with a Saab 340B testbed and GE’s CT7 turboprops: youtu.be/jBu9g6kab9M

A fusion-powered frigate takes a devastating laser strike in Attack Vector: Tactical, a classic hard-SF game by @kenburnside.bsky.social #space #art by Charles Oines. www.artstation.com/artwork/xJVPZX

LITA Laser-drive In-Tube Accelerator: arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2... A project accelerates into a driver beam by riding a laser-supported detonation wave inside a tube filled with gases. 290 Newtons of thrust per megawatt of beam power was achieved using Xenon.

Oh to be a little Tardigrade walking across a microscope slide. 🫧🐻🧪

One dead-end attempt to use Shuttle-era hardware was mounting a Orion capsule atop a cut-down External Tank, boosted by a single SRB stick. This would be the Ares I with 25 tons payload to LEO. The Ares I-X demonstrator with dummy upper stage was actually flown in 2009.

Exceptional star rendering in Blender, by Logan Miller. #space #art www.artstation.com/artwork/qJLDkR

DARPA tried to study way to turn common office buildings into large-area telescopes: www.darpa.mil/research/pro... "WITH-US" would exploit the slightly concave glass flanks of large buildings as light-collecting surfaces to look at targets in the upper atmosphere or in orbit.

An X-15 with attached ramjet and additional drop tanks: www.flickr.com/photos/apoll...

The T249 Vigilante was a cancelled short-range anti-aircraft platform. It was meant to use the T250, a 37mm six-barreled rotary cannon firing at 3000 RPM, making it the largest Gatling gun ever assembled.

A 1200m Stanford Torus for 13,000 people, with its 6 megaton shield ring included: youtu.be/Wn-e5QlfJWA

The MiG-31 Foxhound, an upgrade to the MiG-25 with s second seat and actually usable radar, but just as happy to burn out its engines pushing for Mach 3.2 #art by Martin Miguel. www.artstation.com/artwork/oJwAqB

The US Navy has not introduced a single dedicated cruiser hull since USS Long Beach, a nuclear prototype in 1961. It did not produce a single >10,000 ton surface combatant between the Iowa-class battleship Missouri in 1944 and the Zumwalt-class failures, last one in 2018.

The F-104's thin straight wings were directly descended from testing and windtunnel data of the X-7 drone, a Mach 3 ramjet testbed. Wing area was so low that the tail fins of mounted missiles noticeably added to total lift and reduced its turning circle. www.916-starfighter.de/Joy%20of%20H...

A three-limb orbital skyhook that can fling payloads from LEO to the Moon. #space #art by 青月晓 www.artstation.com/artwork/vDGOV3

Hybrid Drive fusion ignition: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Adding a 4 kJ direct drive ultra-intense laser pulse to 50 kJ indirect drive irradiation of a *spherical* hohlraum gets you a ~4x increase in implosion pressure and suppresses asymmetric shock effects.

I wondering what Ultra Safe Nuclear Corp. was doing. It was supposed to be developing microreactors, Co60 'atomic batteries', nuclear rockets and more. Actually, it filed for bankrupty: www.powermag.com/major-micror...

The AVCR 1360-2 tank engine: V12, twincharged, 22.2L displacement, diesel, producing 1500 horsepower at just 2600 RPM. It could vary its compression ratio from 16:1 to 9:1 to limit piston peak pressure at max power. Reaches 4400 N.m torque in 4 seconds. legacy.sae.org/publications...

HyperSoar, a DoE project for a Mach 10 plane using rocket-based combined cycle propulsion to boost-skip between 35 and 60 km altitude, crossing Tokyo to Chicago in 72 minutes or launch an orbital payload at the peak of its trajectory: youtu.be/7TBGVfHeKZ4

Massive posters like these are like going on a journey. Here's the history of our Solar System since its formation, data on all its main bodies, and a speculative exploration timeline out to 2123! #space #art by Voyager16751. www.deviantart.com/voyager16751...

A Euro-SD article on the future of medium-calibre weapons, from cased telescoped 40mm to 50mm Supershot to 57mm APFSDS with 4+km effective range, that could force AFVs to raise their protection levels to the point of rivalling MBTs in weight and cost... euro-sd.com/2023/01/arti...

San Antonio-class ship: $79,900/ton Nimitz-class carrier: $107,200/ton Ford-class carrier: $130,000/ton Arleigh Burke -class ship: $222,200/ton Triomphant-class sub: $300,000/ton Virginia-class sub: $421,600/ton Seawolf-class sub: $656,600/ton Dreadnought-class sub: $755,800/ton

Ice towers of Callisto. #SciArt #spaceart #astronomy #solarsystem

The Mars Cargo Transfer Vehicle from NASA's DRA 5.0, using 3x111 kN nuclear engines with 900s Isp, in-line LH2 drop tanks and a payload held in a biconic aeroshell. #space #art by SpacePozzolo. www.deviantart.com/spacepozzolo...

The orbital eccentricity of Uranian moons Ariel and Miranda would have generated enough tidal heating to grant them immense oceans up till ~100 million years ago. Ariel's ocean was 170 km deep, while Miranda would have been 53% liquid water by volume! www.psi.edu/blog/evidenc...

Cutting into reflective metals with lasers is doubly difficult: -Much higher intensity needed to get through, up to 20x with silver -Compounding with the risk of intense light travelling back up your optics and destroying them. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

In 1991, the US started building the Superconducting Super Collider. With a circumference of 87 km and a collision energy of 40 TeV, it would be 3x larger and more powerful than the LHC at CERN. After tunelling 22.5 km and spending $2 billion, it was cancelled.

🔵 In 2025, the NASA/ESA/CSA #Webb Space Telescope found a new moon orbiting Uranus! Called S/2025 U1, it joined the 28 other known moons around the ice giant. Webb’s infrared view also revealed the planet’s rings and atmospheric details in stunning clarity 🧪🔭 www.esa.int/ESA_Multimed... @stsci.edu

Stylised and far-fetched animation of an orbital ring around the Earth. Such structures, if we ever build them, will in reality be invisible from such a distance. #SciArt #blender #spaceart

Self-steering mass beams that can be focused on spots of ~100m across 1000 AU: sacramentol5society.nss.org/wp-content/u... These would be composed of 1 micron spinning 'smart particles' that reflect or absorb external laser pulses to counter dispersion, enabling easy interstellar propulsion.

A delicate 1000m wide solar-electric spaceship, held together by cables. Most of its bulk is thin-film photovoltaic panels feeding a pair of swivelling thrusters, with propellant tanks and payload clustered nearby. #space #art by Orbital Illustration. www.artstation.com/artwork/PmV6do

Bullseye is an upcoming General Atomic cruise missile, a new 5th gen type of fully autonomous stealth missile that finds its own targets after tracing its own sea-skimming/low-flying path without GPS. It's based on the Israeli 'Ice Breaker' and 50% of it will be made in the US.

Renault's Filante Record 2025 travelled 1008 km on a single charge of 87 kWh, at an average speed of 102 km/h: www.renault.lu/gamme-concep... It relied on low weight (1000 kg of which 600kg is battery), ultra-low rolling resistance tires and reduced drag with just 1.19x1.71m frontal area.

A straightforward explanation of how helicopters take their 14,000 RPM turbines and use then to power both the main rotor at 256 RPM and a 1400 RPM tail rotor across 95-120° direction changes: youtu.be/iG0WC2ewM4I

Tolkien station, a Mercury base constructed on the planet North Pole in a permanently shadowed crater of the same name. It's resupplied by SpaceX Starships upgraded to methane-nuclear propulsion. #space #art by QuintessenceReality2. www.deviantart.com/quintessence...

Nanochannel arrays of 30 billion tubes per cm^2, each as little as 33 nm, can be drawn from glass: www.researchgate.net/publication/... It can also be used to create massively parallel optical fibers, and can be used for developing semiconductor masks or analyzing liquids via chromatography.

Proposal to deploy and test a 3.7 m diameter Moving Belt Radiator from a Space Shuttle with gallium fluid heat exchanger, 58 kg total mass: ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citation... MBRs could have 5x the performance of regular heatpipes and be very compact once the flexible belt is folded up.

From "The Resources of the Solar System by Dr. R.C. Parkinson, a design using gas-core nuclear rockets to ship cargo across a solar-system wide economy sustained on resources from Mars to Callisto... #space #art by William Black www.deviantart.com/william-blac... www.deviantart.com/william-blac...

Breaking the space-bandwidth product bottleneck on conventional microscopes with RUSH: real-time, ultra-large-scale, high-resolution imaging. www.nature.com/articles/s41... A flat-curved-flat imaging strategy grants 1.2um resolution at cm-scale FoV for taking bio videos at 5.1 GPix/s.

I realized that the minimum-energy crewed Mars mission post is the denouement of the crewed flyby planning story I've dug into these past 30 yrs. If I were to plug it into a new edition of my HUMANS TO MARS book, it would conclude what is in the 2001 edition chapter 4. ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20...

The Krafla Magma Testbed project in Iceland is starting its KMT-II drilling mission this year. It aims to touch actual magma at -2100m, exploring the 900°C environment and testing 'magma geothermal energy' in the one place we can today: kmt.is/about/

A cubic millimeter of mouse brain with 75,000 neurons, vizualized by Quorumetrix Studio: youtu.be/blaS5fBJdsE Watching the way the signals propagate through the layers, with pyramidal cells integrating and processing 11,061 inputs at a time is mindbending.

6 wheels. 8m long, 2.7 tons, driven by 3500 horsepower from a 44.5 litre V12. It had wings, a drag coefficient of 0.18 and a target speed of 750 km/h... in 1939. The Mercedes Benz T80 was built but never made its attemp due to the outbreak of WWII. www.mercedes-benz.com/en/art-and-c...

"Injection Burn": an interstellar probe makes a low pass over a red dwarf star to enter its orbit. I like the huge magnetic nozzle it uses! #space #art by TerranAbassador www.deviantart.com/terranabassa...

LockM doc on laser weapons emphasizes protecting non-stealthy aircraft like AWACs or B-52, defending light vehicles, 'perfect snipers' or endless airborne SEAD: web.archive.org/web/20170707... Also depictions of integration options including submarines, airships or aboard the B-2 bomber

Single-pixel imaging to push domains outside the capability of conventional cameras cheaply, including extreme frames per second, long or short wavelengths, or real-time tracking of invisible gas leaks and such: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Take the Boxer AFV, replace its wheels with tracks, give it a 1200 hp V10 engine and mount a 14 ton turret with an autoloaded 120mm L/44 cannon on top, and you get KMW's pseudo-light tank Boxer RCT120. It even has APS and a Spike ATGM launcher!