DTN 080: The Quest to Build a Telescope on the Moon

Plus: AI revives zombie nuclear plants, Blue Origin hot fires an orbital rociet stage for the first time, inside the quantum computing arms race, Brainfuck CPU, stem cells reverse diabetes, and more.

September 27, 2024

“He led me to a provisional-looking conference room—the company hadn’t had a chance to renovate yet—and uncapped a dry-erase marker. Then, on a whiteboard, he drew a large circle, to represent the moon. Inside the circle, he drew a small square, which represented about two hundred square kilometres of the lunar surface. This was the potential site of the FarView radio-telescope array. Unlike telescopes such as the Hubble and the James Webb, which are made from mirrors and lenses, FarView would comprise a hundred thousand metal antennas made on-site by autonomous robots. It would cover a Baltimore-size swath of the moon. To show the FarView site up close, Carol drew a big square filled with dots. Each dot represented a cluster of four hundred antennas; all the clusters together would be sensitive enough to detect a cell phone on Pluto. They would perceive light that is nearly undetectable from Earth: radio waves from a mysterious period known as the Cosmic Dark Ages.” (The New Yorker)

For the first time, Blue Origin has ignited an orbital rocket stage.

Twenty days after it rolled out to Blue Origin's launch site in Florida, the second stage of the massive New Glenn rocket underwent a successful hot-fire test on Monday. The second stage—known as GS2 for Glenn stage 2—ignited for 15 seconds as part of the "risk reduction" hot-fire test, the company said. The two BE-3U engines, fueled by liquid oxygen and hydrogen and each producing 173,000 pounds of thrust, burned with a nearly transparent flame that approached a temperature of 6,000° Fahrenheit. This marked the first time that Blue Origin, a space company founded by Jeff Bezos more than two decades ago, has integrated and fired an orbital rocket stage. After the test, Blue Origin said it is still tracking toward a November launch of the New Glenn rocket. (via Ars Technica)

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The Deep Tech Agency.

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