Rockets are hard
A summary of things I read this week
Psst.. This newsletter is getting a new brand. I will be writing more about frontier tech, innovation, and the philosophical discussions surrounding them.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket explosion
Building rockets for space travel is hard. No matter how easy SpaceX and Elon make it look, it has involved years and years of failures and rocket explosions.
This was again proven by the recent explosion of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket on Cape Canaveral, Florida. If you have not, check out the video below
It’s unfortunate for Blue Origin, but this is what you can get if you do really hard stuff. Even Elon responded to that that Rockets are hard.
A few interesting details about this explosion and the impact here:
It released 20% of the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb
The launching pad is totally destroyed and can take a year to build
Fortunately, all personnel were accounted for, and they are investigating the root cause of what happened.
I, for one, am super bullish on these experiments to make rockets safer, but that comes with the risk of these kinds of explosions.
Telescope Ranch in Texas
This is the one I find super interesting. I recently learned about a Telescope ranch in Texas, where people from all around the world rent space to set up their telescopes and control them remotely to take photos of the sky. They do it in the middle of Texas to avoid light pollution. Just look at the photo below, it’s crazy.
Core Memory made a very nice video from the rancher's perspective, who actually rents this space to people so they can set up their telescopes there for as little as $99 a month. There are already 550 telescopes.
Ferrari’s first fully electric car
So Ferrari just revealed its first fully electric car, and people are going crazy over its design
First of all, it’s $640,000. What? Apparently, its interior is designed by the legendary Apple designer Johy Ive. A bunch of people say this is one of the ugliest car designs they have seen.
Leave the design aside, even the performance isn’t that great. The Tesla Model S Plaid config is similar (even better in range) to this.
So now Ferrari is joining the EV race. I believe eventually the majority of cars will be EVs, so all the high-end brands are also getting into the game. But it’s definitely gonna be a status symbol to own a Ferrari, even though it doesn’t look that great in terms of design.
Check out the full video (ft Jony Ive) of the Ferrari design.
Figure AI commercial agreement
Another edition, another robotics achievement.
Figure AI announced that it has signed an agreement with Catalyst Brands (which operates JCPenney, Aéropostale, and Brooks Brothers) to deploy humonoids into their distribution and logistics network. It will start with their Reno location.
This is a big deal. We have mostly seen humanoids in controlled environments, but this is a great leap, as they will be deployed in a real logistics network to perform manual, repetitive tasks. I am also pretty sure they will be collecting a large amount of data to better train those humanoids, but this is a great step forward.
Energy Production in the US
For the first time in history, wind and solar produced more electricity than coal in the US. I am very pro-clean energy and producing more energy. I wrote about this earlier that we need more clean energy production in the world
This achievement by the US is just a start, and I think we need to do more to use nuclear energy, too.
People talk a lot about energy becoming costly due to data centers, but that has pushed us to produce more. The President of Duke Energy wrote that the construction of Amazon Data centers will drive innovation in energy production, and, with input from the local community, they can achieve sustainable energy production and even lower electricity costs.
Doing this work at scale will help more communities thrive, support the United States’ competitiveness in artificial intelligence, and drive sustainable, long‑term economic growth across the regions we serve. - Harry Sideris, President and CEO of Duke Energy
More fun read
AI biosecurity company to research the dark side of AI models - https://www.redqueen.bio/
A friend of mine sent me this cool post about a trash can that moves based on where you throw the trash to catch it before it hits the ground