Space, nuclear energy, futurism and movie/anime enthusiast, trying to learn Japanese (round two)
Tx, USA
Joined April 2022
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He’s kinda right. You can make a rocket with a glass jar, but it’s not going to be competing against SpaceX.
Rockets are not hard, apparently.
“Of course rocket engineers are going to get mad with me, but you can simplify it as a big tank feeding engines,” he said of the rocket. “So big tanks—we know how to do them. We know how to do them in composite.”
arstechnica.com/space/2026/1…
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Michael Whyman (ミカリウィマノ) retweeted
Big update to the X platform today
After 10 years of Twitter/X supporting up to 4 Photos and Videos per post, the limit has been increased to 20!
Happy posting
Launch rockets, build data centers, build nuclear reactors, beat communism. These are my politics
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Michael Whyman (ミカリウィマノ) retweeted
Now it's official. The NRC has issued a construction permit for four Xe-100 reactors at a Dow Chemical Facility in Texas. Article link in reply.
The Xe-100 is a high-temp, gas-cooled reactor (HTGR). The fuel consists of graphite pebbles containing TRISO fuel particles.
The four reactors will generate 800 MW of heat and 320 MW of electricity. The heat will be used to produce high-temp steam and electricity. The steam and most of the electricity will be used by the Dow facility. Surplus electricity will be sent to the power grid.
One thing I didn't know. The pebble-bed core allows the reactor to refuel during operation. It will not have to shut down, i.e., have refueling outages. This should result in (even) higher capacity factors. The reactor will shutdown occasionally, for certain maintenance activities.
The average person thinks that nuclear is just electricity, but industrial heat has a major role to play too. X-energy has designed their reactors to provide industrial because it’s that valuable
JUST IN: U.S. regulators approve construction of 4 advanced nuclear reactors at a Dow chemical plant in Texas, marking the first such approval for an American industrial site.
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Michael Whyman (ミカリウィマノ) retweeted
Head of DOE on stage giving an awesomely techno-optimistic speech, literally talking about techno acceleration and putting nuclear energy on the Moon
Michael Whyman (ミカリウィマノ) retweeted
The United States is turning to an unlikely partner to help rescue its nuclear renaissance: South Korea, a country that only half a century ago depended on American technology and expertise to build its first nuclear power plants.
Under a recently announced $120 billion nuclear cooperation framework, South Korea could help finance and construct up to eight reactors on American soil: six Westinghouse AP1000s and, remarkably, two Korean-designed APR1400s.
After decades of free-market orthodoxy, Washington has rediscovered industrial policy. The Biden administration’s CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act marked a return to large-scale industrial intervention, while Donald Trump has gone further, taking an equity stake in Intel, negotiating a golden share in US Steel and promising billions in financing for the nuclear supply chain.
Korea has been practicing its own brand of industrial policy for decades. Its authoritarian developmental state mobilized capital and held industrial champions to exacting production and export targets, transforming an impoverished exporter of human-hair wigs, which once accounted for 10% of Korea’s export earnings, into a nuclear manufacturing powerhouse.
How did Korea acquire capabilities that the United States, a pioneer of commercial nuclear power, let atrophy? Can those capabilities be exported back to America? a 🧵....
Michael Whyman (ミカリウィマノ) retweeted
Redwire wins $20 million DARPA contract for second low-orbit satellite test spacenews.com/redwire-wins-2…
Michael Whyman (ミカリウィマノ) retweeted
🚨 BREAKING: Introducing X-70 Fractal, @NASA's newest experimental aircraft!
This crewed, modular aircraft will allow the agency to rapidly swap out internal & external payloads to help keep pushing the frontiers of aviation technology! @nasaadmin
Details: go.nasa.gov/4kAeM0d
ALT Generated image of NASA’s new X-70 Fractal experimental aircraft, a crewed, rapidly reconfigurable research platform for advanced aviation technologies.
Michael Whyman (ミカリウィマノ) retweeted
BREAKING: Cancer drug manufacturing is now occurring in space.
@VardaSpace has announced that its W-7 spacecraft is growing PROTAC drug crystals in orbit, testing whether microgravity can improve the crystallinity and solubility of these experimental cancer drug compounds.
The spacecraft will return the crystals to Earth in the coming weeks for further analysis.
ALT Source: Varda W-7 spacecraft
Michael Whyman (ミカリウィマノ) retweeted
Here's a few more different ways the future could play out on Mars.
1) Lava Tube Land: it may be mostly underground, but that's no reason for there not to be a ton of green.
2) The Railway City: Homes, gardens, workshops, all traveling together. It iften stops for months at a time, then moves on.
3) Industrial Base: Robots build most of the infrastructure before large numbers of people arrive. Mars becomes a manufacturing and scientific powerhouse, with small human communities living comfortably amid infrastructure that scarcely needs them.
4) The Inland Sea: Settlers build an enclosed maritime world, with island neighbourhoods, ferries, aquaculture, and waterfront markets beneath a vast pressure shell. Children learn to swim and handle boats on a planet whose exposed surface remains desert. A distinctly Martian seafaring culture develops before Mars has an outdoor sea.
I'm going to take a break from my usual style for future Mars settlement, and imagine some very different directions things could go.
Here's a few of them.
1) The hardened archive: a city of scientific research, art and historical repositories, museums and biological collections.
2) Cities from ships: The vessels that brought people to Mars become the settlement itself. Neighborhoods retain their ships names, lots of character.
3) The ice city: cities with icy shells, bordered with clear insulation to separate the ice from the warm interior.
4) Wandering cities. Mining enterprises, scientific expeditions, and independent communities live aboard enormous mobile habitats, stopping for months or years wherever work or interest takes them. Convoys meet to trade, celebrate, exchange passengers, and undertake major repairs.
Michael Whyman (ミカリウィマノ) retweeted
BREAKING: An American shipyard that was once shutting down is now producing autonomous ships following @Saronic takeover.
Saronic has launched its second 180-foot Marauder autonomous ship from its shipyard in Franklin, Louisiana. The second ship required 8% fewer labor hours to build than the first, with plans to scale production to 20 Marauders annually.
Michael Whyman (ミカリウィマノ) retweeted
Spent the last few hours finding the real geofence for Fort Worth and here is the true coverage map.
About 72% coverage, but that isn’t the full story.
🧵
We are now at the stage where with the right combination of technologies, you can just think something and make it
I designed these three parts entirely with my Neuralink, then watched them come off the 3D printer.
Sunglasses rack, RC controller case, and a custom cubby for our tire machine.
The tech is cool. The feeling of taking an idea that only existed in my head and holding it a few hours later is something else entirely.
I’ve always loved making things. The method changed. The feeling didn’t.
What would you design first if you could go from thought to physical object this fast?
#3DPrinting #BCI #Maker
@Neuralink @Neuropod @Elon Musk @Barrow Neurological Institute
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This is going to get so many police calls. It might be nearly as bad as the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast
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Michael Whyman (ミカリウィマノ) retweeted
Neuralink’s first product is called Telepathy.
It enables high-speed communication with computers or humans simply by thinking. Output bandwidth will vastly exceed the fastest human speech or typing in a few years. Read that sentence again.
The drones are coming for you, Mr Fire.
BREAKING: The largest county in America by land area is deploying autonomous drones to fight wildfires.
@Seneca_Systems has secured a deal with San Bernardino County Fire to deploy five autonomous firefighting drones, a mobile operations base, and autonomy software designed to rapidly suppress newly detected wildfires before they spread.
The five-drone strike team can deliver over 500 gallons of finished firefighting foam, with a single pilot supervising multiple aircraft. The system is designed for rapid response, including nighttime operations and difficult-to-access terrain.
San Bernardino County Fire Chief Dan Munsey has set an ambitious goal to stop 90% of fires before they grow beyond 10 square feet, with Seneca's autonomous rapid initial attack capabilities potentially playing a key role.
The drones are expected to enter service ahead of the 2027 wildfire season.
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