Category: Hackaday links

It’s been a busy week in space news, and very little of it was good. We’ll start with the one winner of the week, Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, which landed successfully on the Moon’s surface on March 2. The lander is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program and carries ten scientific payloads, […]
It’s been quite a week for asteroid 2024 YR4, which looked like it was going to live up to its “city killer” moniker only to be demoted to a fraction of a percent risk of hitting us when it swings by our neighborhood in 2032. After being discovered at the end of 2024, the 55-meter […]
Ho-hum — another week, another high-profile bricking. In a move anyone could see coming, Humane has announced that their pricey AI Pin widgets will cease to work in any meaningful way as of noon on February 28. The company made a splash when it launched its wearable assistant in April of 2024, and from an […]
Just when you thought the saga of the Bitcoin wallet lost in a Welsh landfill was over, another chapter of the story appears to be starting. Regular readers will recall the years-long efforts of Bitcoin early adopter James Howells to recover a hard drive tossed out by his ex back in 2013. The disk, which […]
January 9 ended up being a very expensive day for a Culver City, California man after he pleaded guilty to recklessly operating a drone during the height of the Pacific Palisades wildfire. We covered this story a bit when it happened (second item), which resulted in the drone striking and damaging the leading edge of […]
All things considered, it was a very bad week for aviation here in the United States. Three separate crashes, two of which involved US military aircraft, have left over 70 people dead. We’ll spare you the details since there are plenty of other places to get news like that, but we did want to touch […]
Disappointing news this week for those longing for same-hour Amazon delivery as the retail giant tapped the brakes on its Prime Air drone deliveries. The pause is partially blamed on a December incident at the company’s Pendleton, Oregon test facility, where two MK30 delivery drones collided in midair during light rain conditions. A Bloomberg report […]
This week, we witnessed a couple of space oopsies as both Starship and New Glenn suffered in-flight mishaps on the same day. SpaceX’s Starship was the more spectacular, with the upper stage of the seventh test flight of the full stack experiencing a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” thanks to a fire developing in the aft section […]
The big news story of the week of course has been the wildfires in California, which as of Saturday have burned over 30,000 acres, destroyed 12,000 structures, caused 150,000 people to evacuate, and killed eleven people. Actually, calling them wildfires underplays the situation a bit because there are places where they’ve clearly become firestorms, burning […]
Good news this week from the Sun’s far side as the Parker Solar Probe checked in after its speedrun through our star’s corona. Parker became the fastest human-made object ever — aside from the manhole cover, of course — as it fell into the Sun’s gravity well on Christmas Eve to pass within 6.1 million […]