Mark Fisher

Building dreams, savoring flavors, SF all the way! 🏴‍☠️

[ApoStructura @ApoStructura]

The rise of SpaceX to the world’s leading rocket launch provider

[Association of Space Explorers @ASE_Astronauts]

#HappyBirthday to ASE Life Member Tom Henricks, who flew to space four times between 1991 and 1996 (STS-44, STS-55, STS-70, and STS-78)!

[ToughSF @ToughSf]

Star maps change over the course of hundreds of years.

Here's the motions of stars in the Omega Centauri cluster, traced over the next 600 years using Hubble observations, in 30 year increments:
https://t.co/d3HEzoKJLs

[ToughSF @ToughSf]

Hoyt's Cislunar Tether Transport System:
https://t.co/tiDDrMjxjO
It combines an LEO skyhook, a relay rotovator in elliptical orbit, an LLO hook and electrodynamic propulsion to enable <25 m/s Earth-Moon transfers, with total system mass x28 the payload mass.

[Mike Constantine @Moonpans]

Happy 4th of July from the Moon

Apollo 14 astronauts raising the US Flag HD footage

This upscaled 16mm film of the Apollo 14 Flag Deployment is one of the clearest HD Apollo footage of Astronauts on the Lunar Surface ever seen. It has been speed corrected, interpolated and upscaled. It has also been synchronised with the mission audio resulting in a high quality Apollo HD video experience

Original footage source: Apollo Flight Journal

[ISpA - Indian Space Association @ISpA_India]

Heartiest congratulations to our esteemed Startup Member, @SkyrootA , on announcing the launch window for Vikram-1 Test Flight-1, Mission Aagaman—India's first private orbital rocket launch. Wishing the team every success!

#ISpA #SkyrootAerospace #MissionAagaman #Vikram1

[Shawn Chauhan @shawnchauhan1]

Nvidia just became a bank. Nobody's calling it that yet.

Neoclouds like CoreWeave and Lambda buy GPUs in bulk on weak credit ratings, which makes financing expensive.

Nvidia's fix: guarantee to rent back any unused capacity, and take a cut of the revenue.

Read what that actually does.

It doesn't just sell chips anymore. It underwrites the demand risk on every chip it sells.

That's not a hardware moat. That's a financial one, and it's much harder to compete with.

The company selling the shovels just started insuring the gold rush.

[Matthew Gialich @MattGialich]

I have spent more time looking at this gauge than anything else in the facility.

Who is making vacuum testing faster and cheaper?

[Dr. Tamitha Skov @TamithaSkov]

Machine-Gun Sun! More than 5 storms on their way to Earth and 3 of them offer good chances for aurora views. NOAA and NASA model predictions do not show all the storms yet (it's hard to keep up with the rapid-fire storm launches!) but the first should hit before noon July 3 UTC. Once they hit, expect G2+ level conditions, if the magnetic orientation of the storms are conducive for aurora. The NASA model is a composite showing several sets of storms lasting through July 6 UTC. My 3D solar storm visualizer runs are available for these events. I will post links for them momentarily.

[Alexandre Morgand @Almorgand]

"REST3D: Reconstructing Physically Stable 3D Scenes from a Single Image"

TLDR: reconstructs simulation-ready 3D scenes from a single image by combining agentic physical scene understanding with physics-constrained optimization.

[Shawn Chauhan @shawnchauhan1]

Cheaper per token. More expensive per answer.

Sonnet 5 launched at a lower price than its predecessor. Then someone ran the full benchmark suite and the total bill came out higher than Opus.

Nobody reads the per-million-token number and asks the real question: how many tokens does it take this model to get to the right answer.

A cheap model that reasons in circles is not cheap. It's just cheap to start.

The teams optimizing spend right now are watching total cost per completed task, not the sticker price per token.

Everyone else is about to get a very confusing invoice.

[Bay Area Times @BayAreaTimes]

JUST IN: Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5, bringing near-Opus 4.8 performance at a lower price.

It also unveils Claude Science, integrating 60+ scientific databases and specialized research tools.

[Gilles F. Leclerc @spaceleclerc]

@csa_asc astronaut Jenni Gibbons
is CAPCOM on today’s @Space_Station EVA to replace a joint on Canadarm2. From CAPCOM on @astro_jeremy Artemis II mission to ISS repairs, CSA’s astronaut corps continue to prove their value. @Astro_Jenni @NASA @Astro_Jessica @Astro_ChrisW

[James W. Draper @James_W_Draper]

75 years ago today, the Long Range Proving Ground became the Air Force Missile Test Center. From testing missiles down a 10,000-mile Atlantic range to supporting more than 8,000 launches since 1950, the Cape evolved into the World's Premier Gateway to Space.
@ccspacemuseum

[Shawn Chauhan @shawnchauhan1]

Billing units rewrite incentives; watch what the meter rewards.

Anthropic’s renegotiation with Amazon (hours → tokens) changes model economics.

Token billing favors concise, dense outputs and penalizes chatty workflows.

Product teams must stress-test cost-per-output assumptions now.

If you haven't modeled token economics, you're flying blind.

[durvesh @BLackgold_5]

Lockheed C-5M Super Galaxy: The U.S. Air Force's giant Lockheed C-5M Super Galaxy taking off from José Aponte de la Torre Airport at Roosevelt Roads in Ceiba, Puerto Rico.

[Soleio @soleio]

“There will be a Cambrian explosion of new form factors that make the physical world malleable in the way that the digital world is. Infinite Machine exists to build these new kinds of machines. Machines that give people agency. Machines that empower people and enable them. Machines people love.”

A lovely manifesto for @infinitemachine by CEO/cofounder @josephcohen

[The Information @theinformation]

An audit of Anthropic customers’ bills uncovered invoicing errors, finding about $1.7 million in mistaken overcharges.

The Information’s Laura Bratton explains how those errant changes could happen:

"Maybe there was an AI agent that continued to retry a task that it was completing incorrectly and a customer didn't realize that the AI agent kept trying over and over again, and they were getting charged for it."

[durvesh @BLackgold_5]

When aviation meets nature. The world's largest aircraft landing under Alaska's golden sunset is a sight you'll never forget. Credit to Chad Steward from our Operations team for capturing this amazing moment.

[Fahad Naim @Fahadnaimb]

Delta's started equipping their entire 240-strong fleet of 737-800s and -900ERs with VCT aerodynamic finlets.

Developed by ex-Lockheed Martin engineers, these 64cm x 6.4cm plates reshape the airflow over the rear fuselage, cutting drag and even calming down some stabilizer vibes by removing old vortex generators. Their tests confirmed 1.2% less fuel burn... small change, but massive impact when you're burning kerosene at Delta's scale.

They're installing during overnight checks and scheduled maintenance in Atlanta. Should wrap the whole fleet in 18 months. Other airlines like Southwest and Avelo are already seeing the benefits.