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Starfall – Affordable, routine access to microgravity

https://www.spacex.com/starfall
53•gmays•1h ago

Comments

drivebyhooting•43m ago
It sounds like a super villain weapon.

If you manufacture there how do you recover it?

ceejayoz•40m ago
> If you manufacture there how do you recover it?

The graphic shows it reentering the atmosphere.

Bluebird803•37m ago
Presumably the same way we have always recovered payloads from space. Heat-shield + parachute. I'm assuming there would be some capability to do a retrograde maneuver so that the re-entey can be done when and where desired, rather than leaving it to the whims of pure drag.
itishappy•36m ago
You're not wrong! It looks that way because it's a reentry vehicle. You put this thing in a low orbit which decays over the course of a few weeks until it eventually falls from space, then you go find it.
Polizeiposaune•33m ago
The Starfall capsule has enough deltaV to deorbit, a heat shield, and parachutes.

So you tell them where to deliver it (anywhere on the planet that its orbit goes over..), they tell you when it will be arriving, and it reenters and lands there.

Article about a recent test (launched on a Falcon 9):

https://www.afrl.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/4629122...

paxy•30m ago
It may not be designed for recovery. Launch an experiment, take measurements, beam them down and then just..forget about it.
gustavus•36m ago
Here's the thing I might not love Elon or everything he does and there are plenty of things to disagree with him about and I won't comment on him as a person

But I remember watching live when they launched a Tesla into Orbit, was it dumb, was it pointless and potentially wasteful? Sure, but that moment seeing humanity once again reach out to the stars I could feel it deep in my bones the space race was starting again.

Sure have lots of problems down here but the eternally yearning of humanity to extend out our hands to grasp the cosmos, to touch heaven is a pursuit I think highly worthwhile.

jtari3333•33m ago
Elon turning the concept of space into the vanity project of a mentally unstable man child kinda sucks though. Makes it hard to give a shit knowing he is personally profitting from it.
hackyhacky•27m ago
Not just profiting from it, but then reinvesting that money into subverting democracy
_dark_matter_•24m ago
*attempting to subvert democracy. But he may yet succeed.
batperson•21m ago
There's that one photo with a dummy driver in a red tesla and in the background you can see the earth. I think it's one of the best photos ever, part of it is the absurdity of the fact that it exists at all.
aliasxneo
dakial1•33m ago
Here is something that I never imagined there was a use case for. Anyone has any idea of the commercial needs for such a device?
itishappy•27m ago
Material science and manufacturing are two that have always seemed interesting to me, particularly monocrystalline stuff like semiconductors, optics, and metallurgy.
vessenes•27m ago
There's a lot of fundamental science to be done in space; some forms of crystal are much easier to grow, chemical reactions and biological interactions etc. etc. For reference, it wasn't long ago NASA was trying to figure out if spiders could form webs in space.
whalesalad•23m ago
worlds most expensive colocation rack
czhu12•21m ago
Quite a bit of money have been raised on the premise that certain things can be easier to make in space than on earth due to gravity, which creates sedimentation

Semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, solar cell crystals, and artificial organs are on the short list. The International space station actually has done some experiments on this premise with promising results

anukin•19m ago
This is amazing. Especially for biotech. A robot can do biotech in microgravity.
syntaxing•17m ago
Space datacenters sounds dumb and impractical to me. Manufacturing semi conductor in space is actually a pretty interesting idea. I designed a few PVD, CVD, and IBE machines before. Ion thrusters from NASA are what semi conductors use as their source anyway. I can see the business proposition for processes like MBE that requires -12 pressure. It takes days, if not weeks to pump a chamber to those values.
cozzyd•6m ago
It would be nice if SpaceX published GNSS pseudodistance/carrier phase from all Starlink satellites. It would give excellent realtime tomographic information about the ionosphere...
Qworg•5m ago
I wonder where this leaves Varda? Tough to win when your ride is also your competitor.
•
17m ago
We just need someone who can pass the purity test and then we can all celebrate these things. Until then we're not allowed to feel happy about it.

Residential proxies detected on White House network

https://layer3intel.com/blog/residential-proxies-white-house-network
639•Rasbora•5h ago•208 comments

Images 2.6

https://openai.com/index/introducing-images-2-6/
88•davidbarker•2h ago•76 comments

A thousand fewer paths to root

https://openai.com/index/a-thousand-fewer-paths-to-root/
84•dangelosaurus•2h ago•59 comments

Starfall – Affordable, routine access to microgravity

https://www.spacex.com/starfall
53•gmays•1h ago•23 comments

AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-in-cybersecurity-php2shell-vulnerability
1066•pseudolus•13h ago•633 comments

Ripple-65B Preview: U.S. Open-Weight SOTA on Agentic Coding

https://www.ricursive.com/ripple
220•Philpax•6h ago•78 comments

Insects don't swarm at LED lights

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164•speckx•5h ago•93 comments

Kimi K3.1 Pro model weights are out

https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3.1-Pro
372•abrarthought•10h ago•102 comments

A new Go API for JSON

https://go.dev/blog/jsonv2
228•olexsmir•7h ago•95 comments

Hacking the Xbox 360 Hypervisor Part 3: Bad Update Improvements

https://icode4.coffee/?p=1746
61•muricula•3h ago•2 comments

You'll need nerves of steel to work with AI agents

https://orchidfiles.com/youll-need-nerves-of-steel-to-work-with-ai-agents/
19•theorchid•1h ago•10 comments

Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 Ultra – 150W AI Accelerator Card with 128GB at 548GB/s

https://www.qualcomm.com/data-center/products/cloud-ai-100-ultra
100•peter_d_sherman•5h ago•43 comments

Conductor is joining Meta

https://www.conductor.build/announcement
106•kenrose•7h ago•141 comments

Launch HN: Kino AI (YC S23) – AI media manager and video editor

70•lukeigel•8h ago•26 comments

PageScribe: Handwriting and offline dictionary audio for KOReader

https://aspireai.kiranadimatyam.com/builds/pagescribe/
7•seshakiran•2d ago•0 comments

Progress on provable inference for large language models

https://www.anthropic.com/research/provable-inference
174•ltononro•8h ago•84 comments

Show HN: After a decade of reversing, I got co-op working in DOS Wing Commander

https://fireflyk64.github.io/wcmulti/
104•daniel_rh•6h ago•14 comments

Guerrilla bike lanes: San Francisco makes illicit infrastructure permanent (2016)

https://99percentinvisible.org/article/guerrilla-bike-lanes-san-francisco-makes-illicit-infrastru...
257•zenincognito•10h ago•189 comments

Basically no one is using AI agents for their DoorDash orders

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/10/doordash-says-outside-ai-agents-have-only-led-to-hundreds-of-o...
69•PaulHoule•2d ago•116 comments

OpenAI to acquire Pierre Computer Company

https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-pierre/
183•itunpredictable•10h ago•58 comments

Ask HN: What's your current AI agentic setup?

118•eggbrain•11h ago•140 comments

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https://github.com/gauge-sh/gauge-cli
16•0x63_Problems•5h ago•3 comments

Death Comes for XSLT

https://dbushell.com/2026/11/03/xslt-rip/
43•colejohnson66•4h ago•27 comments

Tencent Hy4

https://hy.tencent.ai/research/hy4
183•Philpax•11h ago•61 comments

A wave of plastic-free coffee pods and machines

https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/02/food/coffee-machine-plastic-free
43•thunderbong•10h ago•68 comments

Show HN: The DNA of DOOM – How code structure survives across 44 ports

https://squid-protocol.github.io/gitgalaxy/museum-of-code/doom-dna/
24•joe-esquibel•2d ago•13 comments

Is Curiosity Good for Us?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n20/adam-phillips/is-curiosity-good-for-us
16•NaOH•1d ago•8 comments

AMD expects to outsell Intel in Q4 for the first time in history

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amd-expects-to-outsell-intel-in-q4-for-the-first-...
473•rbanffy•10h ago•174 comments

Have I befriended a murderer?

https://longreads.com/2026/11/03/murder-friendship-doubt/
112•gmays•7h ago•60 comments

'It's just vape, nail, charity shops': Can anything save UK high street?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/nov/04/what-can-save-the-british-high-street-rotherham
59•theanonymousone•9h ago•140 comments