Hey @peard33 @WIRED - free tip for you Yesterday the Anduril team in Mississippi achieved a successful test of our Denali rocket motor, the same rocket that exploded *on that exact test stand* 38 days ago. In the ~5 weeks since the rapid unscheduled disassembly, the Anduril team diagnosed the failure, rebuilt and re-instrumented the test stand (including some backlogged improvements), meticulously studied and inspected the new motor, and prepped for this test. A true all-hands-on-deck effort culminating in success. This is the same exact test stand that Wired, quoting anonymous sources, said “could take up to a couple of months” to rebuild the “knocked out” test stand and “could disrupt a key part of the defense company’s rocket motor business.” Not so much. I look forward to your detailed reporting on the successful test. As I discussed 35-ish days ago, doing hard things is actually hard, and rocket science is definitely hard. It’s easy to cite anonymous sources, usually former disgruntled employees, to throw shade and write critical headlines when tests go wrong. Well, yesterday it went right. The credit belongs to the [team] who is actually in the arena, and for all the Andurilians who sprinted: thanks, and great work. I hope you enjoy some celebratory chicken wings this week down in McHenry. Onward.

The funny thing is that ModRetro actually gets a lot of sales from hysterical articles like this. Most gamers are supportive of the military and smart enough to know that serious labels like "war criminal" should not be diluted into a casual insult. The fringe that feels otherwise aren't the people buying open-source FPGA consoles, we gain so many more customers than we lose from these outrage farms.

Catching skin cancer early is a home robotics problem. Melanoma is highly treatable when detected early, yet today’s screening process depends heavily on patients noticing tiny changes across their entire skin surface. This requires patients to solve a near-impossible visual-memory and registration problem. I built OpenDerm, an open-source 4-DOF robot that captures high-resolution images of the skin and uses them to reconstruct and track the skin surface in 3D over time. The best way to make skin screening truly routine is to bring it into the home. OpenDerm shows that inexpensive robotic skin imaging is possible, but the path to scale is not a dedicated screening robot in every household—it is to make skin screening one of the many useful things a general-purpose home robot can do. Read more about why I built OpenDerm and how it works here: Blog: Project:

Anduril hasn’t released much in the way of specs, but it can carry four 19-tube M261 rocket pods loaded with a whopping 76 AGR-20s (anti-drone air-to-air missiles). By my math, that means the primary payload bay has to be good for at least 2,760 pounds. That’s a lotta heat.

New test footage: first missile shot from YFQ-44A. YFQ-44A executed an end-to-end, beyond-line-of-sight strike against a simulated target. The test, executed out of @EdwardsAFB, represents an important step in turning CCA into an operational capability.