Joined the Charge at ⚡️Base Power ⚡️
Austin, TX
Joined March 2009
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Rob Figueiredo retweeted
The idea that @Alphaschool students don't read books is just anti-AI propoganda.
I lead @alpha_founders, one of the Alpha high schools.
We have a dedicated 30 minute block after lunch each day to read books, and students finish one every ~2 weeks for a group discussion or workshop.
Last one was Meditations, current one is Never Split the Difference. There's plenty of reading.
What some people get confused is that we do use apps which deliberately push a student's reading level through carefully structured passages, since those allow us to be highly tactical in advancing their reading level in a way normal reading cannot do.
But then we ALSO have normal reading. It's not either or.
Waaaooooowwwww
Fusion still can't power a single home after 70 years of trying. A fusion rocket turns out to be a far easier machine to build. One just lit up in the UK.
The reason rockets are easier is the best part of this story.
Power plants have to hit breakeven. The reaction must put out more energy than you pump in, then you convert that heat to electricity at maybe 40% efficiency, then you compete with natural gas at around 4 cents a kilowatt hour. Nobody has cleared that bar commercially.
Rockets skip all of it. You don't need net energy. You need exhaust velocity. The best chemical engines ever built push exhaust at about 4.4 km/s, and that number has barely moved since the Saturn V. Fusion exhaust is projected at 25x that or more. Even a reactor losing energy overall can accelerate particles to speeds no chemical reaction will ever touch.
And space solves fusion's two most expensive problems for free. On Earth you spend a fortune building and maintaining a vacuum chamber. In orbit, the vacuum is the neighborhood. The cold helps the superconducting magnets too.
Pulsar's Sunbird design leans into all of this. Deuterium and helium-3 fusion spits out charged particles, which means you can steer the reaction products straight out the back with magnetic fields and get thrust directly. The reactor IS the engine.
One thing worth being clear on. No fusion happened in this test. They lit krypton plasma in the exhaust section to prove the confinement architecture holds, with the fusion core and an orbital demo targeted for 2027.
But the destination math is why anyone should care. Mars in roughly 150 days instead of nine months. Pluto in 4 years when New Horizons needed 9.5. And Sunbirds never launch from Earth at all. They park in orbit like tugboats, dock with passing spacecraft, and hand them off to physics at 329,000 mph.
Rob Figueiredo retweeted
Fusion still can't power a single home after 70 years of trying. A fusion rocket turns out to be a far easier machine to build. One just lit up in the UK.
The reason rockets are easier is the best part of this story.
Power plants have to hit breakeven. The reaction must put out more energy than you pump in, then you convert that heat to electricity at maybe 40% efficiency, then you compete with natural gas at around 4 cents a kilowatt hour. Nobody has cleared that bar commercially.
Rockets skip all of it. You don't need net energy. You need exhaust velocity. The best chemical engines ever built push exhaust at about 4.4 km/s, and that number has barely moved since the Saturn V. Fusion exhaust is projected at 25x that or more. Even a reactor losing energy overall can accelerate particles to speeds no chemical reaction will ever touch.
And space solves fusion's two most expensive problems for free. On Earth you spend a fortune building and maintaining a vacuum chamber. In orbit, the vacuum is the neighborhood. The cold helps the superconducting magnets too.
Pulsar's Sunbird design leans into all of this. Deuterium and helium-3 fusion spits out charged particles, which means you can steer the reaction products straight out the back with magnetic fields and get thrust directly. The reactor IS the engine.
One thing worth being clear on. No fusion happened in this test. They lit krypton plasma in the exhaust section to prove the confinement architecture holds, with the fusion core and an orbital demo targeted for 2027.
But the destination math is why anyone should care. Mars in roughly 150 days instead of nine months. Pluto in 4 years when New Horizons needed 9.5. And Sunbirds never launch from Earth at all. They park in orbit like tugboats, dock with passing spacecraft, and hand them off to physics at 329,000 mph.
Pulsar Fusion has achieved first plasma in its Sunbird fusion rocket exhaust system at its Bletchley facility in the UK.
The milestone marks a key step toward developing its planned fusion propulsion technology.
Sunbird aims to enable much faster travel through deep space than conventional rocket propulsion.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Pulsar reported first plasma (krypton, no fusion) in March 2026 ground exhaust test. Video is CGI, not the actual brief lab footage.
globenewswire.com/news-release/2…
rottenwifi.com/pulsar-fusion-…
youtu.be/YTEr_UmiaYI
Rob Figueiredo retweeted
The statue of Prometheus is finally finished.
It was cast in Paris, crossed the Atlantic, and was assembled at Starbase. It took us 100 days to go from nothing to this.
People of the West, we have lived through an era devoid of dreams, devoid of destiny.
But the time has come to reclaim our dream of antiquity.
In a few months, we will start building a new city. It will be the most magnificent city in all of history.
After all, the great dream of the West has always been to rebuild Rome.
Come walk beside us in this endeavor. The world is waiting.
Wowowow
Today, Pioneer Labs is announcing our first step towards terraforming Mars. 🚀🌼
With equipment that fits in just a single rocket launch, we can convert Martian dirt, water, and air into enough building materials to construct a small city on Mars.
To do it, we made the first microbe for Mars. We found the best microbe on Earth and used evolution to teach it how to source all of its nutrients directly from Martian materials.
The first astronauts will be greeted with safe shelter already filled with water, oxygen, and rocket fuel for the return journey.
This is the first step toward using biology to make Mars a friendly place for life. It lets us live off the land and helps us build the next great frontier.
It's the first of five organisms we need to green Mars ⬇️
Rob Figueiredo retweeted
Tech bros need to remember that they exist within a nation that has a people, not a blank economic zone
Middle class America needs to remember that national strength comes from economic and technological strength
This is a careful synthesis between these that we must strike
Rob Figueiredo retweeted
Had the pleasure of spending time with @CJHandmer in Burbank last month
I believe Terraform is among the most important companies being built in the world today
Read about The Rockefeller of solar...
rationaloptimistsociety.subs…
Rob Figueiredo retweeted
I don't think people understand how big of a deal this is yet.
The team @RadiantNuclear has built a product that is a nuclear reactor, where historically reactor companies build buildings.
Historic.
My 7yo and I are loving “On the Shores of the Great Sea” from @ChHouseBooks
Wonderful few-page stories introduce the history of western civ from 2000 BC to Caesar and Christ.
Perfect follow up to Greek Myths and Bible stories, to place everything on a map and in time.
He demands at least 3 chapters each night. Not being a history guru, I was keen to read it too.
Highly recommended
Expectations were on the floor, but this coffee flavored protein ice cream is… really tasty. Recommended.
😍
The first three of our flight one engines are designed, built, and ready for testing. ✅
Stage 1 Zenith engines ZE14, 15, and 16 are ready to ship from our shop floor in Kent, WA to Moses Lake for hot fire acceptance testing.
Getting our Zenith engines through qualification testing is no small feat, and trusted vendors like Performance Sealing Inc. - who can iterate at industry-leading speeds - are key to keeping our work on time and on track.🙏🙌
ALT Zenith Engines
Co sign
there are a truly gargantuan number of things code cannot achieve, most notably it is almost completely incapable of solving any task involving the coordination of human institutions towards particular ends. in fact I would venture further and say that software as a tool has made problems of human organization legibly worse across every category.
Rob Figueiredo retweeted
A few very obvious points on Mamdani's grocery stores:
1. The supply of the discounted groceries will run out on day 1, and every day there is a new shipment. This is basic econ 101.
2. This means only the people who are lucky enough or fast enough will get these discounted groceries. Expect to see the city ration these groceries in some other way. By income, or neighborhood or some lottery system.
3. Grocery margins are notoriously low as it is (like 2-3%). These stores will lose a bunch of money selling 30% below market, or they'll sell so little it will be insignificant.
4. There is absolutely zero chance that government bureaucrats can source these products from global supply chains as efficiently as Walmart, or Meier, or Whole Foods, whose survival depends on it. Their costs will be far higher (unless they use government bludgeon to force distributors to sell to them at lower prices).
5. It's actually an incredible triumph of capitalism that you can get a pound of bananas that were shipped to your neighborhood from Equador for like 60 cents, or fresh grapes from Chile in the dead of Midwestern winter for 2 bucks a pound, and Norwegian salmon to cook in Italian olive oil for $15 -20 bucks or so. Truly stop and think about that for a minute. It's a miracle.
The median full time hourly wage is around $31 dollars. For ONE HOUR of work, the median working American can get all of the groceries listed below, which is about 22,000 calories. They can feed themselves for 10 days (or a family of 4 for around 2 and a half days), with an hour of labor.
This is the stupidest industry for socialists to go after.
