Author: John Lindner

  • They caught a Starship!

    After 7 years, 42 ships, and 22 boosters, hard work and persistent iterative development succeeded today in recovering a Starship from orbit, catching it falling from the sky, a moment many of us have long dreamed of. Toward full and rapid reusability, which promises to revolutionize rocketry, booster stages have previously been landed or caught…

  • Powered Gravity Assist

    Last weekend the twin ESCAPADE spacecraft (Blue and Gold) performed powered flybys of Earth, combining a gravitational “slingshot” and the Oberth effect to accelerate their journeys to Mars. (The former name is a science popularization that evokes using a sling to whip a stone in a tight curve before releasing it along a fast tangent,…

  • 3D Ein Stein

    In yet another recent exciting advance in mathematical tiling, last month Ioannis Tsiokos and the reasoning model GPT-6 Astra announced the discovery of a 3D aperiodic mono tile, an ein stein (or “one-stone”), a single shape that forces a non-periodic tiling of space, and reported formal verification by the Lean 4 theorem-prover software. Independently Felix Flicker and Chaim Goodman-Strauss soon simplified and elucidated the result. The shape is…

  • Hyperball Volumes

    The way a ball’s volume varies with dimension is both fascinating and practically important (in statistical physics, data science, and elsewhere). In particular, the ratio of its volume to that of the circumscribing hypercube decreases monotonically to zero! Here I offer an accessible derivation.

  • Orbital Starship

    Up early this morning to watch Starship flight 14. Eighteen years to the day since SpaceX‘s Falcon first achieved orbit, today so did Starship, and it deployed 26 large third-generation Starlink satellites. Superheavy Starship is the world’s largest launch vehicle, by far, and is designed to be completely reusable. Much work remains to perfect it,…

  • Navier-Stokes Singularity

    Yesterday, OpenAI announced the solution to the Millennium-Prize Navier-Stokes problem: an initially smooth fluid can develop a singularity in finite time. More precisely, in a fluid modeled by the Navier-Stokes equations (Newton’s second law for incompressible fluids), from zero initial speeds a smoothly varying localized force can create a vortex that combines inward spiraling with…

  • Roman vs. Hubble

    Up early this morning for the successful launch and deployment of the Roman Space Telescope, whose development I have followed for 15 years. Considered a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, Roman’s 2.4-meter primary mirror is the same size as Hubble’s but is shaped differently, and its shorter focal length provides a much larger field-of-view.…

  • First Photo From Mars

    50 years ago was summer 1976, post Apollo, but pre-Space Shuttle. On July 20th, the seventh anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, the Viking 1 spacecraft made the first successful landing on Mars. (5 years earlier, the Mars 3 spacecraft ceased communicating just 110 seconds after landing.) My family owned and operated a small…

  • Constructing Pentagons

    A highlight of Euclid’s Elements is the exact construction of a regular pentagon using a straight edge and a compass. But I’ve noticed recently that some of the pentagon constructions on YouTube are merely approximations – and are not advertised or understood as such. Furthermore, many of these constructions require non-collapsible compasses, which can “carry”…

  • Negative Resistance

    I recently coauthored an article in the International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos that reports efficiently performing logic with a simple nonlinear electronic device that exhibits negative resistance, something I had previously theorized. At the heart of the device is a single p-n junction, which is formed by a silicon semiconductor crystal doped with impurity…