Polymatt NASA Heat Shield Recreation Crack
Chunks of Orion’s Avcoat came off Artemis I after splashdown, and the scare was real enough that a crewed flight sat in the hangar while investigators spent two years on the cause. Reentry heat itself was not the surprise. Skip entry was. Orion dipped, lifted, then came back in so the peak load would be gentler. That quieter stretch of heating left the outer char less open than a hard, continuous burn. Pyrolysis gases had nowhere to go, pressure rose inside the char, and pieces of the shield broke free. Ground tests that only hammered the material with a short, fierce pulse never showed it.

Travis Pastrana McMurtry Speirling Test Drive
Photo credit: McMurtry
Travis Pastrana has jumped from a plane with no parachute, landed the first double backflip on a motorcycle, collected 11 X Games gold medals, and raced the Daytona 500. On a day at Dunsfold Aerodrome in England, the same airfield used as the old Top Gear test track, he still found something that reset his scale. He climbed into a McMurtry Spéirling prototype and later said he had gone faster than in any vehicle of his life.

Unitree G1 UnifoLM-X2 Autonomous Human Robot Combat
Hangzhou’s Unitree Robotics posted a clip last week that looks familiar until you watch who is missing. A G1 humanoid in red boxing gloves squares off against a padded human trainer inside a ring. Stance changes, slips, straight punches, and body kicks arrive on their own. Unitree calls the software UnifoLM-X2-1.0 and labels the demo the first real-time world-model-driven fully autonomous humanoid combat. No VR headset operator appears, and no gamepad rests just off frame.