The battle of space seeking billionaires took an unexpected turn today when Jeff Bezos announced, on twitter, that his Blue Origin spaceflight company successfully landed a spent rocket back on earth. In case you hadn’t heard, that’s what Elon Musk’s been trying, and failing at, for a while now. The rocket launched from a facility in West Texas, flew a suborbital mission up to an altitude of 330 thousand feet, then made a flawless return to earth touching down a mere 4 feet from where it took off. Pretty amazing stuff.
Always the gentleman, Musk jumped on twitter to congratulate Bezos on his accomplishment… but what’s almost overlooked in this story is that this was Jeff Bezos’ first tweet! That’s easily the all time champ for best first tweet. What’d you do today, eh nothing just landed a rocket back on earth… maybe I should tweet about it. Yeah, no one’s topping that!
You’ve all seen cheap plastic Nerf dart guns, we’ve got dozens of these things floating around the DT offices and they’re pretty harmless. This on the other hand is the PM522 Washbear, a 3D-printed pepperbox revolver. It’s the world’s first repeating firearm printed on a consumer 3D printer, and it can fire off 8 rounds before needing a reload. Since some previous 3D printed firearms have been banned, designer James Patrick added in some steel rods so the firearm will comply with gun regulations. As of right now the blueprints for the gun are still available online, but Nerf… well they may have something to say about this as well.
