Popular Mechanics

pg28 → At long last, a cover story about how living on Mars is more reality than dream. Thank you, SpaceX. Even in 2016, when I first visited the remote Brownsville, Texas, beach where SpaceX planned to build a spaceport, the company’s ambition of developing a rocket and lander to colonize Mars seemed far-fetched. Now its massive Starship lander and booster is on track to nail its first orbital launch from Starbase this year—and become the most powerful rocket ever flown. Starship is the most likely vehicle to land people on Mars. Even if a crewed NASA mission comes first—which could involve Starship, as is the case with the Artemis moonshot—SpaceX has laid out the clearest plans yet for a Martian mission. As its massive lander goes, so does humanity’s quest to become…

pg38 → Everyone agrees the aviation industry needs to reduce its carbon footprint ASAP, yet no one can agree on the best replacement for conventional (and carbon-intensive) aviation gas. Will it be batteries, hydrogen, or biofuels? These new technologies will unlock a variety of new form factors for both small- and large-scale passenger aircraft. As Gregory Davis, the CEO of Eviation told me, their all-electric airplane, Alice, looks different from conventional commuter planes because “the entire aircraft was designed around the batteries.” Alice’s fuselage is lined with battery packs, and the aircraft’s structure was optimized around the power source. The same is true for other alternative power sources such as hydrogen and biofuel. Emile Greenhalgh, a materials scientist at Imperial College London, showed me a mock-up he had commissioned of a hybrid-electric boxwing…

pg72 → I was just 17 years old when I brought $950 to a Target parking lot in Brentwood, New York, one of long Island’s sketchiest neighborhoods and a hotbed for gang activity. An hour earlier, I had tried the PlayStation VR headset at a Best Buy, demoing the Star Wars Battlefront X-Wing experience. This was my gateway into high-fidelity VR; I’ll never forget my first time hopping behind the cockpit and feeling my stomach dip as I barrel-rolled across space. I knew immediately that I had to buy a system. Unfortunately, they were sold out, so I headed to the platform of deals gone wrong: Craigslist. Armed with a fat stack of cash, I was greeted by a chunky scalper in his mid-40s. As he carefully counted my money, I marveled…

pg44 → I’m a natural skeptic. Before I started reporting on Lue Elizondo, I was pretty dubious of the idea of UFOs and UAPs. But after talking at great length to not only Elizondo but also a number of military servicemen and women who saw unexplainable things while on the job, I’m far more inclined to believe there’s something to these sightings. It’s the depth and specificity of the stories that highly credible people told me. Not just people who saw something funny in the night sky, but military pilots who witnessed objects up close, in the course of their duties, and their observations were backed up by sophisticated radar and other technology.…

pg24 → ChatGPT wasn’t really what I would call uncharted territory for someone like myself. However, after spending some time with it, I realized the AI chatbot can actually be quite useful—when used in the right way, for the right job. For instance, instead of asking it how to plan an entire dinner party, I merely requested a “new” Negroni spin-off to check the box on cocktails. And it gave me surprisingly solid results. → 1 oz gin→ 1 oz Campari→ 1 oz dry vermouth→ ½ oz pineapple juice→ ½ oz lime juice→ ½ oz honey syrup (equal parts water and honey)→ Dash of orange bitters The only real misstep was that it wanted me to shake the Negroni before serving, when it’s normally just built in the glass and stirred. That being said,…

JACKIE APPEL Associate News Editor Professional question-asker. I’M AN EXPERT IN… Being curious, as cheesy as that may sound. I know a little about a lot, and thanks to my job, I get to talk to experts all the time to learn more. EAR GEAR I just got a set of Bose QuietComfort 45 headphones—they’re incredible for noise cancellation on flights. And I never go anywhere without my second-generation Apple AirPods. I prefer the regular version over the Pro. Even though they're a bit out of date, they're more comfortable, IMO. A Hack So Simple, It’s Brilliant If you have a top-load washer, get laundry detergent with a dispenser tap and store it above the machine. That way, you can just pull it forward and dispense it right into your laundry. Silly tip? Sure. But it makes me…