How To Sink A Ship: Preparing The SS United States For Its Final Journey

August 19, 2025 by Tom Nardi 82 Comments

When we last brought you word of the SS United States, the future of the storied vessel was unclear. Since 1996, the 990 foot (302 meter) ship — the largest ocean liner ever to be constructed in the United States — had been wasting away at Pier 82 in Philadelphia. While the SS United States Conservancy was formed in 2009 to support the ship financially and attempt to redevelop it into a tourist attraction, their limited funding meant little could be done to restore or even maintain it. In January of 2024, frustrated by the lack of progress, the owners of the pier took the Conservancy to court and began the process of evicting the once-great liner.

SS *United States* docked at Pier 82 in Philadelphia

It was hoped that a last-minute investor might appear, allowing the Conservancy to move the ship to a new home. But unfortunately, the only offer that came in wasn’t quite what fans of the vessel had in mind: Florida’s Okaloosa County offered $1 million to purchase the ship so they could sink it and turn it into the world’s largest artificial reef.

The Conservancy originally considered it a contingency offer, stating that they would only accept it if no other options to save the ship presented themselves. But by October of 2024, with time running out, they accepted Okaloosa’s offer as a more preferable fate for the United States than being scrapped.

It at least means the ship will remain intact — acting not only as an important refuge for aquatic life, but as a destination for recreational divers for decades to come. The Conservancy has also announced plans to open a museum in Okaloosa, where artifacts from the ship will be on display.

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Get Your Tickets For Supercon 2025 Now!

August 5, 2025 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

The wait is over — once this post hits the front page, ticket sales for the 2025 Hackaday Supercon will officially be live!

As is tradition, we’ve reserved 100 tickets priced at $148 (plus fees) for what we like to call the True-Believers. Those are the folks that are willing to sign up even without knowing who will be speaking or what this year’s badge looks like. Once those are sold out, the regular admission tickets will cost $296 (plus fees). We might be slightly biased, but even at full price, we like to think Supercon is a screaming deal.

Those who join us in Pasadena, California from October 31st through November 2nd can look forward to a weekend of talks, workshops, demos, and badge hacking. But what’s more, you’ll experience the unique sense of camaraderie that’s produced when you pack hundreds of hardware hackers into an alleyway and ply them with as much caffeine as they can handle. Some treat it like a normal hacker con, others as a social experiment, but nobody thinks of it as anything less than a fantastic time.

We’re still working closely with our friends at Supplyframe, DigiKey, and Framework to put together a full itinerary for Supercon 2025, so stay tuned over the coming weeks as things are finalized. But in the meantime, we’ve got a couple new additions this year that we’re pretty excited about.

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Hands On: The Hacker Pager

July 31, 2025 by Tom Nardi 27 Comments

It should come as no surprise that the hacker community has embraced the Meshtastic project. It’s got a little bit of everything we hold dear: high quality open source software, fantastic documentation, a roll-your-own hardware ethos, and just a dash of counterculture. An off-grid communications network cobbled together from cheap parts, some of which being strategically hidden within the urban sprawl by rogue operators, certainly sounds like the sort of thing you’d read about it in a William Gibson novel.

But while the DIY nature of Meshtastic is one of its most endearing features for folks like us, it can also be seen as one of its weak spots. Right now, the guidance for those looking to get started is to pick a compatible microcontroller development board, 3D print a case for it, screw on an antenna from AliExpress, flash your creation with the latest firmware, and then spend some quality time with the documentation and configuration tools to actually get it on the air. No great challenge for the average Hackaday reader, but a big ask for the weekend adventurer that’s just looking for a way to keep in touch with their friends while camping.

Quality hardware that offers a turn-key experience will be critical to elevating Meshtastic from a hobbyist’s pastime to something that could actually be fielded for applications such as search and rescue. Plus, let’s be honest, even those of us who like to put together our own gadgets can appreciate a more consumer-oriented piece of hardware from time to time. Especially if that hardware happens to be open source and designed to empower the user rather than hold them back.

Enter the Hacker Pager from exploitee.rs. As the name implies, it’s still very much a device intended for hackers — a piece of hardware designed for the halls of DEF CON rather than trekking through the wilderness. But it’s also an important step towards a new generation of Meshtastic hardware that meets the high standard of quality set by the software itself.

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Supersonic Flight May Finally Return To US Skies

July 24, 2025 by Tom Nardi 52 Comments

After World War II, as early supersonic military aircraft were pushing the boundaries of flight, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that commercial aircraft would eventually fly faster than sound as the technology became better understood and more affordable. Indeed, by the 1960s the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union all had plans to develop commercial transport aircraft capable flight beyond Mach 1 in various stages of development.

Yet today, the few examples of supersonic transport (SST) planes that actually ended up being built are in museums, and flight above Mach 1 is essentially the sole domain of the military. There’s an argument to be made that it’s one of the few areas of technological advancement where the state-of-the-art not only stopped moving forward, but actually slid backwards.

But that might finally be changing, at least in the United States. Both NASA and the private sector have been working towards a new generation of supersonic aircraft that address the key issues that plagued their predecessors, and a recent push by the White House aims to undo the regulatory roadblocks that have been on the books for more than fifty years.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 329: AI Surgery, A Prison Camp Lathe, And A One Hertz Four-Fer

July 18, 2025 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they talk about their favorite hacks and stories from the previous week. They’ll start things off with a small Supercon update, and go right into fusion reactors, AI surgeons, planned obsolescence, and robotic cats and dogs. They’ll also go over several entries from the ongoing 2025 One Hertz Challenge, an ambitious flight simulator restoration project, old school lightning detectors, and how Blu-ray won the battle against HD DVD but lost the war against streaming. Stick around to the end to hear an incredible story about a clandestine machine shop in a WWII prisoner of war camp, and the valiant fight to restore communications with the Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download in DRM-free MP3 and add it to your collection.

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The Apollo–Soyuz Legacy Lives On, Fifty Years Later

July 17, 2025 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

On this date in 1975, a Soviet and an American shook hands. Even for the time period, this wouldn’t have been a big deal if it wasn’t for the fact that it happened approximately 220 kilometers (136 miles) over the surface of the Earth.

Although their spacecraft actually launched a few days earlier on the 15th, today marks 50 years since American astronauts Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand, and Donald “Deke” Slayton docked their Apollo spacecraft to a specifically modified Soyuz crewed by Cosmonauts Alexei Leonov and Valery Kubasov. The two craft were connected for nearly two days, during which time the combined crew was able to freely move between them. The conducted scientific experiments, exchanged flags, and ate shared meals together.

Politically, this very public display of goodwill between the Soviet Union and the United States helped ease geopolitical tensions. On a technical level, it not only demonstrated a number of firsts, but marked a new era of international cooperation in space. While the Space Race saw the two counties approach spaceflight as a competition, from this point on, it would largely be treated as a collaborative endeavour.

The Apollo–Soyuz Test Project lead directly to the Shuttle–Mir missions of the 1990s, which in turn was a stepping stone towards the International Space Station. Not just because that handshake back in 1975 helped establish a spirit of cooperation between the two space-fairing nations, but because it introduced a piece of equipment that’s still being used five decades later — the Androgynous Peripheral Attach System (APAS) docking system.

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The Fight To Save Lunar Trailblazer

July 15, 2025 by Tom Nardi 42 Comments

After the fire and fury of liftoff, when a spacecraft is sailing silently through space, you could be forgiven for thinking the hard part of the mission is over. After all, riding what’s essentially a domesticated explosion up and out of Earth’s gravity well very nearly pushes physics and current material science to the breaking point.

But in reality, getting into space is just the first on a long list of nearly impossible things that need to go right for a successful mission. While scientific experiments performed aboard the International Space Station and other crewed vehicles have the benefit of human supervision, the vast majority of satellites, probes, and rovers must be able to operate in total isolation. With nobody nearby to flick the power switch off and on again, such craft need to be designed with multiple layers of redundant systems and safe modes if they’re to have any hope of surviving even the most mundane system failure.

That said, nobody can predict the future. Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, there will always be edge cases or abnormal scenarios that don’t get accounted for. With proper planning and a pinch of luck, the majority of missions are able to skirt these scenarios and complete their missions without serious incident.

Unfortunately, Lunar Trailblazer isn’t one of those missions. Things started well enough — the February 26th launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 went perfectly, and the rocket’s second stage gave the vehicle the push it needed to reach the Moon. The small 210 kg (460 lb) lunar probe then separated from the booster and transmitted an initial status message that was received by the Caltech mission controllers in Pasadena, California which indicated it was free-flying and powering up its systems.

But since then, nothing has gone to plan.

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