Author: peterjang73

This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

There is a solar-powered revolution going on in the fields of India. By 2026, more than 3 million farmers will be raising irrigation water from beneath their fields using solar-powered pumps. With effectively free water available in almost unlimited quantities to grow their crops, their lives could be transformed. Until the water runs out.

The desert state of Rajasthan is the Indian pioneer and has more solar pumps than any other. Over the past decade, the government has given subsidized solar pumps to almost 100,000 farmers. Those pumps now water more than a million acres and have enabled agricultural water use to increase by more than a quarter. But as a result, water tables are falling rapidly. There is little rain to replace the water being pumped to the surface. In places, the underground rocks are now dry down to 400 feet below ground.

That is the effective extraction limit of the pumps, many of which now lie abandoned. To keep up, in what amounts to a race to the bottom of the diminishing reserves, richer farmers have been buying more powerful solar pumps, leaving the others high and dry or forcing them to buy water from their rich neighbors.

Water wipeout looms. And not just in Rajasthan.

Solar pumps are spreading rapidly among rural communities in many water-starved regions across India, Africa, and elsewhere. These devices can tap underground water all day long at no charge, without government scrutiny.

For now, they can be great news for farmers, with the potential to transform agriculture and improve food security. The pumps can supply water throughout the daylight hours, extending their croplands into deserts, ending their reliance on unpredictable rains, and sometimes replacing existing costly-to-operate diesel or grid-powered pumps.

But this solar-powered hydrological revolution is emptying already-stressed underground water reserves—also known as groundwaters or aquifers. The very success of solar pumps is “threatening the viability of many aquifers already at risk of running dry,” Soumya Balasubramanya, an economist at the World Bank with extensive experience of water policy, warned in January.

An innovation that initially looked capable of reducing fossil-fuel consumption while also helping farmers prosper is rapidly turning into an environmental time bomb.

• Hackers have a potential new way to steal your Tesla.
• Researchers created a fake Tesla WiFi network to steal the owner’s login info and set up a new phone key.
• Teams have previously found other hacking vulnerabilities in the high-tech Teslas.

If you own a Tesla, you might want to be extra careful logging into the WiFi networks at Tesla charging stations.

Security researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry of Mysk Inc. published a YouTube video explaining how easy it can be for hackers to run off with your car using a clever social engineering trick.

Here’s how it works.

Many Tesla charging stations — of which there are over 50,000 in the world — offer a WiFi network typically called "Tesla Guest" that Tesla owners can log into and use while they wait for their car to charge, according to Mysk’s video.

Using a device called a Flipper Zero — a simple $169 hacking tool — the researchers created their own "Tesla Guest" WiFi network. When a victim tries to access the network, they are taken to a fake Tesla login page created by the hackers, who then steal their username, password, and two-factor authentication code directly from the duplicate site.

Although Mysk used a Flipper Zero to set up their own WiFi network, this step of the process can also be done with nearly any wireless device, like a Raspberry Pi, a laptop, or a cell phone, Mysk said in the video.

Once the hackers have stolen the credentials to the owner’s Tesla account, they can use it to log into the real Tesla app, but they have to do it quickly before the 2FA code expires, Mysk explains in the video.

One of Tesla vehicles’ unique features is that owners can use their phones as a digital key to unlock their car without the need for a physical key card.

Once logged in to the app with the owner’s credentials, the researchers set up a new phone key while staying a few feet away from the parked car.

The hackers wouldn’t even need to steal the car right then and there; they could track the Tesla’s location from the app and go steal it later.

Mysk said the unsuspecting Tesla owner isn’t even notified when a new phone key is set up. And, though the Tesla Model 3 owner’s manual says that the physical card is required to set up a new phone key, Mysk found that that wasn’t the case, according to the video.

"This means with a leaked email and password, an owner could lose their Tesla vehicle. This is insane," Tommy Mysk told Gizmodo. "Phishing and social engineering attacks are very common today, especially with the rise of AI technologies, and responsible companies must factor in such risks in their threat models."

When Mysk reported the issue to Tesla, the company responded that it had investigated and decided it wasn’t an issue, Mysk said in the video.

Tesla didn’t respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.

Tommy Mysk said he tested the method out on his own vehicle multiple times and even used a reset iPhone that had never before been paired to the vehicle, Gizmodo reported. Mysk claimed it worked every time.

Mysk said they conducted the experiment for research purposes only and said no one should steal cars (we agree).

At the end of their video, Mysk said the issue could be fixed if Tesla make physical key card authentication mandatory and notified owners when a new phone key is created.

This isn’t the first time savvy researchers have found relatively simple ways to hack into Teslas.

In 2022, a 19-year-old said he hacked into 25 Teslas around the world (though the specific vulnerability has since been fixed); later that year, a security company found another way to hack into Teslas from hundreds of miles away.

In the near century since Robert Goddard, the founder of modern rocketry, fired the first liquid-fuel rocket into the sky, rocket scientists worldwide have favored liquid-fuel engines to power everything from the V-2 missile to the Saturn V moon booster to the Falcon 9 launcher. A liquid rocket motor works by pumping fuel and oxidant into a combustion chamber, where they mix and burn to create hot exhaust gases that expand out the nozzle, propelling the rocket forward.

But all that seems about to change. There’s a new liquid rocket on the launchpad, and it’s definitely not like the rockets of days past. It’s called a rotating detonation engine, or RDE, and those detonations are what make it so different. The fuel in a standard liquid rocket engine doesn’t detonate at all; instead it deflagrates—the technical term for an ignition front that spreads at subsonic speeds, as in piston engines, turbine engines and even candle flames, says Doug Perkins, a detonation propulsion scientist, who has worked at NASA’s Glenn Research Center since the 1990s. When fuel ignites in an RDE, by contrast, it doesn’t “burn” so much as it “bangs,” consumed more completely and near instantaneously via intense compression and heating by a supersonic shockwave. Simply put, rather than burning fuel as in existing powerplants, he says, an RDE explodes it to produce more thrust. Thus an RDE can capture more of the propellant’s energy to power vehicles farther, faster and with larger payloads.

“The power density—the amount of energy release we get within a certain volume—is an order of magnitude higher than today’s devices. And that’s exciting,” says Steve Heister, a Purdue University engineering professor and longtime propulsion researcher. The circa 1,200-degree Celsius combustion that occurs inside an RDE is like “hellfire,” he jests, calling it “the fastest way to eat propellant.”

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The potential benefits of theoretical detonation engines have long been known from the basic thermodynamics of combustion, Perkins says, but for decades most propulsion experts had considered the challenge of controlling the engine cycle’s explosive instabilities too daunting for serious technical development. Today, however, a growing number of aerospace engineers believe the dawn of RDE rocketry is at hand.

“Rocketry has struggled with combustion instability since the very earliest days of liquid rocket engines,” Heister says. “With RDEs, we’re embracing the instability. Let’s make it unstable, but let’s try to control the way it’s unstable.”

During operation, a restless ring of fire runs at the heart of every RDE, with detonation-driven shockwaves whirling in resonance around a high-walled, torus-shaped combustor cavity at constant velocities from Mach 3 up to Mach 6. The expanding gases barber-pole around and out the cylindrical combustion chamber, delivering steady thrust. That racetracklike circulation starts when a pump sprays propellants through perforations in the floor of the annular cavity, and after ignition, the detonation waves can rocket out until the fuel tanks empty. Surprisingly, RDEs have no moving parts. Rather than high-speed fuel injectors, it is the high pressures of the supersonic shockwaves flashing around the precisely engineered circuit that automatically close and open the fuel ports just in time to instantly fuel the next fiery tidal wave that’s sweeping in fast behind.

RDE flight hardware—high-performance, fuel-efficient, compact, affordable rocket motors—will likely first soar aloft by 2030, according to NASA forecasts. In time, RDE applications could range from Mach 5 attack missiles and hypersonic aircraft for the Defense Department to second-stage launchers, deep-space transports, and lunar and Martian landers for NASA, and perhaps even to supersonic transports for the commercial airline industry.

It’s no wonder, then, that significant RDE developments are already appearing. Last year engineers from NASA, Purdue and In Space LLC conducted a series of ground tests of a full-scale RDE rocket at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center that, with the help of a cooling system, produced 5,800 pounds of thrust for 251 seconds, says NASA combustion devices engineer Thomas Teasley, who leads the NASA effort. For perspective, most RDE test firings last one or two seconds.

NASA is pursuing RDE rockets as powerplants for planetary landers and interplanetary spacecraft, where their high performance and compact sizes could allow design efficiencies that benefit other mission areas, Teasley says. “For a typical lander engine, we’re talking a combustor that’s a foot, foot-and-a-half long,” he explains. “With RDEs, that’s down to a couple of inches.”

Also last year GE Aerospace, one of the world’s biggest jet engine builders, sent supersonic air through a subscale lab rig that combined a Mach 2.5-class turbofan with a rotating detonation-enabled “dual-mode ramjet” thought to be capable of Mach 5 velocities. The RDE would supply the Mach 3 speeds needed to start up the ramjet in flight, velocities turbines have difficulty reaching. Joseph Vinciquerra, senior director of aerospace research at GE Aerospace, told FlightGlobal that the engine is “platform agnostic,” meaning that it could someday power missiles, aircraft or even spaceplanes bound for orbit.

Under a U.S. Department of Energy program, researchers at Purdue and Argonne National Laboratory developed a hydrogen-air RDE with innovative nozzle guide vanes for gas turbine power generation. Their plans call for retrofitting a Rolls-Royce turbine with an RDE this year.

And last fall the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) selected RTX, another big aerospace group, to develop a next-gen missile called Gambit, with RTX’s Pratt & Whitney Military Engines unit developing the air-breathing RDE unit that’s to power it. “RDE is a disruptive, game-changing technology,” says Pratt & Whitney’s Military Engines president Jill Albertelli, a veteran aerospace engineer who has a team of 50 people working on the project. “The RDE has attributes that make for a pretty great missile. It has clear potential to provide high-performance, high-efficiency, long-range propulsion in a compact, cost-effective package.”

Yet despite so many fresh advances, Perkins stresses that the RDE field is still in its experimental stage: “any combustion is an unsteady process” that includes instabilities, turbulence and nonlinear behaviors, so gaining greater insight into the underlying physical and chemical forces that prevail under such extreme conditions is critical. Beyond “getting the fuel mixture just right,” many of the current and hoped-for innovations boil down to better understanding the chemical kinetics, the fluid dynamics and thermoacoustics of RDE combustors, which are said to ring like bells during firing. For instance, innovations should derive from enhanced laser diagnostics and optical techniques to map at smaller scales the convoluted flow fields that form as the submicron-thick leading edges of supersonic shockwaves shear through fuel mixtures. Making such exacting measurements of velocity, pressure, density, temperature and chemical species through fireproof quartz viewing windows in laboratory combustion chambers can provide the real-world observations needed to validate the complex computer simulations that help guide research and development.

One development that’s accelerated the critical experimental “build-and-burn” series testing and redesign that powers RDE progress in recent decades has been the arrival of more affordable ultra-high-speed cameras that can visualize events that occur at a hundredth of a microsecond, says Jiro Kasahara, the Nagoya University propulsion researcher who led the team that first operated an RDE in space. More recently NASA Marshall’s development of stronger heat-resistant metal alloys and its innovative use of laser 3D-printing systems has also helped drive progress by enabling high-performance test hardware to be built more quickly and at lower cost than by previous methods.

Pratt & Whitney, which is building on the two decades of detonation engine research it conducted in collaboration with the pioneering propulsion research groups at the Air Force Research Laboratory, is closing in on a fieldable RDE rocket motor. The latest ground tests of a prototype RDE motor “look really good,” Albertelli says. “The results are validating the model architecture that our team has developed during five years of theory and analysis of the needed speeds, flows and pressures.” The next step is to integrate the motor into a vehicle airframe and start ground testing.

Even though the theoretical concepts have been around for nearly 90 years, RDEs are still in their early days. “We really don’t know what an optimized RDE even would look like yet,” NASA’s Perkins says. “I can count the people with significant expertise in this area on 10 fingers.” Nevertheless, rising excitement is spurring RDE startup launches. Alexis Harroun, one of Steve Heister’s recent Purdue graduate students, just founded an RDE startup, Juno Propulsion, with help from an NSF small-business-incubator program. “We just hired our first employee,” she says.

Meanwhile four-year-old, Houston-based Venus Aerospace is busy testing RDE rockets that produce 4,000 pounds of thrust and more, says CTO and co-founder Andrew Duggleby. The company’s 100 employees aim to fly a Mach 5 drone powered by their RDE design to provide hypersonic-flight-testing services to defense contractors. Venus’ RDE rocket augments its burn by drawing in outside air into the combustor while adding extra fuel to the mix, creating a sort of supercharged afterburner effect that boosts speeds sufficiently to start up a ramjet stage.

In January Venus and NASA Marshall announced they had partnered on a cooled RDE rocket featuring a company-designed injector that operated for four minutes of hot-fire testing. “We’ll build a combustor design out of copper, which costs $20,000 and lasts for two seconds,” Duggleby says. “Then we iterate, iterate, iterate. And when we find a design we love, we’ll 3D-print it from NASA’s refractory alloys with integral cooling channels and test it at higher thrusts and for longer durations.”

As global interest in RDE takes off, aerospace engineering labs in the U.S., Japan, China, Europe and elsewhere comprise an emerging international R&D community, though it’s one that includes a large classified component. In any case, nearly 80 research papers on detonation propulsion were presented at January’s SciTech Forum of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Orlando, Fla. Who knows? Maybe rocketry’s next Goddard was there.