PicoCool

"Five years ago, Aptera‘s founder Steve Fambro endeavored to design and build a passenger vehicle that was safe, comfortable, and more fuel-efficient than anything ever produced. This aspiration, combined with his background in engineering, led him to an intensive study of aerodynamics, and composite aircraft construction. He hypothesized that a low-drag, aerodynamic body shape could be achieved without sacrificing comfort, drivability or safety. What emerged, after much designing, conceptualizing, and constructing, was a prototype two-seat, three-wheeled vehicle. This first operating prototype achieved a stunning 230 miles per gallon. Building on this success, Steve expanded his Aptera team and created the Aptera Typ-1, which has been re-designed, re-engineered, and refined into a production ready vehicle.” The Aptera is available with a pre-order reservation for $500 if you live in California. The vehicle costs $26,900. [via missrogue on Twitter]

Network: twitter

Photo by Steve Jurvetson, Creative Commons 2.0

I never know what’s going to turn up in my Flickr stream given the range of people I follow. Tonight it was this photograph of a XPRS rocket launching in the Black Rock desert taken and made by Steve Jurvetson, an engineer and Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The rockets have computers onboard that deploy the parachutes and record data (and a host of other functions I assume). Images are captured from various angles using remote tripods. There’s one in the foreground of the photo above. Be sure to check out this page and watch the videos as the rocket shoots up and returns back to the ground. For more rocket goodness, see his entire set which include some incredible night photos too.

Network: flickr