There’s little about building spacecraft that anyone would call simple. But there’s at least one element of designing a vehicle that will operate outside the Earth’s atmosphere that’s fairly easier to handle: aerodynamics. That’s because, at the altitude that most satellites operate at, drag can essentially be ignored. Which is why most satellites look like refrigerators with solar panels and high-gain antennas attached jutting out at odd angles.
But for all the advantages that the lack of meaningful drag on a vehicle has, there’s at least one big potential downside. If a spacecraft is orbiting high enough over the Earth that the impact of atmospheric drag is negligible, then the only way that vehicle is coming back down in a reasonable amount of time is if it has the means to reduce its own velocity. Otherwise, it could be stuck in orbit for decades. At a high enough orbit, it could essentially stay up forever.
Launched in 1958, Vanguard 1 is expected to remain in orbit until at least 2198
There was a time when that kind of thing wasn’t a problem. It was just enough to get into space in the first place, and little thought was given to what was going to happen in five or ten years down the road. But today, low Earth orbit is getting crowded. As the cost of launching something into space continues to drop, multiple companies are either planning or actively building their own satellite constellations comprised of thousands of individual spacecraft.
Fortunately, there may be a simple solution to this problem. By putting a satellite into what’s known as a very low Earth orbit (VLEO), a spacecraft will experience enough drag that maintaining its velocity requires constantly firing its thrusters. Naturally this presents its own technical challenges, but the upside is that such an orbit is essentially self-cleaning — should the craft’s propulsion fail, it would fall out of orbit and burn up in months or even weeks. As an added bonus, operating at a lower altitude has other practical advantages, such as allowing for lower latency communication.
VLEO satellites hold considerable promise, but successfully operating in this unique environment requires certain design considerations. The result are vehicles that look less like the flying refrigerators we’re used to, with a hybrid design that features the sort of aerodynamic considerations more commonly found on aircraft.
ESA’s Pioneering Work
This might sound like science fiction, but such craft have already been developed and successfully operated in VLEO. The best example so far is the Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE), launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) back in 2009.
To make its observations, GOCE operated at an altitude of 255 kilometers (158 miles), and dropped as low as just 229 km (142 mi) in the final phases of the mission. For reference the International Space Station flies at around 400 km (250 mi), and the innermost “shell” of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are currently being moved to 480 km (298 mi).
Given the considerable drag experienced by GOCE at these altitudes, the spacecraft bore little resemblance to a traditional satellite. Rather than putting the solar panels on outstretched “wings”, they were mounted to the surface of the dart-like vehicle. To keep its orientation relative to the Earth’s surface stable, the craft featured stubby tail fins that made it look like a futuristic torpedo.
Even with its streamlined design, maintaining such a low orbit required GOCE to continually fire its high-efficiency ion engine for the duration of its mission, which ended up being four and a half years.
In the case of GOCE, the end of the mission was dictated by how much propellant it carried. Once it had burned through the 40 kg (88 lb) of xenon onboard, the vehicle would begin to rapidly decelerate, and ground controllers estimated it would re-enter the atmosphere in a matter of weeks. Ultimately the engine officially shutdown on October 21st, and by November 9th, it’s orbit had already decayed to 155 km (96 mi). Two days later, the craft burned up in the atmosphere.
JAXA Lowers the Bar
While GOCE may be the most significant VLEO mission so far from a scientific and engineering standpoint, the current record for the spacecraft with the lowest operational orbit is actually held by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
In December 2017 JAXA launched the Super Low Altitude Test Satellite (SLATS) into an initial orbit of 630 km (390 mi), which was steadily lowered in phases over the next several weeks until it reached 167.4 km (104 mi). Like GOCE, SLATS used a continuously operating ion engine to maintain velocity, although at the lowest altitudes, it also used chemical reaction control system (RCS) thrusters to counteract the higher drag.
SLATS was a much smaller vehicle than GOCE, coming in at roughly half the mass. It also carried just 12 kg (26 lb) of xenon propellant, which limited its operational life. It also utilized a far more conventional design than GOCE, although its rectangular shape was somewhat streamlined when compared to a traditional satellite. Its solar arrays were also mounted in parallel to the main body of the craft, giving it an airplane-like appearance.
The combination of lower altitude and higher frontal drag meant that SLATS had an even harder time maintaining velocity than GOCE. Once its propulsion system was finally switched off in October 2019, the craft re-entered the atmosphere and burned up within 24 hours. The mission has since been recognized by Guinness World Records for the lowest altitude maintained by an Earth observation satellite.
A New Breed of Satellite
As impressive as GOCE and SLATS were, their success was based more on careful planning than any particular technological breakthrough. After all, ion propulsion for satellites is not new, nor is the field of aerodynamics. The concepts were simply applied in a novel way.
But there exists the potential for a totally new type of vehicle that operates exclusively in VLEO. Such a craft would be a true hybrid, in the sense that its primarily a spacecraft, but uses an air-breathing electric propulsion (ABEP) system akin to an aircraft’s jet engine. Such a vehicle could, at least in theory, maintain an altitude as low as 90 km (56 mi) indefinitely — so long as its solar panels can produce enough power.
Both the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the United States and the ESA are currently funding several studies of ABEP vehicles, such as Redwire’s SabreSat, which have numerous military and civilian applications. Test flights are still years away, but should VLEO satellites powered by ABEP become common platforms for constellation applications, they may help alleviate orbital congestion before it becomes a serious enough problem to impact our utilization of space.
Looking for a unique vacation spot? Have at least $10 million USD burning a hole in your pocket? If so, then you’re just the sort of customer the rather suspiciously named “GRU Space” is looking for. They’re currently taking non-refundable $1,000 deposits from individuals looking to stay at their currently non-existent hotel on the lunar surface. They don’t expect you’ll be able to check in until at least the early 2030s, and the $1K doesn’t actually guarantee you’ll be selected as one of the guests who will be required to cough up the final eight-figure ticket price before liftoff, but at least admission into the history books is free with your stay.
This never happened.
The whole idea reminds us of Mars One, which promised to send the first group of colonists to the Red Planet by 2024. They went bankrupt in 2019 after collecting ~$100 deposits from more than 4,000 applicants, and we probably don’t have to tell you that they never actually shot anyone into space. Admittedly, the Moon is a far more attainable goal, and the commercial space industry has made enormous strides in the decade since Mars One started taking applications. But we’re still not holding our breath that GRU Space will be leaving any mints on pillows at one-sixth gravity.
Speaking of something which actually does have a chance of reaching the Moon on time — on Saturday, NASA rolled out the massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that will carry a crew of four towards our nearest celestial neighbor during the Artemis II mission. There’s still plenty of prep work to do, including a dress rehearsal that’s set to take place in the next couple of weeks, but we’re getting very close. Artemis II won’t actually land on the Moon, instead performing a lunar flyby, but it will still be the first time we’ve sent humans beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) since Apollo 17 in 1972. We can’t wait for some 4K Earthrise video.
In more terrestrial matters, Verizon users are likely still seething from the widespread outages that hit them mid-week. Users from all over the US reported losing cellular service for several hours, though outage maps at the time showed the Northeast was hit particularly hard. At one point, the situation got so bad that Verizon’s own system status page crashed. In a particularly embarrassing turn of events, some of the other cellular carriers actually reached out to their customers to explain it wasn’t their fault if they couldn’t reach friends and family on Verizon’s network. Oof.
Speaking of phones, security researchers recently unveiled WhisperPair, an attack targeting Bluetooth devices that utilize Google’s Fast Pair protocol. When the feature is implemented correctly, a Bluetooth accessory should ignore pairing requests unless it’s actually in pairing mode, but the researchers found that many popular models (including Google’s own Pixel Buds Pro 2) can be tricked into accepting an unsolicited pairing request. While an attacker hijacking your Bluetooth headset might not seem like a huge deal at first, consider that it could allow them to record your conversations and track your location via Google’s Find Hub network.
Incidentally, something like WhisperPair is the kind of thing we’d traditionally leave for Jonathan Bennett to cover in his This Week in Security column, but as regular readers may know, he had to hang up his balaclava back in December. We know many of you have been missing your weekly infosec dump, but we also know it’s not the kind of thing that just anyone can take over. We generally operate under a “Write What You Know” rule around here, and that means whoever takes over the reins needs to know the field well enough to talk authoritatively about it. Luckily, we think we’ve found just the hacker for the job, so hopefully we’ll be able to start it back up in the near future.
Finally, we don’t generally promote crowdfunding campaigns due to their uncertain nature, but we’ll make an exception for the GameTank. We’ve covered the open hardware 6502 homebrew game console here in the past, and even saw it in the desert of the real (Philadelphia) at JawnCon 0x2 in October. The project really embraces the retro feel of using a console from the 1980s, even requiring you to physically swap cartridges to play different games. It’s a totally unreasonable design choice from a technical perspective, given that an SD card could hold thousands of games at once, but of course, that’s not the point. There’s a certain joy in plugging in a nice chunky cartridge that you just can’t beat.
See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’ve love to hear about it.
Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they swap their favorite hacks and stories from the week. In this episode, they’ll start off by marveling over the evolution of the “smart knob” and other open hardware input devices, then discuss a futuristic propulsion technology you can demo in your own kitchen sink, and a cheap handheld game system that get’s a new lease on life thanks to the latest version of the ESP32 microcontroller.
From there they’ll cover spinning CRTs, creating custom GUIs on Android, and yet another thing you can build of out that old Ender 3 collecting dust in the basement. The episode wraps up with a discussion about putting Valve’s Steam Deck to work and a look at the history-making medical evacuation of the International Space Station.
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!
Over the course of its nearly 30 years in orbit, the International Space Station has played host to more “firsts” than can possibly be counted. When you’re zipping around Earth at five miles per second, even the most mundane of events takes on a novel element. Arguably, that’s the point of a crewed orbital research complex in the first place — to study how humans can live and work in an environment that’s so unimaginably hostile that something as simple as eating lunch requires special equipment and training.
Today marks another unique milestone for the ISS program, albeit a bittersweet one. Just a few hours ago, NASA successfully completed the first medical evacuation from the Station, cutting the Crew-11 mission short by at least a month. By the time this article is released, the patient will be back on terra firma and having their condition assessed in California. This leaves just three crew members on the ISS until NASA’s Crew-12 mission can launch in early February, though it’s possible that mission’s timeline will be moved up.
What We Know (And Don’t)
To respect the privacy of the individual involved, NASA has been very careful not to identify which member of the multi-nation Crew-11 mission is ill. All of the communications from the space agency have used vague language when discussing the specifics of the situation, and unless something gets leaked to the press, there’s an excellent chance that we’ll never really know what happened on the Station. But we can at least piece some of the facts together.
Crew-11: Oleg Platonov, Mike Fincke, Kimiya Yui, and Zena Cardman
On January 7th, Kimiya Yui of Japan was heard over the Station’s live audio feed requesting a private medical conference (PMC) with flight surgeons before the conversation switched over to a secure channel. At the time this was not considered particularly interesting, as PMCs are not uncommon and in the past have never involved anything serious. Life aboard the Station means documenting everything, so a PMC could be called to report a routine ailment that we wouldn’t give a second thought to here on Earth.
But when NASA later announced that the extravehicular activity (EVA) scheduled for the next day was being postponed due to a “medical concern”, the press started taking notice. Unlike what we see in the movies, conducting an EVA is a bit more complex than just opening a hatch. There are many hours of preparation, tests, and strenuous work before astronauts actually leave the confines of the Station, so the idea that a previously undetected medical issue could come to light during this process makes sense. That said, Kimiya Yui was not scheduled to take part in the EVA, which was part of a long-term project of upgrading the Station’s aging solar arrays. Adding to the mystery, a representative for Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) told Kyodo News that Yui “has no health issues.”
This has lead to speculation from armchair mission controllers that Yui could have requested to speak to the flight surgeons on behalf of one of the crew members that was preparing for the EVA — namely station commander Mike Fincke and flight engineer Zena Cardman — who may have been unable or unwilling to do so themselves.
Within 24 hours of postponing the EVA, NASA held a press conference and announced Crew-11 would be coming home ahead of schedule as teams “monitor a medical concern with a crew member”. The timing here is particularly noteworthy; the fact that such a monumental decision was made so quickly would seem to indicate the issue was serious, and yet the crew ultimately didn’t return to Earth for another week.
Work Left Unfinished
While the reusable rockets and spacecraft of SpaceX have made crew changes on the ISS faster and cheaper than they were during the Shuttle era, we’re still not at the point where NASA can simply hail a Dragon like they’re calling for an orbital taxi. Sending up a new vehicle to pickup the ailing astronaut, while not impossible, would have been expensive and disruptive as one of the Dragon capsules in rotation would have had to be pulled from whatever mission it was assigned to.
So unfortunately, bringing one crew member home means everyone who rode up to the Station with them needs to leave as well. Given that each astronaut has a full schedule of experiments and maintenance tasks they are to work on while in orbit, one of them being out of commission represents a considerable hit to the Station’s operations. Losing all four of them at once is a big deal.
Granted, not everything the astronauts were scheduled to do is that critical. Tasks range form literal grade-school science projects performed as public outreach to long-term medical evaluations — some of the unfinished work will be important enough to get reassigned to another astronaut, while some tasks will likely be dropped altogether.
Work to install the Roll Out Solar Arrays (ROSAs) atop the Stations original solar panels started in 2021.
But the EVA that Crew-11 didn’t complete represents a fairly serious issue. The astronauts were set to do preparatory work on the outside of the Station to support the installation of upgraded roll-out solar panels during an EVA scheduled for the incoming Crew-12 to complete later on this year. It’s currently unclear if Crew-12 received the necessary training to complete this work, but even if they have, mission planners will now have to fit an unforeseen extra EVA into what’s already a packed schedule.
What Could Have Been
Having to bring the entirety of Crew-11 back because of what would appear to be a non-life-threatening medical situation with one individual not only represents a considerable logistical and monetary loss to the overall ISS program in the immediate sense, but will trigger a domino effect that delays future work. It was a difficult decision to make, but what if it didn’t have to be that way?
The X-38 CRV prototype during a test flight in 1999.
In other timeline, the ISS would have featured a dedicated “lifeboat” known as the Crew Return Vehicle (CRV). A sick or injured crew member could use the CRV to return to Earth, leaving the spacecraft they arrived in available for the remaining crew members. Such a capability was always intended to be part of the ISS design, with initial conceptual work for the CRV dating back to the early 1990s, back when the project was still called Space Station Freedom. Indeed, the idea that the ISS has been in continuous service since 2000 without such a failsafe in place is remarkable.
Unfortunately, despite a number of proposals for a CRV, none ever made it past the prototype stage. In practice, it’s a considerable engineering challenge. A space lifeboat needs to be cheap, since if everything goes according to plan, you’ll never actually use the thing. But at the same time, it must be reliable enough that it could remain attached to the Station for years and still be ready to go at a moment’s notice.
In practice, it was much easier to simply make sure there are never more crew members on the Station than there are seats in returning spacecraft. It does mean that there’s no backup ride to Earth in the event that one of the visiting vehicles suffers some sort of failure, but as we saw during the troubled test flight of Boeing’s CST-100 in 2024, even this issue can be resolved by modifications to the crew rotation schedule.
No Such Thing as Bad Data
Everything that happens aboard the International Space Station represents an opportunity to learn something new, and this is no different. When the dust settles, you can be sure NASA will commission a report to dives into every aspect of this event and tries to determine what the agency could have done better. While the ISS itself may not be around for much longer, the information can be applied to future commercial space stations or other long-duration missions.
Was ending the Crew-11 mission the right call? Will the loses and disruptions triggered by its early termination end up being substantial enough that NASA rethinks the CRV concept for future missions? There are many questions that will need answers before it’s all said and done, and we’re eager to see what lessons NASA takes away from today.
If you’re reading this, that means you’ve successfully made it through 2025! Allow us to be the first to congratulate you — that’s another twelve months of skills learned, projects started, and hacks….hacked. The average Hackaday reader has a thirst for knowledge and an insatiable appetite for new challenges, so we know you’re already eager to take on everything 2026 has to offer.
But before we step too far into the unknown, we’ve found that it helps to take a moment and reflect on where we’ve been. You know how the saying goes: those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. That whole impending doom bit obviously has a negative connotation, but we like to think the axiom applies for both the lows and highs in life. Sure you should avoid making the same mistake twice, but why not have another go at the stuff that worked? In fact, why not try to make it even better this time?
As such, it’s become a Hackaday tradition to rewind the clock and take a look at some of the most noteworthy stories and trends of the previous year, as seen from our rather unique viewpoint in the maker and hacker world. With a little luck, reviewing the lessons of 2025 can help us prosper in 2026 and beyond.
Love it or Hate it, AI is Here
While artificial intelligence software — or at least, what passes for it by current standards — has been part of the technical zeitgeist for a few years, 2026 was definitely the year that AI seemed to be everywhere. So much so that the folks at Merriam-Webster decided to make “slop”, as in computer-generated garbage content, their Word of the Year. They also gave honorable mention to “touch grass”, which they describe as a phrase that’s “often aimed at people who spend so much time online that they become disconnected from reality.” But we’re going to ignore that one for personal reasons.
At Hackaday, we’ve obviously got some strong feelings on AI. For those who earn a living by beating the written word into submission seven days a week, the rise of AI is nothing less than an existential crisis. The only thing we have going for us is the fact that the average Hackaday reader is sharp enough to recognize the danger posed by a future in which all of our media is produced by a Python script running on somebody’s graphics card and will continue to support us, warts and all.
Like all powerful tools, AI can get you into trouble if you aren’t careful.
But while most of us are on the same page about AI in regards to things like written articles or pieces of art, it’s not so clear cut when it comes to more utilitarian endeavours. There’s a not insignificant part of our community that’s very interested in having AI help out with tedious tasks such as writing code, or designing PCBs; and while the technology is still in its infancy, there’s no question the state of the art is evolving rapidly.
Make no mistake, an over-reliance on AI tools can be dangerous. In the best case, the user is deprived of the opportunity to actually learn the material at hand. In the worst case, you make an LLM-enhanced blunder that costs you time and money. But when used properly, the takeaway seems to be that a competent maker or hacker can leverage these new AI tools to help bring more of their projects across the finish line — and that’s something we’ve got a hard time being against.
Meshtastic Goes Mainstream
Another tech that gained steam this year is Meshtastic. This open source project aims to allow anyone to create an off-grid, decentralized, mesh network with low cost microcontrollers and radio modules. We fell in love with the idea as soon as we heard about it, as did many a hacker. But the project has reached a level of maturity that it’s starting to overflow into other communities, with the end result being a larger and more capable mesh that benefits everyone.
Part of the appeal is really how ridiculously cheap and easy it is to get started. If you’re starting from absolutely zero, connecting up to an existing mesh network — or creating your own — can cost you as little as $10 USD. But if you’re reading Hackaday, there’s a good chance you’ve already got a supported microcontroller (or 10) laying around, in which case you may just need to spring for the LoRa radio module and wire it up. Add a 3D printed case, and you’re meshin’ with the best of them.
There are turn-key Meshtastic options available for every budget, from beginner to enthusiast.
If you’re OK with trading some money for time, there’s a whole world of ready to go Meshtastic devices available online from places like Amazon, AliExpress, and even Etsy for that personal touch. Fans of the retro aesthetic would be hard pressed to find a more stylish way to get on the grid than the Hacker Pager, and if you joined us in Pasadena this year for Hackaday Supercon, you even got to take home a capable Meshtastic device in the form of the Communicator Badge.
Whether you’re looking for a backup communication network in the event of a natural disaster, want to chat with neighbors without a megacorp snooping on your discussion, or are simply curious about radio communications, Meshtastic is a fantastic project to get involved with. If you haven’t taken the plunge already, point your antenna to the sky and see who’s out there, you might be surprised at what you find.
Arduino’s New Overlord
In terms of headlines, the acquisition of Arduino by Qualcomm was a pretty big one for our community. Many a breathless article was written about what this meant for the future of the company. And things only got more frantic a month later, when the new Arduino lawyers updated the website’s Terms and Conditions.
But you didn’t see any articles about that here on Hackaday. The most interesting part of the whole thing to us was the new Arduino Uno Q: an under $50 USD single-board computer that can run Linux while retaining the classic Uno layout. With the cost of Raspberry Pi hardware steadily increasing over the years, some competition on the lower end of the price spectrum is good for everyone.
The Arduino Uno Q packs enough punch to run Linux.
As for the Qualcomm situation — we’re hackers, not lawyers. Our immediate impression of the new ToS changes was that they only applied to the company’s web services — “The Platform” in the contract — and had no bearing on the core Arduino software and hardware offerings that we’re all familiar with. The company eventually released a blog post explaining more or less the same thing, explaining that evolving privacy requirements for online services meant they had to codify certain best practices, and that their commitment to open source is unwavering.
For now, that’s good enough for us. But the whole debacle does bring to mind a question: if future Arduino software development went closed-source tomorrow, how much of an impact would it really have on the community at this point? Today when somebody talks about doing something with Arduino they are more likely to be talking about the IDE and development environment than one of the company’s microcontroller boards — the licenses for which mean the versions we have now will remain open in perpetuity. The old AVR Arduino code is GPLed, after all, as are the newer cores for microcontrollers like the ESP32 and RP2040, which weren’t written by Arduino anyway. On the software side, we believe that we have nothing to lose.
But Arduino products have also always been open hardware, and we’ve all gained a lot from that. This is where Qualcomm could still upset the applecart, but we don’t see why they would, and they say they won’t. We’ll see in 2026.
The Year of Not-Windows on the Desktop?
The “Year of Linux on the Desktop” is a bit like fusion power, in that no matter how many technical hurdles are cleared, it seems to be perennially just over the horizon. At this point it’s become a meme, so we won’t do the cliché thing and claim that 2025 (or even 2026) is going to finally be the year when Linux breaks out of the server room and becomes a mainstream desktop operating system. But it does seem like something is starting to shift.
That’s due, at least in part, to Microsoft managing to bungle the job so badly with their Windows 11 strategy. In spite of considerable push-back in the tech community over various aspects of the operating system, the Redmond software giant seems hell-bent on getting users upgraded. At the same time, making it a hard requirement that all Windows 11 machines have a Trusted Platform Module means that millions of otherwise perfectly usable computers are left out in the cold.
What we’re left with is a whole lot of folks who either are unwilling, or unable, to run Microsoft’s latest operating system. At the same time desktop Linux has never been more accessible, and thanks in large part to the efforts of Valve, it can now run the majority of popular Windows games. That last bit might not seem terribly exciting to folks in our circles, but historically, the difficulty involved in playing AAA games on Linux has kept many a techie from making the switch.
Does that mean everyone is switching over to Linux? Well, no. Certainly Linux is seeing an influx of new users, but for the average person, it’s more likely they’d switch to Mac or pick up a cheap Chromebook if all they want to do is surf the web and use social media.
Of course, there’s an argument to be made that Chromebook users are technically Linux users, even if they don’t know it. But for that matter, you could say anyone running macOS is a BSD user. In that case, perhaps the “Year of *nix” might actually be nigh.
Grandma is 3D Printing in Color
There was a time when desktop 3D printers were made of laser-cut wood, used literal strings instead of belts, and more often then not, came as a kit you had to assemble with whatever assistance you could scrounge up from message boards and IRC channels — and we liked it that way. A few years later, printers were made out of metal and became more reliable, and within a decade or so you could get something like an Ender 3 for a couple hundred bucks on Amazon that more or less worked out of the box. We figured that was as mainstream as 3D printing was likely to get…but we were very wrong.
A Prusa hotend capable of printing a two-part liquid silicone.
Today 3D printing is approaching a point where the act of downloading a model, slicing it, and manifesting it into physical form has become, dare we say it, mundane. While we’re not always thrilled with the companies that make them and their approach to things that are important to us like repairability, open development, and privacy, we have to admit that the new breed of printers on the market today are damn good at what they do. Features like automatic calibration and filament run-out sensors, once the sort of capabilities you’d only see on eye-wateringly expensive prosumer machines, have became standard equipment.
Desktop 3D printing still hasn’t reached the sort of widespread adoption that all those early investors would have had us believe in the 2000s, where every home would one day have their own Star Trek style personal replicator. But they are arguably approaching the commonality of something like a table saw or drill press — specialized but affordable and reliable tools that act as a force multiplier rather than a tinkerer’s time sink.
Tariffs Take Their Toll
Finally, we couldn’t end an overview of 2025 without at least mentioning the ongoing tariff situation in the United States. While it hasn’t ground DIY electronics to a halt as some might have feared, it’s certainly had an impact.
A tax on imported components is nothing new. We first ran into that back in 2018, and though it was an annoyance, it didn’t have too much of an impact at the hobbyist scale. When an LED costs 20 cents, even a 100% tariff wouldn’t be much of a hit to the wallet at the scale most of us are operating at. Plus there are domestic, or at least non-Chinese, options for some jellybean components. The surplus market can also help here — you can often find great deals on things like partial reels of SMD capacitors and resistors on eBay if you keep an eye out for them.
We’ve heard more complaints about PCB production than anything. After years of being able to get boards made overseas for literal pennies, seeing a import tax that added at checkout can be quite a shock. But just like the added tax on components, while annoying, it’s not enough to actually keep folks from ordering. Even with the tariffs, the cost of getting a PCB made at OSH Park is going to be much higher than any Chinese board house.
Truth be told, if an import tax on Chinese-made PCBs and components resulted in a boom of affordable domestic alternatives, we’d be all over it. The idea that our little hobby boards needed to cross an ocean just to get to us always seemed unsustainable anyway. It wouldn’t even have to be domestic, there’s an opportunity for countries with a lower import tariff to step in. Instead of having our boards made in China, why not India or Mexico?
But unfortunately, the real-world is more complex than that. Building up those capabilities, either at home or abroad, takes time and money. So while we’d love to see this situation lead to greater competition, we’ve got a feeling that the end result is just more money out of our pockets.
Thanks for Another Year of Hacks
One thing that absolutely didn’t change in 2025 was you — thanks to everyone that makes Hackaday part of their daily routine, we’ve been able to keep the lights on for another year. Everyone here knows how incredibly fortunate we are to have this opportunity, and your ongoing support is never taken for granted.
We’d love to hear what you thought the biggest stories or trends of 2025 were, good and bad. Let us know what lessons you’ll be taking with you into 2026 down below in the comments.
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Given the considerable drag experienced by GOCE at these altitudes, the spacecraft bore little resemblance to a traditional satellite. Rather than putting the solar panels on outstretched “wings”, they were mounted to the surface of the dart-like vehicle. To keep its orientation relative to the Earth’s surface stable, the craft featured stubby tail fins that made it look like a futuristic torpedo.
But there exists the potential for a totally new type of vehicle that operates exclusively in VLEO. Such a craft would be a true hybrid, in the sense that its primarily a spacecraft, but uses an air-breathing electric propulsion (ABEP) system akin to an aircraft’s jet engine. Such a vehicle could, at least in theory, maintain an altitude as low as 90 km (56 mi) indefinitely — so long as its solar panels can produce enough power.
