Evolution as Mechanism

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A measured record drawing of one bent-wire arm from NASA's evolved ST5 antenna, its irregular segments and bend angles dimensioned on a small circular ground plane, one bend accented in copper

The Antenna NASA Let Evolve — and Why It Looked Nothing Like One

NASA's Space Technology 5 mission flew the first computer-evolved hardware in space. Its value was not that a genetic algorithm out-designed an engineer, but that its search reached a changed requirement in weeks.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 26, 2026 · 6 min read

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