Tag Archives: science

SpaceX is pivoting to focus on a moon base before Mars

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Elon Musk says SpaceX has shifted its near-term priorities from Mars settlement plans to building what he called a “self-growing city on the Moon,” arguing the lunar target is faster and more achievable. In a post on X, Musk claims the company could complete this in less than 10 years, while doing the same on Mars would take over 20 years.

This marks a major shift for the aerospace company, as Musk points out that the logistics of first completing a proof of concept on the moon are easier with respect to launch windows and proximity to Earth. The SpaceX founder is notorious for promising optimistic timelines that never come to pass, and said in 2017 that a base on Mars would be ready for its first settlers as early as 2024.

In subsequent replies to other posts Musk predicted "Mars will start in 5 or 6 years, so will be done parallel with the Moon, but the Moon will be the initial focus." He also said a manned Mars flight might happen in 2031.

Early last year Musk said in a post on X that SpaceX would be going "straight to Mars" and that "the Moon is a distraction." This was in response to Space industry analyst Peter Hague pointing out that among other considerations, lunar regolith, a material found on the surface of the moon, is about 45 percent oxygen. In 2023 NASA proved this oxygen could be extracted, which would yield enormous payload savings as opposed to shipping liquid oxygen between Earth and Mars.

NASA's Artemis missions, which SpaceX is a contractor for at certain stages, are planned to see humans back on the lunar surface by 2028. Artemis II, during which astronauts will circle the moon before returning to Earth, is set to launch in March of this year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/spacex-is-pivoting-to-focus-on-a-moon-base-before-mars-141851264.html?src=rss

NASA is sending Crew-12 astronauts to the ISS on February 11

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The Crew-12 astronauts will soon make their way to the ISS, joining the three remaining spacefarers on board after the previous mission was cut short due to a medical concern. NASA was originally planning a February 15 launch date for the mission, but it has moved it up to February 11. It’s now targeting a liftoff of no earlier than 6:01 AM Eastern that day from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The crew members are already in quarantine, and if everything goes well on launch day, the Dragon capsule they’re on will dock with the orbiting lab at approximately 10:30 AM on February 12.

If you’ll recall, NASA decided to bring Crew-11 members back home on January 15, a month earlier than planned, citing a medical concern with one of the members. While the affected astronaut was stable, the ISS didn’t have the equipment necessary to be able to diagnose them properly. All four members of Crew-11 flew home, leaving the whole space station in the hands of three people, namely NASA astronaut Chris Williams and two cosmonauts for the Russian side. They will be joined by Crew-12’s NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency’s Sophie Adenot and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.

SpaceX recently had to ground its Falcon 9 rocket after an issue with its upper stage for a few days, leaving the Crew-12’s flight schedule in question. But on February 6, the Federal Aviation Administration cleared it for its next flight. NASA will livestream the mission’s prelaunch, launch and docking activities on NASA+, Amazon Prime and on its YouTube channel, with its launch coverage starting at 4AM Eastern time on February 11. You can also bookmark or pin this page to watch the launch below.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/nasa-is-sending-crew-12-astronauts-to-the-iss-on-february-11-153000139.html?src=rss

NASA will now allow astronauts to take their smartphones to space

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Most people wouldn't leave their phones behind when they so much as go for a drive, but NASA astronauts have had to leave their phones on Earth while they went to work 250 miles away at the International Space Station. That is, until now.

In a post on X, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman shared that the Crew-12 and Artemis II astronauts will be allowed to bring smartphones along for the journey to the ISS and beyond. "We are giving our crews the tools to capture special moments for their families and share inspiring images and video with the world," Isaacman said.

While these won't be the first smartphone images captured in space — that distinction belongs to a trio of miniature phone-based satellites sent into Earth orbit in 2013 which succeeded where the earlier British STRaND-1 project failed. But thanks to the upcoming Artemis II mission, we can look forward to the first smartphone images from the moon's orbit. The March (for now) launch will be the agency's first crewed moon mission since Apollo 17 in 1972.

The crews' personal devices will be far less cumbersome to use than the old Nikon DSLRs they were previously limited to for high-quality still images. Ideally, this means more spontaneous pictures that can be shared with friends and family back on Earth.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/nasa-will-now-allow-astronauts-to-take-their-smartphones-to-space-151310548.html?src=rss

A potential Starlink competitor just got FCC clearance to launch 4,000 satellites

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Aspiring Starlink competitor Logos Space Services has secured FCC clearance to launch more than 4,000 broadband satellites into low Earth orbit by 2035, as reported by Space News. Under FCC regulations, the company must deploy half of the approved amount within the next seven years.

The company is headed by its founder, Milo Medin, a former project manager at NASA as well as a former vice president of wireless services at Google. The company has been raising money since it opened its doors in 2023 and reportedly hopes to deploy its first satellite by 2027. Logos’ planned low Earth orbit constellation would beam high-speed broadband internet to customers worldwide, including government and enterprise users, much like Starlink.

While the satellite broadband market is growing, Starlink remains the biggest player by far. The European Space Agency estimates there are just over 14,000 functioning satellites currently in orbit and we know that roughly 9,600 of them are a part of the Starlink constellation. The SpaceX subsidiary recently asked the FCC for clearance to launch a million satellites, though in reality, the FCC will likely trend closer to the 7,500 it approved on the last go-around. The ESA says it expects 100,000 satellites to be in orbit by 2030.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/a-potential-starlink-competitor-just-got-fcc-clearance-to-launch-4000-satellites-143905076.html?src=rss

NASA moves Artemis 2 launch to March after hydrogen leak during testing

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NASA started making the final preparations for the Artemis 2 mission in early January, with the hopes of opening its launch window as soon as February 6. After issues showed up during the mission’s wet dress rehearsal in the early hours of February 3, however, the agency had to push back its earliest launch opportunity to March.

“With more than three years between SLS launches, we fully anticipated encountering challenges. That is precisely why we conduct a wet dress rehearsal. These tests are designed to surface issues before flight and set up launch day with the highest probability of success,” NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said on X.

During a wet dress rehearsal, the spacecraft to be used for a mission is loaded with propellants to simulate the actual preparations and countdown to liftoff. NASA explained that Artemis 2’s Space Launch System, which was already on the launch pad, suffered from a liquid hydrogen leak that its engineers spent hours troubleshooting. They were ultimately able to fill all the rocket’s tanks and started the countdown to launch. But with approximately five minutes left in the countdown, the ground launch sequencer automatically stopped due to a spike in the spacecraft’s liquid hydrogen leak rate.

The agency admits that it has other issues to fix, based on what happened during the rehearsal. It has to make sure that the cold weather doesn’t affect the mission’s equipment during the actual launch in the same way it did in testing . The Orion crew module’s hatch pressurization process took longer than expected, and that should must not happen on launch day. NASA also has to troubleshoot the audio communication channels for its ground teams after they dropped several times during the rehearsal. Artemis’ ground crew will review data from the wet dress rehearsal and address the aforementioned problems. NASA then has to conduct another test to confirm that they were taken care of before announcing the mission’s launch window.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/nasa-moves-artemis-2-launch-to-march-after-hydrogen-leak-during-testing-140000351.html?src=rss

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has acquired his AI company, xAI

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX has acquired Musk’s xAI, the companies announced. The merger will “form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform,” Musk wrote in an update.

The AI company that right now is best known for its CSAM-generating chatbot might seem like a strange fit for a rocket company. But SpaceX is key to Musk’s latest scheme to build AI data centers in space. In his update, Musk wrote that “global electricity demand for AI simply cannot be met with terrestrial solutions” and that moving the resource-intensive operations to space is “the only logical solution.” SpaceX just days ago filed an application with the FCC to create an “orbital data center” by launching a million new satellites.

Musk also claimed that, eventually, space-based data centers will enable other advancements in space travel. “The capabilities we unlock by making space-based data centers a reality will fund and enable self-growing bases on the Moon, an entire civilization on Mars and ultimately expansion to the Universe.” Notably, it’s not the first time Musk has made lofty claims about Mars. He predicted in 2017 that SpaceX would send crewed missions to Mars by 2024.

This also isn’t the first time Musk has acquired one of his own companies. He merged xAI and X last year, which means SpaceX now owns the social network Musk bought in 2022. And he recently announced that Tesla was investing $2 billion into xAI. SpaceX is planning to go public later this year in an initial public offering (IPO) that could value the company at more than $1 trillion, according to Bloomberg, which notes that SpaceX has also “discussed a possible merger with Tesla.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/elon-musks-spacex-has-acquired-his-ai-company-xai-221617040.html?src=rss

Blue Origin is pausing its space tourist flights to work on lunar landers for NASA

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Blue Origin plans to put a focus on the development of its human lunar capabilities, so it won’t be sending tourists to space for at least the next two years. That means we won’t be seeing any New Shepard launches for quite some time. Blue Origin is one of the companies NASA chose to develop human landing systems for its Artemis program, along with SpaceX. Specifically, it will work on landers for the Artemis III and Artemis V missions.

The company was originally contracted to build the human landing system that would transfer astronauts from NASA’s Gateway station to the moon’s South Pole region for the Artemis V mission. But last year, NASA asked Blue Origin to design an alternative lander for Artemis III after SpaceX experienced delays due to Starship’s failed tests. Artemis III is expected to be the first crewed moon landing mission of the program, and the Trump administration wants it to happen before the end of the president’s term.

New Shepard takes tourists to suborbital space, where they experience a few minutes of weightlessness before the spacecraft makes its way back to Earth. Jeff Bezos was one of the passengers on New Shepard’s first tourist flight back in 2021. Since then, it has flown and landed 37 more times and carried 98 passengers to the Karman line, including Katy Perry and William Shatner.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/blue-origin-is-pausing-its-space-tourist-flights-to-work-on-lunar-landers-for-nasa-143000058.html?src=rss

NASA used Claude to plot a route for its Perseverance rover on Mars

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Since 2021, NASA's Perseverance rover has achieved a number of historic milestones, including sending back the first audio recordings from Mars. Now, nearly five years after landing on the Red Planet, it just achieved another feat. This past December, Perseverance successfully completed a route through a section of the Jezero crater plotted by Anthropic's Claude chatbot, marking the first time NASA has used a large language model to pilot the car-sized robot.    

Between December 8 and 10, Perseverance drove approximately 400 meters (about 437 yards) through a field of rocks on the Martian surface mapped out by Claude. As you might imagine, using an AI model to plot a course for Perseverance wasn't as simple as inputting a single prompt. 

As NASA explains, routing Perseverance is no easy task, even for a human. "Every rover drive needs to be carefully planned, lest the machine slide, tip, spin its wheels, or get beached," NASA said. "So ever since the rover landed, its human operators have painstakingly laid out waypoints — they call it a 'breadcrumb trail' — for it to follow, using a combination of images taken from space and the rover’s onboard cameras." 

To get Claude to complete the task, NASA had to first provide Claude Code, Anthropic's programming agent, with the "years" of contextual data from the rover before the model could begin writing a route for Perseverance. Claude then went about the mapping process methodically, stringing together waypoints from ten-meter segments it would later critique and iterate on.  

This being NASA we're talking about, engineers from the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) made sure to double check the model's work before sending it to Perseverance. The JPL team ran Claude's waypoints through a simulation they use every day to confirm the accuracy of commands sent to the rover. In the end, NASA says it only had to make "minor changes" to Claude's route, with one tweak coming as a result of the fact the team had access to ground-level images Claude hadn't seen in its planning process.  

"The engineers estimate that using Claude in this way will cut the route-planning time in half, and make the journeys more consistent," NASA said. "Less time spent doing tedious manual planning — and less time spent training — allows the rover’s operators to fit in even more drives, collect even more scientific data, and do even more analysis. It means, in short, that we’ll learn much more about Mars."

While the productivity gains offered by AI are often overstated, in the case of NASA, any tool that could allow its scientists to be more efficient is sure to be welcome. Over the summer, the agency lost about 4,000 employees – accounting for about 20 percent of its workforce – due to Trump administration cuts. Going into 2026, the president had proposed gutting the agency's science budget by nearly half before Congress ultimately rejected that plan in early January. Still, even with its funding preserved just below 2025 levels, the agency has a tough road ahead. It's being asked to return to the Moon with less than half the workforce it had during the height of the Apollo program.     

For Anthropic, meanwhile, this is a major feat. You may recall last spring Claude couldn't even beat Pokémon Red. In less than a year, the company's models have gone from struggling to navigate a simple 8-bit Game Boy game to successfully plotting a course for a rover on a distant planet. NASA is excited about the possibility of future collaborations, saying "autonomous AI systems could help probes explore ever more distant parts of the solar system."

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/nasa-used-claude-to-plot-a-route-for-its-perseverance-rover-on-mars-203150701.html?src=rss

Sundance doc ‘Ghost in the Machine’ draws a damning line between AI and eugenics

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The Sundance documentary Ghost in the Machine boldly declares that the pursuit of artificial intelligence, and Silicon Valley itself, is rooted in eugenics. 

Director Valerie Veatch makes the case that the rise of techno-fascism from the likes of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel is a feature, not a bug. That may sound hyperbolic, but Ghost in the Machine, which is built around interviews with philosophers, AI researchers, historians and computer scientists, leaves little room for doubt.

If you've been following the meteoric rise of AI, or Silicon Valley in general, Veatch's methodical deconstruction of the technology doesn't really unearth anything new. The film begins with the utter failure of Microsoft's Tay chatbot, which wasted no time in becoming a Hitler-loving white supremacist. It retreads the environmental impacts of AI datacenters, as well as the ways tech companies have relied on low-wage workers from Africa and elsewhere to improve their algorithms. 

But even I was surprised to learn that we can trace the impact of eugenics in tech all the way back to Karl Pearson, the mathematician who pioneered the field of statistics, and who also spent his life trying to quantify the differences between races. (Guess who he believed was superior.) His legacy was continued by William Shockley, a co-creator of the transistor, an avowed white supremacist who spent his later years espousing (now debunked) theories around IQ and racial differences.

An early robot toy.
An early robot toy.
Valerie Veatch for "Ghost in the Machine"

As a Stanford engineering professor, Shockley fostered a culture of prioritizing white men over women and minorities, which ultimately shaped the way Silicon Valley looks today. His line of thinking could have had an influence on John McCarthy, the Stanford researcher who coined the term “artificial intelligence” in 1955,  

With roots like that, Elon Musk — known to spout bigotry online,  foster a reportedly racist work environment at Tesla and  throw the occasionaly few Nazi salute — looks less like an anomaly than part of a pattern. Ghost in the Machine asks a simple question: How can we trust men like this (and it's almost always men that look like Musk) with our future?

Through its many interviews, which include the likes of AI researcher Dr. Emily Bender, historian Becca Lewis and media theorist Douglass Rushkoff, Ghost in the Machine paints the rise of AI as a fascistic project that aims to demean humans and establish the techno-elite as our de facto rulers. Given how much our lives are already dominated by gadgets and social networks from companies that have pioneered addictive engagement over user safety, it's easy to imagine history repeating itself with AI. 

Ghost in the Machine doesn't leave any room for considering potential benefits around AI, which could lead proponents of the technology to dismiss it as a hit-job. But we're currently at the apex of the AI hype cycle, after Big Tech has invested hundreds of billions of dollars on this technology, and after it has spent years shoving it down our throats without proving why it’s actually useful to many people. AI should be able to withstand a bit of criticism.

Ghost in the Machine is available to view at the Sundance Film Festival’s website and streaming apps from today through the end of Sunday, February 1st.  



This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/sundance-doc-ghost-in-the-machine-draws-a-damning-line-between-ai-and-eugenics-180613367.html?src=rss

Astronomers share new insights about the early universe via the Webb Space Telescope

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Researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope have found a galaxy that is offering new data about the early stages of the universe's existence. The latest discovery shared by astronomers is about a bright galaxy dubbed MoM-z14. According to the team, this galaxy existed 280 million years after the Big Bang. 

The sounds like a long time, but in the context of the universe's estimated 13.8 billion years of existence, that's actually one of the closest examples astronomers have found to the Big Bang's occurrence. As a result, MoM-z14 can offer some insights and some surprises about what the early stages of the universe entailed.

"With Webb, we are able to see farther than humans ever have before, and it looks nothing like what we predicted, which is both challenging and exciting," lead author Rohan Naidu of Massachusetts Institute of Technology said. The findings about this galaxy were published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics.

The scientists were able to date MoM-z14 with Webb's Near-Infrared Spectrograph instrument, analyzing how light from the galaxy changed wavelengths as it traveled to reach the telescope. One of the initial questions sparked by this bright galaxy centers on the presence of nitrogen. Some early galaxies, including MoM-z14, have revealed higher nitrogen concentrations than scientists had projected was possible. Another topic of interest is about reionization, or the process of stars producing enough light or energy to permeate the dense hydrogen fog that existed in the early universe. 

“It’s an incredibly exciting time, with Webb revealing the early Universe like never before and showing us how much there still is to discover” said Pennsylvania State University graduate student and team member Yijia Li.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/astronomers-share-new-insights-about-the-early-universe-via-the-webb-space-telescope-213311848.html?src=rss