Author name: Rejus Almole

pentagon-may-put-spacex-at-the-center-of-a-sensor-to-shooter-targeting-network

Pentagon may put SpaceX at the center of a sensor-to-shooter targeting network

milnet, Science, Space, space development agency, space force, spacex, starlink, starshield / /

Under this plan, SpaceX’s satellites would play a big role in the Space Force’s kill chain.

The Trump administration plans to cancel a fleet of orbiting data relay satellites managed by the Space Development Agency and replace it with a secretive network that, so far, relies primarily on SpaceX’s Starlink Internet constellation, according to budget documents.

The move prompted questions from lawmakers during a Senate hearing on the Space Force’s budget last week. While details of the Pentagon’s plan remain secret, the White House proposal would commit $277 million in funding to kick off a new program called “pLEO SATCOM” or “MILNET.”

The funding line for a proliferated low-Earth orbit satellite communications network hasn’t appeared in a Pentagon budget before, but plans for MILNET already exist in a different form. Meanwhile, the budget proposal for fiscal year 2026 would eliminate funding for a new tranche of data relay satellites from the Space Development Agency. The pLEO SATCOM or MILNET program would replace them, providing crucial support for the Trump administration’s proposed Golden Dome missile defense shield.

“We have to look at what are the other avenues to deliver potentially a commercial proliferated low-Earth orbit constellation,” Gen. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations, told senators last week. “So, we are simply looking at alternatives as we look to the future as to what’s the best way to scale this up to the larger requirements for data transport.”

What will these satellites do?

For six years, the Space Development Agency’s core mission has been to provide the military with a more resilient, more capable network of missile tracking and data relay platforms in low-Earth orbit. Those would augment the Pentagon’s legacy fleet of large, billion-dollar missile warning satellites that are parked more than 20,000 miles away in geostationary orbit.

These satellites detect the heat plumes from missile launches—and also large explosions and wildfires—to provide an early warning of an attack. The US Space Force’s early warning satellites were critical in allowing interceptors to take out Iranian ballistic missiles launched toward Israel last month.

Experts say there are good reasons for the SDA’s efforts. One motivation was the realization over the last decade or so that a handful of expensive spacecraft make attractive targets for an anti-satellite attack. It’s harder for a potential military adversary to go after a fleet of hundreds of smaller satellites. And if they do take out a few of these lower-cost satellites, it’s easier to replace them with little impact on US military operations.

Missile-tracking satellites in low-Earth orbit, flying at altitudes of just a few hundred miles, are also closer to the objects they are designed to track, meaning their infrared sensors can detect and locate dimmer heat signatures from smaller projectiles, such as hypersonic missiles.

The military’s Space Development Agency is in the process of buying, building, and launching a network of hundreds of missile-tracking and communications satellites. Credit: Northrop Grumman

But tracking the missiles isn’t enough. The data must reach the ground in order to be useful. The SDA’s architecture includes a separate fleet of small communications satellites to relay data from the missile tracking network, and potentially surveillance spacecraft tracking other kinds of moving targets, to military forces on land, at sea, or in the air through a series of inter-satellite laser crosslinks.

The military refers to this data relay component as the transport layer. When it was established in the first Trump administration, the SDA set out to deploy tranches of tracking and data transport satellites. Each new tranche would come online every couple of years, allowing the Pentagon to tap into new technologies as fast as industry develops them.

The SDA launched 27 so-called “Tranche 0” satellites in 2023 to demonstrate the concept’s overall viability. The first batch of more than 150 operational SDA satellites, called Tranche 1, is due to begin launching later this year. The SDA plans to begin deploying more than 250 Tranche 2 satellites in 2027. Another set of satellites, Tranche 3, would have followed a couple of years later. Now, the Pentagon seeks to cancel the Tranche 3 transport layer, while retaining the Tranche 3 tracking layer under the umbrella of the Space Development Agency.

Out of the shadows

While SpaceX’s role isn’t mentioned explicitly in the Pentagon’s budget documents, the MILNET program is already on the books, and SpaceX is the lead contractor. It has been made public in recent months, after years of secrecy, although many details remain unclear. Managed in a partnership between the Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), MILNET is designed to use military-grade versions of Starlink Internet satellites to create a “hybrid mesh network” the military can rely on for a wide range of applications.

The military version of the Starlink platform is called Starshield. SpaceX has already launched nearly 200 Starshield satellites for the NRO, which uses them for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions.

At an industry conference last month, the Space Force commander in charge of operating the military’s communications satellites revealed new information about MILNET, according to a report by Breaking Defense. The network uses SpaceX-made user terminals with additional encryption to connect with Starshield satellites in orbit.

Col. Jeff Weisler, commander of a Space Force unit called Delta 8, said MILNET will comprise some 480 satellites operated by SpaceX but overseen by a military mission director “who communicates to the contracted workforce to execute operations at the timing and tempo of warfighting.”

The Space Force has separate contracts with SpaceX to use the commercial Starlink service. MILNET’s dedicated constellation of more secure Starshield satellites is separate from Starlink, which now has more 7,000 satellites in space.

“We are completely relooking at how we’re going to operate that constellation of capabilities for the joint force, which is going to be significant because we’ve never had a DoD hybrid mesh network at LEO,” Weisler said last month.

So, the Pentagon already relies on SpaceX’s communication services, not to mention the company’s position as the leading launch provider for Space Force and NRO satellites. With MILNET’s new role as a potential replacement for the Space Development Agency’s data relay network, SpaceX’s satellites would become a cog in combat operations.

Gen. Chance Saltzman, chief of Space Operations in the US Space Force, looks on before testifying before a House Defense Subcommittee on May 6, 2025. Credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

The data transport layer, whether it’s SDA’s architecture or a commercial solution like Starshield, will “underpin” the Pentagon’s planned Golden Dome missile defense system, Saltzman said.

But it’s not just missiles. Data relay satellites in low-Earth orbit will also have a part in the Space Force’s initiatives to develop space-based platforms to track moving targets on the ground and in the air. Eventually, all Space Force satellites could have the ability to plug into MILNET to send their data to the ground.

A spokesperson for the Department of the Air Force, which includes the Space Force, told Air & Space Forces Magazine that the pLEO, or MILNET, constellation “will provide global, integrated, and resilient capabilities across the combat power, global mission data transport, and satellite communications mission areas.”

That all adds up to a lot of bits and bytes, and the Space Force’s need for data backhaul is only going to increase, according to Col. Robert Davis, head of the Space Sensing Directorate at Space Systems Command.

He said the SDA’s satellites will use onboard edge processing to create two-dimensional missile track solutions. Eventually, the SDA’s satellites will be capable of 3D data fusion with enough fidelity to generate a full targeting solution that could be transmitted directly to a weapons system for it to take action without needing any additional data processing on the ground.

“I think the compute [capability] is there,” Davis said Tuesday at an event hosted by the Mitchell Institute, an aerospace-focused think tank in Washington, DC. “Now, it’s a comm[unication] problem and some other technical integration challenges. But how do I do that 3D fusion on orbit? If I do 3D fusion on orbit, what does that allow me to do? How do I get low-latency comms to the shooter or to a weapon itself that’s in flight? So you can imagine the possibilities there.”

The possibilities include exploiting automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to sense, target, and strike an enemy vehicle—a truck, tank, airplane, ship, or missile—nearly instantaneously.

“If I’m on the edge doing 3D fusion, I’m less dependent on the ground and I can get around the globe with my mesh network,” Davis said. “There’s inherent resilience in the overall architecture—not just the space architecture, but the overall architecture—if the ground segment or link segment comes under attack.”

Questioning the plan

Military officials haven’t disclosed the cost of MILNET, either in its current form or in the future architecture envisioned by the Trump administration. For context, SDA has awarded fixed-price contracts worth more than $5.6 billion for approximately 340 data relay satellites in Tranches 1 and 2.

That comes out to roughly $16 million per spacecraft, at least an order of magnitude more expensive than a Starlink satellite coming off of SpaceX’s assembly line. Starshield satellites, with their secure communications capability, are presumably somewhat more expensive than an off-the-shelf Starlink.

Some former defense officials and lawmakers are uncomfortable with putting commercially operated satellites in the “kill chain,” the term military officials use for the process of identifying threats, making a targeting decision, and taking military action.

It isn’t clear yet whether SpaceX will operate the MILNET satellites in this new paradigm, but the company has a longstanding preference for doing so. SpaceX built a handful of tech demo satellites for the Space Development Agency a few years ago, but didn’t compete for subsequent SDA contracts. One reason for this, sources told Ars, is that the SDA operates its satellite constellation from government-run control centers.

Instead, the SDA chose L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Rocket Lab, Sierra Space, Terran Orbital, and York Space Systems to provide the next batches of missile tracking and data transport satellites. RTX, formerly known as Raytheon, withdrew from a contract after the company determined it couldn’t make money on the program.

The tracking satellites will carry different types of infrared sensors, some with wide fields of view to detect missile launches as they happen, and others with narrow-angle sensors to maintain custody of projectiles in flight. The data relay satellites will employ different frequencies and anti-jam waveforms to supply encrypted data to military forces on the ground.

This frame from a SpaceX video shows a stack of Starlink Internet satellites attached to the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket, moments after the launcher’s payload fairing is jettisoned. Credit: SpaceX

The Space Development Agency’s path hasn’t been free of problems. The companies the agency selected to build its spacecraft have faced delays, largely due to supply chain issues, and some government officials have worried the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps aren’t ready to fully capitalize on the information streaming down from the SDA’s satellites.

The SDA hired SAIC, a government services firm, earlier this year with a $55 million deal to act as a program integrator with responsibility to bring together satellites from multiple contractors, keep them on schedule, and ensure they provide useful information once they’re in space.

SpaceX, on the other hand, is a vertically integrated company. It designs, builds, and launches its own Starlink and Starshield satellites. The only major components of SpaceX’s spy constellation for the NRO that the company doesn’t build in-house are the surveillance sensors, which come from Northrop Grumman.

Buying a service from SpaceX might save money and reduce the chances of further delays. But lawmakers argued there’s a risk in relying on a single company for something that could make or break real-time battlefield operations.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, raised concerns that the Space Force is canceling a program with “robust competition and open standards” and replacing it with a network that is “sole-sourced to SpaceX.”

“This is a massive and important contract,” Coons said. “Doesn’t handing this to SpaceX make us dependent on their proprietary technology and avoid the very positive benefits of competition and open architecture?”

Later in the hearing, Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) chimed in with his own warning about the Space Force’s dependence on contractors. Hoeven’s state is home to one of the SDA’s satellite control centers.

“We depend on the Air Force, the Space Force, the Department of Defense, and the other services, and we can’t be dependent on private enterprise when it comes to fighting a war, right? Would you agree with that?” Hoeven asked Saltzman.

“Absolutely, we can’t be dependent on it,” Saltzman replied.

Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said military officials haven’t settled on a procurement strategy. He didn’t mention SpaceX by name.

As we go forward, MILNET, the term, should not be taken as just a system,” Meink said. “How we field that going forward into the future is something that’s still under consideration, and we will look at the acquisition of that.”

An Air Force spokesperson confirmed the requirements and architecture for MILNET are still in development, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine. The spokesperson added that the department is “investigating” how to scale MILNET into a “multi-vendor satellite communication architecture that avoids vendor lock.”

This doesn’t sound all that different than the SDA’s existing technical approach for data relay, but it shifts more responsibility to commercial companies. While there’s still a lot we don’t know, contractors with existing mega-constellations would appear to have an advantage in winning big bucks under the Pentagon’s new plan.

There are other commercial low-Earth orbit constellations coming online, such as Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband network, that could play a part in MILNET. However, if the Space Force is looking for a turnkey commercial solution, Starlink and Starshield are the only options available today, putting SpaceX in a strong position for a massive windfall.

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

Pentagon may put SpaceX at the center of a sensor-to-shooter targeting network Read More »

us-critical-infrastructure-exposed-as-feds-warn-of-possible-attacks-from-iran

US critical infrastructure exposed as feds warn of possible attacks from Iran

cyberattack, Iran, Iranian Revolutionary Guard, islamic state, Security / /

Hackers working on behalf of the Iranian government are likely to target industrial control systems used at water treatment plants and other critical infrastructure to retaliate against recent military strikes by Israel and the US, federal government agencies are warning. One cybersecurity company says many US-based targets aren’t adequately protected against the threat.

“Based on the current geopolitical environment, Iranian-affiliated cyber actors may target US devices and networks for near-term cyber operations,” an advisory jointly published by the The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, FBI, Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center, and the National Security Agency stated. “Defense Industrial Base (DIB) companies, particularly those possessing holdings or relationships with Israeli research and defense firms, are at increased risk.”

Easy targets

Of particular interest to the would-be hackers are control systems that automate industrial processes inside water treatment plants, dams, and other critical infrastructure, particularly when those systems are manufactured by Israel-based companies. Between November 2023 and January 2024, near the onset of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, federal agencies said hackers affiliated with the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps actively targeted and compromised Israeli-made programmable-logic controllers and human-machine interfaces used in multiple sectors, Including US Water and Wastewater Systems Facilities. At least 75 devices, including at least 34 in US-based water facilities, were compromised.

Hackers in those operations targeted Unitronics Vision Series devices that automate processes inside water facilities. After gaining control of the devices, the hackers interfered with their ability to function normally. The actors also introduced changes that prevented the devices from being remotely accessed by administrators. The hacked devices were either protected by default passwords or no password at all, making them easy targets.

US critical infrastructure exposed as feds warn of possible attacks from Iran Read More »

tuesday-telescope:-a-howling-wolf-in-the-night-sky

Tuesday Telescope: A howling wolf in the night sky

daily telescope, Space, tuesday telescope / /

Welcome to the Tuesday Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light—a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’ll take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

In the 1800s, astronomers were mystified by the discovery of stars that displayed highly unusual emission lines. It was only after 1868, when scientists discovered the element helium, that astronomers were able to explain the broad emission bands due to the presence of helium in these stars.

Over time, these stars became known as Wolf-Rayet stars (Charles Wolf was a French astronomer, and helium was first detected by the French scientist Georges Rayet and others), and astronomers came to understand that they were the central stars within planetary nebulae, and continually ejecting gas at high velocity.

This gives Wolf-Rayet stars a distinctive appearance in the night sky. And this week, Chris McGrew has shared a photo of WR 134—a variable Wolf-Rayet star about 6,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus—which he captured from a dark sky location in southwestern New Mexico.

“The stellar winds are blowing out the blue shell of ionized oxygen gas visible in the middle of the image,” McGrew said. “This is a deep sky object that has been imaged countless times, and I get why. Ever since I saw it for the first time, it’s been high on my list. For years I didn’t have the skies or the time, but I finally got the chance to go after it.”

Source: Chris McGrew

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.

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Supreme Court upholds Texas porn law that caused Pornhub to leave the state

Policy, porn, Supreme Court, texas / /

Justice Elena Kagan filed a dissenting opinion that was joined by Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Kagan said that in similar cases, the court applied strict scrutiny, “a highly rigorous but not fatal form of constitutional review, to laws regulating protected speech based on its content.”

“Texas’s law defines speech by content and tells people entitled to view that speech that they must incur a cost to do so,” Kagan wrote. “That is, under our First Amendment law, a direct (not incidental) regulation of speech based on its content—which demands strict scrutiny.”

The Texas law applies to websites in which more than one-third of the content “is sexual material harmful to minors.” Kagan described the law’s ID requirement as a deterrent to exercising one’s First Amendment rights.

“It is turning over information about yourself and your viewing habits—respecting speech many find repulsive—to a website operator, and then to… who knows? The operator might sell the information; the operator might be hacked or subpoenaed,” Kagan’s dissent said. The law requires website users to verify their ages by submitting “a ‘government-issued identification’ like a driver’s license or ‘transactional data’ associated with things like a job or mortgage,” Kagan wrote.

Limiting no more speech than necessary

Under strict scrutiny, the court must ask whether the law is “the least restrictive means of achieving a compelling state interest,” Kagan wrote. A state facing that standard must show it has limited no more adult speech than is necessary to achieve its goal.

“Texas can of course take measures to prevent minors from viewing obscene-for-children speech. But if a scheme other than H. B. 1181 can just as well accomplish that objective and better protect adults’ First Amendment freedoms, then Texas should have to adopt it (or at least demonstrate some good reason not to),” Kagan wrote.

The majority decision said that applying strict scrutiny “would call into question all age-verification requirements, even longstanding in-person requirements.” It also said the previous rulings cited in the dissent “all involved laws that banned both minors and adults from accessing speech that was at most obscene only to minors. The Court has never before considered whether the more modest burden of an age-verification requirement triggers strict scrutiny.”

Supreme Court upholds Texas porn law that caused Pornhub to leave the state Read More »

childhood-and-education-#11:-the-art-of-learning

Childhood and Education #11: The Art of Learning

Childhood / /

In honor of the latest (always deeply, deeply unpopular) attempts to destroy tracking and gifted and talented programs, and other attempts to get children to actually learn things, I thought it a good time to compile a number of related items.

  1. Lack Of Tracking Hurts Actual Everyone.

  2. Not Tracking Especially Hurts Those Who Are Struggling.

  3. No Child Left Behind Left Behind.

  4. Read Early, Read Often.

  5. Mirror, Mirror.

  6. Spaced Repetition.

  7. Learning Methods.

  8. Interruptions.

  9. Memorization.

  10. Math is Hard.

  11. Get to Work.

  12. The Whiz Kids.

  13. High School Does Not Seem To Teach Kids Much.

  14. Two Kinds of Essays.

Gifted programs and educational tracking are also super duper popular, it is remarkably absurd that our political process cannot prevent these programs from being destroyed.

As in things like this keep happening:

NY Post: Seattle Public Schools shuts down gifted and talented program for being oversaturated with white and asian students.

Once again, now, we face that threat in my home of New York City. The Democratic nominee for New York City Mayor is opposed to gifted and talented programs, and wants to destroy them. Yet few people seem to have much noticed, or decided to much care. Once people realize the danger it may well be too late.

To state the obvious, if you group children by ability in each subject rather than age, they learn better. Yes, there are logistical concerns, but the benefits are immense. Gifted programs are great but mostly seem like a patch to the fact that we are so obsessed with everyone in the room being in the same ‘grade’ at all times.

I agree with Tracing Woods that ‘teaches each according to their ability’ is the bare minimum before I will believe that your institution is making a real attempt to educate children.

Tracing Woods: A good example of the absurdity of “grade-level” thinking, from Texas: “If they’re reading on a second-grade level, but they’re in the third grade, they’re always going to receive that third-grade instruction.”

This makes no sense. Learning does not simply follow age.

Imagine having a “grade level” in chess. 9-year-olds in the third grade advancing to play against 1100 elo players. 100 more elo per year.

“Grade-level performance” has always been nonsensical. Learning does not work that way. Just figure out what people actually know and need

Danielle Fong: sooner or later, and probably sooner, all this will be thrown out in favor of an adaptive learning environment, the human teachers and other students can give individual attention when you’re stuck, and you can maxx out learning like a game. already happening privately. +2sd

Eowyn Jackman: I know I’m supposed to move on but I don’t think I can ever forgive the US public primary education complex for testing me and saying he “has a college reading level” at 9 years old but not administering an exam for me to be in the “gifted/advanced” classes at my PWI until two years later when I wrote my first book. So much time wasted.

Would’ve loved to have an office, secretarial job before 15 tbch

Wow I need therapy 😅

James Miller: Imagine math classes grouped by ability, not age. You’d have classes with 7- and 17-year-olds together.

Tracing Woods: And that’s a good thing (No, but seriously, at that point put them in different schools)

I bite the bullet. I do think it’s fine and actively good to have 7-year-olds and 17-year-olds in the same math classroom.

Of course, if you think that learning is bad, you won’t like this plan to have kids learn.

Owen Cyclops: this conception of early childhood education poses a generally unasked question to our present educational paradigm, which is: what could be the potential downside of learning things too quickly? from my perspective, this is basically never asked. its a total 100% blind spot.

[this is part of a long thread complaining about how awful it is if kids were to learn things too quickly, before they are supposed to, because ‘stages of development’]

Thomas: The main downside brought up re: “learning too quickly” is being ahead of peers. There’s parents’ posts online sharing experiences of being told not to read to their kid at home, or not teach them new math concepts.

Divia: Fwiw I hear people talk about the downside of learning too fast constantly! And have since I was a kid. Mostly whenever anyone wanted academics to be faster than it was convenient for someone they would talk about the downsides IME.

The ‘learning too much too soon is bad’ paradigm seems categorically insane. Here’s the concrete example Owen gives:

Owen: i’m in the forest (this actually happened). a kid asks: why is this log making a sound when i hit it with a stick? and this adult says, “well, the molecules in the log vibrate when you hit it, because you hitting it transfers energy into the log. you’re hearing the vibrations.”

the kid is NOT at that developmental stage (in my opinion). even if they can understand this (may be impossible, they might just be repeating what you’re saying), that type of understanding comes later. that is not the developmental stage a five year old is at. not their world.

I mean, maybe they have enough physics that this is the right explanation. Maybe they don’t, and it would be modestly better to simplify it a bit. But then they can ask.

This seems fine, and opening the doors to ‘what’s a molecule?’ or other similar questions seems great. They ask, you tell them. The actual objection here is ‘you need to explain [A] then [B] then [C]’ and I think that is usually vastly overstated but okay, sure, that doesn’t tell you what age you should tell people [C].

At some point, if you’re far enough ahead or behind the class, the class is worthless to you. A remarkable number of students hit this threshold, or would hit it if they weren’t being sabotaged to not hit it.

There is a point of diminishing returns for sufficiently young students, where you start to outstrip your ability to efficiently process the information and learn the material at your current age, but many students are very far away from that limit. As of course they are, if they’re forced to proceed at the speed of the typical subpar ship, which shall we say is not close to even that ship’s maximum speed.

Tracing Woodgrains: The most refreshing and novel thing to me about the Alpha/GT School model is the four hours of extracurricular workshops.

In sixth grade, I did online school. Completed the entire seventh and eighth grade curriculum in two hours a day that year. And then with all my extra time, I played video games.

Much healthier to have an institution that recognizes what can really be done with all of that time.

Patrick McKenzie: While this makes me feel *extremelyold, my recollection of 4th-8th grade was a solid 1.5-2 years of instruction and 3 years of being physically present while classroom management was conducted.

If you object to being physically present for classroom management you will become one of the focuses of classroom management, so I spent a lot of time counting ceiling tiles, drawing cubes, and writing out the solutions for all possible games of 24.

Ryan Moulton: I think you can get 80% of the benefit of ~whatever gifted/tracking/etc. program in gradeschool by having any mechanism at all to let self directed kids be self directed.

“You already know this, so just go do Khan Academy for an hour during math time” is an essentially zero cost intervention.

“If you finish your grammar/spelling/vocab sheet early, you are allowed to read your library book” is too.

Teachers don’t reliably do this, because letting kids do different things sometimes creates conflict in class. If they did reliably do this then most of the debate about how to organize gradeschool among kids of different academic ability levels goes away.

When you stop holding kids back, you instead get things like in this thread: The 11 year old boy in Organic Chemistry that goes on to be a researcher, the girl graduating college at that same age. Which is proof by counterexample that all this ‘not ready’ nonsense is indeed nonsense.

An important aspect of denying the reality of different learning abilities is that it is absurdly cruel to those you are gaslighting – they are told that they are just as smart and good at learning as everyone else, so what are they to think about their failure to get those same results?

Anonymous: We have this myth of a ‘fast learner’ but research suggests people actually learn at similar rates. A ‘fast learner’ is really just someone who’s been exposed to this problem/material before, maybe multiple times. People seeing something for the first time will struggle.

Eigenrobot: there’s something cruel about asserting that people dont differ in ability like. its cruel to directly rub it in someones face, but its also cruel to proactively lie to people when, be real, they either know youre lying or will end up damaged by believing you.

Some may say “maybe but acknowledging difference in ability is bad because the moral value is a function of their ability and we don’t want a norm of believing that some people are worthless” and to them i say find god.

What happened with No Child Left Behind? One of its architects explains that they knew you can’t actually leave no child behind. That’s impossible. You obviously have to leave some children behind. They were declaring a goal of none with the plan to modifying it to some. Then they met Congress, which has become unable to do reasonable things, so instead of the usual ‘quietly change the rules and declare victory’ the insane requirements stayed on the books and everything went to hell trying to work around them. Whoops.

The good news is that now everyone knows that Congress is unable to fix broken things, so we can correctly plan that laws will stay on the books indefinitely exactly as written no matter how broken they get, and write them accordingly. I endorse both the fully serious and sarcastic versions of that sentence.

Reading is a godsend. The earlier your kids can read, the better, on so many levels. One that is vastly underestimated is this makes parenting vastly easier, you’ve unlocked unlimited cheap, healthy and non-disruptive education and entertainment. It unlocks all the things.

Erik Hoel here says that with a year of dedicated effort, he got his 3-year-old to read at 9-year-old levels, and offers a guide: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. The core is simple, phonics plus spaced repetition plus books as the center of entertainment. In my experience, you need to push to the critical point where they can largely teach themselves via more reading plus a little adult help (and AI voice help?) and then you are home free.

Eric seems to have focused entirely on reading first and ignored other subjects, including math, while he was doing that. This actually seems exactly right to me, if you can (as he did) get your child to buy in, because reading unlocks all the things and builds on itself. Get to that critical point first, worry about everything else (that isn’t a short term practical need) later.

A woman virtuously notices she is confused about why mirrors work the way they do and asks, essentially, ‘mirrors how do they even work,’ as opposed to most other people who have no idea how mirrors work the way they do. That’s great, thumbs up.

Then this gets quoted with ‘this is why we need the department of education,’ but no, actually we had a department of education and not only does no one know no one asks the question. This is why you don’t need the department of education. You need an LLM, and you need to teach people to be curious and give them actual education.

We all know it works. So why don’t schools use it?

Eric Hoel: “The power of spaced repetition has been known for 150 years. It replicates and has large effects. So why is spaced repetition (or even its more implementable form of spiral learning) not used all the time in classrooms? No one knows!”

Spaced repetition works so well that it ends up causing me to memorize a lot of spoilers that I actively don’t want to remember. As in, I’ll keep trying not to think of the pink elephant, to remind myself to forget, at increasingly long intervals, which cause me to remember, and whoops. Damn it. One could use this power for good.

Paper suggests new way to teach economics nonlinearly, supposedly so it will line up with how people learn. I think this is essentially ‘include spaced repetition in your lecture plan.’ Which is one of those obviously good ideas that no one implements.

bosco: 4yo is probably ready to memorize her address, and at least one phone number, in case of emergencies, but she is completely uninterested when I try to teach her the spiel any tips?

Niels Hoven: If you’re having trouble getting your kid to remember your phone number, make it the password to your iPad’s lock screen and watch how quickly they memorize it

Kelsey Piper: We’ve been encouraging the eight year old to pick up some history by saying to one another in front of her “oh, the switch passcode is the year of the Marco Polo bridge incident” or “yeah I changed it to the year Constantinople was sacked in the Fourth Crusade.”

It seems like something you could study and measure, but it seems no one has?

Pamela Hobart: why do so few people have any real insight into just how *verydisruptive interruptions are?

today’s painful reminder via @PepsMccrea

I’m not even sure ‘learning time lost’ is the right measure, as time is not created equal, and there are different types of learning, some of which are far more disruptable than others, so this can shift learning composition, likely in ways we do not want.

The problem, identified.

Ben Hsieh: Parents will likely say, “Drills and rote memorization? That pales in comparison to my strategy, instilling a lifelong love of learning,” and then not instill a lifelong love of learning.

Drills and rote memorization are not ideal, but they work. If you can do better, great, but way too many parents and schools think they can do better and are wrong.

Autumn: if as a society we value math-based disciplines so much, can i ask why we teach calculus in a way thats optimized to weed out students who wont comply with hazing. why do we design them to teach horrible habits for later studies in math?

Sarah Constantin: this is a pet peeve of mine.

there are people who want to make classes easier & less advanced (e.g. not teaching calculus in high school) and there are people who want to scout for exceptional talent but there’s very few people pushing for actually teaching the material well!

“let’s try to make sure everyone in this calculus class learns calculus” is a very lonely mission, even though IMO it’s common sense.

In general we have the problem of teaching math in ways that make many students hate math. I don’t think this is especially a problem in calculus, at least the way I learned it (in a high school class)? Autumn suggests the college method is somehow worse.

Obviously ‘won’t comply with hazing’ is a terrible reason to drive someone away, calculus is vital to understanding the world (for intuition and general understanding, not for actually Doing Calculus, I actively do a happy dance every time I get do Do Calculus which is very rare) and at minimum we want everyone who takes such a class to learn calculus.

However, in terms of the math-based disciplines, as long as we are gating on actual ability I think weeding people out here is in principle fine? In the sense that if you design a good filter, you’re doing a favor for those you filter out, except that now they don’t get to understand calculus.

I strongly agree with this. It is very obvious interacting with kids that they yearn for meaningful work in the ordinary sense of work

Ozy Brennan: my pet parenting theories:

  1. Children yearn for meaningful work; child labor is bad but we’ve overcorrected.

  2. Whenever possible, children should be brought along to adult activities instead of adults going to child activities.

tips for bringing kids along to adult activities: bring a Kindle or (in extreme situations) a laptop. explain behavioral norms ahead of time. allow independence. have friends who like kids. prioritize activities you and kids both like (museums, movies, parks, whatever).

Putting children to pointless industrial work is not a good idea. But if they can understand why what they are doing is useful, yeah, they really dig it, and it seems obviously great for them and also great for you.

For trips, you have to calibrate to your particular kids, but yes, absolutely, especially once the kids cross the ‘can be entertained by a book’ threshold.

Patrick Collison: In which domains are elite practitioners celebrating the kids being better than ever before? Would love to read about a few instances. (Not just where there’s one particular genius, such as Ashwin Sah’s recent success, but where “the kids” as some kind of aggregate appear to be improving.)

Michael Nielsen: It was perhaps in my third week of linear algebra (MP 174!) that the professor told me that incoming students were noticeably worse at math than they used to be There are a very large number of potential confounders here. The point, of course: that was ~30 years ago. “Back when I was a boy…” nostalgia seems to be time-invariant.

I’ll state my prejudice, backed by a wide smattering of anecdotes, and not much else: the top 0.1% today are vastly more competent across a much wider range of subjects than 20 years ago. And that same statement was also true 20 years ago. And 40 years ago. And 60 years ago…

(I don’t mean that a given individual is more competent in every domain. But the ceiling per-domain will be higher, and the range of domains much broader.)

For comparison, the 1939 Putnam, where (IIRC) Feynman was Putnam Fellow. And the 2023 Putnam. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather take the first.

Charles: I think the answer to this is “all of them” or close to it. The very best teenagers at almost every endeavor are better than they’ve ever been.

It’s below the 90th percentile (maybe even higher) where it’s a different story.

Is are children learning? In high school math, the answer seems to be no. The 50th percentile student gets a 230 in 8th grade on this test, and then a 234 in 12th (a second source said 232→237, but that’s the same thing), and we know from the higher percentiles that the test is not being saturated here. Note that reading scores only increased 5 points, from 224→229.

The obvious question is, if students are learning this little, why are we wasting their childhoods in school at all? It seems like there is no point. One would think that at least this much improvement would happen via osmosis and practical learning.

Paul Graham: 13 yo asked me to teach him how to write essays. I asked if he wanted to learn how to write real essays, or the kind you have to write in school. He said the school kind, because he’s writing one for school.

I don’t mind if my kids have to learn math that’s not real math or writing that’s not real writing or science that’s just words, but at the same time as I teach them these things I always try to give them an idea of how they’re fake, and what the real version is like.

At least 13 yo won’t spend years puzzling over how the “conclusion” is supposed to be different from the “introduction” even though they’re saying the same things. I told him upfront it’s just an artifact of this fake format.

RashLabs: How does one write a good essay for school?

Paul Graham: You just write a good essay. But your teachers may freak out if you do.

Patrick McKenzie: Good essays disrupt the production function of teachers w/r/t essay grading/correction. Some teachers give some students a bit of leeway to take more of their cycles than generally required, some of the time.

I once wrote an essay about how the hamburger essay format (buns on top and bottom, three layers in middle) was artificial, limiting, and unengaging, and got a talking to which was… at least minimally helpful.

There are some skills, especially more basic things like spelling and grammar, where the two types of good line up. Being able to write a good School Essay does give you a leg up on a Real Essay, if you don’t get trapped in the arbitrary parts of the format. But past a certain point, they are very different skills.

Paul is nailing the key point. Which is, if a child must write a School Essay, it is vital not to gaslight them about what they are writing, or pretend it has much to do with a Real Essay. Never pretend the fake thing is not fake.

Discussion about this post

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RFK Jr.’s CDC panel ditches some flu shots based on anti-vaccine junk data

ACIP, anti-vaccine, CDC, health / /

Flu shots with thimerosal abandoned, despite decades of data showing they’re safe.

Dr. Martin Kulldorff, chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, during the first meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee On Immunization Practices on June 25, 2025. Credit: Getty | Bloomberg

The vaccine panel hand-selected by health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday voted overwhelmingly to drop federal recommendations for seasonal flu shots that contain the ethyl-mercury containing preservative thimerosal. The panel did so after hearing a misleading and cherry-picked presentation from an anti-vaccine activist.

There is extensive data from the last quarter century proving that the antiseptic preservative is safe, with no harms identified beyond slight soreness at the injection site, but none of that data was presented during today’s meeting.

The significance of the vote is unclear for now. The vast majority of seasonal influenza vaccines currently used in the US—about 96 percent of flu shots in 2024–2025—do not contain thimerosal. The preservative is only included in multi-dose vials of seasonal flu vaccines, where it prevents the growth of bacteria and fungi potentially introduced as doses are withdrawn.

However, thimerosal is more common elsewhere in the world for various multi-dose vaccine vials, which are cheaper than the single-dose vials more commonly used in the US. If other countries follow the US’s lead and abandon thimerosal, it could increase the cost of vaccines in other countries and, in turn, lead to fewer vaccinations.

Broken process

However, it remains unclear what impact today’s vote will have—both in the US and abroad. Normally, before voting on any significant changes to vaccine recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the committee that met today—the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)— would go through an exhaustive process. That includes thoroughly reviewing and discussing the extensive safety and efficacy data of the vaccines, the balance of their benefits and harms, equity considerations, and the feasibility and resource implications of their removal.

But, instead, the committee heard a single presentation given by anti-vaccine activist, Lyn Redwood, who was once the president of the anti-vaccine organization founded by Kennedy, Children’s Health Defense.

Thimerosal has long been a target of anti-vaccine activists like Redwood, who hold fast to the false and thoroughly debunked claim that vaccines—particularly thimerosal-containing vaccines—cause autism and neurological disorders. Her presentation today was a smorgasbord of anti-vaccine talking points against thimerosal, drawing on old and fringe studies she claimed prove that thimerosal is an ineffective preservative, kills cells in petri dishes, and can be found in the brains of baby monkeys after it has been injected into them. The presentation did not appear to have gone through any vetting by the CDC, and an earlier version contained a reference to a study that does not exist.

Yesterday, CBS News reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is hiring Redwood to oversee vaccine safety. In response, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) called Redwood an “extremist,” and urged the White House to immediately reverse the decision. “We cannot allow a few truly deranged individuals to distort the plain truth and facts around vaccines so badly,” Murray said in a statement.

CDC scientists censored

Prior to the meeting, CDC scientists posted a background briefing document on thimerosal. It contained summaries of around two dozen studies that all support the safety of thimerosal and/or find no association with autism or neurological disorders. It also explained how in 1999, health experts and agencies made plans to remove thimerosal from childhood vaccines out of an abundance of caution for concern that it was adding to cumulative exposures that could hypothetically become toxic—at high doses, thimerosal can be dangerous. By 2001, it was removed from every childhood vaccine in the US and remains so to this day. But, since then, studies have found thimerosal to be perfectly safe in vaccines. All the studies listed by the CDC in support of thimerosal were published after 2001.

The document also contained a list of nearly two dozen studies claiming to find a link to autism, but where described by the CDC as having “significant methodological limitations.” The Institute of Medicine also called them “uninterpretable, and therefore, noncontributory with respect to causality.” Every single one of the studies was authored by the anti-vaccine father and son duo Mark and David Geier.

In March, it came to light that Kennedy had hired David Geier to the US health department to continue trying to prove a link between autism and vaccines. He is now working on the issue.

The CDC’s thimerosal document was removed from the ACIP’s meeting documents prior to the meeting. Robert Malone, one of the new ACIP members who holds anti-vaccine views, said during the meeting that it was taken down because it “was not authorized by the Office of the Secretary [Kennedy].” You can read it here.

Lone voice

In the meeting today, Kennedy’s hand-selected ACIP members did not ask Redwood any questions about the data or arguments she made against thimerosal. Nearly all of them readily accepted that thimerosal should be removed entirely. The only person to push back was Cody Meissner, a pediatric professor at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine who has served on ACIP in the past—arguably the most qualified and reasonable member of the new lineup.

“I’m not quite sure how to respond to this presentation,” he said after Redwood finished her slides. “This is an old issue that has been addressed in the past. … I guess one of the most important [things] to remember is that thimerosal is metabolized into ethylmercury and thiosalicylate. It’s not metabolized into methylmercury, which is in fish and shellfish. Ethylmercury is excreted much more quickly from the body. It is not associated with the high neurotoxicity that methylmercury is,” he explained.

Meissner scoffed at the committee even spending time on it. “So, of all the issues that I think we, ACIP, needs to focus on, this is not a big issue. … no study has ever indicated any harm from thimerosal. It’s been used in vaccines … since before World War II.

But he did express concern that it could be removed from the vaccine used globally.

“The recommendations the ACIP makes are followed among many countries around the world,” he said. “And removing thimerosal from all vaccines that are used in other countries, for example, is going to reduce access to these vaccines.”

Anti-vaccine agenda

In the end, the seven-member panel voted in favor of recommending only those seasonal flu vaccines that did not contain thimerosal. There were three separate votes for this, making this recommendation for children, pregnant women, and all adults each, but all with the same outcome: five ‘yes’ votes, one ‘no’ vote (Meissner), and one abstention from anti-vaccine activist and nurse Vicky Pebsworth. After the vote, Pebsworth clarified that she did not support the use of thimerosal in vaccines, but had a quibble with how the voting questions were written.

Prior to the vote, ACIP Chair Martin Kulldorff gave a brief presentation on the MMRV vaccine (measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella/chickenpox). He previewed a proposed recommendation to vote on in a future meeting that would remove the CDC’s recommendation for that vaccine as well.

Photo of Beth Mole

Beth is Ars Technica’s Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes.

RFK Jr.’s CDC panel ditches some flu shots based on anti-vaccine junk data Read More »

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VMware perpetual license holder receives audit letter from Broadcom

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The letter, signed by Aiden Fitzgerald, director of global sales operations at Broadcom, claims that Broadcom will use its time “as efficiently and productively as possible to minimize disruption.”

Still, the security worker that Ars spoke with is concerned about the implications of the audit and said they “expect a big financial impact” for their employer. They added:

Because we are focusing on saving costs and are on a pretty tight financial budget, this will likely have impact on the salary negotiations or even layoffs of employees. Currently, we have some very stressed IT managers [and] legal department [employees] …

The employee noted that they are unsure if their employer exceeded its license limits. If the firm did, it could face “big” financial repercussions, the worker noted.

Users deny wrongdoing

As Broadcom works to ensure that people aren’t using VMware outside its terms, some suggest that the semiconductor giant is wasting some time by investigating organizations that aren’t violating agreements.

After Broadcom started sending cease-and-desist letters, at least one firm claimed that it got a letter from Broadcom despite no longer using VMware at all.

Additionally, various companies claimed that they received a cease-and-desist from Broadcom despite not implementing any updates after their VMware support contract expired.

The employee at the Dutch firm that received an audit notice this month claimed that the only update that their employer has issued to the VMware offerings it uses since support ended was a “critical security patch.”

That employee also claimed to Ars that their company didn’t receive a cease-and-desist letter from Broadcom before being informed of an audit.

Broadcom didn’t respond to Ars’ request for comment ahead of publication, so we’re unable to confirm if the company is sending audit letters without sending cease-and-desist letters first. Ars also reached out to Connor Consulting but didn’t hear back.

“When we saw the news that they were going to send cease-and-desist letters and audits, our management thought it was a bluff and that they would never do that,” the anonymous security worker said.

Broadcom’s litigious techniques to ensure VMware agreements are followed have soured its image among some current and former customers. Broadcom’s $69 billion VMware acquisition has proven lucrative, but as Broadcom approaches two years of VMware ownership, there are still calls for regulation of its practices, which some customers and partners believe are “legally and ethically flawed.”

VMware perpetual license holder receives audit letter from Broadcom Read More »

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During a town hall Wednesday, NASA officials on stage looked like hostages

Donald Trump, janet petro, NASA, nasa budget, Science, Space, space policy, space science / /

A Trump appointee suggests NASA may not have a new administrator until next year.

NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens, acting administrator Janet Petro, chief of staff Brian Hughes, associate administrator Vanessa Wyche, and deputy associate administrator Casey Swails held a town hall with NASA employees Wednesday. Credit: NASA

The four people at the helm of America’s space agency held a town hall meeting with employees Wednesday, fielding questions about downsizing, layoffs, and proposed budget cuts that threaten to undermine NASA’s mission and prestige.

Janet Petro, NASA’s acting administrator, addressed questions from an auditorium at NASA Headquarters in Washington. She was joined by Brian Hughes, the agency’s chief of staff, a political appointee who was formerly a Florida-based consultant active in city politics and in Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Two other senior career managers, Vanessa Wyche and Casey Swails, were also on the stage.

They tried to put a positive spin on the situation at NASA. Petro, Wyche, and Swails are civil servants, not Trump loyalists. None of them looked like they wanted to be there. The town hall was not publicized outside of NASA ahead of time, but live video of the event was available—unadvertised—on an obscure NASA streaming website. The video has since been removed.

8 percent down

NASA’s employees are feeling the pain after the White House proposed a budget cut of nearly 25 percent in fiscal year 2026, which begins October 1. The budget request would slash NASA’s topline budget by nearly 25 percent, from $24.8 billion to $18.8 billion. Adjusted for inflation, this would be the smallest NASA budget since 1961, when the first American launched into space.

“The NASA brand is really strong still, and we have a lot of exciting missions ahead of us,” Petro said. “So, I know it’s a hard time that we’re going to be navigating, but again, you have my commitment that I’m here and I will share all of the information that I have when I get it.”

It’s true that NASA employees, along with industry officials and scientists who regularly work with the agency, are navigating through what would most generously be described as a period of great uncertainty. The perception among NASA’s workforce is far darker. “NASA is f—ed,” one current leader in the agency told Ars a few weeks ago, soon after President Trump rescinded his nomination of billionaire businessman and commercial astronaut Jared Isaacman to be the agency’s next administrator.

Janet Petro, NASA’s acting administrator, is seen in 2020 at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

Before the White House released its detailed budget proposal in May, NASA and other federal agencies were already scrambling to respond to the Trump administration’s directives to shrink the size of the government. While NASA escaped the mass layoffs of probationary employees that affected other departments, the space agency offered buyouts and incentives for civil servants to retire early or voluntarily leave their posts.

About 900 NASA employees signed up for the first round of the government’s “deferred resignation” program. Casey Swails, NASA’s deputy associate administrator, said Wednesday that number is now up to 1,500 after NASA announced another chance for employees to take the government’s deferred resignation offer. This represents about 8 percent of NASA’s workforce, and the window for employees to apply runs until July 25.

One takeaway from Wednesday’s town hall is that at least some NASA leaders want to motivate more employees to resign voluntarily. Hughes said a “major reason” for luring workers to leave the agency is to avoid “being in a spot where we have to do the involuntary options.”

Rumors of these more significant layoffs, or reductions in force, have hung over NASA for several months. If that happens, workers may not get the incentives the government is offering today to those who leave the agency on their own. Swails said NASA isn’t currently planning any such layoff, although she left the door open for the situation to change: “We’re doing everything we can to avoid going down that path.”

Ultimately, it will depend on how many employees NASA can get to resign on their own. If it’s not enough, layoffs may still be an option.

Many questions, few answers

Nearly all of the questions employees addressed to NASA leadership Wednesday were submitted anonymously, and in writing: When might Trump nominate someone for NASA administrator to take Isaacman’s place? Will any of NASA’s 10 field centers be closed? What is NASA going to do about Trump’s budget proposal, particularly its impact on science missions?

Their responses to these questions, in order: Probably not any time soon, maybe, and nothing.

The Trump administration selected Petro, an engineer and former Army helicopter pilot, to become acting head of NASA on Inauguration Day in January. Bill Nelson, who served as a Florida senator until 2019, resigned the NASA administrator job when former President Biden left the White House.

Petro was previously director of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center since 2021, and before that, she was deputy director of the Florida spaceport for 14 years. She leapfrogged NASA’s top civil servant, associate administrator Jim Free, to become acting administrator in January. Free retired from the agency in February. Before the presidential election last year, Free advocated for the next administration to stay the course with NASA’s Artemis program.

But that’s not what the Trump administration wants to do. The White House seeks to cancel the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft, both core elements of the Artemis program to return astronauts to the Moon after two more flights. Under the new plan, NASA would procure commercial transportation to ferry crews to the Moon and Mars in a similar way to how the agency buys rides for its astronauts to the International Space Station in low-Earth orbit.

NASA’s Curiosity rover captured images to create this selfie mosaic on the surface of Mars in 2015. If implemented as written, the Trump budget proposal would mark the first time in 30 years that NASA does not have a Mars lander in development. The agency would instead turn to commercial companies to demonstrate they can deliver payloads, and eventually humans, to the red planet.

The Trump administration’s statements on space policy have emphasized the longer-term goal of human missions to Mars. The White House’s plans for what NASA will do at the Moon after the Artemis program’s first landing are still undefined.

Petro has kept a low profile since becoming NASA’s temporary chief executive five months ago. If Trump moved forward with Isaacman’s nomination, he would likely be NASA administrator today. The Senate was a few days away from confirming Isaacman when Trump pulled his nomination, apparently for political reasons. The White House withdrew the nomination the day after Elon Musk, who backed Isaacman to take the top job at NASA, left the Trump administration.

Who’s running NASA?

Now, Petro could serve out the year as NASA’s acting administrator. Petro is well-regarded at Kennedy Space Center, where she was a fixture in the center’s headquarters building for nearly 20 years. But she lacks a political constituency in the Trump administration and isn’t empowered to make major policy decisions. The budget cuts proposed for NASA came from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, not from within the agency itself.

President Trump has the reins on the process to select the next NASA administrator. Trump named Isaacman for the office in December, more than a month before his inauguration, and the earliest any incoming president has nominated a NASA administrator. Musk had close ties to Trump then, and a human mission to Mars got a mention in Trump’s inauguration speech.

But space issues seem to have fallen far down Trump’s list of priorities. Hughes, who got his job at NASA in part due to his political connections, suggested it might be a while before Trump gets around to selecting another NASA administrator nominee.

“I think the best guess would tell you that it’s hard to imagine it happening before the next six months, and could perhaps go longer than that into the eight- or nine-month range, but that’s purely speculation,” Hughes said, foreseeing impediments such as the large number of other pending nominations for posts across the federal government and high-priority negotiations with Congress over the federal budget.

Congress is also expected to go on recess in August, so the earliest a NASA nominee might get a confirmation hearing is this fall. Then, the Senate must vote to confirm the nominee before they can take office.

The timeline of Isaacman’s nomination for NASA administrator is instructive. Trump nominated Isaacman in December, and his confirmation hearing was in April. He was on the cusp of a confirmation vote in early June when Trump withdrew his nomination May 31.

As NASA awaits a leader with political backing, Petro said the agency is undergoing an overhaul to make it “leaner and more agile.” This is likely to result in office closures, and Hughes indicated NASA might end up shuttering entire field centers.

“To the specific question, will they be closed or consolidated? I don’t think we’re there yet to answer that question, but it is actively a part of the conversation we’re having as we go step-by-step through this,” Hughes said.

What can $4 billion buy you?

While Trump’s budget proposal includes robust funding for human space exploration, it’s a different story for most of the rest of NASA. The agency’s science budget would be cut in half to approximately $3.9 billion. NASA’s technology development division would also be reduced by 50 percent.

If the White House gets its way, NASA would scale back research on the International Space Station and cancel numerous robotic missions in development or already in space. The agency would terminate missions currently exploring Jupiter, on the way to study an asteroid, and approaching interstellar space. It would shut down the largest X-ray space telescope ever built and the only one in its class likely to be operating for the next 10 years.

“There’s a lot of science that can still be done with $4 billion,” Petro said. “How we do science, and how we do partnerships, may change in the future to sort of multiply what we’re doing.”

These partnerships might include asking academic institutions or wealthy benefactors to pitch in money to fund science projects at NASA. The agency might also invite commercial companies to play bigger roles in NASA robotic missions, which are typically owned by the government.

This view of Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere from NASA’s Juno spacecraft includes several of the planet’s southern jet streams. Juno is one of the missions currently in space that NASA would shut down under Trump’s budget request. Credit: NASA

One employee asked what NASA could do to secure more funding in the president’s budget request. But that ship has sailed. The options now available to NASA’s leadership are to support the budget proposal, stay silent, or leave. NASA is an executive agency and part of the Trump administration, and the White House’s budget request is NASA’s, too.

“It’s not our job to advocate, but let’s try to look at this in a positive way,” Petro said. “We’ve still got a lot of money. Let’s see how much mission we can do.”

Ultimately, it’s up to Congress to appropriate funding for NASA and other parts of the government. Lawmakers haven’t signaled where they might land on NASA’s budget, but Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who is influential on space-related matters, released the text of a proposed bill a few weeks ago that would restore funding for the International Space Station and forego cancellation of the Space Launch System rocket, among other things. But Cruz did not have much to say about adding more money for NASA’s science programs.

NASA’s senior leaders did acknowledge Wednesday that the pain of the agency’s downsizing will extend far outside of the agency’s walls.

“Eighty-five percent of our budget goes out the door to contractors,” Petro said. “So, with a reduced budget, absolutely, our contractors will also be impacted. In fact, they’re probably the bigger driver that will be impacted.”

It’s clearly a turbulent time for America’s space agency, and NASA employees have another month to decide if they want to be part of it.

“I know there’s a lot to consider,” Swails said. “There’s a lot that people are thinking about. I would encourage you to talk it out. Tap into your support systems. Talk to your spouse, your partner, your friend, your financial advisor, whomever you consider those trusted advisors for you.”

This sounds like hollow advice, but it seems like it’s all NASA’s workers can do. The Trump administration isn’t waiting for Congress to finalize the budget for 2026. The downsizing is here.

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

During a town hall Wednesday, NASA officials on stage looked like hostages Read More »

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All childhood vaccines in question after first meeting of RFK Jr.’s vaccine panel

ACIP, anti-vaccine, CDC, COVID-19, health, influenza, measles, Robert F Kenned Jr., vaccination / /

A federal vaccine panel entirely hand-selected by health secretary and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gathered for its first meeting Wednesday—and immediately announced that it would re-evaluate the entire childhood vaccination schedule, as well as the one for adults.

The meeting overall was packed with anti-vaccine talking points and arguments from the new panel members, confirming public health experts’ fears that the once-revered panel is now critically corrupted and that Kennedy’s controversial picks will only work to fulfill his long-standing anti-vaccine agenda.

Controversial committee

An hour before the meeting began, the American Academy of Pediatrics came out swinging against the new panel, saying that the panel’s work is “no longer a credible process.” The organization shunned the meeting, refusing to send a liaison to the panel’s meeting, which it has done for decades.

“We won’t lend our name or our expertise to a system that is being politicized at the expense of children’s health,” AAP President Susan Kressly said in a video posted on social media.

The panel in question, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), has for more than 60 years provided rigorous public scientific review, discussion, and trusted recommendations to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how vaccines should be used in the US after they’ve earned approval from the Food and Drug Administration. The CDC typically adopts ACIP’s recommendations, and once that happens, insurance providers are required to cover the cost of the recommended shots.

The system is highly regarded globally. But, on June 9, Kennedy unilaterally and summarily fired all 17 esteemed ACIP members and, two days later, replaced them with eight new people. Some have clear anti-vaccine views, others have controversial and contrarian public health views, and several have little to no expertise in the fields relevant to vaccines.

Last night, it came to light that one of the eight new appointees—Michael Ross, an obstetrics and gynecology physician—had withdrawn from the committee during a financial holdings review that ACIP members are required to complete before beginning work on the panel.

All childhood vaccines in question after first meeting of RFK Jr.’s vaccine panel Read More »

google’s-spotty-find-hub-network-could-get-better-thanks-to-a-small-setup-tweak

Google’s spotty Find Hub network could get better thanks to a small setup tweak

android, bluetooth trackers, Google, Tech / /

Bluetooth trackers have existed for quite a while, but Apple made them worthwhile when it enlisted every iPhone to support AirTags. The tracking was so reliable that Apple had to add anti-stalking features. And although there are just as many Android phones out there, Google’s version of mobile device tracking, known as Find Hub, has been comparatively spotty. Now, Google is about to offer users a choice that could fix Bluetooth tracking on Android.

According to a report from Android Authority, Google is preparing to add a new screen to the Android setup process. This change, integrated with Play Services version 25.24, has yet to roll out widely, but it will allow anyone setting up an Android phone to choose a more effective method of tracking that will bolster Google’s network. This is included in the Play Services changelog as, “You can now configure Find Hub when setting up your phone, allowing the device to be located remotely.”

Trackable devices like AirTags and earbuds work by broadcasting a Bluetooth LE identifier, which phones in the area can see. Our always-online smartphones then report the approximate location of that signal, and with enough reports, the owner can pinpoint the tag. Perhaps wary of the privacy implications, Google rolled out its Find Hub network (previously Find My Device) with harsh restrictions on where device finding would work.

By default, Find Hub only works in busy areas where multiple phones can contribute to narrowing down the location. That’s suboptimal if you actually want to find things. The setting to allow finding in all areas is buried several menus deep in the system settings where no one is going to see it. Currently, the settings for Find Hub are under the security menu of your phone, but the patch may vary from one device to the next. For Pixels, it’s under Security > Device finders > Find Hub > Find your offline devices. Yeah, not exactly discoverable.

Google’s spotty Find Hub network could get better thanks to a small setup tweak Read More »

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Ubuntu disables Intel GPU security mitigations, promises 20% performance boost

Biz & IT, intel gpu, Security, Ubuntu / /

Ubuntu users could see up to a 20 percent boost in graphics performance on Intel-based systems under a change that will turn off security mitigations for blunting a class of attacks known as Spectre.

Spectre, you may recall, came to public notice in 2018. Spectre attacks are based on the observation that performance enhancements built into modern CPUs open a side channel that can leak secrets a CPU is processing. The performance enhancement, known as speculative execution, predicts future instructions a CPU might receive and then performs the corresponding tasks before they are even called. If the instructions never come, the CPU discards the work it performed. When the prediction is correct, the CPU has already completed the task.

By using code that forces a CPU to execute carefully selected instructions, Spectre attacks can extract confidential data that the CPU would have accessed had it carried out the ghost instructions. Over the past seven years, researchers have uncovered multiple attack variants based on the architectural flaws, which are unfixable. CPU manufacturers have responded by creating patches in both micro code and binary code that restrict speculative execution operations in certain scenarios. These restrictions, of course, usually degrade CPU performance.

When the investment costs more than the return

Over time, those mitigations have degraded graphics processing performance by as much as 20 percent, a member of the Ubuntu development team recently reported. Additionally, the team member said, Ubuntu will integrate many of the same mitigations directly into its Kernel, specifically in the Questing Quokka release scheduled for October. In consultation with their counterparts at Intel, Ubuntu security engineers have decided to disable the mitigations in the device driver for the Intel Graphics Compute Runtime.

“After discussion between Intel and Canonical’s security teams, we are in agreement that Spectre no longer needs to be mitigated for the GPU at the Compute Runtime level,” Ubuntu developer Shane McKee wrote. He continued:

At this point, Spectre has been mitigated in the kernel, and a clear warning from the Compute Runtime build serves as a notification for those running modified kernels without those patches. For these reasons, we feel that Spectre mitigations in Compute Runtime no longer offer enough security impact to justify the current performance tradeoff.

McKee went on to say that as a result, “Users can expect up to 20% performance improvement.”

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The axion may help clean up the messy business of dark matter

axion, Dark Matter, Features, particles, Science, standard model, WIMPs / /

We haven’t found evidence of the theoretical particle, but it’s still worth investigating.

In recent years, a curious hypothetical particle called the axion, invented to address challenging problems with the strong nuclear force, has emerged as a leading candidate to explain dark matter. Although the potential for axions to explain dark matter has been around for decades, cosmologists have only recently begun to seriously search for them. Not only might they be able to resolve some issues with older hypotheses about dark matter, but they also offer a dizzying array of promising avenues for finding them.

But before digging into what the axion could be and why it’s so useful, we have to explore why the vast majority of physicists, astronomers, and cosmologists accept the evidence that dark matter exists and that it’s some new kind of particle. While it’s easy to dismiss the dark matter hypothesis as some sort of modern-day epicycle, the reality is much more complex (to be fair to epicycles, it was an excellent idea that fit the data extremely well for many centuries).

The short version is that nothing in the Universe adds up.

We have many methods available to measure the mass of large objects like galaxies and clusters. We also have various methods to assess the effects of matter in the Universe, like the details of the cosmic microwave background or the evolution of the cosmic web. There are two broad categories: methods that rely solely on estimating the amount of light-emitting matter and methods that estimate the total amount of matter, whether it’s visible or not.

For example, if you take a picture of a generic galaxy, you’ll see that most of the light-emitting matter is concentrated in the core. But when you measure the rotation rate of the galaxy and use that to estimate the total amount of matter, you get a much larger number, plus some hints that it doesn’t perfectly overlap with the light-emitting stuff. The same thing happens for clusters of galaxies—the dynamics of galaxies within a cluster suggest the presence of much more matter than what we can see, and the two types of matter don’t always align. When we use gravitational lensing to measure a cluster’s contents, we again see evidence for much more matter than is plainly visible.

The tiny variations in the cosmic microwave background tell us about the influence of both matter that interacts with light and matter that doesn’t. It clearly shows that some invisible component dominated the early Universe. When we look at the large-scale structure, invisible matter rules the day. Matter that doesn’t interact with light can form structures much more quickly than matter that gets tangled up by interacting with itself. Without invisible matter, galaxies like the Milky Way can’t form quickly enough to match observations of the early Universe.

The calculations of Big Bang nucleosynthesis, which correctly predict the abundances of hydrogen and helium in the Universe, put strict constraints on how much light-emitting matter there can be, and that number simply isn’t large enough to accommodate all these disparate results.

Across cosmic scales in time and space, the evidence just piles up: There’s more stuff out there than meets the eye, and it can’t simply be dim-but-otherwise-regular matter.

Weakness of WIMPs

Since pioneering astronomer Vera Rubin first revealed dark matter in a big way in the 1970s, the astronomical community has tried every idea it could think of to explain these observations. One tantalizing possibility is that the dark matter is the entirely wrong approach; instead, we’re misunderstanding gravity itself. But so far, half a century later, all attempts to modify gravity ultimately fail one observational test or another. In fact, the most popular modified gravity theory, known as MOND, still requires the existence of dark matter, just less of it.

As the evidence piled up for dark matter in the 1980s and ’90s, astronomers began to favor a particular explanation known as WIMPs, for weakly interacting massive particles. WIMPs weren’t just made up on the spot. They were motivated by particle physics and our attempts to create theories beyond the Standard Model. Many extensions to the Standard Model predicted the existence of WIMP-like particles that could be made in abundance in the early Universe, generating a population of heavy-ish particles that remained largely in the cosmic background.

WIMPs seemed like a good idea, as they could both explain the dark matter problem and bring us to a new understanding of fundamental physics. The idea is that we are swimming in an invisible sea of dark matter particles that almost always simply pass through us undetected. But every once in a while, a WIMP should interact via the weak nuclear force (hence the origin of its name) and give off a shower of byproducts. One problem: We needed to detect one of these rare interactions. So experiments sprang up around the world to catch an elusive dark matter candidate.

With amazing names like CRESST, SNOLAB, and XENON, these experiments have spent years searching for a WIMP to no avail. They’re not an outright failure, though; instead, with every passing year, we know more and more about what the WIMP can’t be—what mass ranges and interaction strengths are now excluded.

By now, that list of what the WIMP can’t be is rather long, and large regions within the space of possibilities are now hard-and-fast ruled out.

OK, that’s fine. I mean, it’s a huge bummer that our first best guess didn’t pan out, but nature is under no obligation to make this easy for us. Maybe the dark matter isn’t a WIMP at all.

More entities are sitting around the particle physics attic that we might be able to use to explain this deep cosmic mystery. And one of those hypothetical particles is called the axion.

Cleaning up with axions

It was the late 1970s, and physicist Frank Wilczek was shopping for laundry detergent. He found one brand standing out among the bottles: Axion. He thought that would make an excellent name for a particle.

He was right.

For decades, physicists had been troubled by a little detail of the theory used to explain the strong nuclear force, known as quantum chromodynamics. By all measurements, that force obeys charge-parity symmetry, which means if you take an interaction, flip all the charges around, and run it in a mirror, you’ll get the same result. But quantum chromodynamics doesn’t enforce that symmetry on its own.

It seemed to be a rather fine-tuned state of affairs, with the strong force unnaturally maintaining a symmetry when there was nothing in the theory to explain why.

In 1977, Roberto Peccei and Helen Quinn discovered an elegant solution. By introducing a new field into the Universe, it could naturally introduce charge-parity symmetry into the equations of quantum chromodynamics. The next year, Wilczek and Gerard ‘t Hooft independently realized that this new field would imply the existence of a particle.

The axion.

Dark matter was just coming on the cosmic scene. Axions weren’t invented to solve that problem, but physicists very quickly realized that the complex physics of the early Universe could absolutely flood the cosmos with axions. What’s more, they would largely ignore regular matter and sit quietly in the background. In other words, the axion was an excellent dark matter candidate.

But axions were pushed aside as the WIMPs hypothesis gained more steam. Back-of-the-envelope calculations showed that the natural mass range of the WIMP would precisely match the abundances needed to explain the amount of dark matter in the Universe, with no other fine-tuning or adjustments required.

Never ones to let the cosmologists get in the way of a good time, the particle physics community kept up interest in the axion, finding different variations on the particle and devising clever experiments to see if the axion existed. One experiment requires nothing more than a gigantic magnet since, in an extremely strong magnetic field, axions can spontaneously convert into photons.

To date, no hard evidence for the axion has shown up. But WIMPs have proven to be elusive, so cosmologists are showing more love to the axion and identifying surprising ways that it might be found.

A sloshy Universe

Axions are tiny, even for subatomic particles. The lightest known particle is the neutrino, which weighs no more than 0.086 electron-volts (or eV). Compare that to, say, the electron, which weighs over half a million eV. The exact mass of the axion isn’t known, and there are many models and versions of the particle, but it can have a mass all the way down to a trillionth of an eV… and even lower.

In fact, axions belong to a much broader class of “ultra-light” dark matter particle candidates, which can have masses down to 10^-24 eV. This is multiple billions of times lighter than the WIMPs—and indeed most of the particles of the Standard Model.

That means axions and their friends act nothing like most of the particles of the Standard Model.

First off, it may not even be appropriate to refer to them as particles. They have such little mass that their de Broglie wavelength—the size of the quantum wave associated with every particle—can stretch into macroscopic proportions. In some cases, this wavelength can be a few meters across. In others, it’s comparable to a star or a solar system. In still others, a single axion “particle” can stretch across an entire galaxy.

In this view, the individual axion particles would be subsumed into a larger quantum wave, like an ocean of dark matter so large and vast that it doesn’t make sense to talk about its individual components.

And because axions are bosons, they can synchronize their quantum wave nature, becoming a distinct state of matter: a Bose-Einstein condensate. In a Bose-Einstein condensate, most of the particles share the same low-energy state. When this happens, the de Broglie wavelength is larger than the average separation between the particles, and the waves of the individual particles all add up together, creating, in essence, a super-particle.

This way, we may get axion “stars”—clumps of axions acting as a single particle. Some of these axion stars may be a few thousand kilometers across, wandering across interstellar space. Still others may be the size of galactic cores, which might explain an issue with the traditional WIMP picture.

The best description of dark matter in general is that it is “cold,” meaning that the individual particles do not move fast compared to the speed of light. This allows them to gravitationally interact and form the seeds of structures like galaxies and clusters. But this process is a bit too efficient. According to simulations, cold dark matter tends to form more small, sub-galactic clumps than we observe, and it tends to make the cores of galaxies much, much denser than we see.

Axions, and ultra-light dark matter in general, can provide a solution here because they would operate in two modes. At large scales, they can act like regular cold dark matter. But inside galaxies, they can condense, forming tight clumps. Critically, these clumps have uniform densities within them. This smooths out the distribution of axions within galaxies, preventing the formation of smaller clumps and ultra-dense cores.

A messy affair

Over the decades, astronomers and physicists have found an astounding variety of ways that axions might reveal their presence in the Universe. Because of their curious ability to transmute into photons in the presence of strong magnetic fields, any place that features strong fields—think neutron stars or even the solar corona—could produce extra radiation due to axions. That makes them excellent hunting grounds for the particles.

Axion stars—also sometimes known provocatively as dark stars—would be all but invisible under most circumstances. That is, until they destabilize in a cascading chain reaction of axion-to-photon conversion and blow themselves up.

Even the light from distant galaxies could betray the existence of axions. If they exist in a dense swarm surrounding a galaxy, their conversion to photons will contribute to the galaxy’s light, creating a signal that the James Webb Space Telescope can pick up.

To date, despite all these ideas, there hasn’t been a single shred of solid evidence for the existence of axions, which naturally drops them down a peg or two on the credibility scale. But that doesn’t mean that axions aren’t worth investigating further. The experiments conducted so far only place limits on what properties they might have; there’s still plenty of room for viable axion and axion-like candidates, unlike their WIMPy cousins.

There’s definitely something funny going on with the Universe. The dark matter hypothesis—that there is a large, invisible component to matter in the Universe—isn’t that great of an idea, but it’s the best one we have that fits the widest amount of available evidence. For a while, we thought we knew what the identity of that matter might be, and we spent decades (and small fortunes) in that search.

But while WIMPs were the mainstay hypothesis, that didn’t snuff out alternative paths. Dozens of researchers have investigated modified forms of gravity to equal levels of unsuccessfulness. And a small cadre has kept the axion flame alive. It’s a good thing, too, since their obscure explorations of the corners of particle physics laid the groundwork to flesh out axions into a viable competitor to WIMPs.

No, we haven’t found any axions. And we still don’t know what the dark matter is. But it’s only by pushing forward—advancing new ideas, testing them against the reality of observations, and when they fail, trying again—will we come to a new understanding. Axions may or may not be dark matter; the best we can say is that they are promising. But who wouldn’t want to live in a Universe filled with dark stars, invisible Bose-Einstein condensates, and strange new particles?

Photo of Paul Sutter

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