Rejus Almole – Page 6

Under Trump, EPA’s enforcement of environmental laws collapses, report finds

Environmental Protection Agency, Policy, pollution, Science, syndication, trump administration / Rejus Almole / February 7, 2026

The Environmental Protection Agency has drastically pulled back on holding polluters accountable.

Enforcement against polluters in the United States plunged in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, a far bigger drop than in the same period of his first term, according to a new report from a watchdog group.

By analyzing a range of federal court and administrative data, the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project found that civil lawsuits filed by the US Department of Justice in cases referred by the Environmental Protection Agency dropped to just 16 in the first 12 months after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025. That is 76 percent less than in the first year of the Biden administration.

Trump’s first administration filed 86 such cases in its first year, which was in turn a drop from the Obama administration’s 127 four years earlier.

“Our nation’s landmark environmental laws are meaningless when EPA does not enforce the rules,” Jen Duggan, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, said in a statement.

The findings echo two recent analyses from the nonprofits Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and Earthjustice, which both documented dwindling environmental enforcement under Trump.

From day one of Trump’s second term, the administration has pursued an aggressive deregulatory agenda, scaling back regulations and health safeguards across the federal government that protect water, air and other parts of the environment. This push to streamline industry activities has been particularly favorable for fossil fuel companies. Trump declared an “energy emergency” immediately after his inauguration.

At the EPA, Administrator Lee Zeldin launched in March what the administration called the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history”: 31 separate efforts to roll back restrictions on air and water pollution; to hand over more authority to states, some of which have a long history of supporting lax enforcement; and to relinquish EPA’s mandate to act on climate change under the Clean Air Act.

The new report suggests the agency is also relaxing enforcement of existing law. Neither the White House nor the EPA responded to a request for comment.

A “compliance first” approach

Part of the decline in lawsuits against polluters could be due to the lack of staff to carry them out, experts say. According to an analysis from E&E News, at least a third of lawyers in the Justice Department’s environment division have left in the past year. Meanwhile, the EPA in 2025 laid off hundreds of employees who monitored pollution that could hurt human health.

Top agency officials are also directing staff to issue fewer violation notices and reduce other enforcement actions. In December, the EPA formalized a new “compliance first” enforcement policy that stresses working with suspected violators to correct problems before launching any formal action that could lead to fines or mandatory correction measures.

“Formal enforcement … is appropriate only when compliance assurance or informal enforcement is inapplicable or insufficient to achieve rapid compliance,” wrote Craig Pritzlaff, who is now a principal deputy assistant EPA administrator, in a Dec. 5 memo to all enforcement officials and regional offices.

Only in rare cases involving an immediate hazard should enforcers use traditional case tools, Pritzlaff said. “Immediate formal enforcement may be required in certain circumstances, such as when there is an emergency that presents significant harm to human health and the environment,” he wrote.

Federal agencies like the EPA, with staffs far outmatched in size compared to the vast sectors of the economy they oversee, typically have used enforcement actions not only to deal with violators but to deter other companies from breaking the law. Environmental advocates worry that without environmental cops visible on the beat, compliance will erode.

Pritzlaff joined the EPA last fall after five years heading up enforcement for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, where nonprofit watchdog group Public Citizen noted that he was known as a “reluctant regulator.” Public Citizen and other advocacy groups criticized TCEQ under Pritzlaff’s leadership for its reticence to take decisive action against repeat violators.

One example: An INEOS chemical plant had racked up close to 100 violations over a decade before a 2023 explosion that sent one worker to the hospital, temporarily shut down the Houston Ship Channel and sparked a fire that burned for an hour. Public Citizen said it was told by TCEQ officials that the agency allowed violations to accumulate over the years, arguing it was more efficient to handle multiple issues in a single enforcement action.

“But that proved to be untrue, instead creating a complex backlog of cases that the agency is still struggling to resolve,” Public Citizen wrote last fall after Pritzlaff joined the EPA. “That’s not efficiency, it’s failure.”

Early last year, TCEQ fined INEOS $2.3 million for an extensive list of violations that occurred between 2016 and 2021.

“A slap on the wrist”

The EPA doesn’t always take entities to court when they violate environmental laws. At times, the agency can resolve these issues through less-formal administrative cases, which actually increased during the first eight months of Trump’s second term when compared to the same period in the Biden administration, according to the new report.

However, most of these administrative actions involved violations of requirements for risk management plans under the Clean Air Act or municipalities’ violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act. The Trump administration did not increase administrative cases that involve pollution from industrial operations, Environmental Integrity Project spokesperson Tom Pelton said over email.

Another signal of declining enforcement: Through September of last year, the EPA issued $41 million in penalties—$8 million less than the same period in the first year of the Biden administration, after adjusting for inflation. This suggests “the Trump Administration may be letting more polluters get by with a slap on the wrist when the Administration does take enforcement action,” the report reads.

Combined, the lack of lawsuits, penalties, and other enforcement actions for environmental violations could impact communities across the country, said Erika Kranz, a senior staff attorney in the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School, who was not involved in the report.

“We’ve been seeing the administration deregulate by repealing rules and extending compliance deadlines, and this decline in enforcement action seems like yet another mechanism that the administration is using to de-emphasize environmental and public health protections,” Kranz said. “It all appears to be connected, and if you’re a person in the US who is worried about your health and the health of your neighbors generally, this certainly could have effects.”

The report notes that many court cases last longer than a year, so it will take time to get a clearer sense of how environmental enforcement is changing under the Trump administration. However, the early data compiled by the Environmental Integrity Project and other nonprofits shows a clear and steep shift away from legal actions against polluters.

Historically, administrations have a “lot of leeway on making enforcement decisions,” Kranz said. But this stark of a drop could prompt lawsuits against the Trump administration, she added.

“Given these big changes and trends, you might see groups arguing that this is more than just an exercise of discretion or choosing priorities [and] this is more of an abdication of an agency’s core mission and its statutory duties,” Kranz said. “I think it’s going to be interesting to see if groups make those arguments, and if they do, how courts look at them.”

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

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NASA stage show explores “outer” outer space with Henson’s Fraggles

A Space-y Adventure, artemis, Cotterpin, doozer, Florida, Fraggle, fraggle rock, Gobo, Henson Creature Shop, international space station, John Tartaglia, Kennedy Space Center, KSCVC, NASA, RED, Space, Space Coast, Space exploration, space history, stage show, The Jim Henson Company, Uncle Traveling Matt, Universe Theater, Visitor Complex / Rejus Almole / February 7, 2026

(Asked why Traveling Matt would not have recognized the Moon from his time in outer space, Tartaglia said that perhaps he did see it, but only as a thin crescent, and did not equate the two. Or maybe it was that he was “so forward-driven” that he never bothered to look up.)

A postcard with a picture of a “cookie” helps lead Gobo, Red, and Uncle Traveling Matt to learning about the moon and how NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems team is enabling astronaut missions to the lunar surface. Credit: Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex

As Gobo, Red, and Traveling Matt step through the Fraggle hole onto the stage at Kennedy, they are no longer hand-operated puppets but full-body “walk-around” characters. And to remain to scale, that meant up-scaling another character, too.

“When we scaled up the Fraggles to be costume-size, so they could dance and move without being encumbered by being just puppets, we realized that one of the Doozers would have to become puppet-size. That was really fun to do because the real Doozers are six inches tall, and they are animatronic. They’re teeny, and now they get to have their glory as hand puppets,” said Tartaglia, who also voices Gobo for the show and performs as him when in puppet size.

Down at Fraggle Rock

When NASA first contacted the Jim Henson Company about bringing the Fraggles to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, Tartaglia and his team knew it would be cool. And once they decided to have Uncle Traveling Matt be the show’s central character, the plot came together fairly quickly.

“He’s a great character to learn from because he is so oblivious, and he thinks he knows everything, and he really doesn’t. So he’s a great character to use as a bridge for the audience to be able to learn all these awesome facts and figures about NASA,” said Tartaglia.

He and his team also came to appreciate how much Fraggle Rock shares with the space agency, its activities, and goals.

“We all started talking and realized really quickly that Fraggles and Doozers and the whole message of Fraggle Rock—especially about Uncle Matt—is about exploring new worlds, making discoveries, and the whole fragile ecosystem. All of these different worlds need each other and want to work to learn more about each other. It sounded all very aligned with what NASA does and the whole purpose of space exploration,” said Tartaglia.

“So our two worlds that on paper wouldn’t seem connected, made a lot of sense to connect,” he said.

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EU says TikTok needs to drop “addictive design”

Digital Markets Act, EU, European Commision, Policy, syndication, tiktok / Rejus Almole / February 7, 2026

TikTok said: “The Commission’s preliminary findings present a categorically false and entirely meritless depiction of our platform, and we will take whatever steps are necessary to challenge these findings through every means available to us.”

TikTok is owned by China’s ByteDance, although a recent deal with the Trump administration will spin off its US arm into a joint venture majority owned by American investors. The venture will provide data and algorithm security, while ByteDance will retain control of the app’s main business lines in the US, including ecommerce, advertising, and marketing.

European watchdogs have previously taken action against TikTok for breaking the bloc’s digital rules. Last year, Irish regulators issued a 530 million euro fine against TikTok for sending users’ data to China, while Brussels has also probed its online advertising practices.

The EU’s move on Friday comes as other nations move closer to social media bans for teenagers.

Earlier this week, Spain was the latest country to announce it will stop access to social media for children under the age of 16 to curb the potentially harmful impact of online content on young people.

France and the UK are also considering similar measures, following the lead of Australia, which in December became the first country in the world to ban under-16s from holding accounts for 10 apps deemed to be potentially harmful to teenagers and children.

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Sixteen Claude AI agents working together created a new C compiler

agentic AI, AI, AI agents, AI coding, AI development tools, AI programming, AI research, Anthropic, Biz & IT, Claude Code, code agents, Compilers, large language models, machine learning, Nicholas Carlini, Open Source / Rejus Almole / February 6, 2026

Amid a push toward AI agents, with both Anthropic and OpenAI shipping multi-agent tools this week, Anthropic is more than ready to show off some of its more daring AI coding experiments. But as usual with claims of AI-related achievement, you’ll find some key caveats ahead.

On Thursday, Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini published a blog post describing how he set 16 instances of the company’s Claude Opus 4.6 AI model loose on a shared codebase with minimal supervision, tasking them with building a C compiler from scratch.

Over two weeks and nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions costing about $20,000 in API fees, the AI model agents reportedly produced a 100,000-line Rust-based compiler capable of building a bootable Linux 6.9 kernel on x86, ARM, and RISC-V architectures.

Carlini, a research scientist on Anthropic’s Safeguards team who previously spent seven years at Google Brain and DeepMind, used a new feature launched with Claude Opus 4.6 called “agent teams.” In practice, each Claude instance ran inside its own Docker container, cloning a shared Git repository, claiming tasks by writing lock files, then pushing completed code back upstream. No orchestration agent directed traffic. Each instance independently identified whatever problem seemed most obvious to work on next and started solving it. When merge conflicts arose, the AI model instances resolved them on their own.

The resulting compiler, which Anthropic has released on GitHub, can compile a range of major open source projects, including PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, FFmpeg, and QEMU. It achieved a 99 percent pass rate on the GCC torture test suite and, in what Carlini called “the developer’s ultimate litmus test,” compiled and ran Doom.

It’s worth noting that a C compiler is a near-ideal task for semi-autonomous AI model coding: The specification is decades old and well-defined, comprehensive test suites already exist, and there’s a known-good reference compiler to check against. Most real-world software projects have none of these advantages. The hard part of most development isn’t writing code that passes tests; it’s figuring out what the tests should be in the first place.

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Waymo leverages Genie 3 to create a world model for self-driving cars

AI, Cars, Google, self-driving car, waymo, world models / Rejus Almole / February 6, 2026

On the road with AI

The Waymo World Model is not just a straight port of Genie 3 with dashcam videos stuffed inside. Waymo and DeepMind used a specialized post-training process to make the new model generate both 2D video and 3D lidar outputs of the same scene. While cameras are great for visualizing fine details, Waymo says lidar is necessary to add critical depth information to what a self-driving car “sees” on the road—maybe someone should tell Tesla about that.

Using a world model allows Waymo to take video from its vehicles and use prompts to change the route the vehicle takes, which it calls driving action control. These simulations, which come with lidar maps, reportedly offer greater realism and consistency than older reconstructive simulation methods.

With the world model, Waymo can see what would happen if the car took a different turn.

This model can also help improve the self-driving AI even without adding or removing everything. There are plenty of dashcam videos available for training self-driving vehicles, but they lack the multimodal sensor data of Waymo’s vehicles. Dropping such a video into the Waymo World Model generates matching sensor data, showing how the driving AI would have seen that situation.

While the Waymo World Model can create entirely synthetic scenes, the company seems mostly interested in “mutating” the conditions in real videos. The blog post contains examples of changing the time of day or weather, adding new signage, or placing vehicles in unusual places. Or, hey, why not an elephant in the road?

Waymo is ready in case an elephant shows up.

Waymo’s early test cities were consistently sunny (like Phoenix) with little inclement weather. These kinds of simulations could help the cars adapt to the more varied conditions. The new markets include places with more difficult conditions, including Boston and Washington, D.C.

Of course, the benefit of the new AI model will depend on how accurately Genie 3 can simulate the real world. The test videos we’ve seen of Genie 3 run the gamut from pretty believable to uncanny valley territory, but Waymo believes the technology has improved to the point that it can teach self-driving cars a thing or two.

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AI companies want you to stop chatting with bots and start managing them

agentic AI, AI, AI agents, AI and work, AI assistants, AI benchmarks, AI coding, AI development tools, AI security, Anthropic, Biz & IT, chatbots, Claude Code, Claude Opus, Claude Opus 4.6, code agents, Codex, generative ai, GPT-5.3-Codex, large language models, machine learning, openai, sam altman / Rejus Almole / February 5, 2026

Claude Opus 4.6 and OpenAI Frontier pitch a future of supervising AI agents.

On Thursday, Anthropic and OpenAI shipped products built around the same idea: instead of chatting with a single AI assistant, users should be managing teams of AI agents that divide up work and run in parallel. The simultaneous releases are part of a gradual shift across the industry, from AI as a conversation partner to AI as a delegated workforce, and they arrive during a week when that very concept reportedly helped wipe $285 billion off software stocks.

Whether that supervisory model works in practice remains an open question. Current AI agents still require heavy human intervention to catch errors, and no independent evaluation has confirmed that these multi-agent tools reliably outperform a single developer working alone.

Even so, the companies are going all-in on agents. Anthropic’s contribution is Claude Opus 4.6, a new version of its most capable AI model, paired with a feature called “agent teams” in Claude Code. Agent teams let developers spin up multiple AI agents that split a task into independent pieces, coordinate autonomously, and run concurrently.

In practice, agent teams look like a split-screen terminal environment: A developer can jump between subagents using Shift+Up/Down, take over any one directly, and watch the others keep working. Anthropic describes the feature as best suited for “tasks that split into independent, read-heavy work like codebase reviews.” It is available as a research preview.

OpenAI, meanwhile, released Frontier, an enterprise platform it describes as a way to “hire AI co-workers who take on many of the tasks people already do on a computer.” Frontier assigns each AI agent its own identity, permissions, and memory, and it connects to existing business systems such as CRMs, ticketing tools, and data warehouses. “What we’re fundamentally doing is basically transitioning agents into true AI co-workers,” Barret Zoph, OpenAI’s general manager of business-to-business, told CNBC.

Despite the hype about these agents being co-workers, from our experience, these agents tend to work best if you think of them as tools that amplify existing skills, not as the autonomous co-workers the marketing language implies. They can produce impressive drafts fast but still require constant human course-correction.

The Frontier launch came just three days after OpenAI released a new macOS desktop app for Codex, its AI coding tool, which OpenAI executives described as a “command center for agents.” The Codex app lets developers run multiple agent threads in parallel, each working on an isolated copy of a codebase via Git worktrees.

OpenAI also released GPT-5.3-Codex on Thursday, a new AI model that powers the Codex app. OpenAI claims that the Codex team used early versions of GPT-5.3-Codex to debug the model’s own training run, manage its deployment, and diagnose test results, similar to what OpenAI told Ars Technica in a December interview.

“Our team was blown away by how much Codex was able to accelerate its own development,” the company wrote. On Terminal-Bench 2.0, the agentic coding benchmark, GPT-5.3-Codex scored 77.3%, which exceeds Anthropic’s just-released Opus 4.6 by about 12 percentage points.

The common thread across all of these products is a shift in the user’s role. Rather than merely typing a prompt and waiting for a single response, the developer or knowledge worker becomes more like a supervisor, dispatching tasks, monitoring progress, and stepping in when an agent needs direction.

In this vision, developers and knowledge workers effectively become middle managers of AI. That is, not writing the code or doing the analysis themselves, but delegating tasks, reviewing output, and hoping the agents underneath them don’t quietly break things. Whether that will come to pass (or if it’s actually a good idea) is still widely debated.

A new model under the Claude hood

Opus 4.6 is a substantial update to Anthropic’s flagship model. It succeeds Claude Opus 4.5, which Anthropic released in November. In a first for the Opus model family, it supports a context window of up to 1 million tokens (in beta), which means it can process much larger bodies of text or code in a single session.

On benchmarks, Anthropic says Opus 4.6 tops OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 (an earlier model than the one released today) and Google’s Gemini 3 Pro across several evaluations, including Terminal-Bench 2.0 (an agentic coding test), Humanity’s Last Exam (a multidisciplinary reasoning test), and BrowseComp (a test of finding hard-to-locate information online)

Although it should be noted that OpenAI’s GPT-5.3-Codex, released the same day, seemingly reclaimed the lead on Terminal-Bench. On ARC AGI 2, which attempts to test the ability to solve problems that are easy for humans but hard for AI models, Opus 4.6 scored 68.8 percent, compared to 37.6 percent for Opus 4.5, 54.2 percent for GPT-5.2, and 45.1 percent for Gemini 3 Pro.

As always, take AI benchmarks with a grain of salt, since objectively measuring AI model capabilities is a relatively new and unsettled science.

Anthropic also said that on a long-context retrieval benchmark called MRCR v2, Opus 4.6 scored 76 percent on the 1 million-token variant, compared to 18.5 percent for its Sonnet 4.5 model. That gap matters for the agent teams use case, since agents working across large codebases need to track information across hundreds of thousands of tokens without losing the thread.

Pricing for the API stays the same as Opus 4.5 at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, with a premium rate of $10/$37.50 for prompts that exceed 200,000 tokens. Opus 4.6 is available on claude.ai, the Claude API, and all major cloud platforms.

The market fallout outside

These releases occurred during a week of exceptional volatility for software stocks. On January 30, Anthropic released 11 open source plugins for Cowork, its agentic productivity tool that launched on January 12. Cowork itself is a general-purpose tool that gives Claude access to local folders for work tasks, but the plugins extended it into specific professional domains: legal contract review, non-disclosure agreement triage, compliance workflows, financial analysis, sales, and marketing.

By Tuesday, investors reportedly reacted to the release by erasing roughly $285 billion in market value across software, financial services, and asset management stocks. A Goldman Sachs basket of US software stocks fell 6 percent that day, its steepest single-session decline since April’s tariff-driven sell-off. Thomson Reuters led the rout with an 18 percent drop, and the pain spread to European and Asian markets.

The purported fear among investors centers on AI model companies packaging complete workflows that compete with established software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors, even if the verdict is still out on whether these tools can achieve those tasks.

OpenAI’s Frontier might deepen that concern: its stated design lets AI agents log in to applications, execute tasks, and manage work with minimal human involvement, which Fortune described as a bid to become “the operating system of the enterprise.” OpenAI CEO of Applications Fidji Simo pushed back on the idea that Frontier replaces existing software, telling reporters, “Frontier is really a recognition that we’re not going to build everything ourselves.”

Whether these co-working apps actually live up to their billing or not, the convergence is hard to miss. Anthropic’s Scott White, the company’s head of product for enterprise, gave the practice a name that is likely to roll a few eyes. “Everybody has seen this transformation happen with software engineering in the last year and a half, where vibe coding started to exist as a concept, and people could now do things with their ideas,” White told CNBC. “I think that we are now transitioning almost into vibe working.”

Benj Edwards is Ars Technica’s Senior AI Reporter and founder of the site’s dedicated AI beat in 2022. He’s also a tech historian with almost two decades of experience. In his free time, he writes and records music, collects vintage computers, and enjoys nature. He lives in Raleigh, NC.

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US House takes first step toward creating “commercial” deep space program

Commercial, congress, deep space transportation, NASA, new glenn, Space, starship / Rejus Almole / February 4, 2026

A US House committee with oversight of NASA unanimously passed a “reauthorization” act for the space agency on Wednesday. The legislation must still be approved by the full House before being sent to the Senate, which may take up consideration later this month.

Congress passes such reauthorization bills every couple of years, providing the space agency with a general sense of the direction legislators want to see NASA go. They are distinct from appropriations bills, which provide actual funding for specific programs, but nonetheless play an important role in establishing space policy.

There weren’t any huge surprises in the legislation, but there were some interesting amendments. Most notably among these was the Amendment No. 01, offered by the chair of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), as well as its ranking member, Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), and three other legislators.

NASA can consider Artemis alternatives

The amendment concerns acquisition powers bestowed upon NASA by Congress, stating in part: “The Administrator may, subject to appropriations, procure from United States commercial providers operational services to carry cargo and crew safely, reliably, and affordably to and from deep space destinations, including the Moon and Mars.”

That language is fairly general in nature, but the intent seems clear. NASA’s initial missions to the Moon, through Artemis V, have a clearly defined architecture: They must use the Space Launch System rocket, Orion spacecraft, and a lander built by either SpaceX or Blue Origin to complete lunar landings.

But after that? With this amendment, Congress appears to be opening the aperture to commercial companies. That is to say, if SpaceX wanted to bid an end-to-end Starship lunar mission, it could; or if Blue Origin wanted to launch Orion on New Glenn, that is also an option. The language is generalized enough, not specifying “launch” but rather “transportation,” that in-space companies such as Impulse Space could also get creative. Essentially, Congress is telling the US industry that if it is ready to step up, NASA should allow it to bid on lunar cargo and crew missions.

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NASA finally acknowledges the elephant in the room with the SLS rocket

NASA, nasa rocket, Space, space launch system / Rejus Almole / February 4, 2026

“You know, you’re right, the flight rate—three years is a long time.”

The Artemis II mission is not going to the Moon this month. Credit: NASA

The Space Launch System rocket program is now a decade and a half old, and it continues to be dominated by two unfortunate traits: It is expensive, and it is slow.

The massive rocket and its convoluted ground systems, so necessary to baby and cajole the booster’s prickly hydrogen propellant on board, have cost US taxpayers in excess of $30 billion to date. And even as it reaches maturity, the rocket is going nowhere fast.

You remember the last time NASA tried to launch the world’s largest orange rocket, right? The space agency rolled the Space Launch System out of its hangar in March 2022. The first, second, and third attempts at a wet dress rehearsal—elaborate fueling tests—were scrubbed. The SLS rocket was slowly rolled back to its hangar for work in April before returning to the pad in June.

The fourth fueling test also ended early but this time reached to within 29 seconds of when the engines would ignite. This was not all the way to the planned T-9.3 seconds, a previously established gate to launch the vehicle. Nevertheless mission managers had evidently had enough of failed fueling tests. Accordingly, they proceeded into final launch preparations.

The first launch attempt (effectively the fifth wet-dress test), in late August, was scrubbed due to hydrogen leaks and other problems. A second attempt, a week later, also succumbed to hydrogen leaks. Finally, on the next attempt, and seventh overall try at fully fueling and nursing this vehicle through a countdown, the Space Launch System rocket actually took off. After doing so, it flew splendidly.

That was November 16, 2022. More than three years ago. You might think that over the course of the extended interval since then, and after the excruciating pain of spending nearly an entire year conducting fueling tests to try to lift the massive rocket off the pad, some of the smartest engineers in the world, the fine men and women at NASA, would have dug into and solved the leak issues.

You would be wrong.

The second go-round also does not unfold smoothly

On Monday, after rolling the SLS rocket to be used for the Artemis II mission to the pad in January, NASA attempted its first wet-dress test with this new vehicle. At one of the main interfaces where liquid hydrogen enters the vehicle, a leak developed, not dissimilar to problems that occurred with the Artemis I rocket three years ago.

NASA has developed several ploys to mitigate the leak. These include varying the rate of hydrogen, which is very cold, flowing into the vehicle. At times they also stopped this flow, hoping the seals at the interface between the ground equipment and the rocket would warm up and “re-seat,” thereby halting the leaks. It worked—sort of. After several hours of troubleshooting, the vehicle was fully loaded. Finally, running about four hours late on their timeline, the dogged countdown team at Kennedy Space Center pushed toward the last stages of the countdown.

However, at this critical time, the liquid hydrogen leak rate spiked once again. This led to an automatic abort of the test a little before T-5 minutes. And so ended NASA’s hopes of launching the much-anticipated Artemis II mission, sending four astronauts around the Moon, in February. NASA will now attempt to launch the vehicle no earlier than March following more wet-dress attempts in the interim.

In a news conference on Tuesday afternoon, NASA officials were asked why they had not solved a problem that was so nettlesome during the Artemis I launch campaign.

“After Artemis I, with the challenges we had with the leaks, we took a pretty aggressive approach to do some component-level testing with some of these valves and the seals, and try to understand their behavior,” said John Honeycutt, chair of the Artemis II Mission Management Team. “And so we got a good handle on that relative to how we install the flight-side and the ground-side interface. But on the ground, we’re pretty limited in how much realism we can put into the test. We try to test like we fly, but this interface is a very complex interface. When you’re dealing with hydrogen, it’s a small molecule. It’s highly energetic. We like it for that reason. And we do the best we can.”

If NASA were really going to do the best it could with this rocket, there were options in the last three years. It is common in commercial rocketry to build one or more “test” tanks to both stress the hardware and ensure its compatibility with ground systems through an extensive test campaign. However, SLS hardware is extraordinarily expensive. A single rocket costs in excess of $2 billion, so the program is hardware-poor. Moreover, tanking tests might have damaged the launch tower, which itself cost more than $1 billion. As far as I know, there was never any serious discussion of building a test tank.

Hardware scarcity, due to cost, is but one of several problems with the SLS rocket architecture. Probably the biggest one is its extremely low flight rate, which makes every fueling and launch opportunity an experimental rather than operational procedure. This has been pointed out to NASA, and the rocket’s benefactors in Congress, for more than a decade. A rocket that is so expensive it only flies rarely will have super-high operating costs and ever-present safety concerns precisely because it flies so infrequently.

Acknowledging the low flight rate issue

Until this week, NASA had largely ignored these concerns, at least in public. However, in a stunning admission, NASA’s new administrator, Jared Isaacman, acknowledged the flight-rate issue after Monday’s wet-dress rehearsal test failed to reach a successful conclusion. “The flight rate is the lowest of any NASA-designed vehicle, and that should be a topic of discussion,” he said as part of a longer post about the test on social media.

The reality, which Isaacman knows full well, and which almost everyone else in the industry recognizes, is that the SLS rocket is dead hardware walking. The Trump administration would like to fly the rocket just two more times, culminating in the Artemis III human landing on the Moon. Congress has passed legislation mandating a fourth and fifth launch of the SLS vehicle.

However, one gets the sense that this battle is not yet fully formed, and the outcome will depend on hiccups like Monday’s aborted test; the ongoing performance of the rocket in flight; and how quickly SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s New Glenn vehicle make advancements toward reliability. Both of these private rockets are moving at light speed relative to NASA’s Slow Launch System.

During the news conference, I asked about this low flight rate and the challenge of managing a complex rocket that will never be more than anything but an experimental system. The answer from NASA’s top civil servant, Amit Kshatriya, was eye-opening.

“You know, you’re right, the flight rate—three years is a long time between the first and second,” NASA’s associate administrator said. “It is going to be experimental, because of going to the Moon in this configuration, with the energies we’re dealing with. And every time we do it these are very bespoke components, they’re in many cases made by incredible craftsmen. … It’s the first time this particular machine has borne witness to cryogens, and how it breathes, and how it vents, and how it wants to leak is something we have to characterize. And so every time we do it, we’re going to have to do that separately.”

So there you have it. Every SLS rocket is a work of art, every launch campaign an adventure, every mission subject to excessive delays. It’s definitely not ideal.

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

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Netflix says users can cancel service if HBO Max merger makes it too expensive

HBO Max, netflix, paramount plus, Paramount Skydance, streaming, Tech / Rejus Almole / February 3, 2026

There is concern that subscribers might be negatively affected if Netflix acquires Warner Bros. Discovery’s (WBD’s) streaming and movie studios businesses. One of the biggest fears is that the merger would lead to higher prices due to Netflix having less competition. During a Senate hearing today, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos suggested that the merger would have an opposite effect.

Sarandos was speaking at a hearing held by the US Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, “Examining the Competitive Impact of the Proposed Netflix-Warner Brothers Transaction.”

Sarandos aimed to convince the subcommittee that Netflix wouldn’t become a monopoly in streaming or in movie and TV production if regulators allowed its acquisition to close. Netflix is the largest subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) provider by subscribers (301.63 million as of January 2025), and WBD is the third (128 million streaming subscribers, including users of HBO Max and, to a smaller degree, Discovery+).

Speaking at today’s hearing, Sarandos said:

Netflix and Warner Bros. both have streaming services, but they are very complementary. In fact, 80 percent of HBO Max subscribers also subscribe to Netflix. We will give consumers more content for less.

During the hearing, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) asked Sarandos how Netflix can ensure that streaming remains “affordable” after a merger, especially after Netflix issued a price hike in January 2025 despite it adding more subscribers.

Sarandos said the streaming industry is still competitive. The executive claimed that previous Netflix price hikes have come with “a lot more value” for subscribers.

“We are a one-click cancel, so if the consumer says, ‘That’s too much for what I’m getting,’ they can cancel with one click,” Sarandos said.

When pressed further on pricing, the executive argued that the merger doesn’t pose “any concentration risk” and that Netflix is working with the US Department of Justice on potential guardrails against more price hikes.

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Godlike Titan threatens humanity in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters S2 trailer

Apple TV, culture, Entertainment, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, streaming television, Trailers / Rejus Almole / February 3, 2026

Last month, Apple TV released a teaser for the second season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, part of Legendary Entertainment’s MonsterVerse, which brought Godzilla, King Kong, and various other monsters (kaiju) created by Toho Co., Ltd into a shared narrative. But we only got the most fleeting glimpse of the promised new mythical Titan threatening the human race. The full trailer just dropped and rectifies that: it’s a gigantic tentacled undersea being dubbed Titan X—and only Kong and Godzilla can stop it.

(Spoilers for Season 1 below.)

As previously reported, the first season picked up where 2014’s Godzilla left off, specifically the introduction of Project Monarch, a secret organization established in the 1950s to study Godzilla and other kaiju—after attempts to kill Godzilla with nuclear weapons failed. In the S1 finale, Godzilla fights off an Ion Dragon, tossing it through a rift back to the Hollow Earth, and Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell) seemingly sacrifices himself to save his colleagues. Per the official Season 2 premise:

Season two will pick up with the fate of Monarch—and the world—hanging in the balance. The dramatic saga reveals buried secrets that reunite our heroes (and villains) on Kong’s Skull Island, and a new, mysterious village where a mythical Titan rises from the sea. The ripple effects of the past make waves in the present day, blurring the bonds between family, friend and foe—all with the threat of a titan event on the horizon.

In addition to Russell, returning cast members include Wyatt Russell (son of Kurt) as the younger Shaw; Anna Sawai as Cate Randa; Kiersey Clemons as May; Ren Watabe as Kentaro Randa; Joe Tippett as Tim; Elisa Lasowski as Duvall; and Anders Holm playing the younger version of Monarch researcher Bill Randa. Takehiro Hira, Amber Midthunder, Curtiss Cook, Cliff Curtis, Dominique Tipper, and Camilo Jiménez Varón will join the S2 cast as guest stars.

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Google court filings suggest ChromeOS has an expiration date

aluminium, android, ChromeOS, Google / Rejus Almole / February 3, 2026

The documents suggest that Google will wash its hands of ChromeOS once the current support window closes. Google promises 10 years of Chromebook support, but that’s not counted from the date of purchase—Chromebooks are based on a handful of hardware platforms dictated by Google, with the most recent launching in 2023. That means Google has to support the newest devices through 2033. The “timeline to phase out ChromeOS is 2034,” says the filing.

Android goes big

From the start, the ChromeOS experience was focused on the web. Google initially didn’t even support running local apps, but little by little, its aspirations grew. Over the years, it has added Linux apps and Android apps. And it even tried to get Steam games running on Chromebooks—it gave up on that last one just recently. It also tried to shoehorn AI features into ChromeOS with the Chromebook Plus platform, to little effect.

Android was barely getting off the ground when ChromeOS began its journey, but as we approach the 2030s, Google clearly wants a more powerful desktop platform. Android has struggled on larger screens, but Aluminium is a long-running project to fix that. Whatever we see in 2028 may not even look like the Android we know from phones. It will have many of the same components under the hood, though.

Aluminum vs ChromeOS — Aluminium will have Google apps at the core. Credit: US v. Google

Google could get everything it wants with the upcoming Aluminium release. When running on powerful laptop hardware, Android’s performance and capabilities should far outstrip ChromeOS. Aluminium is also expected to run Google apps like Chrome and the Play Store with special system privileges, leaving third-party apps with fewer features. That gives Google more latitude in how it manages the platform and retains users, all without running afoul of recent antitrust rulings.

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Wing Commander III: “Isn’t that the guy from Star Wars?”

C:ArsGames, Chris Roberts, christopher roberts, flight sim, FMV, gaming, gog, Good Old Games, Origin, origin systems, retrogaming, space combat, space combat sim, Wing Commander, wing commander 3 / Rejus Almole / February 3, 2026

C:ArsGames looks at a vanguard of the multimedia FMV future that never quite came to pass.

It’s Christmas of 1994, and I am 16 years old. Sitting on the table in our family room next to a pile of cow-spotted boxes is the most incredible thing in the world: a brand-new Gateway 66MHz Pentium tower, with a 540MB hard disk drive, 8MB of RAM, and, most importantly, a CD-ROM drive. I am agog, practically trembling with barely suppressed joy, my bored Gen-X teenager mask threatening to slip and let actual feelings out. My life was about to change—at least where games were concerned.

I’d been working for several months at Babbage’s store No. 9, near Baybrook Mall in southeast suburban Houston. Although the Gateway PC’s arrival on Christmas morning was utterly unexpected, the choice of what game to buy required no planning at all. I’d already decided a few weeks earlier, when Chris Roberts’ latest opus had been drop-shipped to our shelves, just in time for the holiday season. The choice made itself, really.

Screenshot of John Rhys-Davies and Mark Hamill in the WC3 intro — Gimli and Luke, together at last! Credit: Origin Systems / Electronic Arts

The moment Babbage’s opened its doors on December 26—a day I had off, fortunately—I was there, checkbook in hand. One entire paycheck’s worth of capitalism later, I was sprinting out to my creaky 280-Z, sweatily clutching two boxes—one an impulse buy, The Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual, and the other a game I felt sure would be the best thing I’d ever played or ever would play: Origin’s Wing Commander III: The Heart of the Tiger. On the backs of Wing Commander I and Wing Commander II, how could it not be?!

The movie is on my computer!

It’s easy to pooh-pooh full-motion video games here in 2026; from our vantage point, we know the much-anticipated “Siliwood” revolution that was supposed to transform entertainment and usher interactivity into all media by the end of the millennium utterly failed to materialize, leaving in its wake a series of often spectacularly expensive titles filled with grainy interlaced video and ersatz gameplay. Even the standout titles—smash hits like Roberta Williams’ Phantasmagoria or Cyan’s Riven—were, on the whole, kinda mediocre.

But we hadn’t learned any of those lessons yet in 1994, and Wing Commander III went hard. The game’s production was absurdly expensive, with a budget that eventually reached an unheard-of $4 million. The shooting script runs to 324 printed pages (a typical feature film script is less than half that long—Coppola’s working script for The Godfather was 136 pages). Even the game itself was enormous—in an era where a single CD-ROM was already considered ludicrously large, WC3 sprawled ostentatiously across four of the 600MB-or-so discs.

Photograph of WC3's original CD-ROMs. — Still got these damn things in my closet after all these years. Credit: Lee Hutchinson

Why so big? Because this was the future, and the future—or so we thought at the time—belonged to full-motion video.

The Wing Commander III opening cinematic in all its pixelated glory.

That’s Wing Commander III’s epic opening cinematic, upscaled for YouTube. Even without the upscaling and watching it on a 15-inch CRT, I was entranced. I was blown away. Before the credits were done rolling, I was already on the phone with my buddies Steve and Matt, telling them to stop what they were doing and get over here immediately to see this thing—it’s like a whole movie! A movie, on the computer! Surely only Chris Roberts could conceive and execute such audacity!

And what a movie it was, with an actual-for-real Hollywood cast. Malcolm McDowell! John Rhys-Davies! Jason Bernard! Tom Wilson! Ginger Lynn Allen, whom 16-year-old me definitely did not want his parents to know that I recognized! And, of course, the biggest face on the box: Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill, representing you. You, the decorated hero of the Vega campaign, the formerly disgraced “Coward of K’Tithrak Mang,” the recently redeemed savior of humanity, now sporting an actual name: Colonel Christopher Blair. (“Blair” is an evolution of the internal codename used by Origin to refer to the main character in the previous two Wing Commander titles—”Bluehair.”)

Screenshot of Malcolm McDowell as Admiral Tolywn — I’d watch Malcolm McDowell in anything. Malcolm McDowell is my cinematic love language. Credit: Origin Systems / Electronic Arts

Once the jaw-dropping intro finishes, the player finds Colonel Blair as the newly invested squadron commander aboard the aging carrier TCS Victory, wandering the corridors and having FMV conversations with a few other members of the carrier’s crew. From there, it’s a short hop to the first mission—because beneath all the FMV glitz, Origin still had to provide an actual, you know, game for folks to play.

Through a rose-tinted helmet visor

The game itself is…fine. It’s fine. The polygonal graphics are a welcome step up from the previous two Wing Commander titles’ bitmapped sprites, and the missions themselves manage to avoid many of the “space is gigantic and things take forever to happen” design missteps that plagued LucasArts’ X-Wing (but not, fortunately, TIE Fighter). You fly from point to point and shoot bad guys until they’re dead. Sometimes there are escort missions, sometimes you’re hitting capital ships, and there’s even a (very clunky) planetary bombing mission at the very end that feels like it directly apes the Death Star trench run while doing everything it can to shout “NO THIS IS NOT STAR WARS THIS IS VERY DIFFERENT!”

Screenshot of Mark Hamill saluting badly — That salute is… definitely a choice. Credit: Origin Systems / Electronic Arts

The space combat is serviceable, but the game also very clearly knows why we’re here: to watch a dead-eyed Mark Hamill with five days of beard stubble fulfill our “I am flying a spaceship” hero fantasies while trading banter with Tom Wilson’s Maniac (“How many people here know about the Maniac? …what, nobody?!”) and receiving fatherly advice from Jason Bernard’s Captain Eisen. And maybe, just maybe, we’d also save the universe and get the girl—either Ginger Lynn’s chief technician Rachel Coriolis or fellow pilot “Flint” Peters, played by Jennifer MacDonald.

(Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the primary purchasing demographic, players tended to overwhelmingly choose Rachel—though this might also have something to do with the fact that if you don’t choose Rachel, you can’t customize your missile loadout for some important missions near the end of the game).

Screenshot of the player picking a love interest — Who doesn’t enjoy a good old-fashioned space love triangle? Credit: Origin Systems / Electronic Arts

Worth a revisit? Definitely!

I will let others more qualified than me opine on whether or not Wing Commander III succeeded at the game-y things it set out to do—folks looking to read an educated opinion should consult Jimmy Maher’s thoughts on the matter over at his site, The Digital Antiquarian.

But regardless of whether or not it was a good game in its time, and regardless of whether or not it’s an effective space combat sim, it is absolutely undeniable that it’s a fascinating historical curiosity—one well worth dropping three bucks on at the GOG store (it’s on sale!).

There are cheats built into the game to help you skip past the actual space missions, which range in difficulty from “cream puff” to “obviously untested and totally broken” because just like in 1994, what we’re really here for is the beautiful failed experiment in interactive entertainment that is the movie portion of the game, especially when Malcolm McDowell shows up as Admiral Tolwyn and, in typical Malcom McDowell fashion, totally commits to the role far beyond what would have been required to pull it off and turns in his scenery-chewing best. (He’s even better in Wing Commander IV, though we’ll save that for another day.)

You could find a worse way today to spend those three bucks. Slap on that flight suit, colonel—the galaxy isn’t going to save itself!

Lee is the Senior Technology Editor, and oversees story development for the gadget, culture, IT, and video sections of Ars Technica. A long-time member of the Ars OpenForum with an extensive background in enterprise storage and security, he lives in Houston.

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Author name: Rejus Almole