Author name: Kris Guyer

belkin-shows-tech-firms-getting-too-comfortable-with-bricking-customers’-stuff

Belkin shows tech firms getting too comfortable with bricking customers’ stuff

Smart Home, Tech / /

In a somewhat anticipated move, Belkin is killing most of its smart home products. On January 31, the company will stop supporting the majority of its Wemo devices, leaving users without core functionality and future updates.

In an announcement emailed to customers and posted on Belkin’s website, Belkin said:

After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to end technical support for older Wemo products, effective January 31, 2026. After this date, several Wemo products will no longer be controllable through the Wemo app. Any features that rely on cloud connectivity, including remote access and voice assistant integrations, will no longer work.

The company said that people with affected devices that are under warranty on or after January 31 “may be eligible for a partial refund” starting in February.

The 27 affected devices have last sold dates that go back to August 2015 and are as recent as November 2023.

The announcement means that soon, features like the ability to work with Amazon Alexa will suddenly stop working on some already-purchased Wemo devices. The Wemo app will also stop working and being updated, removing the simplest way to control Wemo products, including connecting to Wi-Fi, monitoring usage, using timers, and activating Away Mode, which is supposed to make it look like people are in an empty home by turning the lights on and off randomly. Of course, the end of updates and technical support has security implications for the affected devices, too.

People will still be able to use affected devices if they configure the products with Apple HomeKit before January 31. In these cases, users will be able to control their Wemo devices without relying on the Wemo app or Belkin’s cloud. Belkin says seven of the 27 devices it is discontinuing are HomeKit-compatible.

Four Wemo devices will not be affected and “will continue to function as they do today through HomeKit,” Belkin said. Those products are: the Wemo Smart Light Switch 3-Way (WLS0503), Wemo Stage Smart Scene Controller (WSC010), Wemo Smart Plug with Thread (WSP100), and Wemo Smart Video Doorbell Camera (WDC010). All except the Smart Video Doorbell Camera are based on the Thread protocol.

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Review: Stellar cast makes Superman shine bright

culture, DCU, film reviews, James Gunn, Superman, Warner Bros. / /

I’ll be frank: I had mixed feelings, based solely on the trailers, about James Gunn’s Superman reboot. Sure, the casting seemed great, Gunn has a winning track record on superhero fare, and Krypto the dog stole the show every time he appeared. The trailers struck a nice balance between action, humor, and heart. Yet the film also seemed overpacked with super-character cameos, and it was hard to get any sense of the actual plot.

I’ve now seen the film, and those impressions were largely correct. But I’m happy to report that the positives far outweigh any negatives. Superman is a super-fun ride that unabashedly embraces its early comic book roots, naive optimism and all.

(Spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

Gunn has described his take as less of an origin story and more of a journey, with Superman (David Corenswet) struggling to reconcile his Kryptonian heritage and aristocratic origins with his small-town adoptive human family. In fact, Gunn wanted to avoid the origin story entirely, asserting (correctly, in my opinion) that it has already been depicted multiple times and there is no need to cover the same ground.

So the film opens in medias res, with Superman’s first defeat in battle against a metahuman dubbed the “Hammer of Boravia.” We see him fall into the snow, bloodied and battered, and whistle for Krypto. The plucky little superdog drags Superman to the Fortress of Solitude, where he is treated by a posse of robots. Then he heads out again for Round 2—only to once again be thrashed by his rival metahuman (codename: Ultraman) who, we learn, is being controlled by Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) for mysterious and no doubt nefarious purposes.

Why is Ultraman attacking Metropolis? Because a few weeks before, Superman had foiled the Boravian army’s invasion of the neighboring country of Jarhanpur, avoiding pointless bloodshed but drawing criticism for interfering in a foreign war when he lacked any governmental authority to do so. Naturally, Luthor expertly manipulates the media coverage against Superman while trying to convince the Pentagon that Superman poses a major threat to national security. The idealistic and naively optimistic Superman walks right into the trap.

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Trump’s DOJ seems annoyed about having to approve T-Mobile’s latest merger

AT&T, Policy, T-Mobile, us cellular, verizon / /

DOJ approval “reads like a complaint”

The DOJ’s unusual statement about the wireless industry oligopoly shows that the Justice Department staff and antitrust chief “clearly did not want to approve this,” stated Harold Feld, senior VP of consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. The press release “reads like a complaint,” not an announcement of a merger approval, he added.

Daniel Hanley, senior legal analyst at the Open Markets Institute, said that “Slater could easily make a public comment or resign in protest. If she isn’t allowed to do the job Congress entrusted her with, then she can leave with her principles intact.” The Trump administration is failing to enforce antitrust laws “even when encountering a blatantly unlawful action that could result in a gov win,” he wrote.

The cable industry, which has been competing for mobile customers, issued a statement in response to the DOJ’s approval of T-Mobile’s transaction. “While cable broadband providers are aggressively investing to deliver real mobile competition, cost savings, and other benefits to millions of wireless consumers, the Big 3 are continuing their desperate attempts to thwart this new competition through aggressive spectrum stockpiling strategies,” cable lobby group NCTA said while urging policymakers to promote competition and fight excessive concentration of spectrum licenses.

Despite approving the T-Mobile deal, Slater said in her statement that the DOJ investigation “raised concerns about competition in the relevant markets for mobile wireless services and the availability of wireless spectrum needed to fuel competition and entry.”

US Cellular competed against the big carriers “by building networks, pricing plans, and service offerings that its customers valued, and which for many years the Big 3 often did not offer,” Slater said. “To the chagrin of its Big 3 competitors, US Cellular maintained a sizable customer base within its network footprint by virtue of its strong emphasis on transparency, integrity, and localized customer service. Accordingly, as part of its investigation, the Department considered the impact of the potential disappearance of the services offered to those customers of US Cellular—soon to become T-Mobile customers following the merger—that chose US Cellular over T-Mobile or its national competitors.”

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openai-model-differentiation-101

OpenAI Model Differentiation 101

openai / /

LLMs can be deeply confusing. Thanks to a commission, today we go back to basics.

How did we get such a wide array of confusingly named and labeled models and modes in ChatGPT? What are they, and when and why would you use each of them for what purposes, and how does this relate to what is available elsewhere? How does this relate to hallucinations, sycophancy and other basic issues, and what are the basic ways of mitigating those issues?

If you already know these basics, you can and should skip this post.

This is a reference, and a guide for the new and the perplexed, until the time comes that they change everything again, presumably with GPT-5.

Tech companies are notorious for being terrible at naming things. One decision that seems like the best option at the time leads to another.

It started out functional. OpenAI did not plan to be a consumer tech company. They started out as a research company. They bet big on scaling “Generative Pretrained Transformers,” or GPTs, which were the AI models that took inputs and generated outputs. They started with GPT-1, then scaled up to GPT-2, then to GPT-3.

The convention was that each full number was a large leap in scale and capabilities. So when there was a smaller jump up in capabilities, they’d use fractional version numbers instead. Thus, we next got GPT-3.5.

The first three GPTs were ‘base models.’ Rather than assistants or chatbots, they would predict how a given block of text was most likely to continue. GPT-3.5 was more capable than GPT-3, and also it and subsequent models were turned via ‘post-training’ into functioning chatbots and assistants.

This allowed OpenAI to use GPT-3.5 to launch a new chat interface they called ChatGPT. It unexpectedly spread like wildfire. The name stuck. Then over time, as OpenAI released new models, the new models would be added to ChatGPT.

The next model was a big leap, so it was called GPT-4.

Several months after that, OpenAI released a major upgrade to GPT-4 that made it faster and cheaper, but which wasn’t a large capabilities leap. Since speed is what customers notice most, they called it GPT-4-Turbo.

Then they created a version that again was a relatively modest capabilities upgrade, with the big leap that it now had native multimodal support, that could parse images, audio and video, and generate its own audio and images. So they decided to call this GPT-4o, where the ‘o’ stands for Omni.

Then OpenAI ran into problems. Directly scaling up GPT-4 into GPT-5 wasn’t much improving performance.

Instead, OpenAI found a new place to scale up, and invented ‘reasoning’ models. Reasoning models are trained using RL (reinforcement learning), to use a lot of time and compute to think and often use tools in response to being asked questions. This was quickly adapted by others and enabled big performance improvements on questions where using tools or thinking more helps.

But what to call it? Oh no. They decided this was a good time to reset, so they called it o1, which we are told was short for OpenAI-1. This resulted in them having models on the ‘o-line’ of reasoning models, o1 and then o3 and o4, at the same time that their main model was for other reasons called GPT-4o. Also they had to skip the name o2 for copyright reasons, so now we have o1, o3 and o4.

The number of the model goes up as they improve their training techniques and have better models to base this all on. Within each o-model (o1, o3 or o4) there is then the question of how much time (and compute, or amount of tokens or output) it will spend ‘thinking’ before it gives you an answer. The convention they settled on was:

  1. The number tells you when it was trained and what generation it is. Higher numbers are better within the same suffix tier.

  2. No suffix would mean it thinks briefly, maybe a minute or two.

  3. ‘-pro’ would mean thinking for very large amounts of time, as in minutes. This is expensive enough to run that they charge quite a lot.

  4. ‘-mini’ means it is quicker and cheaper than the main model of the same number. They also use ‘-mini’ for smaller versions of non-reasoning models.

  5. Within ‘-mini’ there are levels and you sometimes get ‘-low’, ‘medium’ or ‘-high,’ all of which are still below the regular no-suffix version.

Later versions require more compute, so with each new level first we get the mini version, then we get the regular version, then later we get the pro version. Right now, you have in order of compute used o4-mini, o4-mini-high, o3 and then o3-pro. Sure, that makes sense.

Meanwhile, OpenAI (by all reports) attempted several times to create GPT-5. Their latest attempt was a partial success, in that it has some advantages over other OpenAI models (it has ‘big model smell’ and good creativity), but it is not an overall big leap and it is much more expensive and slow than it is usually (but not always) worth. So they couldn’t name it GPT-5, and instead called it GPT-4.5, and buried it within the interface.

OpenAI also generated a more efficient model than GPT-4o to use as a baseline for coding and reasoning model uses where you want to scale up a lot and thus speed and price matter. To indicate this they then chose to call this GPT-4.1, and the cheap version of this GPT-4.1-mini.

The menu of choices looks like this:

Plus you have Deep Research mode:

This will go over the info several times in different forms, since this is confusing, within the context of a non-coding ChatGPT user.

(If you’re doing serious AI coding, you have a different problem and want to use better tools than a chatbot interface, but the basic answer within ChatGPT is ‘use o3, or when the going gets hard use o3-pro.’)

If you are paying the full $200/month you have unlimited access to all models, so the decision tree within ChatGPT is simple and ‘only’ four of these count: GPT-4o, o3, o3-pro and GPT-4.5, plus Deep Research.

Here’s what each of them do:

  1. GPT-4o is the default model, the quick and basic chatbot. It is also the place to generate images. If the question is simple, this will do the job. If you want a rapid back-and-forth chat, or to vibe, or other similar things, this is your play.

  2. o3 is the baseline reasoning model. When I think of using ChatGPT I think of using this. It will typically think for a minute or two before answering, uses web search well and can give you pretty solid answers. This is your default. If you’re not satisfied with the answer, consider escalating to o3-pro if you have access. Note that o3 is the most likely model to hallucinate (more on that in that section) to the point where you have to be actively on the lookout for this.

  3. o3-pro is the heavy duty reasoning model. You’ll want to think carefully about exactly what you ask it. It will think for a long time, as in often 15+ minutes, before you get an answer (and sometimes you’ll get an error). In exchange, you get the best answers, and the lowest error (hallucination) rates. If you want a ‘definitive’ answer in any sense to an objective question, or the best possible one, you want to use this.

  4. o4-mini and o4-mini-high are more advanced, faster but lighter weight versions of o3, and ultimately their answers are worse than o3, so the only real reason to use them in ChatGPT is if you run out of o3 queries.

  5. GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1-mini are newer and more efficient than GPT-4o, but as a ChatGPT you don’t care about that unless you need the larger context window. Either you’re better off with GPT-4o, or if GPT-4o won’t do the job then you want to escalate to o3 or another reasoning model. They initially wanted to only put this in the API, and relented when people complained. They’re not bad models, but they mostly are only needed for when you run out of space.

  6. GPT-4.5 is a slow, expensive and large non-reasoning model. It has the best ‘creativity’ and ‘taste,’ and other aspects of ‘big model smell’ and ability to have a certain kind of background richness of intelligence, although it can’t do reasoning before answering as such. So it has its purposes if you’re confined within ChatGPT and those are the exact things you want, but it is slow and the gains are modest.

  7. You can also use voice mode, if you’d like, in which case it has to be GPT-4o.

Your default for most questions should be to use o3.

If you need bigger guns, o3-pro. If you need smaller guns or want images, GPT-4o.

GPT-4.5 is a special case for when you need a certain kind of creativity, taste and ‘big model smell.’

Here’s the simple heuristic:

  1. Images? Or simple easy question? Want to chat? Need for speed? GPT-4o.

  2. Want some logic or tool use? Question is non-trivial? Coding? o3.

  3. Slow, good but still short answer? o3 stumped? o3-pro.

  4. Slow, long infodump? Deep Research.

Here’s the version with more words and including GPT-4.5, where you default to o3:

  1. If you have a question requiring thought that is unusually hard or where you need the best possible answer that you can trust, and can wait for it, use o3-pro.

  2. If you want a big infodump on a topic, and can wait a bit, use Deep Research.

  3. If you have an ordinary question requiring logic, thought or web search, use o3. You can escalate to o3-pro if you’re not happy with the answer.

  4. If you need something creative, or for the model to express ‘taste,’ and that matters where reasoning doesn’t, use GPT-4.5.

  5. If you have a simple request, or want to chat, or need images, use GPT-4o.

If you are on the $20/month tier, then you don’t have o3-pro and you have to deal with message limits, especially having ~100 messages per week for o3, which is where the other models could come in.

So now the heuristic looks like this:

  1. By default, and if you need tools or reasoning, use o3.

    1. If you run out of o3, use o4-mini-high, then o4-mini.

    2. Be stingy with o3 if and only if you often run out of queries.

    3. If you want a big infodump on a topic, and can wait a bit, use Deep Research.

  2. If you don’t need tools or reasoning, or you need images, use GPT-4o.

    1. If you run out of that, you can use GPT-4.1 or o4-mini.

  3. If you want slow creativity and taste you have ~50 GPT-4.5 uses per week.

ChatGPT has for now won the consumer chatbot market. It has a strong product, but its dominant position is mostly about getting there first.

Competition is fierce. At different times, different offerings will be best.

For most purposes, there are three serious competitors worth mentioning for this: Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok.

Claude offers two models worth using: the faster Claude Sonnet 4 and the slower but more capable Claude Opus 4. Rather than having distinct reasoning models, Sonnet and Opus dynamically decide when to do reasoning. You can also invoke the ‘research’ button similar to OpenAI’s Deep Research.

Both models are quite good. The decision tree here is simple. You default to Opus 4, but if you want to conserve credits or you want something not too complex, you can switch to Sonnet 4.

In general, right now, I prefer using Claude to ChatGPT. I find Claude to be much more pleasant to talk to and interact with, and easier to get to understand and give me what I actually want. For basic things, I definitely prefer Sonnet to GPT-4o.

If you have access to both Claude and ChatGPT, I would use them like this:

  1. If you need to generate images or want voice mode, use GPT-4o.

  2. Otherwise, by default, use Opus 4.

  3. If it’s relatively easy and you don’t need Opus, use Sonnet 4.

  4. If you need a kind of cold factual or logical analysis, o3 is still very good.

  5. Don’t be afraid to query both Opus and o3 and compare outputs.

  6. If you want heavy-duty thinking, o3-pro is still the best game in town.

  7. If you need Deep Research, ideally query both and compare results, I don’t have a strong opinion on which is better if you have to choose one.

Gemini offers its own version of Deep Research, and otherwise has a similar divide into 2.5 Flash (fast) and 2.5 Pro (slow but better).

Gemini Pro 2.5 and Flash 2.5 are good models. For most purposes I currently find them a step behind in usefulness, and I sometimes find it abrasive to use, but they are a solid second or third opinion.

There are three specific places I’ve found Gemini to beat out the competition.

  1. Gemini still has the longest context window. When there is a document or video that other models can’t handle, ask Gemini Pro. GPT-4.1 is also an option here.

  2. Gemini is often a better explainer of known things. I like it for things like kids getting help with homework, or when you want to study papers in a field unfamiliar to you and are you are getting confused. It is very good at picking up the level at which someone is confused and giving them a helpful response.

  3. Gemini’s live video mode, available in the Gemini app, has proven very helpful in solving practical physical problems. As in, I point the phone camera at things and ask questions. It’s still hit and miss, this still clearly has a long way to go, but it’s saved me a lot of trouble multiple times.

They also have some cool other options, like Veo 3 for video, NotebookLM for extending context and generating AI podcasts, and so on, if you want to explore.

Prior to Grok 4, it was very clear to me that Grok had no role to play. There was no situation in which it was the right tool for the job, other than specifically using its interactions with Twitter. It was not a good model.

Now we have Grok 4, which is at least a lot more competitive while it is the most recent release. One advantage is that it is fast. Some people think it is a strong model, with claims it is state of the art. Others are less impressed. This is true both for coding and otherwise.

For the non-power non-coding user, I have seen enough that I am confident ignoring Grok 4 is at most a small mistake. This is not substantially beyond the competition. Given various recent and recurring reasons to worry about the integrity and responsibility of Grok and xAI, it seems wise to pass on them for another cycle.

I don’t have scope here to address best practices for prompting and getting the most of the models, but there are two important things to be on the lookout for: Hallucinations and sycophancy.

Hallucinations used to be a lot worse. LLMs would make things up all the time. That problem definitely is not solved, but things are much improved, and we much better understand what causes them.

As a general rule: Hallucinations mostly happen when the LLM gets backed into a corner, where it expects, based on the context and what it has already said, to be able to give you an answer or fill in a blank, but it doesn’t have the answer or know what goes in the blank. Or it wants to be consistent with what it already said.

So it makes something up, or may double down on its existing error, although note that if it made something up asking ‘did you make that up?’ will very often get the answer ‘yes.’ You can also paste the claim into a new window and ask about it, to check while avoiding the doubling down temptation.

Similarly, if it gets into a situation where it very much wants to be seen as completing a task and make the user happy, reasoning models especially, and o3 in particular, will get the temptation to make something up or to double down.

Think of it as (partly) constructing the answer one word at a time, the way you will often (partly) generate an answer to someone on the fly, and learning over time to do things that get good reactions, and to try and be consistent once you say things. Or how other people do it.

Thus, you can do your best to avoid triggering this, and backing the LLM into a corner. You can look at the answers, and ask whether it seems like it was in a spot where it might make something up. And if it does start to hallucinate or makes errors, and starts to double down, you can start a new chat window rather than fighting it.

In general, ‘don’t be the type of entity that gets lied to and you won’t be’ is more effective than you might think.

o3 in particular is a Lying Liar that frequently lies, as a result of flaws in the way it was trained. o3-pro is the same underlying model, but the extra reasoning time makes the problem mostly go away.

The other big problem to look out for is sycophancy, which is a big problem for GPT-4o in particular but also for many other models. They toned it down somewhat, but it still does it quite a lot.

As in, GPT-4o will tell you that you are awesome, a genius and so on, and agree with you, and tell you what you seem to want to hear in context. You cannot trust these types of statements. Indeed, if you want honest opinions, you need to frame your queries in ways that disguise what the sycophantic answer would be, such as presenting your work as if it was written by someone else.

In the extreme, sycophancy can even be dangerous, leading to feedback loops where GPT-4o or other models can reinforce the user’s delusions, including sometimes making the user think the AI is conscious. If you sense this type of interaction might be happening to you, please be careful. Even if it is not, you still need to be careful that you’re not asking loaded questions and getting yourself echoed back to you.

The core bottom line is: If you’re within ChatGPT, use o3 for logic, reasoning and as your default, o3-pro if you have it for your most important and hardest questions, GPT-4o for basic chats and quick tasks, and occasionally GPT-4.5 for creative stuff.

If you also are willing to subscribe to and use other models, then I would use Claude Opus and Sonnet as defaults for harder versus faster tasks, with o3 and o3-pro as supplements for when you want logic, and GPT-4o for images, with special cases.

To get the most out of LLMs, you’ll of course want to learn when and how to best use them, how to sculpt the right prompts or queries, and ideally use system prompts and other tools to improve your experience. But that is beyond scope, and you can very much 80/20 for many purposes without all that.

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Rocket Report: SpaceX to make its own propellant; China’s largest launch pad

china, european space agency, international space station, interstellar technologies, Japan, launch, long march 10, rocket report, russia, Science, South Korea, soyuz, Space, Space shuttle, spacex, Starbase, starship, united launch alliance, vulcan / /

United Launch Alliance begins stacking its third Vulcan rocket for the second time.

Visitors walk by models of a Long March 10 rocket, lunar lander, and crew spacecraft during an exhibition on February 24, 2023 in Beijing, China. Credit: Hou Yu/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images

Welcome to Edition 8.02 of the Rocket Report! It’s worth taking a moment to recognize an important anniversary in the history of human spaceflight next week. Fifty years ago, on July 15, 1975, NASA launched a three-man crew on an Apollo spacecraft from Florida and two Russian cosmonauts took off from Kazakhstan, on course to link up in low-Earth orbit two days later. This was the first joint US-Russian human spaceflight mission, laying the foundation for a strained but enduring partnership on the International Space Station. Operations on the ISS are due to wind down in 2030, and the two nations have no serious prospects to continue any partnership in space after decommissioning the station.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Sizing up Europe’s launch challengers. The European Space Agency has selected five launch startups to become eligible for up to 169 million euros ($198 million) in funding to develop alternatives to Arianespace, the continent’s incumbent launch service provider, Ars reports. The five small launch companies ESA selected are Isar Aerospace, MaiaSpace, Rocket Factory Augsburg, PLD Space, and Orbex. Only one of these companies, Isar Aerospace, has attempted to launch a rocket into orbit. Isar’s Spectrum rocket failed moments after liftoff from Norway on a test flight in March. None of these companies is guaranteed an ESA contract or funding. Over the next several months, ESA and the five launch companies will negotiate with European governments for funding leading up to ESA’s ministerial council meeting in November, when ESA member states will set the agency’s budget for at least the next two years. Only then will ESA be ready to sign binding agreements.

Let’s rank ’em … Ars Technica’s space reporters ranked the five selectees for the European Launcher Challenge in order from most likely to least likely to reach orbit. We put Munich-based Isar Aerospace, the most well-funded of the group, at the top of the list after attempting its first orbital launch earlier this year. Paris-based MaiaSpace, backed by ArianeGroup, comes in second, with plans for a partially reusable rocket. Rocket Factory Augsburg, another Germany company, is in third place after getting close to a launch attempt last year before its first rocket blew up on a test stand. Spanish startup PLD Space is fourth, and Britain’s Orbex rounds out the list. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger’s and Stephen Clark’s reporting on all things space is to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll collect their stories and deliver them straight to your inbox.

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Japan’s Interstellar Technologies rakes in more cash. Interstellar Technologies raised 8.9 billion yen ($61.8 million) to boost development of its Zero rocket and research and development of satellite systems, Space News reports. The money comes from Japanese financial institutions, venture capital funds, and debt financing. Interstellar previously received funding through agreements with the Japanese government and Toyota, which Interstellar says will add expertise to scale manufacturing of the Zero rocket for “high-frequency, cost-effective launches.” The methane-fueled Zero rocket is designed to deploy a payload of up to 1 metric ton (2,200 pounds) into low-Earth orbit. The unfortunate news from Interstellar’s fundraising announcement is that the company has pushed back the debut flight of the Zero rocket until 2027.

Straight up … Interstellar has aspirations beyond launch vehicles. The company is also developing a satellite communications business, and some of the money raised in the latest investment round will go toward this segment of the company. Interstellar is open about comparing its ambition to that of SpaceX. “On the satellite side, Interstellar is developing communications satellites that benefit from the company’s own launch capabilities,” the company said in a statement. “Backed by Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications and JAXA’s Space Strategy Fund, the company is building a vertically integrated model, similar to SpaceX’s approach with Starlink.”

Korean startup completes second-stage qual testing. South Korean launch services company Innospace says it has taken another step toward the inaugural launch of its Hanbit-Nano rocket by the year’s end with the qualification of the second stage, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. The second stage uses an in-house-developed 34-kilonewton (7,643-pound-thrust) liquid methane engine. Innospace says the engine achieved a combustion time of 300 seconds, maintaining stability of the fuel and oxidizer supply system, structural integrity, and the launch vehicle integrated control system.

A true micro-launcher … Innospace’s rocket is modest in size and capacity, even among its cohorts in the small launch market. The Hanbit-Nano rocket is designed to launch approximately 200 pounds (90 kilograms) of payload into Sun-synchronous orbit. “With the success of this second stage engine certification test, we have completed the development of the upper stage of the Hanbit-Nano launch vehicle,” said Kim Soo-jong, CEO of Innospace. “This is a very symbolic and meaningful technological achievement that demonstrates the technological prowess and test operation capabilities that Innospace has accumulated over a long period of time, while also showing that we have entered the final stage for commercial launch. Currently, all executives and staff are doing their best to successfully complete the first stage certification test, which is the final gateway for launch, and we will make every effort to prepare for a smooth commercial launch in the second half of the year.”

Two companies forge unlikely alliance in Dubai. Two German entrepreneurs have joined forces with a team of Russian expats steeped in space history to design a rocket using computational AI models, Payload reports. The “strategic partnership” is between LEAP 71, an AI-enabled design startup, and Aspire Space, a company founded by the son of a Soviet engineer who was in charge of launching Zenit rockets from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in the 1980s. The companies will base their operations in Dubai. The unlikely pairing aims to develop a new large reusable launch vehicle capable of delivering up to 15 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. Aspire Space is a particularly interesting company if you’re a space history enthusiast. Apart from the connections of Aspire’s founder to Soviet space history, Aspire’s chief technology officer, Sergey Sopov, started his career at Baikonur working on the Energia heavy-lift rocket and Buran space shuttle, before becoming an executive at Sea Launch later in his career.

Trust the computer … It’s easy to be skeptical about this project, but it has attracted an interesting group of people. LEAP 71 has just two employees—its two German co-founders—but boasts lofty ambitions and calls itself a “pioneer in AI-driven engineering.” As part of the agreement with Aspire Space, LEAP 71 will use a proprietary software program called Noyron to design the entire propulsion stack for Aspire’s rockets. The company says its AI-enabled design approach for Aspire’s 450,000-pound-thrust engine will cut in half the time it took other rocket companies to begin test-firing a new engine of similar size. Rudenko forecasts Aspire’s entire project, including a launcher, reusable spacecraft, and ground infrastructure to support it all, will cost more than $1 billion. So far, the project is self-funded, Rudenko told Payload. (submitted by Lin Kayser)

Russia launches ISS resupply freighter. A Russian Progress supply ship launched July 3 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan atop a Soyuz-2.1a rocket, NASASpaceflight reports. Packed with 5,787 pounds (2,625 kilograms) of cargo and fuel, the Progress MS-31 spacecraft glided to an automated docking at the International Space Station two days later. The Russian cosmonauts living aboard the ISS will unpack the supplies carried inside the Progress craft’s pressurized compartment. This was the eighth orbital launch of the year by a Russian rocket, continuing a downward trend in launch activity for the Russian space program in recent years.

Celebrating a golden anniversary … The Soyuz rocket that launched Progress MS-31 was painted an unusual blue and white scheme, as it was originally intended for a commercial launch that was likely canceled after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It also sported a logo commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo-Soyuz mission in July 1975.

Chinese rocket moves closer to first launch. Chinese commercial launch firm Orienspace is aiming for a late 2025 debut of its Gravity-2 rocket following a recent first-stage engine hot fire test, Space News reports. The “three-in-one” hot fire test verified the performance of the Gravity-2 rocket’s first stage engine, servo mechanisms, and valves that regulate the flow of propellants into the engine, according to a press release from Orienspace. The Gravity-2 rocket’s recoverable and reusable first stage will be powered by nine of these kerosene-fueled engines. The recent hot fire test “lays a solid foundation” for future tests leading up to the Gravity-2’s inaugural flight.

Extra medium … Orienspace’s first rocket, the solid-fueled Gravity-1, completed its first successful flight last year to place multiple small satellites into orbit. Gravity-2 is a much larger vehicle, standing 230 feet (70 meters) tall, the same height as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. Orienspace’s new rocket will fly in a core-only configuration or with the assistance of two solid rocket boosters. An infographic released by Orienspace in conjunction with the recent engine hot fire test indicates the Gravity-2 rocket will be capable of hauling up to 21.5 metric tons (47,400 pounds) of cargo into low-Earth orbit, placing its performance near the upper limit of medium-lift launchers.

Senator calls out Texas for trying to steal space shuttle. A political effort to remove space shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian and place it on display in Texas encountered some pushback on Thursday, as a US senator questioned the expense of carrying out what he described as a theft, Ars reports. “This is not a transfer. It’s a heist,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) during a budget markup hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee. “A heist by Texas because they lost a competition 12 years ago.” In April, Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, both representing Texas, introduced the “Bring the Space Shuttle Home Act” that called for Discovery to be relocated from the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in northern Virginia and displayed at Space Center Houston. They then inserted an $85 million provision for the shuttle relocation into the Senate version of the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which, to comply with Senate rules, was more vaguely worded but was meant to achieve the same goal. That bill was enacted on July 4, when President Donald Trump signed it into law.

Dollar signs … As ridiculous as it is to imagine spending $85 million on moving a space shuttle from one museum to another, it’ll actually cost a lot more to do it safely. Citing research by NASA and the Smithsonian, Durbin said that the total was closer to $305 million and that did not include the estimated $178 million needed to build a facility to house and display Discovery once in Houston. Furthermore, it was unclear if Congress even has the right to remove an artifact, let alone a space shuttle, from the Smithsonian’s collection. The Washington, DC, institution, which serves as a trust instrumentality of the US, maintains that it owns Discovery. The paperwork signed by NASA in 2012 transferred “all rights, interest, title, and ownership” for the spacecraft to the Smithsonian. “This will be the first time ever in the history of the Smithsonian someone has taken one of their displays and forcibly taken possession of it. What are we doing here? They don’t have the right in Texas to claim this,” said Durbin.

Starbase keeps getting bigger. Cameron County, Texas, has given SpaceX the green light to build an air separator facility, which will be located less than 300 feet from the region’s sand dunes, frustrating locals concerned about the impact on vegetation and wildlife, the Texas Tribune reports. The commissioners voted 3–1 to give Elon Musk’s rocket company a beachfront construction certificate and dune protection permit, allowing the company to build a facility to produce gases needed for Starship launches. The factory will separate air into nitrogen and oxygen. SpaceX uses liquid oxygen as a propellant and liquid nitrogen for testing and operations.

Saving the roads … By having the facility on site, SpaceX hopes to make the delivery of those gases more efficient by eliminating the need to have dozens of trucks deliver them from Brownsville. The company says they need more than 200 trucks of liquid nitrogen and oxygen delivered for each launch, a SpaceX engineer told the county during a meeting last week. With their application, SpaceX submitted a plan to mitigate expected negative effects on 865 square feet of dune vegetation and 20 cubic yards of dunes, as well as compensate for expected permanent impacts to 7,735 square feet of dune vegetation and 465 cubic yards of dunes. While the project will be built on property owned by SpaceX, the county holds the authority to manage the construction that affects Boca Chica’s dunes.

ULA is stacking its third Vulcan rocket. A little more than a week after its most recent Atlas V rocket launch, United Launch Alliance rolled a Vulcan booster to the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on July 2 to begin stacking its first post-certification Vulcan rocket, Spaceflight Now reports. The operation, referred to by ULA as Launch Vehicle on Stand (LVOS), is the first major milestone toward the launch of the third Vulcan rocket. The upcoming launch will be the first operational flight of ULA’s new rocket with a pair of US military payloads, following two certification flights in 2024.

For the second time … This is the second time that this particular Vulcan booster was brought to Space Launch Complex 41 in anticipation of a launch campaign. It was previously readied in late October of last year in support of the USSF-106 mission, the Space Force’s designation for the first national security launch to use the Vulcan rocket. However, plans changed as the process of certifying Vulcan to fly government payloads took longer than expected, and ULA pivoted to launch two Atlas V rockets on commercial missions from the same pad before switching back to Vulcan launch preps.

Progress report on China’s Moon rocket. China’s self-imposed deadline of landing astronauts on the Moon by 2030 is now just five years away, and we’re starting to see some tangible progress. Construction of the launch pad for the Long March 10 rocket, the massive vehicle China will use to launch its first crews toward the Moon, is well along at the Wenchang Space Launch Site on Hainan Island. An image shared on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, and then reposted on X, shows the Long March 10’s launch tower near its final height. A mobile launch platform presumably for the Long March 10 is under construction nearby.

Super heavy … The Long March 10 will be China’s most powerful rocket to date, with the ability to dispatch 27 metric tons of payload toward the Moon, a number comparable to NASA’s Space Launch System. Designed for partial reusability, the Long March 10 will use an all-liquid propulsion system and stand more than 92 meters (300 feet) tall. The rocket will launch Chinese astronauts inside the nation’s next-generation Mengzhou crew capsule, along with a lunar lander to transport crew members from lunar orbit to the surface of the Moon using an architecture similar to NASA’s Apollo program.

Next three launches

July 11: Electron | JAKE 4 | Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia | 23: 45 UTC

July 13: Falcon 9 | Dror 1 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 04: 31 UTC

July 14: Falcon 9 | Starlink 15-2 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 02: 27 UTC

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.

Rocket Report: SpaceX to make its own propellant; China’s largest launch pad Read More »

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It’s hunting season in orbit as Russia’s killer satellites mystify skywatchers

anti-satellite tests, Features, military space, National Reconnaissance Office, russia, Science, Space, US Space Force / /

“Once more, we play our dangerous game—a game of chess—against our old adversary.”

In this pool photograph distributed by the Russian state media agency Sputnik, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin gives a speech during the Victory Day military parade at Red Square in central Moscow on May 9, 2025. Credit: Yacheslav Prokofyev/Pool/AFP via Getty Images

Russia is a waning space power, but President Vladimir Putin has made sure he still has a saber to rattle in orbit.

This has become more evident in recent weeks, when we saw a pair of rocket launches carrying top-secret military payloads, the release of a mysterious object from a Russian mothership in orbit, and a sequence of complex formation-flying maneuvers with a trio of satellites nearly 400 miles up.

In isolation, each of these things would catch the attention of Western analysts. Taken together, the frenzy of maneuvers represents one of the most significant surges in Russian military space activity since the end of the Cold War. What’s more, all of this is happening as Russia lags further behind the United States and China in everything from rockets to satellite manufacturing. Russian efforts to develop a reusable rocket, field a new human-rated spacecraft to replace the venerable Soyuz, and launch a megaconstellation akin to SpaceX’s Starlink are going nowhere fast.

Russia has completed just eight launches to orbit so far this year, compared to 101 orbital attempts by US launch providers and 36 from China. This puts Russia on pace for the fewest number of orbital launch attempts since 1961, the year Soviet citizen Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly in space.

For the better part of three decades, Russia’s space program could rely on money from Western governments and commercial companies to build rockets, launch satellites, and ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The money tap dried up after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia also lost access to Ukrainian-made components to go into their launch vehicles and satellites.

Chasing a Keyhole

Amid this retrenchment, Russia is targeting what’s left of its capacity for innovation in space toward pestering the US military. US intelligence officials last year said they believed Russia was pursuing a project to place a nuclear weapon in space. The detonation of a nuclear bomb in orbit could muck up the space environment for years, indiscriminately disabling countless satellites, whether they’re military or civilian.

Russia denied that it planned to launch a satellite with a nuclear weapon, but the country’s representative in the United Nations vetoed a Security Council resolution last year that would have reaffirmed a nearly 50-year-old ban on placing weapons of mass destruction into orbit.

While Russia hasn’t actually put a nuclear bomb into orbit yet, it’s making progress in fielding other kinds of anti-satellite systems. Russia destroyed one of its own satellites with a ground-launched missile in 2021, and high above us today, Russian spacecraft are stalking American spy satellites and keeping US military officials on their toes with a rapid march toward weaponizing space.

The world’s two other space powers, the United States and China, are developing their own “counter-space” weapons. But the US and Chinese militaries have largely focused on using their growing fleets of satellites as force multipliers in the terrestrial domain, enabling precision strikes, high-speed communications, and targeting for air, land, and naval forces. That is starting to change, with US Space Force commanders now openly discussing their own ambitions for offensive and defensive counter-space weapons.

Three of Russia’s eight orbital launches this year have carried payloads that could be categorized as potential anti-satellite weapons, or at least prototypes testing novel technologies that could lead to one. (For context, three of Russia’s other launches this year have gone to the International Space Station, and two launched conventional military communications or navigation satellites.)

One of these mystery payloads launched on May 23, when a Soyuz rocket boosted a satellite into a nearly 300-mile-high orbit perfectly aligned with the path of a US spy satellite owned by the National Reconnaissance Office. The new Russian satellite, designated Kosmos 2588, launched into the same orbital plane as an American satellite known to the public as USA 338, which is widely believed to be a bus-sized KH-11, or Keyhole-class, optical surveillance satellite.

A conceptual drawing of a KH-11 spy satellite, with internal views, based on likely design similarities to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: Giuseppe De Chiara/CC BY-SA 3.0

The governments of Russia and the United States use the Kosmos and USA monikers as cover names for their military satellites.

While their exact design and capabilities are classified, Keyhole satellites are believed to provide the sharpest images of any spy satellite in orbit. They monitor airfields, naval ports, missile plants, and other strategic sites across the globe. In the zeitgeist of geopolitics, China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are the likeliest targets for the NRO’s Keyhole satellites. To put it succinctly, Keyhole satellites are some of the US government’s most prized assets in space.

Therefore, it’s not surprising to assume a potential military adversary might want to learn more about them or be in a position to disable or destroy them in the event of war.

Orbital ballet

A quick refresher on orbital mechanics is necessary here. Satellites orbit the Earth in flat planes fixed in inertial space. It’s not a perfect interpretation, but it’s easiest to understand this concept by imagining the background of stars in the sky as a reference map. In the short term, the position of a satellite’s orbit will remain unchanged on this reference map without any perturbation. For something in low-Earth orbit, Earth’s rotation presents a different part of the world to the satellite each time it loops around the planet.

It takes a lot of fuel to make changes to a satellite’s orbital plane, so if you want to send a satellite to rendezvous with another spacecraft already in orbit, it’s best to wait until our planet’s rotation brings the launch site directly under the orbital plane of the target. This happens twice per day for a satellite in low-Earth orbit.

That’s exactly what Russia is doing with a military program named Nivelir. In English, Nivelir translates to “dumpy level”—an optical instrument used by builders and surveyors.

The launch of Kosmos 2588 in May was precisely timed for the moment Earth’s rotation brought the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia underneath the orbital plane of the NRO’s USA 338 Keyhole satellite. Launches to the ISS follow the same roadmap, with crew and cargo vehicles lifting off at exactly the right time—to the second—to intersect with the space station’s orbital plane.

Since 2019, Russia has launched four satellites into bespoke orbits to shadow NRO spy satellites. None of these Russian Nivelir spacecraft have gotten close to their NRO counterparts. The satellites have routinely passed dozens of miles from one another, but the similarities in their orbits would allow Russia’s spacecraft to get a lot closer—and theoretically make physical contact with the American satellite. The Nivelir satellites have even maneuvered to keep up with their NRO targets when US ground controllers have made small adjustments to their orbits.

“This ensures that the orbital planes do not drift apart,” wrote Marco Langbroek, a Dutch archaeologist and university lecturer on space situational awareness. Langbroek runs a website cataloguing military space activity.

This is no accident

There’s reason to believe that the Russian satellites shadowing the NRO in orbit might be more than inspectors or stalkers. Just a couple of weeks ago, another Nivelir satellite named Kosmos 2558 released an unknown object into an orbit that closely mirrors that of an NRO spy satellite named USA 326.

We’ve seen this before. An older Nivelir satellite, Kosmos 2542, released a sub-satellite shortly after launching in 2019 into the same orbital plane as the NRO’s USA 245 satellite, likely a KH-11 platform similar to the USA 338 satellite now being shadowed by Kosmos 2588.

After making multiple passes near the USA 245 spacecraft, Kosmos 2542’s sub-satellite backed off and fired a mysterious projectile in 2020 at a speed fast enough to damage or destroy any target in its sights. US military officials interpreted this as a test of an anti-satellite weapon.

Now, another Russian satellite is behaving in the same way, with a mothership opening up to release a smaller object that could in turn reveal its own surprise inside like a Matryoshka nesting doll. This time, however, the doll is unnesting nearly three years after launch. With Kosmos 2542, this all unfolded within months of arriving in space.

The NRO’s USA 326 satellite launched in February 2022 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. It is believed to be an advanced electro-optical reconnaissance satellite, although the circumstances of its launch suggest a design different from the NRO’s classic Keyhole spy satellites. Credit: SpaceX

In just the last several days, the smaller craft deployed by Kosmos 2558—designated “Object C”—lowered its altitude to reach an orbit in resonance with USA 326, bringing it within 60 miles (100 kilometers) of the NRO satellite every few days.

While US officials are worried about Russian anti-satellite weapons, or ASATs, the behavior of Russia’s Nivelir satellites is puzzling. It’s clear that Russia is deliberately launching these satellites to get close to American spy craft in orbit, a retired senior US military space official told Ars on background.

“If you’re going to launch a LEO [low-Earth orbit] satellite into the exact same plane as another satellite, you’re doing that on purpose,” said the official, who served in numerous leadership positions in the military’s space programs. “Inclination is one thing. We put a bunch of things into Sun-synchronous orbits, but you have a nearly boundless number of planes you can put those into—360 degrees—and then you can go down to probably the quarter-degree and still be differentiated as being a different plane. When you plane-match underneath that, you’re doing that on purpose.”

But why?

What’s not as obvious is why Russia is doing this. Lobbing an anti-satellite, or counter-space, weapon into the same orbital plane as its potential target ties Russia’s hands. Also, a preemptive strike on an American satellite worth $1 billion or more could be seen as an act of war.

“I find it strange that the Russians are doing that, that they’ve invested their rubles in a co-planar LEO counter-space kind of satellite,” the retired military official said. “And why do I say that? Because when you launch into that plane, you’re basically committed to that plane, which means you only have one potential target ever.”

A ground-based anti-satellite missile, like the one Russia tested against one of its own satellites in 2021, could strike any target in low-Earth orbit.

“So why invest in something that is so locked into a target once you put it up there, when you have the flexibility of a ground launch case that’s probably even cheaper?” this official told Ars. “I’d be advocating for more ground-launched ASATs if I really wanted the flexibility to go after new payloads, because this thing can never go after anything new.”

“The only way to look at it is that they’re sending us messages. You say, ‘Hey, I’m going to just annoy the hell out of you. I’m going to put something right on your tail,'” the official said. “And maybe there’s merit to that, and they like that. It doesn’t make sense from a cost-benefit or an operational flexibility perspective, if you think about it, to lock in on a single target.”

Nevertheless, Russia’s Nivelir satellites have shown they could fire a projectile at another spacecraft in orbit, so US officials don’t dismiss the threat. Slingshot Aerospace, a commercial satellite tracking and analytics firm, went straight to the point in its assessment: “Kosmos 2588 is thought to be a Nivelir military inspection satellite with a suspected kinetic weapon onboard.”

Langbroek agrees, writing that he is concerned that Russia might be positioning “dormant” anti-satellite weapons within striking distance of NRO spy platforms.

“To me, the long, ongoing shadowing of what are some of the most prized US military space assets, their KH-11 Advanced Enhanced Crystal high-resolution optical IMINT (imaging intelligence) satellites, is odd for ‘just’ an inspection mission,” Langbroek wrote.

American pilot Francis Gary Powers, second from right, in a Moscow courtroom during his trial on charges of espionage after his U-2 spy plane was shot down while working for the CIA. Credit: Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images

The US military’s ability to spy over vast swaths of Russian territory has been a thorn in Russia’s side since the height of the Cold War.

“They thought they had the edge and shot down Gary Powers,” the retired official said, referring to the Soviet Union’s shoot-down of an American U-2 spy plane in 1960. “They said, ‘We’re going to keep those Americans from spying on us.’ And then they turn around, and we’ve got spy satellites. They’ve always hated them since the 1960s, so I think there’s still this cultural thing out there: ‘That’s our nemesis. We hate those satellites. We’re just going to fight them.'”

Valley of the dolls

Meanwhile, the US Space Force and outside analysts are tracking a separate trio of Russian satellites engaged in a complex orbital dance with one another. These satellites, numbered Kosmos 2581, 2582, and 2583, launched together on a single rocket in February.

While these three spacecraft aren’t shadowing any US spy satellites, things got interesting when one of the satellites released an unidentified object in March in a similar way to how two of Russia’s Nivelir spacecraft have deployed their own sub-satellites.

Kosmos 2581 and 2582 came as close as 50 meters from one another while flying in tandem, according to an analysis by Bart Hendrickx published in the online journal The Space Review earlier this year. The other member of the trio, Kosmos 2583, released its sub-satellite and maneuvered around it for about a month, then raised its orbit to match that of Kosmos 2581.

Finally, in the last week of June, Kosmos 2582 joined them, and all three satellites began flying close to one another, according to Langbroek, who called the frenzy of activity one of the most complex rendezvous and proximity operations exercises Russia has conducted in decades.

Higher still, two more Russian satellites are up to something interesting after launching on June 19 on Russia’s most powerful rocket. After more than 30 years in development, this was the first flight of Russia’s Angara A5 rocket, with a real functioning military satellite onboard, following four prior test launches with dummy payloads.

The payload Russia’s military chose to launch on the Angara A5 is unusual. The rocket deployed its primary passenger, Kosmos 2589, into a peculiar orbit hugging the equator and ranging between approximately 20,000 (12,500 miles) and 51,000 kilometers (31,700 miles) in altitude.

In this orbit, Kosmos 2589 completes a lap around the Earth about once every 24 hours, giving the satellite a synchronicity that allows it to remain nearly fixed in the sky over the same geographic location. These kinds of geosynchronous, or GEO, orbits are usually circular, with a satellite maintaining the same altitude over the equator.

The orbits of Kosmos 2589 and its companion satellite, illustrated in green and purple, bring the two Russian spacecraft through the geostationary satellite belt twice per day. Credit: COMSPOC

But Kosmos 2589 is changing altitude throughout its day-long orbit. Twice per day, on the way up and back down, Kosmos 2589 briefly passes near a large number of US government and commercial satellites in more conventional geosynchronous orbits but then quickly departs the vicinity. At a minimum, this could give Russian officials the ability to capture close-up views of American spy satellites.

Then, a few days after Kosmos 2589 reached orbit last month, commercial tracking sensors detected a second object nearby. Sound familiar? This new object soon started raising its altitude, and Kosmos 2589 followed suit.

Aiming higher

Could this be the start of an effort to extend the reach of Russian inspectors or anti-satellite weapons into higher orbits after years of mysterious activity at lower altitudes?

Jim Shell, a former NRO project manager and scientist at Air Force Space Command, suggested the two satellites seem positioned to cooperate with one another. “Many interesting scenarios here such as ‘spotter shooter’ among others. Certainly something to keep eyes on!” Shell posted Saturday on X.

COMSPOC, a commercial space situational awareness company, said the unusual orbit of Kosmos 2589 and its companion put the Russian satellites in a position to, at a minimum, spy on Western satellites in geosynchronous orbit.

“This unique orbit, which crosses two key satellite regions daily, may aid in monitoring objects in both GEO and graveyard orbits,” COMSPOC wrote on X. “Its slight 1° inclination could also reduce collision risks. While the satellite’s mission remains unclear, its orbit suggests interesting potential roles.”

Historically, Russia’s military has placed less emphasis on operating in geosynchronous orbit than in low-Earth orbit or other unique perches in space. Due to their positions near the equator, geosynchronous orbits are harder to reach from Russian spaceports because of the country’s high latitude. But Russia’s potential adversaries, like the United States and Europe, rely heavily on geosynchronous satellites.

Other Russian satellites have flown near Western communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit, likely in an attempt to eavesdrop on radio transmissions.

“So it is interesting that they may be doing a GEO inspector,” the retired US military space official told Ars. “I would be curious if that’s what it is. We’ve got to watch. We’ve got to wait and see.”

If you’re a fan of spy techno-thrillers, this all might remind you of the plot from The Hunt for Red October, where a new state-of-the-art Russian submarine leaves its frigid port in Murmansk with orders to test a fictional silent propulsion system that could shake up the balance of power between the Soviet and American navies.

Just replace the unforgiving waters of the North Atlantic Ocean with an environment even more inhospitable: the vacuum of space.

A few minutes into the film, the submarine’s commander, Marko Ramius, played by Sean Connery, announces his orders to the crew. “Once more, we play our dangerous game, a game of chess, against our old adversary—the American Navy.”

Today, nearly 40 years removed from the Cold War, the old adversaries are now scheming against one another in space.

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.

It’s hunting season in orbit as Russia’s killer satellites mystify skywatchers Read More »

woman-takes-10x-dose-of-turmeric,-gets-hospitalized-for-liver-damage

Woman takes 10x dose of turmeric, gets hospitalized for liver damage

health, liver, supplements, toxicity, turmeric / /

A 57-year-old woman spent six days in the hospital for severe liver damage after taking daily megadoses of the popular herbal supplement, turmeric, which she had seen touted on social media, according to NBC News.

The woman, Katie Mohan, told the outlet that she had seen a doctor on Instagram suggesting it was useful against inflammation and joint pain. So, she began taking turmeric capsules at a dose of 2,250 mg per day. According to the World Health Organization, an acceptable daily dose is up to 3 mg per kilogram of weight per day—for a 150-pound (68 kg) adult, that would be about 204 mg per day. Mohan was taking more than 10 times that amount.

A few weeks later, she developed stomach pain, nausea, fatigue, and dark urine. “I just did not feel well generally,” she said.

After seeing a news report about the possibility of toxicity from turmeric, she connected her symptoms to the pills and went to urgent care. Blood tests revealed her liver enzyme levels were 60 times higher than the normal limit, suggesting liver damage. She was admitted to a local hospital and then transferred to NYU Langone in New York City. Her hepatologist there, Nikolaos Pyrsopoulos, said she was “one step before full liver damage, liver failure, requiring liver transplant.”

Rare toxicity

Generally, turmeric—a golden-colored staple of curries—is not harmful, particularly in foods. But, as herbal supplements have gained popularity and doses have gotten larger, doctors have reported a rise in liver injuries from the spice. In fact, while rare overall, turmeric appears to have become the most common herbal cause of liver injuries in the US.

Woman takes 10x dose of turmeric, gets hospitalized for liver damage Read More »

pro-basketball-player-and-4-youths-arrested-in-connection-to-ransomware-crimes

Pro basketball player and 4 youths arrested in connection to ransomware crimes

Biz & IT, crime, lapsus$, law enforcement, ransomware, scattered spider, Security / /

Authorities in Europe have detained five people, including a former Russian professional basketball player, in connection with crime syndicates responsible for ransomware attacks.

Until recently, one of the suspects, Daniil Kasatkin, played for MBA Moscow, a basketball team that’s part of the VTB United League, which includes teams from Russia and other Eastern European countries. Kasatkin also briefly played for Penn State University during the 2018–2019 season. He has denied the charges.

Unrelated ransomware attacks

The AFP and Le Monde on Wednesday reported that Kasatkin was arrested and detained on June 21 in France at the request of US authorities. The arrest occurred as the basketball player was at the de Gaulle airport while traveling with his fiancée, whom he had just proposed to. The 26-year-old has been under extradition arrest since June 23, Wednesday’s news report said.

US prosecutors accuse Kasatkin of having negotiated ransom payments with organizations that had been hacked by an unnamed ransomware syndicate responsible for 900 different breaches. A US arrest warrant said he is wanted for “conspiracy to commit computer fraud” and “computer fraud conspiracy.”

An attorney for Kasatkin said his client is innocent of all charges.

“He bought a second-hand computer,” the attorney told reporters. The attorney continued:

He did absolutely nothing. He’s stunned. He’s useless with computers and can’t even install an application. He didn’t touch anything on the computer. It was either hacked, or the hacker sold it to him to act under the cover of another person.

US authorities are currently in the process of extraditing Kasatkin.

Pro basketball player and 4 youths arrested in connection to ransomware crimes Read More »

balsa-update:-springtime-in-dc

Balsa Update: Springtime in DC

Balsa / /

Today’s post is an update from my contractor at Balsa Research, Jennifer Chen. I offer guidance and make strategic choices, but she’s the one who makes the place run. Among all the other crazy things that have been happening lately, we had to divert some time from our Jones Act efforts to fight against some potentially far more disastrous regulations that got remarkably close to happening.

What if, in addition to restricting all domestic waterborne trade to U.S.-built, U.S-flagged vessels, we also required the same of 20% of all U.S. exports?

In late February this year, Balsa Research got word that this was a serious new proposal coming out of the USTR, with public comments due soon and public hearings not much longer after that.

The glaring problem with this proposal was that there were fewer than one hundred oceangoing ships that meet that criteria today, when we probably needed closer to a thousand.

Can we build our way out? No. The US currently only has four shipyards [1] capable of constructing large oceangoing commercial vessels, and it takes them 52 months on average to deliver an oceangoing cargo ship [2]. And that was if you can even get in the order book in the first place; most of these shipyards also take government contracts, the navy is behind on updating its fleet, and there are only so many dry docks to go around. We can theoretically build some shipyards about this, but that would take time as well.

In the meantime, existing oceangoing U.S.-built vessels have a combined capacity that can handle around 2% of current U.S. maritime export volumes, which is a much smaller number than 20%. And once capacity is reached, no more ships will be available at any price, and U.S. waterborne exports will be immediately reduced to a very small fraction of its current volume [3].

This seemed very bad. Maybe Balsa should do something about it?

I tried to squirm out of the responsibility at first, because this was the rational thing to do. With how limited Balsa’s capacity was (only one person working full time, that’s me!), it really only made sense for the entity to take on the highest leverage work we can; the ones where our comparative and absolute advantage absolutely dominated the competition. The work where no one else was on the ball at all. Like, say, trying to put together a set of coherent reforms to the Jones Act.

How might I squirm out of the responsibility? I went through press coverage of the proposal in trade journals, and the list of submitted comments in the USTR public portal. All I needed to do, really, was identify if this observation was being made literally anywhere else that the USTR might see.

Like, the UAW does a bunch of lobbying, surely they would have noticed that they will not be able to export cars? Well, I didn’t find a UAW submission, but did find one from the trade group representing the American auto industry. In the face of crushing export restrictions, they… “encourage USTR to begin implementation of any such restrictions no sooner than 7 years to provide sufficient time for the capacity of U.S.-flagged and U.S.-built vessels to grow to a level where it can meet industry demand.” [4]

…Okay. I guess Balsa might need to do something about this.

First, recall what the political environment was like in early March this year, two months into the new administration. Everyone’s attention was spread quite thin, what with the exciting new tariffs being announced and the Greenland annexation threats.

To make things worse, this proposed restriction was being double billed with another baffling proposal to charge certain cargo ships [6] millions of dollars when they try to deliver imported goods to U.S. ports. Because the dire negative consequences of new $3-5 million dollar port entry fees required no special knowledge to grasp, 99% of the attention and the lobbying might of the American private sector went towards protesting that instead.

But honestly, even without all that, I think the obliviousness is understandable. The U.S. makes trucks and planes, so it’s reasonable to assume that we also make ships and have more than a two digit number of them. The Jones Act killed domestic shipping generations ago, and industries have long adapted to using trucks, rail, or pipelines to move things domestically. As for exports, the nationality of the ships has never mattered there. With American industry severed from American shipbuilding for decades, who exactly was supposed to be keeping tabs?

Of course, a few parties would have been aware. The handful of domestic shipping companies that own all of the Jones Act ships, for instance. But they stand to benefit from the proposal as it sharply increases demand for their services, so they’re not exactly incentivized to speak up. Ditto for U.S. shipyards. I was not surprised by their silence.

More confusing to me was this 60 page economic analysis of the USTR’s complete proposal. This was submitted by the National Retail Federation, but approximately every single industry and trade association in the United States is a co-sponsor.

Regarding the requirement for 20% of U.S. exports to be delivered on U.S.-built ships, the analysts acknowledge that this would be a de-facto restriction of U.S. exports, which would be really bad. But then they proceed to base their analysis on a model where everything is actually fine because the vessels that do not exist actually do exist:

If USTR were to implement this remedy option… it would amount to, in effect, a restriction of U.S. exports out of U.S. ports, a very different scenario than the one we model here. In that event, the results we provide below would be many multiples greater than what we show for the scenario as proposed by USTR, which essentially assumes that the 125+ containerships and all the other new vessels needed to implement it exist. Nevertheless, we have proceeded with the scenario as proposed by USTR. [page 18]

To be clear, in the actual proposal text, there’s no “scenario” from USTR suggesting that any ships would suddenly pop into existence. The proposed policy is simply a requirement for operators to transport 20% of U.S. products on U.S.-flagged, U.S.-built ships [6].

I tried to find the scenario suggested by USTR to no avail. I suspect that sufficiently prestigious submitters probably had the luxury of some pre-submission communication with USTR, like formal stakeholder calls or guidance about analytical approaches. Unfortunately, such prior communication may end up significantly constraining your ultimate range of motion.

Despite the questionable analysis, it was still a huge relief to come across. I’d started to wonder if I was missing something obvious since no other submission brought up the fact that this proposal was de facto a restriction of all U.S. exports. But here was confirmation that no, at least one other team had noticed the same fundamental issue.

Congresspeople introduce bills all the time, and the vast majority of them die. Were we wasting our time on something that was 99% going to fail anyways?

Unfortunately, this did not seem to be the case. It was the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (responsible for a wide swathe of trade functions including advising the president on trade issues) that was proposing the above policies. They were doing so via “Section 301 Investigations”, a specific authority to take retaliatory action against “unfair trade practices”. This authority was invoked by the previous Trump administration six times, twice successfully. This gives us a base rate of 33%.

Additionally, of all the previous cases, this one bore the strongest resemblance to one of the two that passed—a 2017 case that was also framed as targeting unfair Chinese trade practices. That one resulted in significant additional tariffs on nearly two-thirds of all imports from China (~$370 billion in annual goods) beginning in 2018 and 2019.

Hundreds of industry representatives flew to DC to deliver their objections in person for that proposed action, resulting in a full seven days of public hearings. It was enacted anyways.

So there was a real chance that this policy would get enacted, and Balsa had noticed a major flaw that no one else was meaningfully pointing out. It was now overdetermined that we should divert some effort towards making a credible case against it.

I submitted Balsa’s initial public comment on March 22nd, and also a request to present testimony at the public hearing, which was accepted.

Conveniently, I was attending a maritime legislation conference in D.C the weekend prior. I shamelessly took advantage and put my public comment and presentation script in front of all the industry and trade reps I could chase down, and got the contact info and feedback of some of their in-house policy teams.

The consequences of the export restriction was surprising to some of them, but none of them were skeptical about my conclusion after reading through my analysis—another good sign that I was not the one missing something. In some cases, the organizations they were heading represented a plurality of interests, and while they had a notion that the restrictions to U.S. exports would be harmful, they felt unable to speak up about it as some of their members stood to benefit [7].

I made some last minute updates to my testimony based on their feedback and my observations.

On March 26th, I presented Balsa’s findings to a panel of representatives from eleven different government departments and agencies and took their questions.

Almost sixty testimonials were provided to the panel over two days of hearings. The overwhelming majority of speakers were there to object to the port fees. And this was important work; the proposed port fees were going to immediately and negatively impact the economy, this was obvious, and it was well worth it to hammer it home from dozens of angles [8].

Around a sixth of the presenters supported the proposals and came to make the case for why the USTR shouldn’t listen to the haters. These presenters generally represented American labor unions, the domestic shipbuilding industry, and states where unions and/or the shipbuilding industry were unusually important funders of their sitting political representatives.

Besides us, only a handful of the presenters spoke out against the export restrictions [9]. The majority of these presenters still primarily focused on the port fees, however.

Presenters who focused more on export restrictions included representatives from petrochemical industries who pointed out that the U.S. has no chemical or LNG tankers and no current capacity to build them, and shippers who noted extreme cost premiums and prohibitive timelines when trying to work with American shipyards.

In general, I found that the presenters understood that U.S.-built ships were unviable for their specific industries or companies, but didn’t grasp that this was a universal problem rather than a sectoral one [10]. Still, their testimony helped usefully signal that American shipbuilders were fundamentally uncompetitive, which helped legitimize our rather more dire analysis when we presented late on the second day. We just had to spell out the full-scale consequences; it wasn’t that companies like North Florida Shipping would need to pay $40 million instead of $10 million per vessel, it was that after the tiny order books filled up, no more ships would be available at any price.

So that’s basically what Balsa conveyed in our testimony. Afterwards, we had an opportunity to submit post-hearing responses to the questions that we were asked during the hearings. I got one question from the Department of Commerce requesting our analysis of the security implications of continuing to allow Chinese-built ships to dock at our ports (i.e. standard practice today), so we also submitted a response to that.

Around a month after the public hearings, the USTR published updated proposals and gave a summary of the arguments made in the public hearing. Here’s an excerpt from their summarized findings regarding the export restrictions:

Several comments expressed concern that the proposals would only punish U.S. exporters. Some asserted that the proposals would lead to a decrease in U.S. exports and would ultimately divert ships from U.S. ports. Several comments noted that the timelines for the proposals are too aggressive and not achievable. Most of these comments noted that there is currently insufficient capacity of U.S. ships and one comment noted a lack of U.S. mariners.

In response, they got rid of almost the entire thing. (More about that in the next section.)

I think Balsa can take something like 1-3% of the credit for this, and I have no regrets in spending the (relatively small amount of) time and money that we did to guarantee that our analysis was heard by the USTR. Along the way, we also made many useful and promising contacts with some congressional offices and other people working on maritime policy, which is a fantastic bonus.

The revised proposal that the USTR released in response to the public comments is for export restrictions to now only apply to LNG. Beginning in April 2029, 1% of exports must be delivered in U.S.-built vessels, and the percentage ratchets up annually.

This is still very awkward, because there exists no U.S.-made LNG tankers and no current capacity to build them. Building the capacity will take time, which means that starting in 2029, the U.S. may not be able to export any LNG.

But this is objectively a much smaller problem; instead of eliminating 90% of all waterborne U.S. exports (worth around $600 billion annually), it will be eliminating “only” a $30-40 billion dollar industry [11] if enacted.

More relevantly for Balsa, the correct people have noticed and are taking reasonable actions. The Center for LNG, which represents the U.S. LNG industry, has filed a comment to the USTR pointing this out. So has the Cato Institute, the Chamber of Shipping of America, the International Tank Container Organization, and various others.

And more importantly, this administration clearly really wants to export a lot more LNG, so I really don’t anticipate this restriction sticking around.

Zvi and I have minor disagreements about the counterfactual impact of an additional submission from Balsa Research, but I’ve ultimately decided that it is time to return to hunting the biggest fish—taking steps towards the actual repeal of the Jones Act.

Balsa Research is once more 100% focused on Jones Act reform! We are looking to hire someone based in D.C. to do research for us, please get in touch if you think you would be a good fit, and/or forward this to people in your network that you think would be.

We’re also developing specific reports digging to the bottom of specific pro-Jones Act talking points. Since the American Cargo for American Ships Act has passed the House and is currently before a Senate subcommittee, we will be first investigating the value of cargo preference laws for bolstering the American maritime sector.

If you would like to support this sort of work, please consider making a donation.

You can also view our new Request for Applications for a labor market analysis of the Jones Act, now that we are ready to get back to funding more work.

Thanks for reading!

[1] Possibly five, but Fincantieri Marinette Marine is situated on Lake Michigan, and the St. Lawrence Seaway is not wide enough for reasonably sized ocean carriers to be transported from the Great Lakes out to the ocean.

[2] Since the 1980s, the domestic shipbuilding market has shifted to building smaller vessels or vessels focused on coastwise transportation. Most shipyards would need a period to transition to develop the capacity to build commercial vessels suitable for international ocean trade, even if you don’t care about costs. More on this if you’re interested: 2023 CRS one-pager on domestic shipbuilding, 2025 GAO report on navy shipbuilding, 2024 pieces by Brian Potter and Austin Vernon on American shipbuilding.

[3] Note that in this scenario, Alaska, Hawaii, and the U.S. territories are left in the lurch as well, as the ships that serviced them are diverted into servicing the most profitable 10% of international trade routes instead.

[4] I’m inclined to cut them some slack though; new tariffs on Mexican and Canadian steel and auto parts were likely top of mind at the time.

[5] Ships built in China, or ships that are part of a fleet that has any Chinese-built ships. Balsa estimates that this would affect approximately 45% of all ships in the global commercial fleet.

[6] Actually, it requires operators to transport 100% of U.S. products on U.S.-flagged, U.S.-built ships, but if you submit some paperwork, you can get that number down to 20% for your specific entity. For the sake of simplicity, I have assumed that approximately every entity will immediately file this paperwork, but it’s worth noting that this means that the provision as written is actually stricter than that.

[7] Likely, that plurality of interests prevented them from looking too hard at the issue of American shipbuilding too much in the first place

[8] Balsa was originally going to join in on the hammering, actually. We had done analysis for both the port fee and the export restrictions for our written public comment, so we had the material. But when the final list of panelists were released, it became evident that there were much bigger players who were going to make the same arguments we did around the port fees. And they were going to do it better, since they had things like exclusive industry data and entire policy teams that were larger than one person, so we might as well save our five minute allotment to focus on the more neglected policy.

[9] A comprehensive list is available here.

[10] Again, this was reasonable and unsurprising.

[11] LNG specifically refers to super-cooled liquid natural gas requiring specialized tanker vessels for intercontinental transport, while pipeline exports carry natural gas in gaseous form to Canada and Mexico. This means that 100% of LNG exports are transported via tanker vessels, and therefore subject to this restriction.

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It’s Prime Day, and these are the best deals we could hunt down

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Greetings, Arsians! It’s Prime Day, where we celebrate liberation from our Cybertronian oppressors, the Decepticons, and the mighty Autobot leader who fought for our freedom, Optimus Pr—hmm, one moment. I am once again being told that in spite of the name, Prime Day does not in fact have anything to do with the veneration of Optimus Prime, and is in fact all about buying things.

All right, in that case, let’s shift gears and engage in some commerce! Our partners over at the Condé mothership have been toiling in the e-commerce mines for days, gathering some tasty deals for your perusal. We’ll be poking at the list throughout the next day or two, adding items and removing them as deals come and go. Please remember to check back if there’s nothing there right now that tickles you!

Amazon devices

Apple devices

Tech deals

Phones

TVs

Headphones and speakers

Kitchen

Home

Outdoor and Active

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China jumps ahead in the race to achieve a new kind of reuse in space

china, geosynchronous orbit, military space, orbital refueling, satellite servicing, shijian-21, shijian-25, Space, us space command, US Space Force / /

The SJ-21 and SJ-25 satellites “merged” on July 2 and have remained together since then.

This image from a telescope operated by s2a systems, a Swiss space domain awareness company, shows China’s SJ-21 and SJ-25 satellites flying near one another on June 26. Credit: s2a systems

Two Chinese satellites have rendezvoused with one another more than 20,000 miles above the Earth in what analysts believe is the first high-altitude attempt at orbital refueling.

China’s Shijian-21 and Shijian-25 satellites, known as SJ-21 and SJ-25 for short, likely docked together in geosynchronous orbit sometime last week. This is the conclusion of multiple civilian satellite trackers using open source imagery showing the two satellites coming together, then becoming indistinguishable as a single object.

Chinese officials have released no recent public information on what the two satellites are up to, but they’ve said a bit about their missions in prior statements.

SJ-25, which launched in January, is designed “for the verification of satellite fuel replenishment and life extension service technologies,” according to the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, the Chinese state-owned contractor that developed the satellite. SJ-21 launched in 2021 and docked with a defunct Chinese Beidou navigation satellite in geosynchronous orbit, then towed it to a higher altitude for disposal before returning to the geosynchronous belt. Chinese officials described this demonstration as a test of “space debris mitigation” techniques.

More than meets the eye

These kinds of technologies are dual-use, meaning they have civilian and military applications. For example, a docking in geosynchronous orbit could foretell an emerging capability for China to approach, capture, and disable another country’s satellite. At the same time, the US Space Force is interested in orbital refueling as it seeks out ways to extend the lives of military satellites, which are often limited by finite fuel supplies.

The Space Force sometimes calls this concept dynamic space operations. While some military leaders remain skeptical about the payoff of in-space refueling, the Space Force has an agreement with Astroscale to perform the first refueling of a US military asset in orbit as soon as next year.

China appears to be poised to beat the US Space Force to the punch. The apparent docking of the two satellites last week suggests SJ-21 is the target for SJ-25’s refueling demonstration, and US officials are watching. Two of the Space Force’s inspector satellites, known by the acronym GSSAP, positioned themselves near SJ-21 and SJ-25 to get a closer look.

Retired Space Force Lt. Gen. John Shaw is a vocal proponent of dynamic space operations. Because of this, he’s interested in what happens with SJ-21 and SJ-25. Shaw was deputy commander of US Space Command before his retirement in 2023. In this role, Shaw had some oversight over GSSAP satellites as they roamed geosynchronous orbit.

“The theory behind dynamic space operations stemmed from a kind of operational frustration with our inability to conduct the full range of activities with GSSAP that we wanted to at Space Command, as the warfighter—largely due to the combination of fixed fuel availability and expected satellite lifetime,” Shaw told Ars.

As other countries, mainly China, step up their clandestine activities in orbit, military officials are asking more of the GSSAP satellites.

“It was operationally driven then, a couple years ago, but it’s now manifesting itself in much wider ways than even it did back then, particularly in the face of activities by potential adversaries,” Shaw said. “That’s why I’m more confident and even more fanatical about it.”

Geosynchronous orbit is a popular location for military and commercial satellites. At an altitude of some 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers), a satellite’s orbital velocity perfectly matches the speed of Earth’s rotation, meaning a spacecraft has a fixed view of the same region of the planet 24 hours per day. This is useful for satellites providing military forces with secure strategic communications and early warning of missile attacks.

Now, geosynchronous orbit is becoming a proving ground for new kinds of spacecraft to inspect or potentially attack other satellites. Ground-based anti-satellite missiles aren’t as useful in striking targets in high-altitude orbits, and there’s a consensus that, if you were to attack an enemy satellite, it would make more sense to use a weapons platform already in space that could move in and connect with the target without blowing it up and creating a cloud of dangerous space junk.

Keeping watch

The US military’s GSSAP satellites began launching in 2014. They carry enough propellant to maneuver around geosynchronous orbit and approach objects for closer inspection, but there’s a limit to what they can do. Six GSSAP satellites have been launched to date, but the Space Force decommissioned one of them in 2023. Meanwhile, China’s satellite operators are watching the watchers.

“We’ve seen where GSSAP safely and responsibly approaches a Chinese vehicle, and it just quickly maneuvers away,” Shaw said. “We tend to fly our GSSAPs like dirigibles, using relatively slow, minimum energy transfer approaches. The Chinese know that we do that, so it is relatively easy for them to maneuver away today to avoid such an approach.

“If tomorrow they’re able to refuel at will and operate even more dynamically, then the marginal cost of those maneuvers for them becomes even lower, and the challenge for GSSAP becomes even greater,” Shaw said.

Danish Rear Admiral Damgaard Rousøe, Danish Defence Attaché, right, observes space domain awareness data with US Space Force Lt. Col. Mark Natale, left, Joint Commercial Operations cell director, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on September 26, 2024. Credit: US Space Force/Dalton Prejeant

China launched a satellite into geosynchronous orbit in 2016 with a robotic arm that could grab onto another object in space, then sent SJ-21 into orbit four years ago on its “space debris mitigation” mission.

Northrop Grumman launched two satellites in 2019 and 2020 that accomplished the first dockings in geosynchronous orbit. Northrop’s satellites, which it calls Mission Extension Vehicles, took control of two aging commercial communications satellites running low on fuel, maneuvering them to new locations and allowing them to continue operating for several more years. It’s easy to see that this kind of technology could be used for commercial or military purposes.

But these Mission Extension Vehicles don’t have the ability to transfer fluids from one satellite to another. That is the step China is taking with SJ-21 and SJ-25, presumably with hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants, which most satellites use because they combust on contact with one another.

US Space Command’s Joint Commercial Operations cell, which collects unclassified satellite monitoring data to bolster the military’s classified data sources, estimated the SJ-21 and SJ-25 satellites “merged” on July 2 and have remained together since then. The video below, released by s2a systems, shows SJ-25 approaching SJ-21 on June 30.

A time-lapse of yesterday’s SJ-25 / SJ-21 coverage, recorded from 08: 30 to 20: 53 UTC. pic.twitter.com/HUPWBTXZc9

— s2a systems (@s2a_systems) July 1, 2025

The unclassified data does not confirm that the two satellites actually docked, but that is likely what happened. The satellites came together, or merged, on June 13 and June 30 but separated again within a few hours. These may have been practice runs, aborted docking attempts, or sudden maneuvers to avoid the prying eyes of the US military’s GSSAP satellites loitering nearby.

Now, the SJ-21 and SJ-25 have been flying together for more than five days with no discernible changes detected from ground-based telescopes. Thousands of miles over the equator, the two satellites appear only as dots in the viewfinders of these telescopes positioned around the globe.

What we don’t know

COMSPOC is a Pennsylvania-based company that collects and processes data from commercial satellite tracking sensors. COMSPOC fuses optical telescope imagery with radar tracking and passive radio frequency (RF) data, which uses radio signals to measure exact distances to satellites in space, to get the best possible estimate of a spacecraft’s position.

“With most telescopes… at 1 kilometer or a half a kilometer, somewhere in there, you’re going to start to lose it when they get that close,” said Paul Graziani, COMSPOC’s founder and CEO, in an interview with Ars. “I think it’d be difficult for any telescope, even a really capable one, to get within 100 meters. That seems to be a stretch for telescopes.”

That’s why it’s helpful to add radar and RF data to the mix.

“When you add all of that together, you become much better than the 1-kilometer [precision] that a ‘scope might be,” said Joe Callaro, COMSPOC’s director of operations. “RF tells you if part of that blob is moving and the other part isn’t, and even when they all become one pixel, you can tell things about that.”

Even then, companies like COMSPOC have a degree of uncertainty in their conclusions unless Chinese or US officials make a more definitive statement.

“We are not working with the government,” Callaro told Ars before last week’s apparent docking. “We are not clearing this. The charge that I have for my team is we won’t make assertions as to what’s going on. We will only tell what our software gives us as a solution. We can say, ‘Here are the elements, here’s the visual, but what it means and what it’s doing, we will not assert.’

“We will not say they’re docked because unless they told me, I wouldn’t know that,” Callaro said. “So, we will say they’ve been together for this amount of time, that the mission could have happened, and then they separated, became two, and separated at whatever speed.”

Without any updates from China, observers won’t know for sure if the servicing demo was successful until the satellites detach. Then, US officials and independent analysts will watch to see if SJ-21 makes any substantial maneuvers, which might indicate the satellite has a full tank of gas.

SJ-21’s behavior for the last couple of years suggested it was running empty after undertaking large propulsive maneuvers to capture the Chinese Beidou satellite and move it to a different orbit.

Callaro served as a tactician in the Air Force’s Joint Space Operations Center, then joined the Aerospace Corporation before taking the job as operations lead at COMSPOC. He doesn’t buy China’s suggestion that SJ-21 was purely an experiment in collecting space debris.

“That is not how I see that at all,” Callaro said. “The fact that we can calculate all the maneuvers it takes to get out and get back, and the fact that afterwards, it spent a couple of years basically not moving, probably because it was low on fuel, sets up the idea [that there’s more to SJ-21’s mission]. Now, SJ-25 goes out there, and it’s supposed to be a fuel tank, and it’s perfectly aligned with SJ-21 and now we see this happening, tells me that it’s much more a counter-space capability than it is a trash remove. But that’s what they say.”

Unless China makes a public statement on the refueling of SJ-21 by SJ-25, observers won’t know for sure if the servicing demo was successful until the satellites detach. Then, US officials and independent analysts will watch to see if SJ-21 makes any substantial maneuvers, which might indicate the satellite has a full tank of gas for whatever mission Chinese officials send it off to do next.

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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.

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Measles cases reach 33-year high as RFK Jr. pursues anti-vaccine agenda

health, measles / /

Such is the case in Gaines County, Texas, where the largest outbreak this year has erupted. So far, that outbreak, which spans four states, accounts for at least 950 of the country’s 1,281 cases.

But, overall, there have been a whopping 27 outbreaks in the country just in the first six months. According to national data compiled by researchers at Yale School of Public Health, as of July 6, the 1,281 cases are across 39 states, with around 90 percent of the cases associated with one of the outbreaks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also reports a national measles case count but only updates its numbers on Wednesdays. According to the CDC’s latest data, at least 155 people have been hospitalized for the infection, and three people have died—two otherwise healthy young children in Texas and one adult in New Mexico. All three deaths were in people who were not vaccinated.

Overall, most of the cases in the country are in unvaccinated children and teens. About 28 percent of cases are under the age of 5 and about 37 percent are ages 5 to 19. Of all the cases, 92 percent were in people who were unvaccinated or had an unknown vaccination status.

Measles cases reach 33-year high as RFK Jr. pursues anti-vaccine agenda Read More »