Enlarge/ The iPhone that fell from Alaska Airlines flight 1282, discovered by Seanathan Bates under a bush on the side of the road.
On Sunday, game developer Seanathan Bates discovered a working iPhone that fell 16,000 from Alaska Airlines flight 1282 on Friday. Flight 1282 suffered an explosive decompression event when a door plug blew off the plane. No one was injured during the incident. The iPhone wasn’t injured, either—still unlocked and with a torn charging cable connector plugged in, it appeared largely undamaged and displayed information that matched the flight.
“Found an iPhone on the side of the road,” wrote Bates in a post on X. “Still in airplane mode with half a battery and open to a baggage claim for #AlaskaAirlines ASA1282 Survived a 16,000 foot drop perfectly in tact!”
Enlarge/ The discovery location of the iPhone that fell from Alaska Airlines flight 1282.
After the discovery, Bates contacted the NTSB, who took possession of the device and told him the iPhone was actually the second phone that had been found from the flight. During a press conference on Sunday, NTSB chair Jennifer Homendyconfirmed that two people had discovered cell phones that fell from flight 1281. The other cell phone was discovered in someone’s yard.
The decompression event started when a door plug used to cover an unused exit door on the Boeing 737 Max 9 unexpectedly detached from the plane. Rapid decompression can suck passengers and objects violently out of an aircraft due to air pressure differences. While no people fell out of the plane, the loose iPhone apparently got ripped away while charging. “In case you didn’t see it, there was a broken-off charger plug still inside it! Thing got *yankedout the door,” wrote Bates in his X post.
Enlarge/ The iPhone that fell from Alaska Airlines flight 1282 had a ripped charging connector still plugged into it.
iPhones surviving harrowing drops from sky-heights aren’t unheard of. In May, AppleInsider reported on a skydiver’s iPhone that survived a 14,000 fall from a plane. Given air resistance that limits an object’s descent speed and landings in a soft spot like moist dirt or mud, the survivals aren’t entirely surprising. Landing on a hard surface would likely be a different story, however.
At the time of the iPhone’s discovery, the search was still on for the missing door plug, but the plug has since been found. Compared to the apparent ease of discovering two small cell phones first, a Hacker News commenter quipped, “Boeing needs ‘Find My Door.'”
No word yet on whether the iPhone has been reunited with its owner.
United Launch Alliance’s first Vulcan rocket prepares to emerge from the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
United Launch Alliance
ULA’s fully stacked Vulcan rocket is clearly visible for the first time during rollout from its vertical hangar.
Stephen Clark/Ars Technica
This version of ULA’s Vulcan rocket stands 202 feet (61.6 meters) tall.
Stephen Clark/Ars Technica
The Vulcan rocket was positioned on top of a mobile launch platform for the third-of-a-mile trek to Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral.
For its first flight, the Vulcan rocket is emblazoned with a red flame-like insignia, a US flag, and the logos of United Launch Alliance and Astrobotic, which owns the lunar lander nestled inside the rocket’s payload fairing.
Stephen Clark/Ars Technica
The Vulcan rocket passes the halfway point on its journey to the launch pad Friday.
United Launch Alliance
Technicians gather as ULA’s Vulcan rocket nears the launch pad.
United Launch Alliance
Two “trackmobile” locomotives propelled the Vulcan rocket and its mobile launch platform to the launch pad, riding along dual rail tracks.
United Launch Alliance
It took about a half-hour for the Vulcan rocket to complete its rollout to the launch pad.
Stephen Clark/Ars Technica
Liftoff is scheduled for 2: 18 am EST (07: 18 UTC) Monday.
Stephen Clark/Ars Technica
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—United Launch Alliance’s first Vulcan rocket emerged from its hangar Friday for a 30-minute trek to its launch pad in Florida, finally moving into the starting blocks after a decade of development and testing.
This was the first time anyone had seen the full-size 202-foot-tall (61.6-meter) Vulcan rocket in its full form. Since ULA finished assembling the rocket last month, it has been cocooned inside the scaffolding of the company’s vertical hangar at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
On Friday, ULA’s ground crew rolled the Vulcan rocket and its mobile launch platform to its seaside launch pad. It was one of the last steps before the Vulcan rocket is cleared for liftoff Monday at 2: 18 am EST (07: 18 UTC). On Sunday afternoon, ULA engineers will gather inside a control center at Cape Canaveral to oversee an 11-hour countdown, when the Vulcan rocket will be loaded with methane, liquid hydrogen, and liquid oxygen propellants.
ULA has a 45-minute launch window to get the mission off the ground on Monday, and there is an 85 percent chance of good weather.
If the rocket doesn’t take off Monday, ULA has backup launch opportunities Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Then, the company would have to stand down until January 23, a gap in launch availability constrained by the trajectory of the Vulcan rocket’s payload. A commercial robotic Moon lander, developed by a Pennsylvania company named Astrobotic, is the primary passenger on the inaugural flight of Vulcan.
In the wild
This is a big moment for ULA, a 50-50 joint venture formed in 2006 by the merger of Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s launch divisions. The Vulcan rocket, quite literally, is the embodiment of the company’s future, said Mark Peller, ULA’s vice president of Vulcan development. It will replace ULA’s fleet of Atlas and Delta rockets, with lineages dating back to the early years of the Space Age.
“There was an opportunity to develop a new rocket that can do everything Atlas and Delta could do, but do it with even greater performance, and taking advantage of the latest technology,” Peller said Friday. “The system that we’ve developed, and we’re about to fly, is really positioning us for a very bright, prosperous future for many, many years to come.”
Facing stiff competition from SpaceX, still an upstart in the launch business a decade ago, ULA officials decided they needed a new rocket that was cheaper to build and fly than the Atlas V and Delta IV. Ars has traced the history of Vulcan, a timeline that includes lawsuits, a change in corporate leadership, delays and setbacks, and, most recently, reports that Boeing and Lockheed Martin have put ULA up for sale.
ULA has sold dozens of Vulcan missions to the US military and Amazon for its Project Kuiper broadband network. In the military’s case, the Pentagon wants to have at least two independent launch providers capable of hauling national security satellites into orbit, so ULA has been able to count on a steady diet of government contracts.
Amazon booked launches with almost every major Western launch company besides SpaceX, its competitor in the broadband satellite business. This also ensured ULA a hefty cut of work for Amazon’s $10 billion Kuiper satellite constellation.
The Vulcan rocket “has proven to already be an extremely competitive product in the marketplace, having an order book of over 70 missions before first flight, which is really unheard of,” Peller said. “So it is the future of our company, and we’re off to a great start on a really solid trajectory with Vulcan.”
But it still needs to fly, and ULA is putting its record of 100 percent mission success on the line with the Vulcan test flight slated for Monday.
“We have very rigorously gone through a qualification of Vulcan,” Peller said. “That stretched over several years, involved rigorous testing of the components, the subsystems, and the major elements of the rocket as well as testing here at the launch site, extensive simulation using the latest tools to do everything we can to fly the rocket in simulation before we actually fly it.
“Many of the new systems that are flying on Vulcan had the benefit of being introduced on Atlas and Delta in recent years. So many of the systems that we’re flying here actually have a fair amount of flight experience under their belts,” he continued. “But … this is still the first time the vehicle has flown, and we will watch this very carefully and see what we learn from this. We’re going into this very high confidence. If there are any observations with the first flight, we’re prepared to respond and address those, and turn around quickly to fly again.”
The new rocket’s first stage is powered by two methane-fueled BE-4 engines from Blue Origin. While they’ve been tested on the ground countless times, these engines have never flown before.
Vulcan’s upper stage, called the Centaur V, is an upgraded twin-engine version of the single-engine upper stage that flies on the Atlas V rocket. The hydrogen-fueled RL10 engines on the Centaur upper stage are similar in design to the ones flown on every Atlas V and Delta IV rocket, but the Centaur V is much larger. One of the upgraded upper stages for Vulcan exploded during a ground test last year, forcing ULA to push back the rocket’s debut flight for months while engineers strengthened the Centaur’s stainless steel hydrogen tank.
This version of the Vulcan rocket is fitted with two strap-on solid-fueled boosters from Northrop Grumman. These are higher-thrust boosters than the strap-on rockets used on ULA’s previous rockets. In the future, Vulcan rockets will come in variants with zero, two, four, or six solid rocket boosters, allowing ULA to match the vehicle’s lift capability with each mission’s requirements.
The most powerful version of Vulcan will outlift the largest rocket in ULA’s current fleet, the Delta IV Heavy. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket can handle heavier payloads flying to low-Earth orbit and has a similar lift capability to higher-altitude orbits.
ULA’s Vulcan, though, will enter service as a fully expendable rocket. The company plans to gradually introduce an upgrade to recover and reuse the two BE-4 engines, although Peller said Friday that it will take a “few years” to begin reusing engines.
According to ULA, the initial focus is to fully certify the Vulcan rocket to launch US military satellites later this year. The first Vulcan flight, which ULA calls “Cert-1,” will be followed by a “Cert-2” mission as soon as April to launch Sierra Space’s commercial Dream Chaser spaceplane on a resupply mission to the International Space Station.
If those two launches go flawlessly, the Space Force could sign off on launching national security payloads on Vulcan in the second half of this year.
Enlarge/ SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket stands on Launch Complex 39A in Florida, hours before its scheduled liftoff with the military’s X-37B spaceplane.
Trevor Mahlmann/Ars Technica
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket is poised for launch as soon as Tuesday night from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and the US military’s mysterious X-37B spaceplane is fastened atop the heavy-lifter for a ride into orbit.
Although the Space Force is keeping details about the military spaceplane’s flight under wraps, we know it’s heading into an unusual orbit, probably significantly higher than the X-37B’s previous sojourns that stayed within a few hundred miles of Earth’s surface.
SpaceX’s launch team called off a launch attempt Monday night “due to a ground side issue” and reset for another launch opportunity as soon as Tuesday night at 8: 14pm EST (01: 14 UTC). When it lifts off, the Falcon Heavy will light 27 kerosene-fueled engines to power the rocket off its launch pad overlooking the Atlantic coastline.
The exact altitude the X-37B will be flying through is unclear, but hobbyists and amateur sleuths who use open source information to reconstruct trajectories of top-secret military spacecraft suggest the Falcon Heavy will haul the winged vehicle into an orbit that could stretch tens of thousands of miles above the planet.
What’s more, the Falcon Heavy will apparently take a flight path toward the northeast from Florida’s Space Coast, then ultimately release the X-37B on a trajectory that will take it over Earth’s polar regions. This is a significant departure from the flight profile for the military spaceplane’s six previous missions, which all flew to space on smaller rockets than the Falcon Heavy.
In a statement, the Space Force said this flight of the X-37B is focused on “a wide range of test and experimentation objectives.” Flying in “new orbital regimes” is among the test objectives, military officials said.
“It seems to me like it might be a much higher orbit that it’s going to,” said Brian Weeden, director of program planning for the Secure World Foundation, which promotes sustainable and peaceful uses of outer space. “Otherwise, I don’t know why they would use a Falcon Heavy, which is a pretty big thing.”
Covering more ground
The X-37B spaceplane has attracted a lot of attention and speculation since its first mission in 2010. Across multiple administrations, Pentagon officials have consistently walked a narrow line between acknowledging the existence of the spaceplane, and divulging limited information about its general purpose, while treating some details with the utmost secrecy. The military does not talk about where in space it flies. With a few exceptions, defense officials haven’t publicly discussed specifics of what the X-37B carries into orbit.
The military has two Boeing-built X-37B spaceplanes, or Orbital Test Vehicles, in its inventory. They are reusable and designed to launch inside the payload fairing of a conventional rocket, spend multiple years in space with the use of solar power, and then return to Earth for a landing on a three-mile-long runway, either at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California or at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
It resembles a miniature version of NASA’s retired space shuttle orbiter, with wings, deployable landing gear, and black thermal protection tiles to shield its belly from the scorching heat of reentry. It measures 29 feet (about 9 meters) long, roughly a quarter of the length of NASA’s space shuttle, and it doesn’t carry astronauts. The X-37B has a cargo bay inside the fuselage for payloads, with doors that open after launch and close before landing.
The Space Force made a surprise announcement on November 8 that the next flight of the X-37B, sometimes called OTV-7, would launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. All six of the spaceplane’s past flights launched on smaller rockets, either United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V or SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
