Science – Page 12

There was a straight shot from Earth to the Moon and Mars last night

astrophotography, Mars, moon, Science, Space / Paul Patrick / January 14, 2025

The most recent lunar occultation of Mars that was visible from the United States occurred on December 7, 2022. A handful of these events occur every few years around each Martian opposition, but they are usually only visible from a small portion of Earth, often over the ocean or in polar regions. The next lunar occultation of Mars visible across most of the United States will happen on the night of February 4–5, 2042. There are similar occultations of Mars in 2035, 2038, and 2039 visible in narrow swaths of South Florida and the Pacific Northwest.

This photo was taken with a handheld Canon 80D and a 600 mm lens. Settings were 1/2000 sec, f/8, ISO 400. The image was cropped and lightly edited in Adobe Lightroom.

The Moon also periodically covers Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and the Solar System’s more distant planets. A good resource on lunar occultations is In-The-Sky.org, which lists events where the Moon will block out a planet or a bright star. Be sure you choose your location on the upper right corner of the page and toggle year by year to plan out future viewing opportunities.

Viewing these kinds of events can be breathtaking and humbling. In 2012, I was lucky enough to observe the transit of Venus in front of the Sun, something that only happens twice every 121 years.

Seeing Mars, twice the size of the Moon, rising above the lunar horizon like a rusty BB pellet next to a dusty volleyball provided a perfect illustration of the scale and grandeur of the Solar System. Similarly, viewing Venus dwarfed by the Sun was a revealing moment. The worlds accompanying Earth around the Sun are varied in size, shape, color, and composition.

In one glance, an observer can see the barren, airless lunar surface and a cold, desert planet that once harbored rivers, lakes, and potentially life, all while standing on our own planet, an oasis in the cosmos. One thing that connects them all is humanity’s quest for exploration. Today, robots are operating on or around the Moon and Mars. Governments and private companies are preparing to return astronauts to the lunar surface within a few years, then moving on to dispatch human expeditions to the red planet.

Plans to land astronauts on the Moon are already in motion, but significant financial and technological hurdles remain for a crew mission to put humans on Mars. But for a short time Monday night, it looked like there was a direct path.

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Maker of weight-loss drugs to ask Trump to pause price negotiations: Report

drug pricing, eli lilly, GLP-1, health, medicare, mounjaro, negotiations, obesity, Ozempic, Science, wegovy, weight loss, zepbound / Kris Guyer / January 14, 2025

Popular prescriptions

For now, Medicare does not cover drugs prescribed specifically for weight loss, but it will cover GLP-1 class drugs if they’re prescribed for other conditions, such as Type 2 diabetes. Wegovy, for example, is covered if it is prescribed to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke in adults with either obesity or overweight. But, in November, the Biden administration proposed reinterpreting Medicare prescription-coverage rules to allow for coverage of “anti-obesity medications.”

Such a move is reportedly part of the argument Lilly’s CEO plans to bring to the Trump administration. Rather than using drug price negotiations to reduce health care costs, Ricks aims to play up the potential to reduce long-term health care costs by improving people’s overall health with coverage of GLP-1 drugs now. This argument would presumably be targeted at Mehmet Oz, the TV presenter and heart surgeon Trump has tapped to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“My argument to Mehmet Oz is that if you want to protect Medicare costs in 10 years, have [the Affordable Care Act] and Medicare plans list these drugs now,” Ricks said to Bloomberg. “We know so much about how much cost savings there will be downstream in heart disease and other conditions.”

An October report from the Congressional Budget Office strongly disputed that claim, however. The CBO estimated that the direct cost of Medicare coverage for anti-obesity drugs between 2026 and 2034 would be nearly $39 billion, while the savings from improved health would total just a little over $3 billion, for a net cost to US taxpayers of about $35.5 billion.

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Up close and personal with the stag beetle in A Real Bug’s Life S2

A Real Bug's Life, Disney Plus, entomology, National Geographic, Science / Paul Patrick / January 14, 2025

It’s just one of the many fascinating insect species featured in the second season of this NatGeo docuseries.

A female giant stag beetle Credit: National Geographic/Darlyne A. Murawski

A plucky male American stag beetle thinks he’s found a mate on a rotting old tree stump—and then realizes there’s another male eager to make the same conquest. The two beetles face off in battle, until the first manages to get enough leverage to toss his romantic rival off the stump in a deft display of insect jujitsu. It’s the first time this mating behavior has been captured on film, and the stag beetle is just one of the many fascinating insects featured in the second season of A Real Bug’s Life, a National Geographic docuseries narrated by Awkwafina.

The genesis for the docuseries lies in a past rumored sequel to Pixar’s 1998 animated film A Bug’s Life, which celebrated its 25th anniversary two years ago. That inspired producer Bill Markham, among others, to pitch a documentary series on a real bug’s life to National Geographic. “It was the quickest commission ever,” Markham told Ars last year. “It was such a good idea, to film bugs in an entertaining family way with Pixar sensibilities.” And thanks to the advent of new technologies—photogrammetry, probe and microscope lenses, racing drones, ultra-high-speed camera—plus a handful of skilled “bug wranglers,” the team was able to capture the bug’s-eye view of the world beautifully.

As with the Pixar film, the bugs (and adjacent creatures) are the main characters here, from cockroaches, monarch butterflies, and praying mantises to bees, spiders, and even hermit crabs. The 10 episodes, across two seasons, tell their stories as they struggle to survive in their respective habitats, capturing entire ecosystems in the process: city streets, a farm, the rainforest, a Texas backyard, and the African savannah, for example. Highlights from S1 included the first footage of cockroach egg casings hatching; wrangling army ants on location in a Costa Rica rainforest; and the harrowing adventures of a tiny jumping spider navigating the mean streets of New York City.

Looking for love

A luna moth perched on a twig. National Geographic/Nathan Small

S2 takes viewers to Malaysia’s tropical beaches, the wetlands of Derbyshire in England, and the forests of Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains. Among the footage highlights: Malaysian tiger beetles, who can run so fast they temporarily are unable to see; a young female hermit crab’s hunt for a bigger shell; and tiny peacock spiders hatching Down Under. There is also a special behind-the-scenes look for those viewers keen to learn more about how the episodes were filmed, involving 130 different species across six continents. Per the official synopsis:

A Real Bug’s Life is back for a thrilling second season that’s bolder than ever. Now, thanks to new cutting-edge filming technology, we are able to follow the incredible stories of the tiny heroes living in this hidden world, from the fast-legged tiger beetle escaping the heat of Borneo’s beaches to the magical metamorphosis of a damselfly on a British pond to the Smoky Mountain luna moth whose quest is to grow wings, find love and pass on his genes all in one short night. Join our witty guide, Awkwafina, on new bug journeys full of more mind-blowing behaviors and larger-than-life characters.

Entomologist Michael Carr, an environmental compliance officer for Santa Fe County in New Mexico, served as a field consultant for the “Love in the Forest” episode, which focuses on the hunt for mates by a luna moth, a firefly, and an American stag beetle. The latter species is Carr’s specialty, ever since he worked at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History and realized the beetles flourished near where he grew up in Virginia. Since stag beetles are something of a niche species, NatGeo naturally tapped Carr as its field expert to help them find and film the insects in the Smoky Mountains. To do so, Carr set up a mercury vapor lamp on a tripod—”old style warehouse lights that take a little time to charge up,” which just happen to emit frequencies of light that attract different insect species.

Behind the scenes

Beetle expert Michael Carr and shooting researcher Katherine Hannaford film a stag beetle at night. National Geographic/Tom Oldridge

Stag beetles are saprocylic insects, according to Carr, so they seek out decaying wood and fungal communities. Males can fly as high as 30 feet to reach tree canopies, while the females can dig down to between 1 and 3 meters to lay their eggs in wood. Much of the stag beetle’s lifecycle is spent underground as a white grub molting into larger and larger forms before hatching in two to three years during the summer. Once their exoskeletons harden, they fly off to find mates and reproduce as quickly as possible. And if another male happens to get in their way, they’re quite prepared to do battle to win at love.

Stag beetles might be his specialty, but Carr found the fireflies also featured in that episode to be a particular highlight. “I grew up in rural Virginia,” Carr told Ars. “There was always fireflies, but I’d never seen anything like that until I was there on site. I did not realize, even though I’d grown up in the woods surrounded by fireflies, that, ‘Oh, the ones that are twinkling at the top, that’s one species. The ones in the middle that are doing a soft glow, that’s a different species.'”

And Carr was as surprised and fascinated as any newbie to learn about the “femme fatale” firefly: a species in which the female mimics the blinking patterns of other species of firefly, luring unsuspecting males to their deaths. The footage captured by the NatGeo crew includes a hair-raising segment where this femme fatale opts not to wait for her prey to come to her. A tasty male firefly has been caught in a spider’s web, and our daring, hungry lady flies right into the web to steal the prey:

A femme fatale firefly steals prey from a rival spider’s web.

Many people have a natural aversion to insects; Carr hopes that inventive docuseries like A Real Bug’s Life can help counter those negative perceptions by featuring some lesser-loved insects in anthropomorphized narratives—like the cockroaches and fire ants featured in S1. “[The series] did an amazing job of showing how something at that scale lives its life, and how that’s almost got a parallel to how we can live our life,” he said. “When you can get your mindset down to such a small scale and not just see them as moving dots on the ground and you see their eyes and you see how they move and how they behave and how they interact with each other, you get a little bit more appreciation for ants as a living organism.”

“By showcasing some of the bigger interesting insects like the femme fatale firefly or the big chivalrous stag beetle fighting over each other, or the dung beetle getting stomped by an elephant—those are some pretty amazing just examples of the biodiversity and breadth of insect life,” said Carr. “People don’t need to love insects. If they can, just, have some new modicum of respect, that’s good enough to change perspectives.”

The second season of A Real Bug’s Life premieres on January 15, 2025, on Disney+.

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

Up close and personal with the stag beetle in A Real Bug’s Life S2 Read More »

Skull long thought to be Cleopatra’s sister’s was actually a young boy

ancient DNA, ancient egypt, anthropology, Archaeology, cleopatra, forensic archaeology, Science / Kris Guyer / January 13, 2025

Scientists have demonstrated that an ancient human skull excavated from a tomb at Ephesos was not that of Arsinoë IV, half-sister to Cleopatra VII. Rather, it’s the skull of a young male between the ages of 11 and 14 from Italy or Sardinia, who may have suffered from one or more developmental disorders, according to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. Arsinoë IV’s remains are thus still missing.

Arsinoë IV led quite an adventurous short life. She was either the third or fourth daughter of Ptolemy XII, who left the throne to Cleopatra and his son, Ptolemy XIII, to rule together. Ptolemy XIII didn’t care for this decision and dethroned Cleopatra in a civil war—until Julius Caesar intervened to enforce their father’s original plan of co-rulership. As for Arsinoë, Caesar returned Cyprus to Egyptian rule and named her and her youngest brother (Ptolemy XIV) co-rulers. This time, it was Arsinoë who rebelled, taking command of the Egyptian army and declaring herself queen.

She was fairly successful at first in battling the Romans, conducting a siege against Alexandria and Cleopatra, until her disillusioned officers decided they’d had enough and secretly negotiated with Caesar to turn her over to him. Caesar agreed, and after a bit of public humiliation, he granted Arsinoë sanctuary in the temple of Artemis in Ephesus. She lived in relative peace for a few years, until Cleopatra and Mark Antony ordered her execution on the steps of the temple—a scandalous violation of the temple as a place of sanctuary. Historians disagree about Arsinoë’s age when she died: Estimates range from 22 to 27.

Archaeologists have been excavating the ancient city of Ephesus for more than a century. The Octagon was uncovered in 1904, and the burial chamber was opened in 1929. That’s where Joseph Keil found a skeleton in a sarcophagus filled with water, but for some reason, Keil only removed the cranium from the tomb before sealing it back up. He took the skull with him to Germany and declared it belonged to a likely female around 20 years old, although he provided no hard data to support that conclusion.

It was Hilke Thur of the Austrian Academy of Sciences who first speculated that the skull may have belonged to Arsinoë IV, despite the lack of an inscription (or even any grave goods) on the tomb where it was found. Old notes and photographs, as well as craniometry, served as the only evidence. The skull accompanied Keil to his new position at the University of Vienna, and there was one 1953 paper reporting on craniometric measurements, but after that, the skull languished in relative obscurity. Archaeologists at the University of Graz rediscovered the skull in Vienna in 2022. The rest of the skeleton remained buried until the chamber was reopened and explored further in the 1980s and 1990s, but it was no longer in the sarcophagus.

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$getting-an-all-optical-ai-to-handle-non-linear-math$

Getting an all-optical AI to handle non-linear math

AI, Computer science, optical processing, optics, Science / Rejus Almole / January 12, 2025

The problem is that this cascading requires massive parallel computations that, when done on standard computers, take tons of energy and time. Bandyopadhyay’s team feels this problem can be solved by performing the equivalent operations using photons rather than electrons. In photonic chips, information can be encoded in optical properties like polarization, phase, magnitude, frequency, and wavevector. While this would be extremely fast and energy-efficient, building such chips isn’t easy.

Siphoning light

“Conveniently, photonics turned out to be particularly good at linear matrix operations,” Bandyopadhyay claims. A group at MIT led by Dirk Englund, a professor who is a co-author of Bandyopadhyay’s study, demonstrated a photonic chip doing matrix multiplication entirely with light in 2017. What the field struggled with, though, was implementing non-linear functions in photonics.

The usual solution, so far, relied on bypassing the problem by doing linear algebra on photonic chips and offloading non-linear operations to external electronics. This, however, increased latency, since the information had to be converted from light to electrical signals, processed on an external processor, and converted back to light. “And bringing the latency down is the primary reason why we want to build neural networks in photonics,” Bandyopadhyay says.

To solve this problem, Bandyopadhyay and his colleagues designed and built what is likely to be the world’s first chip that can compute the entire deep neural net, including both linear and non-linear operations, using photons. “The process starts with an external laser with a modulator that feeds light into the chip through an optical fiber. This way we convert electrical inputs to light,” Bandyopadhyay explains.

The light is then fanned out to six channels and fed into a layer of six neurons that perform linear matrix multiplication using an array of devices called Mach-Zehnder interferometers. “They are essentially programmable beam splitters, taking two optical fields and mixing them coherently to produce two output optical fields. By applying the voltage, you can control how much those the two inputs mix,” Bandyopadhyay says.

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Did Hilma af Klint draw inspiration from 19th century physics?

Hilma af Klint, Physics, Science, science and art, science illustrations, Thomas Young / Tim Belzer / January 11, 2025

Diagrams from Thomas Young’s 1807 Lectures bear striking resemblance to abstract figures in af Klint’s work.

Hilma af Klint’s Group IX/SUW, The Swan, No. 17, 1915. Credit: Hilma af Klimt Foundation

In 2019, astronomer Britt Lundgren of the University of North Carolina Asheville visited the Guggenheim Museum in New York City to take in an exhibit of the works of Swedish painter Hilma af Klint. Lundgren noted a striking similarity between the abstract geometric shapes in af Klint’s work and scientific diagrams in 19th century physicist Thomas Young‘s Lectures (1807). So began a four-year journey starting at the intersection of science and art that has culminated in a forthcoming paper in the journal Leonardo, making the case for the connection.

Af Klint was formally trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and initially focused on drawing, portraits, botanical drawings, and landscapes from her Stockholm studio after graduating with honors. This provided her with income, but her true life’s work drew on af Klint’s interest in spiritualism and mysticism. She was one of “The Five,” a group of Swedish women artists who shared those interests. They regularly organized seances and were admirers of theosophical teachings of the time.

It was through her work with The Five that af Klint began experimenting with automatic drawing, driving her to invent her own geometric visual language to conceptualize the invisible forces she believed influenced our world. She painted her first abstract series in 1906 at age 44. Yet she rarely exhibited this work because she believed the art world at the time wasn’t ready to appreciate it. Her will requested that the paintings stay hidden for at least 20 years after her death.

Even after the boxes containing her 1,200-plus abstract paintings were opened, their significance was not fully appreciated at first. The Moderna Museum in Stockholm actually declined to accept them as a gift, although it now maintains a dedicated space to her work. It wasn’t until art historian Ake Fant presented af Klint’s work at a Helsinki conference that the art world finally took notice. The Guggenheim’s exhibit was af Klint’s American debut. “The exhibit seemed to realize af Klint’s documented dream of introducing her paintings to the world from inside a towering spiral temple and it was met roundly with acclaim, breaking all attendance records for the museum,” Lundgren wrote in her paper.

A pandemic project

Lundgren is the first person in her family to become a scientist; her mother studied art history, and her father is a photographer and a carpenter. But she always enjoyed art because of that home environment, and her Swedish heritage made af Klint an obvious artist of interest. It wasn’t until the year after she visited the Guggenheim exhibit, as she was updating her lectures for an astrophysics course, that Lundgren decided to investigate the striking similarities between Young’s diagrams and af Klint’s geometric paintings—in particular those series completed between 1914 and 1916. It proved to be the perfect research project during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Lundgren acknowledges the inherent skepticism such an approach by an outsider might engender among the art community and is sympathetic, given that physics and astronomy both have their share of cranks. “As a professional scientist, I have in the past received handwritten letters about why Einstein is wrong,” she told Ars. “I didn’t want to be that person.”

That’s why her very first research step was to contact art professors at her institution to get their expert opinions on her insight. They were encouraging, so she dug in a little deeper, reading every book about af Klint she could get her hands on. She found no evidence that any art historians had made this connection before, which gave her the confidence to turn her work into a publishable paper.

The paper didn’t find a home right away, however; the usual art history journals rejected it, partly because Lundgren was an outsider with little expertise in that field. She needed someone more established to vouch for her. Enter Linda Dalrymple Henderson of the University of Texas at Austin, who has written extensively about scientific influences on abstract art, including that of af Klint. Henderson helped Lundgren refine the paper, encouraged her to submit it to Leonardo, and “it came back with the best review I’ve ever received, even inside astronomy,” said Lundgren.

Making the case

Young and af Klint were not contemporaries; Young died in 1829, and af Klint was born in 1862. Nor are there any specific references to Young or his work in the academic literature examining the sources known to have influenced the Swedish painter’s work. Yet af Klint had a well-documented interest in science, spanning everything from evolution and botany to color theory and physics. While those influences tended to be scientists who were her contemporaries, Lundgren points out that the artist’s personal library included a copy of an 1823 astronomy book.

Excerpt from Plate XXIX of Young’s Lectures Niels Bohr Library and Archives/AIP

Af Klint was also commissioned to paint a portrait of Swedish physicist Knut Angstrom in 1910 at Uppsala University, whose library includes a copy of Young’s Lectures. So it’s entirely possible that af Klint had access to the astronomy and physics of the previous century and would likely have been particularly intrigued by discoveries involving “invisible light” (electromagnetism, x-rays, radioactivity, etc.).

Young’s Lectures contain a speculative passage about the existence of a universal ether (since disproven), a concept that fascinated both scientists and those (like af Klint) with certain occult interests in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In fact, Young’s passage was included in a popular 1875 spiritualist text, Unseen Universe by P.G. Tait and Balfour Stewart, that was heavily cited by Theosophical Society founder Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Blavatsky in turn is known to have influenced af Klint around the time the artist created The Swan, The Dove, and Altarpieces series.

Lundgren found that “in several instances, the captions accompanying Young’s color figures [in the Lectures] even seem to decode elements of af Klint’s paintings or bring attention to details that might otherwise be overlooked.” For instance, the caption for Young’s Plate XXIX describes the “oblique stripes of color” that appear when candlelight is viewed through a prism that “almost interchangeably describes features in af Klint’s Group X., No. 1, Altarpiece,” she wrote

(a) Excerpt from Young's Plate XXX. (b) af Klint, Parsifal Series No. 68. (c and d) af Klint, Group IX/UW, The Dove, No. 12 and No. 13. — (a) Excerpt from Young’s Plate XXX. (b) af Klint, *Parsifal Series No. 68*. (c and d) af Klint, *Group IX/UW, The Dove, No. 12* and *No. 13*. Credit: Niels Bohr Library/Hilma af Klint Foundation

Art historians had previously speculated about af Klint’s interest in color theory, as reflected in the annotated watercolor squares featured in her Parsifal Series (1916). Lundgren argues that those squares resemble Fig. 439 in the color plates of Young’s Lectures, demonstrating the inversion of color in human vision. Those diagrams also “appear almost like crude sketches of af Klint’s The Dove, Nos. 12 and 13,” Lundgren wrote. “Paired side by side, these paintings can produce the same visual effects described by Young, with even the same color palette.”

The geometric imagery of af Klint’s The Swan series is similar to Young’s illustrations of the production and perception of colors, while “black and white diagrams depicting the propagation of light through combinations of lenses and refractive surfaces, included in Young’s Lectures On the Theory of Optics, bear a particularly strong geometric resemblance to The Swan paintings No. 12 and No.13,” Lundgren wrote. Other pieces in The Swan series may have been inspired by engravings in Young’s Lectures.

This is admittedly circumstantial evidence and Lundgren acknowledges as much. “Not being able to prove it is intriguing and frustrating at the same time,” she said. She continues to receive additional leads, most recently from an af Klint relative on the board of the Moderna Museum. Once again, the evidence wasn’t direct, but it seems af Klint would have attended certain local lecture circuits about science, while several members of the Theosophy Society were familiar with modern physics and Young’s earlier work. “But none of these are nails in the coffin that really proved she had access to Young’s book,” said Lundgren.

Did Hilma af Klint draw inspiration from 19th century physics? Read More »

Rocket Report: China launches refueling demo; DoD’s big appetite for hypersonics

blue origin, china, hypersonic vehicles, launch, military space, NASA, rocket lab, rocket report, Science, Space, spacex, starship / Tim Belzer / January 10, 2025

We’re just a few days away from getting a double-dose of heavy-lift rocket action.

Stratolaunch’s Talon-A hypersonic rocket plane will be used for military tests involving hypersonic missile technology. Credit: Stratolaunch

Welcome to Edition 7.26 of the Rocket Report! Let’s pause and reflect on how far the rocket business has come in the last 10 years. On this date in 2015, SpaceX made the first attempt to land a Falcon 9 booster on a drone ship positioned in the Atlantic Ocean. Not surprisingly, the rocket crash-landed. In less than a year and a half, though, SpaceX successfully landed reusable Falcon 9 boosters onshore and offshore, and now has done it nearly 400 times. That was remarkable enough, but we’re in a new era now. Within a few days, we could see SpaceX catch its second Super Heavy booster and Blue Origin land its first New Glenn rocket on an offshore platform. Extraordinary.

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.

Our annual ranking of the top 10 US launch companies. You can easily guess who made the top of the list: the company that launched Falcon rockets 134 times in 2024 and launched the most powerful and largest rocket ever built on four test flights, each accomplishing more than the last. The combined 138 launches is more than NASA flew the Space Shuttle over three decades. SpaceX will aim to launch even more often in 2025. These missions have far-reaching impacts, supporting Internet coverage for consumers worldwide, launching payloads for NASA and the US military, and testing technology that will take humans back to the Moon and, someday, Mars.

Are there really 10? … It might also be fairly easy to rattle off a few more launch companies that accomplished big things in 2024. There’s United Launch Alliance, which finally debuted its long-delayed Vulcan rocket and flew two Atlas V missions and the final Delta IV mission, and Rocket Lab, which launched 16 missions with its small Electron rocket this year. Blue Origin flew its suborbital New Shepard vehicle on three human missions and one cargo-only mission and nearly launched its first orbital-class New Glenn rocket in 2024. That leaves just Firefly Aerospace as the only other US company to reach orbit last year.

DoD announces lucrative hypersonics deal. Defense technology firm Kratos has inked a deal worth up to $1.45 billion with the Pentagon to help develop a low-cost testbed for hypersonic technologies, Breaking Defense reports. The award is part of the military’s Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed (MACH-TB) 2.0 program. The MACH-TB program, which began as a US Navy effort, includes multiple “Task Areas.” For its part, Kratos will be tasked with “systems engineering, integration, and testing, to include integrated subscale, full-scale, and air launch services to address the need to affordably increase hypersonic flight test cadence,” according to the company’s release.

Multiple players … The team led by Kratos, which specializes in developing airborne drones and military weapons systems, includes several players such as Leidos, Rocket Lab, Stratolaunch, and others. Kratos last year revealed that its Erinyes hypersonic test vehicle successfully flew for a Missile Defense Agency experiment. Rocket Lab has launched multiple suborbital hypersonic experiments for the military using a modified version of its Electron rocket, and Stratolaunch reportedly flew a high-speed test vehicle and recovered it last month, according to Aviation Week & Space Technology. The Pentagon is interested in developing hypersonic weapons that can evade conventional air and missile defenses. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

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ESA will modify some of its geo-return policies. An upcoming European launch competition will be an early test of efforts by the European Space Agency to modify its approach to policies that link contracts to member state contributions, Space News reports. ESA has long used a policy known as geo-return, where member states are guaranteed contracts with companies based in their countries in proportion to the contribution those member states make to ESA programs.

The third rail of European space … Advocates of geo-return argue that it provides an incentive for countries to fund those programs. This incentivizes ESA to lure financial contributions from its member states, which will win guaranteed business and jobs from the agency’s programs. However, critics of geo-return, primarily European companies, claim that it creates inefficiencies that make them less competitive. One approach to revising geo-return is known as “fair contribution,” where ESA first holds competitions for projects, and member states then make contributions based on how companies in their countries fared in the competition. ESA will try the fair contribution approach for the upcoming launch competition to award contracts to European rocket startups. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

RFA is building a new rocket. German launch services provider Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) is currently focused on building a new first stage for the inaugural flight of its RFA One rocket, European Spaceflight reports. The stage that was initially earmarked for the flight was destroyed during a static fire test last year on a launch pad in Scotland. In a statement given to European Spaceflight, RFA confirmed that it expects to attempt an inaugural flight of RFA One in 2025.

Waiting on a booster … RFA says it is “fully focused on building a new first stage and qualifying it.” The rocket’s second stage and Redshift OTV third stage are already qualified for flight and are being stored until a new first stage is ready. The RFA One rocket will stand 98 feet (30 meters) tall and will be capable of delivering payloads of up to 1.3 metric tons (nearly 2,900 pounds) into polar orbits. RFA is one of several European startups developing commercial small satellite launchers and was widely considered the frontrunner before last year’s setback. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Pentagon provides a boost for defense startup. Defense technology contractor Anduril Industries has secured a $14.3 million Pentagon contract to expand solid-fueled rocket motor production, as the US Department of Defense moves to strengthen domestic manufacturing capabilities amid growing supply chain concerns, Space News reports. The contract, awarded under the Defense Production Act, will support facility modernization and manufacturing improvements at Anduril’s Mississippi plant, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

Doing a solid … The Pentagon is keen to incentivize new entrants into the solid rocket manufacturing industry, which provides propulsion for missiles, interceptors, and other weapons systems. Two traditional defense contractors, Northrop Grumman and L3Harris, control almost all US solid rocket production. Companies like Anduril, Ursa Major, and X-Bow are developing solid rocket motor production capability. The Navy previously awarded Anduril a $19 million contract last year to develop solid rocket motors for the Standard Missile 6 program. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Relativity’s value seems to be plummeting. For several years, an innovative, California-based launch company named Relativity Space has been the darling of investors and media. But the honeymoon appears to be over, Ars reports. A little more than a year ago, Relativity reached a valuation of $4.5 billion following its latest Series F fundraising round. This was despite only launching one rocket and then abandoning that program and pivoting to the development of a significantly larger reusable launch vehicle. The decision meant Relativity would not realize any significant revenue for several years, and Ars reported in September on some of the challenges the company has encountered developing the much larger Terran R rocket.

Gravity always wins … Relativity is a privately held company, so its financial statements aren’t public. However, we can glean some clues from the published quarterly report from Fidelity Investments, which owns Relativity shares. As of March 2024, Fidelity valued its 1.67 million shares at an estimated $31.8 million. However, in a report ending November 29 of last year, which was only recently published, Fidelity’s valuation of Relativity plummeted. Its stake in Relativity was then thought to be worth just $866,735—a per-share value of 52 cents. Shares in the other fundraising rounds are also valued at less than $1 each.

SpaceX has already launched four times this year. The space company is off to a fast start in 2025, with four missions in the first nine days of the year. Two of these missions launched Starlink internet satellites, and the other two deployed an Emirati-owned geostationary communications satellite and a batch of Starshield surveillance satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office. In its new year projections, SpaceX estimates it will launch more than 170 Falcon rockets, between Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, Spaceflight Now reports. This is in addition to SpaceX’s plans for up to 25 flights of the Starship rocket from Texas.

What’s in store this year?… Highlights of SpaceX’s launch manifest this year will likely include an attempt to catch and recover Starship after returning from orbit, a first in-orbit cryogenic propellant transfer demonstration with Starship, and perhaps the debut of a second launch pad at Starbase in South Texas. For the Falcon rocket fleet, notable missions this year will include launches of commercial robotic lunar landers for NASA’s CLPS program and several crew flights, including the first human spaceflight mission to fly in polar orbit. According to public schedules, a Falcon 9 rocket could launch a commercial mini-space station for Vast, a privately held startup, before the end of the year. That would be a significant accomplishment, but we won’t be surprised if this schedule moves to the right.

China is dipping its toes into satellite refueling. China kicked off its 2025 launch activities with the successful launch of the Shijian-25 satellite Monday, aiming to advance key technologies for on-orbit refueling and extending satellite lifespans, Space News reports. The satellite launched on a Long March 3B into a geostationary transfer orbit, suggesting the unspecified target spacecraft for the refueling demo test might be in geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator.

Under a watchful eye … China has tested mission extension and satellite servicing capabilities in space before. In 2021, China launched a satellite named Shijian-21, which docked a defunct Beidou navigation satellite and towed it to a graveyard orbit above the geostationary belt. Reportedly, Shijian-21 satellite may have carried robotic arms to capture and manipulate other objects in space. These kinds of technologies are dual-use, meaning they have civilian and military applications. The US Space Force is also interested in satellite life extension and refueling tech, so US officials will closely monitor Shijian-25’s actions in orbit.

SpaceX set to debut upgraded Starship. An upsized version of SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket rolled to the launch pad early Thursday in preparation for liftoff on a test flight next week, Ars reports. The rocket could lift off as soon as Monday from SpaceX’s Starbase test facility in South Texas. This flight is the seventh full-scale demonstration launch for Starship. The rocket will test numerous upgrades, including a new flap design, larger propellant tanks, redesigned propellant feed lines, a new avionics system, and an improved antenna for communications and navigation.

The new largest rocket … Put together, all of these changes to the ship raise the rocket’s total height by nearly 6 feet (1.8 meters), so it now towers 404 feet (123.1 meters) tall. With this change, SpaceX will break its own record for the largest rocket ever launched. SpaceX plans to catch the rocket’s Super Heavy booster back at the launch site in Texas and will target a controlled splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean.

Blue Origin targets weekend launch of New Glenn. Blue Origin is set to launch its New Glenn rocket in a long-delayed, uncrewed test mission that would help pave the way for the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos to compete against Elon Musk’s SpaceX, The Washington Post reports. Blue Origin has confirmed it plans to launch the 320-foot-tall rocket during a three-hour launch window opening at 1 am EDT (06: 00 UTC) Sunday in the company’s first attempt to reach orbit.

Finally … This is a much-anticipated milestone for Blue Origin and for the company’s likely customers, which include the Pentagon and NASA. Data from this test flight will help the Space Force certify New Glenn to loft national security satellites, providing a new competitor for SpaceX and United Launch Alliance in the heavy-lift segment of the market. Blue Origin isn’t quite shooting for the Moon on this inaugural launch, but the company will attempt to reach orbit and try to land the New Glenn’s first stage booster on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

Jan. 10: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-12 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 18: 11 UTC

Jan. 12: New Glenn | NG-1 Blue Ring Pathfinder | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 06: 00 UTC

Jan. 13: Jielong 3 | Unknown Payload | Dongfang Spaceport, Yellow Sea | 03: 00 UTC

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: China launches refueling demo; DoD’s big appetite for hypersonics Read More »

Man turns irreversibly gray from an unidentified silver exposure

Argyria, health, NEJM, Science, Silver / Paul Patrick / January 10, 2025

When an 84-year-old man in Hong Kong was admitted to a hospital for a condition related to an enlarged prostate, doctors noticed something else about him—he was oddly gray, according to a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

His skin, particularly his face, had an ashen appearance. His fingernails and the whites of his eyes had become silvery. When doctors took a skin biopsy, they could see tiny, dark granules sitting in the fibers of his skin, in his blood vessels, in the membranes of his sweat glands, and in his hair follicles.

A blood test made clear what the problem was: the concentration of silver in his serum was 423 nmol/L, over 40 times the reference level for a normal result, which is less than 10 nmol/L. The man was diagnosed with a rare case of generalized argyria, a buildup of silver in the body’s tissue that causes a blueish-gray discoloration—which is generally permanent.

When someone consumes silver particles, the metal moves from the gut into the bloodstream in its ionic form. It’s then deposited throughout the body in various tissues, including the skin, muscles, heart, lungs, liver, spleen, and kidneys. There’s some evidence that it accumulates in at least parts of the brain as well.

Discoloration becomes apparent in tissues exposed to sunlight—hence the patient’s notably gray face. Silver ions in the skin undergo photoreduction from ultraviolet light exposure, forming atomic silver that can be oxidized to compounds such as silver sulfide and silver selenide, creating a bluish-gray tinge. Silver can also stimulate the production of the pigment melanin, causing darkening. Once discoloration develops, it’s considered irreversible. Chelation therapy—generally used to remove metals from the body—is ineffective against argyria. That said, some case studies have suggested that laser therapy may help.

Man turns irreversibly gray from an unidentified silver exposure Read More »

Everyone agrees: 2024 the hottest year since the thermometer was invented

carbon dioxide, climate change, Earth science, global warming, greenhouse gasses, Science, temperature records / Tim Belzer / January 10, 2025

An exceptionally hot outlier, 2024 means the streak of hottest years goes to 11.

With very few and very small exceptions, 2024 was unusually hot across the globe. Credit: Copernicus

Over the last 24 hours or so, the major organizations that keep track of global temperatures have released figures for 2024, and all of them agree: 2024 was the warmest year yet recorded, joining 2023 as an unusual outlier in terms of how rapidly things heated up. At least two of the organizations, the European Union’s Copernicus and Berkeley Earth, place the year at about 1.6° C above pre-industrial temperatures, marking the first time that the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5° has been exceeded.

NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration both place the mark at slightly below 1.5° C over pre-industrial temperatures (as defined by the 1850–1900 average). However, that difference largely reflects the uncertainties in measuring temperatures during that period rather than disagreement over 2024.

It’s hot everywhere

2023 had set a temperature record largely due to a switch to El Niño conditions midway through the year, which made the second half of the year exceptionally hot. It takes some time for that heat to make its way from the ocean into the atmosphere, so the streak of warm months continued into 2024, even as the Pacific switched into its cooler La Niña mode.

While El Niños are regular events, this one had an outsized impact because it was accompanied by unusually warm temperatures outside the Pacific, including record high temperatures in the Atlantic and unusual warmth in the Indian Ocean. Land temperatures reflect this widespread warmth, with elevated temperatures on all continents. Berkeley Earth estimates that 104 countries registered 2024 as the warmest on record, meaning 3.3 billion people felt the hottest average temperatures they had ever experienced.

Different organizations use slightly different methods to calculate the global temperature and have different baselines. For example, Copernicus puts 2024 at 0.72° C above a baseline that will be familiar to many people since they were alive for it: 1991 to 2000. In contrast, NASA and NOAA use a baseline that covers the entirety of the last century, which is substantially cooler overall. Relative to that baseline, 2024 is 1.29° C warmer.

Lining up the baselines shows that these different services largely agree with each other, with most of the differences due to uncertainties in the measurements, with the rest accounted for by slightly different methods of handling things like areas with sparse data.

Describing the details of 2024, however, doesn’t really capture just how exceptional the warmth of the last two years has been. Starting in around 1970, there’s been a roughly linear increase in temperature driven by greenhouse gas emissions, despite many individual years that were warmer or cooler than the trend. The last two years have been extreme outliers from this trend. The last time there was a single comparable year to 2024 was back in the 1940s. The last time there were two consecutive years like this was in 1878.

A graph showing a curve that increases smoothly from left to right, with individual points on the curve hosting red and blue lines above and below. The red line at 2024 is larger than any since 1978. — Relative to the five-year temperature average, 2024 is an exceptionally large excursion. Credit: Copernicus

“These were during the ‘Great Drought’ of 1875 to 1878, when it is estimated that around 50 million people died in India, China, and parts of Africa and South America,” the EU’s Copernicus service notes. Despite many climate-driven disasters, the world at least avoided a similar experience in 2023-24.

Berkeley Earth provides a slightly different way of looking at it, comparing each year since 1970 with the amount of warming we’d expect from the cumulative greenhouse gas emissions.

A graph showing a reddish wedge, growing from left to right. A black line traces the annual temperatures, which over near the top edge of the wedge until recent years. — Relative to the expected warming from greenhouse gasses, 2024 represents a large departure. Credit: Berkeley Earth

These show that, given year-to-year variations in the climate system, warming has closely tracked expectations over five decades. 2023 and 2024 mark a dramatic departure from that track, although it comes at the end of a decade where most years were above the trend line. Berkeley Earth estimates that there’s just a 1 in 100 chance of that occurring due to the climate’s internal variability.

Is this a new trend?

The big question is whether 2024 is an exception and we should expect things to fall back to the trend that’s dominated since the 1970s, or it marks a departure from the climate’s recent behavior. And that’s something we don’t have a great answer to.

If you take away the influence of recent greenhouse gas emissions and El Niño, you can focus on other potential factors. These include a slight increase expected due to the solar cycle approaching its maximum activity. But, beyond that, most of the other factors are uncertain. The Hunga Tonga eruption put lots of water vapor into the stratosphere, but the estimated effects range from slight warming to cooling equivalent to a strong La Niña. Reductions in pollution from shipping are expected to contribute to warming, but the amount is debated.

There is evidence that a decrease in cloud cover has allowed more sunlight to be absorbed by the Earth, contributing to the planet’s warming. But clouds are typically a response to other factors that influence the climate, such as the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere and the aerosols present to seed water droplets.

It’s possible that a factor that we missed is driving the changes in cloud cover or that 2024 just saw the chaotic nature of the atmosphere result in less cloud cover. Alternatively, we may have crossed a warming tipping point, where the warmth of the atmosphere makes cloud formation less likely. Knowing that will be critical going forward, but we simply don’t have a good answer right now.

Climate goals

There’s an equally unsatisfying answer to what this means for our chance of hitting climate goals. The stretch goal of the Paris Agreement is to limit warming to 1.5° C, because it leads to significantly less severe impacts than the primary, 2.0° target. That’s relative to pre-industrial temperatures, which are defined using the 1850–1900 period, the earliest time where temperature records allow a reconstruction of the global temperature.

Unfortunately, all the organizations that handle global temperatures have some differences in the analysis methods and data used. Given recent data, these differences result in very small divergences in the estimated global temperatures. But with the far larger uncertainties in the 1850–1900 data, they tend to diverge more dramatically. As a result, each organization has a different baseline, and different anomalies relative to that.

As a result, Berkeley Earth registers 2024 as being 1.62° C above preindustrial temperatures, and Copernicus 1.60° C. In contrast, NASA and NOAA place it just under 1.5° C (1.47° and 1.46°, respectively). NASA’s Gavin Schmidt said this is “almost entirely due to the [sea surface temperature] data set being used” in constructing the temperature record.

There is, however, consensus that this isn’t especially meaningful on its own. There’s a good chance that temperatures will drop below the 1.5° mark on all the data sets within the next few years. We’ll want to see temperatures consistently exceed that mark for over a decade before we consider that we’ve passed the milestone.

That said, given that carbon emissions have barely budged in recent years, there’s little doubt that we will eventually end up clearly passing that limit (Berkeley Earth is essentially treating it as exceeded already). But there’s widespread agreement that each increment between 1.5° and 2.0° will likely increase the consequences of climate change, and any continuing emissions will make it harder to bring things back under that target in the future through methods like carbon capture and storage.

So, while we may have committed ourselves to exceed one of our major climate targets, that shouldn’t be viewed as a reason to stop trying to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

Everyone agrees: 2024 the hottest year since the thermometer was invented Read More »

Coal likely to go away even without EPA’s power plant regulations

carbon emissions, electric grid, Energy, EPA, Policy, renewable energy, Science, Sustainability / Tim Belzer / January 9, 2025

Set to be killed by Trump, the rules mostly lock in existing trends.

In April last year, the Environmental Protection Agency released its latest attempt to regulate the carbon emissions of power plants under the Clean Air Act. It’s something the EPA has been required to do since a 2007 Supreme Court decision that settled a case that started during the Clinton administration. The latest effort seemed like the most aggressive yet, forcing coal plants to retire or install carbon capture equipment and making it difficult for some natural gas plants to operate without capturing carbon or burning green hydrogen.

Yet, according to a new analysis published in Thursday’s edition of Science, they wouldn’t likely have a dramatic effect on the US’s future emissions even if they were to survive a court challenge. Instead, the analysis suggests the rules serve more like a backstop to prevent other policy changes and increased demand from countering the progress that would otherwise be made. This is just as well, given that the rules are inevitably going to be eliminated by the incoming Trump administration.

A long time coming

The net result of a number of Supreme Court decisions is that greenhouse gasses are pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and the EPA needed to determine whether they posed a threat to people. George W. Bush’s EPA dutifully performed that analysis but sat on the results until its second term ended, leaving it to the Obama administration to reach the same conclusion. The EPA went on to formulate rules for limiting carbon emissions on a state-by-state basis, but these were rapidly made irrelevant because renewable power and natural gas began displacing coal even without the EPA’s encouragement.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration replaced those rules with ones designed to accomplish even less, which were thrown out by a court just before Biden’s inauguration. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court stepped in to rule on the now-even-more-irrelevant Obama rules, determining that the EPA could only regulate carbon emissions at the level of individual power plants rather than at the level of the grid.

All of that set the stage for the latest EPA rules, which were formulated by the Biden administration’s EPA. Forced by the court to regulate individual power plants, the EPA allowed coal plants that were set to retire within the decade to continue to operate as they have. Anything that would remain operational longer would need to either switch fuels or install carbon capture equipment. Similarly, natural gas plants were regulated based on how frequently they were operational; those that ran less than 40 percent of the time could face significant new regulations. More than that, and they’d have to capture carbon or burn a fuel mixture that is primarily hydrogen produced without carbon emissions.

While the Biden EPA’s rules are currently making their way through the courts, they’re sure to be pulled in short order by the incoming Trump administration, making the court case moot. Nevertheless, people had started to analyze their potential impact before it was clear there would be an incoming Trump administration. And the analysis is valuable in the sense that it will highlight what will be lost when the rules are eliminated.

By some measures, the answer is not all that much. But the answer is also very dependent upon whether the Trump administration engages in an all-out assault on renewable energy.

Regulatory impact

The work relies on the fact that various researchers and organizations have developed models to explore how the US electric grid can economically meet demand under different conditions, including different regulatory environments. The researchers obtained nine of them and ran them with and without the EPA’s proposed rules to determine their impact.

On its own, eliminating the rules has a relatively minor impact. Without the rules, the US grid’s 2040 carbon dioxide emissions would end up between 60 and 85 percent lower than they were in 2005. With the rules, the range shifts to between 75 and 85 percent—in essence, the rules reduce the uncertainty about the outcomes that involve the least change.

That’s primarily because of how they’re structured. Mostly, they target coal plants, as these account for nearly half of the US grid’s emissions despite supplying only about 15 percent of its power. They’ve already been closing at a rapid clip, and would likely continue to do so even without the EPA’s encouragement.

Natural gas plants, the other major source of carbon emissions, would primarily respond to the new rules by operating less than 40 percent of the time, thus avoiding stringent regulation while still allowing them to handle periods where renewable power underproduces. And we now have a sufficiently large fleet of natural gas plants that demand can be met without a major increase in construction, even with most plants operating at just 40 percent of their rated capacity. The continued growth of renewables and storage also contributes to making this possible.

One irony of the response seen in the models is that it suggests that two key pieces of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) are largely irrelevant. The IRA provides benefits for the deployment of carbon capture and the production of green hydrogen (meaning hydrogen produced without carbon emissions). But it’s likely that, even with these credits, the economics wouldn’t favor the use of these technologies when alternatives like renewables plus storage are available. The IRA also provides tax credits for deploying renewables and storage, pushing the economics even further in their favor.

Since not a lot changes, the rules don’t really affect the cost of electricity significantly. Their presence boosts costs by an estimated 0.5 to 3.7 percent in 2050 compared to a scenario where the rules aren’t implemented. As a result, the wholesale price of electricity changes by only two percent.

A backstop

That said, the team behind the analysis argues that, depending on other factors, the rules could play a significant role. Trump has suggested he will target all of Biden’s energy policies, and that would include the IRA itself. Its repeal could significantly slow the growth of renewable energy in the US, as could continued problems with expanding the grid to incorporate new renewable capacity.

In addition, the US is seeing demand for electricity rise at a faster pace in 2023 than in the decade leading up to it. While it’s still unclear whether that’s a result of new demand or simply weather conditions boosting the use of electricity in heating and cooling, there are several factors that could easily boost the use of electricity in coming years: the electrification of transport, rising data center use, and the electrification of appliances and home heating.

Should these raise demand sufficiently, then it could make continued coal use economical in the absence of the EPA rules. “The rules … can be viewed as backstops against higher emissions outcomes under futures with improved coal plant economics,” the paper suggests, “which could occur with higher demand, slower renewables deployment from interconnection and permitting delays, or higher natural gas prices.”

And it may be the only backstop we have. The report also notes that a number of states have already set aggressive emissions reduction targets, including some for net zero by 2050. But these don’t serve as a substitute for federal climate policy, given that the states that are taking these steps use very little coal in the first place.

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.adt5665 (About DOIs).

Coal likely to go away even without EPA’s power plant regulations Read More »

Here’s what we know, and what we don’t, about the awful Palisades wildfire

California, Los Angeles, palisades, Science, wildfire / Kris Guyer / January 9, 2025

Let’s start with the meteorology. The Palisades wildfire and other nearby conflagrations were well-predicted days in advance. After a typically arid summer and fall, the Los Angeles area has also had a dry winter so far. December, January, February, and March are usually the wettest months in the region by far. More than 80 percent of Los Angeles’ rain comes during these colder months. But this year, during December, the region received, on average, less than one-tenth of an inch of rainfall. Normal totals are on the order of 2.5 inches in December.

So, the foliage in the area was already very dry, effectively extending the region’s wildfire season. Then, strong Santa Ana winds were predicted for this week due, in part, to the extreme cold observed in the eastern United States and high pressure over the Great Basin region of the country. “Red flag” winds were forecast locally, which indicates that winds could combine with dry grounds to spread wildfires efficiently. The direct cause of the Palisades fire is yet unknown.

Wildfires during the winter months in California are not a normal occurrence, but they are not unprecedented either. Scientists, however, generally agree that a warmer planet is extending wildfire seasons such as those observed in California.

“Climate change, including increased heat, extended drought, and a thirsty atmosphere, has been a key driver in increasing the risk and extent of wildfires in the western United States during the last two decades,” the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concludes. “Wildfires require the alignment of a number of factors, including temperature, humidity, and the lack of moisture in fuels, such as trees, shrubs, grasses, and forest debris. All these factors have strong direct or indirect ties to climate variability and climate change.”

Here’s what we know, and what we don’t, about the awful Palisades wildfire Read More »

A taller, heavier, smarter version of SpaceX’s Starship is almost ready to fly

artemis, moon, NASA, Science, Space, spacex, starship / Mike M. / January 9, 2025

Starship will test its payload deployment mechanism on its seventh test flight.

SpaceX’s first second-generation Starship, known as Version 2 or Block 2, could launch as soon as January 13. Credit: SpaceX

An upsized version of SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket rolled to the launch pad early Thursday in preparation for liftoff on a test flight next week.

The two-mile transfer moved the bullet-shaped spaceship one step closer to launch Monday from SpaceX’s Starbase test site in South Texas. The launch window opens at 5 pm EST (4 pm CST; 2200 UTC). This will be the seventh full-scale test flight of SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft and the first of 2025.

In the coming days, SpaceX technicians will lift the ship on top of the Super Heavy booster already emplaced on the launch mount. Then, teams will complete the final tests and preparations for the countdown on Monday.

“The upcoming flight test will launch a new generation ship with significant upgrades, attempt Starship’s first payload deployment test, fly multiple reentry experiments geared towards ship catch and reuse, and launch and return the Super Heavy booster,” SpaceX officials wrote in a mission overview posted on the company’s website.

The mission Monday will repeat many of the maneuvers SpaceX demonstrated on the last two Starship test flights. The company will again attempt to return the Super Heavy booster to the launch site and attempt to catch it with two mechanical arms, or “chopsticks,” on the launch tower approximately seven minutes after liftoff.

SpaceX accomplished this feat on the fifth Starship test flight in October but aborted a catch attempt on a November flight because of damaged sensors on the tower chopsticks. The booster, which remained healthy, diverted to a controlled splashdown offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.

SpaceX’s next Starship prototype, Ship 33, emerges from its assembly building at Starbase, Texas, early Thursday morning. Credit: SpaceX/Elon Musk via X

For the next flight, SpaceX added protections to the sensors on the tower and will test radar instruments on the chopsticks to provide more accurate ranging measurements for returning vehicles. These modifications should improve the odds of a successful catch of the Super Heavy booster and of Starship on future missions.

In another first, one of the 33 Raptor engines that will fly on this Super Heavy booster—designated Booster 14 in SpaceX’s fleet—was recovered from the booster that launched and returned to Starbase in October. For SpaceX, this is a step toward eventually flying the entire rocket repeatedly. The Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft are designed for full reusability.

After separation of the booster stage, the Starship upper stage will ignite six engines to accelerate to nearly orbital velocity, attaining enough energy to fly halfway around the world before gravity pulls it back into the atmosphere. Like the past three test flights, SpaceX will guide Starship toward a controlled reentry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia around one hour after liftoff.

New ship, new goals

The most significant changes engineers will test next week are on the ship, or upper stage, of SpaceX’s enormous rocket. The most obvious difference on Starship Version 2, or Block 2, is with the vehicle’s forward flaps. Engineers redesigned the flaps, reducing their size and repositioning them closer to the tip of the ship’s nose to better protect them from the scorching heat of reentry. Cameras onboard Starship showed heat damage to the flaps during reentry on test flights last year.

SpaceX is also developing an upgraded Super Heavy booster that is slightly taller than the existing model. The next version of the booster will produce more thrust and will be slightly taller than the current Super Heavy, but for the upcoming test flight, SpaceX will still use the first-generation booster design.

Starship Block 2 has smaller flaps than previous ships. The flaps are located in a more leeward position to protect them from the heat of reentry. Credit: SpaceX

For next week’s flight, Super Heavy and Starship combined will hold more than 10.5 million pounds of fuel and oxidizer. The ship’s propellant tanks have 25 percent more volume than previous iterations of the vehicle, and the payload compartment, which contains 10 mock-ups of Starlink Internet satellites on this launch, is somewhat smaller. Put together, the changes add nearly 6 feet (1.8 meters) to the rocket’s height, bringing the full stack to approximately 404 feet (123.1 meters).

This means SpaceX will break its own record for launching the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. And the company will do it again with the even larger Starship Version 3, which SpaceX says will have nine upper stage engines, instead of six, and will deliver up to 440,000 pounds (200 metric tons) of cargo to low-Earth orbit.

Other changes debuting with Starship Version 2 next week include:

• Vacuum jacketing of propellant feedlines

• A new fuel feedline system for the ship’s Raptor vacuum engines

• An improved propulsion avionics module controlling vehicle valves and reading sensors

• Redesigned inertial navigation and star tracking sensors

• Integrated smart batteries and power units to distribute 2.7 megawatts of power across the ship

• An increase to more than 30 cameras onboard the vehicle.

Laying the foundation

The enhanced avionics system will support future missions to prove SpaceX’s ability to refuel Starships in orbit and return the ship to the launch site. For example, SpaceX will fly a more powerful flight computer and new antennas that integrate connectivity with the Starlink Internet constellation, GPS navigation satellites, and backup functions for traditional radio communication links. With Starlink, SpaceX said Starship can stream more than 120Mbps of real-time high-definition video and telemetry in every phase of flight.

These changes “all add additional vehicle performance and the ability to fly longer missions,” SpaceX said. “The ship’s heat shield will also use the latest generation tiles and includes a backup layer to protect from missing or damaged tiles.”

Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, a little more than 17 minutes into the flight, Starship will deploy 10 dummy payloads similar in size and weight to next-generation Starlink satellites. The mock-ups will soar around the world on a suborbital trajectory, just like Starship, and reenter over the unpopulated Indian Ocean. Future Starship flights will launch real next-gen Starlink satellites to add capacity to the Starlink broadband network, but they’re too big and too heavy to launch on SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 9 rocket.

SpaceX will again reignite one of the ship’s Raptor engines in the vacuum of space, repeating a successful test achieved on Flight 6 in November. The engine restart capability is important for several reasons. It gives the ship the ability to maneuver itself out of low-Earth orbit for reentry (not a concern for Starship’s suborbital tests), and will allow the vehicle to propel itself to higher orbits, the Moon, or Mars once SpaceX masters the technology for orbital refueling.

Artist’s illustration of Starship on the surface of the Moon. Credit: SpaceX

NASA has contracts with SpaceX to build a derivative of Starship to ferry astronauts to and from the surface of the Moon for the agency’s Artemis program. The NASA program manager overseeing SpaceX’s lunar lander contract, Lisa Watson-Morgan, said she was pleased with the results of the in-space engine restart demo last year.

“The whole path to the Moon, as we are getting ready to land on the Moon, we’ll perform a series of maneuvers, and the Raptors will have an environment that is very, very cold,” Morgan told Ars in a recent interview. “To that, it’s going to be important that they’re able to relight for landing purposes. So that was a great first step towards that.

“In addition, after we land, clearly, the Raptors will be off, and it will get very cold, and they will have to relight in a cold environment (to launch the crews off the lunar surface),” she said. “So that’s why that step was critical for the Human Landing System and NASA’s return to the Moon.”

“The biggest technology challenge remaining”

SpaceX continues to experiment with Starship’s heat shield, which the company’s founder and CEO, Elon Musk, has described as “the biggest technology challenge remaining with Starship.” In order for SpaceX to achieve its lofty goal of launching Starships multiple times per day, the heat shield needs to be fully and immediately reusable.

While the last three ships have softly splashed down in the Indian Ocean, some of their heat-absorbing tiles stripped away from the vehicle during reentry, when it’s exposed to temperatures up to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius).

Engineers removed tiles from some areas of the ship for next week’s test flight in order to “stress-test” vulnerable parts of the vehicle. They also smoothed and tapered the edge of the tile line, where the ceramic heat shield gives way to the ship’s stainless steel skin, to address “hot spots” observed during reentry on the most recent test flight.

“Multiple metallic tile options, including one with active cooling, will test alternative materials for protecting Starship during reentry,” SpaceX said.

SpaceX is also flying rudimentary catch fittings on Starship to test their thermal performance on reentry. The ship will fly a more demanding trajectory during descent to probe the structural limits of the redesigned flaps at the point of maximum entry dynamic pressure, according to SpaceX.

All told, SpaceX’s inclusion of a satellite deployment demo and ship upgrades on next week’s test flight will lay the foundation for future missions, perhaps in the next few months, to take the next great leap in Starship development.

In comments following the last Starship test flight in November, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk posted on X that the company could try to return the ship to a catch back at the launch site—something that would require the vehicle to complete at least one full orbit of Earth—as soon as the next flight following Monday’s mission.

“We will do one more ocean landing of the ship,” Musk posted. “If that goes well, then SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with the tower.”

A taller, heavier, smarter version of SpaceX’s Starship is almost ready to fly Read More »