Science

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A lot of people are mistaking Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites for UAPs

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That’s just Elon

But many UAP cases have verifiable explanations as airplanes, drones, or satellites, and lawmakers argue AARO might be able to solve more of the cases with more funding.

Airspace is busier than ever with air travel and consumer drones. More satellites are zooming around the planet as government agencies and companies like SpaceX deploy their constellations for Internet connectivity and surveillance. There’s more stuff up there to see.

“AARO increasingly receives cases that it is able to resolve to the Starlink satellite constellation,” the office said in this year’s annual report.

“For example, a commercial pilot reported white flashing lights in the night sky,” AARO said. “The pilot did not report an altitude or speed, and no data or imagery was recorded. AARO assessed that this sighting of flashing lights correlated with a Starlink satellite launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the same evening about one hour prior to the sighting.”

Jon Kosloski, director of AARO, said officials compared the parameters of these sightings with Starlink launches. When SpaceX releases Starlink satellites in orbit, the spacecraft are initially clustered together and reflect more sunlight down to Earth. This makes the satellites easier to see during twilight hours before they raise their orbits and become dimmer.

“We found some of those correlations in time, the direction that they were looking, and the location,” Kosloski said. “And we were able to assess that they were all in those cases looking at Starlink flares.”

SpaceX has more than 6,600 Starlink satellites in low-Earth orbit, more than half of all active spacecraft. Thousands more satellites for Amazon’s Kuiper broadband constellation and Chinese Internet network are slated to launch in the next few years.

“AARO is investigating if other unresolved cases may be attributed to the expansion of the Starlink and other mega-constellations in low-Earth orbit,” the report said.

The Starlink network is still relatively new. SpaceX launched the first Starlinks five years ago. Kosloski said he expects the number of erroneous UAP reports caused by satellites to go down as pilots and others understand what the Starlinks look like.

“It looks interesting and potentially anomalous. But we can model that, and we can show pilots what that anomaly looks like, so that that doesn’t get reported to us necessarily,” Kosloski said.

A lot of people are mistaking Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites for UAPs Read More »

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As ABL Space departs launch, the 1-ton rocket wars have a clear winner

Science, Space / /

“Take a look around,” Piemont wrote. “US rockets fly every couple of days, with perfect success. It’s revolutionary. While there is still a need for more providers in certain market segments, those opportunities are decreasing. To succeed in such a demanding effort as scaling up an orbital launch program, you need deep motivation around your mission and potential impact, from many stakeholders. As the launch market matured, those motivations thinned and our path to making a big contribution as a commercial launch company narrowed considerably.”

Over the last half decade or so, three US companies have credibly vied to develop rockets in the 1-ton class in terms of lift capacity. ABL has been competing alongside Relativity Space and Firefly to bring its rockets to market. ABL never took off. In March 2023, Relativity reached space with the Terran 1 rocket, but, due to second-stage issues, failed to reach orbit. Within weeks, Relativity announced it was shifting its focus to a medium-lift rocket, Terran R. Since then, the California-based launch company has moved along, but there are persistent rumors that it faces a cash crunch.

Of the three, only Firefly has enjoyed success. The company’s Alpha rocket has reached orbit on multiple occasions, and just this week Firefly announced that it completed a $175 million Series D fundraising round, resulting in a valuation of more than $2 billion. The 1-ton rocket wars are over: Firefly has won.

Focusing on defense

Just as Relativity pivoted away from this class of rocket, ABL will now also shift its focus—this time in an even more radical direction.

US Defense spending on missile production and defense has skyrocketed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and ABL will now seek to tap into this potentially lucrative market.

“We have made the decision to focus our efforts on national defense, and specifically on missile defense technologies,” Piemont said. “We’ll have more to share soon on our roadmap and traction in this area. For now, suffice to say we see considerable opportunity to leverage RS1, GS0, the E2 engine, and the rest of the technology we’ve developed to date to enable a new type of research effort around missile defense technologies.”

As ABL Space departs launch, the 1-ton rocket wars have a clear winner Read More »

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Are standing desks good for you? The answer is getting clearer.

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Whatever your office setup, the most important thing is to move.

Without question, inactivity is bad for us. Prolonged sitting is consistently linked to higher risks of cardiovascular disease and death. The obvious response to this frightful fate is to not sit— move. Even a few moments of exercise can have benefits, studies suggest. But in our modern times, sitting is hard to avoid, especially at the office. This has led to a range of strategies to get ourselves up, including the rise of standing desks. If you have to be tethered to a desk, at least you can do it while on your feet, the thinking goes.

However, studies on whether standing desks are beneficial have been sparse and sometimes inconclusive. Further, prolonged standing can have its own risks, and data on work-related sitting has also been mixed. While the final verdict on standing desks is still unclear, two studies out this year offer some of the most nuanced evidence yet about the potential benefits and risks of working on your feet.

Take a seat

For years, studies have pointed to standing desks improving markers for cardiovascular and metabolic health, such as lipid levels, insulin resistance, and arterial flow-mediated dilation (the ability of arteries to widen in response to increased blood flow). But it’s unclear how significant those improvements are to averting bad health outcomes, such as heart attacks. One 2018 analysis suggested the benefits might be minor.

And there are fair reasons to be skeptical about standing desks. For one, standing—like sitting—is not moving. If a lack of movement and exercise is the root problem, standing still wouldn’t be a solution.

Yet, while sitting and standing can arguably be combined into the single category of ‘stationary,’ some researchers have argued that not all sitting is the same. In a 2018 position paper published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, two health experts argued that the link between poor health and sitting could come down to the specific populations being examined and “the special contribution” of “sitting time at home, for example, the ‘couch potato effect.'”

The two researchers—emeritus professors David Rempel, formerly at the University of California, San Francisco, and Niklas Krause, formerly of UC Los Angeles—pointed to several studies looking specifically at occupational sitting time and poor health outcomes, which have arrived at mixed results. For instance, a 2013 analysis did not find a link between sitting at work and cardiovascular disease. Though the study did suggest a link to mortality, the link was only among women. There was also a 2015 study on about 36,500 workers in Japan, who were followed for an average of 10 years. That study found that there was no link between mortality and sitting time among salaried workers, professionals, and people who worked at home businesses. However, there was a link between mortality and sitting among people who worked in farming, forestry, and fishing industries.

Still, despite some murkiness in the specifics, more recent studies continue to turn up a link between total prolonged sitting—wherever that sitting occurs—and poor health outcomes, particularly cardiovascular disease. This has kept up interest in standing desks in offices, where people don’t always have the luxury of frequent movement breaks. And this, in turn, has kept researchers on their toes to try to answer whether there is any benefit to standing desks.

One study published last month in the International Journal of Epidemiology offers a clearer picture of how standing desks may relate to cardiovascular health risks. The authors, an international team of researchers led by Matthew Ahmadi at the University of Sydney in Australia, found that standing desks don’t improve heart health—but they don’t harm it, either, whereas sitting desks do.

Mitigating risks

For the study, the researchers tracked the health data of a little over 83,000 people in the UK over an average of about seven years. During the study, participants wore a wrist-based accelerometer device for at least four days. The devices were calibrated to determine when they were sitting, standing, walking, or running during the waking hours. With that data, the researchers linked their sitting, standing, and stationary (combined sitting and standing) times to health outcomes in their medical records.

The researchers focused on two categories of health outcomes: cardiovascular, covering coronary heart disease, heart failure, and stroke; and orthostatic circulatory disease events, including orthostatic hypotension (blood pressure drops upon standing or sitting), varicose veins, chronic venous insufficiency (veins in your legs don’t move blood back up to your heart), and venous ulcers. The reasoning for this second category is that prolonged sitting and standing may pose risks for developing circulatory diseases.

The researchers found that when participants’ total stationary time (sitting and standing) went over 12 hours per day, risk of orthostatic circulatory disease increased 22 percent per additional hour, while risk of cardiovascular disease went up 13 percent per hour.

For just sitting, risks increased every hour after 10 hours: for orthostatic circulatory disease, risk went up 26 percent every hour after 10 hours, and cardiovascular disease risk went up 15 percent. For standing, risk of orthostatic circulatory disease went up after just two hours, increasing 11 percent every 30 minutes after two hours of standing. But standing had no impact on cardiovascular disease at any time point.

“Contrary to sitting time, more time spent standing was not associated with a higher CVD [cardiovascular disease] risk. Overall, there was no association for higher or lower CVD risk throughout the range of standing duration,” the authors report.

On the other hand, keeping sitting time under 10 hours and standing time under two hours was linked to a weak protective effect against orthostatic circulatory disease: A day of nine hours of sitting and 1.5 of standing (for a total of 11.5 hours of stationary time) lowered risk of orthostatic circulatory disease by a few percentage points, the study found.

In other words, as long as you can keep your total stationary time under 12 hours, you can use a little standing time help you keep your sitting time under 10 hours and avoid increasing both cardiovascular and orthostatic risks, according to the data.

Consistent finding

It’s a very detailed formula to reduce the health risks of long days at the office, but is it set in stone? Probably not. For one thing, it’s just one study that needs to be replicated in a different population. Also, the study didn’t look at any specifics of occupational versus leisure standing and sitting times, let alone the use of standing desks specifically. The study also based estimates of people’s sitting, standing, and total stationary time on as little as just four days of activity monitoring, which may or may not have been consistent over the nearly seven-year average follow-up period.

Still, the study’s takeaway generally fits with a study published in January in JAMA Network Open. This study looked at the link between occupational sitting time, leisure physical activity, and death rates—both deaths from all causes and those specifically caused by cardiovascular disease. Researchers used a group of over 480,000 workers in Taiwan, who were followed for an average of nearly 13 years.

The workers who reported mostly sitting at work had a 16 percent increased risk of all-cause mortality and a 34 percent higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease compared with workers who did not sit at work. The workers who reported alternating between sitting and standing, meanwhile, did not have an increased risk of all-cause or cardiovascular disease mortality. The findings held after adjusting for health factors and looking at subgroups, including by sex, age, smokers, never-smokers, and people with chronic conditions.

That said, being highly active in leisure time appeared to offset the mortality risks among those who mostly sit at work. At the highest leisure-time activity levels reported, participants who mostly sit at work had comparable risks of all-cause mortality as those who alternated sitting and standing or were didn’t sit at work. Overall, the data suggested that keeping overall stationary time as low as possible and alternating sitting and standing to some extent at work can reduce risk.

The authors call for incorporating breaks in work settings and even specifically recommend allowing for standing and activity-permissive workstations.

The takeaway

While prolonged standing has its own risks, the use of standing desks at work can, to some extent, help lessen the risks of prolonged sitting. But, overall, it’s important to keep total stationary time as low as possible and exercise whenever possible.

Photo of Beth Mole

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

Are standing desks good for you? The answer is getting clearer. Read More »

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IBM boosts the amount of computation you can get done on quantum hardware

Biz & IT, Computer science, computing quantum computing, ibm, Physics, quantum mechanics, Science / /

By making small adjustments to the frequency that the qubits are operating at, it’s possible to avoid these problems. This can be done when the Heron chip is being calibrated before it’s opened for general use.

Separately, the company has done a rewrite of the software that controls the system during operations. “After learning from the community, seeing how to run larger circuits, [we were able to] almost better define what it should be and rewrite the whole stack towards that,” Gambetta said. The result is a dramatic speed-up. “Something that took 122 hours now is down to a couple of hours,” he told Ars.

Since people are paying for time on this hardware, that’s good for customers now. However,  it could also pay off in the longer run, as some errors can occur randomly, so less time spent on a calculation can mean fewer errors.

Deeper computations

Despite all those improvements, errors are still likely during any significant calculations. While it continues to work toward developing error-corrected qubits, IBM is focusing on what it calls error mitigation, which it first detailed last year. As we described it then:

“The researchers turned to a method where they intentionally amplified and then measured the processor’s noise at different levels. These measurements are used to estimate a function that produces similar output to the actual measurements. That function can then have its noise set to zero to produce an estimate of what the processor would do without any noise at all.”

The problem here is that using the function is computationally difficult, and the difficulty increases with the qubit count. So, while it’s still easier to do error mitigation calculations than simulate the quantum computer’s behavior on the same hardware, there’s still the risk of it becoming computationally intractable. But IBM has also taken the time to optimize that, too. “They’ve got algorithmic improvements, and the method that uses tensor methods [now] uses the GPU,” Gambetta told Ars. “So I think it’s a combination of both.”

IBM boosts the amount of computation you can get done on quantum hardware Read More »

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What did the snowball Earth look like?

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All of which raises questions about what the snowball Earth might have looked like in the continental interiors. A team of US-based geologists think they’ve found some glacial deposits in the form of what are called the Tavakaiv sandstones in Colorado. These sandstones are found along the Front Range of the Rockies, including areas just west of Colorado Springs. And, if the authors’ interpretations are correct, they formed underneath a massive sheet of glacial ice.

There are lots of ways to form sandstone deposits, and they can be difficult to date because they’re aggregates of the remains of much older rocks. But in this case, the Tavakaiv sandstone is interrupted by intrusions of dark colored rock that contains quartz and large amounts of hematite, a form of iron oxide.

These intrusions tell us a remarkable number of things. For one, some process must have exerted enough force to drive material into small faults in the sandstone. Hematite only gets deposited under fairly specific conditions, which tells us a bit more. And, most critically, hematite can trap uranium and the lead it decays into, providing a way of dating when the deposits formed.

Under the snowball

Depending on which site was being sampled, the hematite produced a range of dates, from as recent as 660 million years ago to as old as 700 million years. That means all of them were formed during what’s termed the Sturtian glaciation, which ran from 715 million to 660 million years ago. At the time, the core of what is now North America was in the equatorial region. So, the Tavakaiv sandstones can provide a window into what at least one continent experienced during the most severe global glaciation of the Cryogenian Period.

What did the snowball Earth look like? Read More »

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Firefly Aerospace rakes in more cash as competitors struggle for footing

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More than just one thing

Firefly’s majority owner is the private equity firm AE Industrial Partners, and the Series D funding round was led by Michigan-based RPM Ventures.

“Few companies can say they’ve defined a new category in their industry—Firefly is one of those,” said Marc Weiser, a managing director at RPM Ventures. “They have captured their niche in the market as a full service provider for responsive space missions and have become the pinnacle of what a modern space and defense technology company looks like.”

This descriptor—a full service provider—is what differentiates Firefly from most other space companies. Firefly’s crosscutting work in small and medium launch vehicles, rocket engines, lunar landers, and in-space propulsion propels it into a club of wide-ranging commercial space companies that, arguably, only includes SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Rocket Lab.

NASA has awarded Firefly three task orders under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Firefly will soon ship its first Blue Ghost lunar lander to Florida for final preparations to launch to the Moon and deliver 10 NASA-sponsored scientific instruments and tech demo experiments to the lunar surface. NASA has a contract with Firefly for a second Blue Ghost mission, plus an agreement for Firefly to transport a European data relay satellite to lunar orbit.

Firefly also boasts a healthy backlog of missions on its Alpha rocket. In June, Lockheed Martin announced a deal for as many as 25 Alpha launches through 2029. Two months later, L3Harris inked a contract with Firefly for up to 20 Alpha launches. Firefly has also signed Alpha launch contracts with NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Space Force, and the National Reconnaissance Office. One of these Alpha launches will deploy Firefly’s first orbital transfer vehicle, named Elytra, designed to host customer payloads and transport them to different orbits following separation from the launcher’s upper stage.

And there’s the Medium Launch Vehicle, a rocket Firefly and Northrop Grumman hope to launch as soon as 2026. But first, the companies will fly an MLV booster stage with seven kerosene-fueled Miranda engines on a new version of Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket for cargo deliveries to the International Space Station. Northrop Grumman has retired the previous version of Antares after losing access to Russian rocket engines in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Firefly Aerospace rakes in more cash as competitors struggle for footing Read More »

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Teen in critical condition with Canada’s first human case of H5 bird flu

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A British Columbia teen who contracted Canada’s first known human case of H5 bird flu has deteriorated swiftly in recent days and is now in critical condition, health officials reported Tuesday.

The teen’s case was announced Saturday by provincial health officials, who noted that the teen had no obvious exposure to animals that could explain an infection with the highly pathogenic avian influenza. The teen tested positive for H5 bird flu at BC’s public health laboratory, and the result is currently being confirmed by the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.

The teen’s case reportedly began with conjunctivitis, echoing the H5N1 human case reports in the US. The case then progressed to fever and cough, and the teen was admitted to BC’s Children’s hospital late Friday. The teen’s condition varied throughout the weekend but had taken a turn for the worse by Tuesday, according to BC provincial health officer Bonnie Henry.

“This was a healthy teenager prior to this—so, no underlying conditions—and it just reminds us that in young people, this is a virus that can progress and cause quite severe illness,” Bonnie Henry said in a media briefing streamed by Global News on Tuesday.

Health officials in the province have opened an investigation to understand the source of the outbreak. Around three dozen contacts of the teen have been tested, and all have been negative. “The source of exposure is very likely to be an animal or bird and is being investigated by BC’s chief veterinarian and public health teams,” health officials noted in the announcement over the weekend. The teen was reportedly exposed to pets, including dogs, cats, and reptiles, but testing so far has been negative on them.

Teen in critical condition with Canada’s first human case of H5 bird flu Read More »

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This elephant figured out how to use a hose to shower

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And the hose-showering behavior was “lateralized,” that is, Mary preferred targeting her left body side more than her right. (Yes, Mary is a “left-trunker.”) Mary even adapted her showering behavior depending on the diameter of the hose: she preferred showering with a 24-mm hose over a 13-mm hose and preferred to use her trunk to shower rather than a 32-mm hose.

It’s not known where Mary learned to use a hose, but the authors suggest that elephants might have an intuitive understanding of how hoses work because of the similarity to their trunks. “Bathing and spraying themselves with water, mud, or dust are very common behaviors in elephants and important for body temperature regulation as well as skin care,” they wrote. “Mary’s behavior fits with other instances of tool use in elephants related to body care.”

Perhaps even more intriguing was Anchali’s behavior. While Anchali did not use the hose to shower, she nonetheless exhibited complex behavior in manipulating the hose: lifting it, kinking the hose, regrasping the kink, and compressing the kink. The latter, in particular, often resulted in reduced water flow while Mary was showering. Anchali eventually figured out how to further disrupt the water flow by placing her trunk on the hose and lowering her body onto it. Control experiments were inconclusive about whether Anchali was deliberately sabotaging Mary’s shower; the two elephants had been at odds and behaved aggressively toward each other at shower times. But similar cognitively complex behavior has been observed in elephants.

“When Anchali came up with a second behavior that disrupted water flow to Mary, I became pretty convinced that she is trying to sabotage Mary,” Brecht said. “Do elephants play tricks on each other in the wild? When I saw Anchali’s kink and clamp for the first time, I broke out in laughter. So, I wonder, does Anchali also think this is funny, or is she just being mean?

Current Biology, 2024. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.10.017  (About DOIs).

This elephant figured out how to use a hose to shower Read More »

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For the second time this year, NASA’s JPL center cuts its workforce

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“This reduction is spread across essentially all areas of the Lab including our technical, project, business, and support areas,” Leshin wrote. “We have taken seriously the need to re-size our workforce, whether direct-funded (project) or funded on overhead (burden). With lower budgets and based on the forecasted work ahead, we had to tighten our belts across the board, and you will see that reflected in the layoff impacts.”

This year’s employee cuts came after NASA decided to consider alternatives to a multibillion-dollar plan to return samples from Mars to Earth, which had been led by JPL. In September 2023 an independent review team found that the JPL plan was unworkable and would cost $8 billion to $11 billion to be successful.

A changing environment

While NASA considers alternatives from other field centers, as well as private companies such as SpaceX and Rocket Lab, the budget for Mars Sample Return was slashed from nearly $1 billion for this fiscal year to less than $300 million. Additionally, there is no guarantee that JPL will be given leadership of a revamped Mars Sample Return mission.

The staffing cuts reflect the fact that after the recent launch of the $5 billion Europa Clipper mission, JPL is not managing another flagship deep-space mission at present. Another sizable mission, the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar, is almost ready for a launch next year from India. The California laboratory has smaller projects, but nothing on the order of a flagship mission to command a large budget and support a very large staff.

JPL has a long and storied history, including the management of most of NASA’s highest-profile planetary probes, including the Voyagers, Mars landers, and Galileo and Cassini spacecraft. However in recent years other spaceflight centers, such as Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and private companies such as Lockheed have competed for projects and delivered results.

The job of Leshin and others at NASA is to ensure that JPL has a bright future in a changing world of planetary exploration. This week’s cuts will ensure such a future, Leshin wrote, adding: “We are an incredibly strong organization—our dazzling history, current achievements, and relentless commitment to exploration and discovery position us well for the future.”

For the second time this year, NASA’s JPL center cuts its workforce Read More »

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There are some things the Crew-8 astronauts aren’t ready to talk about

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“I did not say I was uncomfortable talking about it. I said we’re not going to talk about it.”

NASA astronaut Michael Barratt works with a spacesuit inside the Quest airlock of the International Space Station on May 31. Credit: NASA

The astronauts who came home from the International Space Station last month experienced some drama on the high frontier, and some of it accompanied them back to Earth.

In orbit, the astronauts aborted two spacewalks, both under unusual circumstances. Then, on October 25, one of the astronauts was hospitalized due to what NASA called an unspecified “medical issue” after splashdown aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule that concluded the 235-day mission. After an overnight stay in a hospital in Florida, NASA said the astronaut was released “in good health” and returned to their home base in Houston to resume normal post-flight activities.

The space agency did not identify the astronaut or any details about their condition, citing medical privacy concerns. The three NASA astronauts on the Dragon spacecraft included commander Matthew Dominick, pilot Michael Barratt, and mission specialist Jeanette Epps. Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin accompanied the three NASA crew members. Russia’s space agency confirmed he was not hospitalized after returning to Earth.

Dominick, Barratt, and Epps answered media questions in a post-flight press conference Friday, but they did not offer more information on the medical issue or say who experienced it. NASA initially sent all four crew members to the hospital in Pensacola, Florida, for evaluation, but Grebenkin and two of the NASA astronauts were quickly released and cleared to return to Houston. One astronaut remained behind until the next day.

“Spaceflight is still something we don’t fully understand,” said Barratt, a medical doctor and flight surgeon. “We’re finding things that we don’t expect sometimes. This was one of those times, and we’re still piecing things together on this, and so to maintain medical privacy and to let our processes go forward in an orderly manner, this is all we’re going to say about that event at this time.”

NASA typically makes astronaut health data available to outside researchers, who regularly publish papers while withholding identifying information about crew members. NASA officials often tout gaining knowledge about the human body’s response to spaceflight as one of the main purposes of the International Space Station. The agency is subject to federal laws, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, restricting the release of private medical information.

“I did not say I was uncomfortable talking about it,” Barratt said. “I said we’re not going to talk about it. I’m a medical doctor. Space medicine is my passion … and how we adapt, how we experience human spaceflight is something that we all take very seriously.”

Maybe some day

Barratt said NASA will release more information about the astronaut’s post-flight medical issue “in the fullness of time.” This was Barratt’s third trip to space and the first spaceflight for Dominick and Epps.

One of the most famous incidents involving hospitalized astronauts was in 1975, before the passage of the HIPAA medical privacy law, when NASA astronauts Thomas Stafford, Deke Slayton, and Vance Brand stayed at a military hospital in Hawaii nearly two weeks after inhaling toxic propellant fumes that accidentally entered their spacecraft’s internal cabin as it descended under parachutes. They were returning to Earth at the end of the Apollo-Soyuz mission, in which they docked their Apollo command module to a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft in orbit.

NASA’s view—and perhaps the public’s, too—of medical privacy has changed in the nearly 50 years since. On that occasion, NASA disclosed that the astronauts suffered from lung irritation, and officials said Brand briefly passed out from the fumes after splashdown, remaining unconscious until his crewmates fitted an oxygen mask tightly over his face. NASA and the military also made doctors available to answer media questions about their condition.

The medical concern after splashdown last month was not the only part of the Crew-8 mission that remains shrouded in mystery. Dominick and NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson were supposed to go outside the International Space Station for a spacewalk June 13, but NASA called off the excursion, citing a “spacesuit discomfort issue.” NASA replaced Dominick with Barratt and rescheduled the spacewalk for June 24 to retrieve a faulty electronics box and collect microbial samples from the exterior of the space station. But that excursion ended after just 31 minutes, when Dyson reported a water leak in the service and cooling umbilical unit of her spacesuit.

While Barratt discussed the water leak in some detail Friday, Dominick declined to answer a question from Ars regarding the suit discomfort issue. “We’re still reviewing and trying to figure all the details,” he said.

Aging suits

Regarding the water leak, Barratt said he and Dyson noticed her suit had a “spewing umbilical, which was quite dramatic, actually.” The decision to abandon the spacewalk was a “no-brainer,” he said.

“It was not a trivial leak, and we’ve got footage,” Barratt said. “Anybody who was watching NASA TV at the time could see there was basically a snowstorm, a blizzard, spewing from the airlock because we already had the hatch open. So we were seeing flakes of ice in the airlock, and Tracy was seeing a lot of them on her helmet, on her gloves, and whatnot. Dramatic is the right word, to be real honest.”

Dyson, who came back to Earth in September on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, reconnected the leaking umbilical with her gloves and helmet covered with ice, with restricted vision. “Tracy’s actions were nowhere short of heroic,” Barratt said.

Once the leak stabilized, the astronauts closed the hatch and began repressurizing the airlock.

“Getting the airlock closed was kind of me grabbing her legs and using her as an end effector to lever that thing closed, and she just made it happen,” Barratt said. “So, yeah,  there was this drama. Everything worked out fine. Again, normal processes and procedures saved our bacon.”

Barratt said the leak wasn’t caused by any procedural error as the astronauts prepared their suits for the spacewalk.

“It was definitely a hardware issue,” he said. “There was a little poppet valve on the interface that didn’t quite seat, so really, the question became why didn’t that seat? We solved that problem by changing out the whole umbilical.”

By then, NASA’s attention on the space station had turned to other tasks, such as experiments, the arrival of a new cargo ship, and testing of Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule docked at the complex, before it ultimately departed and left its crew behind. The spacewalk wasn’t urgent, so it had to wait. NASA now plans to attempt the spacewalk again as soon as January with a different set of astronauts.

Barratt thinks the spacesuits on the space station are good to go for the next spacewalk. However, the suits are decades old, and their original designs date back more than 40 years, when NASA developed the units for use on the space shuttle. Efforts to develop a replacement suit for use in low-Earth orbit have stalled. In June, Collins Aerospace dropped out of a NASA contract to build new spacesuits for servicing the International Space Station and future orbiting research outposts.

“None of our spacesuits are spring chickens, so we will expect to see some hardware issues with repeated use and not really upgrading,” Barratt said.

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.

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Air quality problems spur $200 million in funds to cut pollution at ports

carbon emissions, climate change, inflation reduction act, Policy, pollution, Science, syndication / /

Diesel equipment will be replaced with hydrogen- or electric-power gear.

Raquel Garcia has been fighting for years to clean up the air in her neighborhood southwest of downtown Detroit.

Living a little over a mile from the Ambassador Bridge, which thousands of freight trucks cross every day en route to the Port of Detroit, Garcia said she and her neighbors are frequently cleaning soot off their homes.

“You can literally write your name in it,” she said. “My house is completely covered.”

Her neighborhood is part of Wayne County, which is home to heavy industry, including steel plants and major car manufacturers, and suffers from some of the worst air quality in Michigan. In its 2024 State of the Air report, the American Lung Association named Wayne County one of the “worst places to live” in terms of annual exposure to fine particulate matter pollution, or PM2.5.

But Detroit, and several other Midwest cities with major shipping ports, could soon see their air quality improve as port authorities receive hundreds of millions of dollars to replace diesel equipment with cleaner technologies like solar power and electric vehicles.

Last week, the Biden administration announced $3 billion in new grants from the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Ports program, which aims to slash carbon emissions and reduce air pollution at US shipping ports. More than $200 million of that funding will go to four Midwestern states that host ports along the Great Lakes: Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana.

The money, which comes from the Inflation Reduction Act, will not only be used to replace diesel-powered equipment and vehicles, but also to install clean energy systems and charging stations, take inventory of annual port emissions, and set plans for reducing them. It will also fund a feasibility study for establishing a green hydrogen fuel hub along the Great Lakes.

The EPA estimates that those changes will, nationwide, reduce carbon pollution in the first 10 years by more than 3 million metric tons, roughly the equivalent of taking 600,000 gasoline-powered cars off the road. The agency also projects reduced emissions of nitrous oxide and PM2.5—both of which can cause serious, long-term health complications—by about 10,000 metric tons and about 180 metric tons, respectively, during that same time period.

“Our nation’s ports are critical to creating opportunity here in America, offering good-paying jobs, moving goods, and powering our economy,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in the agency’s press release announcing the funds. “Delivering cleaner technologies and resources to US ports will slash harmful air and climate pollution while protecting people who work in and live nearby ports communities.”

Garcia, who runs the community advocacy nonprofit Southwest Detroit Environmental Vision, said she’s “really excited” to see the Port of Detroit getting those funds, even though it’s just a small part of what’s needed to clean up the city’s air pollution.

“We care about the air,” she said. “There’s a lot of kids in the neighborhood where I live.”

Jumpstarting the transition to cleaner technology

Nationwide, port authorities in 27 states and territories tapped the Clean Ports funding, which they’ll use to buy more than 1,500 units of cargo-handling equipment, such as forklifts and cranes, 1,000 heavy-duty trucks, 10 locomotives, and 20 seafaring vessels, all of which will be powered by electricity or green hydrogen, which doesn’t emit CO2 when burned.

In the Midwest, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency and the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority in Ohio were awarded about $95 million each from the program, the Detroit-Wayne County Port Authority in Michigan was awarded $25 million, and the Ports of Indiana will receive $500,000.

Mark Schrupp, executive director of the Detroit-Wayne County Port Authority, said the funding for his agency will be used to help port operators at three terminals purchase new electric forklifts, cranes, and boat motors, among other zero-emission equipment. The money will also pay for a new solar array that will reduce energy consumption for port facilities, as well as 11 new electric vehicle charging stations.

“This money is helping those [port] businesses make the investment in this clean technology, which otherwise is sometimes five or six times the cost of a diesel-powered equipment,” he said, noting that the costs of clean technologies are expected to fall significantly in the coming years as manufacturers scale up production. “It also exposes them to the potential savings over time—full maintenance costs and other things that come from having the dirtier technology in place.”

Schrupp said that the new equipment will slash the Detroit-Wayne County Port Authority’s overall carbon emissions by more than 8,600 metric tons every year, roughly a 30 percent reduction.

Carly Beck, senior manager of planning, environment and information systems for the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority, said its new equipment will reduce the Port of Cleveland’s annual carbon emissions by roughly 1,000 metric tons, or about 40 percent of the emissions tied to the port’s operations. The funding will also pay for two electric tug boats and the installation of solar panels and battery storage on the port’s largest warehouse, she added.

In 2022, Beck said, the Port of Cleveland took an emissions inventory, which found that cargo-handling equipment, building energy use, and idling ships were the port’s biggest sources of carbon emissions. Docked ships would run diesel generators for power as they unloaded, she said, but with the new infrastructure, the cargo-handling equipment and idling ships can draw power from a 2-megawatt solar power system with battery storage.

“We’re essentially creating a microgrid at the port,” she said.

Improving the air for disadvantaged communities

The Clean Ports funding will also be a boon for people like Garcia, who live near a US shipping port.

Shipping ports are notorious for their diesel pollution, which research has shown disproportionately affects poor communities of color. And most, if not all, of the census tracts surrounding the Midwest ports are deemed “disadvantaged communities” by the federal government. The EPA uses a number of factors, including income level and exposure to environmental harms, to determine whether a community is “disadvantaged.”

About 10,000 trucks pass through the Port of Detroit every day, Schrupp said, which helps to explain why residents of Southwest Detroit and the neighboring cities of Ecorse and River Rouge, which sit adjacent to Detroit ports, breathe the state’s dirtiest air.

“We have about 50,000 residents within a few miles of the port, so those communities will definitely benefit,” he said. “This is a very industrialized area.”

Burning diesel or any other fossil fuel produces nitrous oxide or PM2.5, and research has shown that prolonged exposure to high levels of those pollutants can lead to serious health complications, including lung disease and premature death. The Detroit-Wayne County Port Authority estimates that the new port equipment will cut nearly 9 metric tons of PM2.5 emissions and about 120 metric tons of nitrous oxide emissions each year.

Garcia said she’s also excited that some of the Detroit grants will be used to establish workforce training programs, which will show people how to use the new technologies and showcase career opportunities at the ports. Her area is gentrifying quickly, Garcia said, so it’s heartening to see the city and port authority taking steps to provide local employment opportunities.

Beck said that the Port of Cleveland is also surrounded by a lot of heavy industry and that the census tracts directly adjacent to the port are all deemed “disadvantaged” by federal standards.

“We’re trying to be good neighbors and play our part,” she said, “to make it a more pleasant environment.”

Kristoffer Tigue is a staff writer for Inside Climate News, covering climate issues in the Midwest. He previously wrote the twice-weekly newsletter Today’s Climate and helped lead ICN’s national coverage on environmental justice. His work has been published in Reuters, Scientific American, Mother Jones, HuffPost, and many more. Tigue holds a master’s degree in journalism from the Missouri School of Journalism.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

Photo of Inside Climate News

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russia:-fine,-i-guess-we-should-have-a-grasshopper-rocket-project,-too

Russia: Fine, I guess we should have a Grasshopper rocket project, too

Science, Space, Uncategorized / /

Like a lot of competitors in the global launch industry, Russia for a long time dismissed the prospects of a reusable first stage for a rocket.

As late as 2016, an official with the Russian agency that develops strategy for the country’s main space corporation, Roscosmos, concluded, “The economic feasibility of reusable launch systems is not obvious.” In the dismissal of the landing prospects of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, Russian officials were not alone. Throughout the 2010s, competitors including space agencies in Europe and Japan, and US-based United Launch Alliance, all decided to develop expendable rockets.

However, by 2017, when SpaceX re-flew a Falcon 9 rocket for the first time, the writing was on the wall. “This is a very important step, we sincerely congratulate our colleague on this achievement,” then-Roscosmos CEO Igor Komarov said at the time. He even spoke of developing reusable components, such as rocket engines capable of multiple firings.

A Russian Grasshopper

That was more than seven years ago, however, and not much has happened in Russia since then to foster the development of a reusable rocket vehicle. Yes, Roscosmos unveiled plans for the “Amur” rocket in 2020, which was intended to have a reusable first stage and methane-fueled engines and land like the Falcon 9. But its debut has slipped year for year—originally intended to fly in 2026, its first launch is now expected no earlier than 2030.

Now, however, there is some interesting news from Moscow about plans to develop a prototype vehicle to test the ability to land the Amur rocket’s first stage vertically.

According to the state-run news agency, TASS, construction of this test vehicle will enable the space corporation to solve key challenges. “Next year preparation of an experimental stage of the (Amur) rocket, which everyone is calling ‘Grasshopper,’ will begin,” said Igor Pshenichnikov, the Roscosmos deputy director of the department of future programs. The Russian news article was translated for Ars by Rob Mitchell.

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