Enlarge/ Webb has observed the best evidence yet for emission from a neutron star at the site of Supernova 1987A.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, et. al.
Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.
Good morning. It’s February 26, and today’s image highlights the core of a (relatively) nearby supernova.
In the astronomy community, SN 1987A has somewhat legendary status. The first observable light from this exploding star in the Large Magellanic Cloud reached Earth in February, almost 37 years ago to the day. It was the first supernova that astronomers were able to observe and study with modern telescopes. It was still discussed in reverent terms a few years later when I was an undergraduate student studying astronomy at the University of Texas.
One of the enduring mysteries of the supernova is that astronomers have been unable to find its collapsed core, where they would expect to see a neutron star—an ultra-dense object that results from the supernova explosion of a massive star. In recent years, ground-based telescopes have found hints of this collapsed core, but now the James Webb Space Telescope has found emission lines that almost certainly must come from a newly born neutron star.
The astronomical details can be found here. It’s a nice validation of our understanding about supernovae.
I would also like to acknowledge that the Daily Telescope has been anything but “daily” of late. This is due to a confluence of several factors, including a lot of travel and work on other projects, including four features in the last month or so. I’ve had to put some things on the back-burner. I don’t want to stop producing these articles, but I also can’t commit to writing one every day. Maybe it should be renamed? For now, I’m just going to try to do my best. I appreciate those who have written to ask where the Daily Telescope has been—well, all of you but the person who wrote a nasty note.
For some, having to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic was stressful. Parents balanced job duties while caring for children. Some struggled to set up a home office and adjust to new tools, like video conferencing. Lonely workdays at home added to social isolation. The line between work and life blurred.
For others, working from home was a boon—comfort, convenience, flexibility, no commuting or rush-hour traffic, no office-environment distractions. When the acute aspects of the pandemic receded, some who at first struggled began to settle into a work-from-home (WFH) groove and appreciated the newfound flexibility.
Then, bosses began calling their employees back to the office. Many made the argument that the return-to-office (RTO) policies and mandates were better for their companies; workers are more productive at the office, and face-to-face interactions promote collaboration, many suggested. But there’s little data to support that argument. Pandemic-era productivity is tricky to interpret, given that the crisis disrupted every aspect of life. Research from before the pandemic generally suggested remote work improves worker performance—though it often included workers who volunteered to WFH, potentially biasing the finding.
For a clearer look at the effect of RTO policies after the pandemic, two business researchers at the University of Pittsburgh examined a sample of firms on the S&P 500 list—137 of which had RTO mandates and 320 that clearly did not between June 2019 and January 2023. The researchers collected publicly available data on each company, including financial data and employee reviews. They then looked at what factors were linked to whether a firm implemented an RTO policy—such as the company’s size, financial constraints, and CEO characteristics—as well as the consequences of the RTO mandates—employee satisfaction and financial metrics of the firms.
Overall, the analysis, released as a pre-print, found that RTO mandates did not improve a firm’s financial metrics, but they did decrease employee satisfaction.
Drilling down, the data indicated that RTO mandates were linked to firms with male CEOs who had greater power in the company. Here, power is measured as the CEO’s total compensation divided by the average total compensation paid to the four highest-paid executives in the firm.
Before the analysis, the researchers hypothesized that RTO mandates may be used to blame employees for poor firm performance. But, companies that have institutional ownership—such as hedge funds or endowments—would not fall for such a “blame game” and would thus would be less likely to implement an RTO mandate. The data supported those hypotheses. Firms with weaker stock performance before employees were able to return to the office were more likely to enforce RTO mandates. However, institutional ownership decreased the probability of RTO mandates.
Although CEOs often justified RTO mandates by arguing it will improve the company’s performance, “Results of our determinant analyses are consistent with managers using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance,” the researchers concluded.
Unsurprisingly, the researchers also found that RTO mandates were linked to decreases in employee satisfaction. Specifically, after an RTO mandate, employees’ ratings significantly declined on overall job satisfaction, work-life balance, senior management, and corporate culture. But their ratings of factors unrelated to RTO did not change, indicating that the RTO mandate was driving dissatisfaction.
The study has limitations, including a short time frame to look at long-term outcomes of RTO policies and a time frame that overlapped with a labor shortage. Worker responses may be different in a tight labor market. Still, the study adds some data to the ongoing debate—and feuds—over RTO policies.
Enlarge/ Chinguetti slice at the National Museum of Natural History. A larger meteorite reported in 1916 hasn’t been spotted since.
In 1916, a French consular official reported finding a giant “iron hill” deep in the Sahara desert, roughly 45 kilometers (28 miles) from Chinguetti, Mauritania—purportedly a meteorite (technically a mesosiderite) some 40 meters (130 feet) tall and 100 meters (330 feet) long. He brought back a small fragment, but the meteorite hasn’t been found again since, despite the efforts of multiple expeditions, calling its very existence into question.
Three British researchers have conducted their own analysis and proposed a means of determining once and for all whether the Chinguetti meteorite really exists, detailing their findings in a new preprint posted to the physics arXiv. They contend that they have narrowed down the likely locations where the meteorite might be buried under high sand dunes and are currently awaiting access to data from a magnetometer survey of the region in hopes of either finding the mysterious missing meteorite or confirming that it likely never existed.
Captain Gaston Ripert was in charge of the Chinguetti camel corps. One day he overheard a conversation among the chameliers (camel drivers) about an unusual iron hill in the desert. He convinced a local chief to guide him there one night, taking Ripert on a 10-hour camel ride along a “disorienting” route, making a few detours along the way. He may even have been literally blindfolded, depending on how one interprets the French phrase en aveugle, which can mean either “blind” (i.e. without a compass) or “blindfolded.” The 4-kilogram fragment Ripert collected was later analyzed by noted geologist Alfred Lacroix, who considered it a significant discovery. But when others failed to locate the larger Chinguetti meteorite, people started to doubt Ripert’s story.
“I know that the general opinion is that the stone does not exist; that to some, I am purely and simply an imposter who picked up a metallic specimen,” Ripert wrote to French naturalist Theodore Monod in 1934. “That to others, I am a simpleton who mistook a sandstone outcrop for an enormous meteorite. I shall do nothing to disabuse them, I know only what I saw.”
Encouraged by a separate report of local blacksmiths claiming to recover iron from a giant block somewhere east or southeast of Chinguetti, Monod intermittently searched for the meteorite several times over the ensuing decades, to no avail. A pilot named Jacques Gallouédec thought he spotted a dark silhouette in the Saharan dunes in the 1980s. But neither Monod nor a second expedition in the late 1990s—documented by the UK’s Channel 4—could find anything. Monod concluded in 1989 that Ripert had likely mistakenly identified a sedimentary rock “with no trace of metal” as a meteorite.
Still, as Rutgers University physicist Matt Buckley noted on Bluesky, “This story has everything: giant unexplained meteorites, sand dunes, a guy named Gaston, ductile nickel needles, secret aeromagnetic surveys, and camel drivers.” So naturally, it intrigued Stephen Warren of Imperial College London, Oxford University’s Ekaterini Protopapa, and Robert Warren, who began their own search for the mysterious missing meteorite in 2020.
Enlarge/ Mining operations start right at the edge of Bulqizë, Albania.
“The search for geologic hydrogen today is where the search for oil was back in the 19th century—we’re just starting to understand how this works,” said Frédéric-Victor Donzé, a geologist at Université Grenoble Alpes. Donzé is part of a team of geoscientists studying a site at Bulqizë in Albania where miners at one of the world’s largest chromite mines may have accidentally drilled into a hydrogen reservoir.
The question Donzé and his team want to tackle is whether hydrogen has a parallel geological system with huge subsurface reservoirs that could be extracted the way we extract oil. “Bulqizë is a reference case. For the first time, we have real data. We have a proof,” Donzé said.
Greenish energy source
Water is the only byproduct of burning hydrogen, which makes it a potential go-to green energy source. The problem is that the vast majority of the 96 million tons of hydrogen we make each year comes from processing methane, and that does release greenhouse gases. Lots of them. “There are green ways to produce hydrogen, but the cost of processing methane is lower. This is why we are looking for alternatives,” Donzé said.
And the key to one of those alternatives may be buried in the Bulqizë mine. Chromite, an ore that contains lots of chromium, has been mined at Bulqizë since the 1980s. The mining operation was going smoothly until 2007, when the miners drilled through a fault, a discontinuity in the rocks. “Then they started to have explosions. In the mine, they had a small electric train, and there were sparks flying, and then… boom,” Donzé said. At first, Bulqizë management thought the cause was methane, the usual culprit of mining accidents. But it wasn’t.
Hydrogen at fault
The mine was bought by a Chinese company in 2017, and the new owners immediately sent their engineering teams to deal with explosions. They did measurements and found the hydrogen concentration in the mine’s galleries was around 1–2 percent. It only needs to be at 0.4–0.5 percent for the atmosphere to become explosive. “They also found the hydrogen was coming from the fault drilled through back in 2007. Unfortunately, one of the explosions happened when the engineering team was down there. Three or four people died,” Donzé said.
It turned out that over 200 tons of hydrogen was released from the Bulqizë mine each year. Donzé’s team went there to figure out where all this hydrogen was coming from.
The rocks did not contain enough hydrogen to reach that sort of flow rate. One possible explanation is the hydrogen being released as a product of an ongoing geological process called serpentinization. “But for this to happen, the temperature in the mine would need to reach 200–300 degrees Celsius, and even then, it would not produce 200 tons per year,” said Donzé. “So the most probable was the third option—that we have a reservoir,” he added.
Enlarge/ The first stage of United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket was lifted onto its launch platform this week in preparation for an April liftoff with two NASA astronauts on Boeing’s Starliner Crew Flight Test.
United Launch Alliance
Welcome to Edition 6.32 of the Rocket Report! I’m writing the report again this week as Eric Berger is in Washington, DC, to receive a well-earned honor, the 2024 Excellence in Commercial Space Journalism Award from the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. Cape Canaveral is the world’s busiest spaceport, and this week, three leading US launch companies were active there. SpaceX launched another Falcon 9 rocket, and a few miles away, Blue Origin raised a New Glenn rocket on its launch pad for long-awaited ground testing. Nearby, United Launch Alliance began assembling an Atlas V rocket for the first crew launch of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft in April. 2024 is shaping up to be a truly exciting year for the spaceflight community.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and 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.
Astroscale inspector satellite launched by Rocket Lab. Astroscale, a well-capitalized Japanese startup, has launched a small satellite to do something that has never been done in space, Ars reports. This new spacecraft, delivered into orbit on February 18 by Rocket Lab, will approach a defunct upper stage from a Japanese H-IIA rocket that has been circling Earth for more than 15 years. Over the next few months, the satellite will try to move within arm’s reach of the rocket, taking pictures and performing complicated maneuvers to move around the bus-size H-IIA upper stage as it moves around the planet at nearly 5 miles per second (7.6 km/s).
This is a first … Astroscale’s ADRAS-J mission is the first satellite designed to approach and inspect a piece of space junk in orbit. This is a public-private partnership between Astroscale and the Japanese space agency. Of course, space agencies and commercial companies have demonstrated rendezvous operations in orbit for decades. The difference here is the H-IIA rocket is uncontrolled, likely spinning and in a slow tumble, and was never designed to accommodate any visitors. Japan left it in orbit in January 2009 following the launch of a climate monitoring satellite and didn’t look back. ADRAS-J is a technology demonstration that could pave the way for a follow-on mission to actually link up with this H-IIA rocket and remove it from orbit. Astroscale eventually wants to use these technologies for satellite servicing, refueling, and further debris removal missions. (submitted by Ken the Bin and Jay500001)
Software error blamed for Firefly launch malfunction. Firefly Aerospace released an update Tuesday on an investigation into an upper stage malfunction on the company’s Alpha rocket in December. The investigation team, consisting of membership from Firefly, the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Transportation Safety Board, Lockheed Martin, NASA, and the US Space Force, determined a software error in the rocket’s guidance, navigation, and control software algorithm ultimately caused the Alpha rocket to release its payload into a lower-than-planned orbit following a launch from California.
Upper stage woes… The software error prevented the rocket from sending the “necessary pulse commands” to control thrusters on the upper stage before its main engine was supposed to reignite. This second burn by the upper stage was supposed to circularize the rocket’s orbit, but it didn’t happen as planned. Still, the Alpha rocket safely released its commercial satellite payload for Lockheed Martin. Although the lower orbit caused the satellite to reenter the atmosphere earlier this month, Lockheed Martin said it was able to achieve many of the objectives of the technology demonstration mission, which focused on testing an electronically steered antenna. This was the fourth launch of an Alpha rocket, and two of them have suffered from upper stage malfunctions during engine restart attempts. Firefly says it is preparing the next Alpha rocket to fly “in the coming months.” (submitted by Ken the Bin)
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A good fundraising round for Gilmour Space. Australian startup Gilmour Space Technologies has raised $55 million Australian dollars ($36 million) in a Series D funding round announced Monday, Space News reports. The funding supports the small launch vehicle startup’s campaign to manufacture, test, and begin launching rockets and satellites from the Bowen Orbital Spaceport in North Queensland. Gilmour Space, founded in 2012, is developing a three-stage rocket called Eris. The first Eris test flight is expected “in the coming months, pending launch approvals from the Australian Space Agency,” according to the Gilmour Space news release.
Launching from down under… Gilmour Space is aiming to launch the first Australian-built rocket into orbit later this year. The Eris rocket is powered by hybrid engines, and Gilmour says it is capable of delivering about 670 pounds (305 kilograms) of payload mass into a Sun-synchronous orbit. The $36 million fundraising round announced this week follows a $46 million fundraising round in 2021. According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Gilmour Space is aiming for the first flight of Eris in April, and this latest fundraising should give the company enough money to mount four test flights. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
Enlarge/ Odysseus passes over the near side of the Moon following lunar orbit insertion on February 21.
Intuitive Machines
For the first time in more than half a century, a US-built spacecraft has made a soft landing on the Moon.
There was high drama and plenty of intrigue on Thursday evening as Intuitive Machines attempted to land its Odysseus spacecraft in a small crater not all that far from the south pole of the Moon. About 20 minutes after touchdown, NASA declared success, but some questions remained about the health of the lander and its orientation. Why? Because while Odysseus was phoning home, its signal was weak.
But after what the spacecraft and its developer, Houston-based Intuitive Machines, went through earlier on Thursday, it was a miracle that Odysseus made it at all.
Losing your way
The landing attempt was delayed by about two hours after mission controllers had to send a hastily cobbled together, last-minute software patch up to the lander while it was still in orbit around the Moon. Patching your spacecraft’s software shortly before it makes its most critical move is just about the last thing a vehicle operator wants to do. But Intuitive Machines was desperate.
Earlier on Thursday, the company realized that its navigation lasers and cameras were not operational. These rangefinders are essential for two functions during landing: terrain-relative navigation and hazard-relative navigation. These two modes help the flight computer on Odysseus to determine precisely where it is during descent—by snapping lots of images and comparing them to known Moon topography—and to identify hazards below, such as boulders, in order to find a safe landing site.
Without these rangefinders, Odysseus was going to faceplant into the Moon. Fortunately, this mission carried a bunch of science payloads. As part of its commercial lunar program, NASA is paying about $118 million for the delivery of six scientific payloads to the lunar surface.
One of these payloads just happened to be the Navigation Doppler Lidar experiment, a 15-kg package that contains three small cameras. With this NDL payload, NASA sought to test out technologies that might be used to improve navigation systems in future landing attempts on the Moon.
The only chance Odysseus had was if it could somehow tap into two of the NDL experiment’s three cameras and use one for terrain-relative navigation and the other for hazard-relative navigation. So, some software was hastily written and shipped up to the lander. This was some true MacGyver stuff. But would it work?
Enlarge/ Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s new CEO, and founder Jeff Bezos observe the New Glenn rocket on its launch pad Wednesday at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.
Anyone who has tracked the development of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket has been waiting for signs of progress from the usually secretive space company. On Wednesday, engineers rolled a full-scale New Glenn rocket, partially made up of flight hardware, to a launch pad in Florida for ground testing.
The first New Glenn launch is almost certainly at least six months away, and it may not even happen this year. In the last few years, observers inside and outside the space industry have become accustomed to the nearly annual ritual of another New Glenn launch delay. New Glenn’s inaugural flight has been delayed from 2020 until 2021, then 2022, and for now, is slated for later this year.
But it feels different now. Blue Origin is obviously moving closer to finally launching a rocket into orbit.
Scaling up
Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin’s founder, was at Cape Canaveral to see his giant new rocket on the launch pad for the first time. “Just incredible to see New Glenn on the pad at LC-36,” Bezos wrote on Instagram. “Big year ahead. Let’s go!”
Starting late last year, Blue Origin officials doubled down on the company’s plans to launch the first New Glenn test flight by the end of 2024. This messaging coincided with the arrival of Dave Limp as Blue Origin’s chief executive, replacing Bob Smith, whose seven-year tenure included the first human suborbital flights on the company’s New Shepard rocket. Smith’s time as CEO was also marked by repeated delays on the New Glenn rocket.
Limp is pushing Blue Origin to move faster, and it seems the company’s employees got the memo. In December, the company rolled elements of the New Glenn rocket from its factory just outside the gates of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to a final assembly hangar located about nine miles away at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
Inside that building, technicians connected the first stage booster, which is flight hardware, with an upper stage Blue Origin has set aside for ground testing. The final piece of the rocket to be added was a 23-foot-diameter (7-meter) payload fairing, the uppermost section of New Glenn designed to protect spacecraft during the initial phase of launch.
Last week, Blue Origin lifted a structure simulating the rocket’s empty mass vertical using the transporter-erector arm at Launch Complex 36 (LC-36), a former Atlas launch pad Blue Origin took over in 2015. This was a final validation of the lifting arm at LC-36 before Blue Origin put a real, or mostly real, rocket on the pad.
Enlarge/ The first full-scale New Glenn rocket rolls out at Launch Complex 36.
On Wednesday, ground crews rolled a fully assembled New Glenn rocket out of the hangar at LC-36 and up the ramp to the launch mount. Then, the hydraulic lifting arm raised the two-stage launcher vertically. At more than 320 feet (98 meters) tall, New Glenn is one of the largest rockets ever seen on Florida’s Space Coast, roughly the same height as NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and nearly as tall as the Saturn V used in the Apollo program.
“The upending is one in a series of major manufacturing and integrated test milestones in preparation for New Glenn’s first launch later this year,” Blue Origin officials wrote in an update on Wednesday. “The test campaign enables our teams to practice, validate, and increase proficiency in vehicle integration, transport, ground support, and launch operations.”
New Glenn can haul nearly 100,000 pounds (45 metric tons) of payload into low-Earth orbit. For low-altitude orbits, this is a weight class above the uppermost capability of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket or SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket but below SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy. Blue Origin also plans to use the New Glenn rocket to launch lunar landers to the Moon for NASA’s Artemis program.
New Glenn’s first stage booster is reusable, and is designed to land on an offshore barge in the Atlantic Ocean, which will bring it back to the coast, similar to the way SpaceX recovers its Falcon 9 booster.
“The fairing is large enough to hold three school buses,” Blue Origin said. “Its reusable first stage aims for a minimum of 25 missions and will land on a sea-based platform located roughly 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) downrange.”
Blue Origin is now 24 years old and employs around 11,000 people at locations around the country, with major locations in Washington, Texas, Florida, and Alabama. While the company has not yet launched anything into orbit, Blue Origin is working on a wide range of projects aside from rockets, including cargo and human-rated lunar landers for NASA and a space tug that could move payloads into different orbits for the US military. New Glenn is crucial for all of these plans.
Enlarge / Space Perspective’s first test capsule, Excelsior, has a diameter of approximately 16 feet (4.9 meters).
Space Perspective could begin test flights of its privately owned capsule suspended under a high-altitude balloon within the next couple of months, the company’s co-founder told Ars this week.
Florida-based Space Perspective released photos of its first completed test capsule Tuesday. The company will use this pressurized capsule, called Excelsior, for a series of test flights this year over the Atlantic Ocean just off the coast of Cape Canaveral. Taber MacCallum, Space Perspective’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said employees have also finished fabricating the giant balloon that will lift the test capsule into the upper atmosphere for the first test flight.
The final piece of the puzzle is a ship, named Marine Spaceport Voyager, that Space Perspective will use to launch the balloon and capsule. This vessel is due to depart an outfitting facility in Louisiana in the next few weeks for a trip to Port Canaveral, Florida, where Space Perspective will load aboard the capsule and balloon. Then, perhaps in four to six weeks, ground teams will be ready for the system’s first test flight, according to MacCallum.
But this is a test program, and there could be delays, MacCallum said. In the meantime, Space Perspective will start building a second capsule for human test flights.
“We’ll do a series of unmanned tests with this capsule,” he said. “In theory, we could fly people in this capsule. It’s designed that way, and it has all of the systems set up for human flight. But our planning assumes that trailing on what we learn from this capsule, we build another capsule that will be our first human flight capsule. And this will remain an unmanned test capsule.”
Soaring to the edge of “space”
These tests are a prelude to Space Perspective’s plans for regular commercial flights carrying paying customers to 100,000 feet (about 30 kilometers), roughly three times higher than the cruising altitude of a typical commercial airliner. From 100,000 feet, Space Perspective’s clients will see panoramic views of the ground and ocean far below, and the sky will be black, with the capsule flying above 99 percent of Earth’s atmosphere.
Founded in 2019, Space Perspective says on its website it is “driven by a desire to share the transformative power of space travel with as many people as possible.” In reality, the company will give customers an experience similar to spaceflight, with a few significant differences.
Essentially, passengers on Space Perspective’s high-altitude balloon will get a view the company says is similar to what a passenger might see on a suborbital spacecraft from Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic. But Space Perspective’s vehicle won’t subject customers to any high G-forces or the risks of rocket flight. The balloon passengers also won’t float in microgravity. And it will max out at 30 kilometers, well short of the 80-kilometer boundary of space recognized by the US government or the 100-kilometer Kármán line.
Still, the view from 30 kilometers must be tremendous. “You’ll see essentially all of Florida,” MacCallum said. “We’re also looking at flying sort of across the southern tip of Florida, so you’d see Cuba, the Bahamas, essentially all of Florida. So amazing views.”
Enlarge/ Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo speaks during a press conference at Neo City Academy in Kissimmee, Florida.
Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
A sixth student at Florida’s Manatee Bay Elementary School outside of Fort Lauderdale has a confirmed case of measles, health officials announced late Tuesday. However, health officials are not telling unvaccinated students who were potentially exposed to quarantine.
The letter, signed by Ladapo, noted that people with measles can be contagious from four days before the rash develops through four days after the rash appears. And while symptoms often develop between 8 to 14 days after exposure, the disease can take 21 days to appear. As such, the normal quarantine period for exposed and unvaccinated people, who are highly susceptible to measles, is 21 days.
“Because of the high likelihood of infection, it is normally recommended that children stay home until the end of the infectious period, which is currently March 7, 2024,” Ladapo’s letter states, adding that the date could change as the situation develops. “However, due to the high immunity rate in the community, as well as the burden on families and educational costs of healthy children missing school, [the health department] is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance.”
Local media outlets reported that, on Tuesday, more than 200 of the school’s 1,067 students were absent.
The measles cluster began Friday when a third grader, who had not recently traveled, was diagnosed with the vaccine-preventable illness. Over the weekend, three additional cases were identified, leading the local health department to release a health advisory. Two additional cases were identified this week. It’s unclear if all six children are unvaccinated.
According to a county vaccine study, only 89.31 percent of the school’s students were vaccinated in the 2023/2024 school year, suggesting that around 114 students are susceptible due to their vaccination status.
The measles virus spreads easily through respiratory transmission and can linger in air space for up to two hours after an infected person has been in an area. Among people susceptible to the virus—those who are unvaccinated or have compromised immune systems—up to 90 percent will become infected upon exposure. People who are fully vaccinated, meanwhile, are considered protected. Two doses of the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine are 97 percent effective at preventing the disease.
Measles symptoms include high fever, runny nose, red and watery eyes, and a cough, as well as a telltale rash that develops after initial symptoms. About 1 in 5 unvaccinated people with measles are hospitalized, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while 1 in 20 infected children develop pneumonia and up to 3 in 1,000 children die of the infection.
Enlarge/ Nitrogen tanks holding tens of thousands of frozen embryos and eggs sit in the embryology lab at New Hope Fertility Center in New York City on December 20, 2017.
The announcement—the first facility to report halting IVF services—is the much-feared outcome of Friday’s ruling, which was widely decried by reproductive health advocates.
“We are saddened that this will impact our patients’ attempt to have a baby through IVF, but we must evaluate the potential that our patients and our physicians could be prosecuted criminally or face punitive damages for following the standard of care for IVF treatments,” UAB said a statement to media. The statement noted that egg retrieval would continue but that egg fertilization and embryo development are now paused.
Ars has reached out to UAB for further comment and will update this story with any additional information.
Production of extra embryos is a normal part of IVF treatment for several reasons. Most notably, not all embryos will be viable, implant in a uterus, and lead to a live birth. So, creating as many embryos as possible is a common strategy to ensure that people who wish to conceive have the best chance of doing so. Embryos can also be screened for genetic conditions, allowing only the healthiest to be implanted, while those with debilitating or fatal abnormalities can be discarded.
But, the standard practices of IVF used for hundreds of thousands of patients each year were thrown into question and upheaval Friday when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that all embryos, even those outside of a uterus or frozen in storage, are “children” under state law. Anyone who destroys them is liable under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, the court concluded. Chief Justice Tom Parker cited his religious beliefs and quoted the Bible to support the stance.
Reproductive health experts quickly speculated that the ruling would roll back IVF treatment in the state. Some facilities, such as the case of UAB, may halt treatment entirely. While others may choose to fertilize eggs conservatively, adding cost and time to the already arduous process of IVF. Genetic screening of embryos from couples who carry debilitating or fatal mutations may no longer be possible. Doctors could be sued if an embryonic ball of a few cells does not survive the treatment. Insurance rates for fertility clinics could skyrocket. Patients, meanwhile, may have to keep unneeded embryos frozen indefinitely.
On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that the ruling had created a wave of anger, shock, and confusion across the state. Patients are considering moving frozen embryos—some leftover from IVF rounds, some purposely banked for future use—to storage facilities out of the state. Lawyers cautioned that divorce settlements that stipulate frozen embryos must be destroyed may now be void.
But the fear and confusion don’t end there. Health advocates worry more states will follow Alabama’s lead. And, if small clumps of cells gain personhood rights in more states, liability could spread to contraceptive use and people who suffer a miscarriage.
Enlarge/ The first Vulcan rocket fires off its launch pad in Florida in January 2024.
United Launch Alliance
The rocket company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin, has emerged as the sole finalist to buy United Launch Alliance.
The sale is not official, and nothing has been formally announced. The co-owners of United Launch Alliance (ULA), Lockheed Martin and Boeing, have yet to comment publicly on the sale of the company, which, until the rise of SpaceX, was the sole major launch provider in the United States. They declined again on Wednesday.
“Consistent with our corporate practice, Boeing doesn’t comment on potential market rumors or speculation,” a Boeing spokesperson said.
Blue Origin did not return a request for comment.
However, two sources told Ars that Blue Origin is nearing the purchase of ULA. The sources said they have not personally seen any signed agreements, but they expect the sale to be announced within a month or two.
In the 11 months since Ars first reported that ULA was up for sale, the company’s potential buyer has become a topic of widespread speculation and interest. In November, Ars reported that Blue Origin was one of three potential buyers. In December, the Wall Street Journal confirmed that the competition was narrowing and said Blue Origin and a large private equity firm, Cerberus, were the two most likely bidders.
Bezos stock sales
Some recent related activity suggests the sale is imminent. A handful of senior officials at ULA are seeking new jobs. Additionally, Bezos recently sold $2.4 billion in Amazon stock and, in securities filings, disclosed that he could sell an additional $8 billion to $9 billion in stock over the next 12 months. Although there are no confirmed values, there has been speculation in the launch industry that ULA may be sold for $2 billion to $3 billion.
ULA was created in 2006 through a merger of Boeing’s Delta rocket program and Lockheed Martin’s Atlas launcher family. Since then, ULA has been a profitable enterprise for both aerospace giants, thanks to military launch contracts and (until recently) large annual subsidies from the US Department of Defense to maintain “launch readiness” for national security missions.
During the last decade, however, ULA’s launch dominance has first been challenged and then supplanted by the rise of SpaceX and its less expensive and highly reliable Falcon 9 rocket. Tory Bruno, who became ULA’s chief executive in 2014, has slashed employee headcount and taken other steps to control costs, such as closing infrequently used launch pads.
One of the key questions about the acquisition is what will happen to Bruno, who has demonstrated the ability to run a launch company with an excellent record of success, manage the development of a large new launch vehicle—the Vulcan rocket—and is willing to compete with SpaceX. It is unclear what role he would have in an acquisition by Blue Origin. Sources indicate that Bruno has a good relationship with Bezos.
Will the merger work?
There is considerable overlap in the launch businesses of ULA and Blue Origin. Vulcan and Blue Origin’s own large rocket, New Glenn, will both compete for government launch contracts, and both use the BE-4 rocket engines developed by Blue Origin. However, some synergies could make a combined Blue Origin-ULA a more formidable launch competitor to SpaceX.
ULA has operational launch pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. It has large integration facilities at both locations. Additionally, it has an experienced launch team with a long track record of success, which could be useful to Blue Origin as it seeks to launch the New Glenn rocket later this year.
Finally, ULA has some expertise in the storage of cryogenic fuels in space. For a time, before its co-owners shut down the program, ULA was developing an innovative upper stage known as ACES (Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage). This upper stage was intended to be reusable and powered by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. These are the kinds of technologies that Blue Origin will need as it develops a lunar lander and tug spacecraft that uses these same propellants and requires them to be stored in space for long periods of time.
Enlarge/ January 17, 2024, Berlin: In the cell laboratory at the Fertility Center Berlin, an electron microscope is used to fertilize an egg cell.
The Alabama Supreme Court on Friday ruled that frozen embryos are “children,” entitled to full personhood rights, and anyone who destroys them could be liable in a wrongful death case.
The first-of-its-kind ruling throws into question the future use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) involving in vitro fertilization for patients in Alabama—and beyond. For this technology, people who want children but face challenges to conceiving can create embryos in clinical settings, which may or may not go on to be implanted in a uterus.
In the Alabama case, a hospital patient wandered through an unlocked door, removed frozen, preserved embryos from subzero storage and, suffering an ice burn, dropped the embryos, destroying them. Affected IVF patients filed wrongful-death lawsuits against the IVF clinic under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. The case was initially dismissed in a lower court, which ruled the embryos did not meet the definition of a child. But the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that “it applies to all children, born and unborn, without limitation.” In a concurring opinion, Chief Justice Tom Parker cited his religious beliefs and quoted the Bible to support the stance.
“Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself,” Parker wrote. “Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”
In 2020, the US Department of Health and Human Services estimated that there were over 600,000 embryos frozen in storage around the country, a significant percentage of which will likely never result in a live birth.
The process of IVF generally goes like this: First, egg production is overstimulated with hormone treatments. Then, doctors harvest the eggs as well as sperm. The number of eggs harvested can vary, but doctors sometimes try to retrieve as many as possible, ranging from a handful to several dozen, depending on fertility factors. The harvested eggs are fertilized in a clinic, sometimes by combining them with sperm in an incubator or by the more delicate process of directly injecting sperm into a mature egg (intracytoplasmic sperm injection). Any resulting fertilized eggs may then go through additional preparations, including “assisted hatching,” which prepares the embryo’s membrane for attaching to the lining of the uterus, or genetic screening to ensure the embryo is healthy and viable.
Feared reality
This process sometimes yields several embryos, which is typically considered good because each round of IVF can have significant failure rates. According to national ART data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the percentage of egg retrievals that fail to result in a live birth ranges from 46 percent to 91 percent, depending on the patient’s age. The percentage of fertilized egg or embryo transfers that fail to result in a live birth ranges from 51 percent to 76 percent, depending on age. Many patients go through multiple rounds of egg retrievals and embryo transfers.
The whole IVF process often creates numerous embryos but leads to far fewer live births. In 2021, nearly 240,000 patients in the US had over 400,000 ART cycles, resulting in 97,000 live-born infants, according to the CDC.
People who have extra embryos from IVF can currently choose what to do with them, including freezing them for more cycles or future conception attempts, donating them to others wanting to conceive, donating them to research, or having them discarded.
But, if, as Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled, embryos are considered “children,” this could mean that any embryos that are destroyed or discarded in the process of IVF or afterward could be the subject of wrongful death lawsuits. The ruling creates potentially paralyzing liability for ART clinics and patients who use them. Doctors may choose to only attempt creating embryos one at a time to avoid liability attached to creating extras, or they may decline to provide IVF altogether to avoid liability when embryos do not survive the process. This could exacerbate the already financially draining and emotionally exhausting process of IVF, potentially putting it entirely out of reach for those who want to use the technology and putting clinics out of business.
Barbara Collura, CEO of RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, told USA Today that the ruling would likely halt most IVF work in Alabama. “This is exactly what we have been fearful of and worried about where it was heading,” Collura said. “We are extremely concerned that this is now going to happen in other states.”
But the hypothetical risks don’t end there. Health advocates worry that the idea of personhood for an embryonic ball of a few cells could extend to pregnancy outcomes, such as miscarriages or the use of contraceptives.
