Welcome to Edition 7.28 of the Rocket Report! After last week's jam-packed action in the launch business, things are a bit quieter this week. Much of the space world's attention has turned to Washington as the Trump administration takes the helm of the federal government. Some of the administration's policy changes will likely impact the launch industry, with commercial spaceflight poised to become a beneficiary of actions over the next four years. As for the specifics, Ars has reported that NASA is expected to review the future of the Space Launch System rocket. Investments in the military space program could bring in more business for launch companies. And regulatory changes may reduce government oversight of commercial spaceflight.

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.

What happened to China's reusable rocket testbed? A Chinese state-owned company performed a rocket flight on January 18 (US time) aimed at testing reusable launch vehicle technology without announcing the outcome, Space News reports. The Longxing-2 test article lifted off from a makeshift launch area near Haiyang, Shandong province. The methane-fueled rocket was expected to fly to an altitude of 75 kilometers (about 246,000 feet) before performing a reentry burn and a landing burn to guide itself to a controlled splashdown in the Yellow Sea, replicating the maneuvers required to recover a reusable booster like the first stage of SpaceX's Falcon 9. This was China's most ambitious reusable rocket demonstration flight to date.

State-sanctioned silence ... Amateur footage near the launch area showed the rocket rise slowly from the tower and perform an ascent phase with no apparent anomalies. But the video ended before the rocket descended to Earth, and there have been no official updates on the results of the test flight from the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), the state-owned enterprise responsible for the demonstration. SAST published results and video footage of a previous reusable rocket demonstration to an altitude of 12 kilometers last year. The lack of official updates this time raises questions about the success of the test, which could indicate challenges during reentry or landing phases. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

A timely launch for Rocket Lab. A dedicated flight of Rocket Lab's Electron launcher will soon deploy eight small spacecraft for a German company building a constellation of wildfire-monitoring satellites. Rocket Lab announced the deal Wednesday, saying the mission will launch from the company's spaceport in New Zealand. The eight satellites are owned by the German startup OroraTech. Rocket Lab said the launch will take place within "just a few weeks," representing a relatively quick turnaround from contract signing to liftoff. This schedule will allow OroraTech to "meet the season-sensitive requirements of its wildfire-detection mission," Rocket Lab said.

Infrared eyes ... OroraTech's satellites will host thermal infrared cameras to provide 24/7 monitoring of wildfires globally, supporting better and faster wildfire response to protect forests, people, and infrastructure, according to Rocket Lab. These eight satellites follow the launch of OroraTech's first three prototype wildfire-detection spacecraft since 2022. The company plans to expand its constellation with up to 100 satellites by 2028. While this launch isn't directly tied to the ongoing wildfire crisis in Southern California, OroraTech's mission highlights the role of space-based detection for future firefighters. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

US green-lights space-related exports to Norway. The United States and Norway have signed an agreement to allow the export of American space hardware to Norway for launches there, Space News reports. The Technology Safeguards Agreement, or TSA, ensures the protection of US space technology exported to Norway. It allows for American satellites and potentially launch vehicles to operate from Andøya Spaceport, located on an island above the Arctic Circle in Norway.

A valuable alliance ... There are no US companies with publicly known plans to launch from Andøya, but the US military has touted the value of allies in funding, launching, and operating space-based platforms for communications, navigation, and reconnaissance. This agreement, announced on January 16 in the final days of the Biden administration, follows similar space tech transfer agreements with New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. The German rocket startup Isar Aerospace is scheduled to launch its first Spectrum rocket from the Norwegian spaceport as soon as this year. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Lunar lander test-fires uprated rocket engine. The Leros 4 rocket engine, developed by Nammo UK in Buckinghamshire, has successfully ignited in space, powering the Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost lunar lander, European Spaceflight reports. This is a higher-thrust version of Nammo's flight-proven Leros engine design that has provided propulsion for NASA probes to the planets and for numerous telecommunications satellites. Like other engines in the Leros line, the Leros 4 consumes a bipropellant mix of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, which combust when coming into contact with one another.

Thrusting toward the Moon ... Firefly announced the successful main engine burn Sunday to begin raising the Blue Ghost spacecraft's orbit around the Earth. Subsequent burns will further raise the craft's altitude before eventually attaining enough speed to reach the Moon for a landing in early March. This is the first time a Leros 4 engine has fired in space. The variant flying on Blue Ghost is known as the "Leros 4-Extra Thrust" version, and it provides approximately 294 pounds of thrust (1,310 newtons), roughly double the power of Nammo's next-largest engine. It's designed specifically for interplanetary missions and is particularly well-suited for lunar landers because it can sustain thrust for lengthy burns or pulse at high frequency to control a spacecraft's descent rate toward the Moon's surface.

Trump's DOT nominee says he'll review FAA's SpaceX fines. President Donald Trump's nominee to lead the US Transportation Department said he'd review penalties aviation regulators have proposed against SpaceX if confirmed for the role, Bloomberg reports. Transportation Secretary nominee Sean Duffy told senators during a hearing on January 15 that he'd also look into "what's been happening at the FAA with regard to launches." Last year, the FAA proposed more than $633,000 in fines on SpaceX due to alleged violations of the company's launch license associated with two flights of the company's Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. It is rare for the FAA's commercial spaceflight division to fine launch companies.

It's about more than the money ... In addition to the proposed fines related to SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, Elon Musk's space company has also criticized regulators for taking too much time to review applications for launch licenses for the Starship mega-rocket. Some of the regulatory reviews were triggered by environmental concerns rather than public safety, which the FAA is responsible for ensuring during commercial rocket launches and reentries. Musk's close relationship with Trump has led to speculation that the FAA will now have a lighter touch with SpaceX. So far, there's no clear evidence of this happening, but it warrants observation. The FAA ordered a grounding of SpaceX's Starship rocket after a failure of a test flight on January 16, and there's been no announcement of a change in the agency's posture regarding this test flight.

Falcon 9 flexes its muscles. SpaceX launched its latest batch of Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, on Tuesday, and this time, the company set a new record by deploying 27 second-generation Starlinks on the same rocket, Spaceflight Now reports. The mission was delayed from Sunday after an aircraft strayed into a keep-out zone near the launch site. This launch included a new type of Starlink spacecraft bus, or chassis, called the Starlink V2 Mini Optimized version. These satellites are considerably lighter than the previous V2 Mini design but also debut upgrades, such as a new backhaul antenna with a SpaceX-designed and built dual-band chip and improved avionics, propulsion, and power systems.

29 at a time ... This means SpaceX can launch up to 29 Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites on a single Falcon 9 rocket. Before now, SpaceX never launched more than 24 V2 Mini satellites on a single flight. SpaceX has launched the V2 Mini satellite design since 2023. Initially, this design was supposed to be a stopgap until SpaceX began launching much larger Starlink V3 satellites on the Starship rocket. However, SpaceX has now launched more than 3,000 V2 Mini satellites, and the debut of the optimized version suggests SpaceX plans to keep the V2 Mini around for a while longer.

Coming together in Kourou. ArianeGroup has shared that the core stage and two solid-fueled boosters for the second flight of the Ariane 6 rocket have been assembled on the ELA-4 launch pad at the Guiana Space Center in South America, European Spaceflight reports. At the same time, the flight’s payload, the French military CSO-3 spy satellite, arrived at Félix Eboué airport in French Guiana aboard an Antonov transport plane. With the launch campaign in full swing in French Guiana, it's likely that the liftoff of the second Ariane 6 flight is just a few weeks away. The most recent publicly available schedule showed the launch is slated for February 25, but this information is now a couple of months old.

What it was made for … This launch follows the largely successful inaugural flight of Europe's Ariane 6 rocket last July, in which the launcher deployed multiple CubeSats into an on-target orbit, but faltered before completing a deorbit burn to maneuver the upper stage toward reentry. Nevertheless, European officials are confident the issue that caused the upper-stage problem last year will not affect the upcoming launch of the French military's newest surveillance satellite. This is the kind of mission the often-criticized Ariane 6 rocket was made for—launching a sensitive and costly European government payload to orbit with a European rocket from European territory. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

Jan. 24: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-6 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 14:07 UTC

Jan. 25: Long March 8A | Demo Flight | Wenchang Space Launch Site, China | 10:00 UTC

Jan. 27: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-7 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 19:21 UTC

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How are CFOs feeling heading into 2025? The latest look at the topic, a Deloitte poll taken days after Donald Trump’s presidential election victory, suggests that most are now brimming with confidence.

Among 200 large-company finance chiefs participating in Deloitte’s fourth quarter CFO Signals survey, 72% said the North American economy will have improved by late 2025.

Two-thirds (67%) of those polled, all at companies with annual revenue of at least $1 billion, said now is a time to take greater risks, and 55% indicated greater interest in M&A transactions in the coming year.

Deloitte noted the sentiment is “a major reversal from the cautious mood seen in recent quarters.” In its third-quarter survey, a mere 19% were optimistic about the economic picture 12 months out.

The Q4 CFO confidence score, which measures sentiment across five categories relating to future economic and business conditions, climbed to 5.8, the highest reading in 10 quarters. (The typical range of the metric, based on tracking over the past 20 quarters, is between 4 and 7, according to Deloitte.)

As to whether the November election result influenced survey participants, “It’s possible that finance chiefs are relieved that the U.S. election is settled, which may provide a degree of certainty about what’s ahead,” Deloitte wrote in its survey report. “Moreover, with the Republican party now holding a majority in Congress, expiring tax provisions in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) might be amended or made permanent.”

Included in those is the law’s bonus depreciation provision, which allows organizations to write off a percentage of an investment cost in the first year of purchase. The allowable deduction — currently 60% — is slated to decrease over the next two years, eventually sunsetting in 2027.

The sunset has worried many CFOs. In Deloitte’s third-quarter 2024 Signals survey, 50% of participants cited the provision as a key concern.

Other TCJA provisions with scheduled sunsets include those related to the deduction for qualified business income; carried interest; expensing of R&D expenditures; the corporate tax rate; and interest deductibility, among others.

Also suggesting that Trump’s election may have affected CFOs’ outlook is that participants in the Q4 survey were much less optimistic about economic health in regions outside North America.

Whereas 50% of the CFOs characterized North America’s economy as “good” presently, no other region registered higher than 35% for China. And while 72% of the survey-takers judged that the continent’s economy will be better in a year, the next-greatest optimism was registered for Asia excluding China, at 37%.

Still, Deloitte noted, import tariffs that the Trump Administration might impose on international trading partners “could put a dent in [CFOs’] lofty expectations” for North America.

Other selected survey results:

Respondents said that on average they’re expecting 10.8% revenue growth over the next 12 months.

Employee compensation looks set for a big jump. On average, surveyed finance chiefs said they expected their organization to see a 7.3% increase in domestic wages and salaries over the next 12 months.

CFOs remain skeptical about stock valuations, with 58% considering U.S. equity markets overvalued and 30% viewing them as undervalued.

The top external concern for CFOs was the economy, cited as a concern by 55% of respondents. Next came geopolitics, interest rates, cybersecurity, regulations, inflation and taxes.

A push to rein in finance-department spending can be seen in the finance transformations that surveyed CFOs said they intend to focus on in 2025. The most-cited such transformation priority (21%) among a list of options was a focus on developing self-service for business users requesting financial information.

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Fire has always shaped the landscape in California. But today it burns hotter, more frequently, and spreads further than ever before—a shift driven by human development, climate change, and the prevalence of invasive species, which are non-native plants that have negative effects on local ecosystems. Grasses and trees brought to California for agriculture, landscaping, or by accident, have transformed the state’s fire dynamics.

“Many non-native species can propagate fire faster than native plants,” says David Acuña, battalion chief for Cal Fire, the state’s department of forestry and fire protection. This transformation is an overlooked driver for the increasingly destructive wildfires in California and around the world.

Southern California is dominated by shrublands known as chaparral. This landscape was historically characterized by short, shrubby plants, and any native grasses were perennial, maintaining moisture and staying green for most of the year. Fires, when they occurred, were rare because lightning strikes were infrequent. When fires did ignite, they burned hot but wouldn’t spread far because the open gaps between plants acted as natural firebreaks.

The introduction of non-native grasses in the 1700s fundamentally altered this balance. Brought by European settlers, these grasses evolved alongside heavy livestock grazing and routine burning, making them highly resilient to disturbance. They outcompeted native species and filled the gaps in shrublands, creating a continuous carpet of flammable material, especially along altered areas like roadways—frequent starting points for fires.

Unlike perennial native grasses, these non-native grasses are annuals, meaning they die each year and regrow from seeds. Their short life cycle leaves behind a dense layer of dry, dead vegetation by late spring. “They have such a high surface area to volume and are very flat and thin, so they maintain a lot of dead standing material, almost all year round,” says Carla D’Antonio, a plant community researcher and professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. By May, dead grass blankets the ground. “It’s so flammable that it takes any ignition—cigarette, spark from someone dragging a chain on the highway, or lightning,” says Hugh Safford, a vegetation and fire ecology researcher at University of California, Davis.

The grasses fill every available space—a phenomenon called fuel continuity. When fires spark, the uninterrupted line of dry vegetation acts like a wick, carrying the flames into the shrublands. “People underestimate the destructiveness of grasses because you can go hack them down with a hoe quickly, whereas a shrub is pretty hard to cut down,” says D’Antonio. “But if the sparks and embers fly in the middle of a bunch of introduced grasses, then—boom—everything around you just goes up like gasoline. It spreads so fast and it’s so continuous. It’s like throwing tissue paper onto a fire.”

Eucalyptus trees, introduced to California in the mid-19th century from Australia, add another layer of fire risk. Known for their aromatic scent, these trees have incredibly flammable, oily leaves. Their papery bark sloughs off and catches in the wind, transporting embers up to half a mile away. The problem comes when people plant them right next to their home, says Acuña. “You put a very hot, very vigorous burning plant like a eucalyptus tree next to a house, which is primarily composed of petroleum materials. That’s a very strong fire,” he explains.

The 1991 Tunnel Fire in Oakland, California, ignited debates—and multiple lawsuits—about whether to remove the widespread eucalyptus. “People want to keep them because they’re iconic, but wow are they are so freaking flammable,” says Safford. Yet in terms of a landscape-scale issue, Safford emphasizes that grasses remain a bigger concern.

But it’s not just California; invasive species have created fire hazards worldwide. Eucalyptus plantations have contributed to massive wildfires in Portugal, and grass fires have spread everywhere from the Great Basin in the American West to tropical forests in Chile. “It’s a major threat to native ecosystems around the world,” says Safford. “There’s a lot of international interest, so if someone could figure out just how to control grass, I think that would be quite a find.”

Vegetation management plays a critical role for fire mitigation: “The best way people are managing grass right now is just by hand-cutting roadsides and having crews out there every spring,” says D’Antonio. “I live in the mountains and our community has a roadside group that goes out with volunteers and clears the roadsides and rakes off all that dead grass every year.” However, this shouldn’t be conflated with President Trump’s misleading claims from 2019 about “raking the forest floor” that resurfaced on social media during the LA wildfires. (It may work for tracts of grass along roadways, but not woody debris on forest floors.) And while raking is one method of vegetation management, effective fire prevention requires a broader approach, including controlled burns, strategic grazing, and clearing dead vegetation from key areas.

In some areas, sheep grazing is being tested as a low-impact way to manage grass growth. Some areas in Southern California are even testing a “BurnBot”, a machine that travels over the ground, performing controlled burns by torching anything directly underneath it—clearing both existing vegetation and plant seeds.

D’Antonio and her graduate students are researching ways to replace these fire-prone areas with native grasses that are more fire-resilient. “Once they’re established, they’re fairly deep-rooted and they can access soil moisture deeper, so they stay more moist during the summer,” she explains. “Our goal is to create a community of native perennial grasses that can maintain itself so we don’t have to do constant maintenance.”

Homeowners also have an important role to play. “Everybody wants to blame the Forest Service when a fire rips through, right? But we chose to live in this landscape,” says D’Antonio. “So start with your home.” Acuña says that Cal Fire provides tips for home- and landowners looking to fire-proof their property through landscaping and creating defensible space.

Ultimately, invasive plants are a problem that requires collective action—community involvement, responsible land-management practices, and forward-thinking research to restore native ecosystems. Without these efforts, California’s wildfire crisis will only intensify, fueled by plants never meant to be here in the first place.

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For decades, we have been imaging the surface of Mars with ever-finer resolution, cataloging a huge range of features on its surface, studying their composition, and, in a few cases, dispatching rovers to make on-the-ground readings. But a catalog of what's present on Mars doesn't give us answers to what's often the key question: how did a given feature get there? In fact, even with all the data we have available, there are a number of major bits of Martian geography that have produced major academic arguments that have yet to be resolved.

In Monday's issue of Nature Geoscience, a team of UK-based researchers tackle a big one: Mars' dichotomy, the somewhat nebulous boundary between its relatively elevated southern half, and the low basin that occupies its northern hemisphere, a feature that some have proposed also served as an ancient shoreline. The new work suggests that the edge of the dichotomy was eroded back by hundreds of kilometers during the time when an ocean might have occupied Mars' northern hemisphere.

Close to the edge

To view the Martian dichotomy, all you need to do is color-code a relief map of the Martian surface, something that NASA has conveniently done for us. Barring a couple of enormous basins, the entire southern hemisphere of the red planet is elevated by a kilometer or more, and sits atop a far thicker crust. With the exception of the volcanic Tharsis region the boundary between these two areas runs roughly along the equator.

There are two mysteries associated with this dichotomy. One is how it got there, with ideas that range from an abortive early form of plate-tectonics to various planet-shaping impact scenarios. The second is whether it served a function early in the planet's history. All indications are that Mars had a warmer, watery past, and there have been proposals that included an ocean filling Mars' northern basin. But that has also been subject to debate.

The new work focuses on an area called Mawrth Vallis, which sits at the edge of the dichotomy. Relative to the northern basin, it's a kilometer-high plateau cut by a major outflow channel that seems to have been caused by one or more massive floods. The slopes surrounding the plateau feature different types of clay-derived minerals, suggesting the area had been subject to interactions between the original materials and water.

Rather than focusing on the plateau itself, the work focuses on the neighboring lowlands, which include a large region dotted with thousands of buttes and mesas that rise roughly a kilometer above the surrounding plains. Using data from the ESA's Mars Express mission, they determine that these features tend to top out at the same height as the nearby plateau. And, using data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, they determined that the clays present along the slopes match those found on the plateau as well.

Their conclusion from this is that the mesas and buttes are the remains of what was once a far larger plateau, which was largely eroded away on the side facing the northern basin. And that erosion took place across a pretty significant distance, as the buttes extend hundreds of kilometers away from the present highlands.

And, just as at the highland plateau, these mounds hint at a water-based process that modified the rocks from the top down. That's because the deeper clays are often magnesium-rich, which tends to happen when water comes in contact with volcanic rocks or material with similar chemistry. Closer to the surface, things transition to aluminum- and iron-rich clays. These clays can occur when the water source is acidic or can be simply due to longer exposure to water, as the magnesium clays are a bit more soluble.

A shoreline transformed?

The huge area covered by these mounds gives a sense of just how significant this erosion was. "The dichotomy boundary has receded several hundred kilometres," the researchers note. "Nearly all intervening material—approximately 57,000 cubic kilometers over an area of 284,000 square kilometers west of Ares Vallis alone—has been removed, leaving only remnant mounds."

Based on the distribution of the different clays, the team argues that their water-driven formation took place before the erosion of the material. This would indicate that water-rock interactions were going on over a very wide region early in the history of Mars, which likely required an extensive hydrological cycle on the red planet. As the researchers note, a nearby ocean would have improved the chances of exposing this region to water, but the exposure could also have been due to processes like melting at the base of an ice cap.

Complicating matters further, many of the mounds top out below one proposed shoreline of the northern ocean and above a second. It's possible that a receding ocean could have contributed to their erosion. But, at the same time, some of the features of a proposed shoreline now appear to have been caused by the general erosion of the original plateau, and may not be associated with an ocean at all.

Overall, the new results provide mixed evidence for the presence of a Martian ocean. They clearly show an active water cycle and erosion on a massive scale, which are both consistent with having a lot of water around. At the same time, however, the water exposure the mesas and buttes have experienced needn't have come through their being submerged by said ocean and, given their elevation, might best be explained through some other process.

Nature Geoscience, 2019. DOI: 10.1038/s41561-024-01634-8 (About DOIs).

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Our bodies rely on their lymphatic system to drain excessive fluids and remove waste from tissues, feeding those back into the blood stream. It’s a complex yet efficient cleaning mechanism that works in every organ except the brain. “When cells are active, they produce waste metabolites, and this also happens in the brain. Since there are no lymphatic vessels in the brain, the question was what was it that cleaned the brain,” Natalie Hauglund, a neuroscientist at Oxford University who led a recent study on the brain-clearing mechanism, told Ars.

Earlier studies done mostly on mice discovered that the brain had a system that flushed its tissues with cerebrospinal fluid, which carried away waste products in a process called glymphatic clearance. “Scientists noticed that this only happened during sleep, but it was unknown what it was about sleep that initiated this cleaning process,” Hauglund explains.

Her study found the glymphatic clearance was mediated by a hormone called norepinephrine and happened almost exclusively during the NREM sleep phase. But it only worked when sleep was natural. Anesthesia and sleeping pills shut this process down nearly completely.

Taking it slowly

The glymphatic system in the brain was discovered back in 2013 by Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, a Danish neuroscientist and a coauthor of Hauglund’s paper. Since then, there have been numerous studies aimed at figuring out how it worked, but most of them had one problem: they were done on anesthetized mice.

“What makes anesthesia useful is that you can have a very controlled setting,” Hauglund says.

Most brain imaging techniques require a subject, an animal or a human, to be still. In mouse experiments, that meant immobilizing their heads so the research team could get clear scans. “But anesthesia also shuts down some of the mechanisms in the brain,” Hauglund argues.

So, her team designed a study to see how the brain-clearing mechanism works in mice that could move freely in their cages and sleep naturally whenever they felt like it. “It turned out that with the glymphatic system, we didn’t really see the full picture when we used anesthesia,” Hauglund says.

Looking into the brain of a mouse that runs around and wiggles during sleep, though, wasn’t easy. The team pulled it off by using a technique called flow fiber photometry which works by imaging fluids tagged with fluorescent markers using a probe implanted in the brain. So, the mice got the optical fibers implanted in their brains. Once that was done, the team put fluorescent tags in the mice’s blood, cerebrospinal fluid, and on the norepinephrine hormone. “Fluorescent molecules in the cerebrospinal fluid had one wavelength, blood had another wavelength, and norepinephrine had yet another wavelength,” Hauglund says.

This way, her team could get a fairly precise idea about the brain fluid dynamics when mice were awake and asleep. And it turned out that the glymphatic system basically turned brain tissues into a slowly moving pump.

Pumping up

“Norepinephrine is released from a small area of the brain in the brain stem,” Hauglund says. “It is mainly known as a response to stressful situations. For example, in fight or flight scenarios, you see norepinephrine levels increasing.” Its main effect is causing blood vessels to contract. Still, in more recent research, people found out that during sleep, norepinephrine is released in slow waves that roll over the brain roughly once a minute. This oscillatory norepinephrine release proved crucial to the operation of the glymphatic system.

“When we used the flow fiber photometry method to look into the brains of mice, we saw these slow waves of norepinephrine, but we also saw how it works in synchrony with fluctuation in the blood volume,” Hauglund says.

Every time the norepinephrine level went up, it caused the contraction of the blood vessels in the brain, and the blood volume went down. At the same time, the contraction increased the volume of the perivascular spaces around the blood vessels, which were immediately filled with the cerebrospinal fluid.

When the norepinephrine level went down, the process worked in reverse: the blood vessels dilated, letting the blood in and pushing the cerebrospinal fluid out. “What we found was that norepinephrine worked a little bit like a conductor of an orchestra and makes the blood and cerebrospinal fluid move in synchrony in these slow waves,” Hauglund says.

And because the study was designed to monitor this process in freely moving, undisturbed mice, the team learned exactly when all this was going on. When mice were awake, the norepinephrine levels were much higher but relatively steady. The team observed the opposite during the REM sleep phase, where the norepinephrine levels were consistently low. The oscillatory behavior was present exclusively during the NREM sleep phase.

So, the team wanted to check how the glymphatic clearance would work when they gave the mice zolpidem, a sleeping drug that had been proven to increase NREM sleep time. In theory, zolpidem should have boosted brain-clearing. But it turned it off instead.

Non-sleeping pills

“When we looked at the mice after giving them zolpidem, we saw they all fell asleep very quickly. That was expected—we take zolpidem because it makes it easier for us to sleep,” Hauglund says. “But then we saw those slow fluctuations in norepinephrine, blood volume, and cerebrospinal fluid almost completely stopped.”

No fluctuations meant the glymphatic system didn’t remove any waste. This was a serious issue, because one of the cellular waste products it is supposed to remove is amyloid beta, found in the brains of patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

Hauglund speculates it could be possible zolpidem induces a state very similar to sleep but at the same time it shuts down important processes that happen during sleep. While heavy zolpidem use has been associated with increased risk of the Alzheimer disease, it is not clear if this increased risk was there because the drug was inhibiting oscillatory norepinephrine release in the brain. To better understand this, Hauglund wants to get a closer look into how the glymphatic system works in humans.

“We know we have the same wave-like fluid dynamics in the brain, so this could also drive the brain clearance in humans,” Haugland told Ars. “Still, it’s very hard to look at norepinephrine in the human brain because we need an invasive technique to get to the tissue.”

But she said norepinephrine levels in people can be estimated based on indirect clues. One of them is pupil dilation and contraction, which work in in synchrony with the norepinephrine levels. Another other clue may lay in microarousals—very brief, imperceivable awakenings which, Hauglund thinks, can be correlated with the brain clearing mechanism. “I am currently interested in this phenomenon […]. Right now we have no idea why microarousals are there or what function they have” Hauglund says.

But the last step she has on her roadmap is making better sleeping pills. “We need sleeping drugs that don’t have this inhibitory effect on the norepinephrine waves. If we can have a sleeping pill that helps people sleep without disrupting their sleep at the same time it will be very important,” Hauglund concludes.

Cell, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2024.11.027

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From the flamboyant blossoms and birds of rainforests to the living rainbows of coral reefs, Earth’s surface is teeming with life. But some of its most diverse and fascinating biomes are thriving in the darkness below.

We used to think that the subsurface was a far-from-ideal place for living things. Habitats that can soak up light and warmth from the Sun have the energy to sustain many forms of life and so were viewed as the most diverse. That view is now changing.

Led by Emil Ruff of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, Mass., new research has unearthed communities of underground microbes that are almost as—and sometimes more—diverse than even reefs and rainforests. Ruff and his team found that subsurface bacteria and archaea are flourishing, even at depths where the energy supply is orders of magnitude lower than enjoyed by organisms in habitats that see the sun.

“Subsurface ecosystems may host more than half of all microbial cells,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Science Advances.

Digging deeper

Microbes have adapted to survive just about everywhere. Starting in 2016, Ruff began collecting samples from surface and subsurface habitats all over the world for what would be the first global study to compare microbiomes above and beneath the surface. It is also one of the first to compare the composition and diversity in subsurface ecosystems below the land and ocean.

Subsurface samples of bacteria and archaea (many of which could only be reached via mines or boreholes) came from rocks, aquifers, and deep sediments found in deserts, springs, the bottom of the ocean, and other habitats. Surface samples were taken from shallow sediments along with ocean and lake water.

Also included were interface samples. Interfaces are environments right on the edge of surface and subsurface, such caves and hydrothermal vents, where organisms on the surface may be influenced by processes occurring in the subsurface, such as seepage, or vice versa.

For the study, the diversity of bacteria and archaea of each individual sample was determined using DNA sequences, and the diversity found in all samples from a particular biome used to determine that biome’s total diversity. Marine and terrestrial habitats were compared, as well as surface and subsurface environments. It was the effort of almost a decade that unearthed some new details about subsurface life.

In the dull, dank dark

So where were the most diverse bacterial and archaeal populations? The researchers discovered that “species richness and evenness in many subsurface environments rival those in surface environments,” as they said in the same study.

At the level of individual samples, subsurface archaea were most diverse in brines, caves, cold seeps, springs, and the deep sea. Subsurface bacteria were most diverse in caves and marine sediments per sample. The total diversity of archaea was highest in marine subsurface and interface environments, while total bacterial diversity was also highest in interface environments.

The archaea most abundant in the marine subsurface include Euryarchaeota and Asgararchaeota. Euryarchaeota tend to thrive in extreme heat and reduce carbon dioxide to generate methane. The methane output of other methanogenic archaea is already being used as fuel, which is why such organisms can be especially useful. Asgararchaeota are the closest archaeal relatives of eukaryotes, or all organisms whose cells have a nucleus within a membrane, including us. There is special interest in studying asgararchaeota for more insight into how eukaryotic life evolved.

Nitrospirota is an archaeal phylum that’s particularly common in the terrestrial subsurface. Some species of nitrospirota are capable of oxidizing ammonia, while others can reduce it to nitrite, which is used by phytoplankton and also defends against pathogens in the human stomach, mouth, and skin.

Proteobacteria is a bacterial phylum that’s especially abundant in the terrestrial and marine subsurface. Some proteobacteria live in deep ocean trenches, and oxidize carbon monoxide (which contributes to global warming and depletes ozone). Bacteria also common in the marine subsurface include Desulfobacteria and Methylomirabilota. Desulfobacteria reduce sulfates, and other sulfate-reducing bacterias have already shown they can be used to help clean up contaminated soil. Methylomirabilota help control methane levels in the atmosphere by oxidizing methane.

Something unexpected that caught Ruff’s attention was how total diversity went up with depth. This was surprising because less energy is available at deeper levels of the subsurface. For archaea, diversity went up with the increase in depth in terrestrial environments but not marine environments. The same happened with bacteria, except in marine instead of terrestrial environments.

Much of what lies far below our feet still eludes us. Ruff suggests that single-cell microbes in even deeper, yet unexplored levels of the subsurface may have adapted to the absence of energy by slowing down their metabolisms so drastically that it could take decades, even centuries, for them to divide just once.

If there really are microbes that manage to live longer than humans with this survival tactic, it is possible similar species might be hiding on planets such as Mars, where the surface has long been blasted by radiation.

“Understanding deep life on Earth could be a model for discovering if there was life on Mars, and if it has survived,” Ruff said in a press release.

Maybe future technology could retrieve samples several kilometers below the Martian surface. Until then, keep digging.

Science Advances, 2024. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adq0645

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Tuesday, 21 January

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 06:13 UTC
• Where: Florida, US
• Why: SpaceX will launch Starlink Group 13-1 to orbit using a trusty Falcon 9 rocket. Did you know that the Falcon 9 has been involved with 426 missions, and out of those, it has had just 3 failures and 1 partial failure?

This group of satellites will include about 23 Starlink satellites, including 13 direct-to-cell Starlink satellites. All the satellites will join the Starlink constellation and beam internet connectivity to customers on Earth. After the launch, the first stage of the rocket will attempt a landing.

Wednesday, 22 January

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 14:38–18:38 UTC
• Where: California, US
• Why: In this Starlink mission, a Falcon 9 will launch 27 Starlink satellites to a low Earth orbit. This batch is known as Starlink Group 11-6. After the launch, the first stage will likely attempt to land safely so that it can be reused.

Friday, 24 January

• Who: SpaceX
• What: Falcon 9
• When: 22:45 UTC
• Where: Florida
• Why: The final launch we have this week is another Starlink mission. This group is Starlink Group 10-12. By the way, if you're interested in finding these satellites when they're in orbit, you can use apps like ISS Detector to have a go at spotting them. They're usually quite bright when flying overhead and run in a distinctive train through the sky. This mission includes 22 Starlink satellites, and the first stage will probably try to land.

Recap

• The first launch we got last week was a SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying Starlink Group 12-4 to a low Earth orbit, where they will join the Starlink constellation. The first stage of the rocket performed a landing in the Atlantic Ocean on a droneship so that it could be reused.

• The next launch was the start of some notable launches last week. In it, we saw SpaceX launch a Falcon 9, but instead of the usual Starlink satellites, this one was carrying the Transporter-12 mission, which consists of many smallsats. We don't get that many of these, so it's quite notable, but it wasn't the most exciting launch of the lot.

• The third launch was another Falcon 9, but this time, it was carrying the Blue Ghost lunar lander for Firefly Aerospace and the RESILIENCE lunar lander for space. Both of these landers will arrive at different times, but they should be very interesting to keep an eye on as they attempt a lunar landing.

• My favorite launch this week, which I took the time to watch live, was Blue Origin's maiden launch of New Glenn, named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. This massive rocket is dwarfed only by SpaceX's Starship, which also launched this week.

• The final launch we got was from SpaceX, and it launched Starship on its seventh test flight. Unfortunately, while the booster was captured on the ground following the launch, the upper Starship segment exploded.

That's all for this week; check in next time!

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Firefighters battling the deadly wildfires that raced through the Los Angeles area in January 2025 have been hampered by a limited supply of fresh water. So, when the winds are calm enough, skilled pilots flying planes aptly named Super Scoopers are skimming off 1,500 gallons of sea water at a time and dumping it with high precision on the fires.

Using seawater to fight fires can sound like a simple solution—the Pacific Ocean has a seemingly endless supply of water. In emergencies like Southern California is facing, it’s often the only quick solution, though the operation can be risky amid ocean swells.

But seawater also has downsides.

Salt water corrodes firefighting equipment and may harm ecosystems, especially those like the chaparral shrublands around Los Angeles that aren’t normally exposed to seawater. Gardeners know that small amounts of salt—added, say, as fertilizer—does not harm plants, but excessive salts can stress and kill plants.

While the consequences of adding seawater to ecosystems are not yet well understood, we can gain insights on what to expect by considering the effects of sea level rise.

A Seawater Experiment in a Coastal Forest

As an ecosystem ecologist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, I lead a novel experiment called TEMPEST that was designed to understand how and why historically salt-free coastal forests react to their first exposures to salty water.

Sea-level rise has increased by an average of about 8 inches globally over the past century, and that water has pushed salty water into US forests, farms, and neighborhoods that had previously known only fresh water. As the rate of sea level rise accelerates, storms push seawater ever farther onto the dry land, eventually killing trees and creating ghost forests, a result of climate change that is widespread in the US and globally.

In our TEMPEST test plots, we pump salty water from the nearby Chesapeake Bay into tanks, then sprinkle it on the forest soil surface fast enough to saturate the soil for about 10 hours at a time. This simulates a surge of salty water during a big storm.

Our coastal forest showed little effect from the first 10-hour exposure to salty water in June 2022 and grew normally for the rest of the year. We increased the exposure to 20 hours in June 2023, and the forest still appeared mostly unfazed, although the tulip poplar trees were drawing water from the soil more slowly, which may be an early warning signal.

Things changed after a 30-hour exposure in June 2024. The leaves of tulip poplar in the forests started to brown in mid-August, several weeks earlier than normal. By mid-September the forest canopy was bare, as if winter had set in. These changes did not occur in a nearby plot that we treated the same way, but with fresh water rather than seawater.

The initial resilience of our forest can be explained in part by the relatively low amount of salt in the water in this estuary, where water from freshwater rivers and a salty ocean mix. Rain that fell after the experiments in 2022 and 2023 washed salts out of the soil.

But a major drought followed the 2024 experiment, so salts lingered in the soil then. The trees’ longer exposure to salty soils after our 2024 experiment may have exceeded their ability to tolerate these conditions.

Seawater being dumped on the Southern California fires is full-strength, salty ocean water. And conditions there have been very dry, particularly compared with our East Coast forest plot.

Changes Evident in the Ground

Our research group is still trying to understand all the factors that limit the forest’s tolerance to salty water, and how our results apply to other ecosystems such as those in the Los Angeles area.

Tree leaves turning from green to brown well before fall was a surprise, but there were other surprises hidden in the soil below our feet.

Rainwater percolating through the soil is normally clear, but about a month after the first and only 10-hour exposure to salty water in 2022, the soil water turned brown and stayed that way for two years. The brown color comes from carbon-based compounds leached from dead plant material. It’s a process similar to making tea.

Our lab experiments suggest that salt was causing clay and other particles to disperse and move about in the soil. Such changes in soil chemistry and structure can persist for many years.

Sea-Level Rise Is Increasing Coastal Exposure

While ocean water can help fight fires, there are reasons fire officials prefer freshwater sources—provided fresh water is available.

US coastlines, meanwhile, are facing more extensive and frequent saltwater exposure as rising global temperatures accelerate sea level rise that drowns forests, fields, and farms, with unknown risks for coastal landscapes.

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The deep-sea critter, now called Bathynomus vaderi, got its name after researchers noticed its head shared a resemblance to the helmet worn by iconic “Star Wars” villain Darth Vader.

The scientists officially described the newfound species on Tuesday in the journal ZooKeys, confirming that some elements of B. vaderi’s body structure differed greatly from other Bathynomus specimens found in the South China Sea.

Supergiant sea bugs, including B. vaderi, are members of the isopod family, characterized by their hard, protective exoskeleton and seven pairs of legs. The largest specimen in the study weighed more than 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) and measured 32.5 centimeters long (12.8 inches), making B. vaderi one of the world’s largest known isopods.

The overall body structure of Bathynomus crustaceans is similar to many shallow-water cirolanids — the isopod family it belongs to — but these deep-sea creatures have evolved to be significantly larger, according to study coauthor Dr. Conni Sidabalok, a researcher with the National Research and Innovation Agency in Indonesia.

Most isopods are incredibly small, typically measuring less than 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) in length. This disparity in size makes the discovery of such a huge specimen particularly remarkable, said Dr. Lanna Cheng, professor emeritus of marine biology at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the study.

Identifying a species that’s new to science

Study coauthor Dr. Conni Sidabalok, of the National

Research and Innovation Agency in Indonesia,

examines Bathynomus vaderi specimens at Lee Kong

Chian Natural History Museum in Singapore.

Rene Ong

Fishermen who caught B. vaderi were deep-sea trawling in the South China Sea about 50 nautical miles offshore of the city of Quy Nhon in south-central Vietnam, which is west of the Spratly Islands.

B. vaderi are bottom dwellers that feed on dead animals, recycling nutrients as part of the deep-sea food chain, Sidabalok said.

She noted that Bathynomus’ massive size may aid its survival in the ocean’s abyss or provide a competitive advantage over other scavengers.

Currently, there are only 11 known “supergiant” and nine “giant” Bathynomus species, with several awaiting formal description, according to the study. B. vaderi is only the second recorded supergiant isopod species discovered in the South China Sea.

However, because these crustaceans inhabit such deep waters, distinguishing B. vaderi from other species was a laborious process for the research team.

Bathynomus vaderi's massive size may provide a competitive advantage over other scavengers in its deep-sea

habitat in the South China Sea, Sidabalok said.

Nguyen Thanh Son

Unlike other recorded supergiant isopods, B. vaderi possesses a unique feature: The last segment of its back legs narrows at the end and curves slightly backward, according to the study.

To confirm B. vaderi’s uniqueness, Sidabalok and her colleagues examined specimens of related species from museum collections across various countries and collaborated with other experts. In addition, the researchers analyzed the DNA of B. vaderi, but the lack of genetic data for many Bathynomus species presented additional challenges in the identification process.

Vietnamese delicacy vulnerable to overfishing

In recent years, other Bathynomus species, such as B. jamesi, have become a delicacy in Vietnam, with their flesh often compared to that of lobster, according to the study.

As Bathynomus grew in popularity, in 2017 some specimens were sold for up to 2 million Vietnamese dong ($80), researchers wrote. However, as fishermen caught and sold more Bathynomus, prices dropped because the sea bugs became more widely available.

Study coauthor Dr. Thanh Son Nguyen, a researcher at Vietnam

National University, holds B. jamesi in October 2024. The species

of isopod is also found in the coastal waters of Vietnam, and this

specimen weighs 2.6 kilograms (5.8 pounds).

Peter Ng

By early 2024, 1-to-2-kilogram (2.2-to-4.4-pound) specimens were being sold for around 1 million Vietnamese dong ($40), the study noted.

With the discovery of B. vaderi, scientists such as Sidabalok and Cheng have raised concerns about its potential integration into global seafood markets.

Bathynomus are known for their slow reproduction. These supergiant crustaceans produce a small number of eggs — only in the hundreds — which hatch as miniature versions of the adults, Sidabalok said. She added that this slow reproduction rate makes them especially vulnerable to overfishing.

“These (creatures) don’t grow very fast, and if they become a very unusual and sought-after item, we may eat them out of existence,” Cheng said.

The research team believes B. vaderi exists beyond Vietnam’s coastal waters in other parts of the South China Sea, but uncovering other species in these depths will take time.

Sidabalok said she hopes this research will pave the way for further research into Bathynomus populations and help fishermen develop more sustainable practices.

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Lithium may be the key component in most modern batteries, but it doesn't make up the bulk of the material used in them. Instead, much of the material is in the electrodes, where the lithium gets stored when the battery isn't charging or discharging. So one way to make lighter and more compact lithium-ion batteries is to find electrode materials that can store more lithium. That's one of the reasons that recent generations of batteries are starting to incorporate silicon into the electrode materials.

There are materials that can store even more lithium than silicon; a notable example is sulfur. But sulfur has a tendency to react with itself, producing ions that can float off into the electrolyte. Plus, like any electrode material, it tends to expand in proportion to the amount of lithium that gets stored, which can create physical strains on the battery's structure. So while it has been easy to make lithium-sulfur batteries, their performance has tended to degrade rapidly.

But this week, researchers described a lithium-sulfur battery that still has over 80 percent of its original capacity after 25,000 charge/discharge cycles. All it took was a solid electrolyte that was more reactive than the sulfur itself.

When lithium meets sulfur...

Sulfur is an attractive battery material. It's abundant and cheap, and sulfur atoms are relatively lightweight compared to many of the other materials used in battery electrodes. Sodium-sulfur batteries, which rely on two very cheap raw materials, have already been developed, although they only work at temperatures high enough to melt both of these components. Lithium-sulfur batteries, by contrast, could operate more or less the same way that current lithium-ion batteries do.

With a few major exceptions, that is. One is that the elemental sulfur used as an electrode is a very poor conductor of electricity, so it has to be dispersed within a mesh of conductive material. (You can contrast that with graphite, which both stores lithium and conducts electricity relatively well, thanks to being composed of countless sheets of graphene.) Lithium is stored there as Li₂S, which occupies substantially more space than the elemental sulfur it's replacing.

Both of these issues, however, can be solved with careful engineering of the battery's structure. A more severe problem comes from the properties of the lithium-sulfur reactions that occur at the electrode. Elemental sulfur exists as an eight-atom ring, and the reactions with lithium are slow enough that semi-stable intermediates with smaller chains of sulfur end up forming. Unfortunately, these tend to be soluble in most electrolytes, allowing them to travel to the opposite electrode and participate in chemical reactions there.

This process essentially discharges the battery without allowing the electrons to be put to use. And it gradually leaves the electrode's sulfur unavailable for participating in future charge/discharge cycles. The net result is that early generations of the technology would discharge themselves while sitting unused and would only survive a few hundred cycles before performance decayed dramatically.

But there has been progress on all these fronts, and some lithium-sulfur batteries with performance similar to lithium-ion have been demonstrated. Late last year, a company announced that it had lined up the money needed to build the first large-scale lithium-sulfur battery factory. Still, work on improvements has continued, and the new work seems to suggest ways to boost performance well beyond lithium-ion.

The need for speed

The paper describing the new developments, done by a collaboration between Chinese and German researchers, focuses on one aspect of the challenges posed by lithium-sulfur batteries: the relatively slow chemical reaction between lithium ions and elemental sulfur. It presents that aspect as a roadblock to fast charging, something that will be an issue for automotive applications. But at the same time, finding a way to limit the formation of inactive intermediate products during this reaction goes to the root of the relatively short usable life span of lithium-sulfur batteries.

As it turns out, the researchers found two.

One of the problems with the lithium-sulfur reaction intermediates is that they dissolve in most electrolytes. But that's not a problem if the electrolyte isn't a liquid. Solid electrolytes are materials that have a porous structure at the atomic level, with the environment inside the pores being favorable for ions. This allows ions to diffuse through the solid. If there's a way to trap ions on one side of the electrolyte, such as a chemical reaction that traps or de-ionizes them, then it can enable one-way travel.

Critically, pores that favor the transit of lithium ions, which are quite compact, aren't likely to allow the transit of the large ionized chains of sulfur. So a solid electrolyte should help cut down on the problems faced by lithium-sulfur batteries. But it won't necessarily help with fast charging.

The researchers began by testing a glass formed from a mixture of boron, sulfur, and lithium (B₂S₃ and Li₂S). But this glass had terrible conductivity, so they started experimenting with related glasses and settled on a combination that substituted in some phosphorus and iodine.

The iodine turned out to be a critical component. While the exchange of electrons with sulfur is relatively slow, iodine undergoes electron exchange (technically termed a redox reaction) extremely quickly. So it can act as an intermediate in the transfer of electrons to sulfur, speeding up the reactions that occur at the electrode. In addition, iodine has relatively low melting and boiling points, and the researchers suggest there's some evidence that it moves around within the electrolyte, allowing it to act as an electron shuttle.

Successes and caveats

The result is a far superior electrolyte—and one that enables fast charging. It's typical that fast charging cuts into the total capacity that can be stored in a battery. But when charged at an extraordinarily fast rate (50C, meaning a full charge in just over a minute), a battery based on this system still had half the capacity of a battery charged 25 times more slowly (2C, or a half-hour to full charge).

But the striking thing was how durable the resulting battery was. Even at an intermediate charging rate (5C), it still had over 80 percent of its initial capacity after over 25,000 charge/discharge cycles. By contrast, lithium-ion batteries tend to hit that level of decay after about 1,000 cycles. If that sort of performance is possible in a mass-produced battery, it's only a slight exaggeration to say it can radically alter our relationships with many battery-powered devices.

What's not at all clear, however, is whether this takes full advantage of one of the original promises of lithium-sulfur batteries: more charge in a given weight and volume. The researchers specify the battery being used for testing; one electrode is an indium/lithium metal foil, and the other is a mix of carbon, sulfur, and the glass electrolyte. A layer of the electrolyte sits between them. But when giving numbers for the storage capacity per weight, only the weight of the sulfur is mentioned.

Still, even if weight issues would preclude this from being stuffed into a car or cell phone, there are plenty of storage applications that would benefit from something that doesn't wear out even with 65 years of daily cycling.

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08298-9  (About DOIs).

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MOSS LANDING, CALIFORNIA - JANUARY 17: A fire erupted at Moss Landing Power Plant on Thursday. 

Photo: Getty Images

 

A fire broke out at the Moss Landing Energy Storage Facility in Central California Thursday. The battery power plant is the largest in the world according to the company, Vistra, that owns it.

 

The Monterey County Sheriff’s Office issued evacuation orders for nearby residents and closed parts of Highway 1 in response. County Health officials have asked other residents to shelter indoors with windows and doors closed and to switch off ventilation systems.

 

“There’s no way to sugarcoat it. This is a disaster, is what it is,” Monterey County Supervisor Glen Church told KSBW-TV. 

 

The company will investigate the cause of the fire once it’s out, Vistra spokesperson Jenny Lyon told The Mercury News. Vistra did not immediately respond to an email from The Verge. It completed an expansion of the facility in 2023, adding more than 110,000 battery modules needed to store renewable energy. Energy storage facilities like this one are essential for power grids to be able to keep enough excess solar and wind energy so it’s available when the sun goes down and winds wane.

 

This isn’t the first battery fire in the area. A nearby Pacific Gas & Electric battery plant stocked with Tesla batteries caught fire back in 2022. The year prior, Vistra had to temporarily shut down its battery plant at Moss Landing after a malfunctioning smoke detector and heat-suppression system sprayed water on its batteries, Canary Media reported.

 

The current blaze is unrelated to fires burning further south that have devastated Los Angeles County.

 

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SpaceX launched an upgraded version of its massive Starship rocket from South Texas on Thursday, but the flight ended less than nine minutes later after engineers lost contact with the spacecraft.

For a few moments, SpaceX officials discussing the launch on the company's live webcast were unsure of the outcome of the test flight. However, within minutes, residents and tourists in the Turks and Caicos Islands, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico shared videos showing a shower of debris falling through the atmosphere along Starship's expected flight corridor.

The videos confirmed Starship—the rocket's upper stage—broke apart in space, or experienced a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" in SpaceX-speak. This happened well short of the spacecraft's planned trajectory, which would have seen it fly halfway around the world and splash down in the Indian Ocean after more than an hour of flight.

There were no people or satellites aboard the rocket Thursday.

Flight diversions

The test flight began with the liftoff of the 404-foot-tall (123.1-meter) Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage from the Texas Gulf Coast at 4:37 pm CST (5:37 pm EST; 22:37 UTC). The world's largest and most powerful launcher climbed off the launch pad with more than twice the thrust of NASA's Apollo-era Saturn V rocket. Heading east, its 33 methane-fueled Raptor booster engines fired for more than two and a half minutes to propel Starship toward the edge of space.

The booster's engines shut down as planned, followed moments later by the ignition of six Raptor engines on the Starship upper stage. The Super Heavy booster separated from the rocket to fly itself back to the launch site. Just shy of seven minutes after liftoff, the booster returned to the launch pad for a mid-air catch by the tower's two mechanical arms, repeating a feat SpaceX accomplished in October.

The upper stage, meanwhile, appeared to fly normally until a telemetry display on SpaceX's webcast indicated that one of the ship's six engines shut off more than seven minutes after liftoff. The display then showed more engines failing, and the data stream froze.

In an update posted on SpaceX's website later Thursday evening, officials said ground teams lost contact with the spacecraft approximately eight and a half minutes into the flight. At the time, information on SpaceX's live video stream showed the vehicle was traveling at about 13,246 mph (21,317 km/hr) at an altitude of about 91 miles (146 kilometers).

"Initial data indicates a fire developed in the aft section of the ship, leading to a rapid unscheduled disassembly with debris falling into the Atlantic Ocean within the predefined hazard areas," SpaceX officials wrote in the update.

The falling debris caused air traffic controllers to divert or reroute commercial flights over the Caribbean and the Atlantic Ocean, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Air traffic controllers have the ability to activate a "Debris Response Area" if a spacecraft experiences an anomaly with debris falling outside of identified closed aircraft hazard areas, where the FAA notifies pilots in advance about the risk of reentering space junk. Activating a Debris Response Area "allows the FAA to direct aircraft to exit the area and prevent others from entering," the statement read.

This is what the FAA did Thursday evening. Air traffic controllers closed a swath of airspace between the Turks and Caicos Islands, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico to commercial air traffic for more than an hour, causing some passenger airline flights to enter a holding pattern, return to their departure airports, land at alternate airfields, or delay their takeoffs.

Flight-tracking sites and apps showed the extent of the impacts on air traffic. Miami International Airport and Fort Lauderdale International Airport, both hubs for flights to and from the Caribbean, reported short flight delays due to a "rocket launch anomaly," according to an FAA website.

Ars listened to live audio from air traffic control in San Juan, Puerto Rico, as controllers alerted pilots of the airspace restrictions.

"How long do you think this hold is going to be? We don't have a lot of gas to play with," one pilot asked air traffic control. "The sooner we can get on the ground, the better."

A short time later, the airspace reopened, and flights continued on to their destinations or diverted to other airports.

“That’s the coolest sh*t I’ve ever seen in my life”

Some of the videos recorded by residents and tourists in the Turks and Caicos appeared to show fiery debris fragments streaking almost directly overhead. Many people speaking in the videos did not realize what they were seeing, but space enthusiasts on social media quickly identified the source of the spectacle.

Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, wrote on X that early signs from data suggested there was a propellant leak in a cavity above Starship's engine firewall. The leak was large enough to build pressure in excess of the ship's vent capacity.

"Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area," Musk wrote. "Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month."

Coming into 2025, SpaceX officials hoped to launch as many as 25 Starship test flights this year to experiment with new designs, attempt a recovery of Starship from orbit, and demonstrate orbital refueling, a capability that is critical to NASA and SpaceX's plans to land astronauts on the Moon later this decade.

SpaceX designed Starship to be fully reusable, with the ability to deliver more than 100 metric tons (220,000 pounds) of cargo to low-Earth orbit. Future versions of the ship will be suited for travel to the Moon and Mars. NASA has two contracts for SpaceX to develop a derivative of Starship as a human-rated lander for the agency's Artemis lunar program, and Musk views Starship as central to enabling his vision of creating a human settlement on the red planet.

NASA's official public schedule calls for a crew landing at the Moon's south pole in 2027, using the privately developed Starship alongside the agency's government-managed Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule. Together, the vehicles will transport astronauts from Earth to the Moon, then to the lunar surface and back into space, and finally back to Earth.

However, this schedule hinges on the readiness of Starship to accommodate humans, the availability of new lunar spacesuits, and the status of the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, both of which have endured lengthy delays. The incoming Trump administration is expected to reevaluate the architecture of the Artemis program to determine if, and how, NASA can return humans to the Moon faster and cheaper. It's possible SpaceX's Starship and other commercial rockets might carve out a more significant role.

If SpaceX can fly Starship again as soon as next month, it's possible the company could preserve its aims for the program this year. SpaceX has no shortage of hardware ready or nearly ready to go. There are multiple Starships and Super Heavy boosters undergoing preparations for future test flights at the company's Starbase launch facility near Brownsville, Texas.

But schedules often slip in the launch business, and the FAA could ground Starship until SpaceX completes a formal mishap investigation. The federal regulator is responsible for ensuring public safety on commercial space launches. A spokesperson told Ars late Thursday that the FAA is assessing the Starship anomaly and will provide a statement when officials know more.

A setback, sure, but is this a big deal?

In the hours after Thursday's test flight, Musk took to his social media platform to share and comment on several videos of the Starship debris coming back to Earth. SpaceX has long embraced failures as learning opportunities, and the company's culture is centered on rapidly iterating on designs—build, test, break, fix.

This launch debuted a more advanced, slightly taller version of Starship, known as Version 2 or Block 2, with larger propellant tanks, a new avionics system, and redesigned feed lines flowing methane and liquid oxygen propellants to the ship's six Raptor engines. SpaceX officials did not say whether any of these changes might have caused the problem on Thursday's launch.

SpaceX officials have repeatedly and carefully set expectations for each Starship test flight. They routinely refer to the rocket as experimental, and the primary focus of the rocket's early demo missions is to gather data on the performance of the vehicle. What works, and what doesn't work?

Still, the outcome of Thursday's test flight is a clear disappointment for SpaceX. This was the seventh test flight of SpaceX's enormous rocket and the first time Starship failed to complete its launch sequence since the second flight in November 2023. Until now, SpaceX has made steady progress, and each Starship flight has achieved more milestones than the one before.

On the first flight in April 2023, the rocket lost control a little more than two minutes after liftoff, and the ground-shaking power of the booster's 33 engines shattered the concrete foundation beneath the launch pad. Seven months later, on Flight 2, the rocket made it eight minutes before failing. On that mission, Starship failed at roughly the same point of its ascent, just before the cutoff of the vehicle's six methane-fueled Raptor engines.

Back then, a handful of photos and images from the Florida Keys and Puerto Rico showed debris in the sky after Starship activated its self-destruct mechanism due to an onboard fire caused by a dump of liquid oxygen propellant. But that flight occurred in the morning, with bright sunlight along the ship's flight path.

This time, the ship disintegrated and reentered the atmosphere at dusk, with impeccable lighting conditions accentuating the debris cloud's appearance. These twilight conditions likely contributed to the plethora of videos posted to social media on Thursday.

The third Starship test flight last March saw the spacecraft reach its planned trajectory and fly halfway around the world before succumbing to the scorching heat of atmospheric reentry. In June, the fourth test flight ended with controlled splashdowns of the rocket's Super Heavy booster in the Gulf of Mexico and of Starship in the Indian Ocean.

In October, SpaceX caught the Super Heavy booster with mechanical arms at the launch pad for the first time, proving out the company's audacious approach to recovering and reusing the rocket. On this fifth test flight, SpaceX modified the ship's heat shield to better handle the hot temperatures of reentry, and the vehicle again made it to an on-target splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

Most recently, Flight 6 on November 19 demonstrated the ship's ability to reignite its Raptor engines in space for the first time and again concluded with a bullseye splashdown. But SpaceX aborted an attempt to again catch the booster back at Starbase due to a problem with sensors on the launch pad's tower.

With Flight 7, SpaceX hoped to test more changes to the heat shield protecting Starship from reentry temperatures up to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius). Musk has identified the heat shield as one of the most difficult challenges still facing the program. In order for SpaceX to reach its ambition for the ship to become rapidly reusable, with minimal or no refurbishment between flights, the heat shield must be resilient and durable.

While the three previous Starship test flights each softly splashed down at sea, onboard camera views showed some of the ship's heat-absorbing ceramic tiles stripping away from the vehicle during reentry. Other changes on Flight 7 included a new tapered edge to the line where the tiles meet the ship's stainless steel skin and multiple metallic tile options, including one with active cooling, to test alternative heat shield materials.

SpaceX also wanted to test the thermal performance of new fittings that will be used to catch Starship back at the launch tower on future flights. Engineers were eager to see how redesigned flaps near the nose of Starship worked during its descent back to Earth. And once the ship reached space, SpaceX intended to release 10 mock-ups of next-generation Starlink Internet satellites to test the ship's payload deployment mechanism for the first time.

All those objectives will now have to wait until Flight 8. Going into this launch, Musk hoped to attempt to catch the Starship upper stage, similar to the way SpaceX recovered the Super Heavy booster, as soon as the next test flight. Now, that will likely have to wait until a later mission.

"As always, success comes from what we learn, and this flight test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multiplanetary," SpaceX said. "Data review is already underway as we seek out root cause. We will conduct a thorough investigation, in coordination with the FAA, and implement corrective actions to make improvements on future Starship flight tests."

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Welcome to Edition 7.27 of the Rocket Report! Thursday was an eventful day in super heavy lift launch, with Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket having a highly successful debut launch before dawn in Florida, at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Then, on Thursday afternoon, an upgraded Starship took flight from South Texas. The first stage performed well, but the Starship upper stage experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent. Ars will, of course, have full and ongoing coverage.

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.

RFA receives launch license. The UK Civil Aviation Authority has issued Rocket Factory Augsburg a vertical launch license to conduct the inaugural flight of its RFA ONE rocket from SaxaVord Spaceport in Scotland, European Spaceflight reports. The license is for the launch of the company's RFA One rocket, which has an advertised payload of 1.3 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. RFA said it intends to complete the launch sometime this year.

A new era for BritSpace... The company might have launched sooner, but last year, a fire during testing destroyed the rocket’s first stage, forcing RFA to build a replacement before proceeding with the initial launch attempt. An orbital-class rocket has never launched in a vertical configuration before from the United Kingdom, and no rocket has ever successfully reached orbit from there. "This is a new era for aerospace, and granting the first vertical launch license from UK soil builds toward a historic milestone for the nation," said Rob Bishton, chief executive of the civil authority. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Chinese rocket launches from sea platform. China launched a Jielong-3 solid rocket from a mobile sea platform late Sunday, successfully placing 10 Centispace navigation enhancement satellites into orbit, Space News reports. This was the fifth Jielong-3 (or Smart Dragon-3) solid propellant rocket, and it lifted off from a specially converted sea barge off the coast of Haiyang city in the Eastern province of Shandong.

Seeking to scale up quickly... The launch was carried out using facilities belonging to the Haiyang Eastern spaceport for sea launches. The spaceport plans more than 10 for 2025, having conducted six sea launches in 2024. The launch was China’s second orbital launch attempt of 2025 and the second success in as many tries.

Utah considering a spaceport. State Sen. Jerry Stevenson has introduced a bill to form a committee that would investigate whether Utah should invest in a spaceport and what benefits it could bring to the state, KUTV Salt Lake City reports. The legislation would provide $500,000 for a committee to study the potential benefits of a launch site. Stevenson said the committee would look into both scientific uses and opportunities to expand Utah’s tourism industry, but questions remain over whether such a taxpayer-funded investment makes financial sense.

Something to build on... When asked how the state would get a return on its investment, Stevenson said the spaceport would align with Utah’s current industries and infrastructure. "We think that this fits very well into what’s going on in the state of Utah and what’s already here and what we can build on," Stevenson said. Still, critics wondered if the state should focus on space tourism, especially given the potential costs, possibly on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Stoke Space goes nova in fundraising round. The Washington-based launch company announced Wednesday that it had raised $260 million in Series C funding, a significant capital raise at a time when it has become more difficult for some space companies to attract funding, Ars reports. "The market is tough, but I think what we’re doing is poised to go straight to the end state of the industry, and I think investors recognize that," said Andy Lapsa, Stoke Space's co-founder and chief executive officer.

Full reuse right out of the gate... By "end state of the industry," Lapsa means that Stoke is developing a fully reusable medium-lift rocket named Nova. The vehicle's first stage will land vertically, similar to a Falcon 9 rocket, and the second stage, which has a novel metallic heat shield and engine design, will also land back on Earth. Historically, it is unlikely for a company to move from engine testing to a first orbital launch attempt in the same year, so a Nova debut in 2026 seems more likely. Nevertheless, the new funding from investors signals confidence that Stoke is making credible technical progress on its vehicle development. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

The initial launch plan for Neutron. Rocket Lab is closing in on the completion of its Neutron rocket, and the company plans to launch the medium-lift booster for the first time later this year. With a capacity of 13 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, the rocket will be sold at a cost of $50 million to undersell SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket for megaconstellation launches. Falcon 9 can launch 17.5 metric tons to LEO in a reusable configuration, which is often a higher capability than the customer needs, Payload reports. So on a price-per-launch basis, if Neutron can deliver, it could provide credible competition.

A slow ramp-up... Rocket Lab intends to launch a single Neutron this year, followed by three rockets in 2026 and five in 2027. This may not be as flashy as saying the company will ramp up to a dozen rockets next year, but I appreciate the realism in launch cadence. Companies never increase their launch cadence as quickly as they say they will. However, speaking of realism, it's realistic to question whether Neutron will actually make it to the launch pad this year. I'd bet no, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

Two lunar landers launch on Falcon 9. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Wednesday and deployed two commercial lunar landers on separate trajectories to reach the Moon in the next few months, Ars reports.  It took about an hour and a half for the Falcon 9 rocket to release both payloads into two slightly different orbits, ranging up to 200,000 and 225,000 miles (322,000 and 362,000 kilometers) from Earth.

A lunar double shot... The two robotic lunar landers—one from Firefly Aerospace based near Austin, Texas, and another from the Japanese space company ispace—will use their own small engines for the final maneuvers required to enter orbit around the Moon in the coming months. Firefly and ispace reported that their landers, each about the size of an SUV, were healthy as ground teams in Texas and Japan activated the spacecraft soon after their separation from the Falcon 9 launch vehicle.

ArianeGroup completes Prometheus engine test. Although it was not revealed until January 9, ArianeGroup completed a successful hot fire test of the Prometheus rocket engine in late December 2024, European Spaceflight reports. European Space Agency Director General Josef Aschbacher referred to the "very important" test during his annual press briefing. Afterward, an ESA spokesperson confirmed that the test had taken place on December 19 on the PF20 test bench at the ArianeGroup facilities in Vernon, France.

A nominal test... The test of the liquid oxygen and biomethane engine lasted for 41 seconds, with the engine reaching 100 percent of its thrust. Prometheus is slated to initially power the Themis reusable booster demonstrator, a project also being developed by ArianeGroup under an ESA contract. In addition to its use by Themis, Prometheus will also be utilized by ArianeGroup subsidiary MaiaSpace to power its partially reusable Maia rocket. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

The hidden MVP of SpaceX's high cadence. On any given day, SpaceX is probably launching a Falcon 9 rocket, rolling one out to the launch pad, or bringing one back into port. With three active Falcon 9 launch pads and an increasing cadence at the Starbase facility in Texas, SpaceX's teams are often doing all three. The company achieved another milestone last Friday with the 25th successful launch and landing of a single Falcon 9 booster. This rocket, designated B1067, launched a batch of 21 Starlink Internet satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. Ars has reported on these rocket reuse milestones before, but SpaceX is breaking its own records so often that we've dialed back our coverage.

Building a lot of upper stages... SpaceX's accomplishment of 25 flights offers an opportunity to step back and take in some context. Although everyone focuses on reuse, SpaceX is still building new second stages for every launch. The task of building so many spaceships in a year is a tall order. While SpaceX's competency with reusing Falcon 9 boosters gets a lot of attention—landing a rocket is still incredible, even after seeing it nearly 400 times—the high-rate manufacturing of Falcon 9 upper stages is the secret MVP. It also suggests that the company's goal to build 100 Starships a year is not crazy.

New Glenn makes a triumphant first flight. For the first time since its founding nearly a quarter of a century ago, Blue Origin has reached orbit. The long-awaited debut launch of the New Glenn rocket, a super-heavy lift vehicle developed largely with private funding, was a smashing success in its debut launch early on Thursday morning, Ars reports. The launch occurred a little more than one hour into the launch window. Liftoff was delayed, at first, by an unspecified issue with properly chilling the BE-4 engines ahead of launch. Then there was a wayward boat.

No landing, no problem... Ultimately, the rocket launched at 2:03 am in the morning, local time, at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The first and second stages both appeared to perform nominally, and the Blue Ring pathfinder was put into its intended orbit. The only downer came a bit later when Blue Origin's Ariane Cornell confirmed that the first stage did not successfully return to a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. But no one who really understands the difficulties of launching and landing rockets believed that Blue Origin would succeed in catching its first orbital booster, and the company deserves credit for making the attempt rather than criticism for failing to stick the landing.

How to do Artemis without SLS or Starship. There has been a lot of discussion about potential changes to the Artemis Program under the incoming Trump administration, including on Ars. In The Space Review, engineer Ajay Kothari offers an architecture that is based on the Falcon Heavy rocket rather than NASA's Space Launch System or SpaceX's Starship rocket. "The computed numbers below prove that this is quite feasible with margins to spare," Kothari wrote about using Falcon Heavy to get Orion to the Moon. "Although three dockings in LEO would be required for the Orion, there is no refueling need and it is a much smaller number than the Starship HLS refueling estimates."

There is a catch... Because there is always a catch, right? Kothari writes: "The lander would have to be built by NASA. It would be like the Apollo 17 Lunar Module, called Challenger, which carried two astronauts to the surface from LLO. It had a mass of 16.5 tons, so the new one here is bookkept at 18 tons wet mass, including higher consumable for a 6.5-day stay." If we're being realistic, if NASA were to put out a call for bids for a lunar lander tomorrow, it would not have one in hand before the end of the decade at the very earliest. So if NASA is going to the lunar surface in the 2020s, it's likely Starship or bust.

Upgraded Ariane booster to undergo tests. The European Space Agency will begin testing the P160 solid-fuel booster in March 2025, European Spaceflight reports. The booster, which is to be strapped onto the Ariane 6 rocket, will replace the current P120 booster and will be a key element in enabling Arianespace to deliver on an 18-launch contract for Amazon. For 16 of its 18 missions for Amazon to launch Project Kuiper satellites, the Ariane 6 rocket will launch with four of the more powerful boosters.

Don't forget about Vega... The P160 motor will replace the P120 booster currently in service. The upgraded boosters will increase the capacity of the Ariane 6 rocket by about 2 tons to low-Earth orbit. In addition to Ariane 6, the P160 boosters will also be utilized by Avio aboard the upgraded Vega C+ and the company’s next-generation Vega E rocket. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

Jan. 18: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-8 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 15:57 UTC

Jan. 21: Falcon 9 | Starlink 13-1 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 05:13 UTC

Jan. 22: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-6 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 14:38 UTC

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SpaceX plans to launch the seventh full-scale test flight of its massive Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket Thursday afternoon. It's the first of what might be a dozen or more demonstration flights this year as SpaceX tries new things with the most powerful rocket ever built.

There are many things on SpaceX's Starship to-do list in 2025. They include debuting an upgraded, larger Starship, known as Version 2 or Block 2, on the test flight preparing to launch Thursday. The one-hour launch window opens at 5 pm EST (4 pm CST; 22:00 UTC) at SpaceX's launch base in South Texas. You can watch SpaceX's live webcast of the flight here.

SpaceX will again attempt to catch the rocket's Super Heavy booster—more than 20 stories tall and wider than a jumbo jet—back at the launch pad using mechanical arms, or "chopsticks," mounted to the launch tower. Read more about the Starship Block 2 upgrades in our story from last week.

You might think of next week's Starship test flight as an apéritif before the entrées to come. Ars recently spoke with Lisa Watson-Morgan, the NASA engineer overseeing the agency's contract with SpaceX to develop a modified version of Starship to land astronauts on the Moon. NASA has contracts with SpaceX worth more than $4 billion to develop and fly two Starship human landing missions under the umbrella of the agency's Artemis program to return humans to the Moon.

We are publishing the entire interview with Watson-Morgan below, but first, let's assess what SpaceX might accomplish with Starship this year.

There are many things to watch for on this test flight, including the deployment of 10 satellite simulators to test the ship's payload accommodations and the performance of a beefed-up heat shield as the vehicle blazes through the atmosphere for reentry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

If this all works, SpaceX may try to launch a ship into low-Earth orbit on the eighth flight, expected to launch in the next couple of months. All of the Starship test flights to date have intentionally flown on suborbital trajectories, bringing the ship back toward reentry over the sea northwest of Australia after traveling halfway around the world.

Then, there's an even bigger version of Starship called Block 3 that could begin flying before the end of the year. This version of the ship is the one that SpaceX will use to start experimenting with in-orbit refueling, according to Watson-Morgan.

In order to test refueling, two Starships will dock together in orbit, allowing one vehicle to transfer super-cold methane and liquid oxygen into the other. Nothing like this on this scale has ever been attempted before. Future Starship missions to the Moon and Mars may require 10 or more tanker missions to gas up in low-Earth orbit. All of these missions will use different versions of the same basic Starship design: a human-rated lunar lander, a propellant depot, and a refueling tanker.

Questions for 2025

Catching Starship back at its launch tower and demonstrating orbital propellant transfer are the two most significant milestones on SpaceX's roadmap for 2025.

SpaceX officials have said they aim to fly as many as 25 Starship missions this year, allowing engineers to more rapidly iterate on the vehicle's design. SpaceX is constructing a second launch pad at its Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas, to help speed up the launch cadence.

Can SpaceX achieve this flight rate in 2025? Will faster Starship manufacturing and reusability help the company fly more often? Will SpaceX fly its first ship-to-ship propellant transfer demonstration this year? When will Starship begin launching large batches of new-generation Starlink Internet satellites?

Licensing delays at the Federal Aviation Administration have been a thorn in SpaceX's side for the last couple of years. Will those go away under the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump, who counts SpaceX founder Elon Musk as a key adviser?

And will SpaceX gain a larger role in NASA's Artemis lunar program? The Artemis program's architecture is sure to be reviewed by the Trump administration and the nominee for the agency's next administrator, billionaire businessman and astronaut Jared Isaacman.

The very expensive Space Launch System rocket, developed by NASA with Boeing and other traditional aerospace contractors, might be canceled. NASA currently envisions the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft as the transportation system to ferry astronauts between Earth and the vicinity of the Moon, where crews would meet up with a landing vehicle provided by commercial partners SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Watson-Morgan didn't have answers to all of these questions. Many of them are well outside of her purview as Human Landing System program manager, so Ars didn't ask. Instead, Ars discussed technical and schedule concerns with her during the half-hour interview. Here is one part of the discussion, lightly edited for clarity.

Ars: What do you hope to see from Flight 7 of Starship?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: One of the exciting parts of working with SpaceX are these test flights. They have a really fast turnaround, where they put in different lessons learned. I think you saw many of the flight objectives that they discussed from Flight 6, which was a great success. I think they mentioned different thermal testing experiments that they put on the ship in order to understand the different heating, the different loads on certain areas of the system. All that was really good with each one of those, in addition to how they configure the tiles. Then, from that, there'll be additional tests that they will put on Flight 7, so you kind of get this iterative improvement and learning that we’ll get to see in Flight 7. So Flight 7 is the first Version 2 of their ship set. When I say that, I mean the ship, the booster, all the systems associated with it. So, from that, it's really more just understanding how the system, how the flaps, how all of that interacts and works as they're coming back in. Hopefully we'll get to see some catches, that's always exciting.

Ars: How did the in-space Raptor engine relight go on Flight 6 (on November 19)?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: Beautifully. And that's something that's really important to us because when we're sitting on the Moon... well, actually, 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. 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 get off the Moon). So that's why that step was critical for the Human Landing System and NASA's return to the Moon.

Ars: Which version of the ship is required for the propellant transfer demonstration, and what new features are on that version to enable this test?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: We're looking forward to the Version 3, which is what's coming up later on, sometime in ’25, in the near term, because that's what we need for propellant transfer and the cryo fluid work that is also important to us... There are different systems in the V3 set that will help us with cryo fluid management. Obviously, with those, we have to have the couplers and the quick-disconnects in order for the two systems to have the right guidance, navigation, trajectory, all the control systems needed to hold their station-keeping in order to dock with each other, and then perform the fluid transfer. So all the fluid lines and all that's associated with that, those systems, which we have seen in tests and held pieces of when we've been working with them at their site, we'll get to see those actually in action on orbit.

Ars: Have there been any ground tests of these systems, whether it’s fluid couplers or docking systems? Can you talk about some of the ground tests that have gone into this development?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: Oh, absolutely. We’ve been working with them on ground tests for this past year. We've seen the ground testing and reviewed the data. Our team works with them on what we deem necessary for the various milestones. While the milestone contains proprietary (information), we work closely with them to ensure that it's going to meet the intent, safety-wise as well as technically, of what we're going to need to see. So they've done that.

Even more exciting, they have recently shipped some of their docking systems to the Johnson Space Center for testing with the Orion Lockheed Martin docking system, and that's for Artemis III. Clearly, that's how we're going to receive the crew. So those are some exciting tests that we've been doing this past year as well that's not just focused on, say, the booster and the ship. There are a lot of crew systems that are being developed now. We're in work with them on how we're going to effectuate the crew manual control requirements that we have, so it's been a great balance to see what the crew needs, given the size of the ship. That's been a great set of work. We have crew office hours where the crew travels to Hawthorne [SpaceX headquarters in California] and works one-on-one with the different responsible engineers in the different technical disciplines to make sure that they understand not just little words on the paper from a requirement, but actually what this means, and then how systems can be operated.

Ars: For the docking system, Orion uses the NASA Docking System, and SpaceX brings its own design to bear on Starship?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: This is something that I think the Human Landing System has done exceptionally well. When we wrote our high-level set of requirements, we also wrote it with a bigger picture in mind—looked into the overall standards of how things are typically done, and we just said it has to be compliant with it. So it's a docking standard compliance, and SpaceX clearly meets that. They certainly do have the Dragon heritage, of course, with the International Space Station. So, because of that, we have high confidence that they're all going to work very well. Still, it's important to go ahead and perform the ground testing and get as much of that out of the way as we can.

Ars: How far along is the development and design of the layout of the crew compartment at the top of Starship? Is it far along, or is it still in the conceptual phase? What can you say about that?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: It’s much further along there. We’ve had our environmental control and life support systems, whether it's carbon dioxide monitoring fans to make sure the air is circulating properly. We’ve been in a lot of work with SpaceX on the temperature. It’s... a large area (for the crew). The seats, making sure that the crew seats and the loads on that are appropriate. For all of that work, as the analysis work has been performed, the NASA team is reviewing it. They had a mock-up, actually, of some of their life support systems even as far back as eight-plus months ago. So there's been a lot of progress on that.

Ars: Is SpaceX planning to use a touchscreen design for crew displays and controls, like they do with the Dragon spacecraft?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: We’re in talks about that, about what would be the best approach for the crew for the dynamic environment of landing.

Ars: I can imagine it is a pretty dynamic environment with those Raptor engines firing. It’s almost like a launch in reverse.

Lisa Watson-Morgan: Right. Those are some of the topics that get discussed in the crew office hours. That's why it's good to have the crew interacting directly, in addition to the different discipline leads, whether it's structural, mechanical, propulsion, to have all those folks talking guidance and having control to say, "OK, well, when the system does this, here's the mode we expect to see. Here's the impact on the crew. And is this condition, or is the option space that we have on the table, appropriate for the next step, with respect to the displays."

Ars: One of the big things SpaceX needs to prove out before going to the Moon with Starship is in-orbit propellant transfer. When do you see the ship-to-ship demonstration occurring?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: I see it occurring in ’25.

Ars: Anything more specific about the schedule for that?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: That'd be a question for SpaceX because they do have a number of flights that they're performing commercially, for their maturity. We get the benefit of that. It's actually a great partnership. I'll tell you, it's really good working with them on this, but they'd have to answer that question. I do foresee it happening in ’25.

Ars: What things do you need to see SpaceX accomplish before they're ready for the refueling demo? I'm thinking of things like the second launch tower, potentially. Do they need to demonstrate a ship catch or anything like that before going for orbital refueling?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: I would say none of that's required. You just kind of get down to, what are the basics? What are the basics that you need? So you need to be able to launch rapidly off the same pad, even. They've shown they can launch and catch within a matter of minutes. So that is good confidence there. The catching is part of their reuse strategy, which is more of their commercial approach, and not a NASA requirement. NASA reaps the benefit of it by good pricing as a result of their commercial model, but it is not a requirement that we have. So they could theoretically use the same pad to perform the propellant transfer and the long-duration flight, because all it requires is two launches, really, within a specified time period to where the two systems can meet in a planned trajectory or orbit to do the propellant transfer. So they could launch the first one, and then within a week or two or three, depending on what the concept of operations was that we thought we could achieve at that time, and then have the propellant transfer demo occur that way. So you don't necessarily need two pads, but you do need more thermal characterization of the ship. I would say that is one of the areas (we need to see data on), and that is one of the reasons, I think, why they're working so diligently on that.

Ars: You mentioned the long-duration flight demonstration. What does that entail?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: The simple objectives are to launch two different tankers or Starships. The Starship will eventually be a crewed system. Clearly, the ones that we're talking about for the propellant transfer are not. It’s just to have the booster and Starship system launch, and within a few weeks, have another one launch, and have them rendezvous. They need to be able to find each other with their sensors. They need to be able to come close, very, very close, and they need to be able to dock together, connect, do the quick connect, and make sure they are able, then, to flow propellant and LOX (liquid oxygen) to another system. Then, we need to be able to measure the quantity of how much has gone over. And from that, then they need to safely undock and dispose.

Ars: So the long-duration flight demonstration is just part of what SpaceX needs to do in order to be ready for the propellant transfer demonstration?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: We call it long duration just because it's not a 45-minute or an hour flight. Long duration, obviously, that's a relative statement, but it's a system that can stay up long enough to be able to find another Starship and perform those maneuvers and flow of fuel and LOX.

Ars: How much propellant will you transfer with this demonstration, and do you think you’ll get all the data you need in one demonstration, or will SpaceX need to try this several times?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: That’s something you can ask SpaceX (about how much propellant will be transferred). Clearly, I know, but there’s some sensitivity there. You’ve seen our requirements in our initial solicitation. We have thresholds and goals, meaning we want you to at least do this, but more is better, and that's typically how we work almost everything. Working with commercial industry in these fixed-price contracts has worked exceptionally well, because when you have providers that are also wanting to explore commercially or trying to make a commercial system, they are interested in pushing more than what we would typically ask for, and so often we get that for an incredibly fair price.

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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Wednesday and deployed two commercial lunar landers on separate trajectories to reach the Moon in the next few months.

The mission began with a middle-of-the-night launch from Kennedy at 1:11 am EST (06:11 UTC) Wednesday. It took about an hour and a half for the Falcon 9 rocket to release both payloads into two slightly different orbits, ranging up to 200,000 and 225,000 miles (322,000 and 362,000 kilometers) from Earth.

The two robotic lunar landers—one from Firefly Aerospace based near Austin, Texas, and another from the Japanese space company ispace—will use their own small engines for the final maneuvers required to enter orbit around the Moon in the coming months.

Firefly and ispace reported that their landers, each about the size of an SUV, were healthy as ground teams in Texas and Japan activated the spacecraft soon after their separation from the Falcon 9 launch vehicle.

"On behalf of Firefly, we want to thank SpaceX for a spot-on deployment in our target orbit," said Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace. "The mission is now in the hands of the unstoppable Firefly team."

A busy few months at the Moon

This is the first lunar lander built by Firefly, which got its start in the rocket business. Firefly launches its own small-class rocket named Alpha and has partnered with Northrop Grumman to develop a larger medium-class rocket that could debut as soon as 2026. But Firefly officials want to expand beyond rocket development and launch services, and in 2021, NASA awarded the company a contract to deliver 10 research payloads to the Moon's surface as part of the agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS, pronounced "clips") program.

NASA established the CLPS program in 2018 to create a framework for the agency to purchase rides to the Moon on commercial spacecraft. Agency leaders intend for these uncrewed CLPS missions to deliver scientific instruments and tech demo experiments to the Moon at a lower cost than a government-led mission. Another important goal for CLPS is to foster the development of the commercial lunar landers themselves. With CLPS, NASA has become an anchor customer for companies getting into the lunar landing business.

NASA has now booked rides with five companies for scientific payloads on 11 commercial missions to the Moon. Firefly's first Blue Ghost lander is the third of these 11 missions NASA currently has on contract.

The first two CLPS missions launched in early 2024. The first CLPS lander, owned by a company named Astrobotic, failed to reach the Moon after a leak in its propulsion system. Intuitive Machines flew the second CLPS mission to the Moon a month later, and it achieved a successful soft landing but immediately tipped over. Engineers and scientists were still able to obtain images and scientific data from the lander's instruments.

The landing by Intuitive Machines marked the first successful soft landing on the Moon by a US spacecraft since the last Apollo mission in 1972. And it was the first-ever time that a commercial spacecraft accomplished the feat.

In the early days of the CLPS program, NASA officials likened their approach with commercial lunar missions to taking "shots on goal." None of the companies that have won CLPS task orders from NASA had ever sent a spacecraft to the Moon at the time of receiving their contracts.

"We do understand with CLPS [that] a lot of these are first time vendors, first time flying to the Moon," said Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA's science directorate. "We know it's high risk. We accept it's high risk, but man, it’s high reward. So it is worth taking the risk because the science that we will get back from these missions is just going to be amazing."

NASA is paying Firefly $101 million for its payloads to ride with Firefly to the Moon, plus another $44 million for developing the instruments themselves.

NASA's fourth CLPS mission is scheduled for launch in late February. This will be the second lander built by Intuitive Machines. More CLPS missions could head to the Moon later this year.

Meanwhile, the lunar lander from ispace that launched in tandem with Firefly's Blue Ghost lander Wednesday is a purely commercial mission and isn't part of NASA's CLPS program. This lander, named Resilience, is ispace's second lunar mission, following a 2023 landing attempt that ended with a crash on the Moon. Engineers determined that the lander ran out of propellant after a software error caused the spacecraft to hover too long before making its final descent to the lunar surface.

Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science missions for SpaceX, said it made sense to pair the Firefly and ispace missions on the same Falcon 9 rocket.

"When we have two missions that can each go to the Moon on the same launch, that is something that we obviously want to take advantage of," Scheiman said. “So when we found a solution for the Firefly and ispace missions to fly together on the same Falcon 9, it was a no-brainer to put them together.”

SpaceX stacked the two landers, one on top of the other, inside the Falcon 9's payload fairing. Firefly's lander, the larger of the two spacecraft, rode on top of the stack and deployed from the rocket first. The Resilience lander from ispace launched in the lower position, cocooned inside a specially designed canister. Once Firefly's lander separated from the Falcon 9, the rocket jettisoned the canister, performed a brief engine firing to maneuver into a slightly different orbit, then released ispace's lander.

This dual launch arrangement resulted in a lower launch price for Firefly and ispace, according to Scheiman.

"At SpaceX, we are really interested in and invested in lowering the cost of launch for everybody," she said. "So that’s something we’re really proud of."

The Blue Ghost and Resilience landers will take different paths toward the Moon.

Firefly's Blue Ghost will spend about 25 days in Earth orbit, then four days in transit to the Moon. After Blue Ghost enters lunar orbit, Firefly's ground team will verify the readiness of the lander's propulsion and navigation systems and execute several thruster burns to set up for landing.

Blue Ghost's final descent to the Moon is tentatively scheduled for March 2. The target landing site is in Mare Crisium, an ancient 350-mile-wide (560-kilometer) impact basin in the northeast part of the near side of the Moon.

After touchdown, Blue Ghost will operate for about 14 days (one entire lunar day). The instruments aboard Firefly's lander include a subsurface drill, an X-ray imager, and an experimental electrodynamic dust shield to test methods of repelling troublesome lunar dust from accumulating on sensitive spacecraft components.

The Resilience lander from ispace will take four to five months to reach the Moon. It carries several intriguing tech demo experiments, including a water electrolyzer provided by a Japanese company named Takasago Thermal Engineering. This demonstration will test equipment that future lunar missions could use to convert the Moon's water ice resources into electricity and rocket fuel.

The lander will also deploy a "micro-rover" named Tenacious, developed by an ispace subsidiary in Luxembourg. The Tenacious rover will attempt to scoop up lunar soil and capture high-definition imagery of the Moon.

Ron Garan, CEO of ispace's US-based subsidiary, told Ars that this mission is "pivotal" for the company.

"We were not fully successful on our first mission," Garan said in an interview. "It was an amazing accomplishment, even though we didn't have a soft landing... Although the hardware worked flawlessly, exactly as it was supposed to, we did have some lessons learned in the software department. The fixes to prevent what happened on the first mission from happening on the second mission were fairly straightforward, so that boosts our confidence."

The ispace subsidiary led by Garan, a former NASA astronaut, is based in Colorado. While the Resilience lander launched Wednesday is not part of the CLPS program, the company will build an upgraded lander for a future CLPS mission for NASA, led by Draper Laboratory.

"I think the fact that we have two lunar landers on the same rocket for the first time in history is pretty substantial," Garan said. I think we all are rooting for each other."

Investors need to see more successes with commercial lunar landers to fully realize the market's potential, Garan said.

"That market, right now, is very nascent. It's very, very immature. And one of the reasons for that is that it's very difficult for companies that are contemplating making investments on equipment, experiments, etc., to put on the lunar surface and lunar orbit," Garan said. "It's very difficult to make those investments, especially if they're long-term investments, because there really hasn't been a proof of concept yet."

"So every time we have a success, that makes it more likely that these companies that will serve as the foundation of a commercial lunar market movement will be able to make those investments," Garan said. "Conversely, every time we have a failure, the opposite happens."

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It has been a few years since AI began successfully tackling the challenge of predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins, complex molecules that are essential for all life. Next-generation tools are now available, and the Nobel Prizes have been handed out. But people not involved in biology can be forgiven for asking whether any of it can actually make a difference.

A nice example of how the tools can be put to use is being released in Nature on Wednesday. A team that includes the University of Washington's David Baker, who picked up his Nobel in Stockholm last month, used software tools to design completely new proteins that are able to inhibit some of the toxins in snake venom. While not entirely successful, the work shows how the new software tools can let researchers tackle challenges that would otherwise be difficult or impossible.

Blocking venom

Snake venom includes a complicated mix of toxins, most of them proteins, that engage in a multi-front assault on anything unfortunate enough to get bitten. Right now, the primary treatment is to use a mix of antibodies that bind to these toxins, produced by injecting sub-lethal amounts of venom proteins into animals. But antivenon treatments tend to require refrigeration, and even then, they have a short shelf life. Ensuring a steady supply also means regularly injecting new animals and purifying more antibodies from them.

Having smaller, more stable proteins that perform the same function would let us produce them in bacteria and could allow the generation of an antivenon that doesn't require refrigeration—a careful consideration given that many snake bites occur in rural areas or the wilderness.

The new work isn't meant to be a complete solution to the problem. Instead, it tackles a single type of toxic venom protein: the three-finger toxins, named after the physical structure that the proteins fold into. They're a major component of the venom of such infamous snakes as mambas, taipans, and cobras. Despite their relatively compact size, different members of the three-finger toxin family manage to produce two distinct types of damage. One group causes a general toxicity to cells, enabled by disruption of the cell membrane, while a different subset has the ability to block the receptor for a neurotransmitter.

Since these two toxicities work through entirely different mechanisms, the researchers tackled them separately.

Blocking a neurotoxin

The neurotoxic three-fingered proteins are a subgroup of the larger protein family that specializes in binding to and blocking the receptors for acetylcholine, a major neurotransmitter. Their three-dimensional structure, which is key to their ability to bind these receptors, is based on three strings of amino acids within the protein that nestle against each other (for those that have taken a sufficiently advanced biology class, these are anti-parallel beta sheets). So to interfere with these toxins, the researchers targeted these strings.

They relied on an AI package called RFdiffusion (the RF denotes its relation to the Rosetta Fold protein-folding software). RFdiffusion can be directed to design protein structures that are complements to specific chemicals; in this case, it identified new strands that could line up along the edge of the ones in the three-fingered toxins. Once those were identified, a separate AI package, called ProteinMPNN, was used to identify the amino acid sequence of a full-length protein that would form the newly identified strands.

But we're not done with the AI tools yet. The combination of three-fingered toxins and a set of the newly designed proteins were then fed into DeepMind's AlfaFold2 and the Rosetta protein structure software, and the strength of the interactions between them were estimated.

It's only at this point that the researchers started making actual proteins, focusing on the candidates that the software suggested would interact the best with the three-fingered toxins. Forty-four of the computer-designed proteins were tested for their ability to interact with the three-fingered toxin, and the single protein that had the strongest interaction was used for further studies.

At this point, it was back to the AI, where RFDiffusion was used to suggest variants of this protein that might bind more effectively. About 15 percent of its suggestions did, in fact, interact more strongly with the toxin. The researchers then made both the toxin and the strongest inhibitor in bacteria and obtained the structure of their interactions. This confirmed that the software's predictions were highly accurate.

A mix of the three-fingered neurotoxin and the newly designed inhibitor was then injected into mice, where it provided complete protection (as long as there was five times more inhibitor than toxin). It even worked at a 10-fold excess when it was injected into the mouse 30 minutes after the toxin, which might better reflect real-world use of an antivenon.

Mixed success

As mentioned above, a different group of three-fingered toxins can directly kill cells by disrupting their membranes. This class of toxin is made by spitting cobras, which means they can deliver the toxin to victims without the need to even bite them. Here, the researchers focused on the three fingers of the protein structure that gave this group its name. Repeating a similar process created inhibitors that interacted strongly with the three-fingered toxin and could potentially inhibit its activity.

Unfortunately, when tested on actual mice, the inhibitors did not decrease the size of the skin lesions caused by the three-fingered toxin. This may indicate that we don't fully understand how these proteins disrupt membranes and could have potentially targeted the wrong region on them for inhibition. So the researchers stopped testing this inhibitor, though they could continue to work to identify others that target different areas of the protein.

Even if they're successful, this work is mostly a proof of concept. Snake venoms typically contain a wide variety of toxins, and these experiments only targeted two of them. In addition, the proteins it produced worked well because they are highly specific. But that specificity means that an inhibitor designed against proteins in cobra venom might not work against the venom in a more distantly related snake.

Still, the work shows that AI tools really can dramatically expand our options when it comes to intervening in biology. Without them, this work likely would have been stuck at the very first step, given that it was near-impossible to reason our way into identifying a protein structure that might interact with something like this toxin. And refining any initial ideas might have taken months to years of grunt work. It's hard to overstate just how radical a change the ability to do all this in software represents.

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08393-x  (About DOIs).

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Tires might be one of the more prosaic parts of a car, but they are undoubtedly among the most important. Bench racers might obsess about powertrain specs, and average consumers mostly want to know that there's wireless charging for their phones, but it's the tires that actually make contact with the road. Without them, no one is going anywhere. At least not very far.

In the past, tires have been considered somewhat mysterious, with secret blends of rubber, carbon, and other stuff combined with clever arrangements of belts and wires to hold the whole thing together as it rotates faster and faster without flying apart. These days, we know an awful lot about how tires work. Or at least tire companies like Goodyear do, having amassed enough testing data to be able to simulate them accurately enough to shave months off a development schedule.

In fact, the use of simulation in tire research and development has quite a long history. Chris Helsel, who is now Goodyear's CTO, joined the company back in 1996; he was hired as part of a tiny team doing computer tire simulation. "At Goodyear in '96, it felt like almost late to the party in terms of doing what we call finite element analysis, which is basically breaking a large structure down into little parts," Helsel said.

The complexity of the problem shouldn't be understated. "A tire deforms 40 percent every time it rotates, so that huge amount of displacement, or change, causes those elements to displace, and that causes numerical instability," Helsel explained.

Next, there's the contact between the tire and the road surface. "That concept of solving the friction equation at that interface—very challenging," Helsel said. And don't forget, you also have to simulate how the tire makes contact with the rim.

On top of that, the model also has to account for the tire rolling "and then, finally, the huge amount of detail when you look at a tread pattern and those little blades and things in it that are there for traction. How do you represent those in geometry?" Helsel said.

Back in the '90s, Goodyear was just trying to use that technology to predict things like contact patch shapes. Now, it's able to model tires in full fidelity, including in different climatic conditions. "Even snow, which is a really challenging problem because of the fracture mechanics aspect of snow," Helsel said. "Snow is connecting, then it's breaking apart. That's a really challenging numerical problem." A long-running partnership with Sandia National Laboratories has helped the process.

Driving on new tires before they exist in the real world

In silico tire development now extends much further into the tire testing process, as Goodyear is using driver-in-the-loop simulators—similar to the kind used in motorsport—to perform dynamic tire testing without anyone getting their hands dirty swapping wheels and tires on a test vehicle.

"When you take that tire model Chris described and the high fidelity of the vehicle model and put them into a driving simulator, the No. 1 problem is you want it to execute in real time. You want the human to feel like it is a real-world simulation," explained Steve Rohweder, VP of technology development at Goodyear.

"If it's a one-second maneuver, you want it to take one second, right? Those millions of degrees of freedom model do not necessarily execute in real time like that. So there's a translation that has to happen to be able to drive the simulator," Rohweder said.

Goodyear now has a pair of dynamic simulator centers, one in Akron, Ohio, which opened in 2021, and a second in Luxembourg, which opened in 2024.

The payoff is that it's now much faster to iterate during development. "Back in the late '90s, you could count on a half a dozen—maybe up to 10—physical iterations where you're actually ordering a mold, making tires, and putting them on test. [If] you didn't get the result, [you would] work your way back through," Helsel said.

Over time, simulating the tire's footprint allowed Goodyear to cut that in half, "and then since we've really been pushing this higher fidelity tire modeling and now into the simulator, we've cut that in half again," Helsel said. Now, when working with a car manufacturer on tires for a specific model, "we only need basically a build and test confirmation physical [tire], so [we're] down to one," Helsel said.

That's quite a savings—perhaps as many as 13,000 tires and 60,000 miles of test track driving that would otherwise be needed before everything was signed off.

"We've done variation in studies with [tire] sizes when we're setting targets working with the manufacturer before they start the vehicle development," said Rohweder. "Tire dimension is easy to adjust. Compound, major design changes—when you have the data and you prepare it, you can go into the simulator environment and quickly move around in the design space to find out what the driver feels is most effective and best for shooting on that target. So that's why we say that the maturity of that first physical iteration is really the benefit," Rohweder said.

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News stories about the likely existence of extraterrestrial life, and our chances of detecting it, tend to be positive. We are often told that we might discover it any time now. Finding life beyond Earth is “only a matter of time,” we were told in September 2023. “We are close” was a headline from September 2024.

It’s easy to see why. Headlines such as “We’re probably not close” or “Nobody knows” aren’t very clickable. But what does the relevant community of experts actually think when considered as a whole? Are optimistic predictions common or rare? Is there even a consensus? In our new paper, published in Nature Astronomy, we’ve found out.

During February to June 2024, we carried out four surveys regarding the likely existence of basic, complex, and intelligent extraterrestrial life. We sent emails to astrobiologists (scientists who study extraterrestrial life), as well as to scientists in other areas, including biologists and physicists.

In total, 521 astrobiologists responded, and we received 534 non-astrobiologist responses. The results reveal that 86.6 percent of the surveyed astrobiologists responded either “agree” or “strongly agree” that it’s likely that extraterrestrial life (of at least a basic kind) exists somewhere in the universe.

Less than 2 percent disagreed, with 12 percent staying neutral. So, based on this, we might say that there’s a solid consensus that extraterrestrial life, of some form, exists somewhere out there.

Scientists who weren’t astrobiologists essentially concurred, with an overall agreement score of 88.4 percent. In other words, one cannot say that astrobiologists are biased toward believing in extraterrestrial life, compared with other scientists.

When we turn to “complex” extraterrestrial life or “intelligent” aliens, our results were 67.4 percent agreement, and 58.2 percent agreement, respectively for astrobiologists and other scientists. So, scientists tend to think that alien life exists, even in more advanced forms.

These results are made even more significant by the fact that disagreement for all categories was low. For example, only 10.2 percent of astrobiologists disagreed with the claim that intelligent aliens likely exist.

Optimists and pessimists

Are scientists merely speculating? Usually, we should only take notice of a scientific consensus when it is based on evidence (and lots of it). As there is no proper evidence, scientists may be guessing. However, scientists did have the option of voting “neutral,” an option that was chosen by some scientists who felt that they would be speculating.

Only 12 percent chose this option. There is actually a lot of “indirect” or “theoretical” evidence that alien life exists. For example, we do now know that habitable environments are very common in the universe.

We have several in our own solar system, including the sub-surface oceans of the moons Europa and Enceladus, and arguably also the environment a few kilometers below the surface of Mars. It also seems relevant that Mars used to be highly habitable, with lakes and rivers of liquid water on its surface and a substantial atmosphere.

It is reasonable to generalize from here to a truly gargantuan number of habitable environments across the galaxy, and wider universe. We also know (since we’re here) that life can get started from non-life—it happened on Earth, after all. Although the origin of the first, simple forms of life is poorly understood, there is no compelling reason to think that it requires astronomically rare conditions. And even if it does, the probability of life getting started (abiogenesis) is clearly non-zero.

This can help us to see the 86.6 percent agreement in a new light. Perhaps it is not, actually, a surprisingly strong consensus. Perhaps it is a surprisingly weak consensus. Consider the numbers: there are more than 100 billion galaxies. And we know that habitable environments are everywhere.

Let’s say there are 100 billion billion habitable worlds (planets or moons) in the universe. Suppose we are such pessimists that we think life’s chances of getting started on any given habitable world is one in a billion billion. In that case, we would still answer “agree” to the statement that it is likely that alien life exists in the universe.

Thus, optimists and pessimists should all have answered “agree” or “strongly agree” to our survey, with only the most radical pessimists about the origin of life disagreeing.

Bearing this in mind, we could present our data another way. Suppose we discount the 60 neutral votes we received. Perhaps these scientists felt that they would be speculating and didn’t want to take a stance. In which case, it makes sense to ignore their votes. This leaves 461 votes in total, of which 451 were for agree or strongly agree. Now, we have an overall agreement percentage of 97.8 percent.

This move is not as illegitimate as it looks. Scientists know that if they choose “neutral” they can’t possibly be wrong. Thus, this is the “safe” choice. In research, it is often called “satisficing.”

As the geophysicist Edward Bullard wrote back in 1975 while debating whether all continents were once joined together: instead of making a choice “it is more prudent to keep quiet, … sit on the fence, and wait in statesmanlike ambiguity for more data.” Not only is keeping quiet a safe choice for scientists, it means the scientist doesn’t need to think too hard—it is the easy choice.

Getting the balance right

What we probably want is balance. On one side, we have the lack of direct empirical evidence and the reluctance of responsible scientists to speculate. On the other side, we have evidence of other kinds, including the truly gargantuan number of habitable environments in the universe.

We know that the probability of life getting started is non-zero. Perhaps 86.6 percent agreement, with 12 percent neutral and less than 2 percent disagreement, is a sensible compromise, all things considered.

Perhaps—given the problem of satisficing—whenever we present such results, we should present two results for overall agreement: one with neutral votes included (86.6 percent), and one with neutral votes disregarded (97.8 percent). Neither result is the single, correct result.

Each perspective speaks to different analytical needs and helps prevent oversimplification of the data. Ultimately, reporting both numbers—and being transparent about their contexts—is the most honest way to represent the true complexity of responses.

Peter Vickers is professor in philosophy of science at Durham University; Henry Taylor is associate professor, Department of Philosophy at University of Birmingham, and Sean McMahon is a reader in astrobiology at University of Edinburgh.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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An image of the Earth, with cities streaking by below, captured

earlier this month by NASA Astronaut Don Pettit.

Credit: Don Pettit/NASA

People who appreciate good astrophotography will no doubt be familiar with the work of Don Pettit, a veteran NASA astronaut who is closing in on having lived 500 days of his life in space.

Pettit is now in the midst of his third stint on the International Space Station, and the decade he had to prepare for his current stay in orbit was put to good use. Accordingly, he is well stocked on cameras, lenses, and plans to make the most of six months in space to observe the planets and heavens from an incredible vantage point.

Ars has previously written admiringly of Pettit's work, but his latest image deserves additional mention. When I first saw it, I was dazzled by its beauty. But when I looked further into the image, there were just so many amazing details to be found.

In this image, one can see the core of the Milky Way galaxy, zodiacal light (sunlight diffused by interplanetary dust), streaks of SpaceX Starlink satellites, individual stars, an edge-on view of the atmosphere that appears in burnt umber due to hydroxide emissions, a near-sunrise just over the horizon, and nighttime cities appearing as streaks.

Pettit said he took the image from the port-side window of Crew Dragon Freedom, which brought two astronauts to the International Space Station last year and will bring Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back to Earth next spring.

Putting all of this together, I think Pettit's streaky image may be the best picture ever taken from the International Space Station. Disagree?

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“DFAS encountered a common HR dilemma: whether to prioritize subject matter expertise or the difficult-to-measure intangibles, such as skilled customer service, familiarity with process improvement, and passion for the position evinced by thorough interview preparation,” the court wrote in Cunningham v. Austin.

“DFAS chose the intangibles, and we will not second-guess its decision,” the judges said.

The female employee sued the DoD for alleged sex discrimination in violation Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A lower court rejected her claim, and the 7th Circuit upheld pretrial judgment for the DoD.

According to court documents, the woman worked in a GS-12 job as the supervisor in charge of DFAS’s benefits team. After her manager, the chief of the benefits division, was promoted to run an HR services center, DFAS converted a vacant GS-12 job into a new GS-13 supervisory position that would oversee both the benefits and the workers’ compensation teams.

The new benefits division chief, a man, along with the DFAS supervisor of talent supervision, reviewed resumes and began interviewing for the new GS-13 job, court records reflected.

For the interviews, they developed four categories on which to evaluate the candidates and created six standard questions to ask each of them. Four of the questions were behavioral.

Two employees emerged as the top candidates: The female employee in charge of DFAS’s benefits team and the male team leader of DFAS’s customer care call center, also a GS-12 position.

In upholding judgment for the DoD, the 7th Circuit explained that DFAS provided a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason for selecting the male worker: The division chief concluded that his skill set and strategic vision made him more suitable for the job.

Although the division chief praised the female candidate for her subject matter expertise, he was concerned that her resume reflected only five years of relevant experience. 

In comparison, the male candidate had 23 years of military service in the U.S. Air Force and had worked for a private corporation handling workers’ compensation issues and training more than 1,000 employees, according to the record. He also had familiarity with federal benefits through his leadership at the customer care center, the 7th Circuit noted.

Additionally, the division chief’s interview notes described some of the woman candidate’s answers as “tactical,” rather than “strategic,” meaning her answers reflected short-term thinking, the court said.

The female worker’s belief the division chief preferred working with a man and that she was more qualified fell short of showing pretext, especially in light of her own admission that the division chief “wanted something different organization-wise” and felt he “could do that with someone other than myself,” the panel pointed out.

Courts have generally accepted interview performance as a legitimate reason to choose one candidate over another — with a caveat.

“Employers may use interviews so long as they assess relevant criteria and are not ‘entirely subjective,” the 3rd Circuit explained in a November ruling. The case involved a worker for the Port Authority Trans-Hudson Corp. who sued for discrimination after she was passed over for promotion several times. 

In upholding a district court ruling against her, the 3rd Circuit described how the interview process shielded the Port Authority from the worker’s claims. For instance, similar to the DoD case, the interview questions were job-related, and the candidates were asked the same questions and ranked according to the same criteria.

Importantly, the worker’s interview performance was captured in written documentation and reflected that her answers lacked “cohesion and organization,” the 3rd Circuit noted.

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The mayor of Glogowek, Piotr Bujak, said Tuesday that he recently posted the invitation on Musk’s social media platform X and has sent letters to his companies, advocating for him to buy the castle.

No price tag has been announced, and Musk hasn't responded to the offer so far.

Bujak told The Associated Press that he saw media reports in Europe suggesting that the U.S. tech billionaire is looking for a sizeable location, possibly a castle in Italy, as a hub for his operations on the continent.

The Glogowek castle in southwestern Poland boasts a rich history going back to the Middle Ages, briefly serving as Poland's capital in the 17th century. It has also hosted composer Ludwig van Beethoven, who wrote music there.

“The castle has a very good vibe and is a perfect location for great things,” Bujak told the AP.

The area has a long winemaking tradition.

“We do not feel worse than Tuscany. We have a perfect climate and this is the best place on Earth,” Bujak said.

Glogowek's picturesque location is within traveling distance of European capitals Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Bratislava and Warsaw. There is room for a helicopter landing pad too.

The castle requires thorough renovation and needs a private investor, but offers vast spaces for living and business purposes. It belongs to the town.

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Danielle Smith addressed a news conference in Florida after a weekend visit with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort as a guest of Canadian businessman and television personality Kevin O'Leary.

"Oil and gas are owned by the provinces, principally Alberta, and we won't stand for that," she said. "You should never, ever threaten something you cannot do."

Trump has also said he will use economic coercion to pressure Canada to become the nation's 51st state, and he continues to erroneously cast the U.S. trade deficit with Canada — a natural resource-rich nation that provides the U.S. with commodities like oil — as a subsidy.

Trump said the U.S doesn't need anything from Canada, including oil.

Almost a quarter of the oil the U.S. consumes every day is from Canada, with Alberta exporting 4.3 million barrels a day to the U.S. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the U.S. consumes about 20 million barrels a day, while domestically producing about 13.2 million barrels a day.

Canada is the top export destination for 36 U.S. states. Nearly $3.6 billion Canadian (US$2.7 billion) worth of goods and services cross the border each day.

Over the weekend, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly said she hasn't ruled out an energy embargo in response to Trump's tariff threat.

But Smith said Monday that cutting off pipeline supplies through Michigan would choke key supply to Ontario and Quebec.

"We should talk about things that we actually can do, as opposed to empty threats," said Smith, adding that she has seen no indications that Trump will not proceed with his tariffs threats, which will hurt both the Canadian economy and U.S. consumers.

"We're a good partner," Smith said. "We buy a lot of goods from the United States, more than any other jurisdiction. We should maintain this tariff-free relationship for the benefit of both of us."

Canadian officials have said Canada is considering imposing retaliatory tariffs on American orange juice, toilets and some steel products if Trump follows through with his tariffs threat.

Smith also said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's decision to resign, setting up a Liberal leadership race and probable federation election this spring, has hindered Canada's ability to negotiate with Trump.

"I'm very concerned about a leadership vacuum," she said. "That's why I've been calling for an immediate election. We need somebody at the table who is able to engage with the administration saying you've got a four-year mandate, I've got a four-year mandate. Let's deal."

Smith will be attending Trump's inauguration next week. She has been on a diplomatic offensive of late, meeting with U.S. elected officials and appearing on news media south of the border.

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On any given day, SpaceX is probably launching a Falcon 9 rocket, rolling one out to the launch pad or bringing one back into port. With three active Falcon 9 launch pads and an increasing cadence at the Starbase facility in Texas, SpaceX's teams are often doing all three.

The company achieved another milestone Friday with the 25th successful launch and landing of a single Falcon 9 booster. This rocket, designated B1067, launched a batch of 21 Starlink Internet satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

The rocket's nine kerosene-fueled Merlin 1D engines powered the 21 Starlink satellites into space, then separated from the Falcon 9's upper stage, which accelerated the payload stack into orbit. The 15-story-tall booster returned to a vertical propulsive landing on one of SpaceX's offshore drone ships in the Atlantic Ocean a few hundred miles downrange from Cape Canaveral.

With the launch Friday and another Falcon 9 flight Monday (this one with a booster on its 15th mission), SpaceX has launched Falcon 9 rockets 423 times. The fleet leader, Booster No. 1,067, has now launched 457 satellites and eight astronauts over its 25 flights.

Ars has reported on these rocket reuse milestones before, but SpaceX is breaking its own records so often that we've dialed back on our coverage. SpaceX has now broken its own record for the number of flights by a single Falcon 9 booster five times in the last nine months.

Falcon 9’s success is about more than reusability

But SpaceX's accomplishment of 25 flights offers an opportunity to step back and take in some context. The newest and final iteration of the Falcon 9 design, known as Block 5, debuted in 2018. At the time, SpaceX officials said they planned to fly each booster 10 times before standing down for more thorough refurbishment.

SpaceX now plans to launch each Falcon 9 booster up to 40 times. Engineers temporarily removed two Falcon 9 boosters from SpaceX's launch rotation in 2023 for in-depth inspections after their 15th flight. That allowed SpaceX to extend each booster's certification to 20 flights, and last year, officials announced they were going for 40.

The only other US company that seems close to achieving rocket reuse is Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, which has designed the first stage booster on the New Glenn rocket to fly 25 times. Blue Origin aims to launch the New Glenn rocket for the first time this week.

With more experience reusing Falcon 9 boosters, SpaceX has cut the turnaround time between flights of the same rocket. In November, SpaceX launched the same Falcon 9 booster twice in less than 14 days, the shortest turnaround time for a booster yet. The company has launched 38 missions with booster turnaround times of one month or less, and all but nine of those flights occurred within the last year.

But there's more to the story.

SpaceX is also recovering and reusing payload fairings, the shell that encloses satellite payloads during their initial climb through the atmosphere. Last month, the company confirmed it flew a fairing shell for the 22nd time, another new record. SpaceX's factory in Hawthorne, California, must also churn out new upper stages for each Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy flight. That's 135 of these multimillion-dollar stages for each Falcon mission in the last 365 days, or one flight (and one new upper stage) every 2.7 days.

Ground crews must more quickly prepare the launch pad for another flight to achieve this kind of flight rate. Last year, SpaceX's shortest span between two launches from the same pad was less than three days. After each offshore landing, the drone ship must travel hundreds of miles from the downrange landing zone back to port in Florida or California, where a crane lifts the booster off the vessel. Then, the drone ship must return to sea as rapidly as possible.

Here are some of SpaceX's current turnaround records, and note they're all within the last year (all dates UTC):

• Shortest turnaround between two Falcon 9 launches from different pads: 1 hour, 5 minutes (August 31, 2024)

• Shortest time with three Falcon 9 launches: 20 hours, 3 minutes (March 4, 2024 and November 17–18, 2024)

• Shortest turnaround between launches from the same pad: 2 days, 15 hours, 53 minutes (November 11–14, 2024)

• Shortest turnaround of a drone ship between landings: 3 days, 12 hours, 13 minutes (May 28–June 1, 2024)

• Shortest turnaround of the same Falcon 9 booster: 13 days, 12 hours, 34 minutes (November 11–25, 2024)

None of these records are flukes. SpaceX has launched Falcon 9 rockets less than two hours apart on two occasions, and within a handful of hours several more times. Falcon 9 rockets have routinely launched from SpaceX's busiest launch pad—Space Launch Complex 40 in Florida—as little as three or four days apart.

When SpaceX landed twice on the same drone ship in three-and-a-half days last year, the company's vice president of launch, Kiko Dontchev, congratulated his team on X. The drone ship "traveled roughly 640 nautical miles in that time with only 3.5 hrs at the dock to drop off a rocket," he wrote.

At the beginning of last year, Dontchev posted on X that SpaceX rolled a rocket out of the hangar and launched it six-and-a-half hours later. At the time, that was the fastest rollout to launch, but we haven't had accurate rollout times for all missions since then. During the rollout, the rocket rides on a strongback transporter along rail tracks from the hangar to the launch pad, where it pivots vertically in preparation for the countdown to liftoff. On some missions, SpaceX has raised a rocket vertically in as little as four hours before launch for final checkouts and fueling.

A match made for the heavens

All of these statistics are remarkable, considering some rockets (such as the now-retired Delta IV Heavy from United Launch Alliance) have spent a year or more on the launch pad preparing for liftoff. The shortest span between two flights of ULA's expendable workhorse rocket, the Atlas V, from different pads was six days in 2015. SpaceX's fleet-leading booster, with 25 flights, has launched more times since its debut in June 2021 than all of ULA's missions in the same time period.

Rocket Lab, which flies a much smaller launcher than the Falcon 9, has launched two orbital missions from different spaceports within approximately seven-and-a-half days and from the same launch pad within about nine days.

SpaceX's rapid cadence wouldn't be possible without reusability, which allows the company to bring down costs and increase the launch rate. SpaceX's massive Starship rocket is designed to be fully reusable, further reducing costs and potentially resolving any concerns about production bottlenecks.

Imagine, for a moment, the sprawling footprint and bloated headcount of SpaceX's factory if it had to manufacture a new Falcon 9 booster, nine engines, and a payload fairing set every 2.7 days. How cost-effective could that be? Would it even be possible? It's mind-boggling enough to visualize the blistering production pace for Falcon 9's upper stages in Hawthorne or SpaceX's Starlink satellites in Redmond, Washington.

As far as we know, SpaceX doesn't have a plan to make reusable satellites. Some companies have interesting concepts for reusable satellites, but they are focused on in-space manufacturing instead of consumer services.

SpaceX's massive Starship rocket is designed to be fully reusable, further reducing the marginal cost of each flight and potentially resolving any concerns about production bottlenecks. But someone will still need to build Starships, and a lot of them.

Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, has suggested that his company must produce 100 or more Starships per year to fulfill his Mars settlement ambitions, even with full reusability. When you think of the next-generation rocket factory, perhaps you should envision an airplane manufacturer, with multiple plants scattered around the country or globe.

With Falcon 9, SpaceX already produces more than 100 upper stages (and a handful of new boosters) each year. Starship is significantly larger and more sophisticated than a Falcon 9 upper stage, with higher-thrust, finely tuned Raptor engines and a heat shield that will be able to fly over and over again with no refurbishment. It will require larger buildings and likely, at least in the near term, more people on the manufacturing floor. Still, the Falcon 9's upper stage is a complicated piece of equipment.

Putting aside the drama and challenge of catching and re-flying rockets, the task of building so many spaceships in a year is a tall order. While SpaceX's competency with reusing Falcon 9 boosters gets a lot of attention—landing a rocket is still incredible, even after seeing it nearly 400 times—its manufacturing prowess with Falcon 9 upper stages suggests that building 100 Starships each year just might be doable someday.

Combining rocket reuse with high-rate manufacturing is fundamental for SpaceX's Starship ambitions, and it's already proving successful with Falcon 9. One might say it's a match made for the heavens.

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