Seven months after its first lunar lander fell short of reaching the Moon, Astrobotic announced Tuesday that the spacecraft was stricken by a valve failure that caused a propellant tank to burst in orbit. The company's next landing attempt, using a much larger spacecraft, will include fixes to prevent a similar failure.

Astrobotic's first Peregrine lander, which the company called Peregrine Mission One, launched January 8 aboard United Launch Alliance's first Vulcan rocket. But soon after separating from the rocket in space, the lander ran into trouble as it stepped through an activation sequence to begin priming its propulsion system.

A review board determined "the most likely cause of the malfunction was a failure of a single helium Pressure Control Calve called a PCV—Pressure Control Valve 2, within the propulsion system," said John Horack, a space industry veteran and professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at Ohio State University.

Helium was supposed to pressurize Peregrine's propulsion system and force fuel and oxidizer from the lander's onboard storage tanks into the spacecraft's small rocket engines to combust and generate thrust.

"PCV2 suffered a loss of seal capability that was most likely due to a mechanical failure in the valve caused by vibration-induced relaxation between some threaded components that are inside the valve, so a failure deep inside the valve itself," said Horack, who chaired Astrobotic's investigation into the failure of the Peregrine lander.

It didn't take long for the valve malfunction to have catastrophic consequences for Astrobotic's Peregrine lunar lander, which was attempting to become the first US spacecraft since 1972 to achieve a soft landing on the Moon.

"Upon actuating, opening, and closing the PCV2, helium began to flow uncontrollably into the oxidizer tank, and that caused a significant and rapid over-pressurization of the tank," said John Thornton, Astrobotic's CEO. "Unfortunately, the tank then ruptured and subsequently leaked oxidizer for the remainder of the mission.”

Astrobotic's ground controllers, working out of a control center at the company's headquarters in Pittsburgh, acted quickly to stabilize the situation on the spacecraft. The lander's engines used hydrazine fuel mixed with nitrogen tetroxide to generate thrust, but with its diminished supply of nitrogen tetroxide, Peregrine was unable to maneuver into orbit around the Moon and attempt a landing.

But the company kept the lander alive, and ground teams were able to make small adjustments to ensure Peregrine's solar panels pointed toward the Sun to produce power as it arced on a loop that reached approximately the distance of the Moon. Ten-and-a-half days after launch, Earth's gravity pulled it back into the atmosphere, and it burned up over the remote Pacific Ocean.

Astrobotic developed and built the Peregrine lander under contract to NASA, which awarded the company a $108 million contract to deliver a suite of government-sponsored science payloads to the lunar surface. Peregrine Mission One was the first mission launched under the umbrella of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which buys transportation from commercial vendors for science payloads heading to the Moon.

Going to the Moon on a budget

It turns out Astrobotic officials were aware of the risk of a pressure control valve failing on the Peregrine spacecraft. The lander had two of these valves, one controlling the flow of helium into the fuel tank, and another into the oxidizer tank. During ground testing before the mission, the pressure control valve on the fuel side started leaking, so engineers swapped it out for a new one. The similar valve on the oxidizer side, which ended up failing in space, showed no problems during ground tests, according to Sharad Bhaskaran, Astrobotic's mission director for Peregrine Mission One.

Although the pressure control valve on the oxidizer side was the same design, Astrobotic decided not to replace it because doing so would have required disassembling large portions of the Peregrine lander, further delaying the mission's launch, which was already running several years behind schedule.

Tests of a spare pressure control valve that were conducted following the Peregrine mission confirmed it could leak after engineers subjected it to vibrations like those it would experience during a rocket launch.

“You’ve got a threaded component inside the valve," Horack said. "So you can think about a screw and a washer, or any threaded component. And if you shake it sufficiently, you can get some changes in the mechanical configuration that will prevent the valve from seating. And it's pretty much no different than when your sink starts to drip in your kitchen. Water gets through the seal and comes out the other side. In this case, it’s helium and it's high pressure, so it's much harder to confine."

Astrobotic did not identify the third-party vendor who supplied the pressure control valve, but officials said the company is working with its supplier to redesign the component. "It is slightly different than the actual valve that flew on Peregrine, the same vendor, but we worked closely with them to redesign the internal workings," said Steve Clarke, Astrobotic's vice president of landers and spacecraft.

Astrobotic's next lander, named Griffin, is larger and more complex than Peregrine. It will use the redesigned pressure control valves, and Astrobotic will install pressure regulators and so-called latch valves in the helium system on Griffin. These new components would control the flow of helium into the propellant tanks in the event of a similar pressure control valve failure on Astrobotic's next mission, officials said Tuesday.

"We’ve got increased reliability now in the system to mitigate against that single point failure," Clarke said.

Accepting risk

One of the key tenets of NASA's CLPS program is to foster the development of a new commercial industry for transporting instruments and cargo to the Moon. These CLPS missions are precursors to future human lunar landings with the Artemis program, and CLPS contractors are trying to reach the Moon for a fraction of the cost of a typical NASA mission.

Thornton, Astrobotic's CEO, said the company had to make "tough decisions" on the Peregrine mission to keep costs down. NASA set up the CLPS program to use firm fixed price contracts, similar to the contracts the agency uses for commercial crew and cargo services for the International Space Station. This puts Astrobotic and the other CLPS companies on the hook for any cost overruns.

But unlike those programs, NASA didn't offer any of the CLPS contractors up-front money to develop their spacecraft.

"We do have to keep it in context that this is not a multibillion-dollar mission," Thornton said. "These are the first missions. It’s a little bit like the first launch of a new launch vehicle in a commercial paradigm. How many times have we seen a first launch fail? It’s part of the development cycle. It’s part of how we learn. It’s part of how we get better as an industry."

NASA officials have said they're willing to accept risk on the CLPS program. When the agency set up the program in 2018, officials used the sports analogy of taking "shots on goal" for the approach they wanted to take with CLPS.

Intuitive Machines, a Houston-based company, launched the second CLPS mission a month after Astrobotic's failed Peregrine mission. Their Nova-C lander touched down on the Moon on February 22, marking the first successful controlled lunar landing by a US spacecraft in more than 51 years.

Astrobotic currently has one more CLPS contract to use the Griffin lander. NASA originally contracted with Astrobotic to use Griffin to deliver a half-ton rover named VIPER to the Moon's south polar region. But NASA canceled the VIPER rover project in July after it ran over budget and behind schedule. NASA is soliciting ideas from US companies to take over the VIPER rover, which is fully assembled but in need of testing, if the companies can afford to pay the remaining costs to get it to the launch pad.

NASA is keeping its $323 million contract with Astrobotic for the Griffin lander mission, which is now slated to launch in late 2025, but the agency won't have any significant science payloads on the spacecraft. Thornton said Astrobotic is seeking opportunities to fill some of the Griffin lander's excess capacity with payloads from other customers, but time is short, with a launch scheduled for next year.

NASA will provide Astrobotic with a mass simulator to maintain the weight and balance of the Griffin lander without VIPER. The space agency is also flying a laser retroreflector array on Griffin, and Astrobotic will use the mission to deploy its own privately-developed small lunar rover, a fraction of the size of VIPER, on the Moon.

Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA's science directorate, told reporters last month that he wants to see Astrobotic demonstrate the Griffin lander because it can deliver heavier cargo to the lunar surface than most other CLPS providers. Astrobotic says Griffin can deliver nearly 1,400 pounds (625 kilograms) of payload mass to the lunar surface, while Peregrine has a payload capacity of up to 220 pounds (100 kilograms).

Astrobotic doesn't have any more missions on the books with its smaller Peregrine lander, but Bhaskaran said the Peregrine design could be repurposed as a tug or a spacecraft platform for applications other than lunar landings.

Other important systems on the Peregrine lander performed well over the craft's 10-and-a-half days of operations. All of the other anomalies on the spacecraft were either resolved in real-time by Astrobotic's ground team, or were not significant, company officials said.

“I think the decisions that were made at each point in time were sound engineering decisions and sound programmatic decisions," Horack said. "If you're going to ask me what I wish we had, I wish we had a more robust design of the valve. Sometimes hardware just fails."

"We’re trying to do a mission at a price point that has never been possible before, and as such, we have to make decisions on where to focus and how quickly we can get to launch, and we’re trying to balance that," Thornton said. "And I think we got really, really close. I’m very confident that with Griffin, we’re going to hit the right balance, and we’re going to stick that landing and be ultimately successful.”

SpaceX is set to launch the 14th crewed flight on its Dragon spacecraft early on Tuesday morning—and it's an intriguing one.

This Polaris Dawn mission, helmed and funded by an entrepreneur and billionaire named Jared Isaacman, is scheduled to lift off at 3:38 am ET (07:38 UTC) on Tuesday from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

This is just the second free-flying Crew Dragon mission that SpaceX has flown, and like the Inspiration4 mission that came before it, Polaris Dawn will once again field an entire crew of private astronauts. Although this is a private spaceflight, it really is not a space tourism mission. Rather, it seeks to push the ball of exploration forward. Isaacman has emerged as one of the most serious figures in commercial spaceflight in recent years, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to fly into space and push forward the boundaries of what private citizens can do in space.

"The idea is to develop and test new technology and operations in furtherance of SpaceX's bold vision to enable humankind to journey among the stars," Isaacman said last week during a news conference ahead of Tuesday's launch.

A novel step forward

Isaacman, chief executive of the Shift4 payments company, led the Inspiration4 mission in September 2021, which was unique because the crew consisted of himself—an experienced pilot—and three newcomers to spaceflight. Isaacman used the world's first all-civilian spaceflight, on a private vehicle, to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for charity and expand the window of who could become an astronaut.

Yet whereas Inspiration4 felt like something of a novelty, Polaris Dawn is truly pushing the boundary of private spaceflight forward. Working closely with SpaceX, Isaacman has plotted a five-day flight that will accomplish a number of significant tasks after it launches.

During the initial hours of the spaceflight, the crew will seek to fly in a highly elliptical orbit, reaching an altitude as high as 1,400 km (870 miles) above the planet's surface. This will be the highest Earth-orbit mission ever flown by humans and the farthest any person has flown from Earth since the Apollo Moon landings more than half a century ago. This will expose the crew to a not insignificant amount of radiation, and they will collect biological data to assess harms.

The Resilience spacecraft will then descend toward a more circular orbit about 700 km above the Earth's surface. Assuming a launch on Tuesday, the crew will don four spacesuits on Friday and open the hatch to the vacuum of space. Then Isaacman, followed by mission specialist Sarah Gillis, will each briefly climb out of the spacecraft into space.

Isaacman's interest in performing the first private spacewalk accelerated, by years, SpaceX's development of these spacesuits. This really is just the first generation of the suit, and SpaceX is likely to continue iterating toward a spacesuit that has its own portable life support system (PLSS). This is the "backpack" on a traditional spacesuit that allows NASA astronauts to perform spacewalks untethered to the International Space Station.

The general idea is that, as the Starship vehicle makes the surface of the Moon and eventually Mars more accessible to more people, future generations of these lower-cost spacesuits will enable exploration and settlement. That journey, in some sense, begins with this mission's brief spacewalks, with Isaacman and Gillis tethered to the Dragon vehicle for life support.

Lasers and SpaceXers

Isaacman and his crew will also conduct a number of other research experiments, including trying to better understand a recently detected but major concern of space habitation, spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome. This will also be the first crewed mission to test Starlink-based laser communications in space.

Then, there is the crew. Isaacman's close friend, retired US Air Force Col. Scott "Kidd" Poteet, will be the mission's pilot, with Gillis and Anna Menon serving as mission specialists. Both Gillis and Menon are SpaceX engineers who worked with Isaacman during Inspiration4. Now, they'll become the first SpaceX employees to ever go into orbit, bringing their experiences back to share with their colleagues.

This is the first of three "Polaris" missions that Isaacman is scheduled to fly with SpaceX. The plan for the second Polaris mission, also to fly on a Dragon spacecraft, has yet to be determined. But it may well employ a second-generation spacesuit based on learnings from this spaceflight. The third flight, unlikely to occur before at least 2030, will be an orbital launch aboard the company's Starship vehicle—making Isaacman and his crew the first to fly on that rocket.

Jumping into a new car from the driver's seat of something built before 2010 can cause quite the case of future shock. Over that time, automakers have been on a technology frenzy, loading up new vehicles with all manner of gizmos, gadgets, and features, some meant to make your life easier, others to make your journey safer. But do car buyers actually want all this stuff? A new survey by JD Power suggests they may not.

With enough time, a new convenience feature just becomes something buyers expect to be there. Starter motors replaced hand cranks for a reason, and I imagine most modern motorists would prefer not to deal with manual chokes. Manual window winders became more expensive and heavier than electric ones, leading to their extinction.

Some of the technology creep has come about by regulation or the threat of it. While many bemoan the "iPad on the dash," the legal requirement for a backup camera means there needs to be a screen in the car to display that feed. Steering wheels and dashboards grew to conceal airbags. And now vehicle fascias conceal sensors that can alert the driver or stop the car in the event of an imminent head-on crash.

But according to JD Power's Tech Experience Survey, which "measures problems encountered and the user experience with advanced technologies as they first enter the market," advanced technology in cars needs to solve real problems, and too much tech simply doesn't do that.

For example, drivers generally appreciate advanced driver assistance systems, known as ADAS in the industry; blind spot monitoring solves a real problem. But does anyone ever actually use their automatic parking system? JD Power found that systems that partially automate a driving task—even the most advanced hands-free systems—had a low perceived usefulness, a finding that dovetails nicely with data published last month by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety that revealed partial automation did not make cars any safer.

Enough with the screens

My current bete noir is the trend for automakers to include an additional infotainment screen directly in front of the front passenger, separate from the main infotainment screen in the center stack. Blame Ferrari, which started adding a passenger screen to its supercars in the perhaps misguided impression that Ferrari drivers wanted their passengers to know how fast they were actually going.

The early Ferrari passenger displays were somewhat limited, but they have morphed into a second fully fledged infotainment display for the not-driver. Porsche did this with the Taycan, then Mercedes brought us the "hyperscreen," which was really three separate displays and plenty of blank dashboard, all bonded to a single sheet of glass. The latest trick, as seen in some new Audis, is to have an active privacy mode so that the passenger can watch video but the driver can't see anything at all on that display.

If the idea of giving passengers their own display when there's already one immediately next to it sounds excessive, welcome to my club. We're not alone—JD Power says passenger screens are negatively reviewed by many owners and notes that "it is difficult for dealers to teach new owners how to use the primary infotainment screen, let alone a second one."

Other examples of new technology solving a nonexistent problem include facial recognition, fingerprint scanners, and gesture control. Having experienced all three in various new cars over the past few years, I am not surprised by their inclusion. I never felt safe enough, though, with Genesis' facial recognition to leave the key at home, and BMW's gesture controls mean that you might accidentally turn the sound system to full volume if you talk with your hands too much.

But not every new innovation was met with opprobrium. JD Power calls out AI-based features like smart climate control as having quickly won popularity.

"A strong advanced tech strategy is crucial for all vehicle manufacturers, and many innovative technologies are answering customer needs," said Kathleen Rizk, senior director of user experience benchmarking and technology at JD Power. "At the same time, this year’s study makes it clear that owners find some technologies of little use and/or are continually annoying."

The market research company says its tech survey is designed to help automakers decide where to invest their R&D resources. If we start seeing any objectionable in-car tech become less common, we'll know which OEMs were paying attention.

Ten years ago next month NASA announced that Boeing, one of the agency's most experienced contractors, won the lion's share of government money available to end the agency's sole reliance on Russia to ferry its astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit.

At the time, Boeing won $4.2 billion from NASA to complete development of the Starliner spacecraft and fly a minimum of two, and potentially up to six, operational crew flights to rotate crews between Earth and the International Space Station (ISS). SpaceX won a $2.6 billion contract for essentially the same scope of work.

A decade later the Starliner program finds itself at a crossroads after Boeing learned it will not complete the spacecraft's first Crew Flight Test with astronauts onboard. NASA formally decided Saturday that Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched on the Starliner capsule June 5, will instead return to Earth inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Put simply, NASA isn't confident enough in Boeing's spacecraft after it suffered multiple thrusters failures and helium leaks on the way to the ISS.

So where does this leave Boeing with its multibillion contract? Can the company fulfill the breadth of its commercial crew contract with NASA before the space station's scheduled retirement in 2030? It now seems that there is little chance of Boeing flying six more Starliner missions without a life extension for the ISS. Tellingly, perhaps, NASA has only placed firm orders with Boeing for three Starliner flights once the agency certifies the spacecraft for operational use.

Boeing's bottom line

Although Boeing did not make an official statement Saturday on its long-term plans for Starliner, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters he received assurances from Boeing's new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, that the company remains committed to the commercial crew program. And it will take a significant commitment from Boeing to see it through. Under the terms of its fixed price contract with NASA, the company is on the hook to pay for any expenses to fix the thruster and helium leak problems and get Starliner flying again.

Boeing has already reported $1.6 billion in charges on its financial statements to pay for delays and cost overruns on the Starliner program. That figure will grow as the company will likely need to redesign some elements in the spacecraft's propulsion system to remedy the problems encountered on the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission. NASA has committed $5.1 billion to Boeing for the Starliner program, and the agency has already paid out most of that funding.

The next step for Starliner remains unclear, and we'll assess that in more detail later in the story. Had the Starliner test flight ended as expected, with its crew inside, NASA targeted no earlier than August 2025 for Boeing to launch the first of its six operational crew rotation missions to the space station. In light of Saturday's decision, there's a high probability Starliner won't fly with astronauts again until at least 2026.

Starliner safely delivered astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the space station on June 6, a day after their launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. But five of the craft's 28 reaction control system thrusters overheated and failed as it approached the outpost. After the failures on the way to the space station, NASA's engineers were concerned Starliner might suffer similar problems, or worse, when the control jets fired to guide Starliner on the trip back to Earth.

On Saturday, senior NASA leaders decided it wasn't worth the risk. The two astronauts, who originally planned for an eight-day stay at the station, will now spend eight months on the orbiting research lab until they come back to Earth with SpaceX.

If it's not a trust problem, is it a judgement issue?

Boeing managers had previously declared Starliner was safe enough to bring Wilmore and Williams home. Mark Nappi, Boeing's Starliner program manager, regularly appeared to downplay the seriousness of the thruster issues during press conferences throughout Starliner's nearly three-month mission.

So why did NASA and Boeing engineers reach different conclusions? "I think we’re looking at the data and we view the data and the uncertainty that’s there differently than Boeing does," said Jim Free, NASA's associate administrator, and the agency's most senior civil servant. "It’s not a matter of trust. It’s our technical expertise and our experience that we have to balance. We balance risk across everything, not just Starliner."

The people at the top of NASA's decision-making tree have either flown in space before, or had front-row seats to the calamitous decision NASA made in 2003 to not seek more data on the condition of space shuttle Columbia's left wing after the impact of a block of foam from the shuttle's fuel tank during launch. This led to the deaths of seven astronauts, and the destruction of Columbia during reentry over East Texas. A similar normalization of technical problems, and a culture of stifling dissent, led to the loss of space shuttle Challenger in 1986.

"We lost two space shuttles as a result there not being a culture in which information could come forward," Nelson said Saturday. "We have been very solicitous of all of our employees that if you have some objection, you come forward. Spaceflight is risky, even at its safest, and even at its most routine. And a test flight by nature is neither safe nor routine. So the decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring the Starliner home uncrewed is the result of a commitment to safety."

Now, it seems that culture may truly have changed. With SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft available to give Wilmore and Williams a ride home, this ended up being a relatively straightforward decision. Ken Bowersox, head of NASA's space operations mission directorate, said the managers polled for their opinion all supported bringing the Starliner spacecraft back to Earth without anyone onboard.

However, NASA and Boeing need to answer for how the Starliner program got to this point. The space agency approved the launch of the Starliner CFT mission in June despite knowing the spacecraft had a helium leak in its propulsion system. Those leaks multiplied once Starliner arrived in orbit, and are a serious issue on their own that will require corrective actions before the next flight. Ultimately, the thruster problems superseded the seriousness of the helium leaks, and this is where NASA and Boeing are likely to face the most difficult questions moving forward.

Boeing's previous Starliner mission, known as Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2), successfully launched in 2022 and docked with the space station, later coming back to Earth for a parachute-assisted landing in New Mexico. The test flight achieved all of its major objectives, setting the stage for the Crew Flight Test mission this year. But the spacecraft suffered thruster problems on that flight, too.

Several of the reaction control system thrusters stopped working as Starliner approached the space station on the OFT-2 mission, and another one failed on the return leg of the mission. Engineers thought they fixed the problem by introducing what was essentially a software fix to adjust timing and tolerance settings on sensors in the propulsion system, supplied by Aerojet Rocketdyne.

That didn't work. The problem lay elsewhere, as engineers discovered during testing this summer, when Starliner was already in orbit. Thruster firings at White Stands, New Mexico, revealed a small Teflon seal in a valve can bulge when overheated, restricting the flow of oxidizer propellant to the thruster. NASA officials concluded there is a chance, however small, that the thrusters could overheat again as Starliner departs the station and flies back to Earth—or perhaps get worse.

"We are clearly operating this thruster at a higher temperature, at times, than it was designed for," said Steve Stich, NASA's commercial crew program manager. "I think that was a factor, that as we started to look at the data a little bit more carefully, we’re operating the thruster outside of where it should be operated at."

In the doghouse

This is the fundamental design flaw that will cause the Starliner test flight to come to a disappointing end. The thrusters are clustered in four doghouse-shaped propulsion pods around the circular perimeter of the Starliner spacecraft's service module. Thermal modeling now shows these doghouses act like a thermos, trapping heat from the thrusters as they fire over and over in pulses.

“As we look back at OFT-2 now, with this newer lens of what we learned at White Sands, certainly we could have explored OFT-2 in a little more detail, either leading to some redesign of the doghouse to get the thermal environmental lower, or operate the thrusters differently," Stich said.

"It’s easier to do that in hindsight," he said. "If we had went back and thought about the whole integrated problem a little bit more, could we have done some kind of testing? What I would say is it’s very difficult to test the doghouse environment on the ground, where you’ve got thrusters that fire in multiple directions, and it's very hard on the ground to have a test facility, a vacuum chamber, that accommodates thruster firings in multiple directions.

"We thought, obviously, we had done enough analysis to show that the thrusters would be within the temperatures that they were qualified for," Stich said. "Clearly, there were some misses in qualification. We’re going to go through that data in more detail post-flight, and then figure out what we can do to go fix them.”

He said NASA is also re-evaluating its qualification and certification processes to determine if the agency should change any of its procedures to reduce the chance of any similar misses in the future.

Scott Hubbard, a former director of NASA's Ames Research Center and a member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, told Ars earlier this month that NASA and Boeing should revisit their decision to launch the Crew Flight Test with unresolved technical problems. "Was the decision well-supported, or did someone have 'launch fever?'" Hubbard asked.

Starliner's problems go back much further than 2022. Software woes cut short Starliner's first test flight in 2019 before it could dock at the International Space Station, and they forced Boeing to fly a second test flight, OFT-2, to gain confidence that the spacecraft could safely fly astronauts. NASA and Boeing then delayed the second unpiloted test flight nearly a year to overcome an issue with corroded valves in the ship's propulsion system.

Last year, just a couple of months before it was supposed to launch on the crew test flight, officials discovered a design problem with Starliner's parachutes and found that Boeing installed flammable tape inside the capsule's cockpit. All of that happened before Starliner reached the launch pad for the CFT mission.

SpaceX, which NASA has tapped to rescue the Starliner crew, has now launched eight operational long-duration crew missions to the International Space Station to date, plus an initial piloted test flight of the Dragon spacecraft in 2020, and several more fully private human spaceflight missions. SpaceX has finished all of its work in its initial commercial crew contract with NASA, and is now working off of an extended contract to carry the program through 2030, the planned retirement date for the ISS.

What's next for Starliner?

NASA officials said Saturday it is premature to decide whether the agency will require Boeing to conduct yet another test flight of the Starliner spacecraft, or if Starliner could be pressed into operational service after Boeing resolves the myriad problems with the craft's propulsion system.

In either case, don't count on another Starliner crew flight next year. NASA will have to continue leaning on SpaceX, which has shown it is up to the task of launching long-duration crews to the space station every six months. The agency's goal from the start of the commercial crew program has been to fully certify SpaceX and Boeing for operational crew missions, allowing NASA to alternate between Crew Dragon and Starliner missions, with each company flying once per year.

This would give NASA another layer of redundancy for getting its crews to the space station. Right now, the prime route is through SpaceX. NASA continues to fly one astronaut on each Russian Soyuz spacecraft, in exchange for a seat for a Russian cosmonaut on each SpaceX crew mission.

It's not yet clear if NASA will officially classify the situation with the Starliner Crew Flight Test as a "mishap" or a "loss of mission." Such a determination could trigger a more formal independent investigation, which might trigger longer delays in Starliner's next flight, in whatever form it takes.

One thing that could complicate the investigation into the thruster problem is that the control jets are located on the Starliner service module, which jettisons from the crew section of the spacecraft before reentry. The service module will burn up over the Pacific Ocean, so engineers won't have a chance to get their hands on the suspect hardware.

Assuming the investigation doesn't uncover any additional problems, and NASA and Boeing return Starliner to flight with astronauts in 2026, there will not be enough time left in the space station's remaining life—as it stands today—for Starliner to fly all six of its contracted missions at a rate of one per year. It's difficult to imagine a scenario where NASA elects to fly astronauts to the space station exclusively on Starliner, given SpaceX's track record of success and the fact that NASA is already paying SpaceX for crew missions through the end of this decade.

It is noteworthy to mention here that NASA has only given Boeing the "Authority To Proceed" for three of the potential six operational Starliner missions. This milestone, known as ATP, is a decision point in contracting lingo where the customer—in this case, NASA—places a firm order for a deliverable. NASA has previously said it awards these task orders about two to three years prior to a mission's launch.

The commercial crew contracts are structured as Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) agreements, where NASA can order individual missions from SpaceX and Boeing as needed. If SpaceX keeps performing well and the space station is actually decommissioned in 2030, it may turn out that NASA officials decide they just don't need more than three operational flights of Starliner.

But that would mean NASA turning its back on a decade-and-a-half of established policy. Apart from ensuring redundancy for crew transportation to the space station, one of the reasons for selecting two contractors in 2014 was to allow Boeing and SpaceX to compete on technical ability and price. A decade later, there's a clear winner on these criterion.

After retiring the International Space Station, NASA wants commercial companies to deploy human outposts in low-Earth orbit. Ideally, these future space stations will be cheaper to operate than the ISS, and open to use by NASA and money-making commercial ventures. Future space station operators will require transportation for crew and cargo, just as the ISS does.

Some companies involved in commercial space stations are in direct competition with SpaceX. For example, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's space company, has partnered with Boeing to ferry people to and from its proposed Orbital Reef space station using Starliner, rather than choosing SpaceX for the job.

But there are many open questions about when the first commercial space stations might be in orbit, and the market outlook for these projects. In the end, with human lives at stake and a bottom line to worry about, the owners of a private space station will almost certainly go with the less expensive, flight-proven vehicle to transport people to and from orbit.

NASA and its international partners haven't ruled out extending the life of the ISS beyond 2030. If that happens, Boeing's Starliner could be in the mix for more crew flights. However, once NASA and its partners give the "go" to nudge the ISS out of orbit, its fiery plunge through the atmosphere will not just be the coda to 30-plus years of space station operations, it may also mark the end of Boeing's foray into the realm of commercial human spaceflight.

Following weeks of speculation, NASA finally made it official on Saturday: two astronauts who flew to the International Space Station on Boeing's Starliner spacecraft in June will not return home on that vehicle. Instead, the agency has asked SpaceX to use its Crew Dragon spacecraft to fly astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back to Earth.

"NASA has decided that Butch and Suni will return with Crew-9 next February," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson at the outset of a news conference on Saturday afternoon at Johnson Space Center.

In a sign of the gravity surrounding the agency's decision, both Nelson and NASA's deputy administrator, Pam Melroy, attended a Flight Readiness Review meeting held Saturday in Houston. During that gathering of the agency's senior officials, an informal "go/no go" poll was taken. Those present voted unanimously for Wilmore and Williams to return to Earth on Crew Dragon. The official recommendation of the Commercial Crew Program was the same, and Nelson accepted it.

Therefore, Boeing's Starliner spacecraft will undock from the station early next month—the tentative date, according to a source, is September 6—and attempt to make an autonomous return to Earth and land in a desert in the southwestern United States.

Then, no earlier than September 24, a Crew Dragon spacecraft will launch with two astronauts (NASA has not named the two crew members yet) to the space station with two empty seats. Wilmore and Williams will join these two Crew-9 astronauts for their previously scheduled six-month increment on the space station. All four will then return to Earth on the Crew Dragon vehicle.

Saturday's announcement has big implications for Boeing, which entered NASA's Commercial Crew Program more than a decade ago and lent legitimacy to NASA's efforts to pay private companies for transporting astronauts to the International Space Station. The company's failure—and despite the encomiums from NASA officials during Saturday's news conference, this Starliner mission is a failure—will affect Boeing's future in spaceflight. Ars will have additional coverage of Starliner's path forward later today.

Never could get comfortable with thruster issues

For weeks after Starliner's arrival at the space station in early June, officials from Boeing and NASA expressed confidence in the ability of the spacecraft to fly Wilmore and Williams home. They said they just needed to collect a little more data on the performance of the vehicle's reaction control system thrusters. Five of these 28 small thrusters that guide Starliner failed during the trip to the space station.

Engineers from Boeing and NASA tested the performance of these thrusters at a facility in White Sands, New Mexico, in July. Initially, the engineers were excited to replicate the failures observed during Starliner's transit to the space station. (Replicating failures is a critical step to understanding the root cause of a hardware problem.)

However, what NASA found after taking apart the failed thrusters was concerning, said the chief of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, Steve Stich.

"I would say the White Sands testing did give us a surprise," Stich said Saturday. "It was this piece of Teflon that swells up and got in the flow path and causes the oxidizer to not go into the thruster the way it needs to. That's what caused the degradation of thrust. When we saw that, I think that's when things changed a bit for us."

When NASA took this finding to the thruster's manufacturer, Aerojet Rocketdyne, the propulsion company said it had never seen this phenomenon before. It was at this point that agency engineers started to believe that it might not be possible to identify the root cause of the problem in a timely manner and become comfortable enough with the physics to be sure that the thruster problem would not occur during Starliner's return to Earth.

Thank you for flying SpaceX

The result of this uncertainty is that NASA will now turn to the other commercial crew provider, SpaceX. This is not a pleasant outcome for Boeing which, a decade ago, looked askance at SpaceX as something akin to space cowboys. I have covered the space industry closely during the last 15 years, and during most of that time Boeing was perceived by much of the industry as the blueblood of spaceflight while SpaceX was the company that was going to kill astronauts due to its supposed recklessness.

Now the space agency is asking SpaceX to, in effect, rescue the Boeing astronauts currently on the International Space Station.

It won't be the first time that SpaceX has helped a competitor recently. In the last two years SpaceX has launched satellites for a low-Earth orbit Internet competitor, OneWeb, after Russia's space program squeezed the company; it has launched Europe's sovereign Galileo satellites after delays to the Ariane 6 rocket; and it has launched the Cygnus spacecraft built by NASA's other space station cargo services provider, Northrop Grumman, multiple times. Now SpaceX will help out Boeing, a crew competitor.

After Saturday's news conference, I asked Jim Free, NASA's highest-ranking civil servant, what he made of the once-upstart SpaceX now helping to backstop the rest of the Western spaceflight community. Without SpaceX, after all, NASA would not have a way to get crew or cargo to the International Space Station.

"They're flying a lot, and they're having success," Free said. "And you know, when they have an issue, they find a way to recover like with the second-stage issue, We set out to have two providers to take crew to station to have options, and they've given us the option. In the reverse, Boeing could have been out there, and we still would face the same thing if they had a systemic Dragon problem, Boeing would have to bring us back. But I can't argue with how much they've flown, that's for sure, and what they've flown."

Lithium-ion battery fires can be intense and frightening. As someone who used to repair second-hand smartphones, I’ve extinguished my fair share of flaming iPhones with punctured lithium-ion batteries. And the type of smartphone battery in your pocket right now is similar to what’s inside of electric vehicles. Except, the EV battery stores way more energy—so much energy that some firefighters are receiving special training to extinguish the extra-intense EV flames that are emitted by burning EV batteries after road accidents.

If you’ve been reading the news about EVs, you’ve likely encountered plenty of scary articles about battery fires on the rise. Recently, the US National Transportation Safety Board and the California Highway Patrol announced they are investigating a Tesla semi truck fire that ignited after the vehicle struck a tree. The lithium-ion battery burned for around four hours.

“Fires because of battery manufacturing defects are really very rare,” says Matthew McDowell, a codirector of Georgia Tech’s Advanced Battery Center. “Especially in electric vehicles, because they also have battery management systems.” The software keeps tabs on the different cells that comprise an EV’s battery and can help prevent the battery from being pushed beyond its limits.

How do electric vehicle fires happen?

During a crash that damages the EV battery, a fire may start with what’s called thermal runaway. EV batteries aren’t one solid brick. Rather, think of these batteries as a collection of many smaller batteries, called cells, pressed up against each other. With thermal runaway, a chemical reaction located in one of the cells lights an initial fire, and the heat soon spreads to each adjacent cell until the entire EV battery is burning.

Greg Less, director of the University of Michigan’s Battery Lab, breaks down EV battery fires into two distinct categories: accidents and manufacturing defects. He considers accidents to be everything from a collision that punctures the battery to a charging mishap. “Let's take those off the table,” says Less. “Because, I think people understand that, regardless of the vehicle type, if you're in an accident, there could be a fire.”

While all EV battery fires are hard to put out, fires from manufacturing defects are likely more concerning to consumers, due to their seeming randomness. (Think back to when all those Samsung phones had to be recalled because battery issues made them fire hazards.) How do these rare issues with EV battery manufacturing cause fires at what may feel like random moments?

It all comes down to how the batteries are engineered. “There's some level of the engineering that has gone wrong and caused the cell to short, which then starts generating heat,” says Less. “Heat causes the liquid electrolyte to evaporate, creating a gas inside the cell. When the heat gets high enough, it catches fire, explodes, and then propagates to other cells.” These kinds of defects are likely what caused the highly publicized recent EV fires in South Korea, one of which damaged over a hundred vehicles in a parking lot.

How to react if your EV catches fire

According to the National Fire Prevention Agency, if an EV ever catches fire while you’re behind the wheel, immediately find a safe way to pull over and get the car away from the main road. Then, turn off the engine and make sure everyone leaves the vehicle immediately. Don’t delay things by grabbing personal belongings, just get out. Remain over 100 feet away from the burning car as you call 911 and request the fire department.

Also, you shouldn’t attempt to put out the flame yourself. This is a chemical fire, so a couple buckets of water won’t sufficiently smother the flames. EV battery fires can take first responders around 10 times more water to extinguish than a fire in a gas-powered vehicle. Sometimes the firefighters may decide to let the battery just burn itself out, rather than dousing it with water.

Once an EV battery catches fire, it’s possible for the chemical fire to reignite after the initial burn dies down. It’s even possible for the battery to go up in flames again days later. “Both firefighters and secondary responders, such as vehicle recovery or tow companies, also need to be aware of the potential for stranded energy that may remain in the undamaged portions of the battery,” says Thomas Barth, an investigator and biomechanics engineer for the NTSB, in an emailed statement. “This energy can pose risks for electric shock or cause the vehicle to reignite.”

Although it may be tempting to go back into the car and grab your wallet or other important items if the flame grows smaller or goes out for a second, resist the urge. Wait until your local fire department arrives to assess the overall situation and give you the all clear. Staying far away from the car also helps minimize your potential for breathing in unhealthy fumes emitted from the battery fire.

How could EV batteries be safer?

In addition to quick recalls and replacements of potentially faulty lithium-ion batteries, both researchers I spoke with were excited about future possibilities for a different kind of battery, called solid-state, to make EVs even more reliable. “These batteries could potentially show greater thermal stability than lithium-ion batteries,” says McDowell. “When it heats up a lot, it may just remain pretty stable.” With a solid-state battery, the liquid electrolyte is no longer part of battery cells, removing the most flammable aspect of battery design.

These solid-state batteries are already available in some smaller electronics, but producing large versions of the batteries at vast scale continues to be a hurdle that EV manufacturers are working to overcome.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

With the impending arrival of the 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccines approved yesterday, some Americans are now gaming out when to get their dose—right away while the summer wave is peaking, a bit later in the fall to maximize protection for the coming winter wave, or maybe a few weeks before a big family event at the end of the year? Of course, the group pondering such a question is just a small portion of the US.

Only 22.5 percent of adults and 14 percent of children in the country are estimated to have gotten the 2023–2024 vaccine. In contrast, 48.5 percent of adults and 54 percent of children were estimated to have gotten a flu shot. The stark difference is despite the fact that COVID-19 is deadlier than the flu, and the SARS-CoV-2 virus is evolving faster than seasonal influenza viruses.

In a press briefing Friday, federal health officials were quick to redirect focus when reporters raised questions about the timing of COVID-19 vaccination in the coming months and the possibility of updating the vaccines twice a year, instead of just once, to keep up with an evolving virus that has been producing both summer and winter waves.

"The current problem is not that the virus is evolving so much, at least in terms of my estimation," Peter Marks, the top vaccine regulator at the Food and Drug Administration, told journalists. "It's that we don't have the benefits of the vaccine, which is [to say] that it's not vaccines that prevent disease, it's vaccination. It's getting vaccines in arms." When exactly to get the vaccine is a matter of personal choice, Marks went on, but the most important choice is to get vaccinated.

Estimates for this winter

The press briefing, which featured several federal health officials, was intended to highlight the government's preparations and hopes for the upcoming respiratory virus season. The FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are urging all Americans to get their respiratory virus vaccines—flu, COVID-19, and RSV.

CDC Director Mandy Cohen introduced an updated data site that provides snapshots of local respiratory virus activity, national trends, data visualizations, and the latest guidance in one place. HHS, meanwhile, highlighted a new outreach campaign titled "Risk Less. Do More." to raise awareness of COVID-19 and encourage vaccination, particularly among high-risk populations. For those not at high risk, health officials still emphasize the importance of vaccination to lower transmission and prevent serious outcomes, including long COVID. "There is no group without risk," Cohen said, noting that the group with the highest rates of emergency department visits for COVID-19 were children under the age of 5, who are not typically considered high risk.

So far, CDC models are estimating that this year's winter wave of COVID-19 will be similar, if not slightly weaker on some metrics, than last year's winter wave, Cohen said. But she emphasized that many assumptions go into the modeling, including how the virus will evolve in the near future and the amount of vaccine uptake. The modeling assumes the current omicron variants stay on their evolutionary path and that US vaccination coverage is about the same as last year. Of course, beating last year's vaccine coverage could blunt transmission.

Free tests coming

"We need to continue to be vigilant," Cohen said, emphasizing that we should protect ourselves with vaccines, testing, and treatments. "We have the tools to do it. We just need to use them."

To that end, Dawn O’Connell, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS, made the announcement in today's briefing that in late September, the government will once again provide free COVID-19 tests. Households will be able to order four free tests on the website COVIDTests.gov.

The FDA's Marks, meanwhile, highlighted yesterday's vaccine approvals and explained further why the agency has taken such a firm stance to try to couple the vaccines against flu and COVID-19, which are unquestionably different diseases. It comes down to opportunity, he said.

"The point of this campaign is that, if you have someone in the [doctor's] office and you can get them to get a COVID-19 vaccine while they're getting their flu vaccine, and we get that immunity into them, then that is probably better even than what we have now, which is people who haven't had a COVID-19 vaccine for one or two years," Marks said. "Even though COVID is not the flu, being able to get that shot in the arm is what we really need to have happen."

There's also the fact that winter is still when we see the highest levels of hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19, Cohen noted.

When to get vaccinated

For those who are already certain they'll get a COVID-19 vaccine this year and are only deciding on when exactly to get it, the officials offered some things to consider. First, the CDC recommends that Americans get their 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccines sometime in September or October, with the idea of boosting protection against the winter wave (not necessarily the summer wave). Deciding whether to go within that window or later, Marks leaned on the earlier side, though he considered it a personal choice.

"We're talking about a vaccine that is covering a virus that is continuing to evolve. And it is likely that what is going to be there in four or five months from now will further evolve from where it is now," Marks said. "Now, getting vaccinated a little later probably will help protect against it then, too. But getting vaccinated now probably gives you the maximum amount of protection against what is currently circulating, and that will last for several months at least."

"I can tell you," he concluded, "I already have my appointment."

In 2019, an agency within the US Department of Defense released a call for research projects to help the military deal with the copious amount of plastic waste generated when troops are sent to work in remote locations or disaster zones. The agency wanted a system that could convert food wrappers and water bottles, among other things, into usable products, such as fuel and rations. The system needed to be small enough to fit in a Humvee and capable of running on little energy. It also needed to harness the power of plastic-eating microbes.

“When we started this project four years ago, the ideas were there. And in theory, it made sense,” said Stephen Techtmann, a microbiologist at Michigan Technological University, who leads one of the three research groups receiving funding. Nevertheless, he said, in the beginning, the effort “felt a lot more science-fiction than really something that would work.”

That uncertainty was key. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, supports high-risk, high-reward projects. This means there’s a good chance that any individual effort will end in failure. But when a project does succeed, it has the potential to be a true scientific breakthrough. “Our goal is to go from disbelief, like, ‘You're kidding me. You want to do what?’ to ‘You know, that might be actually feasible,’” said Leonard Tender, a program manager at DARPA who is overseeing the plastic waste projects.

The problems with plastic production and disposal are well-known. According to the United Nations Environment Program, the world creates about 440 million tons of plastic waste per year. Much of it ends up in landfills or in the ocean, where microplastics, plastic pellets, and plastic bags pose a threat to wildlife. Many governments and experts agree that solving the problem will require reducing production, and some countries and US states have additionally introduced policies to encourage recycling.

For years, scientists have also been experimenting with various species of plastic-eating bacteria. But DARPA is taking a slightly different approach in seeking a compact and mobile solution that uses plastic to create something else entirely: food for humans.

The goal, Techtmann hastens to add, is not to feed people plastic. Rather, the hope is that the plastic-devouring microbes in his system will themselves prove fit for human consumption. While Techtmann believes most of the project will be ready in a year or two, it’s this food step that could take longer. His team is currently doing toxicity testing, and then they will submit their results to the Food and Drug Administration for review. Even if all that goes smoothly, an additional challenge awaits. There’s an ick factor, said Techtmann, “that I think would have to be overcome.”

The military isn’t the only entity working to turn microbes into nutrition. From Korea to Finland, a small number of researchers, as well as some companies, are exploring whether microorganisms might one day help feed the world’s growing population.

Two birds, one stone

According to Tender, DARPA’s call for proposals was aimed at solving two problems at once. First, the agency hoped to reduce what he called supply-chain vulnerability: During war, the military needs to transport supplies to troops in remote locations, which creates a safety risk for people in the vehicle. Additionally, the agency wanted to stop using hazardous burn pits as a means of dealing with plastic waste. “Getting those waste products off of those sites responsibly is a huge lift,” Tender said.

The Michigan Tech system begins with a mechanical shredder, which reduces the plastic to small shards that then move into a reactor, where they soak in ammonium hydroxide under high heat. Some plastics, such as PET, which is commonly used to make disposable water bottles, break down at this point. Other plastics used in military food packaging—namely polyethylene and polypropylene—are passed along to another reactor, where they are subject to much higher heat and an absence of oxygen.

Under these conditions, the polyethylene and polypropylene are converted into compounds that can be upcycled into fuels and lubricants. David Shonnard, a chemical engineer at Michigan Tech who oversaw this component of the project, has developed a startup company called Resurgent Innovation to commercialize some of the technology. (Other members of the research team, said Shonnard, are pursuing additional patents related to other parts of the system.)

After the PET has broken down in the ammonium hydroxide, the liquid is moved to another reactor, where it is consumed by a colony of microbes. Techtmann initially thought he would need to go to a highly contaminated environment to find bacteria capable of breaking down the deconstructed plastic. But as it turned out, bacteria from compost piles worked really well. This may be because the deconstructed plastic that enters the reactor has a similar molecular structure to some plant material compounds, he said. So the bacteria that would otherwise eat plants can perhaps instead draw their energy from the plastic.

After the bacteria consume the plastic, the microbes are then dried into a powder that smells a bit like nutritional yeast and has a balance of fats, carbohydrates, and proteins, said Techtmann.

Research into edible microorganisms dates back at least 60 years, but the body of evidence is decidedly small. (One review estimated that since 1961, an average of seven papers have been published per year.) Still, researchers in the field say there are good reasons for countries to consider microbes as a food source. Among other things, they are rich in protein, wrote Sang Yup Lee, a bioengineer and senior vice president for research at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, in an email to Undark. Lee and others have noted that growing microbes requires less land and water than conventional agriculture. Therefore, they might prove to be a more sustainable source of nutrition, particularly as the human population grows.

Lee reviewed a paper describing the microbial portion of the Michigan Tech project and said that the group’s plans are feasible. But he pointed out a significant challenge: At the moment, only certain microorganisms are considered safe to eat, namely “those we have been eating thorough fermented food and beverages, such as lactic acid bacteria, bacillus, some yeasts.” But these don’t degrade plastics.

Safety first

Before using the plastic-eating microbes as food for humans, the research team will submit evidence to regulators indicating that the substance is safe. Joshua Pearce, an electrical engineer at Western University in Ontario, Canada, performed the initial toxicology screening, breaking the microbes down into smaller pieces, which they compared against known toxins.

“We’re pretty sure there’s nothing bad in there,” said Pearce. He added that the microbes have also been fed to C. elegans roundworms without apparent ill-effects, and the team is currently looking at how rats do when they consume the microbes over the longer term. If the rats do well, then the next step would be to submit data to the Food and Drug Administration for review.

At least a handful of companies are in various stages of commercializing new varieties of edible microbes. A Finnish startup, Solar Foods, for example, has taken a bacterium found in nature and created a powdery product with a mustard brown hue that has been approved for use in Singapore. In an email to Undark, Chief Experience Officer Laura Sinisalo said that the company has applied for approval in the EU and the UK, as well as in the US, where it hopes to enter the market by the end of this year.

Even if the plastic-eating microbes turn out to be safe for human consumption, Techtmann said, the public might still balk at the prospect of eating something nourished on plastic waste. For this reason, he said, this particular group of microbes might prove most useful on remote military bases or during disaster relief, where it could be consumed short-term, to help people survive.

“I think there’s a bit less of a concern about the ick factor,” said Techtmann, “if it’s really just, ‘This is going to keep me alive for another day or two.’”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

Welcome to Edition 7.08 of the Rocket Report!  Lots of news as always, but what I'm most interested in is the launch of the Polaris Dawn mission. If all goes as planned, the flight will break all sorts of ground for commercial spaceflight, including the first-ever private spacewalk. Best of luck to Jared Isaacman and his crew on their adventurous mission.

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 One blows up a booster. The first stage of Rocket Factory Augsburg's first orbital launcher was destroyed in a fireball during a test-firing Monday evening at a spaceport in Scotland, Ars reports. It's a notable event for the European commercial space industry as the German launch startup aimed to send its first rocket into space later this year and appeared to be running ahead of several competitors in Europe's commercial launch industry that are also developing rockets to deploy small satellites in orbit. BBC obtained video of the fiery explosion.

Now comes the hard work of an anomaly investigation ... In a statement, RFA said there was "an anomaly that led to the loss of the stage" Monday evening. The company said no one was injured and reported that the launch pad had been "saved and secured." This was the same rocket RFA planned to launch on its inaugural test flight. The hot fire test Monday was the first with all nine engines on RFA One's first stage. "We are now working closely with SaxaVord Spaceport and the authorities to gather data and info to eventually resolve what happened," RFA said. "We will take our time to analyze and assess the situation." On Thursday, the cause was attributed to a turbopump fire. (submitted by SPHK_Tech, gizmo23, brianrhurley, Jay500001, and Ken the Bin)

Orbex says it's targeting a 2025 launch, but get real. UK-based Orbex is now projecting a 2025 first launch of its small launch vehicle, the company's chief executive told Space News recently. Phil Chambers, chief executive of the United Kingdom-based company, said the company was making progress on both its Prime small rocket and launch site at Sutherland Spaceport in northern Scotland. “We are shooting for a 2025 launch,” Chambers said but declined to be more specific about a launch date other than to say that the company wanted to avoid a launch in winter because of poor weather conditions. “But I do want it to be 2025.”

Shooting to be the first orbital launch success from the UK ... There is an interesting detail in the story that caught my eye: "Vehicle subsystems are going through critical design reviews, with some flight hardware under construction." Let's be honest, if they're still working through the critical design review process for subsystems, the chance of a launch in 2025 is zero, and honestly for a company founded in 2015 it should not provide much confidence that the company will ever successfully launch an orbital rocket. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

SSLV makes its third launch. India successfully launched its third Small Satellite Launch Vehicle on Thursday, placing an Earth observation satellite into orbit and completing the solid rocket’s development process, Space News reports. The rocket carried the experimental Earth observation EOS-08 spacecraft into its intended 475-kilometer circular orbit for the Indian Space Research Organization.

Two for three ... According to ISRO chairman S. Somanath, the successful completion of the SSLV’s development phase paves the way for technology transfer to Indian industry, enabling serial production and operational deployment of the SSLV. The first SSLV flight failed in August 2022 when an upper stage malfunction left its payloads stranded in a very low orbit. The second launch, in February 2023, was successful. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Indian firm plans suborbital launch. A Chennai-based startup, Space Zone India, plans to launch its Rhumi-01 suborbital rocket on Saturday from a mobile launcher. The hybrid vehicle, combining both solid and liquid rocket propellants, will carry three cubesats and 50 smaller picosats on its debut launch, the New Indian Express reports.

Seeking to recycle rockets ... According to the company's website, the Rhumi launch vehicle can reach an altitude of about 30 km. The three cubesats are designed to monitor and collect data on atmospheric conditions, including cosmic radiation intensity, UV radiation intensity, air quality, and more. The company said most of the rocket is designed to be recoverable and reused. (submitted by brianrhurley)

Sierra Space kicking the tires on ULA. Boeing and Lockheed Martin are in talks to sell their rocket-launching joint venture United Launch Alliance to Sierra Space, Reuters reports. A deal could value ULA at around $2 billion to $3 billion, sources told the publication. A potential deal would be an ambitious move for Sierra Space, spun off from Sierra Nevada in 2021 to focus on bringing to market its long-delayed Dream Chaser spaceplane. A deal with ULA could give the company a rocket, Vulcan, for uncrewed and potentially crewed launches of Dream Chaser.

A source believes the deal is unlikely ... ULA has been up for sale, actively, for more than a year. Blue Origin and Cerberus Capital Management had placed bids in early 2023 for the company, but none of those offers resulted in a deal. I heard about Sierra's interest last Friday, but the Reuters story came out before I could write something up. I will say, from the reporting I have been able to do, that the discussions between Sierra and ULA's owners were serious and substantial. However, at this time, my best information indicates that a sale is unlikely to happen. The parents believe ULA is worth more than Sierra is willing to pay. Sierra would also need to borrow substantially to make any transaction happen. (submitted by Hacker Uno and Ken the Bin)

Polaris Dawn set for launch next week. A private astronaut mission that will attempt the first commercial spacewalk is ready for launch on a SpaceX Crew Dragon, Space News reports. SpaceX has said it is targeting the early morning hours of Tuesday, August 27, for the launch attempt on a Falcon 9 rocket. The mission, designed to last five days, will take the spacecraft to altitudes as high as 1,400 kilometers, the highest for a crewed mission since Apollo 17 went to the moon in 1972. The mission will also test laser inter-satellite links with SpaceX Starlink spacecraft and perform 40 experiments.

Highlight is the first private EVA ... All four members will don new spacesuits developed by SpaceX as the cabin will be brought to vacuum. Two of the four will briefly emerge from the hatch to conduct tests during the two-hour spacewalk. "The idea is to learn as much as we possibly can about this suit and get it back to the engineers to inform future suit design evolutions," Jared Isaacman, the billionaire backing the Polaris program of missions and commander of Polaris Dawn, said at a press conference shortly after arriving at KSC this week. "It feels like a huge honor to have that opportunity to test it out on this flight." (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Blue Origin experiences rocket stage incidents. Blue Origin sustained failures in recent weeks of testing, including a factory mishap that damaged a portion of a future New Glenn rocket, Bloomberg reports. The upper portion of one rocket crumpled into itself, in part due to worker error, while it was being moved to a storage hangar, the publication reported. In a separate incident, another upper rocket portion failed during stress testing and exploded. Repairs are underway, another person said, noting there were no injuries during either episode.

Running into a tight timeline ... Notably, the incidents with these stages involved hardware that had been intended for use on the second and third launches. The upper stage that will be used by the first launch of New Glenn appears to not have been impacted. It is unclear whether these incidents will impact the debut launch of New Glenn, which is facing a tight deadline in mid-October to launch a Mars mission for NASA. More on this in the next item. (submitted by brianrhurley)

Payload for New Glenn's debut shipped to launch site. Two NASA spacecraft built by Rocket Lab are on the road from California to Florida this weekend to begin preparations for launch on Blue Origin's first New Glenn rocket, Ars reports. These two science probes must launch between late September and mid-October to take advantage of a planetary alignment between Earth and Mars that only happens once every 26 months. NASA tapped Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space company, to launch the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission with a $20 million contract.

Will it or won't it be ready? ... Rocket Lab announced Friday that its manufacturing team packed the satellites and shipped them from their factory in Long Beach, California. Over the weekend, they arrived at a clean room facility just outside the gates of NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where technicians will perform final checkups and load hydrazine fuel into both spacecraft, each a little more than a half-ton in mass. There's a lot for Blue Origin to accomplish in the next couple of months if the New Glenn rocket is going to be ready to send the ESCAPADE mission toward Mars in this year's launch period. Blue Origin has not fully exercised a New Glenn rocket during a launch countdown, hasn't pumped a full load of cryogenic propellants into the launch vehicle, and hasn't test-fired a full complement of first stage or second stage engines.

SLS contract hints at additional delays. NASA plans to extend the contract for one element of the current version of the Space Launch System with options that suggest the agency is protecting against multi-year delays in future missions, Space News reports. The contract concerns the Launch Vehicle Stage Adaptor, which connects the core stage to the upper stage of the Block 1 version of the SLS rocket. Teledyne Brown Engineering is the prime contractor for the adaptor under a contract awarded in 2014. The contract, valued at about $200 million, was scheduled to end in September.

Atremis III could be delayed to the end of the decade ... ln an August 14 procurement filing, NASA announced its intent to extend that contract to at least September 2026. That would allow Teledyne Brown to complete work on the third and final LVSA "as well as to ultimately conclude LVSA activities" under the contract, which runs through the Artemis III lunar landing mission. The proposed extension also includes several options for additional extensions. The first is a nine-month extension allowing the contract to run through June 2027. Additional options allow for the contract to be extended through December 2029. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Next three launches

August 23: Falcon 9 | Starlink 9-5 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 08:00 UTC

August 26: Ceres 1S | Unknown Payload | Haiyang Spaceport, China offshore seas | 05:20 UTC

August 27: Falcon 9 | Polaris Dawn | Kennedy Space Center, Fla. | 07:38 UTC

With the country experiencing a relatively large summer wave of COVID-19, the Food and Drug Administration is considering signing off on this year's strain-matched COVID-19 vaccines as soon as this week, according to a report by CNN that cited unnamed officials familiar with the matter.

Last year, the FDA gave the green light for the 2023–2024 COVID shots on September 11, close to the peak of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in that year's summer wave. This year, the summer wave began earlier and, by some metrics, is peaking at much higher levels than in previous years.

Currently, wastewater detection of SARS-CoV-2 shows "very high" virus levels in 32 states and the District of Colombia. An additional 11 states are listed as having "high" levels. Looking at trends, the southern and western regions of the country are currently reporting SARS-CoV-2 levels in wastewater that rival the 2022–2023 and 2023–2024 winter waves, which both peaked at the very end of December.

Test positivity—a metric that has weakened given the dramatic decline in testing—shows a weekly test positivity rate of 18.1 percent for mid-August (amid a test volume of roughly 43,000). Such a rate, if truly reflective of cases, has not been seen since the initial towering omicron wave of January 2022, which peaked at 30.5 percent (with a test volume of roughly 991,000).

The good news is that given the substantial accumulation of protection from past infections and vaccinations, the two most serious metrics—emergency department visits and deaths—have not shown similar rises. The weekly percentage of emergency department visits with a COVID-19 diagnosis is low and similar to last year's summer wave. Deaths are likewise low, though they are still only provisional counts for the most recent weeks.

The FDA has firmly embraced a strategy to offer annual COVID-19 vaccines in the run-up to winter waves, not summer waves. The agency's thinking has always been to encourage Americans to get their flu and COVID-19 vaccines together between September and November, just before a mob of cold-weather respiratory illnesses strike together. The fresh vaccination boost can dull the levels of severe respiratory disease at a time when health care systems are most at risk of becoming overwhelmed.

Seasonality

But, while seasonal flu and some other respiratory viruses reliably surge almost exclusively in the winter, the seasonality of COVID-19 was never a given. And, so far, summer waves have arisen as consistently as winter ones, creating some awkwardness for the vaccine releases.

Some experts have recommended getting a COVID-19 vaccine to protect against the summer surge. "Now is the time to get a dose with this surge," Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told CNN on Sunday.

However, the only vaccines currently available target last year's strains (related to the XBB.1.5 omicron variant), which are long gone and may not offer strong protection against current strains (JN.1 and KP.2 omicron variants). Even if the 2024–2025 KP.2-targeting vaccine is approved by the FDA this week and hits pharmacy shelves next week, a dose takes two weeks to produce full protection. By that time, the summer wave will likely be declining. In fact, it looks to have already peaked in some parts of the country, including in some southern and western areas.

The other thing to consider is timing for maximum protection for the likely winter wave. For healthy people five years old and above, the CDC recommended getting only one shot last year. The shots offer peak protection for around four months. If you get your annual shot at the beginning of September, your protection may be on the decline if COVID-19 peaks again at the turn of the year, as it has the past two years.

According to the 2023–2024 guidance, people who are 65 and older can get a second COVID-19 booster four months after getting their first. People who are moderately or severely immunocompromised may also get additional doses of the updated COVID-19 vaccine.

The Moon may not have much of an atmosphere, mostly because of its weak gravitational field (whether it had a substantial atmosphere billions of years ago is debatable). But it is thought to presently be maintaining its tenuous atmosphere—also known as an exosphere—because of meteorite impacts.

Space rocks have been bombarding the Moon for its 4.5-billion-year existence. Researchers from MIT and the University of Chicago have now found that lunar soil samples collected by astronauts during the Apollo era show evidence that meteorites, from hulking meteors to micrometeoroids no bigger than specks of dust, have launched a steady flow of atoms into the exosphere.

Though some of these atoms escape into space and others fall back to the surface, those that do remain above the Moon create a thin atmosphere that keeps being replenished as more meteorites crash into the surface.

“Over long timescales, micrometeorite impact vaporization is the primary source of atoms in the lunar atmosphere,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Science Advances.

Ready for launch

When NASA sent its orbiter LADEE (Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer) to the Moon in 2013, the mission was intended to find out the origins of the Moon’s atmosphere. LADEE observed more atoms in the atmosphere during meteor showers, which suggested impacts had something to do with the atmosphere. However, it left questions about the mechanism that converts impact energy into a diffuse atmosphere.

To find these answers, a team of MIT and University of Chicago researchers, led by professor Nicole Nie of MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, needed to analyze the isotopes of elements in lunar soil that are most susceptible to the effects of micrometeoroid impacts. They chose potassium and rubidium.

Potassium and rubidium ions are especially prone to two processes: impact vaporization and ion sputtering.

Impact vaporization results from particles colliding at high speeds and generating extreme amounts of heat that excite atoms enough to vaporize the material they are in and send them flying. Ion sputtering involves high-energy impacts that set atoms free without vaporization. Atoms that are released by ion sputtering tend to have more energy and move faster than those released by impact vaporization.

Either of these can create and maintain the lunar atmosphere in the wake of meteorite impacts.

So, if atoms sent into the atmosphere by ion sputtering have an energy advantage, then why did the researchers find that most atoms in the atmosphere actually come from impact vaporization?

Touching back down

Since the lunar soil samples provided by NASA had previously had their lighter and heavier isotopes of potassium and rubidium quantified, Lie’s team used calculations to determine which collision process is more likely to keep different isotopes from fleeing the atmosphere.

The researchers found that atoms transferred to the atmosphere by ion sputtering are sent zooming at such high energies that they often reach escape velocity—the minimum velocity needed to escape the Moon’s already feeble gravity—and continue to travel out into space. Atoms that end up in the atmosphere can also be lost from the atmosphere, after all.

The fraction of atoms that reach escape velocity after impact vaporization depends on the temperature of those atoms. Lower energy levels associated with impact vaporization result in lower temperatures, which give atoms a lower chance of escape.

“Impact vaporization is the dominant long-term source of the lunar atmosphere, likely contributing more than 65 percent of atmospheric [potassium] atoms, with ion sputtering accounting for the rest,” Lie and her team said in the same study.

There are other ways atoms are lost from the lunar atmosphere. It is mostly lighter ions that tend to stick around in the exosphere, with ions falling back to the surface if they’re too heavy. Others are photoionized by electromagnetic radiation from the solar wind and often carried off into space by solar wind particles.

What we’ve learned about the lunar atmosphere through lunar soil could influence studies of other bodies. Impact vaporization has already been found to launch atoms into the exosphere of Mercury, which is thinner than the Moon’s. Studying Martian soil, which may land on Earth with sample return missions in the future, could also give more insight into how meteorite impacts affect its atmosphere.

As we approach a new era of manned lunar missions, the Moon may have more to tell us about where its atmosphere comes from—and where it goes.

Science Advances, 2024.  DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adm7074

Welcome to Edition 7.07 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX has not missed a beat since the Federal Aviation Administration gave the company a green light to resume Falcon 9 launches after a failure last month. In 19 days, SpaceX has launched 10 flights of the Falcon 9 rocket, taking advantage of all three of its Falcon 9 launch pads. This is a remarkable cadence in its own right, but even though it's a small sample size, it is especially impressive right out of the gate after the rocket's grounding.

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.

A quick turnaround for Rocket Lab. Rocket Lab launched its 52nd Electron rocket on August 11 from its private spaceport on Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand, Space News reports. The company's light-class Electron rocket deployed a small radar imaging satellite into a mid-inclination orbit for Capella Space. This was the shortest turnaround between two Rocket Lab missions from its primary launch base in New Zealand, coming less than nine days after an Electron rocket took off from the same pad with a radar imaging satellite for the Japanese company Synspective. Capella's Acadia 3 satellite was originally supposed to launch in July, but Capella requested a delay to perform more testing of its spacecraft. Rocket Lab swapped its place in the Electron launch sequence and launched the Synspective mission first.

Now, silence at the launch pad ... Rocket Lab hailed the swap as an example of the flexibility provided by Electron, as well as the ability to deliver payloads to specific orbits that are not feasible with rideshare missions, according to Space News. For this tailored launch service, Rocket Lab charges a premium launch price over the price of launching a small payload on a SpaceX rideshare mission. However, SpaceX's rideshare launches gobble up the lion's share of small satellites within Rocket Lab's addressable market. On Friday, a Falcon 9 rocket is slated to launch 116 small payloads into polar orbit. Rocket Lab, meanwhile, projects just one more launch before the end of September and expects to perform 15 to 18 Electron launches this year, a record for the company but well short of the 22 it forecasted earlier in the year. Rocket Lab says customer readiness is the reason it will be far short of projections.

Defense contractors teaming up on solid rockets. Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics are joining forces to kickstart solid rocket motor production, announcing a strategic teaming agreement today that could see new motors roll off the line as early as 2025, Breaking Defense reports. The new agreement could position a third vendor to enter into the ailing solid rocket motor industrial base, which currently only includes L3Harris subsidiary Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman in the United States. Both companies have struggled to meet demands from weapons makers like Lockheed and RTX, which are in desperate need of solid rocket motors for products such as Javelin or the PAC-3 missiles used by the Patriot missile defense system.

Pressure from startups ... Demand for solid rocket motors has skyrocketed since Russia's invasion of Ukraine as the United States and its partners sought to backfill stocks of weapons like Javelin and Stinger, as well as provide motors to meet growing needs in the space domain. Although General Dynamics has kept its interest in the solid rocket motor market quiet until now, several defense tech startups, such as Ursa Major Technologies, Anduril, and X-Bow Systems, have announced plans to enter the market. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Going polar with crew. SpaceX will fly the first human spaceflight over the Earth’s poles, possibly before the end of this year, Ars reports. The private Crew Dragon mission will be led by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur named Chun Wang, and he will be joined by a polar explorer, a roboticist, and a filmmaker whom he has befriended in recent years. The "Fram2" mission, named after the Norwegian research ship Fram, will launch into a polar corridor from SpaceX's launch facilities in Florida and fly directly over the north and south poles. The three- to five-day mission is being timed to fly over Antarctica near the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, to afford maximum lighting.

Wang's inclination is Wang's prerogative ... Wang told Ars he wanted to try something new, and flying a polar mission aligned with his interests in cold places on Earth. He's paying the way on a commercial basis, and SpaceX in recent years has demonstrated it can launch satellites into polar orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida, something no one had done in more than 50 years. The highest-inclination flight ever by a human spacecraft was the Soviet Vostok 6 mission in 1963 when Valentina Tereshkova's spacecraft reached 65.1 degrees. Now, Fram2 will fly repeatedly and directly over the poles.

Russia's launch rate has plummeted. A Progress cargo supply spacecraft launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan early on Thursday, local time. The mission was successful, and Russia has launched hundreds of these spacecraft before. So it wasn't all that big of a deal, except for one small detail: This was just Russia's ninth orbital launch of the year, Ars reports. At this pace, it appears that the country's space program is on pace for the fewest number of Russian or Soviet space launches in a year since 1961. That was when Yuri Gagarin went to space at the dawn of the human spaceflight era.

Thanks, Putin ... There are myriad reasons for this, including a decision by Western space powers to distance themselves from the Russian space corporation, Roscosmos, after the invasion of Ukraine. This has had disastrous effects on the Russian space program, but only recently have we gotten any insight into how deep those impacts have cut. In a recent interview with Russian state-owned media, Andrei Yelchaninov, the first deputy director of Roscosmos, said the contract cancellations by "unfriendly contacts"—a presumed reference to former US and European customers—has cost Russia's space program 180 billion rubles, or about $2.1 billion.

10 launches in 19 days. SpaceX suspended flights of its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket for 15 days last month as engineers investigated why an upper stage failed to put a batch of Starlink Internet satellites into the correct orbit. Since resuming Falcon 9 launches on July 27, SpaceX's launch team has been working around the clock, flying 10 missions in 19 days at a pace matching the fastest launch cadence the company has ever achieved. Another launch is on tap for Friday. Seven of these flights have launched more batches of Starlink satellites, while the other three missions deployed a Cygnus supply ship en route to the International Space Station, two Norwegian communications satellites for Arctic coverage, and two commercial high-resolution Earth-imaging satellites for Maxar.

Stars aligning ... SpaceX has launched 80 flights with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rocket family so far this year. That comes out to an average of one launch every 2.9 days, so SpaceX's launch teams are used to firing off rockets at a high rate. But there are some limits to SpaceX's launch cadence. Those push points include the turnaround of SpaceX's three Falcon 9 launch pads—two in Florida and one in California—between flights, the production of brand-new second stages for each mission, and the availability of drone ships for offshore landings of reusable boosters. Three of the 10 Falcon 9 flights in the last three weeks employed mission profiles that allowed the booster to return to land on solid ground near the launch site, easing the strain on SpaceX's fleet of offshore landing platforms. This is one reason, perhaps along with stockpiled upper stages, that SpaceX was able to launch so many missions over the last 19 days.

Stoke Space wants to walk before running. Stoke Space has captured a lot of attention in the launch industry for its ambition to field a fully reusable rocket, with recoverable booster and upper stages, something no other company outside of SpaceX is seriously pursuing anywhere in the world. But for the initial flights of its Nova rocket, Stoke Space will take the same approach as SpaceX did with its Falcon 9 rocket—it will try to get to orbit first before experimenting with rocket landings and reuse, TechCrunch reports. A draft environmental assessment for Stoke's plans to launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, does not consider reusable operations at all, but only missions of the medium-class Nova rocket in a fully expendable configuration.

A familiar pattern ... This is exactly what SpaceX did with its Falcon 9 rocket, which didn't fly with landing legs until its ninth launch in 2014. SpaceX landed the first Falcon 9 booster intact in December 2015. In its draft environmental assessment report, Stoke is seeking authorization from the Space Force to conduct around two launches next year—the first year of operation—and then it anticipates a maximum launch cadence of 10 launches per year. According to TechCrunch, Stoke told regulators that Nova will be capable of carrying up to 7,000 kilograms to low-Earth orbit, the maximum payload capacity of the rocket when it will not be reused. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)

Engineers are reportedly leaving ULA. With a record number of launches due next year, United Launch Alliance is losing key staff to competitors, including Blue Origin and SpaceX, Bloomberg reports. This year alone, ULA has lost about 45 of its 105 launch operations engineers—the people who test, assemble, and prepare every rocket and its cargo to fly—at its primary launch site in Florida, a source told Bloomberg. The lack of experienced personnel has postponed work for future missions, the person said. During preparations for two missions earlier this year, ULA had to fly in workers from other locations to help prepare rockets for liftoff.

Ramping up Vulcan ... Despite stiff competition from SpaceX, ULA, a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has a relatively bright short- to medium-term future. ULA was once the only company certified to launch national security satellites for the US military. SpaceX is now winning nearly half of all available military launch contracts, but the Pentagon has booked ULA's new Vulcan rocket to launch the majority of its military space missions for the next few years. SpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's space company, are currently in a competition for rights to launch the next batch of military satellites from 2027 through 2032. Tory Bruno, ULA's CEO, says ULA is under pressure to ramp up operations with its Vulcan rocket (Vulcan's second test flight is scheduled for next month), but added he doesn't have concerns that the company is understaffed.

FAA postpones Starship hearings. The Federal Aviation Administration announced Monday it will postpone four in-person public meetings in South Texas and one virtual meeting to brief citizens and receive public comments on SpaceX's plans to launch and land up to 25 Starships annually from its Starbase facility at Boca Chica Beach. The FAA is in the process of reviewing SpaceX's proposal and issued a draft environmental assessment on the matter last month. It's unusual for the FAA to postpone such meetings, which are part of the government's standard process for granting environmental approvals. An agency spokesperson said the FAA is seeking additional information from SpaceX before rescheduling the public meetings, but he did not answer further questions from Ars on the nature of the information sought by the FAA.

Could this be the reason? … A few hours after the FAA announced the postponement of the public meetings, CNBC reported that SpaceX has violated environmental regulations by repeatedly releasing pollutants into or near bodies of water in Texas. CNBC cited a notice of violation issued by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) that focused on SpaceX’s water deluge system at its launch pad at Starbase. The Environmental Protection Agency also informed SpaceX that it violated the Clean Water Act with the same type of activity, according to CNBC. SpaceX called CNBC's report "factually inaccurate" in a statement published on X, adding that the launch pad's deluge system only uses "potable (drinking) water." SpaceX said the Texas environmental regulator and the EPA have allowed SpaceX to continue using the water system for Starship engine tests and launches if the company obtains a new permit from the TCEQ, which will cover SpaceX's plans to bring online a second launch pad with a new deluge system.

Next three launches

August 16: SSLV | EOS-08 | Satish Dhawan Space Center, India | 03:47 UTC

August 16: Long March 2D | Unknown Payload | Xichang Satellite Launch Center, China | 07:35 UTC

August 16: Falcon 9 | Transporter 11 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 18:20 UTC

Some 66 million years ago, an errant asteroid wiped out three-quarters of all plant and animal species on Earth, most notably taking down the dinosaurs. That has long been the scientific consensus. However, three years ago, Harvard astronomers offered an alternative hypothesis: The culprit may have been a fragment of a comet thrown off-course by Jupiter's gravity and ripped apart by the Sun.

Now an international team of scientists have reaffirmed the original hypothesis, according to a new paper published in the journal Science. They analyzed ruthenium isotopes from the Chicxulub impact crater and concluded the impact was due to a carbonaceous-type asteroid, likely hailing from beyond Jupiter.

As previously reported, the most widely accepted explanation for what triggered that catastrophic mass extinction is known as the "Alvarez hypothesis," after the late physicist Luis Alvarez and his geologist son, Walter. In 1980, they proposed that the extinction event may have been caused by a massive asteroid or comet hitting the Earth. They based this conclusion on their analysis of sedimentary layers at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary (the K-Pg boundary, formerly known as the K-T boundary) found all over the world, which included unusually high concentrations of iridium—a metal more commonly found in asteroids than on Earth. (That same year, Dutch geophysicist Jan Smit independently arrived at a similar conclusion.)

Since then, scientists have identified a likely impact site: a large crater in Chicxulub, Mexico, in the Yucatan Peninsula, first discovered by geophysicists in the late 1970s. The impactor that created it was sufficiently large (between 11 and 81 kilometers, or 7 to 50 miles) to melt, shock, and eject granite from deep inside the Earth, probably causing a megatsunami and ejecting vaporized rock and sulfates into the atmosphere.

This in turn had a devastating effect on the global climate, leading to mass extinction. In 2022, scientists suggested that one reason so many species perished while others survived may have been because the impact occurred in the spring (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), thereby interrupting the annual reproductive cycles of many species.

In 2016, a scientific drilling project led by the International Ocean Discovery Program took core samples from the crater's peak ring, confirming that the rock had been subjected to immense pressure over a period of minutes. A 2020 paper concluded that the impactor struck at the worst possible angle and caused maximum damage. It has been estimated that the impact would have released energy over a billion times higher than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Asteroid or comet?

Harvard's Avi Loeb and his then-undergraduate student Amir Siraj challenged the asteroid-as-impactor hypothesis in a 2021 paper, proposing instead that the impact was caused by a special kind of comet—originating from a field of debris at the edge of our solar system known as the Oort cloud—that was thrown off course by Jupiter's gravity toward the Sun. The Sun's powerful tidal forces then ripped off pieces off the comet—akin to what happened to the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 when it crashed into Jupiter in 1994—and one of the larger fragments of this "cometary shrapnel" eventually collided with Earth.

Loeb and Siraj's analysis was based on numerical simulations to calculate the flux of long-period comets in our solar system. They found that events like the one described above should happen frequently enough and produce enough sufficiently large fragments to result in a significantly higher impact rate of Chicxulub-sized impactors than the background comet or asteroid populations. They argued that their comet hypothesis would also explain the Chicxulub impactor's unusual composition of carbonaceous chondrite—rare for asteroids but more common for long-period comets—which is consistent with an Oort cloud origin rather than the main asteroid belt.

This latest paper addresses that latter point in particular. Mario Fischer-Gödde of the University of Cologne in Germany and his co-authors took samples from the K-Pg boundary layer from a site at Stevns Klint in Denmark and analyzed the ruthenium isotopes via plasma mass spectrometry. They did the same for samples taken from the sites of five other known asteroid impacts over the last 541 million years, as well as ancient Archean samples (between 3.5 to 3.2 billion years old).

Fischer-Gödde et al. concluded that the ruthenium signatures in the K-Pg samples were a close match to asteroids known as carbonaceous chondrites, so the impact most likely resulted from a C-type asteroid that hailed from the outer Solar System. They were able to rule out the possibility of a comet impactor proposed by Loeb and Siraj since the ruthenium data was inconsistent with that hypothesis. Most of the other samples had ruthenium isotope signatures consistent with salicaceous (S-type) asteroids from the inner Solar System, although the ancient Archean samples were also consist with a C-type asteroid.

Science, 2024. DOI: 10.1126/science.adk4868  (About DOIs).

When it was first discovered, the coelacanth caused a lot of excitement. It was a living example of a group of fish that was thought to only exist as fossils. And not just any group of fish. With their long, stalk-like fins, coelacanths and their kin are thought to include the ancestors of all vertebrates that aren't fish—the tetrapods, or vertebrates with four limbs. Meaning, among a lot of other things, us.

Since then, however, evidence has piled up that we're more closely related to lungfish, which live in freshwater and are found in Africa, Australia, and South America. But lungfish are a bit weird. The African and South American species have seen the limb-like fins of their ancestors reduced to thin, floppy strands. And getting some perspective on their evolutionary history has proven difficult because they have the largest genomes known in animals, with the South American lungfish genome containing over 90 billion base pairs. That's 30 times the amount of DNA we have.

But new sequencing technology has made tackling that sort of challenge manageable, and an international collaboration has now completed the largest genome ever, one where all but one chromosome carry more DNA than is found in the human genome. The work points to a history where the South American lungfish has been adding 3 billion extra bases of DNA every 10 million years for the last 200 million years, all without adding a significant number of new genes. Instead, it seems to have lost the ability to keep junk DNA in check.

Going long

The work was enabled by a technology generically termed "long-read sequencing." Most of the genomes that were completed were done using short reads, typically in the area of 100–200 base pairs long. The secret was to do enough sequencing that, on average, every base in the genome should be sequenced multiple times. Given that, a cleverly designed computer program could figure out where two bits of sequence overlapped and register that as a single, longer piece of sequence, repeating the process until the computer spit out long strings of contiguous bases.

The problem is that most non-microbial species have stretches of repeated sequence (think hundreds of copies of the bases G and A in a row) that were longer than a few hundred bases long—and nearly identical sequences that show up in multiple locations of the genome. These would be impossible to match to a unique location, and so the output of the genome assembly software would have lots of gaps of unknown length and sequence.

This creates extreme difficulty for genomes like that of the lungfish, which is filled with non-functional "junk" DNA, all of which is typically repetitive. The software tends to produce a genome that's more gap than sequence.

Long-read technology gets around that by doing exactly what its name implies. Rather than being able to sequence fragments of 200 bases or so, it can generate sequences that are thousands of base pairs long, easily covering the entire repeat that would have otherwise created a gap. One early version of long-read technology involved stuffing long DNA molecules through pores and watching for different voltage changes across the pore as different bases passed through it. Another had a DNA copying enzyme make a duplicate of a long strand and watch for fluorescence changes as different bases were added. These early versions tended to be a bit error-prone but have since been improved, and several newer competing technologies are now on the market.

Back in 2021, researchers used this technology to complete the genome of the Australian lungfish—the one that maintains the limb-like fins of the ancestors that gave rise to tetrapods. Now they're back with the genomes from African and South American species. These species seem to have gone their separate ways during the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana, a process that started nearly 200 million years ago. And having the genomes of all three should give us some perspective on the features that are common to all lungfish species, and thus are more likely to have been shared with the distant ancestors that gave rise to tetrapods.

Lots of junk, no cleaning service

For starters, it's worth noting again how 20 years of technology development has completely revolutionized things. The human genome, at 3 billion bases' worth of DNA, took multiple international consortiums years to finish. For this paper, a team of just 25 people managed to complete genomes that were 40 billion and 90 billion bases long. Those 90 billion bases were spread across 19 chromosomes, and 18 of those were each longer than the entire human genome put together.

The human genome is also an interesting point of comparison in that our genome has roughly 20,000 protein-coding genes. And these fish, with up to 30 times as much DNA... also have about 20,000 protein-coding genes. As do pretty much all the other tetrapods we've looked at (there are exceptions, like a frog called Xenopus laevis, that carries around an extra set of chromosomes). In fact, the genes appear to be in a configuration that is likely to represent something similar to that found in the ancestor of all tetrapods, meaning that genes that are next to each other now are likely to have been next to each other nearly 400 million years ago.

So, if that extra DNA isn't there to support a lot of additional genes, what's it doing there? All indications are nothing, or at least nothing that's useful to the fish. Instead, most of the additional DNA appears to be junk.

Junk DNA is a generic term that describes genome debris that has a tendency to accumulate. It can be superfluous copies of useful genes, damaged copies of unused ones, pieces of inactivated viruses, and DNA-level parasites called transposable elements that can move about the genome. In the case of the lungfish, most of the junk seems to be transposable elements; the South American species, which has twice the amount of DNA as its two relatives, also has twice the number of transposable elements.

Most genomes have a large number of transposable elements—they account for about 40 percent of human DNA, for example. But they have also evolved mechanisms that keep these things from hopping out of control. Those mechanism seem to be considerably weaker in the lungfish. The fish make fewer functional copies of an RNA that helps shut down transposable element movement. And a gene family that silences transposable elements appears to have far fewer members in the South American lungfish. (Humans and other lungfish have about 300 copies, while the South American lungfish only has 23.)

The net result appears to be enough extra copies of transposable elements to create the incredible bloat found in the South American species. Based on evidence of when the different species separated, the researchers estimate that the South American lungfish genome has been growing by the equivalent of a human genome every 10 million years, and doing so for roughly 200 million years.

What made us?

Aside from examining the explosion of junk DNA, the researchers also spent some time looking into the thin fins found in the African and South American species. The researchers hypothesized that this might be related to the activity of the gene Sonic hedgehog (yes, named after the game character), which helps set up the pattern of specialized digits seen in tetrapods. The gene is normally active in a specific location in the developing limb, as well as the fin of the Australian lungfish. But that activity is missing in the African and South American species.

There were some other changes in gene activity found in the developing fins, suggesting that the difference doesn't involve the loss or gain of a gene, but rather changes in how existing genes are used. And this happened at a time where, at least physically, the Australian lineage remained largely unchanged.

The explosion in genome size tells us something about why the amount of an organism's DNA seems largely unrelated to its physical or behavioral complexity. But the real value of these genomes is going to be once people start using them to understand what changes took place between these fish and the tetrapods that ultimately took over land.

Nature, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07830-1  (About DOIs).