Three-hundred million years ago, the skies of the late Palaeozoic era were buzzing with giant insects. Meganeuropsis permiana, a predatory insect resembling a modern-day dragonfly, had a wingspan of over 70 centimeters and weighed 100 grams. Biologists looked at these ancient behemoths and asked why bugs aren’t this big anymore. Thirty years ago, they came up with an answer known as the “oxygen constrain hypothesis.”

For decades, we thought that any dragonflies the size of hawks needed highly oxygenated air to survive because insect breathing systems are less efficient than those of mammals, birds, or reptiles. As atmospheric oxygen levels dropped, there wasn’t enough to support giant bugs anymore. “It’s a simple, elegant explanation,” said Edward Snelling, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Pretoria. “But it’s wrong.”

Insect breathing

Unlike mammals, insects don’t have a centralized pair of lungs and a closed circulatory system that delivers oxygen-rich blood to their tissues. “They breathe through internalized tubing called the tracheal system,” Snelling explained.

Air enters the insect’s body through specialized portholes on their exoskeleton called spiracles. From there, it travels down larger tubes, the tracheae, which gradually branch into microscopically thin, blind-ending tubes known as tracheoles. These tracheoles are embedded deep within the insect’s tissues, and mitochondria in neighboring cells cluster next to them.

Insects can actively pump air in and out of the larger tracheae by flexing their bodies, but this active pumping stops at the very end of the line, in the tiny tracheoles. Here, oxygen delivery relies on passive diffusion to cross the final barrier into the tissue.

The problem with diffusion is that it’s notoriously slow. The oxygen constraint hypothesis argued that the larger the insect grows, the further the oxygen must travel to reach the deepest tissues.

“As the insects get bigger and bigger, the challenge of diffusion becomes greater,” Snelling said.

To prevent the muscles from suffocating, a bigger insect would need significantly wider or far more numerous tracheoles to maintain the supply of oxygen, which implied there had to be a structural tipping point. If an insect gets too big, the volume of breathing tubes required to supply its muscles with oxygen would take up too much physical space. The tracheoles would crowd the very muscle fibers they were trying to fuel, leaving the insect with severely impaired flight performance.

The late Palaeozoic was a time of hyperoxia, with atmospheric oxygen levels peaking around 30 percent, compared to the 21 percent we breathe today. Hyperoxia was supposed to let insects bypass the limitations of their breathing system and grow larger.

But recently, Snelling led a team of researchers that tested this idea, as they describe in a recent Nature study. It just didn’t hold up.

Tubing inspection

Snelling and his colleagues gathered 44 species of insects across ten distinct orders, representing nearly the entire body mass range of modern flying bugs. On the tiny end of the spectrum was the Trioza erytreae, weighing only 0.334 milligrams. On the heavy end was Goliathus albosignatus, the famous Goliath beetle that weighs 7.74 grams. “We were able to look at insects varying 10,000-fold in body size,” Snelling says.

Using transmission electron microscopes, the team took 1,320 high-resolution images of the insects’ flight muscles. They wanted to measure exactly what percentage of the muscle volume was being taken up by tracheoles, a metric known as tracheolar volume density. If the oxygen-constraint hypothesis was correct, the tracheolar volume density should have dramatically increased as the insects got larger, creeping close to a theoretical limit that would compromise the muscle’s mechanical power. “In our mind, it stands to reason that if very large insects are really challenged, then there should be evidence of this in the tracheoles,” Snelling said.

But his team found no such evidence.

It turned out that in the 0.5 milligram insects, tracheoles took up 0.47 percent of the flight muscle space. In the 5-gram insects, that number rose only to 0.83 percent. Over a 10,000-fold jump in body mass, the relative space occupied by these breathing tubes increased by a factor of just 1.8.

To put that into perspective, the blood-filled capillaries that serve the same oxygen-delivery function in the aerobic flight and cardiac muscles of birds and mammals typically take up around 10 percent of the tissue volume. Insect breathing tubes, by contrast, typically stay at 1 percent or less.

Next, the team extrapolated these findings to estimate the tracheolar volume density in the ancient giants, starting with Meganeuropsis permiana.

Supporting the giant

Assuming a mass of 100 grams, Snalling’s newly conceived scaling equations predict that Meganeuropsis permiana’s tracheoles would have still occupied only about 1 percent of its flight muscle volume. The absolute upper statistical limit places it no higher than 3 percent. So it apparently had plenty of room to spare.

Furthermore, the team ran a sensitivity analysis using a standard 1-gram locust as a physiological model to see what would happen if an insect drastically increased its tracheal plumbing. Doing calculations based on the known locust physiology, the researchers found that tripling the tracheolar volume density from 0.6 percent to 1.8 percent would increase the system’s oxygen-diffusing capacity by over four times. This, Snelling’s analysis shows, would make oxygen delivery quite efficient without much impact on the muscle’s maximum mechanical work rate and peak metabolic rate.

To put it simply, if a giant insect needed more oxygen, evolving a denser network of tracheoles would be a cheap and effective physiological upgrade. There was likely no anatomical roadblock stopping them from doing so, and they probably wouldn’t have to sacrifice flying power to achieve it.

But if the lack of oxygen didn’t kill the giant bugs, we’re still faced with an outstanding question: What’s stopping our present bugs from evolving to the size of a pigeon?

“There are a few hypotheses that are out there,” Snelling said.

Flying snacks

Snelling’s team suggests that to understand the limiting factors in insect size, we need to look beyond the molecular diffusion of oxygen and consider the broader ecology, physical mechanics, and other aspects of whole-body physiology.

One hypothesis is the rise of aerial vertebrate predators. The fossil record shows a decoupling between maximum insect wing length and atmospheric oxygen levels starting at around 135 million years ago, which roughly coincides with the evolution of birds and, later, bats. “This predatory pressure didn’t exist 300 million years ago,” Snelling said.

Giant, meaty insects were likely slow to accelerate, which made them excellent, high-calorie targets for more agile avian predators. So perhaps being huge simply became a bad evolutionary strategy once the skies became more competitive.

Another reason could lie in the physiological hurdles insects face. Flying generates a significant amount of heat. Because surface area-to-volume ratios decrease as animals get larger, a hawk-sized insect might simply cook itself from the inside out with the heat of its own flapping wings, as it wouldn’t have enough surface area to cool down efficiently. In this scenario, the key to the ancient giants was not the oxygen level but a higher density of the atmosphere that enabled the insects to dissipate heat better.

Then there’s an issue of growing XL-sized exoskeletons. Insects must molt to grow. When they shed their hard outer shells, they are temporarily soft and squishy until the new exoskeleton hardens. Surface tension and basic structural mechanics can hold this soft body together in a tiny beetle, but they might struggle to do so if the bug is much larger.

Finally, the insect cardiovascular system might also play a role. Bugs rely on an open circulation system, which might be too inefficient to power flapping flight in extremely large bodies.

But the insect breathing mechanics may still hold one mystery we haven’t solved yet. “While we looked at tracheoles, we didn’t look upstream,” Snelling said. And upstream, in the parts of the internal tubing that are closer to the atmosphere, insects often have large air sacs that act as bellows to ventilate the lateral regions of the tracheal system. Doing the same kind of comparative study on the size of the air sacs is the next step for his team.

“I imagine in the next decade or so, the synchrotron X-ray technology will become so sophisticated that it will be possible,” he said.

For now, though, Snelling doesn’t expect air sacs to suddenly cause a miraculous comeback of the oxygen-constraint hypothesis. “Any limitation upstream can be compensated by the investment in the tracheoles—there’s so much space down there,” Snelling said. “But it would be interesting to see how the air sacs’ dimensions change as a function of body size.”

Nature, 2026.  DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10291-3

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Posted Sunday 29 March 2026 at 5:40 am AEST (my time).

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Our oceans are full of sophisticated, perfect traps: Nets, hooks, fishing lines. Designed to capture animals destined for our dinner tables, they often catch other wildlife too.

This accidental harvest is known as bycatch, and every year it causes the death of millions of marine animals, including whales, dolphins, sharks, turtles, and seabirds. Nets and gear can asphyxiate animals or cause fatal injuries; even when the animals are tossed back to sea, they frequently die. Bycatch is also a dilemma for fishermen—entangled creatures can destroy equipment, costing time, money, and fisheries’ reputations.

Over the decades, conservationists, researchers, and fishermen have developed ways to minimize various kinds of bycatch in different fishing stocks around the world. But putting these solutions to work is often a challenge, and many mitigation strategies are never widely implemented.

Fishing gear that entangles dolphins, porpoises, and whales is a major threat to the animals. Here,

gear trails from the North Atlantic right whale called Snowcone (known individual #3560) who

swims with her calf in waters off Georgia.

Credit: Georgia Dept. of Natural Resources NOAA permit #20556

Some approaches, however, now have a proven success rate—and more may be on the horizon. Recent research has explored nets equipped with lights; even low-tech tricks like kitting out gear with plastic water bottles show promise of reducing some kinds of bycatch while also being practical for fishermen to use.

Despite the challenges, researchers are hopeful. “There are not very many conservation issues that I’m aware of where industry and conservationists and consumers and the fishermen and the resource users all want the same thing,” says marine biologist Matthew Savoca, a research scientist at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station. “Every stakeholder wants less bycatch.”

Keeping turtles out

The bycatch problem has always existed. “It’s a conflict that’s intrinsic to the whole idea of fishing,” says marine scientist Nancy Knowlton, marine biologist emerita at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “If you have something that’s designed to catch animals, you’re going to wind up, almost always, catching some things that you didn’t mean to catch.”

Yet mitigation measures can make a difference—and without significantly reducing the catch of the target species, says Cheng Huang, an expert in sustainability ecology at South China Normal University. Huang and colleagues recently assessed 42 different bycatch prevention measures reported in 121 case studies and found they generally do reduce bycatch of vulnerable marine species. But there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.

“Bycatch is a multi-species, multi-gear and multi-scale problem,” says Huang. “Expecting a single technical fix to work everywhere is unrealistic.”

Sea turtles, many species of which are endangered, are among the animals harmed by bycatch—and one of the success stories. In the 1970s, populations of the animals were threatened by shrimp fisheries in waters off the southeastern United States. Researchers started working with commercial fisheries to develop turtle excluder devices that provide an escape route for turtles and other marine animals after they’ve entered the wide mouth of trawl nets. After many iterations, and eventually regulations, the devices became widely adopted, and current designs are 97 percent effective. The devices also save fishermen time and money—preventing the loss of shrimp to fish and hungry turtles.

Yet turtles are still threatened by multiple types of fishing gear: Estimates suggest that more than 250,000 of the creatures die as bycatch each year. Gillnets, which hang like curtains in the water, or bottom longlines, which string baited hooks held in place by weights along the seafloor, can be especially dangerous for the animals.

Gillnets are designed to allow a fish’s head through, but not its body; as the fish tries to back out of

the net, its gills get caught in the mesh. Gillnets are a major cause of mortality for sea turtles and

marine mammals such as whales, dolphins, and seals.

Credit: damocean via Getty

Attaching green LED lights or UV lights to gillnets in the water seems to deter turtles from the deadly traps. In one early test of the idea, researchers compared UV-illuminated gill nets to non-illuminated gill nets in Baja California, Mexico, and found that the lighted nets reduced turtle bycatch by 40 percent.

Lighted nets have since been tested for multiple species and fisheries worldwide. A study in the waters of northern Peru’s Sechura Bay, for example, showed a turtle bycatch reduction of more than 60 percent thanks to LED-illuminated nets. But they have yet to be implemented in fisheries on a large scale. Barriers include cost and the perception that lights might reduce target fish catch, says marine conservation scientist Jesse Senko of Arizona State University. Part of the expense is batteries for the lights, which need to be replaced often.

Senko and his colleagues, after consulting with local fishers, designed solar-powered lights that regularly flash and tested the approach in a coastal gillnet fishery that catches yellowtail amberjack in the Gulf of California, Mexico. They attached lights to 28 gillnets, each paired with a gillnet with deactivated lights as controls, for 650 hours in an area known for high levels of turtle bycatch. The nets with lights reduced expected turtle bycatch by 63 percent while maintaining target fish catch, the researchers reported in Conservation Letters in October 2025.

The lights didn’t only reduce power consumption, they also worked as buoys, making them easily integrated into the fishing gear. This is crucial for adoption of new techniques, says Senko. “All of a sudden, the light was more or less part of their gear,” he says. “It wasn’t some foreign thing on their net. It was just another buoy that happened to flash green light.”

Marine biologist and conservation scientist Jesse Senko fishes a solar-powered illuminated gillnet

from waters off the coast of Baja California Sur, Mexico. Tests of the lighted nets find that they

reduce bycatch of sea turtles but not the catch of the target fish species.

Credit: Lindsay Lauckner Gundlock / Arizona State University

Pingers and plastic bottles

Another bycatch prevention method that’s demonstrated some success is pingers—devices attached to the fishing gear that emit sounds that deter echolocating whales and dolphins. A field trial of the devices in three Norwegian fisheries using gillnets, for example, showed that pingers reduced bycatch of harbor porpoise by 94 percent, a team reported in Fisheries Research in 2023.

But pingers can have their downsides. An analysis of pinger effectiveness in waters off the United Kingdom, where they have been used for more than a decade, found that while they were linked to a reduction in bycatch of porpoises, they were also linked with an increase in bycatch of seals, which seem to associate the sound with a potential meal. “It’s like a dinner-bell effect,” says policy specialist Sarah Dolman of the Environmental Investigation Agency, a London-based nonprofit that campaigns for environmental issues.

Pingers that transmit at frequencies outside of pinnipeds’ hearing range and are thus considered “seal-safe” have been developed. But the devices can also be expensive, especially for artisanal fishermen, who tend to use lower-tech gear and may lack supportive government policies and investments.

Some of those small-scale fisheries may reduce bycatch of echolocating animals with a low-tech approach: fixing plastic water bottles to their nets. Detecting thin, fine nets is difficult for dolphins, porpoises, and other echolocators, but water bottles are a more easily detectable obstacle that could help them avoid the net. A preliminary study conducted in Brazil found that using plastic bottles on nets was effective at reducing the bycatch of franciscana dolphins, a threatened river dolphin species. It’s a realistic option, says Dolman, in places where fishermen don’t have the funds to buy and maintain pingers.

Practicalities, along with cost, often prevent implementation of bycatch prevention measures, even the ones that work. Many solutions that get developed and tested never end up being widespread.

“We’re very good at providing funding for scientists to conduct trials to reduce bycatch, but very rarely do those trials then continue to the whole of the fleet,” says Dolman.

For a solution to work on a large scale, a number of conditions must be met, says marine sustainability scientist Lekelia Jenkins of Arizona State University. Policies and regulations need to be in place, and they need to be enforced. And perhaps just as important, the preventive measures need to be practical for fishermen and not add extra time and money to the job. “The smaller the change, and the more it feels like their traditional fishing practices, the more likely they’re going to adopt it,” Jenkins says.

The human side of the issue also needs to be acknowledged. “Emotionally, fishermen around the world are beat up and beat down,” Jenkins says. “We say, ‘You’re the problem. You’re catching sea turtles and whales. You are the bad guy.’” Instead, fishermen should be empowered and included in the discussions and development of solutions. “The weight of saving the world’s oceans,” Jenkins says, “can’t fall solely on their shoulders.”

This story originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.

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Posted Sunday 29 March 2026 at 5:38 am AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.35 of the Rocket Report! The headlines this week are again dominated by the big changes afoot in NASA’s exploration program, with the announcement of a Moon base and a nuclear-powered rocket to Mars. The shakeups come as the agency is just a week away from launching Artemis II, a circumlunar flight carrying a crew of four around the Moon. The Ars space team will be writing extensively about this mission in the days ahead, and we may skip the Rocket Report next week to focus on our Artemis II coverage.

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.

NASA announces nuclear rocket demo. NASA’s announcement Tuesday that it will “pause” work on a lunar space station and focus on building a surface base on the Moon was no big surprise to anyone paying attention to the Trump administration’s space policy. But what should NASA do with hardware already built for the Gateway outpost? NASA spent close to $4.5 billion on developing a human-tended complex in orbit around the Moon since the Gateway program’s official start in 2019. There are pieces of the station undergoing construction and testing in factories scattered around the world. The centerpiece of Gateway, called the Power and Propulsion Element, is closest to being ready for launch. NASA’s rejigged exploration roadmap, revealed Tuesday in an all-day event at NASA headquarters in Washington, calls for repurposing the core module for a nuclear-electric propulsion demonstration in deep space, Ars reports.

Introducing SR-1 Freedom... Nuclear-powered rocket engines are more efficient than chemical rockets. They come in two forms: nuclear-thermal and nuclear-electric engines. Nuclear-thermal rockets produce higher thrust, using heat from a reactor to heat up a chemical rocket fuel. Nuclear-electric engines have lower thrust but greater efficiency. Neither have been demonstrated in space. NASA’s new nuclear mission, named Space Reactor-1, will use the latter approach. “We will launch the first-of-its-kind interplanetary mission called SR-1 Freedom before the end of 2028, demonstrating fission power and the extraordinary capabilities to move mass efficiently in space,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman.

Isar scrubs test launch. Isar Aerospace halted the launch of its Spectrum rocket Wednesday on the cusp of its scheduled liftoff, delaying the German startup’s second attempt to get its spacecraft to orbit from a launch pad in Norway, Bloomberg reports. The launch was aborted late on Wednesday after a hold in countdown because an unauthorized boat violated the danger area of the rocket, the company said in a statement. The countdown reset exceeded the launch window, Isar said, adding it’s working to determine a suitable time for a new attempt.

An important flight... This will be the second flight of Isar’s privately developed Spectrum rocket, following a test launch a year ago that failed shortly after liftoff. The Munich-based company leads a crop of European launch startups developing small commercial rockets. The two-stage Spectrum vehicle is designed to haul payloads of up to 1 metric ton (2,200 pounds) to low-Earth orbit. On this flight, Isar will attempt to launch five small CubeSats for European universities. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Mystery launch from Cape Canaveral. An unidentified missile launched and zoomed across the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, leaving a slim white contrail against the afternoon blue sky, Florida Today reports. No public announcements have been made about the mysterious launch, which occurred at roughly 12:30 pm EDT. None of the Space Coast’s major rocket-launch providers had missions scheduled Thursday. The launch was foretold by an unusual Coast Guard-Department of Homeland Security launch hazard zone extending eastward across the sea.

This is probably what it was... The circumstances of Thursday’s launch were similar to two previous missile tests that originated from Cape Canaveral. In April 2025, a hypersonic missile streaked skyward at great speed during a test flight conducted by the US Navy’s Strategic Systems Programs. Previously, in December 2024, the US Army and Navy conducted an unannounced, successful Dark Eagle hypersonic weapon test from Launch Complex 46 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. It is likely Thursday’s flight was related to those tests.

Russia’s Starlink takes flight. A Soyuz rocket launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia on Monday carrying the first batch of Rassvet satellites for a low-orbital Internet network developed by a Moscow-based enterprise named Bureau 1440, RussianSpaceWeb.com reports. The Rassvet project has not been immune to publicity in the past, but the launch itself was surrounded by “military-level secrecy,” RussianSpaceWeb said. “No launch date had been officially announced for the mission and no visuals of the payload processing had been published ahead of the launch.” Russia’s military and civilian space agency also did not issue a post-flight statement confirming the launch, as they typically do, even for classified space missions.

Details, please... Despite this secrecy, we know a few things about the Rassvet satellites. The Soyuz rocket deployed 16 of the spacecraft, each around 815 pounds (370 kilograms), into a low-altitude orbit less than 200 miles above the Earth. Bureau 1440 is backed by Russian state funding and has announced plans to deploy a constellation of around 900 satellites by 2035. It is not clear how long it will take for the constellation to begin providing meaningful connectivity for consumers or, more importantly, for Russia’s government and Russian forces fighting in Ukraine. Up to now, Russia’s space industry has not proven it has the ability to scale production of satellites. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Site 31 is back in business. Russia’s only human-rated launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan is back in service less than four months after being damaged during liftoff of a Soyuz rocket last year. Workers erred in leaving the site’s servicing platform unsecured, and it fell into the pad’s flame trench after being blasted by the Soyuz booster’s engines. Russian officials delayed the next Soyuz launch from Baikonur as technicians scrambled to install a new platform. The repairs were completed a few weeks ago, and a Soyuz rocket lifted off from the pad Sunday with a Progress supply ship heading for the International Space Station.

Manual docking… The Progress MS-33 cargo freighter delivered several tons of fuel, water, and supplies to the International Space Station and its seven-person crew Tuesday, but the craft’s trip to the station was not free of trouble. One of the spacecraft’s Kurs rendezvous antennas failed to deploy after launch, forcing Russian cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov to take over remote control of the Progress supply ship for a manual docking at the complex. Russia’s Tele-robotically Operated Rendezvous Unit, or TORU, system allows cosmonauts on the space station to remotely pilot cargo ships as they approach the outpost. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Amazon plans to ramp up launch cadence. Amazon vowed this week to double the annual launch rate for its low-Earth orbit broadband constellation to more than 20 missions, hinging largely on rockets yet to prove themselves at scale, Space News reports. The Amazon Leo constellation now has 212 production satellites in orbit, less than 7 percent of the network’s planned 3,232 satellites. But the pace of Amazon’s satellite manufacturing appears to be going well. The company says it has more than 200 additional satellites “stacked and ready for launch.” Three more launches are planned over the next month—two on United Launch Alliance Atlas V rockets and one on Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket. That would bring Amazon to 11 launches in the first year of Amazon Leo’s full-scale deployment.

Waiting on rockets… “Every satellite adds coverage and capacity to the network, and we’re on pace to more than double our annual launch rate to over 20 missions and send even more satellites to space at a time,” Amazon wrote in a post on its website. “As of mid-March, we have six fully stacked payloads at our satellite processing facility in Florida—more than 200 satellites in total—and another payload being prepared in French Guiana.” The problem is that ULA’s Vulcan rocket, which Amazon chose to launch the bulk of the Amazon Leo constellation, is grounded after a booster anomaly last month. In the meantime, ULA’s soon-to-retire Atlas V rocket will launch the next two sets of Amazon satellites, with 29 flying on each rocket. That is an increase over the 27 satellites flown on prior Atlas V launches. An Ariane 64 rocket will launch another Amazon package from French Guiana in late April. Meanwhile, Amazon confirmed earlier this year it purchased 10 more Falcon 9 launches from SpaceX to help hasten the deployment of Amazon Leo. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Fortifying spaceports from cyber attacks. The US Space Force has established two new cyber squadrons to defend against potential cyber attacks during launches, Breaking Defense reports. The new units at Patrick Space Force Base in Florida and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California will help the military “stay ahead of the threat,” said Maj. Torius Davis, commander of the 630th Cyberspace Squadron at Vandenberg. Both ground terminals and satellites have become targets for cyber operations in recent years.

Securing the range… “Much like the anti-jamming capabilities we build into our modern satellites, our new Cyberspace Squadrons will work to secure our launch systems from a myriad of potential threats, from hijacking satellites or ground systems to using malware to gain unauthorized access to our systems,” Lt. Col. John Quinn, commander of the 645th Cyberspace Squadron at Patrick. The emphasis on cyber defense follows work done to protect launch sites from physical intrusions and drone threats, which have been on the rise in recent years.

Artemis II back on the pad. NASA’s Artemis II rocket returned to the launch pad March 20 after repairs inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Spaceflight Now reports. The 322-foot-tall (98-meter) Space Launch System rocket took about 11 hours to cover the 4-mile journey to Launch Complex 39B atop a mobile launch platform and crawler-transporter. The rocket’s arrival at the pad keeps NASA on schedule to launch the Artemis II mission no earlier than next Wednesday, April 1, with a two-hour window opening at 6:24 pm EDT (22:24 UTC).

Crew arriving soon… The four astronauts who will fly around the Moon on Artemis II will travel from Houston to Kennedy on Friday. Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen will spend more than nine days in space, traveling farther from Earth than any human in history.

Once again, ULA’s Vulcan can’t answer the call. For the fourth time in a little more than a year, the US Space Force needs to send up a new satellite to replenish the military’s GPS navigation network. And once again, the company the Pentagon is paying to launch it can’t answer the call, Ars reports. United Launch Alliance, a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, was supposed to launch the final satellite for the Space Force’s GPS Block III program this month. Space Systems Command, responsible for buying spacecraft and rockets for the military, announced March 20 it has transferred the launch to a Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX, ULA’s chief rival in the market for launching US government satellites.

More to come?… Lt. Gen. Doug Schiess, the Space Force’s deputy chief of operations, told a House subcommittee Wednesday that the military was looking at moving more missions off of ULA’s Vulcan rocket to other providers. Currently, only ULA’s Vulcan and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets are certified for national security launches. The Vulcan rocket is expected to be grounded until at least this summer as engineers investigate a recurring problem with the vehicle’s solid rocket boosters.

NASA is blowing things up. A team of NASA engineers is intentionally blowing up models of methane-fueled rockets in Florida to see just how big of a bang they make when they explode, Ars reports. Methane is the launch industry’s chic new rocket fuel because it is better suited for reusable engines. Heavy- and super-heavy-lift rockets like Blue Origin’s New Glenn, ULA’s Vulcan, and SpaceX’s Starship now use it. But rockets sometimes blow up. The US Space Force and NASA, the agencies responsible for range safety at America’s federally owned spaceports, want to better understand how the hazards from an exploding methane-fueled rocket might differ from those of other launchers. This is important as launches become more routine, with companies foreseeing multiple flights per day from launch pads that are, in some cases, just 1 or 2 miles apart.

For good reason… Federal safety officials require the evacuation of blast danger areas around each launch pad as rockets are fueled for flight, and some companies have raised concerns that SpaceX, which has the largest of the methane-burning rockets, could disrupt their operations on neighboring launch pads. The ongoing explosive yield tests at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, are meant to help officials fine-tune their hazard analyses to determine the proper size of the danger areas for methane-fueled rockets. Hopefully, the data will show the danger areas are too conservative, and the keep-out zones will shrink. The concept is simple. “We put fuel in a rocket, blow it up in a remote location, and measure how big the boom is,” said Jason Hopper, deputy manager for the methalox assessment project at NASA’s Stennis Space Center.

Next three launches

March 28: Electron | Daughter of the Stars | Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand | 09:14 UTC

March 28: Spectrum | Onward and Upward | Andøya Rocket Range, Norway | 20:00 UTC

March 29: Atlas V | Amazon Leo LA-05 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 07:53 UTC

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Posted Saturday 28 March 2026 at 5:54 am AEST (my time).

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On Thursday, Elon Musk lost his lawsuit alleging that advertisers violated antitrust law by colluding on an ad boycott after he took over Twitter, gutted content moderation teams, and disbanded the Trust and Safety Council.

In her opinion, US District Judge Jane Boyle wrote that the lawsuit was dismissed because Musk failed to state a claim. His arguments that advertisers acted against their own best interests by avoiding advertising on his platform, now called X, did not plead facts showing that consumers were harmed. Without consumer harm, there can be no antitrust violation, the judge wrote, deeming the ad boycott perfectly legal.

“The very nature of the alleged conspiracy does not state an antitrust claim, and the Court therefore has no qualm dismissing with prejudice,” Boyle said. At one point, she emphasized, “the question underlying antitrust injury is whether consumers—not competitors—have been harmed.”

For Musk, the loss is likely significant. He had argued that advertisers should be “criminally prosecuted” after allies in Congress released a report claiming they were conspiring to tank Twitter’s revenue with the supposed goal of censoring conservative voices.

The lawsuit was also part of a larger “thermonuclear” legal fight that Musk started when he sued Media Matters for America for their reporting that he claimed prompted the boycott. That lawsuit remains ongoing but may be hobbled by the judge ruling that there was no illegal boycott.

As of this writing, Musk has not commented on the ruling, and X did not respond to Ars’ request to comment.

It seems likely, though, given Musk’s heated public statements about the litigation, that X will appeal.

X accused of “fishing expedition”

Musk’s recently dismissed lawsuit targeted the World Federation of Advertisers, as well as formerly major Twitter advertisers, including Shell, Nestle, Colgate, and Mars.

Analyzing the alleged conspiracy, Boyle makes it clear in her opinion that Musk seemingly did not realize ahead of purchasing Twitter how much power advertisers had gained over platforms by collectively agreeing on brand safety standards.

As advertisers explained in court filings, they had very little power over ad placements in social media’s early days. That’s why they created the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM): They wanted more control over the content appearing around their ads.

By banding together through an advertiser-controlled initiative that platforms could join but not control, they could finally force platforms to honor their brand safety standards. They did that by sending letters threatening collective action if standards weren’t maintained. That seemingly agitated Musk when he got his first letter reminding him that Twitter was bound by GARM standards.

A subsequent email hinting that there had been “calls for boycotts” seemingly spooked Musk, who arranged a meeting to ensure Twitter wasn’t expelled from GARM.

Although that meeting went well, it didn’t end the boycott, which Musk said continues to this day. Ars chronicled the worst impacts a year into the boycott. At its lowest, the platform’s revenue was down by as much as 59 percent “for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May” in 2023, The New York Times reported.

Frustrated that the peace talks didn’t end the way he wanted and complaining that the platform had to reduce ad prices just to stay afloat, Musk then sued.

There are many ways that Musk’s antitrust claims could have succeeded, Boyle noted. He could have argued that the boycott prevented X from competing with other social media companies to “corner the supply against users’ interests.” Or that advertisers were somehow motivated to help a rival platform raise ad prices to exclude X from that market. Or possibly show that the World Federation of Advertisers intended to shut X out in order to launch its own social media ad business.

But his only attempt to allege that consumers were harmed by the boycott was a claim that reduced revenue made it harder to improve the platform’s functionality. And that wasn’t enough to claim that advertisers violated antitrust law, Boyle wrote.

“The conspiring advertisers here did not attempt to force X to advertise with only GARM advertisers so that they could control the social media advertising market or any other market,” Boyle wrote. “They merely decided that they would not buy from X for their own advertising need.”

In her opinion, Boyle noted that Musk also failed to show that advertisers had worked together to boycott then-Twitter. Advertisers argued that they made independent business decisions based on their own brand safety concerns, and there was no evidence to suggest they were lying.

“Mere affiliation with GARM and its wide-ranging activities does not support a connection to the boycott against X,” Boyle wrote. Later, she concluded that “X simply has not alleged facts supporting the conclusions it wishes to draw.”

Boyle was also troubled by Musk’s attempted “fishing expedition” pushing for broad discovery early on in the lawsuit. Musk sought “sprawling information” from defendants about their general involvement in GARM “rather than specific to the boycott against X,” she wrote.

Ars could not immediately reach the World Federation of Advertisers to comment on what the win could mean for GARM, which was suspended in 2024 as a result of the lawsuit, CNBC reported.

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Posted Friday 27 March 2026 at 12:18 pm AEST (my time).

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Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren and Republican senator Josh Hawley are urging the US’s central energy information agency to provide better information on how much electricity data centers actually use.

In a joint letter sent to the Energy Information Administration Thursday morning, seen by WIRED, Hawley and Warren press the agency to publicly collect “comprehensive, annual energy-use disclosures” on data centers. This information, they write, is “essential for accurate grid planning and will support policymaking to prevent large companies from increasing electricity costs for American families.”

As the data center boom spreads across the country, there have been widespread worries from voters about how their massive energy needs may increase consumers’ electric bills; this concern helped shape some midterm elections in data-center-heavy states, including Virginia and Georgia. Last month, Hawley cosponsored a bill with Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal that would require data centers to supply their own power sources in order to protect consumers. Earlier this month, Donald Trump convened a group of executives from big tech companies at the White House to sign a nonbinding (and toothless) agreement pledging to pay for their own power for data centers.

“If we're worried about ratepayers paying data-center energy costs, then knowing how much energy data centers are using is a necessary part of that calculation,” says Ari Peskoe, a director at Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program. “It's not the only piece of information you need, but it certainly is a piece of the puzzle.”

There are lots of scary headlines floating around about how much energy data centers are expected to use over the next few years, but it’s surprisingly difficult to get official numbers from data centers on either their current or projected electric load. No federal government body collects numbers on energy use from data centers specifically. Information about water or electricity use at an individual data center can be considered proprietary business information, and is most often disclosed to the public voluntarily by the company itself. An increasing number of data centers are also turning to installing their own power separate from the grid—known as behind-the-meter power—making it even tougher to calculate total energy use.

Utilities are privy to information about energy use from data centers in their region; they use that information to forecast growth. But data centers will often shop around to different utilities, which, experts say, causes utilities to double-count projects and forecast “phantom” growth—data centers that will never be built in their region. The CEO of Vistra, a retail electricity company, said during its first quarter earnings call last year that utilities may be inflating electricity demand anywhere from three to five times beyond what is actually needed.

In December, EIA administrator Tristan Abbey said at a roundtable that he expects the EIA “is going to be an essential player in providing objective data and analysis to policymakers” with respect to data centers. The agency announced on Wednesday that it would be conducting a voluntary pilot program to collect energy consumption information from nearly 200 companies operating data centers in Texas, Washington, and Virginia, which will cover “energy sources, electricity consumption, site characteristics, server metrics, and cooling systems.”

While the senators praise the EIA pilot program, their letter includes several questions about how the agency plans to move forward with more data collection, such as whether or not the energy surveys will be mandatory and whether or not the EIA will collect information on behind-the-meter power. This information will be especially crucial, the senators say, to make sure that big tech companies that signed the agreement at the White House earlier this month pledging that consumers won’t bear the costs of data center electricity use will stick to their promises.

“Without this data, policymakers, utility companies, and local communities are operating in the dark,” the senators write.

The EIA mandates that other industries, including oil and gas and manufacturing, provide regular data to the agency; Hawley and Warren assert that the EIA should be able to collect similar information from data centers under the same provision. The provision is broad enough, Peskoe says, that it could absolutely be interpreted to encompass data centers.

The letter comes amid widespread concern in Washington and around the country over data center development. On Wednesday, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced a bill that would introduce a national moratorium on data center construction and development until AI safety laws were passed. The same day, Democratic senator Dick Durbin introduced a bill to mandate data centers disclose their energy and water use. And state legislatures have brought forth hundreds of data center bills, with at least a dozen states considering a moratorium on construction altogether.

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Posted Friday 27 March 2026 at 5:05 am AEST (my time).

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This could be the skeleton of the real-life d'Artagnan.

Credit: Stichting 6213HL

Recent repairs to a centuries-old tile floor at a church in the Netherlands may have revealed the skeleton of the French Musketeer d’Artagnan.

Today, Charles de Batz de Castlemore, Count d’Artagnan, is best known as a character in The Three Musketeers, written by Alexandre Dumas and eventually played by both Gene Kelly and future Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy—but he was a real French military officer and spy. D’Artagnan died during a siege, and the whereabouts of his body have remained a mystery for more than 350 years. But an archaeologist in the Netherlands recently unearthed a skeleton from the floor of a 17th-century church that could actually be d’Artagnan.

“It is only the dead who do not return”

The ground beneath the centuries-old Saints Peter and Paul Church subsided earlier this year, cracking a few of the blue tiles that pave the chapel’s floor. During repairs, church staff decided to have a look beneath the floor to see if there was any truth to the rumor that d’Artagnan—famous French Musketeer and inspiration for a series of swashbuckling novels—lay buried beneath their church. It turns out that there actually was a skeleton buried under the church floor, and there’s a decent chance it’s d’Artagnan himself.

Fragments of a lead musket ball lay mingled with the bones, hinting at a cause of death that would match d’Artagnan’s, since history records that he was shot in the throat while charging the walls of Maastricht in June 1673. A coin from 1660 also lay in the grave. And the location itself suggests that whoever the skeleton once belonged to, it was somebody important; ordinary townsfolk didn’t usually rate burial in a prime spot right beneath the altar table.

But none of those clues provide definite evidence that this was the famed Musketeer. A sample taken from the skeleton’s jawbone is on its way to Germany for DNA sequencing; those sequences will be compared to d’Artagnan’s living relatives. Meanwhile, forensic anthropologists in Deventer, in the Netherlands, will examine the skeleton for clues about how old the person was when they died and whether they were more likely male or female.

“I’m a scientist, but my expectations are high,” Wim Dijkman, archaeologist and curator for the city of Maastricht, who excavated the skeleton, told the BBC. “I’ve already been researching d’Artagnan’s grave for 28 years. This could be the highlight of my career.”

“After all, it is our business to risk our lives”

The King’s Musketeers are best known to most of us today from Alexandre Dumas’ novel The Three Musketeers. They were the top-tier unit of the 17th-century French military, two companies of light cavalry under the king’s personal command, made up entirely of noblemen with muskets and fast horses. They served as the king’s personal guard whenever he left the palace (he had a whole other guard unit at home, where they presumably didn’t need the fast horses). D’Artagnan became their captain-lieutenant in 1667. The unit would later include a young Marquis de Lafayette, who then went on to do some other stuff.

And in 1673, the Musketeers were part of the French forces besieging the Dutch city of Maastricht because Louis XIV had decided to invade what was then called the Dutch Republic. It ended rather poorly for d’Artagnan, among numerous others, as battles tend to do.

D’Artagnan probably attended Mass at Saints Peter and Paul on the morning of June 25, 1673, as he did most days during the siege. The French army had set up its headquarters nearby, in what was then the village of Wolder, just outside Maastrich’s city walls (today, Wolder is a district of the city). And by nightfall, as French historian Odile Bordaz suggested in 2008, d’Artagnan’s body was entombed beneath the altar where he had taken Communion that morning.

Based on parish registers from other churches in the area, high-ranking officers who died during the siege would have been buried at the nearest church. And based on maps of the area around Maastricht from the time of the siege, which Bordaz and her colleagues pored over, the closest church to the Musketeers’ camp would have been Saint Peter and Paul in Wolder.

“Based on all the evidence, there is more than a 90 percent chance that d’Artagnan and other musketeers from the king’s staff were buried in the church next to their camp,” Bordaz told French newspaper Le Monde at the time.

It should have been an easy mystery to solve from there; if d’Dartagnan had been buried at Wolder, his name should have been on the church’s parish register of baptisms, marriages, and burials. But Wolder’s parish register had gone missing sometime in the last 335 years and several wars.

At the time, Dijkman was skeptical of Bordaz’s claim.

“Was d’Artagnan buried there? It’s far from certain: there is no historical or archaeological information to support that,” he told Le Monde in 2008. That wasn’t unfair of him; outside of the missing parish register, it seems nobody ever wrote down exactly where d’Artagnan was laid to rest, other than a note that it was in consecrated ground.

The priest of Saints Peter and Paul at the time said he wouldn’t authorize digging up the church floor without more concrete proof. Eighteen years later, with the floor needing to be torn up for repairs anyway, there was no reason not to take a look. And it seems to have been worthwhile.

After the battle on June 25, 1673, King Louis XIV wrote home to Queen Marie-Thérèse, “I have lost d’Artagnan, in whom I had the utmost confidence and who was kind to all.” Now it looks like he may finally have been found.

The original version of this story reported that Marquis de Lafayette served in the King’s Musketeers under d’Artagnan; Lafayette actually joined the unit about a century later. Your faithful correspondent apologizes for the error but not for any fanfiction it may have inspired.

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Posted Friday 27 March 2026 at 5:03 am AEST (my time).

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When Tesla revealed the Cybercab in 2024, many people were baffled by the automaker’s decision to make it a two-seater. I had similar thoughts when I first saw it at the LA Auto Show later that year: What kind of taxi has only two seats? Once you get above a tuktuk, that’s an asinine idea no one will ever want.

For 18 months, that seems to have been the prevailing attitude. On Reddit and other social media platforms, users have weighed in on the utility, or lack thereof, of a two-seat robotaxi. “You could strap a few people to the roof for a special discount,” quipped one commenter. Nevertheless, the first Tesla Cybercab was put into production last month, and now prototypes have been spotted testing both on public roads and on the grounds of Tesla’s assembly plant in Austin, Texas.

But in case you thought the Cybercab would be alone in absorbing all the anti-two seater vitriol, now there are two such vehicles.

Lucid’s two-seater Lunar robotaxi concept.

Image: John Voelcker / The Verge

At Lucid Motors’ Investor Day in New York City this month, its executive team laid out the EV maker’s plan to reach profitability. It includes three new models on a less expensive midsize platform — the first will arrive next year — an all-new electric powertrain, and a continuing focus on semi-autonomous driving functions and robotaxi partnerships.

Then, in a “just one more thing” moment, Lucid’s acting CEO Marc Winterhoff revealed a concept car hidden behind a curtain at one end of the hall. The two-seat robotaxi concept, dubbed the Lucid Lunar, was displayed without doors to show off its interior space and large luggage bay. Visions of the Tesla Cybercab, different but the same, flashed through my mind.

In a “fireside chat” with Uber’s Andrew Macdonald, Winterhoff revealed the rideshare company has pledged to buy 20,000 Gravitys fitted with robotaxi sensors and software from Nuro. The two firms plan a similar deal with an upcoming Lucid midsize EV model as well.

It took a few hours with Lucid Motors executives for me to understand why, in fact, I was wrong about two-seat robotaxis. And why ridehailing services the world over might buy giant fleets of them. Presuming, of course, that robotaxis prove to be safe, reliable, not a major contributor to urban congestion, and notably cheaper for ridehail fleets than are today’s human drivers using a wide variety of EV and internal combustion models.

At minimum, deploying two-seat robotaxis would require an added step during the hail process: Every user would have to say how many people were traveling, to ensure a vehicle arrived with a sufficient number of seats. Users would most likely accept this added friction in the process, especially if two-seaters were cheaper than other alternatives.

The Lucid Lunar concept uses the same wide horizontal display on the dash as the Lucid Cosmos, but no steering wheel. It would be built on a shortened version of the midsize platform that will underpin the Cosmos and its two siblings, which would deliver major cost savings on the basic architecture. The Lunar is both lower to the ground and smaller than the Cosmos, and — my “aha!” moment — it was designed to be as energy-efficient and low-cost as possible for buyers.

 

Image: John Voelcker / The Verge

 

Image: John Voelcker / The Verge

In their fireside chat, Winterhoff and Macdonald noted that more than 90 percent of the rides Uber provides today have just one or two passengers. Other studies put the proportion slightly lower — though still a strong majority. The logic of the vehicle, Lucid chief engineer Zach Walker later explained, was that the needs of ridehail fleet operators differ substantially from those of individual drivers.

Physics dictates a two-seat EV will be smaller and lighter than one with more seats. That will make it cheaper to buy and to operate, primarily because it can provide the necessary range from a battery with lower capacity — which will cost less and recharge faster for the same range added. Ridehail companies will need robotaxis with the absolutely lowest possible lifetime cost, to make the expensive tech practical versus human-driven vehicles.

According to chief engineer Walker, every 1-kWh reduction in battery size will save a robotaxi operator $1,000 per year in recharging costs, presuming it covers 100,000 miles a year. How efficient could that two-seat robotaxi be versus a four-seat compact EV? Walker said Lucid projects efficiencies of 5.5 miles per kilowatt-hour, perhaps as high as 6 mi/kWh, in typical use. (For comparison, the most energy-efficient EV sold in the US today is the rear-wheel-drive Lucid Air Pure, with an EPA efficiency rating of 146 MPGe, which translates to 4.4 mi/kWh.)

Beyond that, he added, there’s a “virtuous circle” of not just size and weight reduction, but engineering to purpose. Walker noted Lucids sold to individual buyers must have stellar roadholding and handling capabilities; it’s part of the brand. But the preset behavior of a robotaxis’ driving algorithm, and the limits of the performance it will demand, are known in advance, and won’t impose handling loads as extreme as a few private owners will. That means suspension structures can be tuned for comfort, using softer and less complex bushings. It could even let Lucid reduce or eliminate certain reinforcements and braces required to keep the structure stiff during extreme handling maneuvers, Walker said.

Image: John Voelcker / The Verge

 

Image: John Voelcker / The Verge

 

Image: John Voelcker / The Verge

 

Image: John Voelcker / The Verge

Both the Tesla and Lucid two-seaters are low and sleek, which minimizes aerodynamic drag. That further boosts efficiency at speeds of 30 mph and above, when the energy required to overcome wind resistance exceeds the energy required to move the vehicle itself. That’s an advantage for airport runs that require travel on highways, less so in trips predominantly based in urban environments, as Reilly Brennan of Trucks VC notes in his weekly newsletter.

Brennan questioned why the form factor of robotaxis mimicked the shape of a two-door coupe, despite the limitations it imposes on entry and exit. He proposed as an alternative a famous study by designer Giorgetto Giugiaro for a modern New York City taxi, created fully 50 years ago. It’s still crisp, modern, upright — and easier to get into and out of than a coupe.

But Giugiaro’s tall, square, upright design would present a challenge for wind resistance. Still, Brennan is convinced it’s the right approach. “Most of the trips for these will be low-speed and urban, which will make the Cd [drag coefficient] issues largely moot,” he said in an email.

After seeing the Lucid Lunar, every reporter at Lucid Investor Day had the same second thought I did 18 months earlier, when I saw the Tesla Cybercab: If you just added a steering wheel, that would make an awesome small, fast EV sports coupe.

Asked directly about such a possibility, Walker laughed. “Oh, I have lots of ideas in my spare time,” he said. “But this [the Lunar robotaxi] is the one we’re talking about today.”

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Posted Friday 27 March 2026 at 4:59 am AEST (my time).

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Across much of the Western United States, winter 2026 was the year the snow never came. Many ski resorts got by with snowmaking but shut down their winter operations early. Fire officials and water supply managers are worried about summer.

Where I live in Boise, Idaho, temperatures hit the low 80s Fahrenheit (high-20s Celsius) in mid-March. The same heat dome sent temperatures soaring to 105° F (40° C) in Phoenix.

Ordinarily, water managers and hydrologists like me who study the Western US expect the mountain snowpacks to be at their fullest around April 1. Snowpacks are natural reservoirs of water that farms and communities depend on through the hot, dry summer. Their snow water equivalent, meaning the amount of liquid water in the snowpack, is seen as a bellwether for water supplies.

But the 2026 water year has been anything but ordinary. In fact, its snow drought has few historical analogs.

Data from the US Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service shows that out of approximately 70 river basins across the Western US, only five are at or above the 1991–2020 median snow water equivalent for this time of year. Most of those are clustered around the Yellowstone region of western Wyoming and eastern Idaho.

The majority of river basins in the Western US were at less than 50 percent of their 1991–2020 median snow water equivalent on March 23, 2026.

Credit: Natural Resources Conservation Service National Water and Climate Center

By contrast, 11 basins have less than 25 percent of the 1991–2020 median, and more than half are below 50 percent. The headwaters of critically important rivers, including the Colorado, the Columbia, and the Missouri, are peppered with basins that are far below historical averages.

Other important measures of snow water storage and ecosystem health, including which areas have snow cover in the Western US and how long it’s been there, also point toward snow reserves that are far below recent years.

How did we get here?

Just because the Western US is in a snow drought doesn’t mean it isn’t getting precipitation. Temperatures have been high enough since the start of the water year in October that a lot of what normally would have fallen as snow fell as rain instead.

The West experienced a very warm December at all but the highest elevations, but strong storms also drenched large parts of the region. Washington state was swamped with rain that triggered flooding and melted the existing snowpack.

The total area of the Western US with snow cover has been exceptionally low compared to the years 2001 to 2025.

Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center

Temperatures in January were less extreme but still warmer than historical averages. However, precipitation in January was far below the 1991–2020 average throughout much of the region. February brought precipitation conditions closer to historical averages, but temperatures were much warmer than normal.

The Western US, therefore, got a triple whammy: Two of the three critical snow-accumulation months were too warm, and the third was too dry.

Water worries ahead

So what does this mean for water supplies and river flows?

A recent assessment of drought conditions from NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System suggests 2026 will be a tight year for water supplies.

Water managers in Wyoming and Washington are already signaling that some water rights holders—cities, irrigation districts, individual farms, and industries can take limited amounts of water from rivers, canals, and aquifers—can expect to receive less than their full allotment of water in 2026. It’s not unreasonable to expect other states to soon follow suit.

Throughout the Western US, water rights are administered according to the Doctrine of Prior Appropriation—those who hold the oldest legitimate claims to water from a river, reservoir, or aquifer are entitled to receive their allotments first.

Junior water rights holders who may be at risk of receiving less than their full allotment of water likely have difficult decisions ahead related to the planting and management of their crops. The challenges are compounded by the likelihood of increases in fertilizer and transportation costs associated with the ongoing war in Iran.

Credit: The Conversation/CC-BY-ND

In the Colorado River Basin, the US Bureau of Reclamation’s most probable forecast indicates water levels in Lake Powell falling below the minimum power pool elevation in December 2026. That’s bad news for power supplies, because below that level, the Glen Canyon Dam can’t produce hydroelectric power. The dam contributes power for millions of customers across seven states.

What the snow drought means for fire season

Another big concern is whether the historic snow drought is setting up the West for a bad fire season. That’s still an open question.

Rain has meant moisture is available now for plants to grow, but the lack of snowpack that normally keeps meltwater flowing through summer raises concerns about whether those plants will dry out, leaving them ready to burn.

Fire is a historically important feature of the forest and rangeland ecosystems of the West, and these ecosystems are to some degree adapted to large swings in conditions from year to year and season to season.

Because precipitation across much of the West is close to historical averages, there is snow in some of the highest-elevation mountains. And at lower elevations, some of the precipitation that fell as rain likely remains in the soils.

Weather conditions in the late spring and summer—how much rain falls and how hot and dry conditions become—will play critical roles in determining the shape forests and rangelands will be in for fire season.

What this winter suggests about the future

The record-low snowpack may be a harbinger of what a warmer future will look like in the region. Many researchers have investigated how climate change will influence snowpacks and water supply throughout the Western US, but questions and critical challenges remain.

Among them: In years like this, with near-normal precipitation but low snowpack, are there difficult-to-observe stores of water in the deeper subsurface that can help buffer against loss of snow for periods of time? That’s one of several questions my colleagues and I have been working on.

This year’s snow drought presents a timely, albeit high-stakes, stress test for the West. Everyone will be watching.

Alejandro N. Flores is a professor of geoscience at Boise State University

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

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Posted Friday 27 March 2026 at 4:56 am AEST (my time).

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NASA’s announcement Tuesday that it will “pause” work on a lunar space station and focus on building a surface base on the Moon was no big surprise to anyone paying attention to the Trump administration’s space policy.

But what should NASA do with hardware already built for the Gateway outpost? NASA spent close to $4.5 billion on developing a human-tended complex in orbit around the Moon since the Gateway program’s official start in 2019. There are pieces of the station undergoing construction and testing in factories scattered around the world.

The centerpiece of Gateway, called the Power and Propulsion Element, is closest to being ready for launch. NASA’s rejigged exploration roadmap, revealed Tuesday in an all-day event at NASA headquarters in Washington, calls for repurposing the core module for a nuclear-electric propulsion demonstration in deep space.

This is not the first time NASA has announced a nuclear propulsion demo. More than 20 years ago, NASA was working on a nuclear-electric propulsion initiative called Project Prometheus. It was canceled. In 2021, NASA and DARPA, the Pentagon’s research and development agency, started work on a nuclear rocket engine known as DRACO. NASA and the Pentagon canceled the DRACO program last year.

Like on Gateway, NASA and other agencies have spent billions of dollars on nuclear power and propulsion in space, with little to show for it. There are good reasons for using this technology. Nuclear power enables more ambitious robotic missions deeper into the Solar System, where the Sun’s energy is not sufficient to generate electricity. Closer to Earth, nuclear reactors on the Moon can be used to power habitats, robots, and lunar bases during the two-week-long lunar night.

Nuclear-powered rocket engines are more efficient than chemical rockets. They come in two forms: nuclear-thermal and nuclear-electric engines. Nuclear-thermal rockets produce higher thrust, using heat from a reactor to heat up a chemical rocket fuel. Nuclear-electric engines have lower thrust but greater efficiency. The now-canceled DRACO mission would have used the former approach. NASA’s new nuclear mission will use the latter.

“We will launch the first-of-its-kind interplanetary mission called SR-1 Freedom before the end of 2028, demonstrating fission power and the extraordinary capabilities to move mass efficiently in space,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman.

NASA will cannibalize the core module of Gateway for the SR-1 mission. The Power and Propulsion Element, or PPE, is under construction at Lanteris Space Systems in Palo Alto, California. The module will have the most powerful electric propulsion system ever flown in space, with three 12-kilowatt engines and four 6-kilowatt thrusters. The PPE would have originally relied entirely on solar power. Under NASA’s new plan, it will have solar arrays and a uranium-fueled fission reactor.

The goal for SR-1 Freedom is to “prove the US can build, launch, and operate a nuclear propulsion system,” laying the “foundation” for more capable missions to follow, said Steve Sinacore, NASA’s program executive for space reactors. Launch is just 33 months away.

NASA officials present the SR-1 Freedom mission at NASA Headquarters in Washington on March 24, 2026.

Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Can NASA pull this off?

There are reasons NASA has never launched a nuclear propulsion mission before. Past efforts aimed too high, with complicated designs and bonus science objectives that ballooned their costs and dragged out their schedules. Other projects, like DRACO, had convoluted management structures with multiple government agencies claiming ownership.

Only one US-built nuclear reactor has ever flown in space, and that was more than 60 years ago. “The lack of an operational space nuclear reactor is not a technology problem, it’s an execution problem,” Sinacore said.

SR-1, short for Space Reactor-1, will take a smaller bite at solving the nuclear power challenge in space. It will have a roughly 20-kilowatt fission reactor, a fraction of the power levels NASA aimed to achieve with the first mission for Project Prometheus before its cancellation. This is still 20 times more electricity than the nuclear power generators currently operating in deep space, such as on NASA’s Mars rovers and the Voyager probes leaving the Solar System.

NASA is already working with commercial nuclear reactor developers to provide power on the lunar surface. Lockheed Martin and BWX Technologies were developing the reactor to fly on the DRACO mission before its cancellation last year. One thorny problem that cursed the DRACO mission was the question of how to test a nuclear thermal rocket engine on Earth while adhering to nuclear safety protocols. This would require engine exhaust to be scrubbed of radiological material. Managers found there’s no easy, inexpensive way of doing that.

In addition to efficiency, a nuclear-electric propulsion system has the benefit of using conventional plasma thrusters. But instead of using solar power to energize the thrusters’ xenon fuel, SR-1 will use electricity generated from a nuclear reactor.

“Our nuclear program, SR-1, is not about going and lobbying for billions of dollars to undertake a brand-new mission,” Isaacman said. “Honestly, we haven’t won the right to be able to do that after $20 billion worth of failed programs over time. This is why we’re taking hardware that we already have, a reactor that’s mostly built, fuel that’s mostly paid for over time.”

Gateway’s Power and Propulsion Element, seen here under construction last year, will form the centerpiece of the SR-1 Freedom mission.

Credit: Lanteris Space Systems

NASA officials did not disclose an estimated cost for the SR-1 mission.

After proving nuclear propulsion works, “then you can come back and maybe ask for more [funding] in the future when you show that it can be done,” Isaacman said.

“SR-1 Freedom primarily has that one new system, the reactor, on a spacecraft bus that already exists,” Sinacore said. “The timeline will match the need with the next Mars launch window in December 2028. Orbital mechanics does not negotiate, and the scope must bend around this deadline.”

There are still some hurdles that won’t be easy to jump. Readying any large space mission, especially one as novel as a nuclear propulsion demo, for launch in less than three years will require sharp focus, resistance to mission creep, and near-perfect execution. Sinacore laid out an ambitious timeline for SR-1, with mission design complete by June and large-scale assembly beginning at the start of 2028. If the mission misses a launch opportunity in late 2028, the next Earth-Mars alignment won’t happen until early 2031.

“We are not trying to do everything,” Sinacore said. “We are trying to do the hard thing, which is operate a coupled nuclear reactor, power conversion, and electric propulsion thruster system beyond Earth orbit for the first time ever.”

Although NASA will be the “prime integrator” for SR-1, actually launching radioactive fuel into space requires input from multiple federal agencies, including the Department of Energy. Any rocket selected to launch a nuclear-powered mission must undergo a special certification. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which NASA originally booked to launch the Gateway core module, is undergoing a nuclear certification to launch NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan.

Introducing Skyfall

There is one additional payload that NASA says will ride to Mars with the SR-1 Freedom spacecraft. The mothership will release three flying drones, each based on NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter, to land on Mars and scout future landing sites for human explorers.

These copters, presumably built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will carry cameras and ground-penetrating radars to scan the Martian terrain for subsurface water ice. They will land themselves on Mars after plunging through the Martian atmosphere.

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter is seen here in a closeup taken by Mastcam-Z, a pair of zoomable cameras aboard the Perseverance rover.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

“After separating from SR-1 Freedom, the entry capsule enters the Martian atmosphere at hypersonic speeds greater than Mach 5, slowing to approximately Mach 2,” Sinacore said. “Next, a supersonic parachute deploys to slow the capsule further, and finally, the heat shield separates and the helicopters are released in a first-ever mid-air deployment.”

NASA isn’t sure what they will do with the SR-1 mothership after reaching Mars. They could try to maneuver it into orbit around the red planet, or slingshot the spacecraft past Mars to head to another planetary destination.

The inclusion of Mars helicopters on the SR-1 mission would bridge a gap in NASA’s Mars landing missions. The agency canceled a robotic Mars Sample Return mission last year due to rising costs, meaning China is likely to be the first country to bring Martian rocks back to Earth.

NASA is contributing to Europe’s Rosalind Franklin rover, also set for launch in late 2028. The US space agency also plans to partner with a commercial provider for a Mars communications relay orbiter that could launch as soon as 2028.

NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers continue operating on Mars, but there were no US-led Mars landing missions in the agency’s roadmap until this week’s announcement of Skyfall.

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Posted Thursday 26 March 2026 at 12:27 pm AEST (my time).

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When we think of drought, we tend to think of consequences we can see—wildfires, hose bans, taps that run dry and crops that fail. But it turns out drought can have a damaging effect even on the microscopic level by promoting dangerous antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

The finding is detailed in a study published Monday in Nature Microbiology. Researchers discovered that drought conditions can boost both soil-dwelling and human-hosted bacteria’s ability to resist antibiotics. And as rising global temperatures dry out more of the world, more people may be exposed to these treatment-immune pathogens.

“We found this really surprisingly strong correlation of the aridity index and antibiotic resistance,” says Dianne Newman, senior author of the study and a microbiologist at the California Institute of Technology, who adds that the data are a “wake-up call” for people to pay attention to antibiotic resistance.

“I think [the study authors] are exploring something novel,” says Jason Burnham, an infectious diseases physician and clinical researcher who was not involved in the new research. Antibiotic resistance isn’t a new problem: first noticed soon after the discovery of antibiotics, the ability of some bacteria to evade treatment with these drugs has challenged physicians for decades and contributes to an estimated five million deaths worldwide each year. But connecting it to climate change is an emerging area of interest—and there are many unanswered questions about how a warmer world will influence disease.

Newman and her colleagues were interested in the ecological niche of phenazines, which are naturally occurring antibiotics that live in soil. When they tested the microbial population in wet and dry soil samples, they noticed that drier conditions tended to increase the concentration of antibiotics—and resistant bacteria.

“It stands to reason that if you have bacteria in the soil making antibiotics, and you start drying out the soil, those antibiotics become more concentrated,” Newman says. “The only bacteria that can withstand that are those that can resist it.”

The researchers also looked at soil data from several different ecosystems that had experienced drought and found elevated levels of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Then they analyzed hospital data that revealed that the aridity of a hospital's location was strongly correlated with the number of antibiotic-resistant infections.

As the planet warms, more of the world—perhaps as much as 25 percent of Earth by 2050—will experience droughts and desertlike conditions. That could translate to much higher rates of antibiotic-resistant bacterial diseases—but it could also help doctors in dry areas better prepare to fight these illnesses.

“What [the authors] are proposing, reading between the lines a little bit, is that hospitals in drier areas may need to use different antibiotics than hospitals with sort of less arid conditions,” Burnham says.

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WASHINGTON, DC—NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman on Tuesday laid out a sweeping vision for the space agency’s next decade during an event called “Ignition” in which he and other senior leaders set out their exploration plans.

Isaacman and his colleagues shared a number of major announcements, including outlining a nuclear-powered mission to Mars that will release three helicopters there and major changes to commercial space stations. However, most significantly, Isaacman outlined a detailed plan to construct a substantial Moon base over the next decade. He framed it as part of a “great power” challenge, saying that if NASA does not succeed now it will cede the Moon to China.

The base included long-range drones, multiple sources of power, sophisticated communications, permanent habitats, scientific laboratories, local manufacturing, and more. To accomplish this, NASA will work with a broad range of industry partners capable of sending medium-size and large cargos to the lunar surface. Isaacman also confirmed that NASA will no longer build a Lunar Gateway in orbit around the Moon, but would rather focus all of its energy and resources on the lunar surface.

Won’t sit “idly” by

Is this affordable? One of Isaacman’s fundamental beliefs is that NASA does not have a revenue problem. Rather, it has an expense problem.

“For too long we tried to satisfy every stakeholder, and the results of that are very well documented in Office of the Inspector General reports,” he said. “Billions of dollars wasted. Years lost. Hardware that never launched. Fewer flagship science missions. And fewer astronauts in space, which means fewer kids dressing up as astronauts for Halloween. I don’t like it. The president doesn’t like it. The American people have waited long enough.”

Isaacman spoke inside the Webb Auditorium at NASA’s Headquarters in Washington, DC. In the audience were about 160 officials from industry, politicians, and leaders of foreign space agencies. They will participate in “closed door” briefings on Wednesday to get more details about contract opportunities with the new plans.

But publicly, Isaacman sought to be clear with NASA’s contractors. NASA, he said, needed to do better. And they needed to do better. The space agency is prepared to do everything it can to help its contractors succeed, from embedding subject matter experts to relaxing requirements. But the time for excuses is coming to an end, he said.

“We are not going to sit idly by while schedules slip or budgets are exceeded,” he said. “Expect uncomfortable action if that is what it takes. Because the public has invested $100 billion and has been very patient with America’s return to the Moon. Expectations are rightfully very high. Taxpayers and their representatives in Congress should demand accountability from every leader and every CEO if those expectations are not met.”

Here, Isaacman was referencing NASA’s glacial progress over the last 20 years, with many billions spent on the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System rocket, for a very limited return. For so long NASA has seemed far more interested in building this deep space hardware rather than what it needs to actually accomplish in deep space.

On Tuesday that changed in a major way.

Moon base

One of the highlights on Tuesday was an hourlong presentation by Carlos Garcia-Galan, who formerly was a deputy program manager for the Gateway but now has been installed as leader of the Moon Base initiative. Garcia-Galan, however, did not seem downcast by the end of the Gateway. Rather, he seemed fired up about building sprawling infrastructure on the Moon.

“The Gateway team, both NASA and industry and the international partners, were an awesome team,” he said in an interview afterward. “While I do believe an orbiting outpost has value in our overall exploration goals, this doesn’t mean that we can’t do it later. We need to be focused on the surface, and everyone wants to be on the surface. So I’m super excited, and I’m sure the rest of the Gateway team will be once they start to shift their focus.”

NASA released this rendering of a Moon base that will be built over the next decade.

Credit: NASA

Garcia-Galan explained that the lunar base would be established through three phases, using a mix of providers primarily through a scaled up Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Each of these three phases would cost on the order of $10 billion.

The first of these, running through 2028, is estimated to comprise 21 landings, putting a total of 4 metric tons of payload on the Moon, including the VIPER rover to prospect for lunar resources; four “Moon Fall” drones that can travel up to 50 km and reach areas difficult for humans to access; initial versions of a lunar terrain vehicle capable of surviving up to 150 hours without sunlight; and radioisotope heater units. During this phase NASA will also seek to establish two lunar orbital communications satellite constellations.

As part of phase two, running from 2029 to 2032, NASA will seek to secure a site for a lunar base. This phase is projected to entail 27 landings with a total mass of 60 metric tons. These landed payloads would include larger, pressurized rovers, solar and nuclear power sources for surface activities, towers for communication, and excavator rovers.

The final phase, from 2032 to 2036, will establish habitats for long-term human presence, supporting four astronauts for four-week missions. Over the course of 28 landings, NASA would seek to place 150 metric tons of payload on the surface, including fission power, multiple rovers, an “industrial neighborhood” to support in-situ manufacturing, and the capability to return hundreds of kilograms to Earth, such as scientific experiments, critical hardware, and lunar materials.

Providing focus

The Moon base will be NASA’s main exploration focus going forward. Garcia-Galan said part of his job will be bringing together the various efforts at NASA previously focused on or near the Moon and make it clear to all that the work they’re doing must be bent toward supporting a Moon base.

This is why the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program will be scaled up, to accommodate the increased need for frequent access to the Moon with larger cargoes. It’s why Gateway had to go. It’s why NASA will develop not one, but two networks of communications satellites.

With the Ignition event on Tuesday, Isaacman brought this much-needed focus to the space agency. For a long time reporters have joked that NASA stands for “Never A Straight Answer” because it wasn’t quite clear where NASA was going, or why it was doing some of the things it was doing. Now there is a clear plan for people like Garcia-Galan to go and execute.

“It’s very clear that we need to be focused on one thing, not 10 things,” he said. “So for me, this is a game-changer. It’s quite incredible.”

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Posted Wednesday 25 March 2026 at 5:20 am AEST (my time).

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Let’s start with the basics. What, exactly, is an orbital data center?

On the ground, data centers are typically large, warehouse-sized facilities filled with racks of storage and servers, and usually some high-speed networking gear to connect everything. A data center can be small or large, but the ones SpaceX is looking to supplant are of the big kind—the ones operated by major industry players like Amazon Web Services and Google, which provide most of the online services you use today. These are sprawling buildings, or even campuses of buildings, with redundant connections to the electrical grid, on-site generators, massive banks of batteries, and enormous cooling systems to handle the heat being shed by thousands upon thousands of machines operating around the clock.

An orbital data center replicates all of that, but in space.

Instead of being stored in 19-inch racks, the individual server elements would instead be built around—and attached to—a “satellite bus.” This is a spacecraft with large solar arrays to gather energy, thermal systems to manage heat (in a vacuum, heat must be radiated away), propulsion for orbit-keeping and maneuvering, and high-bandwidth communications gear. And it is not a theoretical idea. A company called Starcloud recently modified and launched an Nvidia H100 GPU to a small satellite bus where it is running Gemini in space.

An Amazon Web Services data center is shown situated near single-family homes on July 17, 2024, in Stone Ridge, Virginia.

Credit: Nathan Howard/Getty Images

There’s a catch, though. Replicating the output of even a single large terrestrial data center would require, at a minimum, hundreds of these satellites.

Historically, building things in space has been enormously expensive. The International Space Station, which has about the same amount of habitable space as the average American home, cost more than $150 billion to construct in space. That’s on the order of 1 million times more than the cost of building a single-family home. Until recently, it cost $10,000 to put a single kilogram of payload into orbit, but costs can now be as low as one-third of that.

It never rains in space

So yes, it does sound strange to try to build something in space that is fairly commonplace on Earth. But there is a logic here.

The biggest and most obvious advantage of putting data centers in space is the abundant energy provided by the Sun, which matters because data centers are notoriously avaricious consumers of electricity. The gathering power of a solar panel in space is five to seven times greater than a panel on Earth, depending on cloud cover, the latitude of the solar panel, and other factors that limit surface-based solar power.

Another significant advantage comes on the regulatory side. People on Earth don’t like living near data centers, considering them noisy neighbors that affect local water supplies and electricity prices. A tide of NIMBY opposition is already building. In February, a pair of New York lawmakers said they would file legislation to impose a three-year moratorium on data center development, becoming the sixth US state to consider such “pause laws.” And it’s not just Democrat-led states. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has proposed legislation to limit data centers, and even President Trump has weighed in on electricity costs.

From this perspective, data centers in space could solve important problems, notably the availability and cost of energy and the rate at which new data centers can be permitted and built. If data centers were only a modestly growing industry, these would not be significant issues. But what if the need for computing power scales significantly, as some envision with the ongoing revolution in artificial intelligence? This belief that scaling on Earth will be difficult is why SpaceX recently announced plans to build a megaconstellation of up to 1 million satellites, and they’re not alone in attempting to address what some perceive to be a looming capacity crisis.

The three biggest economic factors

While detailed cost modeling will be examined in part 3 of this series, it’s helpful to highlight the three biggest economic factors at play here. Andrew McCalip is an engineer who works in robotics, manufacturing, and space. As the debate over orbital data centers heated up late last year, he created a widely shared model that allowed people to test the economics. It factors in launch costs, satellite costs, GPU failure rates, energy costs, and more. (If you’re interested in this sort of thing, you should really play around with the various inputs.)

The biggest affordability factor is launch costs, McCalip explained in an interview. To make any of this work, a rocket like SpaceX’s Starship must become highly reliable and then rapidly reusable. Costs per kilogram to orbit must fall well below $1,000. This is not impossible, as launch costs are on a downward trajectory. The Space Shuttle cost more than $60,000 per kilogram, expendable rockets like Atlas and Delta brought that down to the low $10,000s, and the partially reusable Falcon 9 is less than $5,000.

Then there’s the cost of the satellite hardware itself. “Starlinks are an order of magnitude cheaper than previous satellites, but that’s still too expensive,” McCalip said. His model estimates the cost of a Starlink V2 satellite, which has a mass of 1,250 kg, at about $22 per watt generated—which is highly efficient compared to, say, a NASA flagship mission that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per watt.

A third significant factor is the cost of silicon. Whereas startup companies like Starcloud may seek to use Nvidia chips, SpaceX is likely to develop its own microchips to avoid paying a premium for a name brand. This past weekend, SpaceX founder Elon Musk announced that he was launching the Terafab project to build chips; the plan is to vertically integrate every stage of the semiconductor device production process, from design to fabrication to testing, under one roof. This is clearly not a trivial exercise. Chip fabrication lies well outside of SpaceX’s core competencies. Musk estimated the main factory for this would cost about $20 billion.

Chip fabrication is a problem that cannot be solved without major investments—and probably a lot of technical pain. To its credit, SpaceX has solved these kinds of issues before. Consider that, as part of Starlink, the company needs to manufacture millions of “user terminals” a year. These are technically sophisticated devices with a Ku-band phased array antenna to track satellites without moving parts. To reach this scale, the company built the largest printed circuit board manufacturing site in the United States, in Bastrop, Texas. Now Musk will try to run back that playbook on an even larger scale with chips.

Will there really be an energy crunch?

Proponents of space-based data centers seem convinced that energy costs will only go up. But the fusion industry is growing, there are new nuclear initiatives such as Bill Gates’ TerraPower, and there is no shortage of hot, sunny places to put down solar farms.

McCalip is not sold on the idea that energy will be a limiting factor for terrestrial data centers. He believes that capital markets will respond to rising electricity demand and prices. He also has a hard time envisioning states like Texas throwing up regulatory barriers before expanding data centers. Some states may block them, but others will find the economic boon hard to resist.

For all of this, McCalip hedged a bit in our interview. He agreed that global demand for computing power will only increase and that decision-makers are generally underestimating the need for future computing power. Moreover, the ratio of inference workloads relative to training workloads—the type of work orbital data centers will optimize for—should increase over time.

“This is not physically impossible; it’s only a question of whether this is a rational thing to scale up economically,” McCalip said. “The answer is it’s really close. And if you own both sides of the equation, SpaceX and xAI, it’s not a terrible place to be. I wouldn’t bet against Elon.”

Yet betting on Elon also requires a giant leap of faith.

The third part of this series will dive deeper into detailed cost estimates, but in terms of round numbers, the bare-bones cost of deploying 1 million satellites is more than a trillion dollars. SpaceX’s two biggest previous projects to date, the hyper-ambitious Starlink and Starship programs, each required on the order of $10 billion up front. So in terms of scope and cost, orbital data centers are two orders of magnitude larger.

What about hidden costs?

Ground-based data centers are power and water hogs. A Department of Energy report from a little over a year ago found that data centers consumed about 4.4 percent of total US electricity in 2023 (data for AI was only part of this) and are expected to use approximately 6.7 to 12 percent of total US electricity by 2028. This not only puts upward pressure on electricity prices but also has environmental impacts, as much of this demand will come from fossil fuels. Some data centers also use millions of gallons of water on a daily basis for cooling.

Depending on who you ask, the environmental costs estimates of earth-based data centers vary. In terms of water use alone, we see estimates of 560 billion liters annually, and other estimates are much higher. This is especially problematic for arid regions, such as Tucson, Arizona, which successfully pushed back on a large Amazon data center project for this very reason. Ground-based data centers also produce a lot of greenhouse gases from energy consumption.

By contrast, once operational, data centers in space have zero impact on emissions and use no water for cooling. Andrew Dessler, a professor of climate science at Texas A&M University who also writes at The Climate Brink, said there are clear climate benefits from moving this energy generation into space. He considered the potential benefits from a SpaceX constellation generating 100 GW of energy in orbit. The equivalent amount of power from natural gas on Earth would generate around 2 gigatons of carbon dioxide over five years. The Starship launches to put such a constellation into space might produce the equivalent of 100 megatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

There are other trade-offs, though. For example, if ground-based data centers use solar energy, the environmental benefits of putting them in space are significantly lower, Dessler said. “Rocket launches also produce black carbon aerosols, which heat the climate, and that would also reduce the climate benefit,” he added. “On the other hand, my estimate of emissions from natural gas neglects any upstream methane leakage, which would increase the climate benefits of space data centers.”

Some space environmental researchers argue that, factoring in the life cycle of rockets, the benefits of putting data centers in space on climate change are entirely negated by the environmental costs of building rockets, transporting them, and constructing large launch sites.

Another worrisome concern involves the ablation of satellites when they reenter the atmosphere. Measurements from high-altitude aircraft show increasing concentrations of lithium, copper, and aluminum in the upper atmosphere from reentering satellites and rocket upper stages burning up. A recent study, for example, found a 10-fold increase in lithium atoms at the edge of space (96 km above Earth) that was traceable to reentry of a Falcon 9 upper stage. Scientists are only beginning to study these phenomena in detail.

“We think a lot is probably happening in the upper atmosphere, but the science isn’t there yet,” said Victoria Samson, chief director of Space Security and Stability for Secure World Foundation.

Goodbye, night sky?

Another natural resource that will undoubtedly be affected by orbital data centers is the night sky. These satellites, necessitating large solar arrays, will be much more visible than most satellites today. And if companies like SpaceX have their way, there would be something like a factor of 100 more satellites than what are zipping around orbit today.

It is a sobering thought for astronomers, who not only love a dark sky but also rely on it to make observations.

The astronomical community has dealt with satellites photo-bombing the night sky for a long time, but the problem worsened in 2019 when SpaceX started launching operational Starlink satellites. So far, scientists and the space companies have largely been able to work out their differences.

“At this point in time, largely because we have pursued dialogue with the industry, we have avoided what we were concerned about in 2019 as the worst outcome,” said John Barentine, an astronomer and self-described “defender” of dark skies. “We’ve seen companies like SpaceX, and some of their competitors, making efforts on a voluntary basis to reduce their impact on ground-based astronomy.”

The situation is not ideal. Major projects such as the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which surveys large sections of the night sky, frequently have observations compromised by satellite streaks. Even meaningful efforts to darken these satellites only have so much effect. Telescopes with smaller fields of view can compensate. Radio telescopes have also experienced significant interference.

If this were as crowded as the night sky was going to get, astronomers and satellite operators could probably co-exist peacefully.

Asked about the impact of mega-megaconstellations, Barentine offers a frustrated response. Astronomers (and other interested parties) were given only a month to offer comments to the Federal Communications Commission in response to SpaceX’s application for a 1 million-satellite constellation.

Their concerns are myriad. Astronomers fear a multitude of satellite streaks, the potential for orbital debris, and even the aggregate of all of these satellites raising the background brightness of the sky—an impact not dissimilar to light pollution from a nearby small city.

The future of ground-based astronomy—not to mention millions of years of humans looking to the dark sky, marveling at stars and galaxies, and wondering what might be out there—lies at risk.

“We’re expected to respond to the FCC in a quantitative way, but we don’t have all of the details about the SpaceX constellation,” he said. “The companies aren’t funding this work. My colleagues and I are doing this in our literal spare time, trying to understand whether this is an existential problem.”

So is this an existential risk? “I just don’t know yet.”

There’s a lot we don’t know about orbital data centers yet, in fact.

Our next story in this series will explore the technical challenges of putting them into orbit.

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Posted Wednesday 25 March 2026 at 5:18 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of February) 854

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A camera on NASA’s Juno spacecraft took this image of a high-altitude storm—a stealth superstorm

plume—in Jupiter’s North Equatorial Belt on January 12, 2022. The head of the storm is white because

of frozen ammonia crystals. The redder clouds are deeper in the atmosphere. UC Berkeley’s Michael

Wong analyzed lightning produced by four stealth superstorms like this between 2021 and 2022.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Björn Jónsson © cc nc sa

Jupiter’s colossal storms generate lightning flashes at least 100 times more powerful than those on Earth, according to scientists analyzing data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft.

The findings were published March 20 in the journal AGU Advances. Researchers used data recorded by Juno in 2021 and 2022, after NASA granted an extension to the spacecraft’s operations upon completing a five-year science campaign at Jupiter. Juno remains in good health, but NASA officials have not said if they will approve another extension for the mission. The issue is money.

Questions about the future of Juno and more than a dozen other robotic science missions began swirling nearly a year ago, when the administration asked mission leaders to submit “closeout” plans for how to turn off their spacecraft. Ars first reported the news soon after the White House released a budget request that called for slashing NASA’s science budget by nearly half.

Some of NASA’s Solar System exploration missions on the list have received NASA approval to continue operations. These include the OSIRIS-APEX mission, which brought asteroid samples back to Earth in 2023 and is now using leftover fuel to chase down another asteroid in 2029. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the agency’s only active spacecraft at the Moon, will be funded for at least three more years.

Congress rejected most of the proposed NASA cuts. Lawmakers passed a fiscal year 2026 budget with $2.54 billion for NASA’s planetary science division, about $220 million shy of last year’s funding.

Artist’s illustration of the Juno spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter.

Credit: NASA

NASA can’t afford everything

“We can’t quite afford to support everything that we have done in the past,” said Louise Prockter, director of NASA’s planetary science division, in a meeting of the National Academies’ Committee on Astrobiology and Planetary Sciences on Monday. The budget cut is forcing NASA officials to make “tough decisions,” she said.

One of these decisions is what to do with Juno, humanity’s only spacecraft currently operating between the orbits of Jupiter and Pluto. Its future remains uncertain, along with four missions at Mars. NASA lost contact with one of the Mars probes last year, and its mission is likely over anyway. Another one, Odyssey, is about to run out of fuel. The other two Mars missions up for a decision are the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Curiosity rover, neither of which will be fully replaced anytime soon. These two are also the most expensive to operate.

Prockter said Monday the agency will announce its decision on these five missions when it submits its annual “operating plan” to Congress. The document is undergoing review by senior agency leadership and White House budget officials.

It is unusual for NASA to turn off a still-functioning planetary science probe as long as it has fuel, remains healthy, and still makes useful scientific observations. All of the missions still awaiting a decision from NASA were “ranked highly for science” by independent reviewers, Prockter said. But they come at a cost.

“There’s no doubt we’re still getting really great science from these missions,” Prockter said. “We’re spending about 10 percent [of NASA’s planetary science budget] on them. That doesn’t sound like a lot. It sounds like maybe it’s a reasonable amount. It was about $260 million … in ’25.”

Prockter is herself a planetary scientist. She is not a political appointee. Part of her job is finding the right balance between NASA’s multibillion-dollar flagship science missions, like Europa Clipper, and more focused, less expensive projects, such as the Psyche probe on the way to explore a metal asteroid. Even the cheaper missions in NASA’s planetary science portfolio usually cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

NASA must also balance its budget between building new missions, which infuse emerging technologies and seek to answer big science questions, and keeping alive successful spacecraft that taxpayers have already paid for. Questions about the future of NASA’s aging research satellites are not limited to planetary science. Budget limitations nearly caused NASA to shut down the Chandra X-ray Observatory, but Congress specifically directed NASA to continue operating Chandra.

Prockter said NASA wants to “start a conversation” within the space science community about the agency’s priorities, particularly with regard to extended missions. “When we say yes to something, we say no to something else.”

Louise Prockter, director of NASA’s planetary science division, presented this chart showing the agency’s oldest Solar System exploration missions, and their cost to operate each year.

Credit: NASA/Louise Prockter

NASA’s cadence of Solar System missions has declined since reaching a peak in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the agency launched 11 Discovery-class robotic missions in a little more than 15 years. NASA has launched just three Discovery missions in the 15 years since then, and the next one won’t fly before 2030. A program for more expensive missions, called New Frontiers, has launched three missions over the last 20 years. The next New Frontiers mission is Dragonfly, a rotorcraft set to launch Saturn’s moon Titan in 2028.

NASA selects Discovery and New Frontiers missions in periodic competitions, when scientists submit proposals to send probes to other planets, asteroids, or comets. These missions missions have a cost cap. The most recent Discovery competition limited proposals to a development cost of less than $500 million.

Killing off NASA’s long-lived planetary science missions would open opportunities for new exploration, Prockter said.

“If we had an extra $260 million a year, that is the equivalent of about two Discovery missions over the next decade. I think, when we are looking at extended missions, we are starting to have more serious conversations about the value of the science compared to the value of future science that we are not doing,” she said.

“We’re just starting to have the conversations,” Prockter said. “The administrator (Jared Isaacman) has expressed his desire for us to get to science faster and look for ways that we can get more bang for the buck out of the program.”

Here’s a bang

It’s not easy to measure return on investment in scientific discovery, but there is an opportunity cost to ending a science mission too soon. For example, NASA’s Curiosity rover, one of the missions waiting for a possible renewal, collected data in 2022 and 2023 that led to a significant discovery about the carbon cycle on ancient Mars, with potential implications for past life. Curiosity made the measurements after NASA extended the rover’s operations a third time.

Farther into the Solar System, Juno is still returning interesting science results from Jupiter, where enormous cyclones and anticyclones spin through the atmosphere for years. The Great Red Spot, the most famous of Jupiter’s storms, has persisted for at least 190 years.

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft first revealed the inner workings of Jupiter’s storms when it zoomed by the giant planet in 1979. Voyager’s discoveries included the first observations of lightning in Jupiter’s atmosphere.

For decades, scientists struggled to measure the power unleashed with Jovian lightning bolts. It is no surprise Jupiter produces more potent lightning than Earth, but clouds often obscure the full power of the flashes from optical cameras. NASA’s Juno mission, in orbit around Jupiter since 2016, carries an instrument that can detect microwave emissions from deep inside Jupiter’s atmosphere.

Jupiter’s storms are concentrated in belts that encircle the planet. Their close proximity to one another makes it difficult to pinpoint the sources of signals collected by Juno’s microwave radiometer instrument. A lull in storms in 2021 and 2022 allowed scientists to focus on one storm at a time.

Over the course of 12 passes, Juno detected 613 microwave pulses from lightning, with power ranging from about the same as a lightning bolt on Earth to at least 100 times more. There is uncertainty in the interplanetary comparison, so it’s possible Jupiter’s lightning flashes could have been a million times more powerful than those on Earth.

Lightning on Jupiter is likely sparked by a mechanism similar to what happens inside Earth’s atmosphere, where ice crystals within clouds obtain an electrical charge, and voltage differentials lead to cloud-to-cloud or cloud-to-ground lightning strikes.

There are notable differences between the planets, too. There is no true surface on Jupiter, and ice crystals inside the Jovian atmosphere contain water and ammonia. On Earth, it’s just water. Atmospheric convection also works differently at Jupiter, where moist air wants to sink because it is heavier than the surrounding hydrogen rich-atmosphere. Nitrogen, heavier than water, dominates Earth’s atmosphere, so moist air rises.

Therefore, it is not only Jupiter’s immense size than leads to such large and powerful storms. It requires much more energy to propel moist air upward, resulting in stronger winds and more intense cloud-to-cloud lightning. There is still a mystery about what drives lightning to be so extreme on Jupiter.

“Could the key difference be hydrogen versus nitrogen atmospheres, or could it be that the storms are taller on Jupiter and so there’s greater distances involved?” said Michael Wong, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. Wong is the lead author on the Jupiter lightning study.

“Or could it be that greater energy is available because with moist convection on Jupiter, you have a bigger buildup of heat needed before you can generate the storm to create lightning?” Wong said in a press release. “It’s an active area of research.”

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Posted Tuesday 24 March 2026 at 10:38 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of February) 854

RIP Matrix

BROOMFIELD, Colorado—One of NASA’s oldest astronomy missions, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, has been out of action for more than a month as scientists await the arrival of a pioneering robotic rescue mission.

The 21-year-old spacecraft is falling out of orbit, and NASA officials believe it’s worth saving—for the right price. Swift is not a flagship astronomy mission like Hubble or Webb, so there’s no talk of sending astronauts or spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a rescue expedition. Hubble was upgraded by five space shuttle missions, and billionaire and commercial astronaut Jared Isaacman—now NASA’s administrator—proposed a privately funded mission to service Hubble in 2022, but the agency rejected the idea.

Swift may be a more suitable target for a first-of-a-kind commercial rescue mission. It has cost roughly $500 million (adjusted for inflation) to build, launch, and operate, but it is significantly less expensive than Hubble, so the consequences of a botched rescue would be far less severe. Last September, NASA awarded a company named Katalyst Space Technologies a $30 million contract to rapidly build and launch a commercial satellite to stabilize Swift’s orbit and extend its mission.

The Swift observatory is flying in low-Earth orbit, where the outermost layers of the atmosphere still exert some aerodynamic influence on satellites. The spacecraft launched in November 2004 on a mission to detect gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the known Universe. Despite its age, astrophysicists still rely on Swift’s multi-wavelength instruments to identify and locate gamma-ray bursts for follow-up observations by other observatories.

Gamma-ray bursts happen without warning, when massive stars die and form black holes or during mergers of neutron stars and black holes. Their afterglow can last from a few seconds to up to a few hours. Scientists need satellites like Swift to find and study them. One of Swift’s unique abilities is to quickly turn to point toward gamma-ray sources before they fade, a proficiency that gave the mission its name. Until last month, the mission remained operational and scientifically productive, and there is no other US satellite that fully replicates Swift’s capabilities.

But the Swift spacecraft will surely crash back to Earth, likely before the end of this year, without a reboost. That’s where Katalyst comes in. The company’s robotic servicing spacecraft, named Link, will attempt to rendezvous and dock with the Swift satellite, then raise its altitude to give the observatory a new lease on life.

That is, if everything goes according to plan.

Artist’s illustration of Katalyst’s Link spacecraft (top) approaching NASA’s Swift observatory (bottom).

Credit: Katalyst Space Technologies

Deadline looming

There are a few things you should know about this venture. First, Swift was never designed to be captured or reboosted in orbit. Second, this mission is the first time Katalyst will attempt to dock with another satellite in space. And third, NASA gave Katalyst a daunting timetable of just nine months to build, test, and launch the rescue mission before Swift’s altitude falls too low for a safe rendezvous.

“This is really technically ambitious,” said Ghonhee Lee, founder and CEO of Katalyst.

Launch is scheduled for June 1, and there’s little margin for error. By late summer or early fall, Swift will slip below 200 miles (320 kilometers), too low for Katalyst to have confidence in controlling its spacecraft. “It’s a lot of drag with two big spacecraft docking together, ” Lee said. “Originally, we thought we had more time.”

NASA’s goals are twofold: first, demonstrate an important capability for the future of space exploration, and second, save Swift from a fiery demise and continue its scientific observations.

“We realized that you can’t get 100 percent guaranteed success on this,” Lee said.

When Ars visited Katalyst in late February, technicians were heads-down at work stations, soldering parts, assembling solar panels, and preparing components for environmental testing. For a traditional government space mission, a project might be at this stage of manufacturing years before reaching the launch pad.

“This is not quite as mature as you would expect,” one company official said. “Keep in mind that we started this whole thing about five months ago, so we are making great progress by those standards.”

Reporters are natural skeptics, but there was little room for doubt among the Katalyst employees I spoke with. The company is working nights and weekends, accepting risk, pivoting to new ideas, and striving for “good enough.” Katalyst has about 40 employees working on the Swift rescue, all within yelling distance on the factory floor.

When Katalyst started ordering parts for the rescue mission, officials found that some subcontractors were unable to provide components on such an unusually short schedule. Katalyst rapidly swapped vendors or, in some cases, decided to build things on its own.

“We’re basically doing it where everything is coming together,” Lee said. “The design, the testing, and the verification are all happening at once.”

A new way of doing business

NASA has long pursued robotic satellite servicing. The agency spent $1.5 billion on a now-canceled project that advanced several key technologies for in-orbit reboost, repair, and refueling, but in the end, it never left the ground. Now, NASA is buying a service from a company that uses a model similar to the one the agency used for the Commercial Crew and Cargo programs.

In a press release announcing the contract with Katalyst last year, Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, said the rescue mission uses a “forward leaning, risk-tolerant approach” and “is both more affordable than replacing Swift’s capabilities with a new mission, and beneficial to the nation—expanding the use of satellite servicing to a new broader class of spacecraft.”

Only Northrop Grumman, one of the nation’s largest aerospace and defense contractors, has completed a successful commercial servicing mission with a satellite that was not originally designed to receive visitors. Founded in 2020, Katalyst has flown two small satellites in orbit to date, and the company is developing a maneuverable spacecraft platform named Nexus, which is designed to approach, inspect, or service other objects in orbit. The prime market for Nexus will be the US military.

The Link servicing platform selected for the Swift rescue is an intermediate step before Nexus.

“Nothing under this program is inventing new technology,” Lee said. “We’re taking technology that’s already been developed, either here or just in the broader industry, and putting it together in the smart way that allows us to move really quickly. And it’s also only $30 million.”

Katalyst beat out competing proposals from Starfish Space and a team consisting of Cambrian Works and Astroscale to win the contract to save Swift last September.

At that time, officials expected Swift would reenter the atmosphere around the end of this year, or perhaps as late as the first part of 2027. But the Sun has been active, triggering strong geomagnetic storms. With those storms, the Earth’s atmosphere expands, leading to more air resistance in low-Earth orbit. Now, engineers predict Swift will decay sometime between late July and October, Lee said.

Concept of operations for the Swift rescue mission.

Credit: Katalyst Space Technologies

Will this actually work?

“No kidding, if we don’t launch in June, there’s real danger that this mission doesn’t come together,” Lee said.

Katalyst is trading reliability for time. “It’s better to put together a functional spacecraft that has a realistic shot pulling off the mission than delaying by two or three months to ensure another 1, 2, 3, 4 percent of reliability,” Lee said. “It’s just better to get it up there. I think NASA understands that.

“That contrasts deeply with the previous idea of  ‘do no harm,’” Lee said. “Now, ‘do no harm’ is a fine mentality, but I think that it can lead to stifling innovation because you just never take a chance on anything. This is the perfect mix between operational need and risk tolerance.”

Katalyst is one of a growing roster of US companies interested in RPO, or rendezvous and proximity operations. In many cases, these companies have outrun the government in RPO expertise. NASA spent nearly 10 years developing a government-owned servicing demo mission before its cancellation in 2024. A DARPA program has faced similar delays.

“We’re building on those shoulders, so I definitely want to credit them,” Lee said of NASA. “The problem with those programs is that they never really had a customer or a use case. It was ‘Oh, let’s go do a bunch of different things and hope that somebody will see the value in it.’ The danger of that is you get massive amounts of scope creep, and that’s exactly what happened. The programs were constantly delayed.”

In contrast, the commercial world places a premium on flight demonstrations. “For us, these things have to fly, otherwise our company doesn’t deserve to exist,” Lee said.

Guessing game

No one has tried to rescue a satellite on the cusp of reentering the atmosphere. Last month, NASA suspended most science operations on Swift in an effort to reduce atmospheric drag and slow the spacecraft’s orbital decay. Ground controllers will keep the satellite in an orientation that minimizes drag effects.

If Katalyst is able to launch the rescue before Swift drops too close to Earth, engineers aren’t sure what they’ll find when they pull up to the spacecraft.

“One of the big things in developing this mission is there’s not a lot of great information about Swift looked like prior to launch,” a Katalyst manager said as we stood under a full-scale model of the bottom of the Swift observatory. This is the lab where engineers test the robotic arms that will capture the satellite.

“This view that we have right here, there are no pictures that show this angle. None that we’ve found so far,” the manager said. Katalyst looked through archives from NASA and Northrop Grumman, which built the satellite. “There are pictures of lots of things around here,” the official said. “There isn’t one at the end of closeout where you’re, like, ‘OK, yeah, this is what we should be expecting.’”

Katalyst’s rescue craft has three robotic arms with grippers that will attempt to clamp onto any suitable part of the Swift observatory. Engineers came up with a design they say can handle a number of possibilities.

“We know there’s a radiator on one of these side panels, but that was covered in paint 22 years ago before it launched, and it’s had 22 years of ultraviolet exposure,” the manager said. “The paint is likely to be cracking and peeling off, so that’s not a great place to grab.”

The satellite’s outer layers of insulation have been exposed to the harsh environment of space, including atomic oxygen. This can cause the insulation to crack like glass. NASA discovered this phenomenon on servicing missions to the Hubble Space Telescope.

“As soon as you initiate fracture on it, it will just propagate,” the manager said. “So you have these plastics that now behave more like a glass and can shatter. It’s weird.”

After launch, it will take several weeks for the rescue spacecraft to reach Swift. Katalyst’s servicer will approach slowly, and sensors on the robotic arms will attempt to find edges to grab onto.

“No matter what, we’re going to learn a lot. We don’t know exactly what configuration it is in,” the manager said. “We don’t know exactly which surfaces are grabbable… but that’s why we’re kind of engineering our systems to be as versatile and robust as possible.”

Last Pegasus

Instead of choosing a well-oiled workhorse like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 to launch the rescue mission, Katalyst selected the air-launched Pegasus XL, a rocket that hasn’t flown since 2021.

Pegasus was the world’s first privately developed orbital launch vehicle. It has launched 45 times since 1990, but the Pegasus program is winding down. Northrop Grumman took over the program in 2018 after acquiring Orbital ATK, itself a follow-on to Orbital Sciences, the rocket’s original developer.

Using the Pegasus rocket for the Swift rescue mission might seem surprising, but a closer examination reveals a good reason for it. Swift flies close to the equator, swinging between 20 degrees north and south latitude on each orbit, to minimize time flying over the South Atlantic Anomaly, a weak spot in Earth’s magnetic field where satellites are exposed to higher doses of damaging radiation. For Swift, this exposure could contaminate science observations.

In this photo from 2016, a Pegasus XL rocket falls away from its carrier aircraft moments before ignition to deliver a NASA research mission to low-Earth orbit.

Credit: NASA/Lori Losey

If launched on a Falcon 9, the rescue mission would require a dedicated ride from Cape Canaveral, Florida, to reach such an unusual orbit. It could not take advantage of SpaceX’s lower-cost Transporter and Bandwagon rideshare missions that routinely deliver small satellites to higher-inclination orbits. And Katalyst’s spacecraft is too heavy for Rocket Lab.

“A lot of people think launch is a solved issue. They see how often that Falcon 9 flies. They see companies like Rocket Lab and Firefly coming online,” Lee said. “But the reality of the situation is launch is a solved issue if you’re able to fit into a Transporter or Bandwagon.”

The mission’s $30 million budget includes the launch. Katalyst has not disclosed how much it is paying for the ride on Pegasus—Northrop charged $28 million for a Pegasus launch in 2021—but rocket motors were already built for one more Pegasus rocket. It’s a safe bet that the company got a good deal.

“Out of the Cape, if we’re going on a dedicated Falcon 9, that’s like $65 or $70 million. So there was just no trade space. Pegasus was actually a really good option because it’s built for this type of mission, going to unique inclinations, being able to be responsive, and then the payload capacity of it was perfect. They have up to 400 kilograms (880 pounds) to this orbit. That’s exactly what we need. Falcon 9 would have been way overkill for something like this.”

The Pegasus system has the advantage of being mobile. The rocket and its airborne launch platform will be assembled together in California, then flown to Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) north of the equator. There, the airplane will release Pegasus to begin its climb into space.

“It’s kind of sad that it’s the last Pegasus because it’s a really good architecture for things like this,” Lee said. “You can imagine that there are going to be other use cases.”

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Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Tuesday 24 March 2026 at 6:11 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of February) 854

RIP Matrix

Meghan's son, Joey, now two, received multiple transfusions after being born prematurely, and she believes he would not have survived without the supply of special blood kept for babies in intensive care.

"Every time Joey went into surgery the doctors weren't sure if he was going to make it. It was life or death, basically," she said.

As the NHS calls for more volunteers who carry this rare blood type, Meghan said she wanted donors to know the impact they have.

About 200,000 donors in England have blood suitable for newborns — labelled NEO — which is used to help critically ill babies in their first 28 days of life.

Newborns can only receive blood that is free of cytomegalovirus (CMV), a common virus that most adults are exposed to during their lives.

NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) said one in four donors had blood suitable and safe to be given to babies in neonatal care needing transfusions.

Joey and his twin sister Eva were born at 27 weeks and had to be admitted to neonatal intensive care at Nottingham's Queen's Medical Centre two days later.

His body went into septic shock and he needed an emergency transfusion to survive. He remained in the unit for eight months and had further blood transfusions.

Meghan, 26, who lives in Lincoln with her partner Cobie, said:" It wasn't just the doctors who saved his life, it was blood donors too. Joey would not be here if the hospital did not have the blood he needed in that moment."

Why do newborns need CMV-negative blood?

Meghan's son Joey spent months being treated at Nottingham's Queen's Medical Centre

Part of the herpes virus family, CMV is very common and usually harmless, causing mild flu-like symptoms or none at all. But for some people it can be serious.

In babies, who have underdeveloped immune systems, it can cause seizures, sight and hearing problems as well as damage to the liver and spleen. In rare cases it can be deadly.

Why are more donors needed?

Katie Parker recently learned her blood is suitable for newborns

The NHSBT said there was "a particular need" for more B negative, O negative and Ro blood, especially from Black and ethnic minority communities.

A single donation can help three adults or six babies, it said.

Mother-of-two Katie Parker, 43, from Birmingham, recently found out her blood donations were suitable for newborn babies.

"I had no idea I had NEO blood until the donor carer at my last donation told me my blood was suitable for babies and showed me the blue tag," she said.

"I'd tell anyone who is considering donating to give it a go."

Gerry Gogarty, director of blood supply for NHSBT, said: "Every donor can be proud that their generous act will save or improve the life of a seriously-ill child or adult."

He said the NHS needed new donors to "maintain the supply of lifesaving blood to patients of all ages".

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More than 13,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, a more-than-70-ton machine trundled like a tank on its caterpillar tracks for a tenth of a mile—sucking up potato-sized nodules of rock packed with copper, manganese, cobalt, and nickel. It was 2022, and that pilot run of a subsea harvester by a Canadian business, The Metals Company, was pronounced a success.

The company is working to get a green light to deploy similar machines for commercial harvesting over an area of 65,000 square kilometers, to extract over 600 million metric tons of nodules.

There are riches on the ocean floor—round deposits made up of tightly packed layers of critical minerals that have long been out of reach. But not anymore. The pursuits of The Metals Company are among 31 initiatives by companies, governments and state-owned enterprises—including China, India, and the Republic of Nauru, a tiny island nation in the southwestern Pacific Ocean—to collect nodules for analysis and to test mining equipment.

These untapped deposits, undisturbed over millions of years, are in the sights of these countries and companies as the world moves to operate sustainably in the face of climate change. A large-scale shift to clean energy could quadruple demand for critical metals and rare earth elements, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), an organization in Paris that provides advice and analysis on energy policy. And there is sharp disagreement about where to obtain those extra resources.

In a 2022 pilot test by The Metals Company, a nodule-collecting vehicle is lowered over the

side of a ship at the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (top). The harvested nodules are transported

up a riser pipe to the hold of the ship (bottom).

Credit: THE METALS COMPANY

Countries such as the United States, companies including The Metals Company and some scientists who study extractive industries argue that there aren’t enough easily accessible critical minerals on land to supply the growing demand. Rather than opening numerous new terrestrial mines, the nascent deep-sea mining industry could help fill the gap, they say.

Other researchers, conservation groups and some 40 countries, led by the archipelago nation of Palau in the Pacific Ocean, have called for an outright ban or moratorium on deep-sea mining activities until more is known about the potential ecological impacts and until regulations are adopted. Many argue that there are adequate remaining resources to be tapped on land.

For over a decade, the International Seabed Authority, which controls mining in areas beyond national jurisdictions, has been developing a mining code to govern extraction of seabed resources, but its member states have yet to agree on the rules. Talks ended in July 2025 with many unresolved issues, including how to measure and monitor ecological impacts. Negotiations recently resumed.

But time is short, because mining could get the go-ahead as soon as this year, before rules and safeguards are in place. Nauru is exploring a legal loophole that allows it and other nations to apply for a commercial permit before the mining code is agreed to. And in a unilateral initiative that skirts the mandate of the International Seabed Authority, The Metals Company has applied to the United States for permission to mine in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, where most deep-sea mining ambitions are focused; that’s a 6-million-square-kilometer area (almost the size of Australia) under international waters between Hawaii and Mexico. The US has not signed the international treaty that gives the International Seabed Authority jurisdiction over such activities.

Some 4,500 meters below the surface of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a 6-million-square-kilometer stretch of

international waters in the Pacific Ocean, lies the bulk of the earth’s polymetallic nodules, rocks layered with

critical metals. The International Seabed Authority, a United Nations body, is developing rules to govern mining

deposits in international waters. Countries have authority over the mining of deposits in waters under their

national jurisdiction, known as exclusive economic zones.

Credit: Knowable Magazine, ADAPTED FROM J.C. DRAZEN ET AL / PNAS 2020

Pressed for time, researchers and analysts are working to answer key questions. Can we find the minerals we need on land, or must we venture beneath the waves for untapped resources? What would be the environmental consequences of each?

Looming green needs

There is little disagreement that the green transition will require a giant leap in the global supply of critical minerals. And mineral production from existing and planned mines could soon come up short, suggests the IEA in a 2025 assessment on mineral needs for the clean energy transition.

The analysts modeled three different scenarios of renewable energy use and climate change mitigation. They lined up these demand estimates against different types of supply estimates, including a less ambitious one that includes existing mines, ones under construction and projects yet to be launched that have permits or finances already secured, and a bolder case that also considered projects in which financing or permits are still being sought.

From this modeling, the analysts estimate that by 2040, global demand for lithium, a key component of electric vehicle batteries, could grow around 4.7 times from its 2024 levels, and demand for copper, crucial for wind and solar power, could grow 1.3-fold. They predict shortages of both metals as soon as 2035.

Future copper shortfalls may appear less severe than lithium, based on currently announced projects, but opening new copper mines or expanding existing ones is much more challenging, says Shobhan Dhir, a critical minerals analyst with the IEA. “In general, the rock with high copper content has really been mined already,” he says.

The International Energy Agency estimates there could be shortages of key minerals sourced from terrestrial

mines as soon as 2035. Demand for renewable technologies is expected to grow over the next decades, and

minerals harvested from current and proposed mines won’t be enough to meet the projected need.

Credit: Knowable Magazine, ADAPTED FROM GLOBAL CRITICAL MINERALS OUTLOOK 2025 / IEA

Will mines on land suffice?

Some analysts think that these needs can be met on land by opening new mines or digging deeper into existing ones.

Gavin Mudd, director of the Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre at the British Geological Survey in Nottingham, says that there is no shortage of mineral deposits on land. He notes that data from the United States Geological Survey show that reserves for many critical metals are growing (reserves refer to deposits that are economical and feasible to mine right now, while resources are a geological commodity that is known to exist in the ground). For example, the IEA estimates that by 2040 demand for lithium could reach as high as 1.5 million metric tons annually. But 2025 data from the USGS show global reserves on land of 30 million metric tons and resources of 115 million metric tons.

Reserves and resources, Mudd says, will probably continue to grow as new deposits are discovered. As demand for minerals grows, prices may rise, making it profitable to dig deeper into existing mines or to start new mines.

“There is no rational case to argue that we will be running out of lithium reserves any time soon,” he says.

Similar trends are seen for other minerals such as copper and cobalt. A 2022 global assessment of nickel mines by Mudd and Simon Jowitt, director of the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology, estimates that land-based reserves and resources can meet demand for over 100 years.

But to access these resources, new mines will need to open—more than 85 new lithium mines by 2050, by some estimates, and up to 40 new nickel mines by 2030, just to supply EV batteries, according to the IEA. The International Energy Forum, an intergovernmental group for discussing energy policies, estimates a need for at least 35 new copper mines by 2050 to supply the green transition.

It can take over a decade to get a mining project up and running. To avoid greater delays, Mudd says governments and companies must improve their planning of mining projects, or mineral shortages could hit even where resources exist.

Another resource: recycling

Recycling electric vehicle batteries and other materials from green technologies could help to lessen the need for new mines, says Paul Anderson, an inorganic chemist at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom who is leading a project to improve reuse and recycling of lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles.

Estimates vary on how much recycling could cut demand. The IEA estimates that by 2050, recycling can lower the need for new mining activity by 25 percent for lithium and nickel and by 40 percent for copper and cobalt. Other estimates suggest a much larger impact. One 2022 study by researchers at KU Leuven university in Belgium suggests that by 2050, recycling could provide 40 to 77 percent (depending on the metal) of Europe’s clean energy metal needs. And a 2025 report by researchers at the University of California, Davis, estimated that recycling could cut the number of new lithium mines needed from 85 to 15.

Governments would need to build recycling facilities in all regions of the world—not just in areas that manufacture EV batteries or that have the biggest EV markets, the UC Davis researchers concluded. And countries should adopt policies to encourage recycling, such as setting targets for manufacturers to collect used batteries, and for recycling plants to recover critical minerals from batteries.

Anderson says that recycling is often an afterthought in the design and production of batteries and other green technologies, making it less efficient and effective. “We’re obsessed with reducing carbon footprint by rolling out the technology… we’re not thinking about designing the end-of-life management into it,” he says.

But even with recycling, the global transition to a green economy could depend on ramping up terrestrial mining—among the dirtiest and most environmentally and socially destructive industries. Studies suggest that terrestrial mining is responsible for 9 percent of all Amazon forest lost between 2005 and 2015. It also uses large volumes of water, often in water-scarce regions, and can put vulnerable people at risk of human rights abuses. Spills of toxic mining waste pollute waterways and kill aquatic wildlife.

The extent of deep-sea damage

Supporters of deep-sea mining suggest that the industry could have fewer environmental and social problems.

In this depiction of deep-sea mining, vehicles collect nodules from the seabed, and these are then transported

to a ship on the ocean surface through a kilometers-long riser pipe. Researchers raise a variety of ecological

concerns: The collector vehicles dislodge plumes of seabed sediment into the water column, which can interfere

with breathing and feeding of organisms; nodule extraction can release toxic metals into the water column;

collector vehicles create noise and light pollution in an environment that is usually dark and silent; the machines

also crush organisms in their path as they move along on the seabed.

Credit: Knowable Magazine, ADAPTED FROM J.C. DRAZEN ET AL / PNAS 2020

Impacts to the deep ocean might not be as long-lived as those of mining on land, The Metals Company says. It points to research suggesting that some deep-ocean fauna communities disturbed by mining could start to recover in number and diversity within one year. It says that deep-sea microbial communities could recover from the impacts of mining “within 50 years.” By contrast, the company says, “it can take hundreds or thousands of years to regenerate new soil and forests that can support previous levels of biodiversity” that are destroyed by terrestrial mining.

Saleem Ali, an environmental systems scientist at the University of Delaware who also provides research and advice on critical metals to the United Nations, says that deep-sea mining should be part of discussions on the green transition. He coauthored a 2022 analysis, funded by The Metals Company, that compared mining waste from terrestrial deposits to that of seabed resources. (Ali says he has never received direct funding from The Metals Company.) For example, the analysis looked at the impact of terrestrial mine tailings on water pollution and local biodiversity, and at the anticipated pollution from nodule mining, such as seabed sediment kicked into the water column by harvesting machines. It suggests that both types of mining will have effects on biodiversity, but deep-sea mining could result in less waste and fewer risks for communities than terrestrial mining. The study cautions, however, that its conclusions are limited by “substantial uncertainty” regarding impacts of sediment plumes.

Ali adds that the International Seabed Authority has been collecting data for at least 30 years, which should be sufficient to develop rules and regulations to govern seabed mining even if it’s unclear what the long-term impacts are, and whether the environmental impacts are likely to be better or worse than mining on land.

“I’m not saying that we should go ahead with it. I’m saying that it deserves to be considered in this broad context of very difficult choices we have to make,” he says.

But opponents calling for moratoriums or bans note that the same study that The Metals Company refers to as evidence of quick recovery eventually reached more pessimistic conclusions from its data as a whole. “The effects of polymetallic nodule mining are likely to be long term,” the authors wrote, and the analyses “show considerable negative biological effects of seafloor nodule mining, even at the small scale of test mining experiments.” Scientists are concerned that deep-sea organisms, which are adapted to living in a dark, quiet, and sparsely populated environment, will not cope well with the noise and light disturbances from mining. The organisms will also be exposed to toxic metals and plumes of sediment that can interfere with feeding and breathing. The Metals Company did not respond to several requests for comment.

The seafloor of Clarion-Clipperton Zone is home to many creatures, some of which are shown here: anemone

(top left), sea cucumber, Psychropotes longicauda (top right), sea urchin Plesiodiadema sp. (bottom right), and

starfish (bottom left). The biology and ecology of these depths remain poorly understood, making it hard to know

what the ecological impacts of deep-sea mining would be.

Credit: ROV TEAM / GEOMAR (CC-BY 4.0)

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Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Monday 23 March 2026 at 5:50 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of February) 854

RIP Matrix

On Monday, a paper announcing that all four DNA bases had been found on an asteroid sparked a lot of headlines. But many of the headlines omitted a key word needed to put the discovery in context: “again.” The paper itself cited similar results dating back to 2011, and the ensuing years have seen various confirmations and more rigorous studies. The new work was less notable for showing that we had found these bases in Ryugu than for solving a previous mystery: earlier studies had failed to detect them there, despite their presence in many other asteroid samples.

Outside the headlines, though, the new work provides some interesting details, as it may answer an important question: how these bases got there in the first place. Understanding that better may be critical for getting a better picture of how the raw materials for life ended up on Earth in the first place.

Searching for bases

Let’s start with a description of what the researchers found. Both DNA and RNA, the two nucleic acids used by life, share a similar structure. That includes the backbone, a chain that alternates between sugars and phosphates that are all chemically linked together. While the specific sugar differs between DNA and RNA, the chain itself varies only in length; otherwise, the backbone of every DNA or RNA molecule is identical.

What gives nucleic acids the identity needed to carry genetic information are the bases. There are four (A, T, C, and G in DNA; A, U, C, and G in RNA), and one is always attached to each of the sugars in the backbone. The order of the bases along the backbone is what carries genetic information, enabling life as we know it. It’s been hypothesized that, before life evolved, the order of bases along RNA molecules determined the sorts of chemical reactions they could catalyze.

So while the bases aren’t everything you need to move from interesting chemistry to life, they’re a pretty big deal. Searching for them outside the confines of Earth is an obvious priority.

The new paper makes no secret of the fact that those searches have been a success. The paper’s abstract mentions their discovery in three different asteroids. An early paragraph cites a 2011 paper describing the discovery of the bases of nucleic acids in meteorites, fragments of asteroids that have survived the plunge through our atmosphere. Similar results have been reported over the intervening years. In every case, the asteroids also contained closely related molecules not used by present living things.

While that’s exciting, it’s impossible to rule out the possibility that these bases resulted either from chemistry driven by the heat from atmospheric entry or somehow resulted from contamination from life on Earth. But we’ve managed to rule that out by going directly to asteroids and retrieving samples in space. When the OSIRIS-REx mission brought back material from the asteroid Bennu, the same bases turned up in that material.

The surprise is that most of the bases weren’t found in Ryugu, which had been visited by the Hayabusa2 mission. One base was clearly present, but most couldn’t be detected in the first round of tests.

The new paper describes an additional set of tests, which both used more starting sample material and higher sensitivity tests. The combination picks up the remaining bases, confirming that all five of the bases (the three common to DNA and RNA, as well as the two specific to one or the other). With that, Ryugu joins the other asteroids that carry critical precursors of nucleic acids.

Beyond Earth

The paper does take a step beyond simply confirming an expected result, though. The bases of nucleic acids come in two forms: two-ringed structures called purines and simpler single-ringed structures called pyrimidines. The chemistry leading to their formation will necessarily be somewhat distinct, so the researchers pooled the purines and pyrimidines and compared their concentrations across multiple asteroids.

They found a correlation between the relative levels of these two chemical classes and the amount of ammonia present in the asteroid. This, they suggest, might tell us something about the chemistry of the reactions that produced these nucleotides in the first place.

And that could ultimately be the most important aspect of this work: extensive research has sought chemical reactions that can produce nucleotides and other key biochemicals under conditions likely to have prevailed on the early Earth. But conditions in space are very different, so a distinct set of reactions should be possible. Information like this can help us constrain the types of reactions we need to consider and thus may help us identify any prebiotic chemistry that could be happening in space.

That’s not to say biochemicals from space are likely to have been essential to forming life on Earth. Some will degrade due to the heat of crossing the atmosphere and impact, and it’s not clear whether any that survive would end up concentrated enough to kick off life. But the Universe is a really big place, and the conditions present in space are likely to be far more common than those typical of early Earth. So finding out more about the reactions that prevail in asteroids may be more relevant to life elsewhere in the Universe.

Nature Astronomy, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41550-026-02791-z  (About DOIs).

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Posted Sunday 22 March 2026 at 5:42 am AEST (my time).

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There’s a virus you may have never heard of before that is estimated to infect up to 90 percent of people and lurks quietly in your cells for life—but if it becomes activated, it will destroy your brain. If that’s not startling enough, researchers reported this week that there may be a new way for this virus to activate—one that affects up to 10 percent of adults worldwide.

The virus is the human polyomavirus 2, commonly called either the JC virus or John Cunningham virus, named after the poor patient from whom it was first isolated in 1971. It shows up in the urine and stool of infected people and spreads via the fecal-oral route. Many people are thought to be infected early in life, and blood testing surveys have suggested that 50–90 percent of adults have been exposed at some point.

Researchers hypothesize that the initial site of infection is the tonsils, or perhaps the gastrointestinal tract. But wherever it happens, that initial infection is asymptomatic. At that point, a person is infected with what’s called the archetype JC virus, which quietly sets up a persistent but utterly silent lifelong infection.

For the vast majority of people, that is all their JC virus infection will be—silent. But for an unlucky few, the JC virus will seemingly awaken, rearrange its genetic material, and morph into a brain-demolishing nightmare that causes a disease called progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy or PML.

Devastating disease

In PML, the new disease-causing virus or “PML-type” JC virus actively invades the brain, blowing up specific brain cells, including the cells that form the insulating myelin sheaths that protect nerve cells. This leads to extensive demyelination, which results in nerve cell dysfunction and death. On imaging, PML can show up as signature lesions in the brain. Those imaged lesions, paired with test findings of JC virus DNA in cerebrospinal fluid, are how PML is diagnosed. But for patients experiencing PML, the symptoms can mimic everything from a stroke to multiple sclerosis, causing problems like speech impairments, visual defects, motor dysfunction, and seizures.

PML was first identified in 1958 in a cancer patient. But it was considered an extremely rare condition until the 1980s, when it started to be seen in patients with HIV/AIDS. In fact, PML became an AIDS-defining disease, with 2–5 percent of HIV-infected patients developing it in the early phase of the epidemic. At that point, the condition was uniformly fatal. But with the introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) in 1996, PML cases declined, and the disease was no longer a death sentence, though survivors often have significant lasting damage.

Expanding cases

In the decades since its discovery, PML has universally been considered a disease that strikes amid profound immune suppression. It’s thought that the JC virus can activate and rearrange itself into the PML-type only in the absence of normal immune surveillance. And the restoration of immune responses—such as with HAART treatment in HIV-infected patients—can prevent or beat back PML. Beyond certain cancers and HIV/AIDS, PML can sometimes be seen in people taking relatively new, powerful immune-suppressing drugs, which they may take for multiple sclerosis or certain auto-immune diseases. Overall, though, it’s estimated that PML cases worldwide occur only in about 2 in 100,000 people.

But in a new case study reported this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine Case studies, researchers in New York report the case of PML in a patient without profound immune suppression. Instead, the patient had chronic kidney disease (CKD)—a condition that affects around 10 percent of adults worldwide. CKD can lead to toxins building up in the blood that impair immune cells, cause chronic inflammation, and diminish viral surveillance, they note.

Their 72-year-old patient had stage-5 CKD, which is basically when the kidneys have failed. He went to the hospital, though, for neurological problems. For the week prior, he was having trouble finding words, was often confused, and was generally weak. Doctors at the hospital confirmed his speech issues and started running tests.

Initially, they thought his neurologic problems were due to uremic encephalopathy, decreased brain function from toxin accumulation during kidney failure. They treated him with dialysis, but his word-finding difficulty only worsened. At that point, they did brain imaging, which revealed lesions seen in PML cases. Soon, testing on his cerebrospinal fluid confirmed the presence of the JC virus in his central nervous system. Two days later, the patient died.

The authors note that, while sparse so far, the scientific literature includes at least a few other cases of PML in CKD cases. In all, they conclude that “CKD joins the expanding spectrum of conditions predisposing to PML through noncanonical immunosuppression. As CKD prevalence rises globally, heightened vigilance for this devastating complication is imperative.”

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Posted Saturday 21 March 2026 at 12:03 pm AEST (my time).

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NASA has taken a step forward to moving an undetermined spacecraft of a various size on an indefinite date to a yet-to-be-decided location.

Or to put it another way: NASA is seeking to learn more about what it would take to remove the space shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian in Virginia and relocate it to Houston, as compared to transporting a smaller space capsule from anywhere in the country.

The space agency on Thursday (March 19) released a draft request for proposal (DRFP) for the “NASA Flown Space Vehicle Multimodal Transportation Multiple Award Contract,” seeking to learn how contractors would approach transporting both “large aerospace vehicles and smaller spacecraft capsules.”

The pre-solicitation request is an effort to meet the letter of the law — specifically the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — that requires NASA relocate a vehicle that flew with humans through space to a non-profit display facility within the vicinity of an agency center with ties to the commercial crew program. Texas Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz had intended their legislation to result in Discovery being exhibited at Space Center Houston, but Senate rules required the wording to be more vague.

“My law authorizing and funding the space shuttle Discovery’s movement to Houston is being set into motion thanks to NASA’s announcement, and I applaud Administrator Isaacman for keeping this process moving,” said Sen. Cornyn in a statement issued on Friday.

The law as enacted, though, opened the possibility for an alternate artifact to be delivered to “Space City,” as NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman acknowledged in December 2025.

“My job now is to make sure that we can undertake such a transportation [of Discovery] within the budget dollars that we have available. And of course, most importantly, ensuring the safety of the vehicle,” said Isaacman in an interview with CNBC. “If we can’t do that, you know what? We’ve got spacecraft that are going around the moon with Artemis II, III, IV, and V.”

“Illustrative examples”

If NASA has a preference as to the two outcomes, the draft RFP does not say. Instead, it sets up both possibilities as “illustrative examples” and requests in-depth replies (no longer than 40 pages) on what it would take to accomplish each, including engineering analyses, transportation planning, preservation measures, specialized rigging systems, infrastructure coordination, regulatory compliance, and “coordinated multimodal transportation execution.”

“One example addresses the conceptual relocation of a large aerospace vehicle comparable in size and complexity to a space shuttle orbiter or solid rocket booster. The second example addresses the transportation of a smaller spacecraft capsule comparable to an Orion crew module or Mercury capsule,” reads the draft request. “These examples are intended to represent the range of transportation scenarios that NASA may need to support under this contract vehicle.”

NASA is also seeking cost estimates (though not binding price proposals) to plan and achieve each of the moves within a five-year period.

As noted by “multimodal” in the title, NASA expects the deliveries to use multiple types of transportation. It leaves those choices up to each respondent, but identifies possibilities to include “airlift, sealift, rail transport, overland heavy haul transport and barge transport,” among other specialized means of conveyance.

Ground support equipment, such as the yellow sling seen here attached to Discovery, was needed to lift the space shuttle orbiters for past moves. The hardware no longer exists.

Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Whatever the mode of transport, the contractor will be responsible for providing the needed rigging to hoist and cradle the spacecraft during its relocation. NASA is not offering any of its own infrastructure, assuming it still exists (in the case of the space shuttle, the specialized sling used to lift the orbiters was scrapped after the California Science Center took Endeavour vertical for its display in 2024).

The contractor also must provide the “artifact preservation and curatorial support” needed to “protect the physical condition, structural integrity, finish, configuration and historical authenticity” of the spacecraft being moved. As Isaacman had alluded to, “the flown space hardware and aerospace artifacts transported under this contract [must] be treated not only as high-value cargo, but as irreplaceable national assets requiring preservation-focused handling, documentation and care.”

Sustaining service

After NASA first flew to the Moon in the mid-1970s, all of the Apollo command modules were transferred to the Smithsonian, which then worked out their delivery to museums around the country and world. Due to budget constraints, the retirement of the four surviving shuttle orbiters in 2011 was managed by NASA, with the National Air and Space Museum only taking over the title for Discovery.

The provision

in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that necessitated NASA undertake the DRFP has the agency looking beyond just satisfying the law.

NASA’s Artemis I Orion spacecraft was transported by truck across the United States back to Kennedy Space Center in 2022.

Credit: NASA

“The government anticipates that if an RFP is issued, the resulting contract would enable NASA to establish a long-term enterprise capability that would be transportation operations ranging from small spacecraft capsules to extremely large aerospace vehicles,” the draft reads.

Even if Cornyn and Cruz do not get their way and Discovery stays where it is in northern Virginia, the responses to this request may streamline the transport of future flown Orion capsules and other hardware to museums for years to come.

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Posted Saturday 21 March 2026 at 11:59 am AEST (my time).

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Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/JHU-APL

When NASA’s Perseverance rover landed in Jezero Crater in 2021, its primary mission was to scour the remnants of a dried-up Martian lakebed for signs of ancient life. Scientists have been focused on the crater’s spectacular Western Delta, a fan-shaped geologic feature deposited by a river flowing into the basin billions of years ago. But now Perseverance’s ground-penetrating radar (called RIMFAX) detected what is likely another, even older river delta buried tens of meters beneath it.

“I think it’s a promising place to look for signs of biosignatures at depth,” says Emily L. Cardarelli. “Microbial life could have potentially developed in those types of environments.” Cardarelli, an astrobiologist at the University of California Los Angeles, led the team interpreting RIMFAX imagery.

Peeking underground

Perseverance’s RIMFAX, the Radar Imager for Mars Subsurface Experiment, continuously fires radar waves into the ground, acquiring soundings each time the rover traveled 10 centimeters. When these radio waves hit boundaries between different types of rock, ice, or sediment layers, some of the signal bounces back. The timing and intensity of these reflections allow scientists to construct a two-dimensional, vertical slice of the subsurface, much like a sonogram of the Martian crust.

During a campaign spanning from September 2023 to February 2024, or over 250 Martian sols, Perseverance drove across a geological zone known as the Margin unit. The Margin unit is an expansive deposit flanking the inner rim of Jezero’s inlet valley, occupying the space between the western fan deposits and the crater rim. It is rich in magnesium carbonates, which was one of the main reasons Jezero Crater has been chosen as the Perseverance’s landing site: on Earth, carbonates are exceptionally good at preserving the chemical fingerprint of life. “You can think of the Cliffs of Dover, for example, that are all carbonate—they have tons of fossils in them,” Cardarelli says.

Cardarelli’s team analyzed the RIMFAX data and found that the rock comprising the Margin unit was exceptionally transparent to the radar’s waves. This homogenous, low-loss material allowed the radar signals to penetrate deeper than they had in any other previously explored region of Jezero Crater. Soundings reached down more than 35 meters, roughly 1.75 times deeper than measurements taken on the crater floor or the overlying Delta units. Taking into account the surface topography, the team estimates the true thickness of the Margin unit to be at least 85 to 90 meters.

But the real jackpot was the highly structured geometry of geologic features the radar saw at these depths.

The hidden delta

When geologists look at the cross-section of a river delta on Earth, they see distinct features that tell a story of water flow, sediment dumping, and changing water levels. The RIMFAX data revealed exactly this kind of structured layering beneath the Margin unit, with features ranging from tens of centimeters to hundreds of meters across. “We saw really high complexity in the subsurface,” Cardarelli says.

The radar readouts displayed parallel layers dipping toward the center of the Jezero basin at angles of three to 15 degrees. These sweeping, laterally continuous lines are classic signatures of what geologists call clinoforms, layers of sediment that build outward into the water as the river deposits material, forming underwater ramps.

When a fast-moving river carrying sand and gravel suddenly hits the still, deep waters of a lake, it loses its kinetic energy and drops its contents. The heaviest sediments settle quickly on the lake bottom, forming flat, horizontal layers known as topsets. As the sediment continuously piles up and pushes further out into the lake, it eventually reaches a critical angle at the edge of existing sediments and cascades down the underwater slope, forming angled layers called foresets. At the very bottom of the lake, finer sediments fan out into horizontal bottomsets.

The RIMFAX images seemingly captured these transitions, known as rollover points, spread throughout the Martin crust. These rollover points, the team thinks, are the telltale signs of a dynamic fluvial environment that didn’t just bring lots of dirt once, but experienced multiple distinct episodes of continuous deposition over a long period of time. The now-underground river delta looks remarkably similar in scale and structure to ancient delta environments preserved here on Earth.

Watery timeline

This subsurface architecture reframes the timeline of Jezero Crater’s watery past. The radar data from the rover’s 6.1-kilometer traverse makes it clear that the Margin unit physically sits underneath the rocks of the Western Delta. In geology, the stuff on the bottom is usually older.

If Cardarelli’s interpretation is right, it means that, long before a Martian river system carved out the massive Western Delta that we see from orbit today, an entirely different river system had already built a vast delta in the same exact spot. This hidden delta formed during the Noachian period, an era of Martian history when the planet was significantly warmer and wetter, which ran approximately from 4.2 to 3.7 billion years ago. The presence of these deep sedimentary layers suggests that early Mars wasn’t just briefly wet but likely maintained consistent, long-lived conditions that allowed massive amounts of sediment to be systematically transported and deposited over expansive geologic timescales.

But Cardarelli’s team admits an ancient river delta, while very probable, is just one of several hypotheses that could explain RIMFAX data.

Explaining layers

The first of the alternatives is that the geologic features detected by RIMFAX formed through igneous processes. “We talk about volcanic activity—pyroclastic events and volcanic ash fall moving through,” Cardarelli explains. The layers her team found could be solidified magma and ash that rained down from distant volcanic eruptions.

Another idea suggested by the team is the angled layers could also be remnants of a shoreline of an ancient lake. The team also considered a scenario where the Margin unit was just an area in front of a glacier where meltwater streams deposited materials washed out from the ice, forming broad, layered plains.

“But I think what led us to favor the fluvial, deltaic hypothesis is simply the number and scale of the features we observed and their complexity,” Cardarelli says.

Her leading explanation is also the one most favorable to potential Martian life. If microbial life ever existed on Mars, it would have needed stable, long-lasting aquatic environments. A massive delta system pouring into a crater lake should, in principle, provide the right mix of nutrients, water, and chemical energy. “We know that there are potential signs of past microbial life at the surface of Jezero Crater,” Cardarelli says. “Now we see there was an aqueous history there for quite a long time.” And she thinks there’s a lot more left to see in Jezero Crater.

Cardarelli’s study was based on data from 6.1 kilometers of Perseverance’s traverse. “And we have 40 kilometers of data, so please look for upcoming RIMFAX papers,” Cardarelli says. “We have more to say about this area. There’s a lot of stories to be told.”

Science Advances, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adz6095

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Posted Saturday 21 March 2026 at 5:43 am AEST (my time).

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Despite being declared the third-hottest year on record, 2025 was a relatively quiet year for climate disasters in the US. No major hurricanes made landfall, while the total number of acres burned in wildfires last year—a way of measuring the intensity of wildfire season—fell below the 10-year average.

But starting this week, the West is experiencing what looks to be a record-breaking heat wave, while forecasting models predict that a strong El Niño event is likely to emerge later this year. These two unrelated phenomena could set the stage for a long stretch of unpredictable and extreme weather reaching into next year, compounding the effects of a climate that’s getting hotter and hotter thanks to human activity.

First, there’s the heat. Beginning this week and heading into next, a massive ridge of high-pressure air will bring record-breaking temperatures to the American West. The National Weather Service predicts that temperature records across multiple states are set to be broken in dozens of locations, stretching as far east as Missouri and Tennessee. The NWS has issued heat warnings for parts of California, Arizona, and Nevada, as well as fire warnings for parts of Wyoming, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Colorado.

“This will be the single strongest ridge we’ve observed outside of summer in any month,” says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources.

The other remarkable thing about this heat wave, Swain says, is just how long it’s going to last. “This is not a day or two of extreme heat,” he says. “We’ve already in some of these places been seeing record highs every day for a week, and we expect to see them every day for another at least seven to 10 days.” The later end of March will be much more intense, with temperatures in some places breaking April and May records. “There aren’t that many weather patterns that can result in an 85- or 90-degree temperature in San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and Denver in the same week.”

This late winter heat wave is adding on to an already warm winter in the West—with big implications for the summer. A month ago, snowpack levels across multiple states were at record lows thanks to warmer-than-average temperatures. According to data provided by the Department of Agriculture, snowpack levels were still sitting below 50 percent of average across many Western states. Snowpack is a critical natural reservoir for rivers in the West; between 60 to 70 percent of the region’s water supply in many areas comes from melting snow. Low snowpack is a bad sign for already-stressed rivers like the Colorado, which supplies water for 40 million people in seven states.

The ongoing heat wave, Swain says, will more than likely make conditions even worse. “April 1st is typically the point at which snowpack would be, at least historically, at its peak,” he says. Even if temperatures cool off until summer, these low snowpack levels are also a worrisome sign for the upcoming fire season. Snow droughts like the one the West is experiencing can dry out soil, kill trees, and lessen stream flow: ideal conditions for a wildfire to grow. Meanwhile, the water supply in the Colorado River could drop even lower. States that rely on the river are already facing a political crisis as they attempt to renegotiate water rights; a drought would only up the ante.

Then there’s El Niño. Last week, the National Weather Service announced that there was more than a 60 percent chance of an El Niño event emerging in August or September. Various weather models suggest that this El Niño could be particularly strong. While we likely won’t know for sure until summer, “the fact that [all the models] are moving upwards is worth watching,” says Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth.

El Niño is a natural cycle of climate variability, usually concentrated in the tropical Pacific, that pushes heat from the ocean into the atmosphere and towards the western coast of the US. El Niño years are typically warm—an average El Niño can increase yearly global temperatures by 1.2° C.

No one can predict for certain what impact, exactly, El Niño will have in the coming months. The phenomenon has a variety of effects on weather around the world. “It’s not always super consistent: Some areas get wetter, and some areas get drier,” says Hausfather. In the US, El Niño is generally associated with cooler and wetter conditions in the Southeast and Southwest with warmer conditions in western Canada and Alaska.

This could be potentially good news for some areas in the Southwest that, following a parched summer due to lack of snowpack, need more water. But, says Swain, an El Niño event could also increase the chances of dry thunderstorms in some areas—which up the chance for wildfires from lightning in already-dry terrain. During the last strong El Niño event in 2016, heavy rain triggered mudslides in some areas of drought-stricken California. Heavy storms in areas affected by both wildfires and drought have been linked to increased likelihood of mudslides.

“People talk about ‘climate chaos’—I don’t love the term in the context of climate change, because we still have a very structured climate,” says Swain. “But a very strong El Niño event really does induce chaos. It induces patterns that are very different from typical historical norms.”

And there’s no denying that human-caused climate change is upping the ante for heat increases from natural events like El Niño.

“Obviously, any El Niño event that happens is happening on top of human-caused climate change,” Hausfather says. “We’ve warmed the planet 1.4° [Celsius]. So you’re going to have a much bigger impact from heat, for example, if you start at that level versus 150 years ago.”

This story originally appeared on Wired.

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Posted Saturday 21 March 2026 at 5:43 am AEST (my time).

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For more than 60 years, nearly every large rocket used some combination of the same liquid and solid propellants. Refined kerosene was favored for its easy handling and non-toxicity, hydrazine for its storability and simplicity, hydrogen for its efficiency, and solid fuels for their long shelf life and rapid launch capability.

About 15 years ago, rocket companies started serious development of large methane-fueled engines. SpaceX and Blue Origin now build the most powerful of these new engines—the Raptor and BE-4—each capable of generating more than half a million pounds of thrust. SpaceX’s Starship rocket and its enormous booster are powered by 39 Raptors, while Blue Origin’s New Glenn and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rockets use a smaller number of BE-4s on their booster stages.

Burning methane in combination with liquid oxygen, these “methalox” engines have several advantages. Methane is better suited for reusable engines because they leave less behind sooty residue than kerosene, which SpaceX uses on the Falcon 9 rocket. Methane is easier to handle than liquid hydrogen, which is prone to leaks and must be stored at staggeringly cold temperatures of around minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 253 degrees Celsius). Methane is also a cryogenic liquid, but it has a warmer temperature closer to that of liquid oxygen, between minus 260 and minus 297 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 162 to minus 183 degrees Celsius).

A Chinese rocket became the first methane-fueled launcher to reach orbit in 2023. In the United States, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, and Relativity Space are also developing methane-fueled engines for their next-generation launch vehicles.

But rockets sometimes blow up. The US Space Force and NASA, the agencies responsible for range safety at America’s federally owned spaceports, want to better understand how the hazards from an exploding methalox rocket might differ from those of other launchers. This is important as launches become more routine, with companies foreseeing multiple flights per day from launch pads that are, in some cases, just 1 or 2 miles apart.

“We just don’t have the analysis on those to be able to say, ‘Hey, from a testing perspective, how small can we reduce the BDA and be safe?'” said Col. Brian Chatman, commander of the Eastern Range at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, at a roundtable with reporters last year.

SpaceX’s 11th Starship flight climbs away from Starbase, Texas, in October 2025.

Credit: SpaceX

A fine idea

Launch pads for methalox rockets are now operational or under construction on government property at Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, and NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. SpaceX currently launches Starship test flights from South Texas on private property. The Federal Aviation Administration has jurisdiction for public safety there.

Federal safety officials require the evacuation of blast danger areas around each launch pad as rockets are fueled for flight, and some companies have raised concerns that SpaceX, which has the largest of the methalox rockets, could disrupt their operations on neighboring launch pads. The ongoing explosive yield tests are meant to help officials fine-tune their hazard analyses to determine the proper size of the danger areas for methalox rockets.

The concept is simple. “We put fuel in a rocket, blow it up in a remote location, and measure how big the boom is,” said Jason Hopper, deputy manager for the methalox assessment project at NASA’s Stennis Space Center.

“For many of the tests, the barrier separating the two propellants is intentionally ruptured to simulate a catastrophic failure scenario,” NASA said in a statement. “As the mixing fluids are detonated, instruments located on the test articles, and throughout a test field, measure the intensity of the blast wave at certain prescribed distances.”

High-speed cameras on the test range capture how fast and where debris fragments travel after the explosion and measure the blast’s thermal potency.

“This type of testing only comes around once every few decades,” Hopper said in a NASA press release. “With so many rockets launching now, this will contribute to public safety, site safety, and all the risk involved with the work.”

A methane test article awaits its demise at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

Credit: Reliance Test & Technology/Bruce Hoffman

The tests began in January with two baseline explosions using C-4 with well-known blast characteristics. In February, they added methane and liquid oxygen, with four tests involving unmixed propellants. The next step will involve mixing the propellants in an environment more characteristic of an actual launch failure scenario, initially with 2,000-pound test articles, then scaling up to 20,000 pounds. The tests will examine two failure modes—a transfer tube failure and a failure of the shared wall between the two propellant tanks.

Engineers will extrapolate the results to assess the explosive potential of a huge rocket like SpaceX’s Starship, which contains more than 10.8 million pounds of propellant at liftoff.

NASA provided more details on how engineers are conducting the tests in a post to the agency’s website Thursday. The testing is scheduled to conclude in June.

“The findings are expected to help shape launch site planning, safety protocols, and safety requirements for years to come,” NASA said.

Staying conservative, for now

For now, the Space Force will treat any methalox rocket with “100 percent TNT blast equivalency” and maintain a “maximized keep-out zone” for the safety of the public and workers at the spaceport, Chatman said in November. He said initial studies show the required keep-out zone will get smaller, but officials won’t know how much until the test results are in.

Liquid oxygen and methane are highly miscible, meaning they mix together easily, raising the risk of a “condensed phase detonation” with “significantly higher overpressures” than rockets with liquid hydrogen or kerosene fuels. Small-scale mixtures of liquid oxygen and liquified natural gas have “shown a broad detonable range with yields greater than that of TNT,” NASA wrote in 2023.

SpaceX has conducted its own methalox detonation testing. The company said the government is relying on “highly conservative approaches to establishing blast danger areas, simply because they lack the data to make refined, accurate clear zones. In the absence of data, clear areas of LOX/methane rockets have defaulted to very large zones that could be disruptive to operations.”

Industry data suggests that the government should set its TNT blast equivalency to no greater than 25 percent, a change that would greatly reduce the size of keep-out zones around launch pads, according to the Commercial Space Federation, a lobbying group whose members include SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other companies with methane-fueled rockets.

In written testimony to Congress in 2023, the federation urged the government to use “existing industry data” to understand the explosive yield of methane and liquid oxygen rather than spending federal dollars on an independent test campaign. In the end, NASA, the Space Force, and the FAA decided their own tests were worth the money.

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Posted Saturday 21 March 2026 at 5:42 am AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.34 of the Rocket Report! The most important significant news this week, I believe, is the decision by Canada to make a serious investment in launch infrastructure at a spaceport in Nova Scotia. Tensions have risen between the United States and Canada of late (for reasons which are baffling to this author, who has always had an affinity for the nation to our north), and as a result Canada is seeking launch independence. This is an important start, but it will require a sustained, long-term commitment to really develop a flourishing launch industry.

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.

Canada makes major commitment to space launch. The country’s leading minister of national defense, David J. McGuinty, announced on Monday a $200 million investment in “core infrastructure” for a spaceport in Nova Scotia. The investment is a 10‑year, $200 million agreement to lease a dedicated space‑launch pad that will serve as the central foundation for a multi-user spaceport near Canso, Nova Scotia. The facility is operated by Maritime Launch Services.

Why do this now? … McGuinty cited “a more complex and unpredictable security environment.” He added, “In the decades ahead, our security, our prosperity, and our sovereignty will increasingly extend beyond our atmosphere.” One way of looking at this is that, for decades, Canada has relied on others, including the United States, to get its payloads into orbit. The country probably now views its southern neighbor has a less reliable partner. Canada also said it had awarded $8.3 million in funding, each, to native rocket companies NordSpace, Canada Rocket Company, and Reaction Dynamics—companies it hopes will utilize the Nova Scotia spaceport.

Rocket Lab strikes big deal for “Haste” missions. Rocket Lab announced Wednesday it has signed a $190 million contract for a block buy of 20 hypersonic test flights with its Haste launch vehicle for the US Department of Defense. Haste is a modified version of the Electron rocket that is used to fly suborbital missions and demonstrate hypersonic flight. The first of these 20 new missions is expected to take place within months of contract signing. This is Rocket Lab’s largest-ever launch contract in terms of total number of flights.

The nation’s hypersonic provider … Rocket Lab has been flying Haste missions for the US government from its launch site at Wallops Flight Facility since 2023. “Our advanced technology, responsive launch schedules, and mass production of our Haste hypersonic rockets are enabling faster progress across a range of hypersonic experiments by our government and industry partners,” Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck said. This contract signals that demand remains strong for the company’s small-lift Electron vehicle.

Isar targeting Monday for next Spectrum launch. Germany-based launch company Isar Aerospace said Wednesday it is now targeting Monday, March 23, for the second test flight of its Spectrum rocket. The company moved off a March 19 launch date “due to unfavorable weather conditions in the launch area,” the company said on social media. The launch will be webcast here.

If at first you don’t succeed … Nicknamed “Onward and Upward,” this will be the second flight of Spectrum. The vehicle failed 18 seconds into its initial test flight a year ago, on March 30. This second flight will carry five cubesats and one non-separable experiment with the goal of reaching orbit. Isar is aiming to become Europe’s first new space launch company to successfully reach orbit.

Where is Goddard’s historic rocket, Nell? Robert Goddard’s first liquid-fueled rocket, which lifted off from a snowy field on March 16, 1926, has been written about extensively. Earlier solid-fueled rockets existed, but liquid-fueled rockets promised the sustainability and control needed to send spacecraft and humans into Earth orbit and beyond. Photos from that day exist through the efforts of Goddard’s wife, as does a monument stand from where the rocket, nicknamed “Nell,” left the ground (today, located on a golf course).

Putting the pieces together … Over the decades, replicas of Nell have been built, even ones capable of flight. But a century later, a question about the rocket remains. Where is it now? Ars reports that Goddard did not try to reassemble the rocket, which landed in pieces in the New England snow. Rather he reused elements of the rocket in subsequent vehicles. Today fragments of the vehicle remain in a museum in New Mexico as well as what is probably Nell’s nozzle in The National Air and Space Museum.

HyImpulse to launch from Scotland. Germany’s HyImpulse Technologies announced a launch service agreement to begin flying from SaxaVord Spaceport, in the Shetland Islands, Payload reports. The suborbital flight, which is expected to lift off in the third quarter of this year, is the latest in a broader, European-wide push for sovereign launch capabilities much closer to home than French Guiana, which requires many of Europe’s launchers today—including Arianespace and Avio—to cross an ocean before passing the Kármán line.

SR75 to come alive … SaxaVord, located above the northern tip of the Scottish mainland, is working to complete three launch pads to host European launchers. The spaceport also has installed a tracking and telemetry system, mission control center, and integration hangar and has received a license from the UK Civil Aviation Authority for up to 30 launches per year. The expected launch of SR75 this year aims to build on the successful launch of HyImpulse’s hybrid suborbital system from Australia’s Koonibba Test Range in 2024, which validated its single-stage, 75kN engine for the first time.

Innospace pinpoints launch failure. Innospace says a gas leak led to a combustion chamber rupture that caused the first flight of the Hanbit-Nano rocket to fail, Aviation Week reports. The South Korean launch company says it aims to return to the pad in the third quarter of this year. Performance of the rocket, which took off on December 22 from the Brazilian Alcantara Space Center, was nominal for the first 33 seconds when the system suffered a combustion gas leak at the forward section of the first-stage hybrid rocket combustion chamber assembly. That caused the chamber to rupture and the Hanbit-Nano to break apart, Innospace said.

Seeing that it doesn’t happen again … “The leakage was caused by insufficient compression and uneven sealing performance resulting from plastic deformation of sealing components during the reassembly process following the replacement of the forward chamber plug during launch preparation activities in Brazil,” the company said. Innospace is making component upgrades and quality oversight improvements to pave the way for a return to flight in the third quarter, it adds. It also plans to perform additional tests. The precise launch schedule will depend on technical progress and flight approval from the Korean AeroSpace Agency.

French launch company acquires component manufacturer. French launch startup Sirius Space Services has acquired the high-precision metal-component manufacturer AMM-42, part of the company’s vertical integration efforts to bring key manufacturing capabilities in-house, European Spaceflight reports. This is Sirius’ second such purchase in less than a year, following its acquisition of SERM in June 2025. That acquisition specialized in advanced metal manufacturing and is bolstering its parent company’s additive manufacturing capacity, particularly for combustion chambers and turbopumps.

Getting Sirius about launch … Sirius Space Services is developing a range of three rockets that all use a modular booster system. Sirius 1 will be a two-stage, single-stick rocket capable of delivering 175 kilograms to low-Earth orbit. Sirius 13 will feature two strap-on boosters, while Sirius 15 will use four, with payload capacities of 600 and 1,000 kilograms, respectively. The company is currently preparing for a suborbital flight of its Sirius 1B demonstrator in early 2027.

Thanks to Falcon 9, Starlink hits a milestone. SpaceX on Monday night crossed the threshold of having more than 10,000 Starlink satellites in low-Earth orbit simultaneously for the first time, Spaceflight Now reports. The milestone comes less than seven years after SpaceX launched its first batch of satellites in May 2019 on the Falcon 9 rocket.

A lot of launches since Goddard … Coincidently, the Monday night launch also coincided with the 100th anniversary of Robert Goddard’s launch of the first liquid-propelled rocket. The Falcon 9 rocket flew on a southerly trajectory upon leaving Space Launch Complex 4 East. This was the 17th orbital launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California so far this year. SpaceX’s Monday night launch of a Falcon 9 rocket was the 615th flight of this kerosene-fueled rocket.

Artemis II rocket to roll back out to the pad. Engineers are targeting 8 pm EDT on Thursday, March 19, to start rolling the Artemis II SLS (Space Launch System) rocket and Orion spacecraft to Launch Pad 39B at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the US space agency said. NASA’s crawler-transporter 2 will carry the 11-million-pound stack, including the mobile launcher, at about 1 mph along the four-mile route from Kennedy’s Vehicle Assembly Building to the launch pad. The journey can take up to 12 hours.

Astronauts enter quarantine again … Meanwhile, the Artemis II crew entered quarantine at 5 pm CDT Wednesday in Houston to ensure they stay healthy leading up to launch. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen will limit their exposure to others for the next week in Houston before flying to Kennedy approximately five days before launch. Both activities are key milestones on the way to a launch as early as Wednesday, April 1.

Booster 19 completes initial test campaign. The Super Heavy first stage that will be used for the 12th Starship flight test, Booster 19, completed an initial test campaign on the newly commissioned Pad 2 at Starbase, Texas, NASASpaceflight.com reports. Culminating in a short static firing of the rocket, the series of tests was a first for Pad 2, the new Block 3/V3 Super Heavy Booster, and for the upgraded Raptor 3 outside of single engine testing.

New and improved (?) rocket and pad … As the inaugural vehicle to undergo operations on this pad, Booster 19’s campaign served as both a booster qualification test and a commissioning milestone for the expanded launch infrastructure. Pad 2 features significant upgrades over Pad 1, most notably dual booster quick disconnects: one dedicated to liquid methane and another to liquid oxygen. This separation enables independent tank pressurization and more efficient loading, reducing risks associated with mixed propellants. After the static firing, SpaceX said the rocket performed well. Flight 12 is likely to occur no earlier than the second half of April.

Next three launches

March 20: Electron | Eight Days a Week | Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand | 16:10 UTC

March 20: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-15 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 21:48 UTC

March 22: Soyuz 2.1a | Progress MS-33 | Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan | 11:59 UTC

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Posted Saturday 21 March 2026 at 5:41 am AEST (my time).

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If a battle is fought in space, it will look nothing like those depicted in the Star Wars franchise, with sleek TIE fighters blasting enemy ships with laser cannons and mag-pulses. Instead, these battles will be cerebral and unhurried, somewhat like the 1973 film The Day of the Jackal, a slow-burning political thriller with a plot that somehow mixes tension with clinical precision.

In that film, an assassin sets out to murder the French president. The main character’s moves are meticulously planned, with backup plans for backup plans. A police commissioner, just as clever, must pursue the assassin and stop the conspiracy. The events play out over weeks and months, not seconds and minutes.

True Anomaly, which emerged from stealth just three years ago, is planning for The Day of the Jackal in space. The startup’s primary hardware product, aptly named Jackal, is a war-ready satellite platform designed for mass production. In nature, jackals are known for their intelligence, adaptability, and hunting prowess. True Anomaly’s Jackal boasts similar traits in space.

The Jackal spacecraft is designed for agility and maneuverability. True Anomaly has launched two Jackal test missions to date, and a third one is planned for launch in the next few months. The spacecraft bus, or chassis, is about the size of a refrigerator. It’s essentially a flying fuel tank with room for thrusters and sensors to rapidly turn, approach, and surveil other objects in orbit. Some day, True Anomaly believes Jackal could be used for orbital combat.

Even Rogers, a former Air Force space operations officer, co-founded True Anomaly in 2022. The company is named for the term in orbital mechanics that defines an object’s location in its orbit at any one particular time. It has attracted some $400 million in investment, including funding from the venture capital firm cofounded by Vice President JD Vance. Now, after staffing up to several hundred employees, True Anomaly is primed for a breakout, Rogers told Ars in a recent interview.

All-in on space warfare

True Anomaly is focused entirely on winning US military contracts. The startup has already won some Space Force business, including a responsive space demo named Victus Haze scheduled for launch later this year. For this mission, True Anomaly is building a Jackal spacecraft that will launch into low-Earth orbit and pose as a satellite from a potential adversary, such as China or Russia. Rocket Lab will launch a second satellite to go up and try to chase down True Anomaly’s Jackal, simulating how the Space Force might respond to an emerging threat in orbit.

The scenario will play out like a military exercise. This kind of work was Rogers’ specialty before he started True Anomaly. In the Air Force, he worked in a space aggressors unit. If you’ve seen Top Gun, these are the roles of Tom Skerritt’s “Viper” and Michael Ironside’s “Jester” as they spar with Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer playing Navy fighter pilots.

“The space aggressors are tasked with studying and replicating threats for the purposes of training and sometimes tests,” Rogers said. “When I was an aggressor, my job was to teach… the Air Force and space operations community how to deal with a thinking adversary.”

This was right before the establishment of the Space Force in 2019. Rogers said the military and its legacy contractors were not equipped for the future of space warfare. Whether you like it or not, there’s no longer a question of space becoming militarized. It is.

“Some of the gaps that I saw were significant,” Rogers said. “They’re what you would expect for a new service, right or just before a new service, but wouldn’t be acceptable in combat.”

Rogers concluded it would take a “concentration of capital and talent” to solve the problem, and that’s where True Anomaly comes in. “I started True Anomaly because I didn’t have the tools that I needed, and my colleagues needed, to do our jobs as space operations professionals, as orbital warfare professionals, in uniform.”

Last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited True Anomaly on a nationwide tour of defense contractors. The message from Hegseth, like from other military officials, was a call to ramp up production, and fast. This mantra cuts across all domains, from ships to airplanes, missiles, and satellites. For that to happen, contractors must focus on fielding proven technology at lower cost. The military’s interest in funding research is waning.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (second from right) and True Anomaly cofounder Even Rogers (right) examine

an engineering model of True Anomaly’s Jackal spacecraft in Centennial, Colorado.

Credit: True Anomaly

In November, Reuters reported True Anomaly was one of multiple companies that won Space Force contracts to build prototypes of space-based interceptors and related technology for the Pentagon’s Golden Dome missile defense shield. Rogers declined to discuss Golden Dome with Ars, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand how the Jackal platform’s built-in agility might be useful to take on fast-moving ballistic or hypersonic missiles.

True Anomaly also seems well-positioned to win a contract for the Space Force’s upcoming RG-XX program, a follow-on to the military’s fleet of sentinels roaming geosynchronous orbit to approach and inspect other satellites. The Space Force is expected to award multiple companies contracts to build an undisclosed number of RG-XX satellites, expanding the geosynchronous inspection fleet from fewer than 10 existing satellites to a constellation of dozens or more.

Ars recently visited True Anomaly’s headquarters for an off-the-record tour, then sat down with Rogers to chat about the vision, risks, and rewards in True Anomaly’s orbit. The text of the interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Ars: True Anomaly’s specialty is in building highly maneuverable, highly agile spacecraft. Why was this your first priority?

Rogers: Space-to-space engagements are going to be one of the engagement phenomenologies the Space Force has to deal with. There are a small number of things that make space-to-space engagements successful outcomes: sensing, autonomy, maneuverability, and payload-carrying capacity.

In warfare… maneuverability is a key element of employing forces in any domain. That gives you the ability to overmatch your adversary. Kinematically, it gives you the ability to respond, to get into position when you’re out of position, and achieve a position of advantage. That was a major gap in the defense industrial base. There were a small number of very, very expensive RPO (Rendezvous and Proximity Operations)-capable spacecraft, and they were only effective in one particular orbital regime, so we built Jackal to fill this gap at the intersection of scale, maneuverability, agility, and autonomy. When I say scale, I mean per-unit cost.

If you assume a fairly constrained budget for the Space Force, you need us. You need to be able to use that budget to buy as many capabilities as possible. We want to drive the per-unit cost down to something that can allow for the necessary number of units to be purchased that would provide the force structure necessary for the Space Force to be successful, and those need to be built very quickly to deal with the threat.

Ars: What makes your satellites so maneuverable? What is the differentiator between Jackal and other spacecraft that the Space Force currently has in their inventory?

Rogers: The Jackal provides a high level of agility in both translation and rotation, so maneuverability in any direction—back, left, right, up, down, and a high rate of rotation, so you can track targets at high closing velocities. It is arrayed with a simple propulsion system, a proven propulsion system, with a very large number of thrusters—20 thrusters in the case of Jackal—that allow us to maneuver in any direction while not losing track of the target.

Ars: Tell me about your Mosaic software platform. What does it bring to the table?

Rogers: It’s designed to control Jackal, but also other systems, to do effects-based mission planning. You articulate to the software the intent of your mission, and the software helps you decompose that mission into tasks and then plans the trajectories and movements of forces, and the timing and tempo of those forces in the achievement of that mission. It then helps you manage the latency and periodicity of communications so you can track the execution, and then intervene in the execution, in a highly machine-facilitated way.

So, it’s sort of the ultimate command-and-control system for tactical and operational mission execution for space superiority. It’s a cockpit, while also being kind of the Ender’s Game-type approach to space warfare. We named it Mosaic after a modern concept in maneuver warfare called Mosaic warfare.

Ars: What is Mosaic warfare?

Rogers: Mosaic is designed for high quality and fast loops for space superiority by ingesting disparate data, fusing that picture into an intuitive, human-readable picture, and then allowing for rapid tasking and orchestration of assets. The last pillar that’s really important for Mosaic warfare is human command and machine control. So it’s a command-and-control concept that leverages human creativity and the capacity to pattern-match quickly and gain intuition about a system with the capacity for machine-speed orchestration in real time.

Ars: We’ve heard Space Force generals begin to talk about dogfighting in space. What does dogfighting look like in the space domain? Is that the right term?

Rogers: I think it’s a perfectly fine term. It’s certainly a fun term. But dogfighting in space doesn’t quite have the drama of an aerial dogfight. So, we should come up with a different one. Maybe not dogfight. Maybe sloth fight. Sloth fighting in space. The tempo is slower, and the relative velocities are slower. True Anomaly is building the technologies that will allow for a very high-tempo engagement activity in space that is more akin to what we see in terrestrial operations. But I think today it’s more like sloth fight than dogfight.

A Jackal spacecraft on a rotation stand at True Anomaly’s headquarters in Centennial, Colorado.

Credit: True Anomaly

Ars: Why dedicate yourselves to national security in space? Why not pursue other markets at the same time?

Rogers: Where we are today in space warfare is very similar to where air superiority was in the 1930s, which is, you have this massive industrialization effort, this buildup of war-fighting capability the United States is doing now, in advance of, or in an effort to, prevent conflict. No. 2, you have the demonstrated utility of air platforms following World War I and the development of early doctrine. And No. 3, you have the advancement of flight sciences. As those three things interacted with each other, new operational concepts were built for air systems that necessitated military-only platforms.

There was no commercial application for the P-51. The P-51 was there to be a fighter escort and sweep asset for air superiority missions. As operational concepts mature for space superiority, those operational concepts will drive a performance envelope for warfare that will be mutually exclusive of commercial applications. Not in all cases. There are spinoffs that can happen, to be clear, but we’re focused on getting the war-fighting technologies right, and we believe the market will support this thesis.

Ars: This is an interesting topic, the idea of developing doctrine and learning how to use new technologies in warfare. I read the first munition was dropped from an airplane in 1911, before World War I. It’s interesting to trace where the space domain is in that arc and compare it to how humans learned how to fight in the air.

Rogers: That’s what I spend most of my time thinking about. How are we going to use space systems for warfare in the future? We have all the applications for intelligence and missile warning and communications, but we’re just starting to think about space warfare, offense, and defense.

By the way, those decompose into different missions on the basis of the specific tactical tasks that need to be accomplished… That means that there are going to be, just like in every other domain, platforms that are purpose-built, that really only have a [military] function. There’s no other function for a guided bomb unit, a GBU, other than for warfare. The B-2 has no commercial application. Lockheed Martin doesn’t sell F-35 to United Airlines, right? That’s because the mission drives the design, so I’m just basically vehemently agreeing with you.

Ars: Is True Anomaly building sensors, weapons, or things for on-ship awareness? Or just the spacecraft bus?

Rogers: We are absolutely designing and building payloads. We hope to announce a few early payloads this year, but we really see ourselves as a full-stack mission solution provider across a wide variety of space superiority missions. We’re going to build a wide variety of sensors for different mission applications: optical sensors, active sensors, lidars, radars, you name it. We’ll leverage our existing supply base where we can, but for most missions, we’re going to provide the full stack of capability, payload, spacecraft, software, and then ops and sustainment, and tactics development and training as well.

But we’re going to partner also. We’re going to provide whatever we think is in the best interests of the customer… Jackal is just the beginning of our hardware lineup. We will have different platforms in the future that are bigger and that are smaller. We’ll have a wide variety of payload solutions… We just started with Jackal because that’s where we had the most expertise, and that’s where the industry needed to be disrupted.

Ars: Do you hand over the keys of your satellites to the Space Force after they launch, or do you operate the satellites yourselves and provide services to the Space Force?

Rogers: We’re open to anything that makes sense for the mission—commercially owned and operated, government-owned and operated. If it’s speed to market, and there’s a clear demand signal, commercially owned and operated might make sense, but I think there are probably hybrid models that will end up evolving. We do not have a dogmatic view of the best way to partner with the government.

Ars: What missions have you flown so far, and what’s next?

Rogers: Our previous missions are all developmental flight tests for Jackal. They were all executed on our own funding, and we use a model that’s similar to other aerospace companies like SpaceX, which is what we call fly, fix, fly. So we build, we flight test, we push those systems to failure, we find their failure modes through flight test, and then we fix them, and then we fly again. We’re really trying to drive towards a very high flight cadence so that we can increase the speed of our learning cycles.

Our last two missions were learning flight tests. We got farther on the second one than we did on the first one, by design, and then we’ve got another one coming up here in a couple of months that I think is going to open a much wider portion of the envelope that we need to evaluate Jackal against.

Ars: What do you have launching over the next 12 or 18 months?

Rogers: We are preparing for several upcoming missions, and there are over a dozen other flights that we’re doing in the next 18 months for other efforts. So, we have a very hardware-rich year ahead of us.

Ars: What can you tell me about the GEO mission? Is that another internal mission?

Rogers: That’s an internal mission. We do anticipate there being a government partner at some point, but that’s a developmental flight for the GEO version of the spacecraft, which features a bunch of really interesting upgrades. That spacecraft, we’re using as an opportunity to create one baseline [design] between both LEO (low-Earth orbit) and GEO… That allows for commonality across mission sets. The design will allow us to hit rate for Jackal, and in Denver alone, we can build 50 spacecraft a year. So that will be the iteration that allows us to really go into large-scale production.

Ars: I’ve seen some hints about a True Anomaly lunar mission. Is that something you can talk about?

Rogers: That’s one of the ones I can’t talk about.

Even Rogers, co-founder and CEO of True Anomaly, during a Bloomberg Tech interview at Anduril’s

headquarters in Costa Mesa, California, on October 10, 2025.

Credit: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Ars: I want to take a step back and talk about larger trends. The military is pivoting toward a stronger emphasis on production over research and development. How is True Anomaly suited to answer this demand?

Rogers: We are the perfect partner for this change in the way that the DoD is operating. There are a number of examples we can point to, chief among them Jackal and Mosaic, where True Anomaly shouldered the burden of developing a product on our own dime, with conviction, and took that product to a point where it could be produced at scale to meet a wide variety of requirements for the Space Force. That’s a motion you’ve seen adopted across industry. I think we’re one of the best exemplars of that. We expend our own private capital to build products designed for space superiority so that the Space Force can purchase units of capability immediately, rather than paying for R&D. So we recoup our investment through firm fixed-price production contracts.

Ars: I’ve heard some hesitation among investors that the Space Force’s changing priorities might be a hindrance to fundraising. Is there a risk to True Anomaly if the Pentagon suddenly comes to you and says we need something different, or if a new administration changes direction? And what about the risk of being a target for a military attack?

Rogers: We’re in a slightly different position than the rest of industry. We’re a privately owned company, but we’re not a commercial space developer. We’re not building systems for commercial operators, and we’re not offering commercial applications that are dual-use applications. We’re a defense company. We actually assume we’re exposed to those risks already.

I think some of the work the government is doing to acknowledge that there is risk to companies like True Anomaly is great, although we’re not any different than Northrop or Lockheed, in the sense that we know that we’re targets of espionage, we know that we’re targets of adverse action, and we invest in the infrastructure and the personnel to mitigate those risks.

I think there is a question that the rest of industry has to answer for themselves, and we hope to build, at some point, defense solutions for commercial operators, but for the purpose of ensuring that the United States military has access to commercial resources when they need them, so done under the auspices of being a defense company, not a commercial defense company.

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Posted Friday 20 March 2026 at 12:56 pm AEST (my time).

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People in North America adopted the bow and arrow as replacement weapons for the dart and atlatl about 1,400 years ago, according to a new paper published in the journal PNAS Nexus. But the adoption was almost immediate in southern regions, while people living farther north initially adopted the bow and arrow as a complement to their existing toolkit, gradually phasing out the atlatl and dart over a thousand years.

That’s according to the latest research from experimental archaeologist Metin Eren’s Experimental Archaeology Laboratory at Kent State University in Ohio, where he and his team try to reverse-engineer a wide range of ancient technologies, from stone tools and ceramics to metal, butchery, and textiles. Eren achieved some notoriety for his 2019 debunking of an Inuit legend, testing rudimentary knives made of frozen feces to see whether they could cut through pig hide, muscle, and tendon. That paper snagged Eren an Ig Nobel prize.

While such work might be colorful, Eren has always emphasized that what he does is very much serious science, not entertainment. His lab has conducted studies on the pitches and octaves produced from the percussive aspects of flint-knapping; common injuries suffered by flint-knappers; the butchering efficiency of Clovis points (field work done jointly with the MeatEater hunters and immortalized on YouTube); and ballistics experiments to test a 1970s hypothesis about whether some stone blades once had some sort of wood or bone backing on the flat, dulled edge (as opposed to the sharp cutting edge), which would have increased adhesion.

Most of Eren’s students get the chance to throw point-tipped spears at a hunting target outside on campus, using an attached atlatl or spear-thrower. The atlatl is an ingenious handheld rod-shaped device that employs leverage to launch a dart or spear. Versions have been developed by several different ancient cultures, including Aztec, Maya, Greek, Roman, and Australian Aboriginal designs.

At some point in North America, the atlatl was replaced by the bow and arrow, thanks to the latter’s increased arrow accuracy, distance, velocity, more frequent shots, plus the ability to shoot (and reshoot) from a number of different positions. There were also trade-offs, though: Using a bow costs more to make and maintain, for instance, and it requires both hands to operate, making it difficult to also hold a shield. Its widespread adoption probably occurred because the benefits outweighed the downsides.

It’s challenging to determine when the bow was introduced and how quickly it was adopted because the weapons are made with organic materials that tend not to be preserved, unlike stone, bone, or metal tools. So for this latest study, Eren and his co-authors focused on radiocarbon dating a carefully curated dataset of clearly identifiable weapons found in dry caves and rock shelters (naturally anaerobic environments).

Single origin or independent invention?

Metin Eren demonstrates proper form when throwing a spear with an atlatl.

Credit: Jennifer Ouellette

The radiocarbon dating results showed that the bow and arrow emerged in North America roughly 1,400 years ago. However, in the north, that weapon coexisted with the atlatl for several centuries, while the bow proved to be disruptive almost immediately in the south, quickly rendering tools like the atlatl obsolete. For the authors, this is evidence of “a relatively late introduction that occurred nearly simultaneously across a vast area, followed by regionally distinct adoption trajectories.”

In other words, the bow and arrow likely had a single origin that then rapidly diffused through cultural transmission networks, with a few regional differences affecting the rate of replacement. Eren et al. note that there is also evidence from other studies of people in several geotemporal contexts converging on bow-and-arrow technology multiple times since the African Middle Stone Age. So more data is needed to make a definitive finding, and for now, at least, “such testing is beyond current archaeological resolution and analysis,” the authors wrote.

The regional differences are likely linked to broader environmental, ecological, and social factors, as well as the relative pros and cons of each type of weapon. Eren’s prior work showed that a thrown javelin increases not only in velocity but also in kinetic energy—almost a 200 percent increase in impact energy by 9 meters in height. But the atlatl’s effectiveness decreases as the height increases. So the atlatl has a major cost when firing downward, which might be why Neanderthals never developed a version of it. They often hunted in hilly areas and would have gained more advantage from a thrown javelin.

Similarly, “The bow’s decisive advantages in accuracy, distance, rate of fire, and versatility, among others, allowed it to displace the atlatl as a one-to-one replacement across diverse southern environments, highlighting how disruptive technologies can quickly homogenize practices over large geographical areas,” the authors wrote. But the slower adoption in the north is an example of a different evolutionary dynamic: a “risk-buffering” scenario “in which foragers in high-risk, variable environments maintain a wider diversity of tools to ensure flexibility and resilience”—i.e., a technological redundancy.

According to the authors, in the northern regions, the atlatl was probably still useful during colder months or when hunting certain kinds of prey, with the bow and arrow proving more useful for other prey or during warmer months. “These results reveal that technological evolution is context dependent, sometimes producing disruptive replacements and at other times enriching toolkits to buffer ecological risks,” the authors concluded.

DOI: PNAS Nexus, 2026. 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgag040  (About DOIs).

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Posted Friday 20 March 2026 at 4:55 am AEST (my time).

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