Whether or not autonomous vehicles ever work out, the effort put into using small cameras and machine-learning algorithms to detect cars could pay off big for an unexpected group: cyclists.

Velo AI is a firm cofounded by Clark Haynes and Micol Marchetti-Bowick, both PhDs with backgrounds in robotics, movement prediction, and Uber's (since sold-off) autonomous vehicle work. Copilot, which started as a "pandemic passion project" for Haynes, is essentially car-focused artificial intelligence and machine learning stuffed into a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and boxed up in a bike-friendly size and shape.

A look into the computer vision of the Copilot.

While car-detecting devices exist for bikes, including the Garmin Varia, they're largely radar-based. That means they can't distinguish between vehicles of different sizes and only know that something is approaching you, not, for example, how much space it will allow when passing.

Copilot purports to do a lot more:

• Identify cars, bikes, and pedestrians
• Alert riders audibly about cars "Following," "Approaching," and "Overtaking"
• Issue visual warning to drivers who are approaching too close or too fast
• Send visual notifications and a simplified rear road view to an optional paired smartphone
• Record 1080p video and tag "close calls" and "incidents" from your phone

At 330 grams, with five hours of optimal battery life (and USB-C recharging), it's not for the aero-obsessed rider or super-long-distance rider. And at $400, it might not speak to the most casual and infrequent cyclist. But it's an intriguing piece of kit, especially for those who already have, or considered, a Garmin or similar action camera for watching their back. What if a camera could do more than just show you the car after you're already endangered by it?

The Velo team detailed some of their building process for the official Raspberry Pi blog. The Compute Module 4 powers the core system and lights, while a custom Hailo AI co-processor helps with the neural networks and computer vision. An Arducam camera provides the vision and recording.

Beyond individual safety, the Velo AI team hopes that data from Copilots can feed into larger-scale road safety improvements. The team told the Pi blog that they're starting a partnership with Pittsburgh, seeding Copilots to regular bike commuters and analyzing the aggregate data for potential infrastructure upgrades.

The Copilot is available for sale now and shipping, according to Velo AI. A December 2023 pre-order sold out.

Gourmands are well aware of the many varieties of blue cheese, known by the blue-green veins that ripple through the cheese. Different kinds of blue cheese have distinctive flavor profiles: they can be mild or strong, sweet or salty, for example. Soon we might be able to buy blue cheeses that belie the name and sport veins of different colors: perhaps yellow-green, reddish-brown-pink, or lighter/darker shades of blue, according to a recent paper published in the journal Science of Food.

“We’ve been interested in cheese fungi for over 10 years, and traditionally when you develop mould-ripened cheeses, you get blue cheeses such as Stilton, Roquefort, and Gorgonzola, which use fixed strains of fungi that are blue-green in color," said co-author Paul Dyer of the University of Nottingham of this latest research. "We wanted to see if we could develop new strains with new flavors and appearances."

Blue cheese has been around for a very long time. Legend has it that a young boy left his bread and ewe's milk cheese in a nearby cave to pursue a lovely young lady he'd spotted in the distance. Months later, he came back to the cave and found it had molded into Roquefort. It's a fanciful tale, but scholars think the basic idea is sound: people used to store cheeses in caves because their temperature and moisture levels were especially hospitable to harmless molds. That was bolstered by a 2021 analysis of paleofeces that found evidence that Iron Age salt miners in Hallstatt (Austria) between 800 and 400 BCE were already eating blue cheese and quaffing beer.

The manufacturing process for blue cheese is largely the same as for any cheese, with a few crucial additional steps. It requires cultivation of Penicillium roqueforti, a mold that thrives on exposure to oxygen. The P. roqueforti is added to the cheese, sometimes before curds form and sometimes mixed in with curds after they form. The cheese is then aged in a temperature-controlled environment. Lactic acid bacteria trigger the initial fermentation but eventually die off, and the P. roqueforti take over as secondary fermenters. Piercing the curds forms air tunnels in the cheese, and the mold grows along those surfaces to produce blue cheese's signature veining.

Once scientists published the complete genome for P. roqueforti, it opened up opportunities for studying this blue cheese fungus, per Dyer et al. Different strains "can have different colony cultures and textures, with commercial strains being sold partly on the basis of color development," they wrote. This coloration comes from pigments in the coatings of the spores that form as the colony grows. Dyer and his co-authors set out to determine the genetic basis of this pigment formation in the hopes of producing altered strains with different spore coat colors.

The team identified a specific biochemical pathway, beginning with a white color that gradually goes from yellow-green, red-brown-pink, dark brown, light blue, and ultimately that iconic dark blue-green. They used targeted gene deletion to block pigment biosynthesis genes at various points in this pathway. This altered the spore color, providing a proof of principle without adversely affecting the production of flavor volatiles and levels of secondary metabolites called mycotoxins. (The latter are present in low enough concentrations in blue cheese so as not to be a health risk for humans, and the team wanted to ensure those concentrations remained low.)

However, food industry regulations prohibit gene-deletion fungal strains for commercial cheese production. So Dyer et al. used UV mutagenesis—essentially "inducing sexual reproduction in the fungus," per Dyer—to produce non-GMO mutant strains of the fungi to create "blue" cheeses of different colors, without increasing mycotoxin levels or impacting the volatile compounds responsible for flavor.

“The interesting part was that once we went on to make some cheese, we then did some taste trials with volunteers from across the wider university, and we found that when people were trying the lighter colored strains they thought they tasted more mild," said Dyer. "Whereas they thought the darker strain had a more intense flavor. Similarly, with the more reddish-brown and a light green one, people thought they had a fruity, tangy element to them—whereas, according to the lab instruments, they were very similar in flavor. This shows that people do perceive taste not only from what they taste but also by what they see.”

Dyer's team is hoping to work with local cheese makers in Nottingham and Scotland, setting up a spinoff company in hopes of commercializing the mutant strains. And there could be other modifications on the horizon. “Producers could almost dial up their list of desirable characteristics—more or less color, faster or slower growth rate, acidity differences,” Donald Glover of the University of Queensland in Australia, who was not involved in the research, told New Scientist.

Science of Food, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41538-023-00244-9  (About DOIs).

In the summer of 2017, when communication professor Jeffery Gentry moved from Oklahoma to accept a position at Eastern New Mexico University, he was pleasantly surprised to find it easier to get up in the morning. The difference, he realized, was early morning light. On September mornings in Portales, New Mexico, Gentry rose with the sun at around 6:30 am, but at that time of day in Oklahoma, it was still dark.

As the Earth rotates, the sun reaches the eastern edge of a time zone first, with sunrise and sunset occurring progressively later as you move west. Gentry’s move had taken him from the western side of Central Time in Oklahoma to the eastern edge of Mountain Time. Following his curiosity into the scientific literature, he discovered the field of chronobiology, the study of biological rhythms, such as how cycles of daylight and dark affect living things. “I really just stumbled upon it from being a guinea pig in my own experiment,” he said.

In 2022, Gentry and an interdisciplinary team of colleagues added to that body of research, publishing a study in the journal Time & Society that showed the rate of fatal motor-vehicle accidents was highest for people living in the far west of a time zone, where the sun rises and sets at least an hour later than on the eastern side. Chronobiology research shows that longer evening light can keep people up later and that, as Gentry found, morning darkness can make it harder to get going for work or school. Western-edge folks may suffer more deadly car wrecks, the team theorized, because they are commuting in the dark while sleep deprived and not fully alert.

With all the hullabaloo over the health and safety of setting clocks forward an hour in the spring for Daylight Saving Time (DST) and back in the fall with Standard Time (ST), could where you live in a time zone actually have a more profound effect? I asked Gentry. “That’s very possible,” he said.

Time researchers make this point, and research results and public opinion polls reflect it: Something is awry about the way we mark time. Those problems start with the annual toggle between DST and ST. In these days of sharp division, poll after poll finds most people unified in their dislike of switching clocks back and forth with the season. However, the question of whether to stick with ST or DST year-round once again sends people to different camps.

Scientists generally advocate for permanent ST, or “natural time,” as Gentry calls it because it better aligns people’s schedules with the sun year-round. “People who study the issue are all in agreement,” he said. On the other hand, public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic tends to favor permanent DST—and many politicians agree—perhaps because of the positive associations with summer sunshine. (A bill to make that switch passed the US Senate unanimously in 2022 but then stalled in the House; a new version was recently reintroduced.)

Some scientists have fired back that such a move would be a grave mistake: The German newspaper Die Welt quoted pioneering chronobiologist and sleep researcher Till Roenneberg warning that permanent DST would make Europeans “dicker, dümmer und grantiger” (fatter, dumber, and grumpier).

The conflict over DST versus ST makes for grabby headlines and engaging social media posts. But focusing on the clash misses the bigger questions about how we choose to mark time. A close look at the research reveals not only uncertainties about the effects of DST, but also about other factors, such as how time zones are drawn and, possibly most important, how structuring our schedules around light and dark could have a profound impact on health and safety.

“We absolutely need to think about our time,” said Beth Malow, a neurologist and director of the sleep division at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “And how are we going to actually figure this out as a country?”

Internal clocks are ticking

The 24-hour cycle of light and dark created by the Earth’s rotation is the force that rules our lives. Homer’s rosy-fingered dawn is what chronobiologists call a zeitgeber, German for “time giver”—a natural signal that touches off cyclical processes in the body governing our internal clocks. Morning light, for example, cues our bodies to ramp up production of cortisol, a hormone that helps us feel awake and alert. Meanwhile, as cortisol dwindles through the evening, darkness triggers the sleep-promoting hormone melatonin.

In the language of chronobiologists, the biological clock rhythms of humans and other animals are entrained, or synchronized, to the solar clock.

Humans have devised schemes such as time zones and Daylight Saving Time to optimize their interactions with these natural cycles of light and dark. But the match between time policy and the zeitgeber is often imperfect.

When we set clocks forward with DST in the spring, many people suddenly have to get up for school or work before the light has jumpstarted physiological processes associated with wakefulness. Cortisol levels peak about an hour later during DST according to a 2014 Australian study. Then, at the other end of the day, people have to go to bed before hours of darkness have signaled to their body that it’s time to sleep.

The abrupt change, especially to DST in the spring, can wreak havoc on health and safety. In a 2020 commentary for JAMA Neurology, Beth Malow and colleagues outline evidence for negative health effects during the DST transition, including less and poorer quality sleep, an increased risk of stroke and heart attack, and a decreased sense of well-being, particularly for men who work full time.

In addition, although the research on road safety is mixed, some studies find an uptick in traffic accidents and fatalities in the days after the DST switch.

However, those bad effects are fleeting. The longer-term impact of DST is hard to research because the amount of sunlight changes with the seasons. Only one study has directly compared permanent DST to permanent ST: a seven-year study of students aged 10 to 24 living in northwestern Russia when the government mandated a switch from seasonal DST to year-around DST in 2011—and then switched again, to permanent ST, in 2014.

Permanent DST meant that the sun also rose and set later in the winter. Results published in 2017 associated year-round DST with a greater likelihood of feeling down in the winter as well as sleeping later on weekends, a phenomenon known as social jet lag. Chronobiologist Till Roenneberg and colleagues coined the term nearly two decades ago to describe the chronic sleep deprivation that people experience when they have to get up for school or work before they would awaken naturally.

“Social jet lag is the umbrella term for not being able to live in sync with one’s biological time,” said Roenneberg. He likens wakening with an alarm to stopping the washing machine before the cycle is complete: “All we get is wet and dirty laundry,” he said. “And that’s what we get in our body.”

Social jet lag is an artifact of our modern world. Nearly half of US adults sleep at least an hour later when they have the chance, according to a study published in JAMA Network Open in 2022. And research suggests that the phenomenon is especially pronounced in adolescents due to both biology—melatonin release tends to be delayed in that age group, for example—and environmental factors such as late nights on electronics and early school-start times.

Research by Roenneberg and others have associated social jet lag—and the sleep deprivation it reflects—with smoking and consuming higher amounts of alcohol and caffeine as well as a range of ill health effects including obesity, metabolic syndrome (a group of health conditions that increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes), risk factors for heart disease, and depression. Studies have also linked social jet lag to worse academic performance for high school and college students.

In a thorough review, Roenneberg and colleagues argue that by pushing sunrise and sunset an hour later, permanent DST is bound to worsen social jet lag. But the Russian study is the only direct evidence of that link, and it’s uncertain whether those effects, which the Russian researchers characterize as “small or very small,” apply to older age groups or people living where the cycles of light and dark are less extreme. In Vorkuta, one of three cities in the study, for example, the sun never rises for a time in the winter and never sets for six weeks in the summer.

Like all of the researchers I spoke with for this story, Derk-Jan Dijk, a sleep and physiology professor at the University of Surrey in England, sees potential harm in permanently setting our clocks an hour ahead because in the winter many people would have to start their day in darkness. “Any schedule that implies that you have to get up before sunrise may cause problems,” said Dijk. But he also doesn’t like to overstate the case against DST, especially when we observe it seasonally.

“The entire discussion about Daylight Saving Time and how bad it is upsets me a little bit,” he told me. The slight effects seen during the transition to DST in the spring and then back to ST in the autumn, quickly disappear he noted. “There is no good evidence that during the entire summer, when we are on Daylight Saving Time, everything is worse,” he said. “I don’t think the evidence is there.”

Changing the clocks is irritating

Polls show that we generally dislike mucking with time twice a year. Nearly two-thirds of Americans want to eliminate the changing of clocks, according to a nationally representative survey of 1,500 US adults conducted by The Economist magazine and market research company YouGov in 2021.

Permanent DST enjoys bipartisan support among many political leaders in the US. In a document supporting the Sunshine Protection Act, Sen. Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, cites evidence that DST promotes health, safety, recreation, commerce, and energy savings. However, some of that research focuses on the harms of switching back and forth, so one could also use it to support year-around ST.

In other cases, Rubio cherry picks studies showing benefits to DST while ignoring contradictory research. A 2020 report from the Congressional Research Service prepared for members of the US Congress did not find substantial evidence that DST improves health and safety or that it reduces energy consumption by much—if at all.

And in drumming up supportive evidence, the permanent DST camp hits the same wall as the eliminate DST camp: Researchers haven’t sufficiently studied the effects of year-around DST.

In a controversial 2020 perspective for the journal Clocks & Sleep, sleep scientists Christina Blume and Manuel Schabus call on the scientific establishment to own up to uncertainties in the existing data and to do the research needed to fill those holes. Still, even Blume acknowledges that taken as a whole, the available data makes a decent case that changing clocks to shift light from the morning to the evening could be bad for our health and safety.

“We all agree as researchers that the safer option is to go for perennial Standard Time,” said Blume, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Basel in Switzerland.

The nonprofit organization Save Standard Time lists endorsements from more than 30 sleep-science and medical organizations—including the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, the American Medical Association, and the American Academy of Neurology among others—in addition to individual scientists and researchers.

Here, I feel compelled to note that the last time we tried permanent DST, it didn’t go well. In attempt to conserve energy, Congress established a trial period of year-round DST in late 1973. But public approval dropped precipitously as Americans faced the reality of dark winter mornings. By October 1974, the country had reverted to four months of yearly ST.

The disconnect between the perception and reality arises because of how we think and talk about the seasons and time change, said neurologist Malow, who testified before the US Congress about the benefits of permanent ST. “People have associated being on standard time, with it being cold and winter and dark,” she said. Meanwhile “springing forward” coincides with the return of warmer, longer days.

But, of course, DST doesn’t buy you more light. Winter days are short and summer days are long regardless of how you mark time.

Maps, schools, and jobs

In addition to DST, other factors about how we control light and time in our environment—how we draw time zones, use artificial light, and set school and work schedules—affect our relationship to the solar clock as well as health and safety.

To understand time zones, it helps to go back to basic geography. The Earth rotates all the way around in 24 hours. Imagine longitude lines running north and south separating the globe into 24 segments, each marking one hour’s rotation. Time zones roughly follow those longitude lines. As the Earth rotates, the sun rises and sets first on the eastern edge of a time zone, and then about an hour later on the western edge.

Things gets interesting on either side of a time-zone boundary, where the sun position is essentially the same, but the clock time is different. In late January, for example, the sun sets around 6:10 pm in Columbus, Georgia in Eastern Time, but at 5:10 pm just over the time-zone border in Auburn, Alabama.

People living on the late-sunset side of a time-zone border, like those in Columbus, tend to go to bed later, sleeping an average of around 20 minutes less each night than those on the early-sunset side, like those in Auburn, according to a 2019 study published in the Journal of Health Economics. Drawing on large national surveys and data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers found that health outcomes associated with sleep deficiency and social jet lag were worse for the late-sunset folks. Their wages were also about 3 percent lower than those of early-sunset people, who, better rested, were presumably more productive.

“The effects are larger when you zoom in really close the border,” said study co-author Osea Giuntella, an economics professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Seasonal changes, including the shift to DST in the spring, didn’t have a significant effect. Giuntella said that it’s possible that where you live in a time zone could have a bigger effect than DST, but he couldn’t be sure because DST wasn’t a focus of the study. That would be harder to study, he noted, as the time change typically affects people on both sides of a time-zone border. (Arizona is the only state in the continental US that does not observe DST.)

Another tricky aspect of time zones is that they don’t strictly adhere to longitude lines but instead meander to accommodate city and state boundaries. In the US, all the time zones except Pacific Time encompass areas west of what would be the natural time-zone boundary. Communication professor Jeffery Gentry and a team that included Eastern New Mexico University professors with expertise in geography, biology, and education have dubbed those regions west of the geographic time zone “eccentric time localities,” or ETLs.

In these ETLs, sunrise and sunset time may occur more than an hour later than the eastern side of the time zone. For example, geographically, Marquette, Michigan, should be in Central Time, but instead, the city lies in an ETL in Eastern Time. In late October, the sun rises at around 7:10 a.m. Eastern Time in Bangor, Maine, but not until around 8:30 am in Marquette.

Gentry and colleague’s analysis of more than 400,000 fatal traffic accidents that occurred between 2006 and 2017 showed that ETL residents suffered a 22 percent higher fatality rate than those living elsewhere in the time zone. If the death rate in ETLs had been the same as the rest of the time zone, they would have experienced about 15,000 fewer fatalities over 12 years, according to the analysis.

The most likely explanation, according to the researchers, is that people in ETLs are forced to keep schedules that are out of sync with cues from the solar clock—what the authors call “dysfunctional social time.” Compared to people living with more light in the morning and less in the evening, Gentry told me, ETL dwellers may not sleep as long or as well and may be less sharp for their morning commute.

The authors accounted for differences in urban and rural areas, but not for other factors linked to traffic accidents such as speed limits, drunk driving, and road conditions. Still, Gentry said that the strength of the study is the size and completeness of the data set, meaning that small regional differences are unlikely to affect the overall results. “We eliminated everything we could and we still have a pretty stark number here,” said Gentry.

Gentry would like to see time zones redrawn. But other policy fixes could help as well. The authors didn’t explore whether accidents varied by season, but they found evidence from other research strong enough to presume that DST magnifies the potential harm of living in an ETL. Gentry said that notion leaves him hopeful because he views DST as simple enough to fix. “I’m more positive that if Daylight Saving Time were eliminated, that we might save quite a few lives.”

Artificial lighting

In our artificially lit world, our internal clocks are affected by far more than sunrise and sunset. No doubt, the sun is the strongest zeitgeber, but artificial light also affects our internal clocks, said sleep researcher Derk-Jan Dijk. He dismissed the notion that humans are entrained solely to the sun as a romantic idea. “We, to a large extent, have divorced our activity schedules from the natural light-dark cycle,” he said.

A body of research shows that even dim light can suppress melatonin production and delay sleep. Blue light from fluorescent lights and our ubiquitous screens, which has the shortest wavelength and highest energy of light that the human eye can see, has a particularly powerful effect on circadian rhythms.

Dijk is frustrated that focus on DST overlooks harder questions about the built environment and how we choose to live and work. “The more general question is how the heck do we actually come up with our work schedules and social schedules, which basically determine to what extent we make use of natural light versus man-made light?” said Dijk. Aligning our sleep and work schedules with the light that is available for free would not only be better for us, but, because we’d use less electricity to power devices late into the night, better for the planet.

Doing so goes far beyond the details of the daylight saving debate—although it involves changes that are not so easily legislated by Congress.

Like many other researchers, Dijk advocates for adjusting school-start times and allowing flexible work schedules so that people don’t have to get up before sunrise. In the time-zone study by Giuntella and colleagues, for example, when people could sleep later in the morning—because they were unemployed or started work later—they didn't seem to experience the negative effects of living with later sunsets.

And, although it sounds like a radical idea, states could also adjust time-zone boundaries. “I don’t think we want 10 time zones, but maybe we add one for the Northeast,” said Malow. Because the New England states are so far east, winter sunsets come early—before 4 pm in December in parts of Maine.

And then there is the question of whether so-called ETLs would better align with the time zone to their west. For example, Malow lives in the Nashville area in Central Time, but part of the state juts into Eastern time. “If we could get Eastern Tennessee into Central Time, that would solve a lot of problems,” she said. As it is, if the country shifts to permanent DST, the cities of Chattanooga and Knoxville wouldn’t see the sun until nearly 9 am in January or darkness until nearly 10 pm in June.

Chronobiologist Till Roenneberg and colleagues have also suggested redrawing time-zone boundaries in Europe, which in some cases are even more skewed than those in the US.

Ideally, Malow would like to see all of the above—flexible schedules, adjusted time zones, and permanent ST. “It’s important to look at the whole picture, and for us to figure something out,” said Malow. She’s somewhat hopeful as the discussions about how we mark time are not particularly partisan and changes wouldn’t cost much, if anything.

It could even bring people together across the political divide, said Malow. “Wouldn’t that be great?” she said. “Stopping the clock back and forth could be the great unifier in our country.”

UPDATE: A previous version of this piece said one study estimated that "eccentric time localities"—regions that accommodate their time zone for cities and towns, rather than following longitudinal lines—would have experienced 70,000 fewer fatalities over 12 years had they followed the geographic time zone instead. The study, in fact, estimated about 15,000 fewer deaths. 

That's no spice harvester. It's an extractor pulling helium-3 from the lunar surface.

Two of Blue Origin's earliest employees, former President Rob Meyerson and Chief Architect Gary Lai, have started a company that seeks to extract helium-3 from the lunar surface, return it to Earth, and sell it for applications here.

The company has been operating in stealth since its founding in 2022, but it emerged on Wednesday by announcing it has raised $15 million, adding to previous rounds of angel investments.

This is a notable announcement because, while the funding is small, the implications are potentially large. Lately, there has been a lot of discussion of a 'lunar economy' in spaceflight but precious little clarity on what that means. Most firms that have announced business plans to launch rockets to the Moon, land on the Moon, or perform other activities there have been doing so with the intent of selling services or lunar water to NASA or other parties fulfilling government contracts. Put another way, there has been no wealth creation, and ultimately, NASA is the customer.

The present lunar rush is rather like a California gold rush without the gold.

By harvesting helium-3, which is rare and limited in supply on Earth, Interlune could help change that calculus by deriving value from resources on the Moon. But many questions about the approach remain. First of all, the company must devise a means of extracting the gas from the lunar regolith, the abrasive, rocky, and dirt-like material on the surface of the Moon. Then it must return the helium-3 to the Earth. There is currently no means of doing so. Finally, it must prove that there will be a large and sustained market for the stable isotope on Earth to support its business.

However, with NASA investing tens of billions of dollars in the Artemis Program to return humans to the Moon, Meyerson is convinced that now is the time to piggyback on those transportation, power, and other resources to start a lunar mining company. It would not have been possible at any time before now. It may be barely possible today.

"Helium-3 is the only resource out there that is priced high enough to support going to the Moon and bringing it back to Earth," Meyerson said in an interview. "There are customers that want to buy it today."

A useful helium isotope

Helium-3 is a stable isotope of helium with two protons and one neutron. It is produced by fusion in the Sun and transported by the Solar wind. However, Earth's magnetosphere deflects this stream of particles away from the planet.

The material does not occur naturally on Earth, and it exists in only very limited quantities from nuclear weapons tests, nuclear reactors, and radioactive decay. A single liter costs a few thousand dollars, and there are efforts to recycle it by the US Department of Energy. Because there is no magnetosphere around the Moon, it's believed there are large quantities of helium-3 gas trapped in pockets of the lunar regolith.

Meyerson said that in the near term, there is considerable demand for helium-3 in the superconducting quantum computing industry and for medical imaging. Longer term, there is potential for operating a fusion reactor with helium-3 as a fuel. This is something that has long been advocated by people like Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, a geologist who flew on Apollo 17 to the Moon. However, there are serious questions in the scientific community about the viability of this approach.

Regardless, Meyerson said one reason that the use of helium-3 for commercial applications has not been widely explored is because it has not been available in quantity. Producing a steady supply of the gas would stimulate new business plans and applications, he said.

That is, if Interlune can get at the helium-3 and return it to Earth.

Mining the Moon

Interlune's key technology is a process to extract gas from the Moon. It won't be easy. While there's a lot of the stuff, perhaps 1 million metric tons, the helium-3 is spread across the lunar surface. The company will likely need to process dozens to hundreds of tons of lunar regolith to produce a single gram of helium-3. Recognizing this, Interlune has developed what Meyerson characterized as an energy-efficient processor.

The company is working toward the launch of a demonstrator mission in 2026 that will sample the lunar regolith, measure the helium-3 quantity, and then attempt to extract some of it. Meyerson said this mission would likely fly on one of NASA's Commercial Lunar Services Provider missions—private companies flying regularly to the Moon and carrying a variety of government and commercial payloads.

"Then we want to put a pilot plant in place by 2028, and by 2030 start to operationalize and return quantities of helium-3 to support the markets on Earth," he said.

The return of helium-3 may be facilitated by SpaceX or Meyerson's former company, Blue Origin, both of which are developing reusable lunar landers and transportation systems between lunar orbit and Earth.

Alexis Ohanian’s venture firm Seven Seven Six led the most recent round of fundraising for Interlune. The investment firm likes that there is a near-term market for helium-3 but also the potential for much larger markets in the future if the gas can be extracted at scale from the Moon.

"There are so many investments that we could be making, but there are also moonshots," said Katelin Holloway, the lead investor at Seven Seven Six, in an interview. "This is a literal Moonshot, which I love. It might impact my children or my grandchildren. But the immediacy of what Interlune is doing is really compelling, and knowing that this is just the starting place for helium-3 is really exciting to me."

Good morning. It's March 12, and today's photo comes from the James Webb Space Telescope.

Astronomers have long been fascinated by a nebula, NGC 604, in the relatively nearby Triangulum Galaxy. That's because this nebula contains about 200 of the hottest and largest types of stars, most of which are in the early stages of their lives. Some of these stars are 100 times or more massive than the Sun. Astronomers know of no other region in the Universe so densely packed with large stars as this nebula.

In this image, captured by the Near-Infrared Camera on the Webb telescope, there are brilliant reds and oranges. Here's the explanation from astronomers for these colors:

The most noticeable features are tendrils and clumps of emission that appear bright red, extending out from areas that look like clearings, or large bubbles in the nebula. Stellar winds from the brightest and hottest young stars have carved out these cavities, while ultraviolet radiation ionizes the surrounding gas. This ionized hydrogen appears as a white and blue ghostly glow. The bright orange streaks in the Webb near-infrared image signify the presence of carbon-based molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

The nebula is only about 3.5 million years old.

Source: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

It's budget-palooza, NASA nerds. For the first time in more than a decade, the US space agency is grappling with budget cuts. Be forewarned, there will be a lot of numbers in this story, but we'll do our best to make sense of them.

First of all, the space agency only just received its budget for the current fiscal year (October 1, 2023, to September 30, 2024) last Friday. If it seems weird that a federal agency should find out how much money it has to spend nearly halfway through that budget year, well, it is. But this is the world we live in, with a fractious Congress unable to agree on much of anything, including budgets.

In any case, NASA's budget for fiscal year 2024 came to $24.9 billion. This represents an approximately 2 percent cut in the space agency's funding relative to the final budget for fiscal year 2023. It's worth noting that the last time NASA's budget decreased from year to year came more than a decade ago, from fiscal year 2012 to 2013. This was due, in large part, to the end of the Space Shuttle program.

This budget cut does not reflect Congressional displeasure with NASA's performance. Rather, to avert a debt limit crisis in June 2023, the US Congress and President Biden agreed to budget caps for fiscal years 2024 and 2025.

"We’re not going to get out of this hole until you finish both fiscal years, 24 and 25," NASA administrator Bill Nelson said Monday during a teleconference with reporters. "NASA makes do with whatever we’re given. This is an agency where the impossible becomes possible."

FY 2025 request

On Monday, mere hours after finally learning its final budget for the current year, NASA released its budget request for the coming fiscal year, 2025. All of the federal agencies did so on Monday in conjunction with the rollout of the president's budget request for FY 2025.

Such budget requests are part of the political theater of Washington, DC. The White House has the power to appoint the leaders of federal agencies, such as NASA. However, Congress authorizes funding, so the final budget will be subject to negotiations among the House, Senate, and the White House.

The blueprint clearly outlines the White House's priorities regarding NASA's direction. The space agency's budget request can be found here. The Planetary Society has published a useful comparison here that delineates the NASA budget for 2023, the president's budget request for 2024, and the final budget enacted last week.

NASA is asking for $25.4 billion for the coming fiscal year. This is more than the agency will receive in fiscal year 2024 but significantly less than the $27.2 billion NASA asked for in last year's budget request. Put another way, NASA has recognized the real-world constraints and is asking for 7 percent less funding this year than it did in 2023.

"Naturally, we have to make hard choices," Nelson said.

About those hard choices

There are no significant changes in NASA's proposed budget for the Artemis Program, which seeks to return humans to the Moon later this decade. There remains broad support in Congress for this program, at least for the initial lunar landings. Funding for the Artemis landings, which have a mix of cost-plus and fixed-price contracts, should more or less continue.

The harder choices will have to be made in the science portion of NASA's budget, which covers planetary missions as well as deep space observatories. In particular, NASA requested $2.7 billion for planetary science missions in fiscal year 2025, virtually the same amount received this fiscal year.

But there's a catch: This funding level includes no allocation for the Mars Sample Return mission, a multi-year, multi-billion program to return rock samples from Mars to Earth for scientific study. This mission is a high priority for NASA and the scientific community, but the overall plans were recently declared to be "unrealistic" by an independent review board.

A NASA committee is studying alternative mission designs to bring Mars samples back to Earth with better cost and schedule estimates. It will release its findings later this month. After that time, NASA may reformulate plans and allocate funding for the Mars Sample Return. The catch is that it would not seek new funding but rather pull money from other planetary science missions.

"We don't expect that the planetary top line will go up," said Nicky Fox, chief of science for NASA, during the press call.

Astronomers have made new measurements of the Hubble Constant, a measure of how quickly the Universe is expanding, by combining data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. Their results confirmed the accuracy of Hubble's earlier measurement of the constant's value, according to their recent paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, with implications for a long-standing discrepancy in values obtained by different observational methods known as the "Hubble tension."

There was a time when scientists believed the Universe was static, but that changed with Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. Alexander Friedmann published a set of equations showing that the Universe might actually be expanding in 1922, with Georges Lemaitre later making an independent derivation to arrive at that same conclusion. Edwin Hubble confirmed this expansion with observational data in 1929. Prior to this, Einstein had been trying to modify general relativity by adding a cosmological constant in order to get a static universe from his theory; after Hubble's discovery, legend has it, he referred to that effort as his biggest blunder.

As previously reported, the Hubble constant is a measure of the universe's expansion expressed in units of kilometers per second per megaparsec. So, each second, every megaparsec of the Universe expands by a certain number of kilometers. Another way to think of this is in terms of a relatively stationary object a megaparsec away: Each second, it gets a number of kilometers more distant.

How many kilometers? That's the problem here. There are basically three methods scientists use to measure the Hubble constant: looking at nearby objects to see how fast they are moving, gravitational waves produced by colliding black holes or neutron stars, and measuring tiny deviations in the afterglow of the Big Bang known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). However, the various methods have come up with different values. For instance, tracking distant supernovae produced a value of 73 km/s Mpc, while measurements of the CMB using the Planck satellite produced a value of 67 km/s Mpc.

Just last year, researchers made a third, independent measure of the Universe's expansion by tracking the behavior of a gravitationally lensed supernova, where the distortion in space-time caused by a massive object acts as a lens to magnify an object in the background. The best fits of those models all ended up slightly below the value of the Hubble constant derived from the CMB, with the difference being within the statistical error. Values closer to those derived from measurements of other supernovae were a considerably worse fit for the data. The method is new, with considerable uncertainties, but it did provide an independent means of getting at the Hubble Constant.

"We've measured it using information in the cosmic microwave background and gotten one value," Ars Science Editor John Timmer wrote. "And we've measured it using the apparent distance to objects in the present-day Universe and gotten a value that differs by about 10 percent. As far as anyone can tell, there's nothing wrong with either measurement, and there's no obvious way to get them to agree." One hypothesis is that the early universe briefly experienced some kind of "kick" from repulsive gravity (akin to the notion of dark energy) that then mysteriously turned off and vanished. But it remains a speculative idea, albeit a potentially exciting one for physicists.

This latest measurement builds on last year's confirmation based on Webb data that Hubble's measurements of the expansion rate were accurate, at least for the first few "rungs" of the "cosmic distance ladder." But there was still the possibility of as-yet-undetected errors that might increase the deeper (and hence further back in time) one looked into the universe, particularly for brightness measurements of more distant stars.

So a new team made additional observations of Cepheid variable stars—a total of 1,000 in five host galaxies as far out as 130 million light-years—and correlated them with the Hubble data. The Webb telescope is able to see past the interstellar dust that has made Hubble's own images of those stars more blurry and overlapping, so astronomers could more easily distinguish between individual stars.

The results further confirmed the accuracy of the Hubble data.  “We’ve now spanned the whole range of what Hubble observed, and we can rule out a measurement error as the cause of the Hubble Tension with very high confidence," said co-author and team leader Adam Riess, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University. "Combining Webb and Hubble gives us the best of both worlds. We find that the Hubble measurements remain reliable as we climb farther along the cosmic distance ladder. With measurement errors negated, what remains is the real and exciting possibility that we have misunderstood the Universe.”

The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2024. DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ad1ddd  (About DOIs).

On October 19, 1989, at 12:29 UT, a monstrous X13 class solar flare triggered a geomagnetic storm so strong that auroras lit up the skies in Japan, America, Australia, and even Germany the following day. Had you been flying around the Moon at that time, you would have absorbed well over 6 Sieverts of radiation—a dose that would most likely kill you within a month or so.

This is why the Orion spacecraft that is supposed to take humans on a Moon fly-by mission this year has a heavily shielded storm shelter for the crew. But shelters like that aren’t sufficient for a flight to Mars—Orion’s shield is designed for a 30-day mission.

To obtain protection comparable to what we enjoy on Earth would require hundreds of tons of material, and that's simply not possible in orbit. The primary alternative—using active shields that deflect charged particles just like the Earth’s magnetic field does—was first proposed in the 1960s. Today, we’re finally close to making it work.

Deep space radiation

Space radiation comes in two different flavors. Solar events like flares or coronal mass ejections can cause very high fluxes of charged particles (mostly protons). They're nasty when you have no shelter but are relatively easy to shield against since solar protons are mostly low energy. The majority of solar particle events flux is between 30 Mega-electronVolts to 100 MeV and could be stopped by Orion-like shelters.

Then there are galactic cosmic rays: particles coming from outside the Solar System, set in motion by faraway supernovas or neutron stars. These are relatively rare but are coming at you all the time from all directions. They also have high energies, starting at 200 MeV and going to several GeVs, which makes them extremely penetrating. Thick masses don’t provide much shielding against them. When high-energy cosmic ray particles hit thin shields, they produce many lower-energy particles—you’d be better off with no shield at all.

The particles with energies between 70 MeV and 500 MeV are responsible for 95 percent of the radiation dose that astronauts get in space. On short flights, solar storms are the main concern because they can be quite violent and do lots of damage very quickly. The longer you fly, though, GCRs become more of an issue because their dose accumulates over time, and they can go through pretty much everything we try to put in their way.

What keeps us safe at home

The reason nearly none of this radiation can reach us is that Earth has a natural, multi-stage shielding system. It begins with its magnetic field, which deflects most of the incoming particles toward the poles. A charged particle in a magnetic field follows a curve—the stronger the field, the tighter the curve. Earth’s magnetic field is very weak and barely bends incoming particles, but it is huge, extending thousands of kilometers into space.

Anything that makes it through the magnetic field runs into the atmosphere which, when it comes to shielding, is the equivalent of an aluminum wall that's 3 meters thick. Finally, there is the planet itself, which essentially cuts the radiation in half since you always have 6.5 billion trillion tons of rock shielding you from the bottom.

To put that in perspective, the Apollo crew module had on average 5 grams of mass per square centimeter standing between the crew and radiation. A typical ISS module has twice that, about 10 g/cm2. The Orion shelter has 35–45 g/cm2, depending on where you sit exactly, and it weighs 36 tons. On Earth, the atmosphere alone gives you 810 g/cm2—roughly 20 times more than our best shielded spaceships.

The two options are to add more mass—which gets expensive quickly—or to shorten the length of the mission, which isn’t always possible. So solving radiation with passive mass won't cut it for longer missions, even using the best shielding materials like polyethylene or water. This is why making a miniaturized, portable version of the Earth’s magnetic field was on the table from the first days of space exploration. Unfortunately, we discovered it was far easier said than done.

Three ways to skin a cat

In the 1960s, NASA funded multiple studies looking into three active shielding concepts: plasma shields (PDF), electrostatic shields, and magnetic shields (PDF). In 1967, Richard H. Levy and Francis W. French delivered a report saying that plasma and electrostatic shields were promising, but they both needed 60 million volts to work—even by today’s standards, that number is ridiculous.

Magnetic shields looked more enticing. The 1950s brought the discovery of type II superconductors—materials that had virtually no electrical resistance at very low temperatures and could be used to build extremely strong magnetic coils. In 1966, P.F. McDonald and T.J. Buntyn of Research Laboratories Brown Engineering Company reported that there were no magnets strong enough to shield a spacecraft, but “rapid advances in superconducting magnets technology indicate that it will soon be possible to produce necessary high fields with very modest power consumption.”

Active shielding studies from the 1960s didn’t produce any working prototypes, but they shaped the views on active shielding over the coming decades: Plasma and electrostatics were a hard pass, while magnetic shields could work if space-ready superconducting magnets became available. It took us until 2003 to make one, and we sent it to space for entirely different reasons.

Dark matter and magnets

In 1995, the Antimatter Study Group, a team of scientists led by Samuel Ting, a 1976 Nobel Prize winner in physics, proposed putting a device called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station to search for dark matter using galactic cosmic rays. The spectrometer was to comprise detectors and a powerful magnet. By measuring how much a particle was bent by the magnetic field, it’s possible to obtain information about its mass and charge.

“Making large magnets is an art. Only a few institutions in the world can do that. The most advanced of them is CERN in Geneva,” said Roberto Battiston, a former president of the Italian Space Agency and one of the founders of the AMS collaboration. Battiston coordinated the European part of the AMS effort, which included building a space-grade superconducting magnet at CERN.

The resulting AMS-02 Superconducting Magnet was based on the technology used in the Large Hadron Collider. It used two big dipole coils and two series of six racetrack coils, all wound with Niobium-Titanium superconducting wire. Four cryocoolers working with superfluid helium kept the coils at 1.7 Kelvin.

The problem was that the system relied on evaporative cryocooling. This meant the magnet needed regular helium refills, which ultimately sealed its fate. “We designed the AMS-02 [Superconducting Magnet] at a time when the Shuttle was operational and working, well, like a shuttle—shuttling up and down several times a year. The idea was taking our magnet down to Earth when needed, replenishing the helium, and taking it back to the ISS,” said Battiston.

AMS-02 was assembled and fully qualified for space. Then, on Saturday, February 1, 2003, Space Shuttle Columbia exploded while reentering the atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts onboard and the entire Space Shuttle program.

“At first, NASA told us the AMS would not fly,” said Battiston. “But after some very long lobbying in the Congress, they said that, yes, we would fly, but only once. There would be no going up and down,” he added. This forced the AMS team to make a tough decision. Ting, Battiston, and the rest ditched the superconducting magnet and went for a permanent magnet that was much weaker but needed no maintenance. “The first and only superconducting magnet qualified for space was stored at CERN, and it hasn’t been used since,” said Battiston. But building it wasn’t completely futile.

ESA takes the shot

In October 2002, ESA appointed a group of experts from CERN and other European institutes to revisit the issue of radiation shielding on deep space missions. Their findings were that passive mass could keep the astronauts under the radiation exposure limits on a short mission to the Moon, but it would not be enough for longer flights. According to the group, an active shield weighing 60 tons with magnets and cooling systems offered better performance than hundreds of tons of water, which is one of the best passive shielding materials.

So ESA commissioned a study called ARSSEM (Active Radiation Shield for Space Exploration Missions) to investigate the technology. Battiston assembled a new team, roughly based on the one responsible for building the AMS-02 superconducting magnet, and went to work to reassess the issue and propose some preliminary designs.

The first problem was that AMS-02 was too small. “At CERN, we have an experiment called ATLAS, which is a huge, like, four-story building designed around a magnet made with four superconducting coils—12 meters long, 10 meters diameter, thousands of tons. And this gives you the shielding we’re looking for,” said Battiston. “We have the technology to build such magnets on Earth, but for space… not really.” The second problem was cooling—after AMS, everyone involved knew that liquid helium cooling was a no-go.

The design they came up with looked a bit like a miniature ATLAS—a 10-meter-long solenoid with a 3-meter inner radius and a hair above 6-meter outer radius hosting 12 racetrack superconducting coils. The habitable space was placed inside. The cooling problem was solved by using yttrium barium copper oxide, the first of ReBCO family of superconducting materials that worked above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen. This meant the entire system could be cooled with nitrogen rather than helium. The estimated weight was between 40 and 46 tons, depending on the magnetic field’s bending power. It offered a way to reduce the radiation dose by a factor of two.

Space radiation superconducting shield

Preliminary designs done, ESA funded an even larger effort to build an active radiation shield called Space Radiation Superconducting Shield, or SR2S, this time with CERN and Thales Alenia, a European space industry giant, onboard. Battiston again took the helm as the project’s coordinator. The solenoid shield got more powerful—the bending power achieved in the most promising configuration grew from 5 Tesla/meter to 11.9 Tesla/meter, but it also grew heavier, hitting 100 tons—over 50 percent above the payload capacity of a Falcon Heavy.

“The magnetic coils generate huge forces, and you need a supporting structure to keep these forces at bay. The stronger the magnets, the heavier the support structures must be, and [the support structure] causes secondary radiation.” Battiston said. When a high-energy particle flying in hits those supporting structures, it breaks down into three or four secondary lower-energy particles. The problem is one 100-GeV particle does way less damage to a human body than a hundred 1-GeV particles. “If the shield’s heavy, you are creating new particles at the same time as you are deflecting them away,” Battiston explained. So toward the end of the SR2S project, his team proposed a radically different design.

The new concept was called a pumpkin configuration, after the shape of the magnetic field it generated. It had three or four smaller shields installed around the spacecraft. The coils were arranged to balance out the forces they created, so the structure was mostly self-supporting. The pumpkin design matched the shielding efficiency of the best-performing solenoids at less than half their weight.

“At the end of the day, though, we are still talking about using roughly 40-ton shield to protect a module that weighs maybe 8 tons. It doesn’t add up. No space agency is currently considering putting a magnetic shield on a rocket because today we don’t have a good solution,” he said. The pumpkin idea, however, lived on to see another day.

NASA’s CREW HaT

In 2022, Elena D’Onghia and Paolo Desiati, scientists at the University of Wisconsin, submitted a magnetic shield project using a pumpkin-like configuration to NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program and got funding. “Battiston’s conclusion was the same as always—active shields are way too heavy, but this is the best we can do at the moment,” said Desiati. “But in his report, he said that the future belonged to systems where magnetic fields are not confined in solenoids but are open into space. His team did provide some designs, but I have never seen dedicated technical studies. Our idea was to do such a technical study.”

CREW HaT stands for Cosmic Radiation Extended Warding Halbach Torus. It relies on eight magnetic racetrack coils made with ReBCO superconducting wires arranged to enhance the magnetic field outside the shielded habitat and suppress it inside. “It’s called the Halbach array. It’s used in maglev trains where you need the magnetic field only on the side facing the train, but don’t need it on the opposite side,” said Desiati.

Unlike the pumpkin design suggested by Battiston, CREW HaT is not self-supporting. Hoop stresses in the curved section of each individual coil reach 900 tons. They are contained by internal aluminum rib structures and Kevlar composites. Four coils facing the habitat with their flat side are expected to exert an outward force of about 85 tons. The remaining four coils exert an inward pressure on the structure, reaching 140 tons. These forces are counteracted by strong aluminum beams.

Overall, the CREW HaT team estimates its weight at a hair above 24 tons, and power requirements are a bit below 60 kW. “These are promising numbers. Passive shielding cuts roughly 20 percent of the particles hitting the spacecraft up to 500 MeV. CREW HaT adds another 50 percent on top of that. We are in the process of calculating everything precisely, but it is surprising that with such energies, we can achieve such shielding efficiency,” said D’Onghia.

60 kW, though, is the entire energy budget of the ISS, and it would need to go just into powering the shields. So, with nearly all the bets placed on next-gen superconducting magnets, NASA decided to try a different direction. In 2017, the Johnson Space Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory joined forces to launch their own active shielding project. And it turned out that electrostatic shields were way less dead than they appeared.

NASA’s active shield project

“When you look at literature on active shielding, the key takeaway is that such projects never make it out of what we call a paper study,” said Dr. Daniel Fry, a scientist working for the Space Radiation Analysis Group at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. So when he and Dr. Stojan Madzunkov, a scientist working at the JPL, started a new active shielding project, they opted for a more empirical approach.

“Stojan and I, we have always been experimentalists. We wanted to build small-scale shields, test them in a particle beam, learn how they function, and then scale them up to protect full-size spacecraft,” Fry said. This, in turn, pushed them toward electrostatic shields. “Simply because they are easy to do. You’re pretty much just flipping the power switch,” Fry added.

Electrostatics didn’t need advanced magnets, superconductors, or cryocooling systems. Instead, they relied on electrodes with positive and negative charges that created an electrostatic field that slows the incoming particles down and accelerates them away using the same force that makes your hair stand when you take off your sweater. On paper, they did the same thing as magnetic shields, but engineering-wise, they were entirely different.

“Take these solenoid designs. Your spaceship basically becomes an MRI tube. Like, how do you get out? And cryopumps are working all the time—clank, clank, clank—keeping liquid helium at 4 Kelvin,” said Madzunkow. And then there is quenching, which happens when part of a superconducting wire gets too hot and loses superconductivity. In a quench, all the energy accumulated in the coil is instantly released, which melts the wire and sends off a powerful electromagnetic pulse.

When a quench happened in the LHC’s superconducting magnets in 2008, its force was strong enough to squeeze and twist powerful steel hardware like it was made of paper. “You are surrounded by tons of liquid helium with a powerful magnet, and when it quenches, you are dead. That’s what they are talking about. Nobody would fly in that thing. It can kill you very, very badly,” Madzunkow said.

Electrostatic shields had been ignored because they required those 60 million volts that French and Levy talked about in their report. In 2008, NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and ASRC Aerospace Corporation proposed an electrostatic shield based on three huge Van de Graaff generators connected to an outer ring that looked like something taken straight from a Vulcan Combat Cruiser. It was undeniably cool, but it was completely infeasible. Fry and Madzunkow had to find something more realistic, so they turned to advanced modeling software and huge GPU clusters.

Electrostatic comeback

There are many things that shape electrostatic shields’ performance. You can use charged rods, spheres, planes, meshes—any imaginable combination of shapes and geometries. You then arrange them in a 3D space, which leaves you with another myriad of possibilities. You can then define different charges for each component. “The problem with choosing the right electrostatic shield configuration is that I could not pick the best one out of twenty just by looking at it. Not by a long shot. You only learn that when you run the numbers,” said Madzunkow. And there are lots of numbers to run.

First, the simulated space has to extend kilometers in every direction to fully model the unconfined electrostatic fields. You must then fill this space with millions of particles. “For each nanosecond, you need to calculate where each particle is, apply all the forces, and you do it again and again and again,” Madzunkow explained. “It wasn’t possible ten years ago. Testing just one configuration would take forever.”

So Fry’s and Madzunkow’s team developed their own simulation code called Active Shielding Particle Pusher, or ASPP. The ASPP was efficient and fast, and it used CUDA graphic card processing technology, allowing it to be run on clusters available at JSC and JPL. “Over 10 thousand independent simulations were done in two years,” said Fry.

This broad search yielded electrostatic shield configurations that could shield 50 percent of solar particle events’ radiation and 15 percent of cosmic rays using just 1 million volts, not 60 million. And you no longer needed to haul a full-size power plant with you. “Using grid-like, porous structures we not only brought the weight down, but we also brought the needed power down from megawatts to 100 watts,” said Fry. Power savings that big were possible because plasmas, which normally bleed away volts, did not accumulate on these porous structures—they flew right through them.

The electrostatic shields that emerged from Fry’s and Madzunkow’s simulations don’t look like rings in Vulcan cruisers anymore. Based on the scale-models, they will probably look more like large screens—similar to the anti-drone cages soldiers fit on their vehicles in Ukraine. “Such shields are not science fiction anymore,” Fry said.

The end of paper studies

Based on their simulations, Fry and Madzunkow built small-scale models of their electrostatic shields and tested them in a particle beam at Brookhaven National Laboratory with good results—they showed that the ASPP software was fairly accurate in its predictions. “We are at stage where we need to start looking at building larger demonstrators. Stojan and I proposed putting a device on a lunar surface as a technology demonstration for the plasma mitigation method. Sometimes, you’ve just got to focus on applications that perhaps you don’t want to do first,” said Fry.

Meanwhile, the CREW HaT team is working on cooling systems and improvements of superconducting coils. “There are different options, different pumps that need to be optimized for space. We are also designing the coils to optimize their superconducting properties as much as we can. Also, you don’t just wrap a superconducting tape around your racetrack coil. The winding has to have a very specific geometry. Our engineers are working on that like crazy,” said Desiati.

At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, ESA is also backing the development of superconducting magnets. Last year, Battiston’s team built YBCO coils and tested their currents, magnetic fields, and operating temperatures. Their next project looking into materials, superconducting wires, coil design, gluing, etc. will start in the coming months.

“Starship-type rockets could lift hundreds of tons to space. Maybe active shields could be done if rockets of this size become a reality,” Battiston said. “Also, cooling systems are responsible for most of the mass in magnetic shields, so our calculations will go out the window the moment we get room-temperature superconductors. There are hundreds of teams working on this around the world. Sooner or later, we’ll get there.”

Spaceflight Human-System Standard

But is “getting there” even worth it? ESA’s career radiation dose limit for astronauts is 1,000 mSv. Reference Mars mission scenarios estimate a total dose at a bit below 1200 mSv. That’s not that much of a difference—nothing you couldn’t fix by throwing a little more mass here and there in your spaceship. NASA had career limits dependent on sex and age, but you could probably get away with just picking old men for the job.

But then, on January 5, 2022, NASA revised Section 4.8.2 of the Spaceflight Human-System Standard and set the astronauts’ career radiation dose limit to flat 600 mSv. Active shields offer a roughly 50-percent dose reduction at a cost of huge mass penalty and development efforts. They have always ended up shelved because they were overkill. We just didn’t need that much protection. With NASA’s new standards, we ultimately might.

Built and flown by Stratolaunch, the massive Roc aircraft took off from Mojave Air and Space Port in California on Saturday. The airplane flew out over the Pacific Ocean, where it deployed the Talon-A vehicle, which looks something like a mini space shuttle.

This marked the first time this gargantuan airplane released an honest-to-goodness payload, the first Talon-A vehicle, TA-1, which is intended to fly at hypersonic speed. During the flight, TA-1 didn't quite reach hypersonic velocity, which begins at Mach 5, or five times greater than the speed of sound.

"While I can’t share the specific altitude and speed TA-1 reached due to proprietary agreements with our customers, we are pleased to share that in addition to meeting all primary and customer objectives of the flight, we reached high supersonic speeds approaching Mach 5 and collected a great amount of data at an incredible value to our customers," said Zachary Krevor, chief executive of Stratolaunch, in a statement.

In essence, the TA-1 vehicle is a pathfinder for subsequent versions of the vehicle that will be both reusable and capable of reaching hypersonic speeds. The flight of the company's next vehicle, TA-2, could come later this year, Krevor said.

A long road

It's been a long, strange road for Stratolaunch to reach this moment. The company was founded in 2011 to build a super-sized carrier aircraft, from which rockets would be launched mid-air. It was bankrolled by Microsoft cofounder and airplane enthusiast Paul Allen, who put at least hundreds of millions of dollars into the private project.

As the design of the vehicle evolved, its wingspan grew to 117 meters, nearly double the size of a Boeing 747 aircraft. It far exceeded the wingspan of the Spruce Goose, built by Howard Hughes in the 1940s, which had a wingspan of 97.5 meters. The Roc aircraft was so large that it seemed impractical to fly on a regular basis.

At the same time, the company was struggling to identify a rocket that could be deployed from the aircraft. At various times, Stratolaunch worked with SpaceX and Orbital ATK to develop a launch vehicle. But both of those partnerships fell through, and eventually, the company said it would develop its own line of rockets.

Allen would never see his large plane fly, dying of septic shock in October 2018 due to his non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Roc did finally take flight for the first time in April 2019, but it seemed like a pyrrhic victory. Following the death of Allen, for whom Stratolaunch was a passion project, the company's financial future was in doubt. Later in 2019, Allen's family put the company's assets up for sale and said it would cease to exist.

However, Stratolaunch did not die. Rather, the aircraft was acquired by the private equity firm Cerberus, and in 2020, the revitalized Stratolaunch changed course. Instead of orbital rockets, it would now launch hypersonic vehicles to test the technology—a priority for the US military. China, Russia, and the United States are all racing to develop hypersonic missiles, as well as new countermeasure technology as high-speed missiles threaten to penetrate most existing defenses.

Featuring a new engine

This weekend's flight also marked an important moment for another US aerospace company, Ursa Major Technologies. The TA-1 vehicle was powered by the Hadley rocket engine designed and built by Ursa Major, which specializes in the development of rocket propulsion engines.

Hadley is a 5,000-pound-thrust liquid oxygen and kerosene, oxygen-rich staged combustion cycle rocket engine for small vehicles. Its known customers include Stratolaunch and a vertical launch company, Phantom Space, which is developing a small orbital rocket.

Founded in 2015, Ursa Major seeks to provide off-the-shelf propulsion solutions to launch customers. While Ursa Major started small, the company is already well into the development of its much larger Ripley engine. With 50,000 pounds of thrust, Ripley is aimed at the medium-launch market. The company completed a hot-fire test campaign of Ripley last year. For Ursa Major, it must feel pretty good to finally see an engine in flight.

When Japanese scientists wanted to learn more about how ground stone tools dating back to the Early Upper Paleolithic might have been used, they decided to build their own replicas of adzes, axes, and chisels and used those tools to perform tasks that might have been typical for that era. The resulting fractures and wear enabled them to develop new criteria for identifying the likely functions of ancient tools, according to a recent paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.  If these kinds of traces were indeed found on genuine Stone Age tools, it would be evidence that humans had been working with wood and honing techniques significantly earlier than previously believed.

The development of tools and techniques for woodworking purposes started out simple, with the manufacture of cruder tools like the spears and throwing sticks common in the early Stone Age. Later artifacts dating back to Mesolithic and Neolithic time periods were more sophisticated, as people learned how to use polished stone tools to make canoes, bows, wells, and to build houses. Researchers typically date the emergence of those stone tools to about 10,000 years ago. However, archaeologists have found lots of stone artifacts with ground edges dating as far back as 60,000 to 30,000 years ago. But it's unclear how those tools might have been used.

So Akira Iwase of Tokyo Metropolitan University and co-authors made their own replicas of adzes and axes out of three raw materials common to the region between 38,000 and 30,000 years ago: semi-nephrite rocks, hornfels rocks, and tuff rocks. They used a stone hammer and anvil to create various long oval shapes and polished the edges with either a coarse-grained sandstone or a medium-grained tuff. There were three types of replica tools: adze-types, with the working edge oriented perpendicular to the long axis of a bent handle; axe-types, with a working edge parallel to the bent handle's long axis; and chisel-types, in which a stone tool was placed at the end of a straight handle.

Then it was time to test the replica tools via ten different usage experiments. For instance, the authors used axe-type tools to fell Japanese cedar and maple trees in north central Honshu, as well as a forest near Tokyo Metropolitan University. Axe-type and adze-type tools were used to make a dugout canoe and wooden spears, while adze-type tools and chisel-type tools were used to scrape off the bark of fig and pine. They scraped flesh and grease from fresh and dry hides of deer and boar using adze-type and chisel-type tools. Finally, they used adze-type tools to disarticulate the femur and tibia joints of deer hindlimbs.

The team also conducted several experiments in which the tools were not used to identify accidental fractures not related to any tool-use function. For instance, flakes and blades can break in half during flint knapping; transporting tools in, say, small leather bags can cause microscopic flaking; and trampling on tools left on the ground can also modify the edges. All these scenarios were tested. All the tools used in both use and non-use experiments,ents were then examined for both macroscopic and microscopic traces of fracture or wear.

The results: they were able to identify nine different types of macroscopic fractures, several of which were only seen when making percussive motions, particularly in the case of felling trees. There were also telltale microscopic traces resulting from friction between the wood and stone edge. Cutting away at antlers and bones caused a lot of damage to the edges of adze-like tools, creating long and/or wide bending fractures. The tools used for limb disarticulation caused fairly large bending fractures and smaller flaking scars, while only nine out of 21 of the scraping tools showed macroscopic signs of wear, despite hundreds of repeated strokes.

The authors concluded that examining macroscopic fracture patterns alone are insufficient to determine whether a given stone tool had been used percussively. Nor is any resulting micropolish from abrasion an unambiguous indicator on its own, since scraping motions produce a similar micropolish.  Combining the two, however, did yield more reliable conclusions about which tools had been used percussively to fell trees, compared to other uses, such as disarticulation of bones.

DOI: Journal of Archaeological Science, 2024. 10.1016/j.jas.2023.105891  (About DOIs).

Apple spent roughly $1 billion a year on its car project before canceling it last month, according to a report in Bloomberg. The project, which apparently made as little sense to many inside Apple as it did to outside observers, began in 2014 as the tech giant looked for a new revenue stream to supplement its hardware and software businesses. But grand plans for a fully autonomous vehicle were never able to overcome the various technical challenges, and prototypes only ever ran on a closed-course test track.

During his tenure as CEO, the late Steve Jobs contemplated Apple getting into the automotive world, an idea that did not survive the global financial crisis of 2008. But by 2013, Apple executives thought this could be "one more example of Apple entering a market very late and vanquishing it."

At first, the company considered simply acquiring Tesla—at the time the startup automaker was worth just under $28 billion, a fraction of the annual profit that Apple was raking in even then. It is suggested that Musk standing down from Tesla was a sticking point, and talks ended. Later, in 2017, Musk apparently tried to interest Apple in buying Tesla, which at the time was mired in Model 3 "production hell," but current Apple CEO Tim Cook refused the meeting.

With a Tesla purchase off the table, in 2014 Apple instead decided to set up its own automotive R&D program, known internally as Project Titan. Almost immediately, Project Titan was the cause of arguments within Apple. The company's CFO, Luca Maestri, was not a fan; having come from General Motors' European arm, Maestri was all too familiar with the low profit margins enjoyed by automakers. Apple's top software engineer, Craig Federighi, and its star designer, Jony Ive, were both skeptics, too.

But it seems the lure of a fully autonomous (level 5) vehicle, capable of driving anywhere without a human at the wheel, was too tempting to ignore.

By 2015, the plan was to bring an Apple EV to market by 2020, and with Ive in charge of the style, that vehicle was destined to be a minivan. Given some of the ideas Apple experimented with, it's no surprise that Project Titan's gestation proved problematic—touchscreens folding down from the roof as controllers and external microphones to pipe in outside sounds, to name but two.

In 2016, Apple decided to bet even more heavily on autonomous driving, as some in the company believed this could leave the company with a product to license to others, even if the car never materialized.

Though the Tesla deal never happened, Apple considered partnering with or buying other automakers, including BMW, Canoo, Ford, McLaren, Mercedes-Benz, and Volkswagen.

Apple prototypes were running on a private test track in Arizona in 2020. These were rounded minivans, painted white, with sliding doors and whitewall tires, apparently inspired by the VW microbus.—Ive must have been as enamored with VW ID. Buzz as pretty much everyone else on the planet. By this point, the company knew 2025 would be the earliest it could bring its car to market and planned to equip it with "a giant TV screen, a powerful audio system and windows that adjusted their own tint," plus reclining seats for the passengers.

It wouldn't feature a steering wheel, however, "just a video-game-style controller or iPhone app for driving at low speed as a backup," an idea that is sure to horrify many Ars readers. There are longstanding reasons why the industry continues to use a steering wheel and pedals rather than joysticks or controllers, but the autonomous vehicle sector has been actively lobbying Congress to update federal regulations to allow for AVs sans steering wheel. In 2022, GM's Cruise petitioned the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for permission to build its Origin robotaxis without one.

By 2020, the prospect of achieving a fully autonomous vehicle capable of driving anywhere its user wanted to go—rather than one with a more limited design domain like a geofenced robotaxi—was still daunting. At the time, Project Titan was being run by Doug Field, formerly of Tesla, who suggested a conditionally automated driving feature, also known as "level 3," was more realistic. This proved unwelcome advice, and in 2021, Field moved to Ford.

The Apple car continued to morph, apparently losing its front and rear windshields for some time as the design switched to a curved pod with gullwing doors. Finally, in 2023, visions of fully autonomous driving were downgraded to the same kind of advanced cruise control and lane keeping offered by most automakers, and the cabin now had a steering wheel. But it wouldn't be cheap; estimates put Apple's cost of building the car at $120,000.

The problem, according to Bloomberg, was Cook's decadelong indecision.

"If Bob [Mansfield] or Doug ever had a reasonable set of objectives, they could have shipped a car," says someone who was deeply involved in the project. "They'd ask to take the next step, and Tim would frequently say, 'Get me more data, and let me think about it.'"

Kevin Lynch replaced Field and recently succeeded in piercing the reality distortion field, convincing the Apple board of something obvious to many of us: full autonomy you could sell to the public is at least a decade away, and the margins for selling cars are terrible. And at the end of February, the Apple car was no more.

Computer scientists have discovered a new way to multiply large matrices faster than ever before by eliminating a previously unknown inefficiency, reports Quanta Magazine. This could eventually accelerate AI models like ChatGPT, which rely heavily on matrix multiplication to function. The findings, presented in two recent papers, have led to what is reported to be the biggest improvement in matrix multiplication efficiency in over a decade.

Multiplying two rectangular number arrays, known as matrix multiplication, plays a crucial role in today's AI models, including speech and image recognition, chatbots from every major vendor, AI image generators, and video synthesis models like Sora. Beyond AI, matrix math is so important to modern computing (think image processing and data compression) that even slight gains in efficiency could lead to computational and power savings.

Graphics processing units (GPUs) excel in handling matrix multiplication tasks because of their ability to process many calculations at once. They break down large matrix problems into smaller segments and solve them concurrently using an algorithm.

Perfecting that algorithm has been the key to breakthroughs in matrix multiplication efficiency over the past century—even before computers entered the picture. In October 2022, we covered a new technique discovered by a Google DeepMind AI model called AlphaTensor, focusing on practical algorithmic improvements for specific matrix sizes, such as 4x4 matrices.

By contrast, the new research, conducted by Ran Duan and Renfei Zhou of Tsinghua University, Hongxun Wu of the University of California, Berkeley, and by Virginia Vassilevska Williams, Yinzhan Xu, and Zixuan Xu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (in a second paper), seeks theoretical enhancements by aiming to lower the complexity exponent, ω, for a broad efficiency gain across all sizes of matrices. Instead of finding immediate, practical solutions like AlphaTensor, the new technique addresses foundational improvements that could transform the efficiency of matrix multiplication on a more general scale.

Approaching the ideal value

The traditional method for multiplying two n-by-n matrices requires n³ separate multiplications. However, the new technique, which improves upon the "laser method" introduced by Volker Strassen in 1986, has reduced the upper bound of the exponent (denoted as the aforementioned ω), bringing it closer to the ideal value of 2, which represents the theoretical minimum number of operations needed.

The traditional way of multiplying two grids full of numbers could require doing the math up to 27 times for a grid that's 3x3. But with these advancements, the process is accelerated by significantly reducing the multiplication steps required. The effort minimizes the operations to slightly over twice the size of one side of the grid squared, adjusted by a factor of 2.371552. This is a big deal because it nearly achieves the optimal efficiency of doubling the square's dimensions, which is the fastest we could ever hope to do it.

Here's a brief recap of events. In 2020, Josh Alman and Williams introduced a significant improvement in matrix multiplication efficiency by establishing a new upper bound for ω at approximately 2.3728596. In November 2023, Duan and Zhou revealed a method that addressed an inefficiency within the laser method, setting a new upper bound for ω at approximately 2.371866. The achievement marked the most substantial progress in the field since 2010. But just two months later, Williams and her team published a second paper that detailed optimizations that reduced the upper bound for ω to 2.371552.

The 2023 breakthrough stemmed from the discovery of a "hidden loss" in the laser method, where useful blocks of data were unintentionally discarded. In the context of matrix multiplication, "blocks" refer to smaller segments that a large matrix is divided into for easier processing, and "block labeling" is the technique of categorizing these segments to identify which ones to keep and which to discard, optimizing the multiplication process for speed and efficiency. By modifying the way the laser method labels blocks, the researchers were able to reduce waste and improve efficiency significantly.

While the reduction of the omega constant might appear minor at first glance—reducing the 2020 record value by 0.0013076—the cumulative work of Duan, Zhou, and Williams represents the most substantial progress in the field observed since 2010.

"This is a major technical breakthrough," said William Kuszmaul, a theoretical computer scientist at Harvard University, as quoted by Quanta Magazine. "It is the biggest improvement in matrix multiplication we've seen in more than a decade."

While further progress is expected, there are limitations to the current approach. Researchers believe that understanding the problem more deeply will lead to the development of even better algorithms. As Zhou stated in the Quanta report, "People are still in the very early stages of understanding this age-old problem."

So what are the practical applications? For AI models, a reduction in computational steps for matrix math could translate into faster training times and more efficient execution of tasks. It could enable more complex models to be trained more quickly, potentially leading to advancements in AI capabilities and the development of more sophisticated AI applications. Additionally, efficiency improvement could make AI technologies more accessible by lowering the computational power and energy consumption required for these tasks. That would also reduce AI's environmental impact.

The exact impact on the speed of AI models depends on the specific architecture of the AI system and how heavily its tasks rely on matrix multiplication. Advancements in algorithmic efficiency often need to be coupled with hardware optimizations to fully realize potential speed gains. But still, as improvements in algorithmic techniques add up over time, AI will get faster.

Welcome to Edition 6.34 of the Rocket Report! It's Starship season again. Yes, SpaceX appears to be about a week away from launching the third full-scale Starship test flight from the company's Starbase site in South Texas, pending final regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration. Ars will be there. SpaceX plans to build a second Starship launch pad at Starbase, and the company's footprint there is also about to get a little bigger, with the expected acquisition of 43 acres of Texas state park land.

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.

Astra's founders take the company private. Astra's three-year run as a public company is over. Chris Kemp and Adam London, Astra's co-founders, are taking the company private after a string of rocket failures and funding shortfalls, Ars reports. Kemp and London bought the company for 50 cents a share. Astra's board approved the transaction, the company announced Thursday, as the only alternative to bankruptcy. Kemp and London founded Astra in 2016. After emerging from stealth mode in 2020, Astra launched its light-class launcher, called Rocket 3, seven times, but five of those flights were failures. Astra went public via a special purpose acquisition company (or SPAC) in 2021, reaching a valuation of more than $2 billion. Today, its market cap sits at approximately $13 million.

What's next for Astra? ... Where Astra goes from here is anyone's guess. The company abandoned its unreliable Rocket 3 vehicle in 2022 to focus on the larger Rocket 4 vehicle. But Rocket 4 is likely months or years from the launch pad. It faces stiff competition not just from established small launch players such as Rocket Lab and Firefly but also from new entrants as well, including ABL Space and Stoke Space. Additionally, all of these small launch companies have been undercut in price by SpaceX's Transporter missions, which launch dozens of satellites at a time on the Falcon 9 booster. Additionally, Astra's spacecraft engine business—acquired previously from Apollo Fusion—may or may not be profitable now, but there are questions about its long-term viability as well.

Virgin Galactic is retiring its only operational spaceship. Over the last year, Virgin Galactic has proven it has the technical acumen to pull off monthly flights of its VSS Unity rocket plane, each carrying six people on a suborbital climb to the edge of space. But VSS Unity has never been profitable. It costs too much and takes too much time to reconfigure between flights. Virgin Galactic plans to fly the suborbital spaceship one more time before taking a hiatus from flight operations, Ars reports. This, along with layoffs announced last year, will allow the company to preserve cash while focusing on the development of a new generation of rocket planes, called Delta-class ships, designed to fly more often and with more people. Michael Colglazier, Virgin Galactic's president and CEO, says the first of the Delta ships is on track to begin ground and flight testing next year, with commercial service targeted for 2026 based out of Spaceport America in New Mexico.

Bigger and faster... The Delta ships will each carry six customers in the spacecraft's pressurized passenger cabin, compared to a maximum of four passengers on each VSS Unity flight. Virgin Galactic's goal is to fly each Delta ship eight times per month, and the company will do this by eliminating many of the inspections required between each VSS Unity flight. The company is building a Delta ship structural test article to put through extensive checks on the ground, validating component life and cycle limits for major components of the vehicle. This will give engineers enough confidence to forego many inspections, according to Mike Moses, president of Virgin Galactic's spaceline operations. Virgin Galactic has nearly $1 billion in cash or cash equivalents on its balance sheet, so it's not in any immediate financial trouble. But the company reported just $7 million in revenue last year, with a net loss of $502 million. So, there's an obvious motivation to make a change.

A new Japanese rocket will launch this weekend. A privately held Japanese company named Space One is set to shoot for orbit with the first flight of its Kairos rocket Friday night (US time), News on Japan reports. Space One will attempt to become the first Japanese private company to launch a rocket into orbit. Japan's existing launch vehicles, like the H-IIA, the H3, and the Epsilon, were developed with funding from the Japanese space agency. But there is some involvement from the Japanese government on this flight. The Kairos rocket will launch with a small "quick response" spacecraft for the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office, which is responsible for Japan's fleet of spy satellites. Kairos, which is the Ancient Greek word for "timeliness," is made up of three solid-fueled stages and a liquid-fueled upper stage. It can place a payload of up to 550 pounds (250 kilograms) into low-Earth orbit.

Winning hearts and minds... The Kairos rocket will take off from Space One's Space Port Kii, located on a south-facing peninsula on the main Japanese island of Honshu. This new launch site is hundreds of miles away from Japan's existing spaceports. Local businesses see the arrival of the space industry in this remote part of Japan as a marketing opportunity. A local confectionery store, not wanting to miss the opportunity to attract visitors, is selling manju shaped like rockets. There are two paid viewing areas to watch the launch, and a total of 5,000 seats sold out in just two days, according to News on Japan. (submitted by tsunam)

UK spaceport project to get 10 million pounds from government. The UK government has pledged 10 million pounds in funding to SaxaVord Spaceport in Scotland, European Spaceflight reports. This funding is sorely needed for SaxaVord, which slowed construction last year after its developer ran into financial trouble. In the last couple of months, SaxaVord raised enough money to resume payments to the contractors building the launch site. The UK government's pledge of 10 million pounds for SaxaVord apparently is not quite a done deal. The UK's science minister posted on X that the funding was "subject to due diligence." SaxaVord will eventually have three launch pads, one of which has been dedicated to German launch startup Rocket Factory Augsburg. This company's rocket, RFA ONE, is expected to be the first orbital launch from SaxaVord later this year.

The UK spaceport scene... The UK government, local entities, and private industry are making a pretty serious effort to bring orbital launches to the British Isles. Spaceport Cornwall became the first UK facility to host an orbital attempt last year with the failed launch of Virgin Orbit's LauncherOne rocket, which was released from a carrier jet that took off from Cornwall. There are several vertical launch spaceports under construction or in the concept development phase. SaxaVord appears to be among those closest to reality, along with Sutherland spaceport, also in Scotland, to be used by the UK launch startup Orbex Space. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Another crew heads for the ISS. SpaceX launched three NASA astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut to the International Space Station on Sunday night, Ars reports. This was SpaceX's eighth fully operational crew launch for NASA, and the 13th crew flight of SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft overall. Business is booming for SpaceX's Dragon program, which is flying more often than anticipated due to delays with Boeing's Starliner spacecraft. This means the spacecraft that launched NASA's Crew-8 mission Sunday night is now flying in space for its fifth mission and is reaching the end of its certified design life. SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavour capsule will stay in orbit at the space station for about six months, then come back to Earth.

It will certainly fly again ... This won't be the end of Endeavour's spaceflight career. NASA and SpaceX are working on certifying each Dragon spaceship for as many as 15 flights. SpaceX has four reusable Crew Dragon spacecraft in its inventory, with a fifth set to join the fleet late this year or early next year. This fleet should be enough to satisfy demand for crew missions from NASA and commercial customers through the end of the decade.

Three launches in 20 hours. Between Sunday night and Monday night, SpaceX teams in Texas, Florida, and California supervised three Falcon 9 rocket launches and completed a full dress rehearsal ahead of the next flight of the company's giant Starship launch vehicle, Ars reports. SpaceX has previously had rockets on all four of its active launch pads. But what SpaceX accomplished over a 24-hour period was noteworthy. Engineers inside at least four control centers were actively overseeing spacecraft and rocket operations simultaneously, and one of the Falcon 9 rockets took off before the previous mission was finished deploying all of its payloads.

Not boring yet ... Days like Sunday and Monday will become more common if SpaceX achieves its goals with the fully reusable Starship rocket. Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, has said one measure of success for SpaceX is to make rocket launches boring. The regularity of the Falcon 9 launch rate has succeeded in eroding the news value of many of SpaceX's missions, but thousands of people, at least space enthusiasts, still log in to watch every launch. Launches remain exciting, but that's not such a bad thing.

Russia has nothing to launch on its new flagship rocket. It has been nearly 10 years since Russia launched the first test flights of the country's Angara rocket. The heaviest version of the Angara rocket family—the Angara A5—is about to make its fourth flight in April, and like the three launches before, this mission won't carry a real satellite, Ars reports. By some measures, the Angara rocket program is more than 30 years old. Russia's government approved the development of Angara in 1992, but economic problems, chronic underfunding, and corruption have delayed the completion of the new rocket and its primary spaceport in Russia's Far East. Now, the rocket is finally flying, albeit at a glacial launch cadence, but Russia doesn't have any functioning satellites to put on it.

Dummy payload ...This next launch will be a milestone for the beleaguered Angara rocket program because it will be the first Angara flight from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, Russia's newest launch site in the country's far east. The previous Angara launches were based out of the military-run Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia. The Angara A5 is supposed to replace Russia's Proton rocket, but its launch rate has slowed in recent years, too. The Proton has launched three times in the last two years, an anemic cadence also driven by a lack of payloads. Without any satellites available, Russian officials will launch a dummy payload on the next Angara A5 flight.

Chinese reusable rockets are on the horizon. China’s main state-owned contractor plans test flights for two new large-diameter reusable rockets in the next couple of years, despite existing commercial reusability efforts, Space News reports. These new government-backed reusable rockets will be 4 and 5 meters in diameter, a Chinese government official told state media, which did not clearly identify the names of the two rockets. The 5-meter diameter rocket could be the Long March 10, China's next-generation crew launch vehicle to ferry astronauts into low-Earth orbit, and eventually to the Moon. Chinese officials previously said the Long March 10's first stage will be reusable.

China's multiple paths to rocket reuse … Alongside efforts from China's incumbent state-backed space enterprises, there are several commercial companies in China also working on reusable rocket technology. In January, Landspace performed a vertical takeoff and landing hop test with a methane-fueled rocket, which reached an altitude of about 1,150 feet (350 meters). This test was akin to one of SpaceX's early Grasshopper hops to fine-tune techniques for landing Falcon 9 boosters. Landspace is developing a partially reusable rocket called Zhuque 3. A roster of Chinese companies is joining the reusable rocket race, including iSpace, Space Pioneer, Galactic Energy, CAS Space, and Orienspace, which have already successfully launched expendable rockets into orbit. (submitted by Jay500001)

A date at Starbase. SpaceX has set March 14, next Thursday, as a tentative target launch date for the third full-scale test flight of the Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket, Ars reports. This launch date hinges on SpaceX receiving a launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration, but all signs point to SpaceX being ready for a launch attempt on the morning of March 14. The team at SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas completed a full-up countdown dress rehearsal last weekend, loading methane and liquid oxygen into the rocket before cutting off the countdown at T-minus 10 seconds.

Some changes this time … Based upon learnings from these first two flights, this next mission, with upgraded hardware and flight software, likely has a reasonable chance of success. On this mission, SpaceX will want to achieve the same good performance from the Super Heavy booster's 33 Raptor engines that it saw on the second Starship test flight in November. The November launch also demonstrated SpaceX's "hot staging" technique, which will be repeated on this next flight, but Starship's upper stage failed a few minutes later, shortly before reaching its target near-orbital velocity. SpaceX will want to complete the upper stage's six-engine burn this time, then perform tests of Starship's payload bay door and in-space refueling tech in microgravity. An engine restart will guide Starship on a reentry over the Indian Ocean before completing a full orbit of the Earth.

SpaceX's land deal in Texas. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission voted unanimously Monday to pursue an exchange that would give 43 acres of Boca Chica State Park in Cameron County, Texas, to SpaceX, the Texas Tribune reports. The state park land would be swapped for 477 acres adjacent to Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, an area to the northwest of SpaceX's Starbase launch site. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) has been interested in this location for many years because of its biological diversity and suitability for fishing, kayaking, hiking, camping, and birding. SpaceX appears to be swapping the 477-acre plot through an affiliate company. SpaceX hasn't said how it will use the 43 acres it will receive in the deal, but the land is located near existing launch and rocket manufacturing infrastructure at Starbase. TPWD will now begin negotiations with SpaceX for the land swap, including environmental assessments that could take up to 18 months.

Not everyone is happy … The land swap vote Monday was originally scheduled for late January, but officials delayed it after backlash by conservationists and some South Texas residents who said the deal was being rushed and TPWD violated its open meetings code by not providing enough notice to Spanish speakers about the proposal. Some local activists voiced concerns SpaceX's activities could lead to reduced access to the public beach near Starbase or could put endangered species at risk. Officials from Indigenous communities are worried about losing access to sacred tribal areas near Boca Chica Beach. Kathy Lueders, SpaceX's general manager at Starbase, spoke at Monday's meeting. "Those launches are exciting the young minds that are watching them … children become what they see," Lueders said as people booed behind her, according to the Texas Tribune. "Today it is not an aspiration to be a rocket scientist and work in the Rio Grande Valley. It is a reality." (submitted by Jay500001)

New Glenn testing underway in Florida. Blue Origin has completed an initial round of cryogenic testing on a New Glenn rocket at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, NASASpaceflight reports. A test version of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket was loaded with super-cold liquid nitrogen on at least two occasions, February 27 and March 4. These cold flow tests helped Blue Origin validate how connections between the launch pad and the rocket itself will perform when exposed to super-cold fluids. Future tests will involve flowing New Glenn's actual propellants, methane and liquid oxygen, into the rocket.

Static fire this summer … There are no engines on this New Glenn test vehicle. Blue Origin plans to wrap up testing in the next few months on the seven methane-fueled BE-4 booster engines and two hydrogen-burning BE-3U upper-stage engines slated to fly on the first New Glenn rocket, which could take off before the end of 2024. Once this first round of cryogenic tests is complete, Blue Origin will remove this rocket from the launch pad to allow technicians to install the booster's engine compartment with the seven BE-4s. New Glenn will also need a new upper stage before returning to Launch Complex 36 for a hot-fire test of the seven BE-4 engines this summer.

Next three launches

March 9: Kairos | Quick Response Satellite | Space Port Kii, Japan | 02:01 UTC

March 10: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-43 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 23:03 UTC

March 11: Falcon 9 | Starlink 7-17 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 02:13 UTC

In the US, for orange juice to be labeled as such, it must be 90 percent sweet orange, or Citrus sinensis. Thus, citrus producers in the US have long planted 90 percent Citrus sinensis. But this cultivar is extremely susceptible to the bacteria that causes citrus greening disease, which has devastated the near-monocultural Florida crop. There is as yet no way to control the disease; the most effective way to deal with it would be to find citrus cultivars that are resistant to it and breed them with sweet orange to grant them disease resistance.

Sweet oranges are a hybrid of mandarin and pomelo and are not especially genetically diverse. Any disease-resistant citrus we know of, however, does not taste like sweet orange, so breeding with it will produce fruit and juice with off flavors. It has been difficult to define and quantify those off flavors, though, because it has been difficult to define and quantify the components essential for proper orange flavor.

Now, researchers at the USDA Agricultural Research Service performed a comprehensive chemical evaluation of 179 different citrus combinations—oranges, mandarins, and assorted hybrids—and cross-referenced their chemical compositions with evaluations of orange and mandarin flavors in juice samples performed by a “trained panel.”

Twenty-six compounds were identified by a statistical model as being important in predicting orange versus mandarin flavor. Some of these were positively associated with orange flavor—i.e., having more of the compound meant more orange flavor. Others were negatively associated with it, meaning that having less of those compounds made the juice taste more orange-y.

The study identified seven chemicals that differentiate orange flavor from mandarin flavor and one previously undescribed gene that controls the synthesis of six of them. Its activity is induced as the fruit ripens.

This work should facilitate the breeding of disease-resistant but tasty orange hybrids, and the DNA marker for orange flavor could be used to screen seedlings to see which will yield the most flavorful fruit before they ripen.

Science, 2024.  DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adk2051

Good morning. It's March 7, and today's photo features a Halley-type comet that is currently approaching the Sun. It will reach perihelion on April 21.

The comet, named 12P/Pons–Brooks, features a brilliant ion tail, and its nucleus is estimated to be around 30 km in diameter. The comet should brighten further as it nears the Sun in the coming weeks. However, at an apparent magnitude of 4.5, it is unlikely to be visible to the naked eye—that's why we have telescopes.

12P/Pons–Brooks was imaged here by the Virtual Telescope Project facility in Manciano, Italy. The covered field of view is about 16×11 square degrees, and there is a bonus photobombing by the Andromeda Galaxy.

Source: Gianluca Masi