After SpaceX completed a fueling test of its third full Starship stack on Sunday night, successfully loading more than 10 million pounds of methane and liquid oxygen propellant onto the rocket, it was only a matter of time before the world's largest rocket took flight.

Now, we have a tentative date. In a post on the social media site X, the company posted a link to watch "Starship's third flight test" at 7:30 am ET (11:30 UTC) on March 14. Published on Tuesday morning, the social media post was 'hidden,' but somehow discovered late Tuesday night.

Nevertheless, this is a credible date that the company is working toward. The hardware, following the fueling test on Sunday night at the company's Starbase site in South Texas, appears to be in good shape. And although SpaceX has yet to receive its launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency recently announced that it has closed its investigation into the second Starship test flight in November. So a mid-March launch date is plausible from a regulatory standpoint.

The first two Starship flights last April and November ultimately ended in failures, but each of the experimental launches provided valuable data. On the second mission four months ago, the first-stage Super Heavy booster performed a nominal flight before it separated from the Starship upper stage. The Starship vehicle exploded a few minutes into its flight due to a leak during a liquid oxygen vent.

Based upon learnings from these first two flights, this next mission, with upgraded hardware and flight software, likely has a reasonable chance of success. Among the milestones SpaceX will seek to complete during this test flight are:

• Nominal first-stage performance, followed by a controlled descent of the Super Heavy booster into the Gulf of Mexico
• Starship separation from the first stage using "hot staging," meaning engine ignition while the first stage is still firing its engines
• Starship reaching an orbital velocity and engine shutdown
• Early-stage testing of in-space refueling technology inside the propellant tanks of Starship
• Controlled splashdown of Starship near the Hawaiian islands after flying around two-thirds of the planet

SpaceX is seeking to demonstrate the basic flight capabilities of Starship so that it can move into a more operational phase with the big rocket. The company wants to begin deploying larger Starlink satellites from the vehicle this year, which will enable direct-to-cell phone Internet connectivity.

Additionally, a higher cadence of missions will allow the company to begin developing the technology and procedures needed for the in-space storage and transfer of propellant for deep-space missions. This is a necessary step for SpaceX to fulfill its obligations to NASA for the Artemis program, which seeks to return humans to the Moon later this decade.

In a recent update, the company said more Starships are ready for flight, so a higher cadence is possible if this month's flight is a success. Recently, the Federal Aviation Administration disclosed that SpaceX is seeking to launch Starship at least nine times this year.

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.

This was a remarkable sequence of events, even for SpaceX, which has launched a mission at an average rate of once every three days since the start of the year. We've reported on this before, but it's worth reinforcing that no launch provider, commercial or government, has ever operated at this cadence.

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.

The sprawl of SpaceX

On Sunday night at the Starbase facility in South Texas, teams loaded more than 10 million pounds of methane and liquid oxygen propellants into the nearly 400-foot-tall (121-meter) Starship rocket slated to lift off as soon as this month on the third full-scale test flight of SpaceX's next-generation launcher.

This was likely the final major test before SpaceX launches the third Starship test flight. The countdown rehearsal of the fully stacked rocket ended as planned at T-minus 10 seconds, just before the booster's Raptor engines were ignited; SpaceX then drained the vehicle of propellant. SpaceX previously test-fired the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage separately.

The schedule for the next Starship launch hinges on approval from the Federal Aviation Administration, which is reviewing SpaceX's actions to correct the malfunctions that occurred on the second Starship test flight in November. Last week, the FAA announced it closed its investigation into the second Starship test flight, which was largely successful in demonstrating significant progress on SpaceX's privately funded rocket program. But the test flight ended with explosions of the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage, prompting an FAA investigation.

On the next Starship flight, SpaceX wants to perform some early-stage testing of the in-space refueling technology it will need for later Starship flights, such as missions to the Moon for NASA.

At the same time SpaceX's team in Texas managed the Starship countdown rehearsal, another group of engineers and technicians on Florida's Space Coast stepped through a Falcon 9 launch countdown Sunday night. Three NASA astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut strapped into their seats on SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft on top of the Falcon 9 rocket, then waited for liftoff from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 10:53 pm EST Sunday (03:53 UTC Monday).

The Falcon 9 launch of NASA's Crew-8 mission Sunday night was the first of three Falcon 9 launches over the next 20 hours. Next in line was a launch at 5:05 pm EST (2205 UTC) Monday from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California with 53 small payloads on SpaceX's 10th Transporter rideshare mission. The customer payloads on this Falcon 9 launch included MethaneSAT, an $88 million satellite funded primarily by philanthropic donations to monitor methane greenhouse gas missions around the world.

Then, less than two hours later, at 6:56 pm EST (2356 UTC), a Falcon 9 rocket took off from SpaceX's most active launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. This mission delivered 23 more Starlink broadband satellites into orbit for SpaceX's commercial Internet network. At 1 hour and 51 minutes, this was the shortest time separation to date between two SpaceX launches.

All three Falcon 9 launches ended with landings of the rockets' first stage boosters.

While controllers at Starbase, Cape Canaveral, and Vandenberg looked after these three Falcon 9 launches, SpaceX engineers at the company's headquarters near Los Angeles tracked the performance and progress of the Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft on its way to the International Space Station, where it docked early Tuesday. Next week, another SpaceX capsule, Crew Dragon Endurance, will depart the station to bring a different four-person crew back to Earth.

SpaceX, which now has more than 13,000 employees, pulled off a similar rapid-fire launch cadence in mid-February with three Falcon 9 launches in approximately 23 hours, but this time included the additional complexity of operating a Dragon crew capsule en route to the ISS, plus the Starship countdown in Texas. While all this was going on, a handful of ground controllers also monitored the health of the Dragon spacecraft currently docked at the space station.

Constraint to launch

SpaceX has modified its primary Cape Canaveral launch pad—Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40)—over the last few months to accommodate Falcon 9 launches with Dragon crew and cargo capsules, a capability currently exclusive to Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) a few miles to the north at Kennedy Space Center. While LC-39A is not used as often as SLC-40, it has been the only launch pad outfitted to launch Dragon crew and cargo missions, and the Falcon Heavy rocket.

With a new servicing tower and arm to allow access to the Dragon spacecraft on the launch pad, SLC-40 will be ready for the launch of SpaceX's next Dragon resupply mission to the space station later this month, NASA and SpaceX officials said last week. If needed, it could be used for SpaceX's next commercial crew mission this summer.

The availability of SLC-40 for crew and cargo missions helps offload demand from LC-39A. For example, if a critical military or NASA planetary science payload needs to launch on a Falcon Heavy rocket at the same time as a Dragon crew mission, SpaceX could shift the crew launch over to SLC-40. The crew launch capability at SLC-40 also helps alleviate NASA's concerns about SpaceX's plan to launch Starship rockets from LC-39A.

Before its launch Sunday night, the launch date for NASA's Crew-8 mission was delayed about a week because of a scheduling conflict at LC-39A. Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lunar lander, which NASA had under contract, took priority in the schedule because it at a narrow launch window of just a few days in mid-February in order to reach the Moon. The Odysseus lander had to launch from LC-39A because SpaceX upgraded the pad to load cryogenic propellants into the payload just before liftoff.

"Could you imagine if I had walked up to you five years ago and said our constraint to launch is launch pad availability?" said Matthew Dominick, the NASA commander of the Crew-8 mission. "You would have thought I was crazy, but we’re at a cool spot in spaceflight right now. We’ve got rockets competing for launch pads, so you’re not waiting on payloads. You’re not waiting on rockets. You’re waiting on launch pads now."

All told, SpaceX continues to expand its launch capacity for Falcon 9 and Starship. The company aims to launch its Falcon rocket fleet more than 140 times this year, up from 96 Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy flights in 2023. SpaceX wants to launch "at least" nine Starship test flights this year. You can probably count on even higher numbers for both of SpaceX's rocket families in 2025.

SpaceX plans to construct a second Starship launch tower at Starbase in Texas. It already has a partially built Starship launch complex at Kennedy Space Center, and preliminary plans exist to install another Starship launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

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.

It's difficult to gauge how many people are watching SpaceX's official launch livestreams after the company shifted away from YouTube and started streaming launches only on X, the social media platform also owned by Musk. Initially, at least, this appeared to have the effect of suppressing the number of viewers for SpaceX's live productions. However, launch viewership on third-party streamers, such as NASASpaceflight and Spaceflight Now, has only increased as space missions fly more often.

Launches remain exciting, but that's not such a bad thing.

On one level, we have fireflies figured out. We know the enzyme they use to make light (called luciferase), as well as the chemicals they use in the light-generating reaction. We know them so well that we've turned them into useful tools for studying other aspects of biology, such that lots of people who have never even seen a firefly have used firefly luciferase in the lab.

But on another level, there's a lot we don't understand. Fireflies clearly exercise a level of control over when they light up, and they do so only in specialized organs. And there's nothing like that organ in other species. So, somehow, fireflies evolved an elaborate light-producing organ, and there's no sign of any potential precursors in related species. Which makes it a bit of a mystery.

Now, a pair of researchers from Wuhan, China, (Xinhua Fu and Xinlei Zhu) have started unraveling what's going on at the level of the genes responsible. And, while they haven't produced a complete picture of how evolution built the fireflies, they've brought us a lot closer.

Following the light

We know a fair bit about how fireflies produce light. First off, it's not limited to the adults we're familiar with. The larval stages also light up, and it's thought that this is a way to signal their toxicity to potential predators. One idea is that this was how the light-emitting system initially evolved, and it was later adapted for mating.

In any case, the adult organs form in specific segments of the beetle's abdomen (they form in different segments in males and females). They include a transparent cuticle on the exterior of the insect and specialized light-emitting cells underneath it.

Within those cells, the luciferase enzyme is sent into a compartment called the peroxisome, where various chemicals are normally broken down through oxidation reactions. On the simplest level, this makes sense because the reaction luciferase catalyzes involves oxygen. But there are some indications that the peroxisomes of the light-producing cells are specialized for that and may no longer be able to perform all the other functions of peroxisomes.

One of the easiest ways to study novel features like this is to identify the genes involved in producing them. Here, genetics doesn't work especially well, as fireflies are very difficult to breed in the lab. Another option is to sequence the genome of fireflies and their relatives and look for newly evolved genes or existing genes that have undergone duplications so that there are extra copies. This has been tried in fireflies, and some potentially interesting genes have been identified. But none of these seem to have anything to do with making light.

The genetics of light

Fu and Zhu were working with a species of aquatic firefly, and its genome hadn't been sequenced yet, so they started with that. It turned out to be unusually large and filled with a lot of extraneous junk, such as mobile DNA elements and large introns within genes. Still, they were able to complete roughly 98 percent of the genome and identify most of the genes within it.

Because the light-producing organs develop in specific segments (one in females, a second in males), the researchers focused on genes known to help determine a segment's identity—the ones that tell a segment whether to develop a wing or a leg or some other structure. These are called homeobox genes, and they play roles in establishing the identity of body parts in everything from fruit flies to humans.

By checking the activity of homeobox proteins found in the firefly genome, Fu and Zhu came up with half a dozen that were active at the right time and place to potentially influence light organ formation. They then knocked down the activity of each of these genes using a technology called RNA interference. Based on the loss of activity, three of the genes seem to be involved in coordinating the production of flashes of light from the organ. In the case of two other genes, the loss of their activity disrupted the formation of the light-producing organ.

Since homeobox proteins regulate other genes by binding to DNA near them, the researchers tested for altered gene activity in animals where these two homeobox proteins have been knocked down. They found that one of the genes is the luciferase enzyme itself. A detailed look showed that the two homeobox proteins form a complex on the DNA near the luciferase gene and directly activate it in the light-producing cells.

One of the homeobox proteins also activates genes that are involved in getting the luciferase into the organelle where it catalyzes the light-producing reaction.

Fu and Zhu haven't looked at all aspects of light production; there's no indication here about what is needed to produce the clear cuticle that lets the light out of the abdomen, for example. But the new paper has gone some way toward describing the basic features of the system. For one, it suggests that the production of light-producing cells is separate from the system that produces coordinated flashes of light from these cells. It also indicates that the homeobox proteins that help determine which segments the light-producing organ develops in are directly involved in the production of the luciferase that the organs ultimately rely on.

By identifying the genes that are key players in all these processes, they've also provided new avenues for follow-up to glean more details about how this system works.

However, in terms of evolution, this initial picture tells a familiar story. Fireflies didn't necessarily evolve anything completely new to create a light-producing organ in their abdomen. Instead, once the basic pieces were in place, they came under the control of the homeobox genes that were already active in dictating the identity of different abdominal segments.

Nature Communications, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-45559-7  (About DOIs).

Good morning. It's March 5, and today's image comes from the James Webb Space Telescope.

It's a new deep-field image from the infrared space telescope, showcasing a portion of the "Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey" region of space that has previously been observed by other space telescopes, including Hubble and Chandra. Almost everything in this image that doesn't have lines emanating from it is a galaxy.

Such deep field images are poetic in that they're just showing a tiny fraction of a sky—the width of this image is significantly less than a single degree of the night sky—and yet they reveal a universe teeming with galaxies. We live in a cosmos that is almost incomprehensibly large.

If you click through to the Webb telescope site you will find an annotated image that highlights a galaxy in the far lower-right corner. It is galaxy GN-z11, seen at a time just 430 million years after the Big Bang.

Source: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, et. al.

NASA has canceled an over-budget, behind-schedule mission to demonstrate robotic satellite servicing technology in orbit, pulling the plug on a project that has cost $1.5 billion and probably would have cost nearly $1 billion more to get to the launch pad.

The On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing 1 mission, known as OSAM-1, would have grappled an aging Landsat satellite in orbit and attempted to refuel it, while also demonstrating how a robotic arm could construct an antenna in space. The spacecraft for the OSAM-1 mission is partially built, but NASA announced Friday that officials decided to cancel the project "following an in-depth, independent project review."

The space agency cited "continued technical, cost, and schedule challenges" for the decision to cancel OSAM-1.

Mission creep

The mission's cost has ballooned since NASA officially kicked off the project in 2016. The mission's original scope called for just the refueling demonstration, but in 2020, officials tacked on the in-orbit assembly objective. This involved adding a complex piece of equipment called the Space Infrastructure Dexterous Robot (SPIDER) essentially a 16-foot-long (5-meter) robotic arm to assemble seven structural elements into a single Ka-band communications antenna.

The addition of SPIDER meant the mission would launch with three robotic arms, including two appendages needed to grab onto the Landsat 7 satellite in orbit for the refueling demonstration. With this change in scope, the name of the mission changed from Restore-L to OSAM-1.

A report by NASA's inspector general last year outlined the mission's delays and cost overruns. Since 2016, the space agency has requested $808 million from Congress for Restore-L and OSAM-1. Lawmakers responded by giving NASA nearly $1.5 billion to fund the development of the mission, nearly double what NASA said it wanted.

Restore-L, and then OSAM-1, has always enjoyed support from Congress. The mission was managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Former Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland) was a key backer of NASA missions run out of Goddard, including the James Webb Space Telescope. She was the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee when Congress started funding Restore-L in late 2015.

At one time, NASA projected the Restore-L mission would cost between $626 million and $753 million and could be ready for launch in the second half of 2020. That didn't happen, and the mission continued facing delays and cost increases. The most recent public schedule for OSAM-1 showed a launch date in 2026.

In 2020, after reshaping the Restore-L mission to become OSAM-1, NASA formally laid out a budget for the renamed mission. At the time, NASA said it would cost $1.78 billion to design, build, launch, and operate. An independent review board NASA established last year to examine the OSAM-1 mission estimated the total project could cost as much as $2.35 billion, according to Jimi Russell, a NASA spokesperson.

The realities of the satellite servicing market have also changed since 2016. There are several companies working on commercial satellite servicing technologies, and the satellite industry has shifted away from refueling unprepared spacecraft, as OSAM-1 would have demonstrated with the Landsat 7 Earth-imaging satellite.

Instead, companies are focusing more on extending satellite life in other ways. Northrop Grumman has developed the Mission Extension Vehicle, which can latch on to a satellite and provide maneuvering capability without cutting into the customer spacecraft to refuel it. Other companies are looking at satellites that are designed, from the start, with refueling ports. The US military has a desire to place fuel depots and tankers in orbit to regularly service its satellites, giving them the ability to continually maneuver and burn propellant without worrying about running out of fuel.

Maxar is NASA's prime contractor for the OSAM-1 mission, charged with supplying both the spacecraft platform and the robotic assembly payload. In a statement announcing the decision to cancel OSAM-1, NASA said the "broader community evolution away from refueling unprepared spacecraft" has "led to a lack of a committed partner" on the mission.

One of NASA's principles on the OSAM-1 project was to develop and prove out satellite servicing technologies, then hand them over to industry for commercial use. But many of the capabilities OSAM-1 would have demonstrated were no longer the ones that garnered interest in the commercial market.

"Technologies developed as part of OSAM-1 have been previously made available for commercial licensing and will continue to be available, albeit with no additional technology maturation or flight demonstration," Russell said in a statement to Ars.

Following the customary processes to notify Congress of its decision to cancel OSAM-1, NASA said it plans to "complete an orderly shutdown, including the disposition of sensitive hardware, pursuing potential partnerships or alternative hardware uses, and licensing of applicable technological developments."

Last year, Maxar delivered the main body of the OSAM-1 spacecraft from its factory in California to the Goddard Space Flight Center, where teams planned to install robotic arms and the modular Ka-band antenna the mission would have assembled in orbit. But this milestone was two-and-a-half years behind schedule, according to NASA's inspector general.

In its report, NASA's inspector general said much of the OSAM-1 mission's cost growth and delays "can be traced to Maxar's poor performance" on the spacecraft and SPIDER contracts.

"In our discussions with Maxar officials, they acknowledged that they were no longer profiting from their work on OSAM-1," the inspector general reported. "Moreover, project officials stated that OSAM-1 does not appear to be a high priority for Maxar in terms of the quality of its staffing."

The structure of NASA's firm fixed price contracts with Maxar did not allow the agency to incentivize Maxar to improve its performance, according to the inspector general. In 2022 and 2023, NASA provided Maxar with labor valued at approximately $2 million to assist with flight software and systems engineering.

Maxar also delivered to NASA last year one of OSAM-1's robotic arms and a stowage platform that would secure the payloads to the satellite during launch. The final two robotic arms were on schedule for delivery this year, according to Eric Glass, a Maxar spokesperson.

"While we are disappointed by the decision to discontinue the program, we are committed to supporting NASA in pursuing potential new partnerships or alternative hardware uses as they complete the shutdown," Glass said. "We look forward to future opportunities to partner with NASA on innovative and pioneering technologies."

In a response to the inspector general's report last year, Maxar cited other factors causing OSAM-1 delays, including the COVID-19 pandemic and problems developing the NASA-led servicing payload that would actually refuel Landsat 7 in orbit. "Maxar Space Systems’ contracts represent only about 15 percent of the overall program budget," the company said.

NASA said it is reviewing how to mitigate the impact of OSAM-1's cancellation on the workforce at Goddard. Approximately 450 NASA employees and contractors are working on OSAM-1, according to Space News.

Cambridge University historian Federica Gigante is an expert on Islamic astrolabes. So naturally she was intrigued when the Fondazione Museo Miniscalchi-Erizzo in Verona, Italy, uploaded an image of just such an astrolabe to its website. The museum thought it might be a fake, but when Gigante visited to see the astrolabe firsthand, she realized it was not only an authentic 11th century instrument—one of the oldest yet discovered—it had engravings in both Arabic and Hebrew.

“This isn’t just an incredibly rare object. It’s a powerful record of scientific exchange between Arabs, Jews, and Christians over hundreds of years,” Gigante said. “The Verona astrolabe underwent many modifications, additions, and adaptations as it changed hands. At least three separate users felt the need to add translations and corrections to this object, two using Hebrew and one using a Western language.” She described her findings in a new paper published in the journal Nuncius.

As previously reported, astrolabes are actually very ancient instruments—possibly dating as far back as the second century BCE—for determining the time and position of the stars in the sky by measuring a celestial body's altitude above the horizon. Before the emergence of the sextant, astrolabes were mostly used for astronomical and astrological studies, although they also proved useful for navigation on land, as well as for tracking the seasons, tide tables, and time of day. The latter was especially useful for religious functions, such as tracking daily Islamic prayer times, the direction of Mecca, or the feast of Ramadan, among others.

Navigating at sea on a pitching deck was a bit more problematic unless the waters were calm. The development of a mariner's astrolabe—a simple ring marked in degrees for measuring celestial altitudes—helped solve that problem. It was eventually replaced by the invention of the sextant in the 18th century, which was much more precise for seafaring navigation. Mariner's astrolabes are among the most prized artifacts recovered from shipwrecks; only 108 are currently cataloged worldwide. In 2019, researchers determined that a mariner's astrolabe recovered from the wreck of one of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama's ships is now officially the oldest known such artifact. The so-called Sodré astrolabe was recovered from the wreck of the Esmeralda (part of da Gama's armada) off the coast of Oman in 2014, along with around 2,800 other artifacts.

An astrolabe is typically comprised of a disk (mater) engraved with graduations to mark hours and/or arc degrees. The mater holds one more engraved flat plate (tympans) to represent azimuth and altitude at specific latitudes. Above these pieces is a rotating framework called the rete that essentially serves as a star map, with one rotation being equivalent to one day. An alidade attached to the back could be rotated to help the user take the altitude of a sighted star. Engravings on the backs of the astrolabes varied but often depicted different kinds of scales.

The Verona astrolabe is meant for astronomical use, and while it has a mater, a rete, and two plates (one of which is a later replacement), it is missing the alidade. It's also undated, according to Gigante, but she was able to estimate a likely date based on the instrument's design, construction, and calligraphy. She concluded it was Andalusian, dating back to the 11th century when the region was a Muslim-ruled area of Spain.

For instance, one side of the original plate bears an Arabic inscription "for the latitude of Cordoba, 38° 30'" and another Arabic inscription on the other side reading "for the latitude of Toledo, 40°." The second plate (added at some later date) was for North African latitudes, so at some point, the astrolabe might have found its way to Morocco or Egypt. There are engraved lines from Muslim prayers, indicating it was probably originally used for daily prayers.

There is also a signature on the back in Arabic script: "for Isḥāq [...]/the work of Yūnus.” Gigante believes this was added by a later owner. Since the two names translate to Isaac and Jonah, respectively, in English, it's possible that a later owner was an Arab-speaking member of a Sephardi Jewish community. In addition to the Arabic script, Gigante noticed later Hebrew inscriptions translating the Arabic names for certain astrological signs, in keeping with the earliest surviving treatise in Hebrew on astrolabes, written by Abraham Ibn Ezra in Verona in 1146.

“These Hebrew additions and translations suggest that at a certain point the object left Spain or North Africa and circulated amongst the Jewish diaspora community in Italy, where Arabic was not understood, and Hebrew was used instead,” said Gigante. “This object is Islamic, Jewish, and European, they can’t be separated."

Nuncius, 2024. DOI: 10.1163/18253911-bja10095  (About DOIs).

SpaceX's oldest Crew Dragon spacecraft is about to launch on its fifth mission to the International Space Station, and engineers are crunching data to see if the fleet of Dragons can safely fly as many as 15 times.

It has been five years since SpaceX launched the first Crew Dragon spacecraft on an unpiloted test flight to the space station, and nearly four years since SpaceX's first astronaut mission took off in May 2020. Since then, SpaceX has put its clan of Dragons to use ferrying astronauts and cargo to and from low-Earth orbit.

Now, it's already time to talk about extending the life of the Dragon spaceships. SpaceX and NASA, which shared the cost of developing the Crew Dragon, initially certified each capsule for five flights. Crew Dragon Endeavour, the first in the Dragon fleet to fly astronauts, is about to launch on its fifth mission to the space station.

This ship has spent 466 days in orbit, longer than any spacecraft designed to transport people to and from Earth. It will add roughly 180 days to its flight log with this mission.

Liftoff of Crew Dragon Endeavour from Florida aboard a Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled for 10:53 pm EST Sunday (03:53 UTC Monday). You can watch NASA TV's live coverage of the launch below.

Commander Matthew Dominick, pilot Michael Barratt, mission specialist Jeanette Epps, and Russian

cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin put on their SpaceX pressure suits and strapped into their seats inside

Crew Dragon Endeavour Sunday evening at NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

This mission, known as Crew-8, will launch on a brand new Falcon 9 booster, which will return to landing a few minutes after liftoff at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Officials delayed the launch three days due to poor weather conditions across the Atlantic Ocean, where the capsule would ditch into the sea in the event of a rocket failure during the climb into orbit. Assuming the launch occurs Sunday night, the four-person crew will dock at the space station around 3 am EST (0800 UTC) Tuesday.

Crew-8 will replace the four-person Crew-7 team that has been at the space station since last August. Crew-7 will return to Earth in about one week on SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endurance spacecraft, which is flying in space for the third time.

The Crew-8 mission will return to Earth for a reentry and splashdown off the coast of Florida in late August of this year, wrapping up Crew Dragon Endeavour's fifth trip to space. This is the current life limit for a Crew Dragon spacecraft, but don't count out Endeavour just yet.

Fleet management

“Right now, we’re certified for five flights on Dragon, and we’re looking at extending that life out," said Steve Stich, NASA's commercial crew program manager. "I think the goal would be for SpaceX to say 15 flights of Dragon. We may not get there in every single system."

One by one, engineers at SpaceX and NASA are looking at Dragon's structural skeleton, composite shells, rocket engines, valves, and other components to see how much life is left in them. Some parts of the spacecraft slowly fatigue from the stresses of each launch, reentry and splashdown, along with the extreme temperature swings the capsule sees thousands of times in orbit. Each Draco thruster on the spacecraft is certified for a certain number of firings.

Some components are already approved for 15 flights, Stich said in a recent press conference. "Some, we're still in the middle of working on," he said. "Some of those components have to go through some re-qualification to make sure that they can make it out to 15 flights."

Re-qualifying a component on a spacecraft typically involves putting hardware through extensive testing on the ground. Because SpaceX reuses hardware, engineers can remove a part from a flown Dragon spacecraft and put it through qualification testing. NASA will get the final say in certifying the Dragon spacecraft for additional flights because the agency is SpaceX's primary customer for crew missions.

The Dragon fleet is flying more often than SpaceX or NASA originally anticipated. The main reason for this is that Boeing, NASA's other commercial crew contractor, is running about four years behind SpaceX in getting to its first astronaut launch on the Starliner spacecraft.

When NASA selected SpaceX and Boeing for multibillion-dollar commercial crew contracts in 2014, the agency envisioned alternating between Crew Dragon and Starliner flights every six months to rotate four-person crews at the International Space Station. With Boeing's delays, SpaceX has picked up the slack.

The Boeing delays have been good for SpaceX in the sense that NASA has awarded contract extensions to carry the Crew Dragon program through the end of the 2020s. NASA has purchased 14 operational Crew Dragon flights from SpaceX, compared to six Starliner flights from Boeing. On Sunday night, SpaceX is counting down to liftoff of the eighth operational Crew Dragon flight for NASA, and the 13th crew flight on Dragon overall.

While SpaceX is flying astronauts for NASA, the company is also launching all-private crews to orbit through deals with the Houston-based company Axiom Space and billionaire Jared Isaacman, who plans to perform the first commercial spacewalk later this year.

Business is booming, but SpaceX is reaching certification limits on the Dragon spacecraft faster than expected.

SpaceX has four human-rated Dragon spaceships, plus three Dragons designed for cargo missions. A fifth Crew Dragon is on track for completion later this year, and will probably make its first flight in early 2025, according to Stich. SpaceX officials have said this will be the final Crew Dragon spacecraft the company will build, and the fleet of five capsules will be enough to satisfy demand for Dragon missions until the next-generation Starship vehicle is ready to take over.

It will be at least several years, and possibly longer, until Starship is certified for human launches and landings. Until then, Dragons will continue launching on Falcon 9 rockets, even if some satellite missions shift to Starship.

SpaceX has flown some of its reusable Falcon 9 boosters as many as 19 times, nearly double the rocket's original life expectancy, and is looking at certifying Falcon 9s for as many as 40 launches and landings.

Stich said NASA and SpaceX could settle on an intermediate number of flights, somewhere between five and 15, when they re-certify the Dragon spaceships. A later round of testing and reviews could eventually get to SpaceX's 15-flight goal. "I would like to get out to seven to 10 flights for Dragon, but we'll see where we get," he said.

There are some parts, like heat shield material and parachutes, that SpaceX still needs to replace after each flight.

COVID-19 is becoming more like the flu and, as such, no longer requires its own virus-specific health rules, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday alongside the release of a unified "respiratory virus guide."

In a lengthy background document, the agency laid out its rationale for consolidating COVID-19 guidance into general guidance for respiratory viruses—including influenza, RSV, adenoviruses, rhinoviruses, enteroviruses, and others, though specifically not measles. The agency also noted the guidance does not apply to health care settings and outbreak scenarios.

"COVID-19 remains an important public health threat, but it is no longer the emergency that it once was, and its health impacts increasingly resemble those of other respiratory viral illnesses, including influenza and RSV," the agency wrote.

The most notable change in the new guidance is the previously reported decision to no longer recommend a minimum five-day isolation period for those infected with the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. Instead, the new isolation guidance is based on symptoms, which matches long-standing isolation guidance for other respiratory viruses, including influenza.

"The updated Respiratory Virus Guidance recommends people with respiratory virus symptoms that are not better explained by another cause stay home and away from others until at least 24 hours after both resolution of fever AND overall symptom are getting better," the document states. "This recommendation addresses the period of greatest infectiousness and highest viral load for most people, which is typically in the first few days of illness and when symptoms, including fever, are worst."

“Residual risk”

The CDC acknowledged that the eased isolation guidance will create "residual risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission," and that most people are no longer infectious only after 8 to 10 days. As such, the agency urged people to follow additional interventions—including masking, testing, distancing, hygiene, and improving air quality—for five additional days after their isolation period.

"Today’s announcement reflects the progress we have made in protecting against severe illness from COVID-19," CDC Director Dr. Mandy Cohen said in a statement. "However, we still must use the commonsense solutions we know work to protect ourselves and others from serious illness from respiratory viruses—this includes vaccination, treatment, and staying home when we get sick."

Overall, the agency argued that a shorter isolation period would be inconsequential. Other countries and states that have similarly abandoned fixed isolation times did not see jumps in COVID-19 emergency department visits or hospitalizations, the CDC pointed out. And most people who have COVID-19 don't know they have it anyway, making COVID-19-specific guidance moot, the agency argued. In a recent CDC survey, less than half of people said they would test for SARS-CoV-2 if they had a cough or cold symptoms, and less than 10 percent said they would go to a pharmacy or health care provider to get tested. Meanwhile, "The overall sensitivity of COVID-19 antigen tests is relatively low and even lower in individuals with only mild symptoms," the agency said.

The CDC also raised practical concerns for isolation, including a lack of paid sick leave for many, social isolation, and "societal costs."

The points are likely to land poorly with critics.

“The CDC is again prioritizing short-term business interests over our health by caving to employer pressure on COVID guidelines. This is a pattern we’ve seen throughout the pandemic,” Lara Jirmanus, Clinical Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, said in a press release last month after the news first broke of the CDC's planned isolation update. Jirmanus is a member of the People's CDC, a group that advocates for more aggressive COVID-19 policies, which put out the press release.

Another member of the group, Sam Friedman, a professor of population health at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, also blasted the CDC's stance last month. The guidance will "make workplaces and public spaces even more unsafe for everyone, particularly for people who are high-risk for COVID complications," he said.

COVID and flu

But, the CDC argues that the threat of COVID-19 is fading. Hospitalizations, deaths, prevalence of long COVID, and COVID-19 complications in children (MIS-C) are all down. COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective at preventing severe disease, death, and to some extent, long COVID—we just need more people to get them. Over 95 percent of adults hospitalized with COVID-19 in the 2023–2024 respiratory season had no record of receiving the seasonal booster dose, the agency noted. Only 22 percent of adults got the latest shot, including only 42 percent of people ages 65 and older. In contrast, 48 percent of adults got the latest flu shot, including 73 percent of people ages 65 and older.

But even with the crummy vaccination rates for COVID-19, a mix of past infection and shots have led to a substantial protection in the overall population. The CDC even went as far as arguing that COVID-19 deaths have fallen to a level that is similar to what's seen with flu.

"Reported deaths involving COVID-19 are several-fold greater than those reported to involve influenza and RSV. However, influenza and likely RSV are often underreported as causes of death," the CDC said. In the 2022–2023 respiratory virus season, there were nearly 90,000 reported COVID-19 deaths. For flu, there were 9,559 reported deaths, but the CDC estimates the true number to be between 18,000 and 97,000. In the current season, there have been 32,949 reported COVID-19 deaths to date and 5,854 reported flu deaths, but the agency estimates the real flu deaths are between 17,000 and 50,000.

"Total COVID-19 deaths, accounting for underreporting, are likely to be higher than, but of the same order of magnitude as, total influenza deaths," the agency concluded.

In all, the CDC was ready to fold SARS-CoV-2 into the gang of common seasonal respiratory viruses, with most cases mild and undiagnosed. "Viruses cause most acute respiratory illnesses, but it is rarely possible to determine the type of virus without testing, and oftentimes testing does not change clinical management," the agency wrote.

Welcome to Edition 6.33 of the Rocket Report! If you check the "next three launches" list below you'll see that all three are for Falcon 9 rockets. That's not the first time this has happened this year, nor will it likely be the last. It's starting to look like SpaceX might actually come close to its target of 150 launches this year—a remarkable cadence.

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.

India building a second spaceport. The Indian Space Research Organisation, ISRO, has received the go-ahead to construct a new spaceport in Tamil Nadu, with which it aims to help private players launch small rockets, Tech Crunch reports. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for the spaceport, located on an island named Kulasekharapatnam off the southern state of Tamil Nadu. This will be the country's second spaceport after the space agency’s existing Satish Dhawan Space Centre.

Easier path to the poles ... The spaceport will be dedicated to launching smaller launch vehicles and will be ready in about two years. Spread over 2,350 acres, the Kulasekharapatnam spaceport will help save propellant for small rocket launches, as the port can launch rockets directly south over the Indian Ocean without requiring crossing landmasses. This is unlike the existing launch site at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, which adds more fuel requirement for launching into a polar orbit as rockets need to follow a curved path to the south to avoid Sri Lanka’s landmass. (submitted by Joey S-IVB)

Astra founders warn of "imminent bankruptcy." The founders of satellite propulsion and launch vehicle company Astra have sharply cut their offer to take the company private, warning of “imminent bankruptcy” if the company doesn’t accept their new proposal, Space News reports. In a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Tuesday, Astra released a letter sent three days earlier to a special committee of the company’s board of directors from Chris Kemp and Adam London, the chief executive and chief technology officer, slashing by two-thirds their offer to buy outstanding shares of the publicly traded company.

Pray I don't alter it further ... In November, Kemp and London proposed to buy Astra shares at $1.50, approximately double their price at the time they announced the deal. In the new proposal, they are offering only $0.50 per share. Kemp and London cited several reasons for cutting the share price. They included continued cash burn by the company since they tendered the original offer and higher “non-operating expenses” as the company used multiple third-party advisers to assess options. Under the revised proposal, Kemp and London said they anticipated raising $45 million overall to take Astra private, of which $7.7 million would go to shareholders. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

RFA reveals plans for SaxaVord spaceport. An environmental report published by the UK Civil Aviation Authority has provided greater insight into Rocket Factory Augsburg’s proposed operations at SaxaVord Spaceport in Scotland, European Spaceflight reports. The report details a plan for RFA to conduct up to 10 launches per year from SaxaVord, which would account for one-third of the spaceport’s total budget of 30 orbital launches per year.

More engines, please ... Because of the local bird population, RFA will be unable to conduct launches or static fire tests between mid-May and the end of June. The company will also be limited to a maximum of two launches per month. The rocket's design is also changing. Significantly, the 21-meter first stage will now be equipped with 13 Helix engines producing 1,300 kilonewtons of thrust instead of just nine engines, as previously stated by the company. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Firefly expanding rapidly in Central Texas. The company held a ribbon-cutting ceremony yesterday celebrating the expansion of its rocket production facility from 92,000 to 207,000 sq ft to support its “launch, land, orbit” initiatives, Payload reports. There is a lot happening at the company that, to date, has built the Alpha rocket. In one building, engineers were fine-tuning the company’s next-generation Miranda engine. A short walk to the next building revealed the construction of the new Medium Launch Vehicle/Antares 330 rocket. Nearby, the Elytra spacecraft was being developed, and down the road, engineers were putting the finishing touches on the Blue Ghost lunar lander.

Recycling the MLV ... Of most interest to a newsletter about rockets is the new rocket. The Medium Launch Vehicle will incorporate a new first stage built by Firefly, with seven Miranda engines. It will be capable of lifting 16 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. And reuse is in the cards—eventually. "Anyone who comes into this market that doesn’t have reusability on their roadmap is a doomed program," said Adam Oakes, Firefly’s VP of launch vehicles. A debut launch is possible as early as 2025. (submitted by EllPeaTea, Ken the Bin, and Jay500001)

Rocket Lab pushing for first Neutron launch. Rocket Lab says it could launch its first Neutron rocket before the end of the year, Space News reports. "Right now, we have a schedule that closes for a launch by the end of the year," Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said of Neutron during an earnings call on Wednesday. "But, we’ve got a lot of testing to get through." Beck outlined the progress the company was making on various components of Neutron, such as avionics and structures, as well as the construction of Neutron’s launch pad, Launch Complex 3 on Wallops Island, Virginia.

An aspirational schedule ... However, the company has yet to start hot-fire tests of the Archimedes engine that will power Neutron. Beck said Rocket Lab was completing a test stand for Archimedes at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, allowing it "to support an engine by the end of March," but did not disclose when the company expected to start firing the engine on the stand. Later in the call, Adam Spice, Rocket Lab’s chief financial officer, acknowledged a Neutron launch by the end of the year was a “green-light schedule” where there are no problems in the vehicle’s development. I'd be pleasantly surprised if Neutron launches in 2025. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

Starliner launch is near. We've heard this before, but Boeing appears to be a couple of months from finally launching astronauts into orbit aboard the commercial CST-100 Starliner crew capsule on an Atlas V rocket, Ars reports. It was about two months prior to this mission's previous launch date last July when Boeing and NASA officials decided to put a hold on launch preparations. During their final reviews to certify Starliner for flight nearly a year ago, engineers discovered two technical issues that somehow escaped detection for years. One of these issues involved parts of Starliner's parachute deployment system that did not meet required safety specifications, and another entailed flammable tape inside the spacecraft.

April, probably ... "We’ve worked through a number of issues that delayed the launch from last summer and closed those out," said Steve Stich, manager of NASA's commercial crew program. "We had a successful parachute test in early January, with some modifications to the parachute system to improve the strength of those parachutes. That went well. We reviewed that data." The launch is currently scheduled for April 26, according to NASA's internal schedule. But this launch date is likely to slip a couple of days due to scheduling issues unrelated to Starliner's readiness.

FAA closes Starship "mishap" investigation. A little more than three months after the most recent launch of a Starship vehicle, which ended with both the booster and upper stage being lost in flight, the Federal Aviation Administration has closed its investigation of the mishap, Ars reports. SpaceX must still submit additional information to the FAA, which is responsible for the safety of people and property on the ground before the agency completes its review of an application to launch Starship for a third time. Early to mid-March seems likely for this attempt.

SpaceX also discusses failures during second flight ... In conjunction with Monday's announcement, SpaceX released details for the first time of what happened to cause the November 18 launch to go awry. The Super Heavy booster was lost when one of its engines failed "energetically" during a burn to make a controlled reentry through Earth's atmosphere. The Starship upper stage was lost due to a vent of excess liquid oxygen that resulted in a "combustion event."

Space Force wants to see a good cadence from ULA and Blue. The assistant secretary of the Air Force in charge of Space Force acquisitions, Frank Calvelli, said this week that a top concern for his office this year is the launch tempo of United Launch Alliance. "I think it’s going to be really important for us to watch two amazing companies: ULA and Blue Origin," Calvelli said, according to Space News. "They need to scale." Speaking at the National Security Space Association’s Defense and Intelligence Space Conference, Calvelli applauded the successful inaugural launch last month of ULA’s new Vulcan rocket but emphasized the need for the company to adapt swiftly to a faster-paced launch schedule.

Next step, certification ... The Space Force official noted that ULA is projecting to launch Vulcan at least once a month and ramp up to two launches per month by 2025. Calvelli said that would be a “dramatic change in the culture” of ULA, which has flown only six rockets a year on average over the past five years. Vulcan has to complete one more successful launch to get certified for national security missions. ULA said it expects to be certified before year’s end. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

NASA, SpaceX test Starship docking system. As part of the initial Artemis missions to the Moon, SpaceX's Starship rocket will need to dock with NASA's Orion spacecraft in lunar orbit. The space agency said this week that NASA and SpaceX recently performed qualification testing for the docking system that will help make that possible. The docking system tests for Starship were conducted at the Johnson Space Center over 10 days using a system that simulates contact dynamics between two spacecraft in orbit.

Orion and Gateway ... The testing included more than 200 docking scenarios with various approach angles and speeds. These real-world results using full-scale hardware will validate computer models of the Moon lander’s docking system. This dynamic testing demonstrated that the Starship system could perform a “soft capture” while in the active docking role. Based on SpaceX’s flight-proven Dragon 2 docking system used on missions to the International Space Station, the Starship docking system can be configured to connect the lander to Orion or Gateway. (submitted by Jay500001)

Northrop completes booster segment. Northrop Grumman Corporation completed the first Booster Obsolescence and Life Extension (BOLE) motor segment for the next-generation Space Launch System solid rocket booster. The first BOLE demonstration test is scheduled for this year, featuring a full-scale static test with all five segments integrated and horizontally fired in a test bay.

Boosting the boosters ... BOLE adds nearly five metric tons of payload capacity for SLS Block 2 Moon and Mars missions above the enhancements already in work for the SLS Block 1B configuration slated to fly on Artemis IV. The new solid rocket boosters will be used on Block 2, possibly beginning with Artemis IX, when all the recovered and refurbished shuttle-era steel cases have been expended. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Falcon Heavy launch delayed. NASA and SpaceX are now targeting no earlier than May 2024 for the launch of the fourth and final satellite in NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) -R Series, the space agency said Tuesday. The new date allows for additional testing and preparation of a new Falcon Heavy center core booster after a liquid oxygen leak was discovered during routine new booster testing. 

Keeping an eye on the weather ... Lockheed Martin designs, builds, and tests the GOES-R series satellites. L3Harris Technologies provides the primary instrument, the Advanced Baseline Imager, along with the ground system, which includes the antenna system for data reception. (submitted by EllPeaTea)     

Next three launches

March 3: Falcon 9 | Crew-8 | Kennedy Space Center, Fla. | 03:16 UTC

March 3: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-41 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla. | 11:19 UTC

March 4: Falcon 9 | Transporter 10 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 20:04 UTC

Good morning. It's March 1, and today's image showcases two nebulae within the Orion constellation.

On the left of the image you can see the Flame Nebula, named as such because it's an emoticon often used in gaming chats—just kidding. Rather, it's an emission nebula about 1,000 light-years from Earth. To the right of the image is the rather iconic Horsehead Nebula, which really does resemble the head of a horse. It's a little less than 1,400 light-years from Earth. The darkness in the nebula is mostly due to thick dust blocking the light of the stars behind it.

Andrew Desrosiers sent in this image, which he took from his home in Ashby, Massachusetts. It's the product of about 60 hours of observing the same location of the night sky.

"This is part of a project I started early this winter to keep my telescope just trained on this part of the sky all winter," he told me. "So far I have captured 60 hours of exposure data." He hopes to get to 100 before the end of the season.

Source: Andrew Desrosiers

By now, everyone has heard of millennials’ supposed devotion to avocado toast, but is it true that millennials live for brunch more than work? Could Gen Z be the laziest generation of all? These are just some of the stereotypes associated with what generations we are born into, but there may be less to these stereotypes than many people think.

Sociologist Martin Schröder, a professor at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, wanted to find out if some birth cohorts consider work and career more important than others do. Tracking how answers changed over time produced some unexpected results.

Regardless of what generation someone belongs to, the importance of work actually depends on a combination of what year it was and what age that person was at the time of being surveyed. Schröder’s findings showed that younger individuals (regardless of what generation they’re from) tend to find work less important and that the importance of work has been going down over time.

No matter what they might say about the youth, someone who’s now a middle-aged work obsessive would have rated work as less important when asked in their twenties. The importance of work has also decreased over historical time, so attitudes shift as a result, regardless of what birth cohort someone belongs to.

Avocado toast priorities

Generations were not always a thing. They are actually the brainchild of Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim, who saw generations as birth cohorts united by a shared experience, such as the horrors of World War I, during their formative years.

He thought that cohorts that did not share such an experience could not form a generation. That idea would change with his successors, who defined new generations every decade or two. What exactly bound them together, besides the period during which they were born, was questionable.

Even though these generations are somewhat arbitrarily defined, people still associate them with distinct personality traits, including work motivation. Is the rumored laziness of Gen Z an effect of cohort, their age at the time, or the time period they are living through?

To see if laziness is really defined by generation, Schröder focused on the most recent birth cohorts, which he defined as follows: the World War Generation (1925–1945), Baby Boomers (1945–1965), Gen X (1965–1980), Gen Y, aka millennials (1980–2000), and Gen Z (2001 and younger). There are differences within how these generations are popularly defined, but for the purpose of Schröder’s study, the cohort definitions above were used.

Act your age

What Schröder wanted to find out was whether the importance of work was an effect of certain factors. It could be that everyone’s opinions change as they grow older (age effect), or maybe opinions of society in general change regardless of age (period effect). Or perhaps the opinions are exclusively tied to birth year (generational differences).

“Seeing a purported generation as being lazy when it is young and hard-working when it is middle-aged is more compatible with an age rather than a cohort effect,” Schröder said in a study recently published in the Journal of Business and Psychology.

Using data from nearly 600,000 people who participated in the Integrated Values Survey, which ran from 1981 to 2022, Schröder used one generation for reference and then compared it to the others. What is often seen as the “laziness” of younger people is partly due to the period during which they are surveyed. With the passing of time, the importance of work has lessened. This is the period effect.

But there’s also an age effect. An individual who was 20 (the age around which work is seen as least important) in 2022 (the year in the data when society saw work as less important than ever) probably appeared lazy to someone who was in their fifties at the same time.

When looking at a younger coworker, an older person might not necessarily consider that, when they were the same age, they were at a lifetime low in terms of how they viewed work. The year when they were that age was also—at least up until that point then—the time when society gave the least importance to work.

At least for the importance of work, there really is no such thing as a generational difference. Two separate trends just combine to make it look like one.

So is there any truth to the other stereotypes? Most of them really have more to do with societal trends than anything else, and the young tend to jump on trends at light speed. While Boomers may think they are the hardest workers and Gen Z could argue they would rather be social media influencers, maybe the older generation isn’t remembering how they saw work when they were just starting out.

People ages 65 and up should get another dose of a COVID-19 vaccine this spring, given the age group's higher risk of severe disease and death from the pandemic virus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Wednesday.

Earlier today, an advisory committee for the CDC voted overwhelmingly in favor of recommending the spring booster dose. And late this afternoon, CDC Director Mandy Cohen signed off on the recommendation, allowing boosting to begin.

"Today’s recommendation allows older adults to receive an additional dose of this season’s COVID-19 vaccine to provide added protection," Cohen said in a statement. "Most COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations last year were among people 65 years and older. An additional vaccine dose can provide added protection that may have decreased over time for those at highest risk."

The spring booster will be an additional shot of the 2023–2024 COVID-19 vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Novavax. The booster dose should be taken after at least four months have passed since a previous COVID-19 vaccination. However, as FDA representative David Kaslow noted in today's advisory committee meeting, the FDA will likely approve a 2024–2025 version of COVID-19 vaccines for this coming fall. Given that, it's best for people to get their spring booster dose by the end of June, so they can be ready for another booster before the winter when COVID-19 has generally peaked.

A report published earlier this month by the CDC found that the 2023–2024 COVID-19 vaccine was about 54 percent effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 when compared against people who had not received the latest vaccine. However, the CDC estimates that only about 22 percent of adults in the US have gotten a COVID-19 booster this season, and just over 40 percent of people ages 65 and up have gotten the shot.

People over age 65 made up 67 percent of COVID-19 hospitalizations between October 2023 and January 2024, according to CDC data presented at today's advisory committee meeting. In early January, COVID-19 hospitalizations hit a seasonal high of about 35,000 weekly new admissions per week and nearly 2,500 weekly deaths.

The advisors debated how to word their recommendation for a spring booster and whether getting a booster should require consulting with a health care provider. But, ultimately, the committee decided on a more permissive recommendation, allowing anyone in the age group who wants a booster to be able to freely get one, including at convenient locations, such as local pharmacies.

"Data continues to show the importance of vaccination to protect those most at risk for severe outcomes of COVID-19," the CDC said in its announcement of the recommendation. "An additional dose of the updated COVID-19 vaccine may restore protection that has waned since a fall vaccine dose, providing increased protection to adults ages 65 years and older."

The CDC noted that its previous recommendations allow people who are immunocompromised to get additional doses of the COVID-19 vaccines.

ChatGPT, arguably the most famous chatbot ever, learned its sometimes human-like conversational skills by parsing through absurd amounts of text data—millions of books, articles, Wikipedia pages, and everything else its creators could find by crawling around the Internet.

But what if an advanced AI could learn the way a little kid does, without reading 80 million books or looking at 97 million cats? Just making its first baby steps exploring an amazing new world under the patient guidance of mom and dad. A team of New York University researchers just gave it a shot, and it kind of worked.

Childhood memories

“The big thing this project speaks to is this classic debate on nurture versus nature. What is built into the child and what can be acquired through experience out in the world?” says Wai Keen Vong, a researcher at the NYU Center for Data Science. To find out, Vong and his team pushed an AI algorithm through the closest possible equivalent of early human childhood. They did this by feeding it a database called SAYCam-S, which is filled with first-person video footage taken by a camera strapped to a baby named Sam, recorded while Sam was doing usual baby things between the sixth and 25^th month of his life.

“For our work we used a multimodal learning algorithm, which processed visual input—frames from the camera, and child-directed speech,” Vong explains. The algorithm was termed Child’s View for Contrastive Learning (CVCL); it worked by using a visual encoder and a language encoder to translate images and words into descriptive vectors. Then, a neural network analyzed these equations to find patterns and eventually learned to associate the right images with the right words. (It was a generic multimodal learning algorithm, nothing revolutionary.)

Based on just 61 of Sam’s waking hours—roughly one percent of the child’s experience—the AI learned to recognize sand, paper, puzzles, cars, and balls in images. It performed on par with standard image recognition algorithms that learned the usual way, through millions of examples. But it couldn’t figure out hands or rooms or baskets. Some things simply didn’t click here.

Imperfect slideshows

The problem was that AI didn’t perceive Sam’s experiences the way Sam did. Because the algorithm had access to individual frames annotated with transcribed speech, it saw them more like a very long slideshow and not a continuous experience. “This caused learning artifacts,” says Vong.

For example, it struggled with the word “hands” because hands were in most of the frames. Also, the parents used the word “hands” most often when Sam was at the beach. So, the AI confused “hands” with “sand,” Vong explains. The same thing applied to the word “room.” Sam spent most of his time indoors, and his parents didn’t constantly remind them that they are in a room.

Then, there was an issue of word frequency. Sam liked to play with balls, so he heard the word “ball” many times. He very rarely heard the word “basket," though.

The AI also didn’t come to grips with the idea of movement. “The words associated with movement like “push,” “pull,” “twist”—all the verbs have a temporal element to them,” Vong says. “This is something we are actively working on, learning from videos. We already know that using videos instead of still frames leads to a bit better understanding of things that unfold over time,” he adds. The next version should have learning from continuous experiences sorted out.

Driving lessons

Obviously, teaching AIs to recognize balls in images has already been done before. So why is Vong’s team’s work such a big deal that it landed in Science, not some second-tier AI-specific publication? The answer is its potential to lay the groundwork for future advances.

It’s the first demonstration that AI can effectively learn from limited, individualized experience. It’s the difference between collecting a monstrous database of driving examples from hundreds of thousands of Teslas to teach an AI to drive a car and signing up a single Tesla for a few lessons with a driving instructor. The latter is simpler, faster, and infinitely cheaper.

We’re still far away from teaching machines the way we teach humans. “The model we used was passive; it was not designed to produce actions or provide any responses on its own,” says Vong.

Still, even this system has many avenues for improvement: using a database larger than 1 percent of the kid’s time, or adding information besides text and images—sound, smell, touch, emotional load, and so on could potentially be included. “But all this can be done by expanding the AI we already have and not starting from scratch,” Vong claims.

Which suggests we’re way less special than we thought. “Be it driving or language learning, humans are just way more sample-efficient than AIs. Big part of our work is to figure out what makes us so sample-efficient and how to use that to build smarter machines,” says Vong.

Jacek Krywko is a science and technology writer based in Olsztyn, Poland. He covers space exploration and artificial intelligence research.

In the early 20th century, the deadliest nutrient-related disease in US history ravaged the American South. Pellagra, a disease caused by a deficiency in niacin and/or tryptophan, is marked by the four "D's": diarrhea, dermatitis that leads to gruesome skin plaques, dementia, and death. At its peak during the Great Depression, pellagra killed nearly 7,000 Southerners a year. Between 1906 and 1940, researchers estimate that the epidemic struck roughly 3 million Americans, killing around 100,000.

The deadly epidemic led to voluntary—and eventually mandatory—fortification of wheat and other cereals with niacin (aka Vitamin B3). By the middle of the century, pellagra nearly vanished from the US. But, decades later, the public health triumph may be backfiring. With Americans' diets more reliant than ever on processed, niacin-fortified foods, the average niacin intake in the US is now nearing what's considered the tolerable upper limit of the nutrient, according to a federal health survey. And an extensive study recently published in Nature Medicine suggests that those excess amounts of niacin may be exacerbating cardiovascular disease, increasing risks of heart attacks, strokes, and death.

The study, led by Stanley Hazen, chair of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Sciences at Cleveland Clinic's Lerner Research Institute, connected high blood levels of a breakdown product of niacin—and to a lesser extent, tryptophan—to an elevated risk of major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE). And this elevated risk appears to be independent of known risk factors for those events, such as high cholesterol.

"What’s exciting about these results is that this pathway appears to be a previously unrecognized yet significant contributor to the development of cardiovascular disease," Hazen said in an announcement of the study. It can be measured, he added, and one day could be a new avenue for treatment and prevention.

Metabolite fishing

Hazen and his colleagues didn't start out suspecting niacin could be a culprit in cardiovascular disease. They arrived at that point after fishing through patients' blood plasma. The researchers were carefully inventorying metabolites in the fasting plasma of 1,162 patients who had been evaluated for cardiovascular disease. They were looking for anything that might be linked to a heightened risk of heart attack, stroke, or death in a three-year period that couldn't entirely be explained by other risk factors. Despite advances in identifying and treating cardiovascular disease, researchers have noted that some patients continue to be at risk of serious cardiovascular events despite having their traditional risk factors treated and controlled. Hazen and his colleagues wanted to know why.

The metabolomic trawling came up with an unknown metabolite (signature C₇H₉O₂N₂) that was significantly linked to having a MACE in the three-year period. People who had higher levels of this metabolite circulating in their systems were within the top 75th percentile for relative MACE risk in the cohort. Further work identified the metabolite as actually being two related molecules: 2PY (N1-methyl-2-pyridone-5-carboxamide) and 4PY (N1-methyl-4-pyridone -3-carboxamide)—both the final breakdown products of niacin.

To ensure this unexpected finding wasn't some sort of blip in their cohort, the researchers looked at metabolite data from two other cohorts for validation: A US cohort of 2,331 people and a UK cohort of 832. Again, 4PY and 2PY were linked to increased risk of MACE, although when the risk assessments accounted for kidney function, 2PY was significantly linked to MACE only in the European cohort.

The researchers next turned to genomic analysis to see if any genetic changes could help explain these elevated levels. The genome-wide association study, involving data from nearly 50,000 people, linked elevated 2PY and 4PY levels to a gene that codes for an enzyme called ACMSD (aminocarboxymuconate semialdehyde decarboxylase). This is an enzyme critical in the metabolism of tryptophan, which can also lead to the production of 2PY and 4PY, though to a lesser extent than niacin metabolism. The researchers took this finding to mice, which validated the link. Knocking down ACMSD enzyme levels in mice led to elevated 2PY and 4PY levels.

They next looked for protein markers associated with one of the ACMSD genetic variants linked to high 4PY and 2PY levels, and that led them to vascular adhesion molecule 1 (VCAM-1). This is a molecule that is known to be involved in vascular inflammation, a critical component in cardiovascular disease. VCAM-1 has previously been linked to atherosclerosis, the buildup of plaques in artery walls.

The line from niacin to inflammation

The link between ACMSD and VCAM-1 was a bit of a eureka moment for the researchers, Hazen told Ars over email. The breakdown of tryptophan, where the ACMSD enzyme works, "usually accounts for a small component" of 4PY and 2PY production. But, Hazen said,  "That genetic connection is what led us to the understanding of a link to vascular inflammation."

Connecting all the dots, the researchers took human cells that line the inside of arteries and veins and, in a lab, incubated them with 4PY and 2PY directly. The 4PY, but not the 2PY, induced VCAM-1 levels. When they moved to a mouse study, they saw the same. Further, the study found the initial stages of vascular inflammation in the mice after 4PY injections.

Altogether, the study suggests that the two niacin breakdown products are both clinically associated with cardiovascular disease independent of traditional risk factors, and also linked to vascular inflammation, the researchers concluded.

The study has limitations. For one, the researchers don't have any information on the dietary niacin intake of the people in their cohorts. While niacin intake is generally high in the US, Hazen noted that many factors can influence 4PY and 2PY levels, such as tryptophan breakdown. The cohorts in the study are also enriched for people with cardiovascular disease and of European-ancestry, making it unclear if all of the findings translate to people of more ethnicities and with low cardiovascular risk. The plasma samples used in the study were only single snapshots in time. Future studies should look at 4PY and 2PY levels over a longer time frame. So, in short, more work will be needed to extend and validate the findings.

As Hazen and his colleagues put it: " The present studies suggest that further investigation of the links among niacin/NAD supplementation, 4PY and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease are needed." Those investigations could get people rethinking niacin fortification—an intervention to thwart a deadly disease that may have inadvertently spurred another.

A little more than three months after the most recent launch of a Starship vehicle, which ended with both the booster and upper stage being lost in flight, the Federal Aviation Administration has closed its investigation of the mishap.

"SpaceX identified, and the FAA accepts, the root causes and 17 corrective actions documented in SpaceX’s mishap report," the federal agency said in a statement issued Monday. "Prior to the next launch, SpaceX must implement all corrective actions and receive a license modification from the FAA that addresses all safety, environmental and other applicable regulatory requirements."

SpaceX must still submit additional information to the FAA, which is responsible for the safety of people and property on the ground, before the agency completes its review of an application to launch Starship for a third time. The administrator for Commercial Space Transportation at the Federal Aviation Administration, Kelvin Coleman, said last week that early- to mid-March is a reasonable timeline for the regulatory process to conclude.

A launch attempt is likely to follow soon after.

What went wrong

In conjunction with Monday's announcement, SpaceX released details for the first time of what happened to cause the November 18 launch to go awry.

In this update, SpaceX noted that the Super Heavy first stage of the rocket performed nominally, with all 33 Raptor engines on this massive rocket igniting successfully. The booster then performed a full-duration burn to reach stage separation. At this point, the upper stage executed a successful "hot staging" maneuver in which the Starship stage separated from the booster while some of the booster's engines were still firing.

For the Super Heavy booster, the next step was to perform a series of burns to make a soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico. As part of the initial burn, 13 of the rocket's engines were intended to fire.

"During this burn, several engines began shutting down before one engine failed energetically, quickly cascading to a rapid unscheduled disassembly of the booster," SpaceX said. "The vehicle breakup occurred more than three and a half minutes into the flight at an altitude of ~90 km over the Gulf of Mexico."

The problem was subsequently linked to a problem with supplying liquid oxygen to the Raptor engines.

"The most likely root cause for the booster RUD was determined to be filter blockage where liquid oxygen is supplied to the engines, leading to a loss of inlet pressure in engine oxidizer turbopumps that eventually resulted in one engine failing in a way that resulted in loss of the vehicle," the company stated. "SpaceX has since implemented hardware changes inside future booster oxidizer tanks to improve propellant filtration capabilities and refined operations to increase reliability."

Starship vents

As Super Heavy was experiencing these problems, the six Raptor engines on the Starship upper stage were burning nominally and pushing the vehicle along a flight path intended to take it nearly two-thirds of the way around Earth before splashing down near Hawaii. However, at about seven minutes after liftoff, a large vent of liquid oxygen occurred. There was excess liquid oxygen on the vehicle, SpaceX said, to gather data representative of future payload deployment missions. It needed to be released before Starship splashed down.

"A leak in the aft section of the spacecraft that developed when the liquid oxygen vent was initiated resulted in a combustion event and subsequent fires that led to a loss of communication between the spacecraft’s flight computers," the company said. "This resulted in a commanded shut down of all six engines prior to completion of the ascent burn, followed by the Autonomous Flight Safety System detecting a mission rule violation and activating the flight termination system, leading to vehicle breakup."

At the time, the vehicle had reached an altitude of 150 km, well into outer space, and had achieved a velocity of about 24,000 km/h. This is just short of orbital velocity, which is 28,000 km/h.

In its statement, SpaceX said it was implementing changes to the Super Heavy and Starship stages to account for these issues. The company is also seeking to improve the overall performance of Starship, with the addition of a new electronic Thrust Vector Control system for Starship’s upper stage Raptor engines and more rapid propellant loading operations prior to launch.

SpaceX has four Starships in complete, or nearly complete, build stages. Should the next flight go smoothly, the company could begin to launch the world's largest rocket on a more frequent basis.

Time is running out for the historic Odysseus lander that made a soft touchdown on the Moon last Thursday evening.

In an update posted on Monday morning, the company that built the spacecraft, Intuitive Machines, said, "[W]e believe flight controllers will continue to communicate with Odysseus until Tuesday morning." This is because the lander, which is tipped over on its side, will only be able to collect solar energy for a limited period of time.

Originally, the company had hoped to operate its privately developed lunar lander on the surface for a week or longer. But now, that will no longer be possible due to the limited ability of Odysseus to gather solar energy and remain powered on. As the Sun dips closer to the horizon, and with the two-week-long lunar night coming, the spacecraft will, effectively, freeze to death.

On its side

The shorter-than-anticipated lifetime is due to the lander's position on the surface. On Friday, during a news conference, Intuitive Machines' chief executive, Steve Altemus, said the company believed Odysseus had come down to the lunar surface in a vertical configuration, as anticipated.

However, for reasons that Altemus did not entirely explain, the lander came down a bit faster than anticipated—6 mph (2.7 m/s) instead of 2 mph (0.9 m/s). Still, this pace, about the same as a moderate walk, was within the tolerances of the vehicle's landing legs and structures to withstand. The problem is that the vehicle also had a lateral motion of about 2 mph, when it was supposed to come straight down.

Thus, as the vehicle descended to the Moon, it is possible that one or more landing legs may have been snagged by the lunar surface before the vehicle touched down. "It might have fractured that landing gear and tipped over," Altemus said.

Based on the information available, the vehicle is lying horizontal but somewhat elevated off the ground. Intuitive Machines knew this, Altemus said, because the solar panels on the sides of the vehicle were able to gather solar power. This meant the body of the vehicle had to be somewhat raised above the surface. It's possible, therefore, that the top of the vehicle tipped over onto a small boulder.

Altemus said on Friday that the company was attempting to orient a solar array at the top of the vehicle to gather sunlight in addition to the panels on its side.

It seems like this operation was unsuccessful, as the lander's solar arrays will only be able to gather enough energy to operate through Tuesday morning.

Data desired

Intuitive Machines received a valuable assist from a NASA spacecraft orbiting the Moon, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which flew over the landing site this weekend. From this imagery, NASA was able to determine a precise landing spot for the vehicle: 80.13 degrees south latitude, 1.44 degrees east longitude, at an elevation of 8,461 feet (2,579 meters).

Notably, the spacecraft landed in a crater where the terrain was sloped at 12 degrees, which may have contributed to its tipping over.

During the news conference on Friday, Altemus and the company's chief technology officer, Tim Crain, said they expected to be able to conduct most of the science missions on board the lander despite its sideways configuration. "Best guess, we expect to get most of the mission data down once we stabilize our configuration," Crain said.

However, at the time, the company was still planning to operate the lander through this week. It is unclear that there will be enough time to get all of that data down between now and Tuesday morning. The company did not provide any updates on this on Monday.

A success, or no?

Another critical question is whether operators will be able to download images of Odysseus on the surface of the Moon. To date, Intuitive Machines has not published photos from the Moon's surface. There remains some hope, however, that a CubeSat camera developed by students at Embry Riddle, EagleCam, will be deployed and activated before Odysseus' power runs out.

So what are we to make of this? Is Odysseus a success or a failure?

The mission has achieved some notable firsts. No privately developed spacecraft has ever made a soft landing on the Moon before, and it is important that Intuitive Machines has been able to maintain contact with the lander for several days. And at 80 degrees south, no spacecraft has ever made a soft landing so close to a lunar pole.

Although Intuitive Machines is not going to achieve all of the mission's objectives, getting down to the Moon in one piece was, unquestionably, the achievement by which Odysseus and its builders should be judged.

Good morning. It's February 26, and today's image highlights the core of a (relatively) nearby supernova.

In the astronomy community, SN 1987A has somewhat legendary status. The first observable light from this exploding star in the Large Magellanic Cloud reached Earth in February, almost 37 years ago to the day. It was the first supernova that astronomers were able to observe and study with modern telescopes. It was still discussed in reverent terms a few years later when I was an undergraduate student studying astronomy at the University of Texas.

One of the enduring mysteries of the supernova is that astronomers have been unable to find its collapsed core, where they would expect to see a neutron star—an ultra-dense object that results from the supernova explosion of a massive star. In recent years, ground-based telescopes have found hints of this collapsed core, but now the James Webb Space Telescope has found emission lines that almost certainly must come from a newly born neutron star.

The astronomical details can be found here. It's a nice validation of our understanding of supernovae.

I would also like to acknowledge that the Daily Telescope has been anything but "daily" of late. This is due to a confluence of several factors, including a lot of travel and work on other projects, including four features in the last month or so. I've had to put some things on the back-burner. I don't want to stop producing these articles, but I also can't commit to writing one every day. Maybe it should be renamed? For now, I'm just going to try to do my best. I appreciate those who have written to ask where the Daily Telescope has been—well, all of you except the person who wrote a nasty note.

Source: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, et. al.