Beth Washington – Page 27

It’s hunting season in orbit as Russia’s killer satellites mystify skywatchers

anti-satellite tests, Features, military space, National Reconnaissance Office, russia, Science, Space, US Space Force / Beth Washington / July 11, 2025

“Once more, we play our dangerous game—a game of chess—against our old adversary.”

In this pool photograph distributed by the Russian state media agency Sputnik, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin gives a speech during the Victory Day military parade at Red Square in central Moscow on May 9, 2025. Credit: Yacheslav Prokofyev/Pool/AFP via Getty Images

Russia is a waning space power, but President Vladimir Putin has made sure he still has a saber to rattle in orbit.

This has become more evident in recent weeks, when we saw a pair of rocket launches carrying top-secret military payloads, the release of a mysterious object from a Russian mothership in orbit, and a sequence of complex formation-flying maneuvers with a trio of satellites nearly 400 miles up.

In isolation, each of these things would catch the attention of Western analysts. Taken together, the frenzy of maneuvers represents one of the most significant surges in Russian military space activity since the end of the Cold War. What’s more, all of this is happening as Russia lags further behind the United States and China in everything from rockets to satellite manufacturing. Russian efforts to develop a reusable rocket, field a new human-rated spacecraft to replace the venerable Soyuz, and launch a megaconstellation akin to SpaceX’s Starlink are going nowhere fast.

Russia has completed just eight launches to orbit so far this year, compared to 101 orbital attempts by US launch providers and 36 from China. This puts Russia on pace for the fewest number of orbital launch attempts since 1961, the year Soviet citizen Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly in space.

For the better part of three decades, Russia’s space program could rely on money from Western governments and commercial companies to build rockets, launch satellites, and ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The money tap dried up after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia also lost access to Ukrainian-made components to go into their launch vehicles and satellites.

Chasing a Keyhole

Amid this retrenchment, Russia is targeting what’s left of its capacity for innovation in space toward pestering the US military. US intelligence officials last year said they believed Russia was pursuing a project to place a nuclear weapon in space. The detonation of a nuclear bomb in orbit could muck up the space environment for years, indiscriminately disabling countless satellites, whether they’re military or civilian.

Russia denied that it planned to launch a satellite with a nuclear weapon, but the country’s representative in the United Nations vetoed a Security Council resolution last year that would have reaffirmed a nearly 50-year-old ban on placing weapons of mass destruction into orbit.

While Russia hasn’t actually put a nuclear bomb into orbit yet, it’s making progress in fielding other kinds of anti-satellite systems. Russia destroyed one of its own satellites with a ground-launched missile in 2021, and high above us today, Russian spacecraft are stalking American spy satellites and keeping US military officials on their toes with a rapid march toward weaponizing space.

The world’s two other space powers, the United States and China, are developing their own “counter-space” weapons. But the US and Chinese militaries have largely focused on using their growing fleets of satellites as force multipliers in the terrestrial domain, enabling precision strikes, high-speed communications, and targeting for air, land, and naval forces. That is starting to change, with US Space Force commanders now openly discussing their own ambitions for offensive and defensive counter-space weapons.

Three of Russia’s eight orbital launches this year have carried payloads that could be categorized as potential anti-satellite weapons, or at least prototypes testing novel technologies that could lead to one. (For context, three of Russia’s other launches this year have gone to the International Space Station, and two launched conventional military communications or navigation satellites.)

One of these mystery payloads launched on May 23, when a Soyuz rocket boosted a satellite into a nearly 300-mile-high orbit perfectly aligned with the path of a US spy satellite owned by the National Reconnaissance Office. The new Russian satellite, designated Kosmos 2588, launched into the same orbital plane as an American satellite known to the public as USA 338, which is widely believed to be a bus-sized KH-11, or Keyhole-class, optical surveillance satellite.

A conceptual drawing of a KH-11 spy satellite, with internal views, based on likely design similarities to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: Giuseppe De Chiara/CC BY-SA 3.0

The governments of Russia and the United States use the Kosmos and USA monikers as cover names for their military satellites.

While their exact design and capabilities are classified, Keyhole satellites are believed to provide the sharpest images of any spy satellite in orbit. They monitor airfields, naval ports, missile plants, and other strategic sites across the globe. In the zeitgeist of geopolitics, China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are the likeliest targets for the NRO’s Keyhole satellites. To put it succinctly, Keyhole satellites are some of the US government’s most prized assets in space.

Therefore, it’s not surprising to assume a potential military adversary might want to learn more about them or be in a position to disable or destroy them in the event of war.

Orbital ballet

A quick refresher on orbital mechanics is necessary here. Satellites orbit the Earth in flat planes fixed in inertial space. It’s not a perfect interpretation, but it’s easiest to understand this concept by imagining the background of stars in the sky as a reference map. In the short term, the position of a satellite’s orbit will remain unchanged on this reference map without any perturbation. For something in low-Earth orbit, Earth’s rotation presents a different part of the world to the satellite each time it loops around the planet.

It takes a lot of fuel to make changes to a satellite’s orbital plane, so if you want to send a satellite to rendezvous with another spacecraft already in orbit, it’s best to wait until our planet’s rotation brings the launch site directly under the orbital plane of the target. This happens twice per day for a satellite in low-Earth orbit.

That’s exactly what Russia is doing with a military program named Nivelir. In English, Nivelir translates to “dumpy level”—an optical instrument used by builders and surveyors.

The launch of Kosmos 2588 in May was precisely timed for the moment Earth’s rotation brought the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia underneath the orbital plane of the NRO’s USA 338 Keyhole satellite. Launches to the ISS follow the same roadmap, with crew and cargo vehicles lifting off at exactly the right time—to the second—to intersect with the space station’s orbital plane.

Since 2019, Russia has launched four satellites into bespoke orbits to shadow NRO spy satellites. None of these Russian Nivelir spacecraft have gotten close to their NRO counterparts. The satellites have routinely passed dozens of miles from one another, but the similarities in their orbits would allow Russia’s spacecraft to get a lot closer—and theoretically make physical contact with the American satellite. The Nivelir satellites have even maneuvered to keep up with their NRO targets when US ground controllers have made small adjustments to their orbits.

“This ensures that the orbital planes do not drift apart,” wrote Marco Langbroek, a Dutch archaeologist and university lecturer on space situational awareness. Langbroek runs a website cataloguing military space activity.

This is no accident

There’s reason to believe that the Russian satellites shadowing the NRO in orbit might be more than inspectors or stalkers. Just a couple of weeks ago, another Nivelir satellite named Kosmos 2558 released an unknown object into an orbit that closely mirrors that of an NRO spy satellite named USA 326.

We’ve seen this before. An older Nivelir satellite, Kosmos 2542, released a sub-satellite shortly after launching in 2019 into the same orbital plane as the NRO’s USA 245 satellite, likely a KH-11 platform similar to the USA 338 satellite now being shadowed by Kosmos 2588.

After making multiple passes near the USA 245 spacecraft, Kosmos 2542’s sub-satellite backed off and fired a mysterious projectile in 2020 at a speed fast enough to damage or destroy any target in its sights. US military officials interpreted this as a test of an anti-satellite weapon.

Now, another Russian satellite is behaving in the same way, with a mothership opening up to release a smaller object that could in turn reveal its own surprise inside like a Matryoshka nesting doll. This time, however, the doll is unnesting nearly three years after launch. With Kosmos 2542, this all unfolded within months of arriving in space.

The NRO’s USA 326 satellite launched in February 2022 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. It is believed to be an advanced electro-optical reconnaissance satellite, although the circumstances of its launch suggest a design different from the NRO’s classic Keyhole spy satellites. Credit: SpaceX

In just the last several days, the smaller craft deployed by Kosmos 2558—designated “Object C”—lowered its altitude to reach an orbit in resonance with USA 326, bringing it within 60 miles (100 kilometers) of the NRO satellite every few days.

While US officials are worried about Russian anti-satellite weapons, or ASATs, the behavior of Russia’s Nivelir satellites is puzzling. It’s clear that Russia is deliberately launching these satellites to get close to American spy craft in orbit, a retired senior US military space official told Ars on background.

“If you’re going to launch a LEO [low-Earth orbit] satellite into the exact same plane as another satellite, you’re doing that on purpose,” said the official, who served in numerous leadership positions in the military’s space programs. “Inclination is one thing. We put a bunch of things into Sun-synchronous orbits, but you have a nearly boundless number of planes you can put those into—360 degrees—and then you can go down to probably the quarter-degree and still be differentiated as being a different plane. When you plane-match underneath that, you’re doing that on purpose.”

But why?

What’s not as obvious is why Russia is doing this. Lobbing an anti-satellite, or counter-space, weapon into the same orbital plane as its potential target ties Russia’s hands. Also, a preemptive strike on an American satellite worth $1 billion or more could be seen as an act of war.

“I find it strange that the Russians are doing that, that they’ve invested their rubles in a co-planar LEO counter-space kind of satellite,” the retired military official said. “And why do I say that? Because when you launch into that plane, you’re basically committed to that plane, which means you only have one potential target ever.”

A ground-based anti-satellite missile, like the one Russia tested against one of its own satellites in 2021, could strike any target in low-Earth orbit.

“So why invest in something that is so locked into a target once you put it up there, when you have the flexibility of a ground launch case that’s probably even cheaper?” this official told Ars. “I’d be advocating for more ground-launched ASATs if I really wanted the flexibility to go after new payloads, because this thing can never go after anything new.”

“The only way to look at it is that they’re sending us messages. You say, ‘Hey, I’m going to just annoy the hell out of you. I’m going to put something right on your tail,'” the official said. “And maybe there’s merit to that, and they like that. It doesn’t make sense from a cost-benefit or an operational flexibility perspective, if you think about it, to lock in on a single target.”

Nevertheless, Russia’s Nivelir satellites have shown they could fire a projectile at another spacecraft in orbit, so US officials don’t dismiss the threat. Slingshot Aerospace, a commercial satellite tracking and analytics firm, went straight to the point in its assessment: “Kosmos 2588 is thought to be a Nivelir military inspection satellite with a suspected kinetic weapon onboard.”

Langbroek agrees, writing that he is concerned that Russia might be positioning “dormant” anti-satellite weapons within striking distance of NRO spy platforms.

“To me, the long, ongoing shadowing of what are some of the most prized US military space assets, their KH-11 Advanced Enhanced Crystal high-resolution optical IMINT (imaging intelligence) satellites, is odd for ‘just’ an inspection mission,” Langbroek wrote.

American pilot Francis Gary Powers, second from right, in a Moscow courtroom during his trial on charges of espionage after his U-2 spy plane was shot down while working for the CIA. Credit: Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images

The US military’s ability to spy over vast swaths of Russian territory has been a thorn in Russia’s side since the height of the Cold War.

“They thought they had the edge and shot down Gary Powers,” the retired official said, referring to the Soviet Union’s shoot-down of an American U-2 spy plane in 1960. “They said, ‘We’re going to keep those Americans from spying on us.’ And then they turn around, and we’ve got spy satellites. They’ve always hated them since the 1960s, so I think there’s still this cultural thing out there: ‘That’s our nemesis. We hate those satellites. We’re just going to fight them.'”

Valley of the dolls

Meanwhile, the US Space Force and outside analysts are tracking a separate trio of Russian satellites engaged in a complex orbital dance with one another. These satellites, numbered Kosmos 2581, 2582, and 2583, launched together on a single rocket in February.

While these three spacecraft aren’t shadowing any US spy satellites, things got interesting when one of the satellites released an unidentified object in March in a similar way to how two of Russia’s Nivelir spacecraft have deployed their own sub-satellites.

Kosmos 2581 and 2582 came as close as 50 meters from one another while flying in tandem, according to an analysis by Bart Hendrickx published in the online journal The Space Review earlier this year. The other member of the trio, Kosmos 2583, released its sub-satellite and maneuvered around it for about a month, then raised its orbit to match that of Kosmos 2581.

Finally, in the last week of June, Kosmos 2582 joined them, and all three satellites began flying close to one another, according to Langbroek, who called the frenzy of activity one of the most complex rendezvous and proximity operations exercises Russia has conducted in decades.

Higher still, two more Russian satellites are up to something interesting after launching on June 19 on Russia’s most powerful rocket. After more than 30 years in development, this was the first flight of Russia’s Angara A5 rocket, with a real functioning military satellite onboard, following four prior test launches with dummy payloads.

The payload Russia’s military chose to launch on the Angara A5 is unusual. The rocket deployed its primary passenger, Kosmos 2589, into a peculiar orbit hugging the equator and ranging between approximately 20,000 (12,500 miles) and 51,000 kilometers (31,700 miles) in altitude.

In this orbit, Kosmos 2589 completes a lap around the Earth about once every 24 hours, giving the satellite a synchronicity that allows it to remain nearly fixed in the sky over the same geographic location. These kinds of geosynchronous, or GEO, orbits are usually circular, with a satellite maintaining the same altitude over the equator.

The orbits of Kosmos 2589 and its companion satellite, illustrated in green and purple, bring the two Russian spacecraft through the geostationary satellite belt twice per day. Credit: COMSPOC

But Kosmos 2589 is changing altitude throughout its day-long orbit. Twice per day, on the way up and back down, Kosmos 2589 briefly passes near a large number of US government and commercial satellites in more conventional geosynchronous orbits but then quickly departs the vicinity. At a minimum, this could give Russian officials the ability to capture close-up views of American spy satellites.

Then, a few days after Kosmos 2589 reached orbit last month, commercial tracking sensors detected a second object nearby. Sound familiar? This new object soon started raising its altitude, and Kosmos 2589 followed suit.

Aiming higher

Could this be the start of an effort to extend the reach of Russian inspectors or anti-satellite weapons into higher orbits after years of mysterious activity at lower altitudes?

Jim Shell, a former NRO project manager and scientist at Air Force Space Command, suggested the two satellites seem positioned to cooperate with one another. “Many interesting scenarios here such as ‘spotter shooter’ among others. Certainly something to keep eyes on!” Shell posted Saturday on X.

COMSPOC, a commercial space situational awareness company, said the unusual orbit of Kosmos 2589 and its companion put the Russian satellites in a position to, at a minimum, spy on Western satellites in geosynchronous orbit.

“This unique orbit, which crosses two key satellite regions daily, may aid in monitoring objects in both GEO and graveyard orbits,” COMSPOC wrote on X. “Its slight 1° inclination could also reduce collision risks. While the satellite’s mission remains unclear, its orbit suggests interesting potential roles.”

Historically, Russia’s military has placed less emphasis on operating in geosynchronous orbit than in low-Earth orbit or other unique perches in space. Due to their positions near the equator, geosynchronous orbits are harder to reach from Russian spaceports because of the country’s high latitude. But Russia’s potential adversaries, like the United States and Europe, rely heavily on geosynchronous satellites.

Other Russian satellites have flown near Western communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit, likely in an attempt to eavesdrop on radio transmissions.

“So it is interesting that they may be doing a GEO inspector,” the retired US military space official told Ars. “I would be curious if that’s what it is. We’ve got to watch. We’ve got to wait and see.”

If you’re a fan of spy techno-thrillers, this all might remind you of the plot from The Hunt for Red October, where a new state-of-the-art Russian submarine leaves its frigid port in Murmansk with orders to test a fictional silent propulsion system that could shake up the balance of power between the Soviet and American navies.

Just replace the unforgiving waters of the North Atlantic Ocean with an environment even more inhospitable: the vacuum of space.

A few minutes into the film, the submarine’s commander, Marko Ramius, played by Sean Connery, announces his orders to the crew. “Once more, we play our dangerous game, a game of chess, against our old adversary—the American Navy.”

Today, nearly 40 years removed from the Cold War, the old adversaries are now scheming against one another in space.

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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Pro basketball player and 4 youths arrested in connection to ransomware crimes

Biz & IT, crime, lapsus$, law enforcement, ransomware, scattered spider, Security / Beth Washington / July 11, 2025

Authorities in Europe have detained five people, including a former Russian professional basketball player, in connection with crime syndicates responsible for ransomware attacks.

Until recently, one of the suspects, Daniil Kasatkin, played for MBA Moscow, a basketball team that’s part of the VTB United League, which includes teams from Russia and other Eastern European countries. Kasatkin also briefly played for Penn State University during the 2018–2019 season. He has denied the charges.

Unrelated ransomware attacks

The AFP and Le Monde on Wednesday reported that Kasatkin was arrested and detained on June 21 in France at the request of US authorities. The arrest occurred as the basketball player was at the de Gaulle airport while traveling with his fiancée, whom he had just proposed to. The 26-year-old has been under extradition arrest since June 23, Wednesday’s news report said.

US prosecutors accuse Kasatkin of having negotiated ransom payments with organizations that had been hacked by an unnamed ransomware syndicate responsible for 900 different breaches. A US arrest warrant said he is wanted for “conspiracy to commit computer fraud” and “computer fraud conspiracy.”

An attorney for Kasatkin said his client is innocent of all charges.

“He bought a second-hand computer,” the attorney told reporters. The attorney continued:

He did absolutely nothing. He’s stunned. He’s useless with computers and can’t even install an application. He didn’t touch anything on the computer. It was either hacked, or the hacker sold it to him to act under the cover of another person.

US authorities are currently in the process of extraditing Kasatkin.

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Everything tech giants will hate about the EU’s new AI rules

AI, AI Act, AI risks, AI safety, AI training, Artificial Intelligence, copyright infringement, European Union, Google, Meta, microsoft, openai, piracy, Policy / Beth Washington / July 10, 2025

The code also details expectations for AI companies to respect paywalls, as well as robots.txt instructions restricting crawling, which could help confront a growing problem of AI crawlers hammering websites. It “encourages” online search giants to embrace a solution that Cloudflare is currently pushing: allowing content creators to protect copyrights by restricting AI crawling without impacting search indexing.

Additionally, companies are asked to disclose total energy consumption for both training and inference, allowing the EU to detect environmental concerns while companies race forward with AI innovation.

More substantially, the code’s safety guidance provides for additional monitoring for other harms. It makes recommendations to detect and avoid “serious incidents” with new AI models, which could include cybersecurity breaches, disruptions of critical infrastructure, “serious harm to a person’s health (mental and/or physical),” or “a death of a person.” It stipulates timelines of between five and 10 days to report serious incidents with the EU’s AI Office. And it requires companies to track all events, provide an “adequate level” of cybersecurity protection, prevent jailbreaking as best they can, and justify “any failures or circumventions of systemic risk mitigations.”

Ars reached out to tech companies for immediate reactions to the new rules. OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft declined to comment. A Google spokesperson confirmed that the company is reviewing the code, which still must be approved by the European Commission and EU member states amid expected industry pushback.

“Europeans should have access to first-rate, secure AI models when they become available, and an environment that promotes innovation and investment,” Google’s spokesperson said. “We look forward to reviewing the code and sharing our views alongside other model providers and many others.”

These rules are just one part of the AI Act, which will start taking effect in a staggered approach over the next year or more, the NYT reported. Breaching the AI Act could result in AI models being yanked off the market or fines “of as much as 7 percent of a company’s annual sales or 3 percent for the companies developing advanced AI models,” Bloomberg noted.

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Ars Live recap: Climate science in a rapidly changing world

Berkeley Earth, climate change, Earth science, global temperatures, Science / Beth Washington / July 10, 2025

The conversation then moved to the record we have of the Earth’s surface temperatures and the role of Berkeley Earth in providing an alternate method of calculating those. While the temperature records were somewhat controversial in the past, those arguments have largely settled down, and Berkeley Earth played a major role in helping to show that the temperature records have been reliable.

Lately, those temperatures have been unusually high, crossing 1.5° C above pre-industrial conditions for the first time and remaining elevated for months at a stretch. Scientists have been coming up with a number of explanations and figuring out how to test them. Hausfather described those tests and what we’re learning about how these things might be influencing the trajectory of our warming.

From there, we moved on to user questions, which addressed issues like tipping points, the potential use of geoengineering, and what things Hausfather would most like to see in terms of better data and new questions to answer. For details on these issues and the answers to viewer questions, see the video above. We also have a full transcript of the conversation.

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Inside Brembo’s brake factory, where technology is making better brakes

brembo, Cars, Le Mans / Beth Washington / July 10, 2025

“Ultimately, the more cooling holes, the lower the temperature of the disc,” Miller said. “You have mechanical wear between the disc and the pad, and 350˚ Celsius and below you have a lot of dust, which physically wears the disc. At higher temperature ranges, the dust between the pad and the disc creates friction. That results in less wear and less impact.”

The shift to technology

While manufacturing is the visible side of the brakes process, CEO Daniele Schillaci emphasizes the role of technology. In the last three years alone, Brembo has hired more than 100 software engineers in Italy, China, India, and the US (some in Silicon Valley).

“The automotive business is in a very deep transformation phase with new technology, software, AI, and electrification,” Schillaci said. “Until a couple of years ago, Brembo was a very nice company building cast iron discs, aluminum calipers, and carbon ceramic for racing. But when it came to software, Brembo wasn’t top of mind.”

Cast iron discs are cooled a bit differently. Brembo

That’s changing, as the manufacturer has poured money and resources into its newest offering, a software-controlled product called Sensify. Billed as the first fluid-free braking system that continuously controls and supervises each wheel’s braking, Sensify integrates software and mechatronics, combining mechanical, electrical, computer, and robotics engineering with code.

Brembo sees Sensify as a significant breakthrough that represents a new standard in the automotive industry, and the company built the software and AI in-house. While some outlets are describing it as brake-by-wire technology, which debuted more than 20 years ago, Schillaci says it goes way beyond that.

“Sensify is more than brake-by-wire,” Schillaci said. “Brembo has been collecting data from its test benches for many years. With this data, combined with our internally built algorithm, Brembo has increased its ability to read the data and understand the impulse in the braking system at each corner. The car will stay stable, without vibration, even in emergency braking situations.”

As racing evolves, parts manufacturers will have to as well. Brembo, like the rest of the industry, aims to stay on top of the shift and use the latest tools to remain successful.

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RFK Jr. barred registered Democrats from being vaccine advisors, lawsuit says

ACIP, anti-vaccine, COVID-19 vaccines, health, HHS, robert f kennedy jr, vaccines / Beth Washington / July 9, 2025

The lawsuit was filed by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American College of Physicians (ACP), the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), the Massachusetts Public Health Alliance, the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, and a Jane Doe, who is a pregnant physician.

The group’s lawsuit aims to overturn Kennedy’s unilateral decision to drop the CDC’s recommendations that healthy children and pregnant people get COVID-19 vaccines. The medical groups argue that Kennedy’s decision—announced in a video on social media on May 27—violates the Administrative Procedure Act for being arbitrary and capricious.

Specifically, Kennedy made the decision unilaterally, without consulting the CDC or anyone on ACIP, entirely bypassing the decadeslong evidence-based process ACIP uses for developing vaccine recommendations that set standards and legal requirements around the country. Further, the changes are not supported by scientific evidence; in fact, the data is quite clear that pregnancy puts people at high risk of severe COVID-19, and vaccination protects against dire outcomes for pregnant people and newborns. Kennedy has not explained what prompted the decision and has not pointed to any new information or recommendations to support the move.

“Existential threat”

The medical groups say the decision has caused harms. Pregnant patients are being denied COVID-19 vaccines. Patients are confused about the changes, requiring clinicians to spend more time explaining the prior evidence-based recommendation. The conflict between Kennedy’s decision and the scientific evidence is damaging trust between some patients and doctors. It’s also making it difficult for doctors to stock and administer the vaccines and creating uncertainty among patients about how much they may have to pay for them.

In making the claims, the medical groups offer a sweeping review of all of the damaging decisions Kennedy has made since taking office—from canceling a flu shot awareness campaign, spreading misinformation about measles vaccines amid a record-breaking outbreak, and clawing back $11 billion in critical public health funds to wreaking havoc on ACIP.

The lead lawyer representing the groups, Richard Hughes IV, a partner at Epstein Becker Green, did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.

But in a statement Monday, Hughes said that “this administration is an existential threat to vaccination in America, and those in charge are only just getting started. If left unchecked, Secretary Kennedy will accomplish his goal of ridding the United States of vaccines, which would unleash a wave of preventable harm on our nation’s children.”

RFK Jr. barred registered Democrats from being vaccine advisors, lawsuit says Read More »

Tuesday Telescope: Webb and Hubble team up to reveal spectacular star clusters

daily telescope, Space, tuesday telescope / Beth Washington / July 8, 2025

Welcome to the Tuesday Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light—a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’ll take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Open clusters of stars—which consist of dozens up to a few thousand stars—are an interesting tool for astronomers to study the Universe.

That’s because all of the stars in such a cluster formed more or less at the same time, allowing astronomers to compare different types of stars, in terms of size and composition, which are all of a similar age. This is useful for understanding how different kinds of stars evolve over time.

Some of these open clusters are pretty famous, such as the Pleiades cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters. This is relatively close to Earth, just 444 light-years away. Others are much more distant, such as NGC 460 and NGC 456. They reside in a nearby galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud, and are the subject of today’s post.

NASA has shared side-by-side views of these clusters taken in visible light by the Hubble Space Telescope and in infrared light by the James Webb Space Telescope. Hubble’s image captures the glowing, ionized gas as stellar radiation produces what look like bubbles in the clouds of gas and dust, whereas Webb highlights the clumps and delicate filamentary structures of dust.

Today’s image combines the two into a single composite, based on 12 overlapping observations. It’s quite spectacular.

Source: NASA

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.

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What would a cheap, Apple A18-powered MacBook actually be good at?

Apple, MacBook, MacBook Air / Beth Washington / July 8, 2025

Op-ed: A Mac with an iPhone chip inside could be great—for the right audience.

The 2018 MacBook Air, which still lives on today as the low-cost M1 MacBook Air. Credit: Valentina Palladino

Some Apple rumors just don’t go away, hanging around in perpetuity either because they reflect things that Apple is actually testing in its labs or because hope springs eternal. A HomePod-like device with a screen? A replacement for the dear, departed 27-inch iMac? Touchscreen MacBooks? The return of TouchID fingerprint scanning via a sensor located beneath a screen? Maybe these things are coming, but they ain’t here yet.

However, few rumors have had the longevity or staying power of “Apple is planning a low-cost MacBook,” versions of which have been circulating since at least the late-2000s netbook craze. And yet, despite seismic shifts in just about everything—three distinct processor instruction sets, two CEOs, innumerable design changes, and global trade upheaval—Apple’s cheapest modern laptops have started around $1,000 for more than two decades.

Last week, supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo (whose Apple predictions aren’t always correct but whose track record is better than your garden variety broken-clock prognosticators) kicked up another round of these rumors, claiming that Apple was preparing to manufacture a new low-cost MacBook based on the iPhone’s A18 Pro chip. Kuo claims it will come in multiple colors, similar to Apple’s lower-cost A16 iPad, and will use a 13-inch screen.

MacRumors chipped in with its own contribution, claiming that a “Mac17,1” model it had found listed in an older macOS update was actually that A18 Pro MacBook model, apparently far enough along in development that Apple’s beta operating systems were running on it.

The last round of “cheap MacBook” rumors happened in late 2023 (also instigated by Kuo, but without the corroboration from Apple’s own software). As we wrote then, Apple’s control over its own chips could make this kind of laptop more plausible. But if it existed, what would this laptop be good for? Who could buy it instead of a MacBook Air, and who would want to stick to Apple’s current $999 status quo? To commemorate the “budget MacBook” idea becoming infinitesimally more likely, let’s ruminate on those questions a bit.

Good for: Basic computing

The A18 Pro combines two high-performance CPU cores, four high-efficiency CPU cores, and six GPU cores. Assuming this A18 Pro MacBook would ship with that fully enabled version of the chip—not a guarantee, especially if Apple is trying to cut costs—that’s two big CPU cores, two little CPU cores, and between two and four GPU cores fewer than the basic Apple M4.

But as pointed out by Jason Snell at Sixcolors, the A18 Pro actually far outstrips the old M1 in single-core processor benchmarks and essentially matches it in both multicore and graphics benchmarks—despite having fewer cores, the other architectural improvements Apple has made over a few generations have helped elevate its performance into a performance category that would still probably read as sufficiently Mac-like for most people.

I still use an M1 MacBook Air with some regularity, and nearly five years on, its combination of performance and efficiency still strikes a really good balance for basic computing. I’m not using it to play games or edit 8K videos or transcode my media library. But for Messages? Safari? Photos? Google Chrome? Microsoft Word? Slack? For bread-and-butter computing, including office work and communication, I don’t especially miss the extra speed of my Mac Studio’s M2 Max, or even the faster M4 chip in Apple’s latest MacBook Air.

Good for: All-portable use

No one knows what design Apple would use for a hypothetical low-cost MacBook, though past precedent and the 13-inch screen rumor would suggest that Apple could continue to roll with the old 2018-vintage MacBook Air design (“old shell with new guts” being Apple’s standard formula for this kind of thing).

But whatever the company does, the 13-inch MacBook Air is still a great all-rounder and a good combination of size and speed for people whose laptop is a purely portable computer that floats from room to room in their house rather than traveling for work or getting docked on a desk.

There are MacBooks that will never see an external display; there are MacBooks that will never crop or edit a photo; there are MacBooks whose USB-C ports will never be plugged into anything other than their charger. As the MacBook Air has gotten more capable—it has added a 15-inch screen size, more performance, more RAM, and more display outputs in the last couple of years, closing a lot of the gap between the Air and the cheapest of the MacBook Pros—it has left more space underneath it for a cheaper model that can serve an audience that doesn’t need those kinds of features.

Bad for: Heavy multitaskers

Apple’s A18 Pro is smaller and slower than a chip like the M3 or M4, but it’s as fast or faster than the M1. That could make it a decent fit for a low-cost Mac, though it might not be enough for power users. Credit: Apple

The A18 Pro’s single-core performance is going to keep things feeling snappy when you’re just hopping between a couple of apps at a time, but having two fewer high-performance cores and two fewer high-efficiency cores than the M4 is going to take a big bite out of your multicore performance—how your Mac feels when you’re doing something that uses all of its processor cores at once, especially for an extended period of time.

An A18 MacBook—or any Mac built around an A-series iPhone processor—could also have other limitations because of its handheld pedigree. We already know from the iPhone 16 Pro that the A18 Pro only supports 10Gbps USB 3 connections, rather than full Thunderbolt speeds as the M-class processors do. But do they include display controllers that could be used to extend a Mac’s desktop to even a single external display? The A17 Pro chip used in the latest iPad mini doesn’t support extended displays; it could be because it’s an older chip, or it could be because Apple doesn’t spend precious transistors on adding features that its phones don’t need.

Another big question mark here is how much RAM the laptop will have. Would it stick to the same 8GB that the iPhone versions of the processors use? Or could Apple package up a version with 16GB or even 12GB of RAM instead? If the point is to keep the laptop cheap, Apple’s costs would go up when paying for the RAM itself and when asking TSMC to package purpose-built versions of the A18 with extra RAM that could only be used for MacBooks.

It would feel like a step back, since Apple just bumped entry-level Macs up to 16GB of RAM for the first time last fall. But dipping back down to 8GB could be the thing that makes the most financial sense for this kind of laptop.

Bad for: Future-proofing

If you’re already spending a lot of money on new hardware, it’s best to buy a little more than you think you’ll currently need, at least if your budget will bear it. That’s because you don’t know how demanding future software will get, or what new apps you’ll get into that you weren’t thinking of when you bought it. (Case in point: One Ars Technica staffer bought an M1 Mac mini with 8GB of RAM and needed to replace it before its time because 8GB of RAM wasn’t enough to handle Logic Pro when they decided to start experimenting with it.)

Even stuck with 8GB of RAM, an A18 MacBook would serve a lot of people well, particularly the class of casual Internet browsers and email checkers who want a Mac because they’re comfortable with its interface but for whom an Apple M4 would be overkill. But it could be iffy as a starter laptop for someone who wants to experiment with new software. And they’d be less useful hand-me-downs, because the person having the laptop handed down to them could already have needs that outstrip the modest hardware.

Good for: Apple’s lineup

Apple’s iPhone and iPad lineups both include products that were purpose-built to cost a couple hundred dollars less than its flagships (right now, the $599 iPhone 16e and the A16-powered 11th-generation iPad). Even the Apple Watch has a cheaper “SE” version that’s sold alongside the Series 10 and Ultra 2.

These products have always been slow to adopt new designs and lack certain features that Apple uses to differentiate its midrange and high-end offerings. But they still get the basics right and integrate into buyers’ individual Apple ecosystems just as well as the more expensive products do. A cheap MacBook still syncs with iCloud; it still gives you easy access to iMessage and your photo library; it still runs the same software and apps, even if it doesn’t always do it as quickly.

You could argue that 2020’s M1 MacBook Air currently fills that niche, even though Apple itself no longer offers it for sale through its own site—you can head to Walmart and buy one right now for $649 if you wanted. But buying a nearly 5-year-old MacBook design also means you’re probably buying fewer macOS versions and security updates, potentially lopping years off the useful life of your new-to-you laptop.

Replacing that M1 Air, possibly with an A18-powered version that uses the exact same design, fills a gap in the Mac lineup that Apple has filled in all of its other product families. Buyers would be able to rest easier knowing they were buying a modern product with years of software support ahead of it (Apple sometimes cuts off its “cheap” devices a year or two before higher-end ones, but it varies from device to device). And Apple has already proven that it can make and sell a MacBook that serves basic needs for way less than $1,000, without (apparently) totally wrecking demand for new MacBook Airs and Pros.

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

What would a cheap, Apple A18-powered MacBook actually be good at? Read More »

F1 in Britain: Terrible English summer weather equals entertaining race

Cars, F1, Formula 1 / Beth Washington / July 7, 2025

Maybe Bernie Ecclestone was right about fitting racetracks with sprinklers.

Oscar Piastri’s McLaren emerges from the spray during the 2025 British Grand Prix at Silverstone in England. Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

The heat dome that oppressed much of Europe has broken. Not a drop of rain marred the 24 hour races at Le Mans, the Nürburgring, or Spa-Francorchamps, held unusually over consecutive weekends this June. Similarly, last weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix took place under scorching skies that were baking the Tyrolean mountains. No such luck for the vast crowds at Silverstone attending the British Grand Prix this past weekend, who definitely needed their waterproofs. On the plus side, the addition of rain certainly made things interesting.

Like many British race circuits, Silverstone was a former World War II airbase. Originally home to Wellington Bombers, it’s very exposed to the wind, which was gusting at times during practice and qualifying, making life complicated for the drivers. Lewis Hamilton made the home crowd smile by topping the time charts during FP1. Hamilton has struggled to get to grips with his new Ferrari for much of this season, but at Silverstone he looked much more comfortable, finishing FP2 less than a 10th of a second behind his teammate, Charles Leclerc, although neither could match McLaren’s Lando Norris for outright speed.

On Saturday, it was Red Bull’s Max Verstappen who rose to the top, snatching pole position from the McLarens of Oscar Piastri and Norris by about a 10th of a second. George Russell’s Mercedes was competitive in the colder temperatures, securing fourth on the grid ahead of the Ferraris of Hamilton and Leclerc. Mercedes’ young rookie, Kimi Antonelli, qualified seventh but would start 10th as a result of a penalty acquired in Austria, and Haas rookie Oliver Bearman put in the eighth-fastest time, but ignoring a red flag during Saturday’s final practice session landed him with a 10-place grid penalty. As it was, Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso lined up seventh for the race, followed by Pierre Gasly’s Alpine, Carlos Sainz in the first Williams, and then Antonelli rounding out the top 10.

Ferrari's British driver Lewis Hamilton on the grid ahead of the Formula One British Grand Prix at the Silverstone motor racing circuit in Silverstone, central England, on July 6, 2025. — Lewis Hamilton has more wins at Silverstone than any other F1 driver. Credit: ANDREJ ISAKOVIC/AFP via Getty Images

Race day was rainy, with the F2 feature race proving a good preview for the main event. A heavy shower during the F1 pre-race buildup saw everyone choose to take the formation lap on intermediate tires, although sections of the track were dry enough that Russell, Leclerc, Antonelli, Bearman, and Racing Bull’s Isack Hadjar all diverted to the pit lane at the end of the formation lap for slick tires. That was the wrong gamble—the last few turns were far too wet for slicks, as they would soon find out.

Who wants to bet?

Up front, Verstappen had placed the wrong bet, too, opting for a dry weather setup that was light on downforce. The first few laps were interrupted by virtual safety car periods as drivers collided or spun off, with others like Leclerc choosing to take the opportunity to stop for tires—another bad bet, as it turned out.

Verstappen was passed first by Piastri, then Norris got by as the rain returned. Verstappen was clearly not having a good time and had an off-track excursion that was greeted with a roar by the partisan spectators. But the Red Bull got back past Norris in the pits, as McLaren was forced to double-stack its cars, losing Norris a second or two in the process.

The main problem with running F1 races in the rain is the lack of visibility. The aerodynamic downforce generated by the cars sends up huge rooster tails of spray from the rear diffusers, with more water pumped into the airflow by the treaded intermediate or wet tires. And so, on lap 14, a full safety car period was declared, with the cars circulating behind the Mercedes AMG coupe at a reduced pace.

The safety car is present during the Formula 1 Qatar Airways Grand Prix of Great Britain at the Silverstone Circuit in Towcester, England, on July 6, 2024. — Did Piastri violate safety car procedure? He didn’t think so, but the stewards did. Credit: Jon Hobley | MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images

The race went green for about a lap until Hadjar crashed heavily in the spray, hitting the back of Antonelli before even seeing the Mercedes in front of him. A mistimed brake application by Piastri just as this safety car period ended saw Verstappen briefly pass him on track before the green flag was waved—normally this would garner the passing car a penalty, but in this case the stewards chose to penalize Piastri with a 10 second time penalty, to be served at his next pitstop. With his teammate Norris just a few seconds behind, this robbed the Australian of the win, gifting it to the other McLaren instead.

Verstappen, like the stewards, thought Piastri was playing games behind the safety car, and it evidently unsettled the Dutch driver, forcing him into an error like in Spain a few weeks ago. The reigning world champion fell as low as 10th, recovering to fifth place by the end.

The second half of the race saw various drivers gamble on slick tires, betting the track was dry enough to build enough tire temperature to go faster than the grooved intermediate rubber. Fernando Alonso went first on lap 38, followed by George Russell, both of whom struggled initially. Waiting a few more laps proved wiser, but even by lap 44 the very fast Stowe corner looked like it was wet enough to get a driver’s attention.

Norris delighted his many fans in attendance by taking victory ahead of Piastri, passing his teammate easily, while the Australian was held stationary for his penalty before his team was allowed to change the car’s tires. That closed the gap in the standings between them to just eight points.

Well deserved, well overdue

NORTHAMPTON, ENGLAND - JULY 06: Third placed Nico Hulkenberg of Germany and Stake F1 Team Kick Sauber celebrates on the podium with his trophy during the F1 Grand Prix of Great Britain at Silverstone Circuit on July 06, 2025 in Northampton, England. — I can’t imagine anyone in the paddock was displeased to see Nico Hulkenberg finally earn a podium. Credit: Rudy Carezzevoli/Getty Images

But the biggest smiles were surely for the man in third place. Sauber’s Nico Hulkenberg got past Lance Stroll, then held a hard-charging Lewis Hamilton at bay for the final chapter of the race to secure third place. It was the first podium finish for Sauber since 2012, and the very first for Hulkenberg, who waited a record 239 races to achieve the result. The highly rated German driver, who won the 24 Hours of Le Mans with Porsche on a spare weekend in 2015, has never had access to front-line F1 machinery, but even so, this result was well overdue.

When he was still in charge and wanted to get his own way, Bernie Ecclestone would often throw out a number of implausible-sounding or extreme ideas for the sport in order to force teams to back the less-extreme idea he really wanted implemented. One of those extreme ideas—one he brought up back in 2011—was to fit F1 tracks with sprinklers that would come on at random, and while we never saw it happen, the added chaos of a wet-then-drying track has proved time and again to create entertaining racing. Maybe we should give it a go?

Damson Idris, one of the stars of the recent F1 movie, was on hand to wave the checkered flag at Silverstone. A second viewing of the film reveals that the script is actually even cheesier than I first thought, and a number of plot holes continue to bug me—if the Rolex 24 at Daytona is at the end of January, how come the F1 season was halfway through, for example? Then again, I also rewatched Days of Thunder to see if I was hasty in placing F1 ahead of the NASCAR movie in my recent review, but I found enough to remain satisfied that I got those two in the right order. Normally, technical accuracy plays a back seat to a good plot. For F1 The Movie, it’s mostly the other way around.

Jonathan is the Automotive Editor at Ars Technica. He has a BSc and PhD in Pharmacology. In 2014 he decided to indulge his lifelong passion for the car by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute and launching Ars Technica’s automotive coverage. He lives in Washington, DC.

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Rocket Report: Japan’s workhorse booster takes a bow; you can invest in SpaceX now

discovery, rocket report, Shuttle, Space / Beth Washington / July 4, 2025

“We will be able to industrialize Zephyr production up to 50 units per year.”

Europe’s first reusable rocket main stage demonstrator, Themis, is being transported to its launch pad at Esrange Space Centre, Sweden. Credit: ESA/ArianeGroup

Welcome to Edition 8.01 of the Rocket Report! Today’s edition will be a little shorter than normal because, for one day only, we celebrate fake rockets—fireworks—rather than the real thing. For our American readers, we hope you have a splendid Fourth of July holiday weekend. For our non-American readers, you may be wondering what the heck is happening in our country right now. Alas, making sense of all this is beyond the scope of this humble little newsletter.

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.

Will Orbex ever launch an orbital rocket? Orbex, a launch services company based in the United Kingdom, has announced the postponement of its first orbital launch to 2026 due to infrastructure limitations and other issues, Orbital Today reports. At the Paris Air Show at Le Bourget, Orbex chief executive Miguel Bello Mora announced that the company is now targeting next year for the liftoff of its Prime rocket from SaxaVord in Scotland. He said the delay is partly due to the limited launch infrastructure at SaxaVord and a “bottleneck” in site operations.

The real issue, revealed … Orbex is developing the Prime rocket, but progress has been very slow. The company is now a decade old and has shown off relatively little hardware. It’s difficult to believe the company will launch anytime soon. Tellingly, Orbex recently told the UK government it would need to raise a further 120 million pounds ($163 million) from private investors over the next four years to realize its ambitions. That seems like a huge ask. This newsletter has been skeptical of Orbex before, and this latest update only affirms that skepticism.

Themis demonstrator arrives in Sweden. Developed by ArianeGroup, a 30-meter launch vehicle intended to demonstrate reusable launch capability has arrived at the Esrange Space Center in northern Sweden, SVT reports. The initial phase of the test campaign will include wet-dress rehearsals and hot-fire tests, to be followed by a “hop test” that will occur no earlier than the end of this year.

Hopping higher and higher … Based on experience from these initial tests, the program aims to fly the Themis demonstrator on higher and progressively more advanced tests, not dissimilar to what SpaceX did with its Grasshopper vehicle a little more than a decade ago in Texas. Eventually, Europe aims to use lessons learned from Themis to develop a reusable rocket similar to the Falcon 9 vehicle. (submitted by bjelkeman)

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Electron launches twice in two days. Rocket Lab’s “Symphony in the Stars” mission lifted off on Saturday, June 28, from Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand. The mission was the second of two launches from the same launch site in less than 48 hours, a new record for turnaround time, the company said. It’s a sign of a maturing company that Rocket Lab can turn between launches so quickly.

Reaching an impressive cadence … “Symphony in the Stars” was Rocket Lab’s tenth Electron mission of 2025 and its 68th launch overall as the company continues to increase the cadence of Electron launches. “The future of space is built on proven performance, and Electron continues to deliver against a stacked launch manifest this year,” Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck said in a news release. It’s been a good year for the firm, with 100 percent mission success.

Latitude announces expansion plans. In an emailed news release, the French launch startup Latitude said this week that it has secured a strategic industrial site south of Reims on the former AstraZeneca production facility. This site offers development potential of 270,000 sq. feet. By investing over 50 million euros ($58 million) in this site, Latitude aims to deliver on its promise of developing a small rocket with a high launch cadence.

Seeking to scale … “Thanks to this location, we will be able to industrialize Zephyr production up to 50 units per year while maintaining control over our growth pace,” said Isabelle Valentin, chief operating officer of the company. Latitude aims to launch its Zephyr rocket in 2026 from the Guiana Space Centre, in French Guiana, for the first time. The company also said it has signed two major contracts, including a strategic mission for the European Defence Fund and a contract with the French space agency, CNES, for microgravity demonstrations.

Japan’s H2A rocket makes final flight. Japan’s flagship H2A rocket lifted off for the final time on Sunday from the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture, successfully concluding a 24-year run that has defined the nation’s space capabilities, The Japan Times reports. The rocket’s 50th and final mission carried the GOSAT-GW, a government-developed hybrid environmental observation satellite.

Out with the old, in with the new … Jointly developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the 53-meter rocket debuted in 2001 and quickly became the workhorse of the country’s space program. It had an excellent record, with 49 successes out of 50 launch attempts. The decision to retire the H2A comes amid rising global competition in the space launch industry, where cost-efficiency has become a key differentiator. Japan hopes its new H3 rocket, although expendable, will be more cost competitive.

SpaceX to win DOD satellite contract. The Trump administration plans to cancel a fleet of orbiting data relay satellites managed by the Space Development Agency and replace it with a secretive network that, so far, relies primarily on SpaceX’s Starlink Internet constellation, Ars reports. While details of the Pentagon’s plan remain secret, the White House proposal would commit $277 million in funding to kick off a new program called “pLEO SATCOM” or “MILNET.” The funding line for a proliferated low-Earth orbit satellite communications network hasn’t appeared in a Pentagon budget before, but plans for MILNET already exist in a different form.

X marks the spot … Meanwhile, the budget proposal for fiscal year 2026 would eliminate funding for a new tranche of data relay satellites from the Space Development Agency. The pLEO SATCOM or MILNET program would replace them, providing crucial support for the Trump administration’s proposed Golden Dome missile defense shield. While SpaceX’s role isn’t mentioned explicitly in the Pentagon’s budget documents, the MILNET program is already on the books, and SpaceX is the lead contractor. It has been made public in recent months, after years of secrecy, although many details remain unclear.

Prometheus rocket engine undergoes testing. European rocket builder ArianeGroup announced this week that it completed a series of Prometheus rocket engine test ignitions in late June, marking a key milestone in the program, European Spaceflight reports. Developed under a European Space Agency contract, Prometheus is a reusable rocket engine capable of producing around 100 metric tons of thrust.

Launching soon from Sweden … It is designed to be manufactured at a fraction of the cost of current European engines, with the use of additive manufacturing playing a key role in reducing production costs. According to ArianeGroup, the multiple ignitions over a single day represent a “significant advancement in the engine’s development.” Prometheus will initially power the Themis demonstrator (see item above). Its first commercial application will be the two-stage Maia rocket, developed by MaiaSpace, an ArianeGroup subsidiary.

Do you want to buy SpaceX tokens? SpaceX remains a privately held company, which means that us mere mortals cannot invest in the launch firm. (To be clear, as a space reporter, I do not invest in any space companies. To do so would be unethical.) The DealBook newsletter has a report on a new trend in “tokens” that allows ordinary investors to invest in privately traded companies, including SpaceX.

Not technically equity … Vlad Tenev, Robinhood’s chief executive, said that the tokens are not technically “equity,” but that they “effectively give retail investors exposure to these private assets.” Robinhood isn’t alone: The startup Republic is offering tokens meant to track the equity performance of SpaceX. Those will be sold to US investors via a loophole in a 2012 securities law. However, DealBook warns, unregulated private-company tokens could lead to a fragmented and less transparent ecosystem for investments, making it harder for regulators to protect the public.

Texas politicians seek to move shuttle Discovery. This week, a political effort to relocate the space shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian to Space Center Houston has been merged with the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which the US Senate passed on Tuesday, Ars reports. Among the bill’s many provisions is $85 million for the Bring the Space Shuttle Home Act. Sponsored by US Sen John Cornyn, R–Texas, the bill calls for Discovery to be removed from its home of the past 13 years, the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, and put it on display at Space Center Houston, the official visitor complex for NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas.

Underestimating transport costs … The Senate version of the bill provides “no less than $5 million” for the “transportation of the space vehicle” and the remainder to go toward the construction of a facility to house it. The original text of the Bring the Space Shuttle Home Act called for the NASA administrator and the Smithsonian to jointly develop a plan for moving Discovery prior to appropriations being made by Congress. It is unclear whether the total amount allocated by the Senate would be enough; the National Air and Space Museum provided Congress with an estimate of $200 million to $300 million for the move. Speaking frankly, and as a resident of Houston, this bill is absurd, and the shuttle Discovery absolutely belongs in the Smithsonian. NASA is being told to cut science missions left and right, but funding can be found for this?

Next New Glenn launch will target Mars. Blue Origin is making steady progress toward the second launch of its New Glenn rocket, which could occur sometime this fall, Ars reports. Publicly, the company has said this second launch will take place no earlier than August 15. This is now off the table. One source told Ars that a mid- to late-September launch date was “realistic,” but another person said late October or November was more likely.

A big landing on tap … Blue Origin has been mum about the payload that will fly on this rocket, but multiple people have told Ars that the current plan is to launch NASA’s ESCAPADE mission on the second launch of New Glenn. This mission encompasses a pair of small spacecraft that will be sent to Mars to study the red planet’s magnetosphere. After ESCAPADE, Blue Origin has several missions tentatively plotted out. A much-anticipated mission to land Blue Origin’s Mk1 lander on the Moon could take place during the first half of next year.

Next three launches

July 3: Soyuz 2.1a | Progress MS-31 | Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan | 19: 32 UTC

July 8: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-28 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 05: 48 UTC

July 15: Eris | Initial test flight | Bowen Orbital Spaceport, Australia | 21: 30 UTC

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

Rocket Report: Japan’s workhorse booster takes a bow; you can invest in SpaceX now Read More »

Rice could be key to brewing better non-alcoholic beer

beer, chemistry, fermentation, Science / Beth Washington / July 3, 2025

small glass of light colored beer with a nice foam head — Rice enhances flavor profiles for nonalcoholic beer, reduces fermentation time, and may contribute to flavor stability. Credit: Paden Johnson/CC BY-NC-SA

He and his team—including Christian Schubert, a visiting postdoc from the Research Institute for Raw Materials and Beverage Analysis in Berlin—brewed their own non-alcoholic beers, ranging from those made with 100 percent barley malt to ones made with 100 percent rice. They conducted a volatile chemical analysis to identify specific compounds present in the beers and assembled two sensory panels of tasters (one in the US, one in Europe) to assess aromas, flavors, and mouthfeel.

The panelists determined the rice-brewed beers had less worty flavors, and the chemical analysis revealed why: lower levels of aldehyde compounds. Instead, other sensory attributes emerged, most notably vanilla or buttery notes. “If a brewer wanted a more neutral character, they could use nonaromatic rice,” the authors wrote. Along with brewing beers with 50 percent barley/50 percent rice, this would produce non-alcoholic beers likely to appeal more broadly to consumers.

The panelists also noted that higher rice content resulted in beers with a fatty/creamy mouthfeel—likely because higher rice content was correlated with increased levels of larger alcohol molecules, which are known to contribute to a pleasant mouthfeel. But it didn’t raise the alcohol content above the legal threshold for a nonalcoholic beer.

There were cultural preferences, however. The US panelists didn’t mind worty flavors as much as the European tasters did, which might explain why the former chose beers brewed with 70 percent barley/30 percent rice as the optimal mix. Their European counterparts preferred the opposite ratio (30 percent barley/70 percent rice). The explanation “may lie in the sensory expectations shaped by each region’s brewing traditions,” the authors wrote. Fermentation also occurred more quickly as the rice content increased because of higher levels of glucose and fructose.

The second study focused on testing 74 different rice cultivars to determine their extract yields, an important variable when it comes to an efficient brewing process, since higher yields mean brewers can use less grain, thereby cutting costs. This revealed that cultivars with lower amylose content cracked more easily to release sugars during the mashing process, producing the highest yields. And certain varieties also had lower gelatinization temperatures for greater ease of processing.

International Journal of Food Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1080/10942912.2025.2520907 (About DOIs)

Journal of the American Society of Brewing Chemists, 2025. DOI: 10.1080/03610470.2025.2499768

Rice could be key to brewing better non-alcoholic beer Read More »

AT&T rolls out Wireless Account Lock protection to curb the SIM-swap scourge

Biz & IT, fraud, Security, sim swap, wireless carrier / Beth Washington / July 3, 2025

AT&T is rolling out a protection that prevents unauthorized changes to mobile accounts as the carrier attempts to fight a costly form of account hijacking that occurs when a scammer swaps out the SIM card belonging to the account holder.

The technique, known as SIM swapping or port-out fraud, has been a scourge that has vexed wireless carriers and their millions of subscribers for years. An indictment filed last year by federal prosecutors alleged that a single SIM swap scheme netted $400 million in cryptocurrency. The stolen funds belonged to dozens of victims who had used their phones for two-factor authentication to cryptocurrency wallets.

Wireless Account Lock debut

A separate scam from 2022 gave unauthorized access to a T-Mobile management platform that subscription resellers, known as mobile virtual network operators, use to provision services to their customers. The threat actor gained access using a SIM swap of a T-Mobile employee, a phishing attack on another T-Mobile employee, and at least one compromise of an unknown origin.

This class of attack has existed for well over a decade, and it became more commonplace amid the irrational exuberance that drove up the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In some cases, scammers impersonate existing account holders who want a new phone number for their account. At other times, they simply bribe the carrier’s employees to make unauthorized changes.

AT&T rolls out Wireless Account Lock protection to curb the SIM-swap scourge Read More »

Author name: Beth Washington