Author name: Mike M.

solar’s-growth-in-us-almost-enough-to-offset-rising-energy-use

Solar’s growth in US almost enough to offset rising energy use

coal, Energy, hydropower, natural gas, nuclear, Science, solar, US Grid, Wind / /

If you add in nuclear, then the US has reached a grid that is 40 percent emissions-free over the first nine months of 2025. That’s up only 1 percent compared to the same period the year prior. And because coal emits more carbon than natural gas, it’s likely the US will see a net increase in electricity-related emissions this year.

If you would like to have a reason to feel somewhat more optimistic, however, the EIA used the new data to release an analysis of the state of the grid in California, where the production from utility-scale solar has nearly doubled over the last five years, thanks in part to another 17 percent increase so far in 2024.

Through 2023, it was tough to discern any impact of that solar production on the rest of the grid, in part due to increased demand. But since then, natural gas use has dropped considerably (it’s down by 17 percent so far in 2025), placing it at risk of being displaced by solar as the largest source of electricity in California as early as next year. This displacement is happening even as California’s total consumption jumped by 8 percent so far in 2025 compared to the same period last year.

Image of three graphs representing spring electrical use over the last five years. All show a large green bump representing solar generation peaking at mid-day. A fblue line representing battery use is flat on the left, develops wiggles in the middle, then develops into a curve where energy is drawn in during the day and released in the evening.

Massive solar growth plus batteries means less natural gas on California’s grid. Credit: US EIA

The massive growth in solar has also led to overproduction of power in the spring and autumn, when heating/cooling demands are lowest. That, in turn, has led to a surge in battery construction to absorb the cheap power and sell it back after the Sun sets. The impact of batteries was nearly impossible to discern as recently as 2023, but data from May and June of 2025 shows batteries pulling in lots of power at mid-day, and using it in the early evening to completely offset what would otherwise be an enormous surge in the use of natural gas.

Not every state has the sorts of solar resources available to California. But the economics of solar power suggest that other states are likely to experience this sort of growth in the coming years. And, while the Trump administration has been openly hostile to solar power from the moment it took office, so far there is no sign of that hostility at the grid level.

Solar’s growth in US almost enough to offset rising energy use Read More »

russia’s-soyuz-5-will-soon-come-alive.-but-will-anyone-want-to-fly-on-it?

Russia’s Soyuz 5 will soon come alive. But will anyone want to fly on it?

rockets, russia, soyuz-5, Space / /

The Soyuz 5 rocket, also named Irtysh for a river that flows through Russia and Kazakhstan, answers to that purpose. Its first stage is powered by a single RD-171MV engine, which at sea level has three times the thrust of a single Raptor 3 engine, and is part of a family of engines that are the most powerful liquid-fueled rocket engines in the world. The RD-171MV uses only Russian components.

Russian officials also plan to use the Soyuz 5 rocket as the “boost” stage of a super-heavy lift rocket, known as Yenisei, that would be used for a human lunar program. However the Yenisei rocket seems to be one of those Russian space initiatives that is forever mired in a nebulous development stage—often talked about as a national priority, but rarely advanced.

What market is there?

But the Soyuz 5 rocket now is very real, and it should launch within the next month. The question is, what market will it serve? Russia presently has the Soyuz 2, which has about half the lift capacity, for crew and cargo missions to the International Space Station, as well as the launch of smaller spacecraft. There is also the line of Angara rockets that has come online during the last decade.

The Soyuz 5 slots in between the Soyuz 2 and Angara A5 rocket in terms of performance. So what demand is there for a rocket with 18 tons of capacity to low-Earth orbit? One concern is that the number of geostationary satellites launched annually, once the bread and butter of the Proton vehicle, has dropped precipitously.

Another is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has taken Russian rockets off the table for many Western satellite operators. At the same time, international competition in the medium-lift market has stiffened. China has an increasing number of government and commercial options, and India’s launch offerings are growing as well. And for any company or country mostly concerned about price, Russia almost certainly can’t beat the reusable Falcon 9 booster offered by SpaceX.

Russia’s Soyuz 5 will soon come alive. But will anyone want to fly on it? Read More »

vision-pro-m5-review:-it’s-time-for-apple-to-make-some-tough-choices

Vision Pro M5 review: It’s time for Apple to make some tough choices

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A state of the union from someone who actually sort of uses the thing.

The M5 Vision Pro with the Dual Knit Band. Credit: Samuel Axon

With the recent releases of visionOS 26 and newly refreshed Vision Pro hardware, it’s an ideal time to check in on Apple’s Vision Pro headset—a device I was simultaneously amazed and disappointed by when it launched in early 2024.

I still like the Vision Pro, but I can tell it’s hanging on by a thread. Content is light, developer support is tepid, and while Apple has taken action to improve both, it’s not enough, and I’m concerned it might be too late.

When I got a Vision Pro, I used it a lot: I watched movies on planes and in hotel rooms, I walked around my house placing application windows and testing out weird new ways of working. I tried all the neat games and educational apps, and I watched all the immersive videos I could get ahold of. I even tried my hand at developing my own applications for it.

As the months went on, though, I used it less and less. The novelty wore off, and as cool as it remained, practicality beat coolness. By the time Apple sent me the newer model a couple of weeks ago, I had only put the original one on a few times in the prior couple of months. I had mostly stopped using it at home, but I still took it on trips as an entertainment device for hotel rooms now and then.

That’s not an uncommon story. You even see it in the subreddit for Vision Pro owners, which ought to be the home of the device’s most dedicated fans. Even there, people say, “This is really cool, but I have to go out of my way to keep using it.”

Perhaps it would have been easier to bake it into my day-to-day habits if developer and content creator support had been more robust, a classic chicken-and-egg problem.

After a few weeks of using the new Vision Pro hardware refresh daily, it’s clear to me that the platform needs a bigger rethink. As a fan of the device, I’m concerned it won’t get that, because all the rumors point to Apple pouring its future resources into smart glasses, which, to me, are a completely different product category.

What changed in the new model?

For many users, the most notable change here will be something you can buy separately (albeit at great expense) for the old model: A new headband that balances the device’s weight on your head better, making it more comfortable to wear for long sessions.

Dubbed the Dual Knit Band, it comes with an ingeniously simple adjustment knob that can be used to tighten or loosen either the band that goes across the back of your head (similar to the old band) or the one that wraps around the top.

It’s well-designed, and it will probably make the Vision Pro easier to use for many people who found the old model to be too uncomfortable—even though this model is slightly heavier than its predecessor.

The band fit is adjusted with this knob. You can turn it to loosen or tighten one strap, then pull it out and turn it again to adjust the other. Credit: Samuel Axon

I’m one of the lucky few who never had any discomfort problems with the Vision Pro, but I know a bunch of folks who said the pressure the device put on their foreheads was unbearable. That’s exactly what this new band remedies, so it’s nice to see.

The M5 chip offers more than just speed

Whereas the first Vision Pro had Apple’s M2 chip—which was already a little behind the times when it launched—the new one adds the M5. It’s much faster, especially for graphics-processing and machine-learning tasks. We’ve written a lot about the M5 in our articles on other Apple products if you’re interested to learn more about it.

Functionally, this means a lot of little things are a bit faster, like launching certain applications or generating a Persona avatar. I’ll be frank: I didn’t notice any difference that significantly impacted the user experience. I’m not saying I couldn’t tell it was faster sometimes. I’m just saying it wasn’t faster in a way that’s meaningful enough to change any attitudes about the device.

It’s most noticeable with games—both native mixed-reality Vision Pro titles and the iPad versions of demanding games that you can run on a virtual display on the device. Demanding 3D games look and run nicer, in many cases. The M5 also supports more recent graphics advancements like ray tracing and mesh shading, though very few games support them, even in terms of iPad versions.

All this is to say that while I always welcome performance improvements, they are definitely not enough to convince an M2 Vision Pro owner to upgrade, and they won’t tip things over for anyone who has been on the fence about buying one of these things.

The main perk of the new chip is improved efficiency, which is the driving force behind modestly increased battery life. When I first took the M2 Vision Pro on a plane, I tried watching 2021’s Dune. I made it through the movie, but just barely; the battery ran out during the closing credits. It’s not a short movie, but there are longer ones.

Now, the new headset can easily get another 30 or 60 minutes, depending on what you’re doing, which finally puts it in “watch any movie you want” territory.

Given how short battery life was in the original version, even a modest bump like that makes a big difference. That, alongside a marginally increased field of view (about 10 percent) and a new 120 Hz maximum refresh rate for passthrough are the best things about the new hardware. These are nice-to-haves, but they’re not transformational by any means.

We already knew the Vision Pro offered excellent hardware (even if it’s overkill for most users), but the platform’s appeal is really driven by software. Unfortunately, this is where things are running behind expectations.

For content, it’s quality over quantity

When the first Vision Pro launched, I was bullish about the promise of the platform—but a lot of that was contingent on a strong content cadence and third-party developer support.

And as I’ve written since, the content cadence for the first year was a disappointment. Whereas I expected weekly episodes of Apple’s Immersive Videos in the TV app, those short videos arrived with gaps of several months. There’s an enormous wealth of great immersive content outside of Apple’s walled garden, but Apple didn’t seem interested in making that easily accessible to Vision Pro owners. Third-party apps did some of that work, but they lagged behind those on other platforms.

The first-party content cadence picked up after the first year, though. Plus, Apple introduced the Spatial Gallery, a built-in app that aggregates immersive 3D photos and the like. It’s almost TikTok-like in that it lets you scroll through short-form content that leverages what makes the device unique, and it’s exactly the sort of thing that the platform so badly needed at launch.

The Spatial Gallery is sort of like a horizontally-scrolling TikTok for 3D photos and video. Credit: Samuel Axon

The content that is there—whether in the TV app or the Spatial Gallery—is fantastic. It’s beautifully, professionally produced stuff that really leans on the hardware. For example, there is an autobiographical film focused on U2’s Bono that does some inventive things with the format that I had never seen or even imagined before.

Bono, of course, isn’t everybody’s favorite, but if you can stomach the film’s bloviating, it’s worth watching just with an eye to what a spatial video production can or should be.

I still think there’s significant room to grow, but the content situation is better than ever. It’s not enough to keep you entertained for hours a day, but it’s enough to make putting on the headset for a bit once a week or so worth it. That wasn’t there a year ago.

The software support situation is in a similar state.

App support is mostly frozen in the year 2024

Many of us have a suite of go-to apps that are foundational to our individual approaches to daily productivity. For me, primarily a macOS user, they are:

  • Firefox
  • Spark
  • Todoist
  • Obsidian
  • Raycast
  • Slack
  • Visual Studio Code
  • Claude
  • 1Password

As you can see, I don’t use most of Apple’s built-in apps—no Safari, no Mail, no Reminders, no Passwords, no Notes… no Spotlight, even. All that may be atypical, but it has never been a problem on macOS, nor has it been on iOS for a few years now.

Impressively, almost all of these are available on visionOS—but only because it can run iPad apps as flat, virtual windows. Firefox, Spark, Todoist, Obsidian, Slack, 1Password, and even Raycast are all available as supported iPad apps, but surprisingly, Claude isn’t, even though there is a Claude app for iPads. (ChatGPT’s iPad app works, though.) VS Code isn’t available, of course, but I wasn’t expecting it to be.

Not a single one of these applications has a true visionOS app. That’s too bad, because I can think of lots of neat things spatial computing versions could do. Imagine browsing your Obsidian graph in augmented reality! Alas, I can only dream.

You can tell the native apps from the iPad ones: The iPad ones have rectangular icons nested within circles, whereas the native apps fill the whole circle. Credit: Samuel Axon

If you’re not such a huge productivity software geek like me and you use Apple’s built-in apps, things look a little better, but surprisingly, there are still a few apps that you would imagine would have really cool spatial computing features—like Apple Maps—that don’t. Maps, too, is just an iPad app.

Even if you set productivity aside and focus on entertainment, there are still frustrating gaps. Almost two years later, there is still no Netflix or YouTube app. There are decent-enough third-party options for YouTube, but you have to watch Netflix in a browser, which is lower-quality than in a native app and looks horrible on one of the Vision Pro’s big virtual screens.

To be clear, there is a modest trickle of interesting spatial app experiences coming in—most of them games, educational apps, or cool one-off ideas that are fun to check out for a few minutes.

All this is to say that nothing has really changed since February 2024. There was an influx of apps at launch that included a small number of show-stoppers (mostly educational apps), but the rest ranged from “basically the iPad app but with one or two throwaway tech-demo-style spatial features you won’t try more than once” to “basically the iPad app but a little more native-feeling” to “literally just the iPad app.” As far as support from popular, cross-platform apps, it’s mostly the same list today as it was then.

Its killer app is that it’s a killer monitor

Even though Apple hasn’t made a big leap forward in developer support, it has made big strides in making the Vision Pro a nifty companion to the Mac.

From the start, it has had a feature that lets you simply look at a Mac’s built-in display, tap your fingers, and launch a large, resizable virtual monitor. I have my own big, multi-monitor setup at home, but I have used the Vision Pro this way sometimes when traveling.

I had some complaints at the start, though. It could only do one monitor, and that monitor was limited to 60 Hz and a standard widescreen resolution. That’s better than just using a 14-inch MacBook Pro screen, but it’s a far cry from the sort of high-end setup a $3,500 price tag suggests. Furthermore, it didn’t allow you to switch audio between the two devices.

Thanks to both software and hardware updates, that has all changed. visionOS now supports three different monitor sizes: the standard widescreen aspect ratio, a wider one that resembles a standard ultra-wide monitor, and a gigantic, ultra-ultra-wide wrap-around display that I can assure you will leave no one wanting for desktop space. It looks great. Problem solved! Likewise, it will now transfer your Mac audio to the Vision Pro or its Bluetooth headphones automatically.

All of that works not just on the new Vision Pro, but also on the M2 model. The new M5 model exclusively addresses the last of my complaints: You can now achieve higher refresh rates for that virtual monitor than 60 Hz. Apple says it goes “up to 120 Hz,” but there’s no available tool for measuring exactly where it’s landing. Still, I’m happy to see any improvement here.

This is the standard width for the Mac monitor feature… Samuel Axon

Through a series of updates, Apple has turned a neat proof-of-concept feature into something that is genuinely valuable—especially for folks who like ultra-wide or multi-monitor setups but have to travel a lot (like myself) or who just don’t want to invest in the display hardware at home.

You can also play your Mac games on this monitor. I tried playing No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 on it with a controller, and it was a fantastic experience.

This, alongside spatial video and watching movies, is the Vision Pro’s current killer app and one of the main areas where Apple has clearly put a lot of effort into improving the platform.

Stop trying to make Personas happen

Strangely, another area where Apple has invested quite a bit to make things better is in the Vision Pro’s usefulness as a communications and meetings device. Personas—the 3D avatars of yourself that you create for Zoom calls and the like—were absolutely terrible when the M2 Vision Pro came out.

There is also EyeSight, which uses your Persona to show a simulacrum of your eyes to people around you in the real world, letting them know you are aware of your surroundings and even allowing them to follow your gaze. I understand the thought behind this feature—Apple doesn’t want mixed reality to be socially isolating—but it sometimes puts your eyes in the wrong place, it’s kind of hard to see, and it honestly seems like a waste of expensive hardware.

Primarily via software updates, I’m pleased to report that Personas are drastically improved. Mine now actually looks like me, and it moves more naturally, too.

I joined a FaceTime call with Apple reps where they showed me how Personas float and emote around each other, and how we could look at the same files and assets together. It was indisputably cool and way better than before, thanks to the improved Personas.

I can’t say as much for EyeSight, which looks the same. It’s hard for me to fathom that Apple has put multiple sensors and screens on this thing to support this feature.

In my view, dropping EyeSight would be the single best thing Apple could do for this headset. Most people don’t like  it, and most people don’t want it, yet there is no question that its inclusion adds a not-insignificant amount to both the price and the weight, the product’s two biggest barriers to adoption.

Likewise, Personas are theoretically cool, and it is a novel and fun experience to join a FaceTime call with people and see how it works and what you could do. But it’s just that: a novel experience. Once you’ve done it, you’ll never feel the need to do it again. I can barely imagine anyone who would rather show up to a call as a Persona than take the headset off for 30 minutes to dial in on their computer.

Much of this headset is dedicated to this idea that it can be a device that connects you with others, but maintaining that priority is simply the wrong decision. Mixed reality is isolating, and Apple is treating that like a problem to be solved, but I consider that part of its appeal.

If this headset were capable of out-in-the-world AR applications, I would not feel that way, but the Vision Pro doesn’t support any application that would involve taking it outside the home into public spaces. A lot of the cool, theoretical AR uses I can think of would involve that, but still no dice here.

The metaverse (it’s telling that this is the first time I’ve typed that word in at least a year) already exists: It’s on our phones, in Instagram and TikTok and WeChat and Fortnite. It doesn’t need to be invented, and it doesn’t need a new, clever approach to finally make it take off. It has already been invented. It’s already in orbit.

Like the iPad and the Apple Watch before it, the Vision Pro needs to stop trying to be a general-purpose device and instead needs to lean into what makes it special.

In doing so, it will become a better user experience, and it will get lighter and cheaper, too. There’s real potential there. Unfortunately, Apple may not go that route if leaks and insider reports are to be believed.

There’s still a ways to go, so hopefully this isn’t a dead end

The M5 Vision Pro was the first of four planned new releases in the product line, according to generally reliable industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Next up, he predicted, would be a full Vision Pro 2 release with a redesign, and a Vision Air, a cheaper, lighter alternative. Those would all precede true smart glasses many years down the road.

I liked that plan: keep the full-featured Vision Pro for folks who want the most premium mixed reality experience possible (but maybe drop EyeSight), and launch a cheaper version to compete more directly with headsets like Meta’s Quest line of products, or the newly announced Steam Frame VR headset from Valve, along with planned competitors by Google, Samsung, and others.

True augmented reality glasses are an amazing dream, but there are serious problems of optics and user experience that we’re still a ways off from solving before those can truly replace the smartphone as Tim Cook once predicted.

All that said, it looks like that plan has been called into question. A Bloomberg report in October claimed that Apple CEO Tim Cook had told employees that the company was redirecting resources from future passthrough HMD products to accelerate work on smart glasses.

Let’s be real: It’s always going to be a once-in-a-while device, not a daily driver. For many people, that would be fine if it cost $1,000. At $3,500, it’s still a nonstarter for most consumers.

I believe there is room for this product in the marketplace. I still think it’s amazing. It’s not going to be as big as the iPhone, or probably even the iPad, but it has already found a small audience that could grow significantly if the price and weight could come down. Removing all the hardware related to Personas and EyeSight would help with that.

I hope Apple keeps working on it. When Apple released the Apple Watch, it wasn’t entirely clear what its niche would be in users’ lives. The answer (health and fitness) became crystal clear over time, and the other ambitions of the device faded away while the company began building on top of what was working best.

You see Apple doing that a little bit with the expanded Mac spatial display functionality. That can be the start of an intriguing journey. But writers have a somewhat crass phrase: “kill your darlings.” It means that you need to be clear-eyed about your work and unsentimentally cut anything that’s not working, even if you personally love it—even if it was the main thing that got you excited about starting the project in the first place.

It’s past time for Apple to start killing some darlings with the Vision Pro, but I truly hope it doesn’t go too far and kill the whole platform.

Photo of Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon is the editorial lead for tech and gaming coverage at Ars Technica. He covers AI, software development, gaming, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.

Vision Pro M5 review: It’s time for Apple to make some tough choices Read More »

there-may-not-be-a-safe-off-ramp-for-some-taking-glp-1-drugs,-study-suggests

There may not be a safe off-ramp for some taking GLP-1 drugs, study suggests

GLP-1, health, obesity, Tirzepatide, weight loss / /

Of the 308 who benefited from tirzepatide, 254 (82 percent) regained at least 25 percent of the weight they had lost on the drug by week 88. Further, 177 (57 percent) regained at least 50 percent, and 74 (24 percent) regained at least 75 percent. Generally, the more weight people regained, the more their cardiovascular and metabolic health improvements reversed.

Data gaps and potential off-ramps

On the other hand, there were 54 participants of the 308 (17.5 percent) who didn’t regain a significant amount of weight (less than 25 percent.) This group saw some of their health metrics worsen on withdrawal of the drug, but not all—blood pressure increased a bit, but cholesterol didn’t go up significantly overall. About a dozen participants (4 percent of the 308) continued to lose weight after stopping the drug.

The researchers couldn’t figure out why these 54 participants fared so well; there were “no apparent differences” in demographic or clinical characteristics, they reported. It’s clear the topic requires further study.

But, overall, the study offers a gloomy outlook for patients hoping to avoid needing to take anti-obesity drugs for the foreseeable future.

Oczypok and Anderson highlight that the study involved an abrupt withdrawal from the drug. In contrast, many patients may be interested in slowly weaning off the drugs, stepping down dosage levels over time. So far, data on this strategy and the protocols to pull it off have little data behind them. It also might not be an option for patients who abruptly lose access to or insurance coverage for the drugs. Other strategies for weaning off the drugs could involve ramping up physical activity or calorie restriction in anticipation of dropping the drugs, the experts note.

In addition to more data on potential GLP-1 off-ramps, the pair calls for more data on the effects of weight fluctuations from people going on and off the treatment. At least one study has found that the regained weight after intentional weight loss may end up being proportionally higher in fat mass, which could be harmful.

For now, Oczypok and Anderson say doctors should be cautious about talking with patients about these drugs and what the future could hold. “These results add to the body of evidence that clinicians and patients should approach starting [anti-obesity medications] as long-term therapies, just as they would medications for other chronic diseases.”

There may not be a safe off-ramp for some taking GLP-1 drugs, study suggests Read More »

doge-“cut-muscle,-not-fat”;-26k-experts-rehired-after-brutal-cuts

DOGE “cut muscle, not fat”; 26K experts rehired after brutal cuts

department of government efficiency, doge, Donald Trump, elon musk, Policy / /

Government brain drain will haunt US after DOGE abruptly terminated.

Billionaire Elon Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), holds a chainsaw as he speaks at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. Credit: SAUL LOEB / Contributor | AFP

After Donald Trump curiously started referring to the Department of Government Efficiency exclusively in the past tense, an official finally confirmed Sunday that DOGE “doesn’t exist.”

Talking to Reuters, Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor confirmed that DOGE—a government agency notoriously created by Elon Musk to rapidly and dramatically slash government agencies—was terminated more than eight months early. This may have come as a surprise to whoever runs the DOGE account on X, which continued posting up until two days before the Reuters report was published.

As Kupor explained, a “centralized agency” was no longer necessary, since OPM had “taken over many of DOGE’s functions” after Musk left the agency last May. Around that time, DOGE staffers were embedded at various agencies, where they could ostensibly better coordinate with leadership on proposed cuts to staffing and funding.

Under Musk, DOGE was hyped as planning to save the government a trillion dollars. On X, Musk bragged frequently about the agency, posting in February that DOGE was “the one shot the American people have to defeat BUREAUcracy, rule of the bureaucrats, and restore DEMOcracy, rule of the people. We’re never going to get another chance like this.”

The reality fell far short of Musk’s goals, with DOGE ultimately reporting it saved $214 billion—an amount that may be overstated by nearly 40 percent, critics warned earlier this year.

How much talent was lost due to DOGE cuts?

Once Musk left, confidence in DOGE waned as lawsuits over suspected illegal firings piled up. By June, Congress was drawn, largely down party lines, on whether to codify the “DOGE process”—rapidly firing employees, then quickly hiring back whoever was needed—or declare DOGE a failure—perhaps costing taxpayers more in the long term due to lost talent and services.

Because DOGE operated largely in secrecy, it may be months or even years before the public can assess the true cost of DOGE’s impact. However, in the absence of a government tracker, the director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution, Elaine Kamarck, put together what might be the best status report showing how badly DOGE rocked government agencies.

In June, Kamarck joined other critics flagging DOGE’s reported savings as “bogus.” In the days before DOGE’s abrupt ending was announced, she published a report grappling with a critical question many have pondered since DOGE launched: “How many people can the federal government lose before it crashes?”

In the report, Kamarck charted “26,511 occasions where the Trump administration abruptly fired people and then hired them back.” She concluded that “a quick review of the reversals makes clear that the negative stereotype of the ‘paper-pushing bureaucrat’” that DOGE was supposedly targeting “is largely inaccurate.”

Instead, many of the positions the government rehired were “engineers, doctors, and other professionals whose work is critical to national security and public health,” Kamarck reported.

About half of the rehires, Kamarck estimated, “appear to have been mandated by the courts.” However, in about a quarter of cases, the government moved to rehire staffers before the court could weigh in, Kamarck reported. That seemed to be “a tacit admission that the blanket firings that took place during the DOGE era placed the federal government in danger of not being able to accomplish some of its most important missions,” she said.

Perhaps the biggest downside of all of DOGE’s hasty downsizing, though, is a trend in which many long-time government workers simply decided to leave or retire, rather than wait for DOGE to eliminate their roles.

During the first six months of Trump’s term, 154,000 federal employees signed up for the deferred resignation program, Reuters reported, while more than 70,000 retired. Both numbers were clear increases (tens of thousands) over exits from government in prior years, Kamarck’s report noted.

“A lot of people said, ‘the hell with this’ and left,” Kamarck told Ars.

Kamarck told Ars that her report makes it obvious that DOGE “cut muscle, not fat,” because “they didn’t really know what they were doing.”

As a result, agencies are now scrambling to assess the damage and rehire lost talent. However, her report documented that agencies aligned with Trump’s policies appear to have an easier time getting new hires approved, despite Kupor telling Reuters that the government-wide hiring freeze is “over.” As of mid-November 2025, “of the over 73,000 posted jobs, a candidate was selected for only about 14,400 of them,” Kamarck reported, noting that it was impossible to confirm how many selected candidates have officially started working.

“Agencies are having to do a lot of reassessments in terms of what happened,” Kamarck told Ars, concluding that DOGE “was basically a disaster.”

A decentralized DOGE may be more powerful

“DOGE is not dead,” though, Kamarck said, noting that “the cutting effort is definitely” continuing under the Office of Management and Budget, which “has a lot more power than DOGE ever had.”

However, the termination of DOGE does mean that “the way it operated is dead,” and that will likely come as a relief to government workers who expected DOGE to continue slashing agencies through July 2026 at least, if not beyond.

Many government workers are still fighting terminations, as court cases drag on, and even Kamarck has given up on tracking due to inconsistencies in outcomes.

“It’s still like one day the court says, ‘No, you can’t do that,’” Kamarck explained. “Then the next day another court says, ‘Yes, you can.’” Other times, the courts “change their minds,” or the Trump administration just doesn’t “listen to the courts, which is fairly terrifying,” Kamarck said.

Americans likely won’t get a clear picture of DOGE’s impact until power shifts in Washington. That could mean waiting for the next presidential election, or possibly if Democrats win a majority in midterm elections, DOGE investigations could start as early as 2027, Kamarck suggested.

OMB will likely continue with cuts that Americans appear to want, as White House spokesperson Liz Huston told Reuters that “President Trump was given a clear mandate to reduce waste, fraud and abuse across the federal government, and he continues to actively deliver on that commitment.”

However, Kamarck’s report noted polls showing that most Americans disapprove of how Trump is managing government and its workforce, perhaps indicating that OMB will be pressured to slow down and avoid roiling public opinion ahead of the midterms.

“The fact that ordinary Americans have come to question the downsizing is, most likely, the result of its rapid unfolding, with large cuts done quickly regardless of their impact on the government’s functioning,” Kamarck suggested. Even Musk began to question DOGE. After Trump announced plans to appeal an electrical vehicle mandate that the Tesla founder relied on, Musk posted on X, “What the heck was the point of DOGE, if he’s just going to increase the debt by $5 trillion??”

Facing “blowback” over the most unpopular cuts, agencies sometimes rehired cut staffers within 24 hours, Kamarck noted, pointing to the Department of Energy as one of the “most dramatic” earliest examples. In that case, Americans were alarmed to see engineers cut who were responsible for keeping the nation’s nuclear arsenal “safe and ready.” Retention for those posts was already a challenge due to “high demand in the private sector,” and the number of engineers was considered “too low” ahead of DOGE’s cuts. Everyone was reinstated within a day, Kamarck reported.

Alarm bells rang across the federal government, and it wasn’t just about doctors and engineers being cut or entire agencies being dismantled, like USAID. Even staffers DOGE viewed as having seemingly less critical duties—like travel bookers and customer service reps—were proven key to government functioning. Arbitrary cuts risked hurting Americans in myriad ways, hitting their pocketbooks, throttling community services, and limiting disease and disaster responses, Kamarck documented.

Now that the hiring freeze is lifted and OMB will be managing DOGE-like cuts moving forward, Kamarck suggested that Trump will face ongoing scrutiny over Musk’s controversial agency, despite its dissolution.

“In order to prove that the downsizing was worth the pain, the Trump administration will have to show that the government is still operating effectively,” Kamarck wrote. “But much could go wrong,” she reported, spouting a list of nightmare scenarios:

“Nuclear mismanagement or airline accidents would be catastrophic. Late disaster warnings from agencies monitoring weather patterns, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and inadequate responses from bodies such as the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), could put people in danger. Inadequate staffing at the FBI could result in counter-terrorism failures. Reductions in vaccine uptake could lead to the resurgence of diseases such as polio and measles. Inadequate funding and staffing for research could cause scientists to move their talents abroad. Social Security databases could be compromised, throwing millions into chaos as they seek to prove their earnings records, and persistent customer service problems will reverberate through the senior and disability communities.”

The good news is that federal agencies recovering from DOGE cuts are “aware of the time bombs and trying to fix them,” Kamarck told Ars. But with so much brain drain from DOGE’s first six months ripping so many agencies apart at their seams, the government may struggle to provide key services until lost talent can be effectively replaced, she said.

“I don’t know how quickly they can put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” Kamarck said.

Photo of Ashley Belanger

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

DOGE “cut muscle, not fat”; 26K experts rehired after brutal cuts Read More »

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Keep your receipts: Tech firms told to prepare for possible tariff refunds

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Tech firms dare to dream chip tariffs may go away amid rumors of delays.

For months, the Trump administration has warned that semiconductor tariffs are coming soon, leaving the tech industry on pins and needles after a chaotic year of unpredictable tariff regimes collectively cost firms billions.

The semiconductor tariffs are key to Donald Trump’s economic agenda, which is intended to force more manufacturing into the US by making it more expensive to import materials and products. He campaigned on axing the CHIPS Act—which provided subsidies to companies investing in manufacturing chips in the US—complaining that it was a “horrible, horrible thing” to “give hundreds of billions of dollars” away when the US could achieve the same objective by instead taxing companies and “use whatever is left over” of CHIPS funding to “reduce debt.” However, as 2025 winds down, the US president faces pressure on all sides to delay semiconductor tariffs, insiders told Reuters, and it appears that he is considering caving.

According to “two people with direct knowledge of the matter and a third person briefed on the conversations,” US officials have privately told industry and government stakeholders that semiconductor tariffs will likely be delayed.

A fourth insider suggested Trump was hesitant to impose tariffs that could rock the recent US-China trade truce, while Reuters noted that Trump may also be hesitant to announce new tariffs during the holiday shopping season that risk increasing prices of popular consumer tech products. Recently, Trump cut tariffs on grocery items in the face of mounting consumer backlash, so imposing new tariffs now—risking price hikes on laptops, game consoles, and smartphones—surely wouldn’t improve his record-low approval rating.

In April, Trump started threatening semiconductor tariffs as high as 100 percent, prompting a Commerce Department probe into the potential economic and national security impacts of imposing broad chip tariffs. Stakeholders were given 30 days to weigh in, and tech industry associations were quick to urge Trump to avoid imposing broad tariffs that they warned risked setting back US chip manufacturing, ruining US tech competitiveness, and hobbling innovation. The best policy would be no chip tariffs, some industry groups suggested.

Glimmer of hope chip tariffs may never come

Whether Trump would ever give up on imposing broad chip tariffs that he thinks will ensure that the US becomes a world-leading semiconductor hub is likely a tantalizing daydream for companies relieved by rumors that chip tariffs may be delayed. But it’s not completely improbable that he might let this one go.

During Trump’s first term, he threatened tariffs on foreign cars that did not come to pass until his second term. When it comes to the semiconductor tariffs, Trump may miss his chance to act if he’s concerned about losing votes in the midterm elections.

The Commerce Department’s investigation must conclude by December 27, after which Trump has 90 days to decide if he wants to move ahead with tariffs based on the findings.

He could, of course, do nothing or claim to disagree with the findings and seek an alternative path to impose tariffs, but there’s a chance that his own party may add to the pressure to delay them. Trump’s low approval rating is already hurting Republicans in polls, New York Magazine reported, and some are begging Trump to join them on the campaign trail next year to avoid a midterm slump, Politico reported.

For tech companies, the goal is to persuade Trump to either drop or narrowly tailor semiconductor tariffs—and hopefully eliminate the threat of tariffs on downstream products, which could force tech companies to pay double or triple taxes on imports. If they succeed, they could be heading into 2026 with more stable supply chains and even possibly with billions in tariff refunds in their pockets, if the Supreme Court deems Trump’s “emergency” “reciprocal tariffs” illegal.

Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), attended oral arguments in the SCOTUS case, noting on LinkedIn that “business executives have had to contend with over 100 announcements of tariff changes since the beginning of 2025.”

“I hope to see the Supreme Court rule swiftly to provide businesses the certainty they need,” Shapiro said, arguing in a second post that tariffs “cause uncertainty for businesses, snarl supply chains, and drive inflation and higher costs for consumers.”

As tech companies wait to see how the court rules and how Trump responds to the conclusion of the Commerce Department’s probe, uncertainty remains. CTA’s vice president of international trade, Ed Brzytwa, told Ars that the CTA has advised tech firms to keep their receipts and document all tariff payments.

How chip tariffs could raise prices

Without specifying what was incorrect, a White House official disputed Reuters’ reporting that Trump may shift the timeline for announcing semiconductor tariffs, saying simply “that is not true.”

A Commerce Department official said there was “no change” to report, insisting that the “administration remains committed to reshoring manufacturing that’s critical to our national and economic security.”

But neither official shared any details on when tariffs might be finalized, Reuters reported. And the Commerce Department did not respond to Ars’ request for information on when the public could expect to review findings of its probe.

In comments submitted to the Commerce Department, the Semiconductor Industry Association warned that “for every dollar that a semiconductor chip increases in price, products with embedded semiconductors will have to raise their sales price by $3 to maintain their previous margins.” That makes it easy to see how semiconductor tariffs risk significantly raising prices on any product containing a chip, depending how high the tariff rate is, including products like refrigerators, cars, video game consoles, coffee makers, smartphones, and the list goes on.

It’s estimated that chip tariffs could cost the semiconductor industry more than $1 billion. However, the bigger threat to the semiconductor industry would be if the higher prices of US-made chip made it harder to compete with “companies who sell comparable chips at a lower price globally,” SIA reported. Additionally, “higher input costs from tariffs” could also “force domestic companies to divert funds away from R&D,” the group noted. US firms that Trump wants to promote could rapidly lose their edge in such a scenario.

Echoing SIA, the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) warned the Commerce Department that “broad tariffs would significantly increase input costs for a wide range of downstream industries, raising costs for consumers while decreasing revenues for domestic semiconductor producers, the very industry this investigation seeks to protect.”

To avoid harming key US industries, CCIA recommended that any semiconductor tariffs imposed “focus narrowly” on semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment “that are critical for national defense and sourced from countries of concern.” The group also suggested creating high and low-risk categories, so that “low-risk goods, such as the import of commercial-grade printed circuit boards used in consumer electronics from key partners” wouldn’t get hit with taxes that have little to do with protecting US national security.

“US long-term competitiveness in both the semiconductor industry and downstream sectors could be greatly impaired if policy interventions are not carefully calibrated,” CCIA forecasted, warning that everyone would feel the pain, from small businesses to leading AI firms.

Trump’s plan for tariff funds makes no sense, groups say

Trump has been claiming since April that chip tariffs are coming soon, and he continues to use them as leverage in recent deals struck with Korea and Switzerland. But so far, while some countries have managed to negotiate rates as low as 15 percent, the semiconductor industry and downstream sectors remain in the dark on what to expect if and when the day finally comes that broader tariffs are announced.

Avoiding so-called tariff stacking—where products are taxed, as well as materials used in the products—is SIA’s biggest ask. The group “strongly” requested that Trump maintain “as simple of a tariff regime for semiconductors as possible,” given “the far-reaching consequences” the US could face if chip tariffs become as complex and burdensome to tech firms as reciprocal tariffs.

SIA also wants Trump to consider offering more refunds, perhaps offering to pay back “duties, taxes, and fees paid on imported parts, components, and materials that are incorporated in an exported product.”

Such a policy “would ensure the United States remains at the forefront of global chip technology,” SIA claimed, by making sure that tariffs collected “remain available for investments in expanding US manufacturing capacity and advanced research and development, as opposed to handed over to the US Treasury.”

Rather than refunding firms, Trump has instead proposed sharing tariffs as dividends, perhaps sending $2,000 checks to low and middle-income families. However, CNN spoke with experts who said the math doesn’t add up, making the prospect that Trump could send stimulus checks seem unlikely. He has also suggested the funds—which were projected to raise $158.4 billion in total revenue in 2025, CNN reported—could be used to reduce national debt.

Trump’s disdain for the CHIPS Act, casting it as a handout to tech firms, makes it seem unlikely that he’ll be motivated to refund firms or offer new incentives. Some experts doubt that he’ll make it easy for firms to get refunds of tariffs if the Supreme Court drafted such an order, or if a SCOTUS loss triggered a class action lawsuit.

CTA’s Shapiro said on LinkedIn that he’s “not sure” which way the SCOTUS case will go, but he’s hoping the verdict will come before the year’s end. Like industry groups urging Trump to keep semiconductor tariffs simple, Shapiro said he hoped Trump would streamline the process for any refunds coming. In the meantime, CTA advises firms to keep all documents itemizing tariffs paid to ensure firms aren’t stiffed if Trump’s go-to tariff regimes are deemed illegal.

“If plaintiffs prevail in this case, I hope to see the government keep it simple and ensure that retailers and importers get their tariff payments refunded swiftly and with as few hoops to jump through as possible,” Shapiro said.

Photo of Ashley Belanger

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Keep your receipts: Tech firms told to prepare for possible tariff refunds Read More »

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Chris Hemsworth and dad fight Alzheimer’s with a trip down memory lane

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Millions of people around the world are living with the harsh reality of Alzheimer’s disease, which also significantly impacts family members. Nobody is immune, as A-list actor Chris Hemsworth discovered when his own father was recently diagnosed. The revelation inspired Hemsworth to embark on a trip down memory lane with his father, which took them to Australia’s Northern Territory. The experience was captured on film for A Road Trip to Remember, a new documentary film from National Geographic.

Director Tom Barbor-Might had worked with Hemsworth on the latter’s documentary series Limitless, also for National Geographic. Each episode of Limitless follows Hemsworth on a unique challenge to push himself to the limits, augmented with interviews with scientific experts on such practices as fasting, extreme temperatures, brain-boosting, and regulating one’s stress response. Barbor-Might directed the season 1 finale, “Acceptance,” which was very different in tone, dealing with the inevitability of death and the need to confront one’s own mortality.

“It was really interesting to see Chris in that more intimate personal space, and he was great at it,” Barbor-Might told Ars. “He was charming, emotional, and vulnerable, and it was really moving. It felt like there was more work to be done there.” When Craig Hemsworth received his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to explore that personal element further.

Hemsworth found a scientific guide for this journey in Suraj Samtani, a clinical psychologist at the New South Wales Center for Healthy Brain Aging who specializes in dementia. Recent research has shown that one’s risk of dementia can be reduced by half by maintaining regular social interactions, and, even after a diagnosis, fostering strong social connections can slow cognitive decline. Revisiting past experiences, including visiting locations from one’s past, can also boost cognition in those with early onset dementia or Alzheimer’s—hence the Hemsworth road trip.

The first stage was to re-create the Melbourne family home from the 1990s. “The therapeutic practice of reminiscence therapy gave the film not only its intellectual and emotional underpinning, it gave it its structure,” said Barbor-Might. “We wanted to really explore this and also, as an audience, get a glimpse of their family life in the 1990s. It was a sequence that felt really important. The owner extraordinarily agreed to let us revert [the house]. They went and lived in a hotel for a month and were very, very noble and accommodating.”

Chris Hemsworth and dad fight Alzheimer’s with a trip down memory lane Read More »

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Rocket Report: SpaceX’s next-gen booster fails; Pegasus will fly again

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With the government shutdown over, the FAA has lifted its daytime launch curfew.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn booster arrives at Port Canaveral, Florida, for the first time Tuesday aboard the “Jacklyn” landing vessel. Credit: Manuel Mazzanti/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Welcome to Edition 8.20 of the Rocket Report! For the second week in a row, Blue Origin dominated the headlines with news about its New Glenn rocket. After a stunning success November 13 with the launch and landing of the second New Glenn rocket, Jeff Bezos’ space company revealed a roadmap this week showing how engineers will supercharge the vehicle with more engines. Meanwhile, in South Texas, SpaceX took a step toward the first flight of the next-generation Starship rocket. There will be no Rocket Report next week due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. We look forward to resuming delivery of all the news in space lift the first week of December.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Northrop’s Pegasus rocket wins a rare contract. A startup named Katalyst Space Technologies won a $30 million contract from NASA in August to build a robotic rescue mission for the agency’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory in low-Earth orbit. Swift, in space since 2004, is a unique instrument designed to study gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the Universe. The spacecraft lacks a propulsion system and its orbit is subject to atmospheric drag, and NASA says it is “racing against the clock” to boost Swift’s orbit and extend its lifetime before it falls back to Earth. On Wednesday, Katalyst announced it selected Northrop Grumman’s air-launched Pegasus XL rocket to send the rescue craft into orbit next year.

Make this make sense … At first glance, this might seem like a surprise. The Pegasus XL rocket hasn’t flown since 2021 and has launched just once in the last six years. The solid-fueled rocket is carried aloft under the belly of a modified airliner, then released to fire payloads of up to 1,000 pounds (450 kilograms) into low-Earth orbit. It’s an expensive rocket for its size, with Northrop charging more than $25 million per launch, according to the most recent public data available; the satellites best suited to launch on Pegasus will now find much cheaper tickets to orbit on rideshare missions using SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. There are a few reasons none of this mattered much to Katalyst. First, the rescue mission must launch into a very specific low-inclination orbit to rendezvous with the Swift observatory, so it won’t be able to join one of SpaceX’s rideshare missions. Second, Northrop Grumman has parts available for one more Pegasus XL rocket, and the company might have been willing to sell the launch at a discount to clear its inventory and retire the rocket’s expensive-to-maintain L-1011 carrier aircraft. And third, smaller rockets like Rocket Lab’s Electron or Firefly’s Alpha don’t quite have the performance to place Katalyst’s rescue mission into the required orbit. (submitted by gizmo23)

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Ursa Major rakes in more cash. Aerospace and defense startup Ursa Major Technologies landed a $600 million valuation in a new fundraising round, the latest sign that investors are willing to back companies developing new rocket technology, Bloomberg reports. Colorado-based Ursa Major closed its Series E fundraising round with investments from the venture capital firms Eclipse, Woodline Partners, Principia Growth, XN, and Alsop Louie Partners. The company also secured $50 million in debt financing. Ursa Major is best known as a supplier of liquid-fueled rocket engines and solid rocket motors to power a range of commercial and government vehicles.

Hypersonic tailwinds … Ursa Major says it is positioned to provide the US industrial base with propulsion systems faster and more affordably than legacy contractors can supply. “The company will rapidly field its throttleable, storable, liquid-fueled hypersonic and space-based defense solution, as well as scale its solid rocket motor and sustained space mobility manufacturing capacity,” Ursa Major said in a press release. Its customers include BAE Systems, which will use Ursa Major’s solid rocket motors to power tactical military-grade rockets, and Stratolaunch, which uses Ursa Major’s liquid-fueled Hadley engine for its hypersonic Talon-A spaceplane.

Rocket Lab celebrates two launches in 48 hours. Rocket Lab launched a payload for an undisclosed commercial customer Thursday, just hours after the company announced plans for the launch, Space News reports. The launch from Rocket Lab’s primary spaceport in New Zealand used the company’s Electron rocket, but officials released little more information on the mission, other than its nickname: “Follow My Speed.” An artist’s illustration on the mission patch indicated the payload might have been the next in a line of Earth-imaging satellites from the remote sensing company BlackSky, although the firm’s previous satellites have not launched with such secrecy.

Two hemispheres … Thursday’s launch from the Southern Hemisphere came just two days after Rocket Lab’s previous mission lifted off from Wallops Island, Virginia. That flight was a suborbital launch to support a hypersonic technology demonstration for the Defense Innovation Unit and the Missile Defense Agency. All told, Rocket Lab has now launched 18 Electron rockets this year with 100 percent mission success, a company record.

Spanish startup makes a big reveal. The Spanish company PLD Space released photos of a test version of its Miura 5 rocket Thursday, calling it a “decisive step forward in the orbital launcher validation campaign.” The full-scale qualification unit, called QM1, will allow engineers to complete subsystem testing under “real conditions” to ensure the rocket’s reliability before its first mission scheduled for 2026. The first stage of the qualification unit will undergo a full propellant loading test, while the second stage will undergo a destructive test in the United States to validate the rocket’s range safety destruct system. Miura 5 is designed to deliver a little more than a metric ton (2,200 pounds) of payload to low-Earth orbit.

Still a long way to go … “Presenting our first integrated Miura 5 unit is proof that our model works: vertical integration, proprietary infrastructure and a philosophy based on testing, learning, and improving,” said Raúl Torres, CEO and co-founder of PLD Space. The reveal, however, is just the first step in a qualification campaign that takes more than a year for most rocket companies. PLD Space aims to go much faster, with plans to complete a second qualification rocket by the end of December and unveil its first flight rocket in the first quarter of next year. “This unprecedented development cadence in Europe reinforces PLD Space’s position as the company that has developed an orbital launcher in the shortest time–just two years–whilst meeting the highest quality standards,” the company said in a statement. This would be a remarkable achievement, but history suggests PLD Space has a steep climb in the months ahead. (submitted by Leika and EllPeaTea)

Sweden digs deep in pursuit of sovereign launch. In an unsettled world, many nations are eager to develop homegrown rockets to place their own satellites into orbit. These up-and-coming spacefaring nations see it as a strategic imperative to break free from total reliance on space powers like Russia, China, and the United States. Still, some decisions are puzzling. This week, the Swedish aerospace and defense contractor Saab announced a $10 million investment in a company named Pythom. If you’re not familiar with this business, allow me to link back to a 2022 story published by Ars about Pythom’s questionable safety practices. The company has kept quiet since then, until the name surprisingly popped up again in a press release from Saab, a firm with a reputation that seems to be diametrically opposed to that of Pythom.

Just enough … The statement from Saab suggests its $10 million contribution to Pythom will make it the “lead investor” in the company’s recent funding round. Pythom hasn’t said anything more about this funding round, but Saab said the investment will accelerate Pythom’s “development and deployment of its launch systems,” which include an initial rocket capable of putting up to 330 pounds (150 kilograms) of payload into low-Earth orbit. $10 million may be just enough to keep Pythom afloat for a couple more years but is far less than the money Pythom would need to get serious about fielding an orbital launcher. Pythom is headquartered in California, but it has Swedish roots. It was founded by the Swedish married couple Tina and Tom Sjögren. The company has a couple dozen employees, and a handful of them are based in Sweden, according to Pythom’s website. (submitted by Leika and EllPeaTea)

China is about to launch an astronaut lifeboat. China is set to launch an uncrewed Shenzhou spacecraft to the Tiangong space station to provide the Shenzhou 21 astronauts with a means of returning home, Space News reports. The launch of China’s Shenzhou 22 mission is scheduled for Monday night, US time, aboard a Long March 2F rocket. Instead of carrying astronauts, the ship will ferry cargo to the Chinese Tiangong space station. More importantly, it will provide a safe ride home for the three astronauts living and working aboard the orbiting outpost.

How did we get here? … The Shenzhou 20 spacecraft currently docked to the Tiangong station was damaged by a suspected piece of space junk, cracking its window and rendering it unable to meet China’s safety standards for returning astronauts to Earth. The damage discovery occurred just before three outgoing crew members were supposed to ride Shenzhou 20 home earlier this month. Instead, those three astronauts departed the station and returned to Earth on the newer, undamaged Shenzhou 21 spacecraft. That left the other three crew members on Tiangong with only the damaged Shenzhou 20 spacecraft to get them home in the event of an emergency. Shenzhou 22 will replace Shenzhou 20, providing a lifeboat for the rest of the crew’s six-month stay in space. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Atlas V launches for Viasat. United Launch Alliance launched its Atlas V rocket on November 13 with a satellite for the California-based communications company Viasat, Spaceflight Now reports. The launch came a week after the mission was scrubbed due to a faulty liquid oxygen tank vent valve on the Atlas booster. ULA rolled the rocket back to the Vertical Integration Facility, replaced it with a new valve, and returned the rocket to the pad on November 12. The launch the following day was successful, with the Atlas V’s Centaur upper stage deploying the ViaSat-3 F2 spacecraft into a geosynchronous transfer orbit nearly three-and-a-half hours after liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

End of an era … This was the final launch of an Atlas V rocket with a payload heading for geosynchronous orbit. These are the kinds of missions the Atlas V was designed for more than 25 years ago, but the market has changed. All of the Atlas V’s remaining 11 missions will target low-Earth orbit carrying broadband satellites for Amazon or Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft heading for the International Space Station. The Atlas V will be retired in the coming years in favor of ULA’s new Vulcan rocket.

SpaceX launches key climate change monitor. SpaceX launched a joint NASA-European environmental research satellite early Monday, the second in an ongoing billion-dollar project to measure long-term changes in sea level, a key indicator of climate change, CBS News reports. The first satellite, known as Sentinel-6 and named in honor of NASA climate researcher Michael Freilich, was launched in November 2020. The latest spacecraft, Sentinel-6B, was launched from California atop a Falcon 9 rocket this week. Both satellites are equipped with a sophisticated cloud-penetrating radar. By timing how long it takes beams to bounce back from the ocean 830 miles (1,336 kilometers) below, the Sentinel-6 satellites can track sea levels to an accuracy of about one inch while also measuring wave height and wind speeds. The project builds on earlier missions dating back to the early 1990s that have provided an uninterrupted stream of sea level data.

FAA restrictions lifted … The Federal Aviation Administration lifted a restriction on commercial space operations this week that limited launches and reentries to the late night and early morning hours, Spaceflight Now reports. The FAA imposed a daytime curfew on commercial launches as it struggled to maintain air traffic control during the recent government shutdown. Those restrictions, which did not affect government missions, were lifted Monday. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Blue Origin’s New Glenn will grow larger. One week after the successful second launch of its large New Glenn booster, Blue Origin revealed a road map on Thursday for upgrades to the rocket, including a new variant with more main engines and a super-heavy lift capability, Ars reports. These upgrades to the rocket are “designed to increase payload performance and launch cadence, while enhancing reliability,” the company said in an update published on its website. The enhancements will be phased in over time, starting with the third launch of New Glenn, which is likely to occur during the first half of 2026.

No timelines … The most significant part of the update concerned an evolution of New Glenn that will transform the booster into a super-heavy lift launch vehicle. The first stage of this evolved vehicle will have nine BE-4 engines instead of seven, and the upper stage will have four BE-3U engines instead of two. In its update, Blue Origin refers to the new vehicle as 9×4 and the current variant as 7×2, a reference to the number of engines in each stage. “New Glenn 9×4 is designed for a subset of missions requiring additional capacity and performance,” the company said. “The vehicle carries over 70 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, over 14 metric tons direct to geosynchronous orbit, and over 20 metric tons to trans-lunar injection. Additionally, the 9×4 vehicle will feature a larger 8.7-meter fairing.” The company did not specify a timeline for the debut of the 9×4 variant. A spokesperson for the company told Ars, “We aren’t disclosing a specific timeframe today. The iterative design from our current 7×2 vehicle means we can build this rocket quickly.”

Recently landed New Glenn returns to port. Blue Origin welcomed “Never Tell Me the Odds” back to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, on Thursday, where the rocket booster launched exactly one week prior, Florida Today reports. The New Glenn’s first stage booster landed on Blue Origin’s offshore recovery barge, which returned it to Port Canaveral on Tuesday with great fanfare. Blue Origin’s founder, Jeff Bezos, rode the barge into port, posing for photos with the rocket and waving to onlookers viewing the spectacle from a nearby public pier. The rocket was lowered horizontally late Wednesday morning, as spectators watched alongside the restaurants and fishing boats at the port.

Through the gates … Officials from Blue Origin guided the 188-foot-long New Glenn booster to the Space Force station Thursday, making Blue Origin the only company besides SpaceX to return a space-flown booster through the gates. Once back at Blue Origin’s hangar, the rocket will undergo inspections and refurbishment for a second flight, perhaps early next year. “I could not be more excited to see the New Glenn launch, and Blue Origin recover that booster and bring it back,” Col. Brian Chatman, commander of Space Launch Delta 45, told Florida Today. “It’s all part of our certification process and campaign to certify more national security space launch providers, launch carriers, to get our most crucial satellites up on orbit.”

Meanwhile, down at Starbase. SpaceX rolled the first of its third-generation Super Heavy boosters out of the factory at Starbase, Texas, this week for a road trip to a nearby test site, according to NASASpaceflight.com. The booster rode SpaceX’s transporter from the factory a few miles down the road to Massey’s Test Site, where technicians prepared the rocket for cryogenic proof testing. However, during the initial phases of testing, the booster failed early on Friday morning.

Tumbling down … At the Starship launch site, ground teams are busy tearing down the launch mount at Pad 1, the departure point for all of SpaceX’s Starships to date. SpaceX will upgrade the pad for its next-generation, more powerful Super Heavy boosters, while Starship V3’s initial flights will take off from Pad 2, a few hundred meters away from Pad 1.

Next three launches

Nov. 22: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-79 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 06: 59 UTC

Nov. 23: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-30 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 08: 00 UTC

Nov. 25: Long March 2F | Shenzhou 22 | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 04: 11 UTC

Photo of Stephen Clark

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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Stoke Space goes for broke to solve the only launch problem that “moves the needle”

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“Does the world really need a 151st rocket company?”

Stoke Space’s full-flow staged combustion is tested in Central Washington in 2024. Credit: Stoke Space

Stoke Space’s full-flow staged combustion is tested in Central Washington in 2024. Credit: Stoke Space

LAUNCH COMPLEX 14, Cape Canaveral, Fla.—The platform atop the hulking steel tower offered a sweeping view of Florida’s rich, sandy coastline and brilliant blue waves beyond. Yet as captivating as the vista might be for an aspiring rocket magnate like Andy Lapsa, it also had to be a little intimidating.

To his right, at Launch Complex 13 next door, a recently returned Falcon 9 booster stood on a landing pad. SpaceX has landed more than 500 large orbital rockets. And next to SpaceX sprawled the launch site operated by Blue Origin. Its massive New Glenn rocket is also reusable, and founder Jeff Bezos has invested tens of billions of dollars into the venture.

Looking to the left, Lapsa saw a graveyard of sorts for commercial startups. Launch Complex 15 was leased to a promising startup, ABL Space, two years ago. After two failed launches, ABL Space pivoted away from commercial launch. Just beyond lies Launch Complex 16, where Relativity Space aims to launch from. The company has already burned through $4 billion in its efforts to reach orbit. Had billionaire Eric Schmidt not stepped in earlier this year, Relativity would have gone bankrupt.

Andy Lapsa may be a brainy rocket scientist, but he is not a billionaire. Far from it.

“When you start a company like this, you have no idea how far you’re going to be able to make it, you know?” he admitted.

Lapsa and another aerospace engineer, Tom Feldman, founded Stoke Space a little more than five years ago. Both had worked the better part of a decade at Blue Origin and decided they wanted to make their mark on the industry. It was not an easy choice to start a rocket company at a time when there were dozens of other entrants in the field.

Andy Lapsa speaks at the Space Economy Summit in November 2025.

Credit: The Economist Group

Andy Lapsa speaks at the Space Economy Summit in November 2025. Credit: The Economist Group

“It was a huge question in my head: Does the world really need a 151st rocket company?” he said. “And in order for me to say yes to that question, I had to very systematically go through all the other players, thinking about the economics of launch, about the business plan, about the evolution of these companies over time. It was very non-intuitive to me to start another launch company.”

So why did he do it?

I traveled to Florida in November to answer this question and to see if the world’s 151st rocket company had any chance of success.

Launch Complex 14

It takes a long time to build a launch site. Probably longer than you might think.

Lapsa and Feldman spent much of 2020 working on the basic design of a rocket that would eventually be named Nova and deciding whether they could build a business around it. In December of that year, they closed their seed round of funding, raising $9.1 million. After this, finding somewhere to launch from became a priority.

They zeroed in on Cape Canaveral because it’s where the majority of US launch companies and customers are, as well as the talent to assemble and launch rockets. They learned in 2021 that the US Space Force was planning to lease an old pad, Space Launch Complex 14, to a commercial company. This was not just a good location to launch from; it was truly a historic location—John Glenn launched into orbit from here in 1962 aboard the Friendship 7 spacecraft. It was retired in 1967 and designated a National Historic Landmark.

But in recent years, the Space Force has sought to support the flourishing US commercial space industry, and it has offered Launch Complex 14. After the competition opened in 2021, Stoke Space won the lease a year later. Then began the long and arduous process of conducting an Environmental Assessment. It took nearly two years, and it was not until October 20, 2024, that Stoke was allowed to break ground.

None of the structures on the site were usable, and aside from the historic blockhouse dating to the Mercury program, everything else had to be demolished and cleared before work could begin.

As we walked the large ring encompassing the site, Lapsa explained that all of the tanks and major hardware needed to support a Nova launch were now on site. There is a large launch tower, as well as a launch mount upon which the rocket will be stood up. The company has mostly turned toward integrating all of the ground infrastructure and wiring up the site. A nearby building to assemble rockets and process payloads is well underway.

Lapsa seemed mostly relieved. “A year ago, this was my biggest concern,” he said.

He need not have worried. A few months before the company completed its environmental permitting, a tall, lanky, thickly bearded engineer named Jonathan Lund hired on. A Stanford graduate who got his start with the US Army Corps of Engineers, Lund worked at SpaceX during the second half of the 2010s, helping to lead the reconstruction of one launch pad, the crew tower project at Launch Complex 39A, and a pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base. He also worked on multiple landing sites for the Falcon 9 rocket. Lund arrived to lead the development of Stoke’s site.

This is Lund’s fifth launch pad. Each one presents different challenges. In Florida, for example, the water table lies only a few feet below the ground. But for most rockets, including Nova, a large trench must be dug to allow flames from the rocket engines to be carried away from the vehicle at ignition and liftoff. As we stood in this massive flame diverter, there were a few indications of water seeping in.

Still, the company recently completed a major milestone by testing the water suppression system, which dampens the energy of a rocket at liftoff to protect the launch pad. Essentially, the plume from the rocket’s engines flows downward where it meets a sheet of water, turning it into steam. This creates an insulating barrier of sorts.

Water suppression test at LC-14 complete. ✅ Flowed the diverter and rain birds in a “launch like” scenario. pic.twitter.com/rs1lEloPul

— Stoke Space (@stoke_space) October 21, 2025

The water comes from large pipes running down the flame diverter, each of which has hundreds of holes not unlike a garden sprinkler hose. Lund said the pipes and the frame they rest on were built near where we stood.

“We fabricated these pieces on site, at the north end of the flame trench,” Lund explained. “Then we built this frame in Cocoa Beach and shipped it in four different sections and assembled it on site. Then we set the frame on the ramp, put together this surface (with the pipes), and then Egyptian-style we slide it down the ramp right into position. We used some old-school methods, but simple sometimes works best. Nothing fancy.”

At this point, Lapsa interrupted. “I was pretty nervous,” he said. “The way you’re describing this sounded good on a PowerPoint. But I wasn’t sure it actually would work.”

But it did.

Waiting on Nova

So if the pad is rounding into shape, how’s that rocket coming?

It sounds like Stoke Space is doing the right things. Earlier this year, the company shipped a full-scale version of its second stage to its test site at Moses Lake in central Washington. There, it underwent qualification testing, during which the vehicle is loaded with cryogenic fuels on multiple occasions, pressurized, and put through other exercises. Lapsa said that testing went well.

The company also built a stubby version of its first stage. The tanks and domes had full-size diameters, but the stage was not its full height. That vehicle also underwent qualification testing and passed.

The company has begun building flight hardware for the first Nova rocket. The vehicle’s software is maturing. Work is well underway on the development of an automated flight termination system. “Having a team that’s been through this cycle many times, it’s something we started putting attention on very early,” Lapsa said. “It’s on a good path as well.”

And yet the final, frenetic months leading to a debut launch are crunch time for any rocket company: first assembly of the full vehicle, first time test-firing it all. Things will inevitably go wrong. The question is how bad will the problems be?

For as long as I’ve known Lapsa, he has been cagey about launch dates for Stoke. This is smart because in reality, no one knows. And seasoned industry people (and journalists) know that projected launch dates for new rockets are squishy. The most precise thing Lapsa will say is that Stoke is targeting “next year” for Nova’s debut.

The company has a customer for the first flight. If all goes well, its first mission will sail to the asteroid belt. Asteroid mining startup AstroForge has signed on for Nova 1.

Stoke Space isn’t shooting for the Moon. It’s shooting for something 1 million times farther.

Too good to believe it’s true?

Stoke Space is far from the first company to start with grand ambitions. And when rocket startups think too big, it can be their undoing.

A little more than a decade ago, Firefly Space Systems in Texas based the design of its Alpha rocket on an aerospike engine, a technology that had never been flown to space before. Although this was theoretically a more efficient engine design, it also brought more technical risk and proved a bridge too far. By 2017, the company was bankrupt. When Ukrainian investor Max Polyakov rescued Firefly later that year, he demanded that Alpha have a more conventional rocket engine design.

Around the same time that Firefly struggled with its aerospike engine, another launch company, Relativity Space, announced its intent to 3D-print the entirety of its rockets. The company finally launched its Terran 1 rocket after eight years. But it struggled with additively manufacturing rockets. Relativity was on the brink of bankruptcy before a former Google executive, Eric Schmidt, stepped in to rescue the company financially. Relativity is now focused on a traditionally manufactured rocket, the Terran R.

Stoke Space’s Hopper 2 takes to the skies in September 2023 in Moses Lake, Washington.

Credit: Stoke Space

Stoke Space’s Hopper 2 takes to the skies in September 2023 in Moses Lake, Washington. Credit: Stoke Space

So what to make of Stoke Space, which has an utterly novel design for its second stage? The stage is powered by a ring of 24 thrusters, an engine collectively named Andromeda. Stoke has also eschewed a tile-based heat shield to protect the vehicle during atmospheric reentry in favor of a regeneratively cooled design.

In this, there are echoes of Firefly, Relativity, and other companies with grand plans that had to be abandoned in favor of simpler designs to avoid financial ruin. After all, it’s hard enough to reach orbit with a conventional rocket.

But the company has already done a lot of testing of this design. Its first iteration of Andromeda even completed a hop test back in 2023.

“Andromeda is wildly new,” Lapsa said. “But the question of can it work, in my opinion, is a resounding yes.”

The engineering team had all manner of questions when designing Andromeda several years ago. How will all of those thrusters and their plumbing interact with one another? Will there be feedback? Is the heat shield idea practical?

“Those are the kind of unknowns that we knew we were walking into from an engineering perspective,” Lapsa said. “We knew there should be an answer in there, but we didn’t know exactly what it would be. It’s very hard to model all that stuff in the transient. So you just had to get after it, and do it, and we were able to do that. So can it work? Absolutely yes. Will it work out of the box? That’s a different question.”

First stage, too

Stoke’s ambitions did not stop with the upper stage. Early on, Lapsa, Feldman, and the small engineering team also decided to develop a full-flow staged combustion engine. This, Lapsa acknowledges, was a “risky” decision for the company. But it was a necessary one, he believes.

Full-flow staged combustion engines had been tested before this decade but were never flown. From an engineering standpoint, they are significantly more complex than a traditional staged combustion engine in that the oxidizer and propellant—which began as cryogenic liquids—arrive in the combustion chamber in a fully gaseous state. This interaction between two gases is more efficient and produces less wear and tear on turbines within the engine.

“You want to get the highest efficiency you can without driving the turbine temperature to a place where you have a short lifetime,” Lapsa said. “Full-flow is the right answer for that. If you do anything else, it’s a distraction.”

Stoke Space successfully tests its advanced full-flow staged combustion rocket engine, designed to power the Nova launch vehicle’s first stage.

Credit: Stoke Space

Stoke Space successfully tests its advanced full-flow staged combustion rocket engine, designed to power the Nova launch vehicle’s first stage. Credit: Stoke Space

It was also massively unproven. When Stoke Space was founded in 2020, no full-flow staged combustion engine had ever gotten close to space. SpaceX was developing the Raptor engine using the technology, but it would not make its first “spaceflight” until the spring of 2023 on the Super Heavy rocket that powers Starship. Multiple Raptors failed shortly after ignition.

But for a company choosing full reusability of its rocket, as SpaceX sought to do with Starship, there ultimately is no choice.

“Anything you build for full and rapid reuse needs to find margin somewhere in the system,” Lapsa said. “And really that’s fuel efficiency. It makes fuel efficiency a very strong, very important driver.”

In June 2024, Stoke Space announced it had just completed a successful hot fire test of its full-flow, staged combustion engine for Nova’s first stage. The propulsion team had, Lapsa said at the time, “worked tirelessly” to reach that point.

Not just another launch company?

Stoke Space got to the party late. After SpaceX’s success with the first Falcon 9 in 2010, a wave of new entrants entered the field over the next decade. They were drawing down billions in venture capital funding, and some were starting to go public at huge valuations as special purpose acquisition companies. But by 2020, the market seemed saturated. The gold rush for new launch companies was nearing the cops-arrive-to-bust-up-the-festivities stage.

Every new company seemed to have its own spin on how to conquer low-Earth orbit.

“There were a lot of other business plans being proposed and tried,” Lapsa said. “There were low-cost, mass-produced disposable rockets. There were rockets under the wings of aircraft. There were rocket engine companies that were going to sell to 150 launch companies. All of those ideas raised big money and deserve to be considered. The question is, which one is the winner in the end?”

And that’s the question he was trying to answer in his own mind. He was in his 30s. He had a family. And he was looking to commit his best years, professionally, to solving a major launch problem.

“What’s the thing that fundamentally moves the needle on what’s out there already today?” he said. “The only thing, in my opinion, is rapid reuse. And once you get it, the economics are so powerful that nothing else matters. That’s the thing I couldn’t get out of my head. That’s the only problem I wanted to work on, and so we started a company in order to work on it.”

Stoke was one of many launch companies five years ago. But in the years since, the field has narrowed considerably. Some promising companies, such as Virgin Orbit and ABL Space, launched a few times and folded. Others never made it to the launch pad. Today, by my count, there are fewer than 10 serious commercial launch companies in the United States, Stoke among them. The capital markets seem convinced. In October, Stoke announced a massive $510 million Series D funding round. That was a lot of money in a challenging time to raise launch firm funding.

So Stoke has the money it needs. It has a team of sharp engineers and capable technicians. It has a launch pad and qualified hardware. That’s all good because this is the point in the journey for a launch startup where things start to get very, very difficult.

Photo of Eric Berger

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.

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Trump revives unpopular Ted Cruz plan to punish states that impose AI laws

AI, Policy, state AI laws, Trump / /

The FTC chairman would be required to issue a policy statement detailing “circumstances under which State laws that require alterations to the truthful outputs of AI models are preempted by the FTC Act’s prohibition on engaging in deceptive acts or practices affecting commerce.”

When Cruz proposed a moratorium restricting state AI regulation in mid-2025, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) helped lead the fight against it. “Until Congress passes federally preemptive legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act and an online privacy framework, we can’t block states from making laws that protect their citizens,” Blackburn said at the time.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) also spoke out against the Cruz plan, saying it would preempt “good state consumer protection laws” related to robocalls, deepfakes, and autonomous vehicles.

Trump wants Congress to preempt state laws

Besides reviving the Cruz plan, Trump’s draft executive order seeks new legislation to preempt state laws. The order would direct Trump administration officials to “jointly prepare for my review a legislative recommendation establishing a uniform Federal regulatory framework for AI that preempts State AI laws that conflict with the policy set forth in this order.”

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) this week said a ban on state AI laws could be included in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Democrats are trying to keep the ban out of the bill.

“We have to allow states to take the lead because we’re not able to, so far in Washington, come up with appropriate legislation,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the ranking member on the Armed Services Committee, told Semafor.

In a Truth Social post on Tuesday, Trump claimed that states are “trying to embed DEI ideology into AI models.” Trump wrote, “We MUST have one Federal Standard instead of a patchwork of 50 State Regulatory Regimes. If we don’t, then China will easily catch us in the AI race. Put it in the NDAA, or pass a separate Bill, and nobody will ever be able to compete with America.”

Trump revives unpopular Ted Cruz plan to punish states that impose AI laws Read More »

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Google’s new Nano Banana Pro uses Gemini 3 power to generate more realistic AI images

AI, AI image generation, Google, Google Gemini, Tech / /

Detecting less sloppy slop

Google is not just blowing smoke—the new image generator is much better. Its grasp of the world and the nuance of language is apparent, producing much more realistic results. Even before this, AI images were getting so good that it could be hard to spot them at a glance. Gone are the days when you could just count fingers to identify AI. Google is making an effort to help identify AI content, though.

Images generated with Nano Banana Pro continue to have embedded SynthID watermarks that Google’s tools can detect. The company is also adding more C2PA metadata to further label AI images. The Gemini app is part of this effort, too. Starting now, you can upload an image and ask something like “Is this AI?” The app won’t detect just any old AI image, but it will tell you if it’s a product of Google AI by checking for SynthID.

Gemini can now detect its own AI images.

At the same time, Google is making it slightly harder for people to know an image was generated with AI. Operating with the knowledge that professionals may want to generate images with Nano Banana Pro, Google has removed the visible watermark from images for AI Ultra subscribers. These images still have SynthID, but only the lower tiers have the Gemini twinkle in the corner.

While everyone can access the new Nano Banana Pro today, AI Ultra subscribers will enjoy the highest usage limits. Gemini Pro users will get a bit less access, and free users will get the lowest limits before being booted down to the non-pro version.

Google’s new Nano Banana Pro uses Gemini 3 power to generate more realistic AI images Read More »

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Testing shows Apple N1 Wi-Fi chip improves on older Broadcom chips in every way

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This year’s newest iPhones included one momentous change that marked a new phase in the evolution of Apple Silicon: the Apple N1, Apple’s first in-house chip made to handle local wireless connections. The N1 supports Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and the Thread smart home communication protocol, and it replaces the third-party wireless chips (mostly made by Broadcom) that Apple used in older iPhones.

Apple claimed that the N1 would enable more reliable connectivity for local communication features like AirPlay and AirDrop but didn’t say anything about how users could expect it to perform. But Ookla, the folks behind the SpeedTest app and website, have analyzed about five weeks’ worth of users’ testing data to get an idea of how the iPhone 17 lineup stacks up to the iPhone 16, as well as Android phones with Wi-Fi chips from Qualcomm, MediaTek, and others.

While the N1 isn’t at the top of the charts, Ookla says Apple’s Wi-Fi chip “delivered higher download and upload speeds on Wi-Fi compared to the iPhone 16 across every studied percentile and virtually every region.” The median download speed for the iPhone 17 series was 329.56Mbps, compared to 236.46Mbps for the iPhone 16; the upload speed also jumped from 73.68Mbps to 103.26Mbps.

Ookla noted that the N1’s best performance seemed to improve scores most of all in the bottom 10th percentile of performance tests, “implying Apple’s custom silicon lifts the floor more than the ceiling.” The iPhone 17 also didn’t top Ookla’s global performance charts—Ookla found that the Pixel 10 Pro series slightly edges out the iPhone 17 in download speed, while a Xiaomi 15T Pro with MediaTek Wi-Fi silicon featured better upload speeds.

Testing shows Apple N1 Wi-Fi chip improves on older Broadcom chips in every way Read More »