Mike M. – Page 34

A Chinese-born crypto tycoon—of all people—changed the way I think of space

crew dragon, fram2, human spaceflight, Space, spacex, starlink / Mike M. / April 22, 2025

“Are we the first generation of digital nomad in space?”

Chun Wang orbits the Earth inside the cupola of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft. Credit: Chun Wang via X

For a quarter-century, dating back to my time as a budding space enthusiast, I’ve watched with a keen eye each time people have ventured into space.

That’s 162 human spaceflight missions since the beginning of 2000, ranging from Space Shuttle flights to Russian Soyuz missions, Chinese astronauts’ first forays into orbit, and commercial expeditions on SpaceX’s Dragon capsule. Yes, I’m also counting privately funded suborbital hops launched by Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic.

Last week, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin captured headlines—though not purely positive—with the launch of six women, including pop star Katy Perry, to an altitude of 66 miles (106 kilometers). The capsule returned to the ground 10 minutes and 21 seconds later. It was the first all-female flight to space since Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s solo mission in 1963.

Many commentators criticized the flight as a tone-deaf stunt or a rich person’s flex. I won’t make any judgments, except to say two of the passengers aboard Blue Origin’s capsule—Aisha Bowe and Amanda Nguyen—have compelling stories worth telling.

Immerse yourself

Here’s another story worth sharing. Earlier this month, an international crew of four private astronauts took their own journey into space aboard a Dragon spacecraft owned and operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Like Blue Origin’s all-female flight, this mission was largely bankrolled by a billionaire.

Actually, it was a couple of billionaires. Musk used his fortune to fund a large portion of the Dragon spacecraft’s development costs alongside a multibillion-dollar contribution from US taxpayers. Chun Wang, a Chinese-born cryptocurrency billionaire, paid SpaceX an undisclosed sum to fly one of SpaceX’s ships into orbit with three of his friends.

So far, this seems like another story about a rich guy going to space. This is indeed a major part of the story, but there’s more to it. Chun, now a citizen of Malta, named the mission Fram2 after the Norwegian exploration ship Fram used for polar expeditions at the turn of the 20th century. Following in the footsteps of Fram, which means “forward” in Norwegian, Chun asked SpaceX if he could launch into an orbit over Earth’s poles to gain a perspective on our planet no human eyes had seen before.

Joining Chun on the three-and-a-half-day Fram2 mission were Jannicke Mikkelsen, a Norwegian filmmaker and cinematographer who took the role of vehicle commander. Rabea Rogge, a robotics researcher from Germany, took the pilot’s seat and assisted Mikkelsen in monitoring the spacecraft’s condition in flight. Wang and Eric Philips, an Australian polar explorer and guide, flew as “mission specialists” on the mission.

Chun’s X account reads like a travelogue, with details of each jet-setting jaunt around the world. His propensity for sharing travel experiences extended into space, and I’m grateful for it.

The Florida peninsula, including Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral, through the lens of Chun’s iPhone. Credit: Chun Wang via X

Usually, astronauts might share their reflections from space by writing posts on social media, or occasionally sharing pictures and video vignettes from the International Space Station (ISS). This, in itself, is a remarkable change from the way astronauts communicated with the public from space just 15 years ago.

Most of these social media posts involve astronauts showcasing an experiment they’re working on or executing a high-flying tutorial in physics. Often, these videos include acrobatic backflips or show the novelty of eating and drinking in microgravity. Some astronauts, like Don Pettit, who recently came home from the ISS, have a knack for gorgeous orbital photography.

Chun’s videos offer something different. They provide an unfiltered look into how four people live inside a spacecraft with an internal volume comparable to an SUV, and the awe of seeing something beautiful for the first time. His shares have an intimacy, authenticity, and most importantly, an immediacy I’ve never seen before in a video from space.

One of the videos Chun recorded and posted to X shows the Fram2 crew members inside Dragon the day after their launch. The astronauts seem to be enjoying themselves. Their LunchBot meal kits float nearby, and the capsule’s makeshift trash bin contains Huggies baby wipes and empty water bottles, giving the environment a vibe akin to a camping trip, except for the constant hum of air fans.

Later, Chun shared a video of the crew opening the hatch leading to Dragon’s cupola window, a plexiglass extension with panoramic views. Mikkelsen and Chun try to make sense of what they’re seeing.

“Oh, Novaya Zemlya, do you see it?” Mikkelsen asks. “Yeah. Yeah. It’s right here,” Chun replies. “Oh, damn. Oh, it is,” Mikkelsen says.

Chun then drops a bit of Cold War trivia. “The largest atomic bomb was tested here,” he says. “And all this ice. Further north, the Arctic Ocean. The North Pole.”

Flight Day 3 pic.twitter.com/vLlbAKIOvl

— Chun (@satofishi) April 3, 2025

On the third day of the mission, the Dragon spacecraft soared over Florida, heading south to north on its pole-to-pole loop around the Earth. “I can see our launch pad from here,” Mikkelsen says, pointing out NASA’s Kennedy Space Center several hundred miles away.

Flying over our launch site. pic.twitter.com/eHatUsOJ20

— Chun (@satofishi) April 3, 2025

Finally, Chun capped his voyage into space with a 30-second clip from his seat inside Dragon as the spacecraft fires thrusters for a deorbit burn. The capsule’s small rocket jets pulsed repeatedly to slow Dragon’s velocity enough to drop out of orbit and head for reentry and splashdown off the coast of California.

Lasers in LEO

It wasn’t only Chun’s proclivity for posting to social media that made this possible. It was also SpaceX’s own Starlink Internet network, which the Dragon spacecraft connected to with a “Plug and Plaser” terminal mounted in the capsule’s trunk. This device allowed Dragon and its crew to transmit and receive Internet signals through a laser link with Starlink satellites orbiting nearby.

Astronauts have shared videos similar to those from Fram2 in the past, but almost always after they are back on Earth, and often edited and packaged into a longer video. What’s unique about Chun’s videos is that he was able to immediately post his clips, some of which are quite long, to social media via the Starlink Internet network.

“With a Starlink laser terminal in the trunk, we can theoretically achieve speeds up to 100 or more gigabits per second,” said Jon Edwards, SpaceX’s vice president for Falcon launch vehicles, before the Fram2 mission’s launch. “For Fram2, we’re expecting around 1 gigabit per second.”

Compare this with the connectivity available to astronauts on the International Space Station, where crews have access to the Internet with uplink speeds of about 4 to 6 megabits per second and 500 kilobits to 1 megabit per second of downlink, according to Sandra Jones, a NASA spokesperson. The space station communications system provides about 1 megabit per second of additional throughput for email, an Internet telephone, and video conferencing. There’s another layer of capacity for transmitting scientific and telemetry data between the space station and Mission Control.

So, Starlink’s laser connection with the Dragon spacecraft offers roughly 200 to 2,000 times the throughput of the Internet connection available on the ISS. The space station sends and receives communication signals, including the Internet, through NASA’s fleet of Tracking and Data Relay Satellites.

The laser link is also cheaper to use. NASA’s TDRS relay stations are dedicated to providing communication support for the ISS and numerous other science missions, including the Hubble Space Telescope, while Dragon plugs into the commercial Starlink network serving millions of other users.

SpaceX tested the Plug and Plaser device for the first time in space last year on the Polaris Dawn mission, which was most notable for the first fully commercial spacewalk in history. The results of the test were “phenomenal,” said Kevin Coggins, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for Space Communications and Navigation.

“They have pushed a lot of data through in these tests to demonstrate their ability to do data rates just as high as TDRS, if not higher,” Coggins said in a recent presentation to a committee of the National Academies.

Artist’s illustration of a laser optical link between a Dragon spacecraft and a Starlink satellite. Credit: SpaceX

Edwards said SpaceX wants to make the laser communication capability available for future Dragon missions and commercial space stations that may replace the ISS. Meanwhile, NASA is phasing out the government-owned TDRS network. Coggins said NASA’s relay satellites in geosynchronous orbit will remain active through the remaining life of the International Space Station, and then will be retired.

“Many of these spacecraft are far beyond their intended service life,” Coggins said. “In fact, we’ve retired one recently. We’re getting ready to retire another one. In this period of time, we’re going to retire TDRSs pretty often, and we’re going to get down to just a couple left that will last us into the 2030s.

“We have to preserve capacity as the constellation gets smaller, and we have to manage risks,” Coggins said. “So, we made a decision on November 8, 2024, that no new users could come to TDRS. We took it out of the service catalog.”

NASA’s future satellites in Earth orbit will send their data to the ground through a commercial network like Starlink. The agency has agreements worth more than $278 million with five companies—SpaceX, Amazon, Viasat, SES, and Telesat—to demonstrate how they can replace and improve on the services currently provided by TDRS (pronounced “tee-dress”).

These companies are already operating or will soon deploy satellites that could provide radio or laser optical communication links with future space stations, science probes, and climate and weather monitoring satellites. “We’re not paying anyone to put up a constellation,” Coggins said.

After these five companies complete their demonstration phase, NASA will become a subscriber to some or all of their networks.

“Now, instead of a 30-year-old [TDRS] constellation and trying to replenish something that we had before, we’ve got all these new capabilities, all these new things that weren’t possible before, especially optical,” Coggins said. “That’s going to that’s going to mean so much with the volume and quality of data that you’re going to be able to bring down.”

Digital nomads

Chun and his crewmates didn’t use the Starlink connection to send down any prize-winning discoveries about the Universe, or data for a comprehensive global mapping survey. Instead, the Fram2 crew used the connection for video calls and text messages with their families through tablets and smartphones linked to a Wi-Fi router inside the Dragon spacecraft.

“Are we the first generation of digital nomad in space?” Chun asked his followers in one X post.

“It was not 100 percent available, but when it was, it was really fast,” Chun wrote of the Internet connection in an email to Ars. He told us he used an iPhone 16 Pro Max for his 4K videos. From some 200 miles (300 kilometers) up, the phone’s 48-megapixel camera, with a simulated optical zoom, brought out the finer textures of ice sheets, clouds, water, and land formations.

While the flight was fully automated, SpaceX trained the Fram2 crew how to live and work inside the Dragon spacecraft and take over manual control if necessary. None of Fram2 crew members had a background in spaceflight or in any part of the space industry before they started preparing for their mission. Notably, it was the first human spaceflight mission to low-Earth orbit without a trained airplane pilot onboard.

Chun Wang, far right, extends his arm to take an iPhone selfie moments after splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. Credit: SpaceX

Their nearly four days in orbit was largely a sightseeing expedition. Alongside Chun, Mikkelsen put her filmmaking expertise to use by shooting video from Dragon’s cupola. Before the flight, Mikkelsen said she wanted to create an immersive 3D account of her time in space. In some of Wang’s videos, Mikkelsen is seen working with a V-RAPTOR 8K VV camera from Red Digital Cinema, a device that sells for approximately $25,000, according to the manufacturer’s website.

The crew spent some of their time performing experiments, including the first X-ray of a human in space. Scientists gathered some useful data on the effects of radiation on humans in space because Fram2 flew in a polar orbit, where the astronauts were exposed to higher doses of ionizing radiation than a person might see on the International Space Station.

After they splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at the end of the mission, the Fram2 astronauts disembarked from the Dragon capsule without the assistance of SpaceX ground teams, which typically offer a helping hand for balance as crews readjust to gravity. This demonstrated how people might exit their spaceships on the Moon or Mars, where no one will be there to greet them.

Going into the flight, Chun wanted to see Antarctica and Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago where he lives north of the Arctic Circle. In more than 400 human spaceflight missions from 1961 until this year, nobody ever flew in an orbit directly over the poles. Sophisticated satellites routinely fly over the polar regions to take high-resolution imagery and measure things like sea ice.

The Fram2 astronauts’ observations of the Arctic and Antarctic may not match what satellites can see, but their experience has some lasting catchet, standing alone among all who have flown to space before.

“People often refer to Earth as a blue marble planet, but from our point of view, it’s more of a frozen planet,” Chun told Ars.

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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Teen coder shuts down open source Mac app Whisky, citing harm to paid apps

Codeweavers, codeweavers crossover, Crossover, game compatibility, gaming, isaac marovitz, james b. ramey, Mac gaming, macOS, Whisky, Wine / Mike M. / April 22, 2025

A tipped-cap moment

The center of Whisky’s homepage. The page now carries a persistent notice that “Whisky is no longer actively maintained. Apps and games may break at any time.” Credit: Whisky

CodeWeavers’ CEO wrote on the company’s blog late last week about the Whisky shutdown, topped with an image of a glass of the spirit clinking against a glass of wine. “Whisky may have been a CrossOver competitor, but that’s not how we feel today,” wrote James B. Ramey. “Our response is simply one of empathy, understanding, and acknowledgement for Isaac’s situation.”

Ramey noted that Whisky was a free packaging of an open source project, crafted by someone who, like CrossOver, did it as “a labor of love built by people who care deeply about giving users more choices.” But Marovitz faced “an avalanche of user expectations,” Ramey wrote, regarding game compatibility, performance, and features. “The reality is that testing, support, and development take real resources … if CodeWeavers were not viable because of CrossOver not being sustainable, it would likely dampen the future development of WINE and Proton and support for macOS gaming,” Ramey wrote.

“We ‘tip our cap’ to Isaac and the impact he made to macOS gaming,” Ramey wrote, strangely choosing that colloquial salute instead of the more obvious beverage analogy for the two projects.

Marovitz told Ars that while user expectations were “definitely an issue,” they were not the major reason for ceasing development. “I’ve worked on other big projects before and during Whisky’s development, so I’m not a stranger to tuning out the noise of constant user expectations.”

Open source projects shutting down because of the tremendous pressure they put on their unpaid coders is a kind of “dog bites man” story in the coding world. It’s something else entirely when a prolific coder sees a larger ecosystem as not really benefiting from their otherwise very neat tool, and chooses deference. Still, during its run, the Whisky app drew attention to Mac gaming and the possibilities of Wine, and by extension Apple’s own Game Porting Toolkit, itself based on CrossOver. And likely gave a few Mac owners some great times with games they couldn’t get on their favorite platform.

Marovitz, while stepping back, is not done with Mac gaming, however. “Right now I’m working on the recompilation of Sonic Unleashed and bringing it fully to Mac, alongside other folks, but for the most part my goals and passions have remained the same,” Marovitz told Ars.

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Microsoft’s “1‑bit” AI model runs on a CPU only, while matching larger systems

AI / Mike M. / April 19, 2025

Does size matter?

Memory requirements are the most obvious advantage of reducing the complexity of a model’s internal weights. The BitNet b1.58 model can run using just 0.4GB of memory, compared to anywhere from 2 to 5GB for other open-weight models of roughly the same parameter size.

But the simplified weighting system also leads to more efficient operation at inference time, with internal operations that rely much more on simple addition instructions and less on computationally costly multiplication instructions. Those efficiency improvements mean BitNet b1.58 uses anywhere from 85 to 96 percent less energy compared to similar full-precision models, the researchers estimate.

A demo of BitNet b1.58 running at speed on an Apple M2 CPU.

By using a highly optimized kernel designed specifically for the BitNet architecture, the BitNet b1.58 model can also run multiple times faster than similar models running on a standard full-precision transformer. The system is efficient enough to reach “speeds comparable to human reading (5-7 tokens per second)” using a single CPU, the researchers write (you can download and run those optimized kernels yourself on a number of ARM and x86 CPUs, or try it using this web demo).

Crucially, the researchers say these improvements don’t come at the cost of performance on various benchmarks testing reasoning, math, and “knowledge” capabilities (although that claim has yet to be verified independently). Averaging the results on several common benchmarks, the researchers found that BitNet “achieves capabilities nearly on par with leading models in its size class while offering dramatically improved efficiency.”

Despite its smaller memory footprint, BitNet still performs similarly to “full precision” weighted models on many benchmarks.

Despite the apparent success of this “proof of concept” BitNet model, the researchers write that they don’t quite understand why the model works as well as it does with such simplified weighting. “Delving deeper into the theoretical underpinnings of why 1-bit training at scale is effective remains an open area,” they write. And more research is still needed to get these BitNet models to compete with the overall size and context window “memory” of today’s largest models.

Still, this new research shows a potential alternative approach for AI models that are facing spiraling hardware and energy costs from running on expensive and powerful GPUs. It’s possible that today’s “full precision” models are like muscle cars that are wasting a lot of energy and effort when the equivalent of a nice sub-compact could deliver similar results.

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Rover finds hints of an ancient Martian carbon cycle

carbon cycle, Climate science, Curiosity rover, greenhouse gasses, Mars, minerals, Science / Mike M. / April 19, 2025

The Curiosity mission started near the bottom of the crater, at the base of a formation called Aeolis Mons, or Mount Sharp, where NASA expected to find the earliest geological samples. The idea then was to climb up Mount Sharp and collect samples from later and later geological periods at increasing elevations, tracing the history of habitability and the great drying up of Mars. On the way, the carbon missed by the satellites was finally found.

An imperfect cycle

Tutolo’s team focused their attention on four sediment samples Curiosity drilled after climbing over a kilometer up Mount Sharp. The samples were examined with the rover’s Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument, which uses X-ray diffraction to determine their composition. It turned out the samples contained roughly between 5 and 10 percent of siderite. “It was an iron carbonate, directly analogous to a mineral called calcite found in sedimentary rocks like limestone. The difference is it has iron in its cation site rather than calcium,” Tutolo explained. “We expected that because Mars is much richer in iron—that’s why it is the red planet.”

The siderite found in the samples was also pure, which Tutolo thinks indicates it has formed through an evaporation process akin to what we see in evaporated lakes on Earth. This, in turn, was the first evidence we’ve found of the ancient Martian carbon cycle. “Now we have evidence that confirms the models,” Tutolo claims. The carbon from the atmosphere was being sequestered in the rocks on Mars just as it is on Earth. The problem was, unlike on Earth, it couldn’t get out of these rocks.

“On Earth, whenever oceanic plates get subducted into the mantle, all of the limestone that was formed before gets cooked off, and the carbon dioxide gets back to the atmosphere through volcanoes,” Tutolo explains. Mars, on the other hand, has never had efficient plate tectonics. A large portion of carbon that got trapped in Martian rocks stayed in those rocks forever, thinning out the atmosphere. While it’s likely the red planet had its own carbon cycle, it was an imperfect one that eventually turned it into the lifeless desert it is today.

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Cupra is all about affordable cars, funky styling, electrified performance

Cars, Cupra / Mike M. / April 18, 2025

“So we are part of Volkswagen Group. We have factories all across the whole planet. We have Mexican factories. We have US factories. Even Volkswagen Group is ramping up additional factories in the United States. We have European factories,” Schuwirth said.

The original plan was to import one model from Mexico and one model from Europe, but now “I think the only mantra for the future is we need to remain flexible because no one knows what is slightly changing, whether we like it or we don’t like it. I mean, we cannot influence it, but it’s not changing our plan overall,” he said.

When it does, it won’t be with the Cupras that are finding friends in Europe. The Formentor is a rather cool little crossover/hatchback, available with either a 48 V mild hybrid (starting at under $32,000 or 28,000 euros) or a plug-in hybrid (starting at under $49,000 or 43,000 euro) powertrain.

It uses VW Group’s ubiquitous MQB platform, and the driving experience is midway between a GTI-badged VW and one of Audi’s S models. But the interior was a much more interesting place to be than either an Audi or a VW, with details like full carbon fiber seatbacks and a matte paint that drew plenty of attention in a city with outré automotive tastes.

But Cupra reckons the Formentor is too small for US car buyers, and that’s a pretty safe bet. That also means you can forget about the Cupra Born EV coming here. I didn’t drive Cupra’s Terramar but probably should have; this is an SUV that is about as small as Cupra thinks will sell in the US.

Did you say new customers?

Cupra’s plan does not include stealing customers from existing VW brands—they are in their 50s on average, and Cupra is targeting a demographic that’s about a decade younger. The aforementioned focus on design is one way it’s going about attracting those new customers. The company is based in Barcelona, one of the more design-focused cities in the world, and it’s leaning into that, teaming up with local designers in cities where it maintains one of its “brand houses.”

Cupra is all about affordable cars, funky styling, electrified performance Read More »

There’s a secret reason the Space Force is delaying the next Atlas V launch

Amazon, kuiper, launch, Space, space force, united launch alliance / Mike M. / April 18, 2025

The Space Force is looking for responsive launch. This week, they’re the unresponsive ones.

File photo of a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch in 2022. Credit: SpaceX

Pushed by trackmobile railcar movers, the Atlas V rocket rolled to the launch pad last week with a full load of 27 satellites for Amazon’s Kuiper Internet megaconstellation. Credit: United Launch Alliance

Last week, the first operational satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband network were minutes from launch at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

These spacecraft, buttoned up on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, are the first of more than 3,200 mass-produced satellites Amazon plans to launch over the rest of the decade to deploy the first direct US competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink Internet network.

However, as is often the case on Florida’s Space Coast, bad weather prevented the satellites from launching April 9. No big deal, right? Anyone who pays close attention to the launch industry knows delays are part of the business. A broken component on the rocket, a summertime thunderstorm, or high winds can thwart a launch attempt. Launch companies know this, and the answer is usually to try again the next day.

But something unusual happened when ULA scrubbed the countdown last Wednesday. ULA’s launch director, Eric Richards, instructed his team to “proceed with preparations for an extended turnaround.” This meant ULA would have to wait more than 24 hours for the next Atlas V launch attempt.

But why?

At first, there seemed to be a good explanation for the extended turnaround. SpaceX was preparing to launch a set of Starlink satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket around the same time as Atlas V’s launch window the next day. The Space Force’s Eastern Range manages scheduling for all launches at Cape Canaveral and typically operates on a first-come, first-served basis.

The Space Force accommodated 93 launches on the Eastern Range last year—sometimes on the same day—an annual record that military officials are quite proud of achieving. This is nearly six times the number of launches from Cape Canaveral in 2014, a growth rate primarily driven by SpaceX. In previous interviews, Space Force officials have emphasized their eagerness to support more commercial launches. “How do we get to yes?” is often what range officials ask themselves when a launch provider submits a scheduling request.

It wouldn’t have been surprising for SpaceX to get priority on the range schedule since it had already reserved the launch window with the Space Force for April 10. SpaceX subsequently delayed this particular Starlink launch for two days until it finally launched on Saturday evening, April 12. Another SpaceX Starlink mission launched Monday morning.

There are several puzzling things about what happened last week. When SpaceX missed its reservation on the range twice in two days, April 10 and 11, why didn’t ULA move back to the front of the line?

ULA, which is usually fairly transparent about its reasons for launch scrubs, didn’t disclose any technical problems with the rocket that would have prevented another launch attempt. ULA offers access to listen to the launch team’s audio channel during the countdown, and engineers were not discussing any significant technical issues.

The company’s official statement after the scrub said: “A new launch date will be announced when approved on the range.”

Also, why can’t ULA make another run at launching the Kuiper mission this week? The answer to that question is also a mystery, but we have some educated speculation.

Changes in attitudes

A few days ago, SpaceX postponed one of its own Starlink missions from Cape Canaveral without explanation, leaving the Florida spaceport with a rare week without any launches. SpaceX plans to resume launches from Florida early next week with the liftoff of a resupply mission to the International Space Station. The delayed Starlink mission will fly a few days later.

Meanwhile, the next launch attempt for ULA is unknown.

Tory Bruno, ULA’s president and CEO, wrote on X that questions about what is holding up the next Atlas V launch are best directed toward the Space Force. A spokesperson for ULA told Ars the company is still working with the range to determine the next launch date. “The rocket and payload are healthy,” she said. “We will announce the new launch date once confirmed.”

While the SpaceX launch delay this week might suggest a link to the same range kerfuffle facing United Launch Alliance, it’s important to point out a key difference between the companies’ rockets. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 uses an automated flight termination system to self-destruct the rocket if it flies off course, while ULA’s Atlas V uses an older human-in-the-loop range safety system, which requires additional staff and equipment. Therefore, the Space Force is more likely to be able to accommodate a SpaceX mission near another activity on the range.

One more twist in this story is that a few days before the launch attempt, ULA changed its launch window for the Kuiper mission on April 9 from midday to the evening hours due to a request from the Eastern Range. Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, the range commander, spoke with reporters in a roundtable meeting last week. After nearly 20 years of covering launches from Cape Canaveral, I found a seven-hour time change so close to launch to be unusual, so I asked Panzenhagen about the reason for it, mostly out of curiosity. She declined to offer any details.

File photo of a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch in 2022. Credit: SpaceX

“The Eastern Range is huge,” she said. “It’s 15 million square miles. So, as you can imagine, there are a lot of players that are using that range space, so there’s a lot of de-confliction … Public safety is our top priority, and we take that very seriously on both ranges. So, we are constantly de-conflicting, but I’m not going to get into details of what the actual conflict was.”

It turns out the range conflict now impacting the Eastern Range is having some longer-lasting impacts. While a one- or two-week launch delay doesn’t seem serious, it adds up to deferred or denied revenue for a commercial satellite operator. National security missions get priority on range schedules at Cape Canaveral and at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, but there are significantly more commercial missions than military launches from both spaceports.

Clearly, there’s something out of the ordinary going on in the Eastern Range, which extends over much of the Atlantic Ocean to the southeast, east, and northeast of Cape Canaveral. The range includes tracking equipment, security forces, and ground stations in Florida and downrange sites in Bermuda and Ascension Island.

One possibility is a test of one or more submarine-launched Trident ballistic missiles, which commonly occur in the waters off the east coast of Florida. But those launches are usually accompanied by airspace and maritime warning notices to ensure pilots and sailors steer clear of the test. Nothing of the sort has been publicly released in the last couple of weeks.

Maybe something is broken at the Florida launch base. When launches were less routine than today, the range at Cape Canaveral would close for a couple of weeks per year for upgrades and refurbishment of critical infrastructure. This is no longer the case. In 2023, Panzenhagen told Ars that the Space Force changed the policy.

“When the Eastern Range was supporting 15 to 20 launches a year, we had room to schedule dedicated periods for maintenance of critical infrastructure,” she said at the time. “During these periods, launches were paused while teams worked the upgrades. Now that the launch cadence has grown to nearly twice per week, we’ve adapted to the new way of business to best support our mission partners.”

Perhaps, then, it’s something more secret, like a larger-scale, multi-element military exercise or war game that either requires Eastern Range participation or is taking place in areas the Space Force needs to clear for safety reasons for a rocket launch to go forward. The military sometimes doesn’t publicize these activities until they’re over.

A Space Force spokesperson did not respond to Ars Technica’s questions on the matter.

While we’re still a ways off from rocket launches becoming as routine as an airplane flight, the military is shifting in the way it thinks about spaceports. Instead of offering one-off bespoke services tailored to the circumstances of each launch, the Space Force wants to operate the ranges more like an airport.

“We’ve changed the nomenclature from calling ourselves a range to calling ourselves a spaceport because we see ourselves more like an airport in the future,” one Space Force official told Ars for a previous story.

In the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal-year 2024, Congress gave the Space Force the authority to charge commercial launch providers indirect fees to help pay for common infrastructure at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg—things like roads, electrical and water utilities, and base security used by all rocket operators at each spaceport. The military previously could only charge rocket companies direct fees for the specific services it offered in support of a particular launch, while the government was on the hook for overhead costs.

Military officials characterize the change in law as a win-win for the government and commercial launch providers. Ideally, it will grow the pool of money available to modernize the military’s spaceports, making them more responsive to all users, whether it’s the Space Force, SpaceX, ULA, or a startup new to the launch industry.

Whatever is going on in Florida or the Atlantic Ocean this week, it’s something the Space Force doesn’t want to talk about in detail. Maybe there are good reasons for that.

Cape Canaveral is America’s busiest launch base. Extending the spaceport-airport analogy a little further, the closure of America’s busiest airport for a week or more would be a big deal. One of the holy grails the Space Force is pursuing is the capability to launch on demand.

This week, there’s demand for launch slots at Cape Canaveral, but the answer is no.

There’s a secret reason the Space Force is delaying the next Atlas V launch Read More »

Tesla odometer uses “predictive algorithms” to void warranty, lawsuit claims

Cars, Tesla / Mike M. / April 17, 2025

Tesla is facing a new scandal that once again sees the electric automaker accused of misleading customers. In the past, it has been caught making “misleading statements” about the safety of its electric vehicles, and more recently, an investigation by Reuters found Tesla EVs exaggerated their efficiency. Now, a lawsuit filed in California alleges that the cars are also falsely exaggerating odometer readings to make warranties expire prematurely.

The lead plaintiff in the case, Nyree Hinton, bought a used Model Y with less than 37,000 miles (59,546 km) on the odometer. Within six months, it had pushed past the 50,000-mile (80,467 km) mark, at which point the car’s bumper-to-bumper warranty expired. (Like virtually all EVs, Tesla powertrains have a separate warranty that lasts much longer.)

For this six-month period, Hinton says his Model Y odometer gained 13,228 miles (21,288 km). By comparison, averages of his three previous vehicles showed that with the same commute, he was only driving 6,086 miles (9,794 km) per 6 months.

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Diablo vs. Darkest Dungeon: RPG devs on balancing punishment and power

darkest dungeon, Diablo, difficulty, Features, Game Design, gaming, interview, roguelike, roleplaying game, RPG, systems design / Mike M. / April 17, 2025

For Sigman and the Darkest Dungeon team, it was important to establish an overarching design philosophy that was set in place. That said, the details within that framework may change or evolve significantly during development.

“In this age of early access and easily updatable games, balance is a living thing,” Sigman said. “It’s highly iterative throughout the game’s public life. We will update balance based upon community feedback, analytics, evolving metas, and also reflections on our own design philosophies and approaches.”

In Darkest Dungeon 2, a group of adventures sits by a table, exhausted — A screen for managing inventory and more in *Darkest Dungeon II*. Credit: Red Hook Studios

The problem, of course, is that every change to an existing game is a double-edged sword. With each update, you risk breaking the very elements you’re trying to fix.

Speaking to that ongoing balancing act, Sigman admits, “It’s not without its challenges. We’ve found that many players eagerly await such updates, but a subset gets really angry when developers change balance elements.”

Getting one of your favorite heroes or abilities nerfed can absolutely sink a game or destroy a strategy you’ve relied on for success. The team relies on a number of strictly mathematical tools to help isolate and solve balance problems, but on some level, it’s an artistic and philosophical question.

“A good example is how to address ‘exploits’ in a game,” Sigman said. “Some games try to hurriedly stamp out all possible exploits. With a single-player game, I think you have more leeway to let some exploits stand. It’s nice to let players get away with some stuff. If you kick sand over every exploit that appears, you remove some of the fun.”

As with so many aspects of game design, perfecting the balance between adversity and empowerment comes down to a simple question.

“One amazing piece of wisdom from Sid Meier, my personal favorite designer, is to remember to ask yourself, ‘Who is having the fun here? The designer or the player?’ It should be the player,” Sigman told us.

It’s the kind of approach that players love to hear. Even if a decision is made to make a game more difficult, particularly in an existing game, it should be done to make the play experience more enjoyable. If it begins to feel like devs are making balance changes just to scale down players’ power, it can begin to feel like you’re being punished for having fun.

The fine balance between power and challenge is a hard one to strike, but what players ultimately want is to have a good time. Sometimes that means feeling like a world-destroying demigod, and sometimes it means squeaking through a bloody boss encounter with a single hit point. Most often, though, you’re looking for a happy medium: a worthy challenge overcome through power and skill.

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Why are two Texas senators trying to wrest a Space Shuttle from the Smithsonian?

Space, space center houston, Space Shuttle Discovery / Mike M. / April 17, 2025

Should the city of Houston, which proudly bills itself as “Space City,” have a prized Space Shuttle orbiter on public display?

More than a decade ago, arguably, the answer was yes. After all, the Space Shuttle program was managed from Johnson Space Center, in southeastern Houston. All the astronauts who flew on the shuttle trained there. And the vehicle was operated out of Mission Control at the Houston-based facility.

But when the final decisions were being made to distribute the shuttles 15 years ago, the Houston community dragged its feet on putting together a competitive proposal. There were also questions about the ability of Space Center Houston to raise funding to house the shuttle within a new display area, which magnified concerns that the historical vehicle, like a Saturn V rocket before it, would be left outside in the region’s humid environment. Finally, other cities offered better proposals for displaying the shuttles to the public.

In the end, the four shuttles were sent to museums in Washington, DC, New York, Florida, and California.

Bring it back home

And that was all more or less settled until last week when the two US senators from Texas, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, filed the “Bring the Space Shuttle Home Act” to move Space Shuttle Discovery from its current location at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia to Houston.

The space collectibles news site, CollectSpace, has a good overview of why this move is stupidly impractical. Essentially, it would easily cost $1 billion to get one of the two shuttle aircraft carriers back into service and move Discovery, it is unclear where the shuttle could survive such a journey in its current state, and the Smithsonian is the nation’s premier museum. There’s a reason that Discovery, the most historical of the three remaining shuttles that have gone to space, was placed there.

After the senators announced their bill, the collective response from the space community was initially shock. This was soon followed by: why? And so I’ve spoken with several people on background, both from the political and space spheres, to get a sense of what is really happening here. The short answer is that it is all political, and the timing is due to the reelection campaign for Cornyn, who faces a stiff runoff against Ken Paxton.

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Disgruntled users roast X for killing Support account

elon musk, Policy, Social Media, Twitter, X / Mike M. / April 17, 2025

After X (formerly Twitter) announced it would be killing its “Support” account, disgruntled users quickly roasted the social media platform for providing “essentially non-existent” support.

“We’ll soon be closing this account to streamline how users can contact us for help,” X’s Support account posted, explaining that now, paid “subscribers can get support via @Premium, and everyone can get help through our Help Center.”

On X, the Support account was one of the few paths that users had to publicly seek support for help requests the platform seemed to be ignoring. For suspended users, it was viewed as a lifeline. Replies to the account were commonly flooded with users trying to get X to fix reported issues, and several seemingly paying users cracked jokes in response to the news that the account would soon be removed.

“Lololol your support for Premium is essentially non-existent,” a subscriber with more than 200,000 followers wrote, while another quipped “Okay, so no more support? lol.”

On Reddit, X users recently suggested that contacting the Premium account is the only way to get human assistance after briefly interacting with a bot. But some self-described Premium users complained of waiting six months or longer for responses from X’s help center in the Support thread.

Some users who don’t pay for access to the platform similarly complained. But for paid subscribers or content creators, lack of Premium support is perhaps most frustrating, as one user claimed their account had been under review for years, allegedly depriving them of revenue. And another user claimed they’d had “no luck getting @Premium to look into” an account suspension while supposedly still getting charged. Several accused X of sending users into a never-ending loop, where the help center only serves to link users to the help center.

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The physics of bowling strike after strike

bowling, Physics, Science, sports science / Mike M. / April 16, 2025

More than 45 million people in the US are fans of bowling, with national competitions awarding millions of dollars. Bowlers usually rely on instinct and experience, earned through lots and lots of practice, to boost their strike percentage. A team of physicists has come up with a mathematical model to better predict ball trajectories, outlined in a new paper published in the journal AIP Advances. The resulting equations take into account such factors as the composition and resulting pattern of the oil used on bowling lanes, as well as the inevitable asymmetries of bowling balls and player variability.

The authors already had a strong interest in bowling. Three are regular bowlers and quite skilled at the sport; a fourth, Curtis Hooper of Longborough University in the UK, is a coach for Team England at the European Youth Championships. Hooper has been studying the physics of bowling for several years, including an analysis of the 2017 Weber Cup, as well as papers devising mathematical models for the application of lane conditioners and oil patterns in bowling.

The calculations involved in such research are very complicated because there are so many variables that can affect a ball’s trajectory after being thrown. Case in point: the thin layer of oil that is applied to bowling lanes, which Hooper found can vary widely in volume and shape among different venues, plus the lack of uniformity in applying the layer, which creates an uneven friction surface.

Per the authors, most research to date has relied on statistically analyzing empirical data, such as a 2018 report by the US Bowling Congress that looked at data generated by 37 bowlers. (Hooper relied on ball-tracking data for his 2017 Weber Cup analysis.) A 2009 analysis showed that the optimal location for the ball to strike the headpin is about 6 centimeters off-center, while the optimal entry angle for the ball to hit is about 6 degrees. However, such an approach struggles to account for the inevitable player variability. No bowler hits their target 100 percent of the time, and per Hooper et al., while the best professionals can come within 0.1 degrees from the optimal launch angle, this slight variation can nonetheless result in a difference of several centimeters down-lane.

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After market tumult, Trump exempts smartphones from massive new tariffs

Apple, Google, Policy, smartphones, syndication, tariffs / Mike M. / April 13, 2025

Shares in the US tech giant were one of Wall Street’s biggest casualties in the days immediately after Trump announced his reciprocal tariffs. About $700 billion was wiped off Apple’s market value in the space of a few days.

Earlier this week, Trump said he would consider excluding US companies from his tariffs, but added that such decisions would be made “instinctively.”

Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the exemptions mirrored exceptions for smartphones and consumer electronics issued by Trump during his trade wars in 2018 and 2019.

“We’ll have to wait and see if the exemptions this time around also stick, or if the president once again reverses course sometime in the not-too-distant future,” said Bown.

US Customs and Border Protection referred inquiries about the order to the US International Trade Commission, which did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

The White House confirmed that the new exemptions would not apply to the 20 percent tariffs on all Chinese imports applied by Trump to respond to China’s role in fentanyl manufacturing.

White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said on Saturday that companies including Apple, TSMC, and Nvidia were “hustling to onshore their manufacturing in the United States as soon as possible” at “the direction of the President.”

“President Trump has made it clear America cannot rely on China to manufacture critical technologies such as semiconductors, chips, smartphones, and laptops,” said Leavitt.

Apple declined to comment.

Economists have warned that the sweeping nature of Trump’s tariffs—which apply to a broad range of common US consumer goods—threaten to fuel US inflation and hit economic growth.

New York Fed chief John Williams said US inflation could reach as high as 4 percent as a result of Trump’s tariffs.

Additional reporting by Michael Acton in San Francisco

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Author name: Mike M.