Science

measles-arrives-in-kansas,-spreads-quickly-in-undervaccinated-counties

Measles arrives in Kansas, spreads quickly in undervaccinated counties

On Thursday, the county on the northern border of Stevens, Grant County, also reported three confirmed cases, which were also linked to the first case in Stevens. Grant County is in a much better position to handle the outbreak than its neighbors; its one school district, Ulysses, reported 100 percent vaccination coverage for kindergartners in the 2023–2024 school year.

Outbreak risk

So far, details about the fast-rising cases are scant. The Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) has not published another press release about the cases since March 13. Ars Technica reached out to KDHE for more information but did not hear back before this story’s publication.

The outlet KWCH 12 News out of Wichita published a story Thursday, when there were just six cases reported in just Grant and Stevens Counties, saying that all six were in unvaccinated people and that no one had been hospitalized. On Friday, KWCH updated the story to note that the case count had increased to 10 and that the health department now considers the situation an outbreak.

Measles is an extremely infectious virus that can linger in airspace and on surfaces for up to two hours after an infected person has been in an area. Among unvaccinated people exposed to the virus, 90 percent will become infected.

Vaccination rates have slipped nationwide, creating pockets that have lost herd immunity and are vulnerable to fast-spreading, difficult-to-stop outbreaks. In the past, strong vaccination rates prevented such spread, and in 2000, the virus was declared eliminated, meaning there was no continuous spread of the virus over a 12-month period. Experts now fear that the US will lose its elimination status, meaning measles will once again be considered endemic to the country.

So far this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has documented 378 measles cases as of Thursday, March 20. That figure is already out of date.

On Friday, the Texas health department reported 309 cases in its ongoing outbreak. Forty people have been hospitalized, and one unvaccinated child with no underlying medical conditions has died. The outbreak has spilled over to New Mexico and Oklahoma. In New Mexico, officials reported Friday that the case count has risen to 42 cases, with two hospitalizations and one death in an unvaccinated adult. In Oklahoma, the case count stands at four.

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“infantile-amnesia”-occurs-despite-babies-showing-memory-activity

“Infantile amnesia” occurs despite babies showing memory activity

For many of us, memories of our childhood have become a bit hazy, if not vanishing entirely. But nobody really remembers much before the age of 4, because nearly all humans experience what’s termed “infantile amnesia,” in which memories that might have formed before that age seemingly vanish as we move through adolescence. And it’s not just us; the phenomenon appears to occur in a number of our fellow mammals.

The simplest explanation for this would be that the systems that form long-term memories are simply immature and don’t start working effectively until children hit the age of 4. But a recent animal experiment suggests that the situation in mice is more complex: the memories are there, they’re just not normally accessible, although they can be re-activated. Now, a study that put human infants in an MRI tube suggests that memory activity starts by the age of 1, suggesting that the results in mice may apply to us.

Less than total recall

Mice are one of the species that we know experience infantile amnesia. And, thanks to over a century of research on mice, we have some sophisticated genetic tools that allow us to explore what’s actually involved in the apparent absence of the animals’ earliest memories.

A paper that came out last year describes a series of experiments that start by having very young mice learn to associate seeing a light come on with receiving a mild shock. If nothing else is done with those mice, that association will apparently be forgotten later in life due to infantile amnesia.

But in this case, the researchers could do something. Neural activity normally results in the activation of a set of genes. In these mice, the researchers engineered it so one of the genes that gets activated encodes a protein that can modify DNA. When this protein is made, it results in permanent changes to a second gene that was inserted in the animal’s DNA. Once activated through this process, the gene leads to the production of a light-activated ion channel.

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hints-grow-stronger-that-dark-energy-changes-over-time

Hints grow stronger that dark energy changes over time

In its earliest days, the Universe was a hot, dense soup of subatomic particles, including hydrogen and helium nuclei, aka baryons. Tiny fluctuations created a rippling pattern through that early ionized plasma, which froze into a three-dimensional place as the Universe expanded and cooled. Those ripples, or bubbles, are known as baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO). It’s possible to use BAOs as a kind of cosmic ruler to investigate the effects of dark energy over the history of the Universe.

DESI is a state-of-the-art instrument and can capture light from up to 5,000 celestial objects simultaneously.

DESI is a state-of-the-art instrument that can capture light from up to 5,000 celestial objects simultaneously.

That’s what DESI was designed to do: take precise measurements of the apparent size of these bubbles (both near and far) by determining the distances to galaxies and quasars over 11 billion years. That data can then be sliced into chunks to determine how fast the Universe was expanding at each point of time in the past, the better to model how dark energy was affecting that expansion.

An upward trend

Last year’s results were based on analysis of a full year’s worth of data taken from seven different slices of cosmic time and include 450,000 quasars, the largest ever collected, with a record-setting precision of the most distant epoch (between 8 to 11 billion years back) of 0.82 percent. While there was basic agreement with the Lamba CDM model, when those first-year results were combined with data from other studies (involving the cosmic microwave background radiation and Type Ia supernovae), some subtle differences cropped up.

Essentially, those differences suggested that the dark energy might be getting weaker. In terms of confidence, the results amounted to a 2.6-sigma level for the DESI’s data combined with CMB datasets. When adding the supernovae data, those numbers grew to 2.5-sigma, 3.5-sigma, or 3.9-sigma levels, depending on which particular supernova dataset was used.

It’s important to combine the DESI data with other independent measurements because “we want consistency,” said DESI co-spokesperson Will Percival of the University of Waterloo. “All of the different experiments should give us the same answer to how much matter there is in the Universe at present day, how fast the Universe is expanding. It’s no good if all the experiments agree with the Lambda-CDM model, but then give you different parameters. That just doesn’t work. Just saying it’s consistent to the Lambda-CDM, that’s not enough in itself. It has to be consistent with Lambda-CDM and give you the same parameters for the basic properties of that model.”

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brains-of-parrots,-unlike-songbirds,-use-human-like-vocal-control

Brains of parrots, unlike songbirds, use human-like vocal control

Due to past work, we’ve already identified the brain structure that controls the activity of the key vocal organ, the syrinx, located in the bird’s throat. The new study, done by Zetian Yang and Michael Long of New York University, managed to place fine electrodes into this area of the brain in both species and track the activity of neurons there while the birds were awake and going about normal activities. This allowed them to associate neural activity with any vocalizations made by the birds. For the budgerigars, they had an average of over 1,000 calls from each of the four birds carrying the implanted electrodes.

For the zebra finch, neural activity during song production showed a pattern that was based on timing; the same neurons tended to be most active at the same point in the song. You can think of this as a bit like a player piano central organizing principle, timing when different notes should be played. “Different configurations [of neurons] are active at different moments, representing an evolving population ‘barcode,’” as Yang and Long describe this pattern.

That is not at all what was seen with the budgerigars. Here, instead, they saw patterns where the same populations of neurons tended to be active when the bird was producing a similar sound. They broke the warbles down into parts that they characterized on a scale that ranged from harmonic to noisy. They found that the groups of neurons tended to be more active whenever the warble was harmonic, and different groups tended to spike when it got noisy. Those observations led them to identify a third population, which was active whenever the budgerigars produced a low-frequency sound.

In addition, Yang and Long analyzed the pitch of the vocalizations. Only about half of the neurons in the relevant region of the brain were linked to pitch. However, the half that was linked had small groups of neurons that fired during the production of a relatively narrow range of pitches. They could use the activity of as few as five individual neurons and accurately predict the pitch of the vocalizations at the time.

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even-the-worst-mass-extinction-had-its-oases

Even the worst mass extinction had its oases

Some earlier plants might not have made it through the extinction since rock layers from the onset of the End-Permian Mass Extinction showed a decrease in pollen and spores, as well as fewer plant species. Other species were scarce because they had not been as well-preserved as others; the team did not automatically assume the scarcity of a plant that did not fossilize meant it had gone extinct.

While there were plant species that ended up being victims of the Great Dying, analysis of species through spore and pollen told the team that only about 21 percent of them succumbed to extinction.

Life will not be contained

The fossils also revealed the presence of plant species known to grow near lakes, which meant an environment that most likely provided drinking water for land-dwelling animals. Fossilized spores farther from what were once the banks of an ancient lake or the edge of a lakeplain suggest it was surrounded by a forest of gymnospermous trees, such as conifers or ginkgo, and ferns.

Because the researchers found so many spores from plant species known to grow in humid climates, they think the regional climate before the extinction was either humid or sub-humid, with plenty of rain. It was a lush environment that would see dry periods during the mass extinction event, but not be completely devastated.

Despite some species of plants vanishing, those that were found to have survived during and after the extinction mostly belonged to conifers and pteridosperms (now-extinct plants similar to ferns), which showed “a remarkable ability to adapt to drought,” as Liu and his team said in the same study.

The drought turned out to be only temporary. Younger rock layers were found to contain a greater abundance of pollen and spores from species that grew during the extinction event. The types of plants represented suggest a climate that had returned to subhumid and was more habitable.

Fossils of animals found at the site support its role as a haven for life. From the herbivorous Lystrosaurus (not a dinosaur), which looked something like a walrus with legs and a shovel face, to the carnivorous chroniosuchians that resembled giant lizards and fed on insects and small amphibians, the refugium in what is now Xinjiang kept life going.

Both flora and fauna would soon spread across terrestrial environments once again. Life on land flourished only 75,000 years after the End-Permian Mass Extinction, so life really does find a way.

Science Advances, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ads5614

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people-in-this-career-are-better-at-seeing-through-optical illusions

People in this career are better at seeing through optical illusions

A hint came from our previous work comparing mathematical and social scientists’ judgements of illusions (we work in universities, so we sometimes study our colleagues). Social scientists, such as psychologists, see illusions more strongly.

Researchers like us have to take many factors into account. Perhaps this makes us more sensitive to context even in the way we see things. But also, it could be that your visual style affects what you choose to study. One of us (Martin) went to university to study physics, but left with a psychology degree. As it happens, his illusion perception is much stronger than normal.

Training your illusion skills

Despite all these individual differences, researchers have always thought that you have no choice over whether you see the illusion. Our recent research challenges this idea.

Radiologists need to be able to rapidly spot important information in medical scans. Doing this often means they have to ignore surrounding detail.

Radiologists train extensively, so does this make them better at seeing through illusions? We found it does. We studied 44 radiologists, compared to over 100 psychology and medical students.

Below is one of our images. The orange circle on the left is 6% smaller than the one on the right. Most people in the study saw it as larger.

The orange circle on the left is actually smaller Credit: Radoslaw Wincza

Here is another image. Most non-radiologists still saw the left one as bigger. Yet, it is 10% smaller. Most radiologists got this one right.

Does the left orange circle look bigger or smaller to you? Credit: Radoslaw Wincza

It was not until the difference was nearly 18%, as shown in the image below, that most non-radiologists saw through the illusion.

Most people get this one right. Credit: Radoslaw Wincza, The Conversation

Radiologists are not entirely immune to the illusion, but are much less susceptible. We also looked at radiologists just beginning training. Their illusion perception was no better than normal. It seems radiologists’ superior perception is a result of their extensive training.

According to current theories of expertise, this shouldn’t happen. Becoming an expert in chess, for example, makes you better at chess but not anything else. But our findings suggest that becoming an expert in medical image analysis also makes you better at seeing through some optical illusions.

There is plenty left to find out. Perhaps the most intriguing possibility is that training on optical illusions can improve radiologists’ skills at their own work.

So, how can you learn to see through illusions? Simple. Just five years of medical school, then seven more of radiology training and this skill can be yours too.The Conversation

Martin Doherty, Associate Professor in Psychology, University of East Anglia and Radoslaw Wincza, Lecturer in Behavioural Sciences, University of Central Lancashire. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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here’s-the-secret-to-how-firefly-was-able-to-nail-its-first-lunar-landing

Here’s the secret to how Firefly was able to nail its first lunar landing


Darkness fell over Mare Crisium, ending a daily dose of dazzling images from the Moon.

Firefly’s X-band communications antenna (left) is marked with the logos of NASA, Firefly Aerospace, and the US flag. Credit: Firefly Aerospace

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost science station accomplished a lot on the Moon in the last two weeks. Among other things, its instruments drilled into the Moon’s surface, tested an extraterrestrial vacuum cleaner, and showed that future missions could use GPS navigation signals to navigate on the lunar surface.

These are all important achievements, gathering data that could shed light on the Moon’s formation and evolution, demonstrating new ways of collecting samples on other planets, and revealing the remarkable reach of the US military’s GPS satellite network.

But the pièce de résistance for Firefly’s first Moon mission might be the daily dose of imagery that streamed down from the Blue Ghost spacecraft. A suite of cameras recorded the cloud of dust created as the lander’s engine plume blew away the uppermost layer of lunar soil as it touched down March 2 in Mare Crisium, or the Sea of Crises. This location is in a flat basin situated on the upper right quadrant of the side of the Moon always facing the Earth.

Other images from Firefly’s lander showed the craft shooting tethered electrodes out onto the lunar surface, like a baseball outfielder trying to throw out a runner at home plate. Firefly’s cameras also showed the lander’s drill as it began to probe several meters into the Moon’s crust.

The first Blue Ghost mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program established in 2018 to partner with US companies for cargo transportation to the Moon. Firefly is one of 13 companies eligible to compete for CLPS missions, precursors to future astronaut landings on the Moon under NASA’s Artemis program.

Now, Firefly finds itself at the top of the pack of firms seeking to gain a foothold at the Moon.

Blue Ghost landed just after sunrise at Mare Crisium, an event shown in the blow video captured with four cameras mounted on the lander to observe how its engine plume interacted with loose soil on the lunar surface. The information will be useful as NASA plans to land astronauts on the Moon in the coming years.

“Although the data is still preliminary, the 3,000-plus images we captured appear to contain exactly the type of information we were hoping for in order to better understand plume-surface interaction and learn how to accurately model the phenomenon based on the number, size, thrust and configuration of the engines,” said Rob Maddock, project manager for NASA’s SCALPSS experiment.

One of the vehicle’s payloads, named Lunar PlanetVac, dropped from the bottom of the lander and released a blast of gas to blow fine-grained lunar soil into a collection chamber for sieving. Provided by a company named Honeybee Robotics, this device could be used as a cheaper alternative to other sample collection methods, such as robotic arms, on future planetary science missions.

Just over 4 days on the Moon’s surface and #BlueGhost is checking off several science milestones! 8 out of 10 @NASA payloads, including LPV, EDS, NGLR, RAC, RadPC, LuGRE, LISTER, and SCALPSS, have already met their mission objectives with more to come. Lunar PlanetVac for example… pic.twitter.com/i7pOg70qYi

— Firefly Aerospace (@Firefly_Space) March 6, 2025

After two weeks of pioneering work, the Blue Ghost lander fell into darkness Sunday when the Sun sank below the horizon, robbing it of solar power and plunging temperatures below minus 200° Fahrenheit (148°Celcius). The spacecraft’s internal electronics likely won’t survive the two-week-long lunar night.

A precoded message from Blue Ghost marked the moment Sunday afternoon, signaling a transition to “monument mode.”

“Goodnight friends,” Blue Ghost radioed Firefly’s mission control center in Central Texas. “After exchanging our final bits of data, I will hold vigil in this spot in Mare Crisium to watch humanity’s continued journey to the stars. Here, I will outlast your mightiest rivers, your tallest mountains, and perhaps even your species as we know it.”

Blue Ghost’s legacy is now secure as the first fully successful commercial lunar lander. Its two-week mission was perhaps just as remarkable for what didn’t happen as it was for what did. The spacecraft encountered no significant problems on its transit to the Moon, its final descent, or during surface operations.

One of the few surprises of the mission was that the lander got hotter a little sooner than engineers predicted. At lunar noon, when the Sun is highest in the sky, temperatures can soar to 250° F (121° C).

“We started noticing that the lander was getting hotter than we expected, and we couldn’t really figure out why, because it was a little early for lunar noon,” Ray Allensworth, Firefly’s spacecraft program director, told Ars. “So we went back and started evaluating and realized that the crater that we landed next to was actually reflecting a really significant amount of heat. So we went back and we updated our thermal models, incorporated that crater into it, and it matched the environment we were seeing.”

Early Friday morning, the Blue Ghost spacecraft captured the first high-definition views of a total solar eclipse from the Moon. At the same time that skywatchers on Earth were looking up to see the Moon turn an eerie blood red, Firefly’s cameras were looking back at us as the Sun, Earth, and Moon moved into alignment and darkness fell at Mare Crisium.

Diamond ring

The eclipse was a bonus for Firefly. It just happened to occur during the spacecraft’s two-week mission at the Moon, the timing of which was dependent on numerous factors, ranging from the readiness of the Blue Ghost lander to weather conditions at its launch site in Florida.

“We weren’t actually planning to have an eclipse until a few months prior to our launch, when we started evaluating and realizing that an eclipse was happening right before lunar sunset,” Allensworth said. “So luckily, that gave us some time to work some procedures and basically set up what we wanted to take images of, what cameras we wanted to run.”

The extra work paid off. Firefly released an image Friday showing a glint of sunlight reaching around the curvature of the Earth, some 250,000 miles (402,000 kilometers) away. This phenomenon is known as the “diamond ring” and is a subject of pursuit for many eclipse chasers, who travel to far-flung locations for a few minutes of totality.

A “diamond ring” appears around the edge of the Earth, a quarter-million miles from Firefly’s science station on the lunar surface. Credit: Firefly Aerospace

The Blue Ghost spacecraft, named for a species of firefly, took eclipse chasing to new heights. Not only did it see the Earth block the Sun from an unexplored location on the Moon, but the lander fell into shadow for 2 hours and 16 minutes, about 18 times longer than the longest possible total solar eclipse on the Earth.

The eclipse presented challenges for Firefly’s engineers monitoring the mission from Texas. Temperatures at the spacecraft’s airless landing site plummeted as darkness took hold, creating what Allensworth called a “pseudo lunar night.”

“We were seeing those temperatures rapidly start dropping,” Allensworth said Friday. “So it was kind of an interesting game of to play with the hardware to keep everything in its temperature bounds but also still powered on and capturing data.”

Shaping up

Using navigation cameras and autonomous guidance algorithms, the spacecraft detected potential hazards at its original landing site and diverted to a safer location more than 230 feet (70 meters) away, according to Allensworth.

Finally happy with the terrain below, Blue Ghost’s computer sent the command for landing, powered by eight thrusters pulsing in rapid succession to control the craft’s descent rate. The landing was gentler than engineers anticipated, coming down at less than 2.2 mph (1 meter per second).

According to preliminary data, Blue Ghost settled in a location just outside of its 330-foot (100-meter) target landing ellipse, probably due to the last-minute divert maneuvers ordered by the vehicle’s hazard avoidance system.

It looks like we’re slightly out of it, but it’s really OK,” Allensworth said. “NASA has told us, more than anything, that they want us to make sure we land softly… They seem comfortable where we’re at.”

Firefly originally intended to develop a spacecraft based on the design of Israel’s Beresheet lander, which was the first private mission to attempt a landing on the Moon in 2019. The spacecraft crashed, and Firefly opted to go with a new design more responsive to NASA’s requirements.

“Managing the center of gravity and the mass of the lander is most significant, and that informs a lot of how it physically takes shape,” Allensworth said. “So we did want to keep certain things in mind about that, and that really is what led to the lander being wider, shorter, broader. We have these bigger foot pads on there. All of those things were very intentional to help make the lander as stable and predictable as possible.”

Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander, seen here inside the company’s spacecraft manufacturing facility in Cedar Park, Texas. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

These design choices must happen early in a spacecraft’s development. Landing on the Moon comes with numerous complications, including an often-uneven surface and the lack of an atmosphere, rendering parachutes useless. A lander targeting the Moon must navigate itself to a safe landing site without input from the ground.

The Odysseus, or Nova-C, lander built by Intuitive Machines snapped one of its legs and fell over on its side after arriving on the Moon last year. The altimeter on Odysseus failed, causing it to come down with too much horizontal velocity. The lander returned some scientific data from the Moon and qualified as a partial success. The spacecraft couldn’t recharge its batteries after landing on its side, and Odysseus shut down a few days after landing.

The second mission by Intuitive Machines reached the Moon on March 6, but it suffered the same fate. After tipping over, the Athena lander succumbed to low power within hours, preventing it from accomplishing its science mission for NASA.

The landers designed by Intuitive Machines are tall and skinny, towering more than 14 feet (4.3 meters) tall with a width of about 5.2 feet (1.6 meters). The Blue Ghost vehicle is short and squatty in shape—about 6.6 feet tall and 11.5 feet wide (2-by-3.5 meters). Firefly’s approach requires fewer landing legs than Intuitive Machines—four instead of six.

Steve Altemus, co-founder and CEO of Intuitive Machines, defended the design of his company’s lander in a press briefing after the second lunar landing tip-over earlier this month. The Nova-C lander isn’t too top-heavy for a safe landing because most of its cargo attaches to the bottom of the spacecraft, and for now, Altemus said Intuitive Machines is not considering a redesign.

Intuitive Machines stacked its two fuel and oxidizer tanks on top of each other, resulting in a taller vehicle. The Nova-C vehicle uses super-cold methane and liquid oxygen propellants, enabling a fast journey to the Moon over just a few days. The four propellant tanks on Blue Ghost are arranged in a diagonal configuration, with two containing hydrazine fuel and two holding an oxidizer called nitrogen tetroxide. Firefly’s Blue Ghost took about six weeks to travel from launch until landing.

The design trade-off means Firefly’s lander is heavier, with four tanks instead of two, according to Will Coogan, Blue Ghost’s chief engineer at Firefly. By going with a stockier lander design, Firefly needed to install four tanks because the spacecraft’s fuel and oxidizer have different densities. If Firefly went with just two tanks side-by-side, the spacecraft’s center of mass would change continually as it burns propellant during the final descent to the Moon, creating an unnecessary problem for the lander’s guidance, navigation, and control system to overcome.

“You want to avoid that,” Coogan told Ars before Blue Ghost’s launch. “What you can do is you can either get four tanks and have fuel and oxidizer at diagonal angles, and then you’re always centered, or you can stay with two tanks, and you can stack them.”

A camera on Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander captured a view of its shadow after touching down on the Moon just after sunrise on March 2. Earth looms over the horizon. Credit: Firefly Aerospace

The four landing legs on the Blue Ghost vehicle have shock-absorbing feet, with bowl-shaped pads able to bend if the lander comes down on a rock or a slope.

“If we did come in a little bit faster, we needed the legs to be able to take that, so we tested the legs really significantly on the ground,” Allensworth said. “We basically loaded them up on a makeshift weight bench at different angles and slammed it into the ground, slammed it into concrete, slammed it into regular simulant rocks, boulders, at different angles to really characterize what the legs could do.

“It’s actually really funny, because one of the edge cases that we didn’t test is if we came down very lightly, with almost no acceleration,” she said. “And that was the case that the lander landed in. I was joking with our structural engineer that he wasted all his time.”

Proof positive

Firefly delivered 10 NASA-sponsored science and technology demonstration experiments to the lunar surface, operating under contract with NASA’s CLPS program. CLPS builds on the commercial, service-based business model of NASA’s commercial cargo and crew program for transportation to the International Space Station.

NASA officials knew this approach was risky. The last landing on the Moon by a US spacecraft was the last Apollo mission in 1972, and most of the companies involved in CLPS are less than 20 years old, with little experience in deep space missions.

A Pittsburgh company named Astrobotic failed to reach the Moon on its first attempt in January 2024. The next month, Houston-based Intuitive Machines landed its Nova-C spacecraft on the lunar surface, but it tipped over after one of its legs snapped at the moment of touchdown.

Firefly, based in Cedar Park, Texas, was the third company to try a landing. Originally established as a rocket developer, Firefly signed up to be a CLPS provider and won a $101 million contract with NASA in 2021 to transport a government-funded science package to the Moon. NASA’s instruments aboard the Blue Ghost lander cost about $44 million.

The successful landing of Firefly’s Blue Ghost earlier this month buoyed NASA’s expectations for CLPS. “Overall, it’s been a fabulous, wonderful proof positive that the CLPS model does work,” said Brad Bailey, assistant deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

NASA has seven more CLPS missions on contract. The next could launch as soon as August when Blue Origin plans to send its first Blue Moon lander to the Moon. NASA has booked two more Blue Ghost missions with Firefly and two more landing attempts with Intuitive Machines, plus one more flight by Astrobotic and one lander from Draper Laboratory.

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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researchers-engineer-bacteria-to-produce-plastics

Researchers engineer bacteria to produce plastics

Image of a series of chemical reactions, with enzymes driving each step forward.

One of the enzymes used in this system takes an amino acid (left) and links it to Coenzyme A. The second takes these items and links them into a polymer. Credit: Chae et. al.

Normally, PHA synthase forms links between molecules that run through an oxygen atom. But it’s also possible to form a related chemical link that instead runs through a nitrogen atom, like those found on amino acids. There were no known enzymes, however, that catalyze these reactions. So, the researchers decided to test whether any existing enzymes could be induced to do something they don’t normally do.

The researchers started with an enzyme from Clostridium that links chemicals to Coenzyme A that has a reputation for not being picky about the chemicals it interacts with. This worked reasonably well at linking amino acids to Coenzyme A. For linking the amino acids together, they used an enzyme from Pseudomonas that had four different mutations that expanded the range of molecules it would use as reaction materials. Used in a test tube, the system worked: Amino acids were linked together in a polymer.

The question was whether it would work in cells. Unfortunately, one of the two enzymes turns out to be mildly toxic to E. coli, slowing its growth. So, the researchers evolved a strain of E. coli that could tolerate the protein. With both of these two proteins, the cells produced small amounts of an amino acid polymer. If they added an excess of an amino acid to the media the cells were growing in, the polymer would be biased toward incorporating that amino acid.

Boosting polymer production

However, the yield of the polymer by weight of bacteria was fairly low. “It was reasoned that these [amino acids] might be more efficiently incorporated into the polymer if generated within the cells from a suitable carbon source,” the researchers write. So, the researchers put in extra copies of the genes needed to produce one specific amino acid (lysine). That worked, producing more polymer, with a higher percentage of the polymer being lysine.

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small-charges-in-water-spray-can-trigger-the-formation-of-key-biochemicals

Small charges in water spray can trigger the formation of key biochemicals

Once his team nailed how droplets become electrically charged and how the micro-lightning phenomenon works, they recreated the Miller-Urey experiment. Only without the spark plugs.

Ingredients of life

After micro-lightnings started jumping between droplets in a mixture of gases similar to that used by Miller and Urey, the team examined their chemical composition with a mass spectrometer. They confirmed glycine, uracil, urea, cyanoethylene, and lots of other chemical compounds were made. “Micro-lightnings made all organic molecules observed previously in the Miller-Urey experiment without any external voltage applied,” Zare claims.

But does it really bring us any closer to explaining the beginnings of life? After all, Miller and Urey already demonstrated those molecules could be produced by electrical discharges in a primordial Earth’s atmosphere—does it matter all that much where those discharges came from?  Zare argues that it does.

“Lightning is intermittent, so it would be hard for these molecules to concentrate. But if you look at waves crashing into rocks, you can think the spray would easily go into the crevices in these rocks,” Zare suggests. He suggests that the water in these crevices would evaporate, new spray would enter and evaporate again and again. The cyclic drying would allow the chemical precursors to build into more complex molecules. “When you go through such a dry cycle, it causes polymerization, which is how you make DNA,” Zare argues. Since sources of spray were likely common on the early Earth, Zare thinks this process could produce far more organic chemicals than potential alternatives like lightning strikes, hydrothermal vents, or impacting comets.

But even if micro-lightning really produced the basic building blocks of life on Earth, we’re still not sure how those combined into living organisms. “We did not make life. We just demonstrated a possible mechanism that gives us some chemical compounds you find in life,” Zare says. “It’s very important to have a lot of humility with this stuff.”

Science Advances, 2025.  DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adt8979

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a-“biohybrid”-robotic-hand-built-using-real-human-muscle-cells

A “biohybrid” robotic hand built using real human muscle cells

Biohybrid robots work by combining biological components like muscles, plant material, and even fungi with non-biological materials. While we are pretty good at making the non-biological parts work, we’ve always had a problem with keeping the organic components alive and well. This is why machines driven by biological muscles have always been rather small and simple—up to a couple centimeters long and typically with only a single actuating joint.

“Scaling up biohybrid robots has been difficult due to the weak contractile force of lab-grown muscles, the risk of necrosis in thick muscle tissues, and the challenge of integrating biological actuators with artificial structures,” says Shoji Takeuchi, a professor at the Tokyo University, Japan. Takeuchi led a research team that built a full-size, 18 centimeter-long biohybrid human-like hand with all five fingers driven by lab-grown human muscles.

Keeping the muscles alive

Out of all the roadblocks that keep us from building large-scale biohybrid robots, necrosis has probably been the most difficult to overcome. Growing muscles in a lab usually means a liquid medium to supply nutrients and oxygen to muscle cells seeded on petri dishes or applied to gel scaffoldings. Since these cultured muscles are small and ideally flat, nutrients and oxygen from the medium can easily reach every cell in the growing culture.

When we try to make the muscles thicker and therefore more powerful, cells buried deeper in those thicker structures are cut off from nutrients and oxygen, so they die, undergoing necrosis. In living organisms, this problem is solved by the vascular network. But building artificial vascular networks in lab-grown muscles is still something we can’t do very well. So, Takeuchi and his team had to find their way around the necrosis problem. Their solution was sushi rolling.

The team started by growing thin, flat muscle fibers arranged side by side on a petri dish. This gave all the cells access to nutrients and oxygen, so the muscles turned out robust and healthy. Once all the fibers were grown, Takeuchi and his colleagues rolled them into tubes called MuMuTAs (multiple muscle tissue actuators) like they were preparing sushi rolls. “MuMuTAs were created by culturing thin muscle sheets and rolling them into cylindrical bundles to optimize contractility while maintaining oxygen diffusion,” Takeuchi explains.

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For climate and livelihoods, Africa bets big on solar mini-grids


Nigeria is pioneering the development of small, off-grid solar panel installations.

A general view of a hybrid minigrids station in Doma Town which is mainly powered by solar energy in Doma, Nassarawa State, Nigeria on October 16, 2023. Credit: Kola Sulaimon/AFP via Getty Images

To the people of Mbiabet Esieyere and Mbiabet Udouba in Nigeria’s deep south, sundown would mean children doing their homework by the glow of kerosene lamps, and the faint thrum of generators emanating from homes that could afford to run them. Like many rural communities, these two villages of fishermen and farmers in the community of Mbiabet, tucked away in clearings within a dense palm forest, had never been connected to the country’s national electricity grid.

Most of the residents had never heard of solar power either. When, in 2021, a renewable-energy company proposed installing a solar “mini-grid” in their community, the villagers scoffed at the idea of the sun powering their homes. “We didn’t imagine that something [like this] can exist,” says Solomon Andrew Obot, a resident in his early 30s.

The small installation of solar panels, batteries and transmission lines proposed by the company Prado Power would service 180 households in Mbiabet Esieyere and Mbiabet Udouba, giving them significantly more reliable electricity for a fraction of the cost of diesel generators. Village leaders agreed to the installation, though many residents remained skeptical. But when the panels were set up in 2022, lights blinked on in the brightly painted two-room homes and tan mud huts dotted sparsely through the community. At a village meeting in September, locals erupted into laughter as they recalled walking from house to house, turning on lights and plugging in phone chargers. “I [was] shocked,” Andrew Obot says.

Like many African nations, Nigeria has lagged behind Global North countries in shifting away from planet-warming fossil fuels and toward renewable energy. Solar power contributes just around 3 percent of the total electricity generated in Africa—though it is the world’s sunniest continent—compared to nearly 12 percent in Germany and 6 percent in the United States.

At the same time, in many African countries, solar power now stands to offer much more than environmental benefits. About 600 million Africans lack reliable access to electricity; in Nigeria specifically, almost half of the 230 million people have no access to electricity grids. Today, solar has become cheap and versatile enough to help bring affordable, reliable power to millions—creating a win-win for lives and livelihoods as well as the climate.

That’s why Nigeria is placing its bets on solar mini-grids—small installations that produce up to 10 megawatts of electricity, enough to power over 1,700 American homes—that can be set up anywhere. Crucially, the country has pioneered mini-grid development through smart policies to attract investment, setting an example for other African nations.

Nearly 120 mini-grids are now installed, powering roughly 50,000 households and reaching about 250,000 people. “Nigeria is actually like a poster child for mini-grid development across Africa,” says energy expert Rolake Akinkugbe-Filani, managing director of EnergyInc Advisors, an energy infrastructure consulting firm.

Though it will take more work—and funding—to expand mini-grids across the continent, Nigeria’s experience demonstrates that they could play a key role in weaning African communities off fossil-fuel-based power. But the people who live there are more concerned with another, immediate benefit: improving livelihoods. Affordable, reliable power from Mbiabet’s mini-grid has already supercharged local businesses, as it has in many places where nonprofits like Clean Technology Hub have supported mini-grid development, says Ifeoma Malo, the organization’s founder. “We’ve seen how that has completely transformed those communities.”

The African energy transition takes shape

Together, Africa’s countries account for less than 5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and many experts, like Malo, take issue with the idea that they need to rapidly phase out fossil fuels; that task should be more urgent for the United States, China, India, the European countries and Russia, which create the bulk of emissions. Nevertheless, many African countries have set ambitious phase-out goals. Some have already turned to locally abundant renewable energy sources, like geothermal power from the Earth’s crust, which supplies nearly half of the electricity produced in Kenya, and hydropower, which creates more than 80 percent of the electricity in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Uganda.

But hydropower and geothermal work only where those resources naturally exist. And development of more geographically versatile power sources, like solar and wind, has progressed more slowly in Africa. Though solar is cheaper than fossil-fuel-derived electricity in the long term, upfront construction costs are often higher than they are for building new fossil-fuel power plants.

Thanks to its sunny, equatorial position, the African continent has an immense potential for solar power, shown here in kilowatt-hours. However, solar power contributes less than 3 percent of the electricity generated in Africa. Credit: Knowable Magazine

Getting loans to finance big-ticket energy projects is especially hard in Africa, too. Compared to Europe or the United States, interest rates for loans can be two to three times higher due to perceived risks—for instance, that cash-strapped utility companies, already struggling to collect bills from customers, won’t be able to pay back the loans. Rapid political shifts and currency fluctuations add to the uncertainty. To boot, some Western African nations such as Nigeria charge high tariffs on importing technologies such as solar panels. “There are challenges that are definitely hindering the pace at which renewable energy development could be scaling in the region,” says renewable energy expert Tim Reber of the Colorado-based US National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Some African countries are beginning to overcome these barriers and spur renewable energy development, notes Bruno Merven, an expert in energy systems modeling at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, coauthor of a look at renewable energy development in the Annual Review of Resource Economics. Super-sunny Morocco, for example, has phased out subsidies for gasoline and industrial fuel. South Africa is agreeing to buy power from new, renewable infrastructure that is replacing many coal plants that are now being retired.

Nigeria, where only about a quarter of the national grid generates electricity and where many turn to generators for power, is leaning on mini-grids—since expanding the national grid to its remote communities, scattered across an area 1.3 times the size of Texas, would cost a prohibitive amount in the tens of billions of dollars. Many other countries are in the same boat. “The only way by which we can help to electrify the entire continent is to invest heavily in renewable energy mini-grids,” says Stephen Kansuk, the United Nations Development Program’s regional technical advisor for Africa on climate change mitigation and energy issues.

Experts praise the steps Nigeria has taken to spur such development. In 2016, the country’s Electricity Regulatory Commission provided legal guidelines on how developers, electricity distribution companies, regulators and communities can work together to develop the small grids. This was accompanied by a program through which organizations like the World Bank, the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, Bezos Earth Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation could contribute funds, making mini-grid investments less financially risky for developers.

Solar power was also made more attractive by a recent decision by Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to remove a long-standing government subsidy on petroleum products. Fossil-fuel costs have been soaring since, for vehicles as well as the generators that many communities rely on. Nigeria has historically been Africa’s largest crude oil producer, but fuel is now largely unaffordable for the average Nigerian, including those living in rural areas, who often live on less than $2 a day. In the crude-oil-rich state of Akwa Ibom, where the Mbiabet villages are located, gasoline was 1,500 naira per liter (around $1) at the time of publishing. “Now that subsidies have come off petrol,” says Akinkugbe-Filani, “we’re seeing a lot more people transition to alternative sources of energy.”

Mini-grids take off

To plan a mini-grid in Nigeria, developers often work with government agencies that have mapped out ideal sites: sunny places where there are no plans to extend the national grid, ensuring that there’s a real power need.

More than 500 million Africans lack access to electricity, and where there is electricity, much of it comes from fossil fuels. Countries are taking different approaches to bring more renewable energy into the mix. Nigeria is focusing on mini-grids, which are especially useful in areas that lack national electricity grids. Morocco and South Africa are building large-scale solar power installations, while Kenya and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are making use of local renewable energy sources like geothermal and hydropower, respectively. Credit: Knowable Magazine

The next step is getting communities on board, which can take months. Malo recalls a remote Indigenous village in the hills of Adamawa state in Nigeria’s northeast, where locals have preserved their way of life for hundreds of years and are wary of outsiders. Her team had almost given up trying to liaise with reluctant male community leaders and decided to try reaching out to the women. The women, it turned out, were fascinated by the technology and how it could help them, especially at night — to fetch water from streams, to use the bathroom and to keep their children safe from snakes. “We find that if we convince them, they’re able to go and convince their husbands,” Malo says.

The Mbiabet community took less convincing. Residents were drawn to the promise of cheap, reliable electricity and its potential to boost local businesses.

Like many other mini-grids, the one in Mbiabet benefited from a small grant, this one from the Rocky Mountain Institute, a US-based nonprofit focused on renewable energy adoption. The funds allowed residents to retain 20 percent ownership of the mini-grid and reduced upfront costs for Prado Power, which built the panels with the help of local laborers.

On a day in late September, it’s a sunny afternoon, though downpours from the days before have made their imprint on the ground. There are no paved roads and today, the dirt road leading through the tropical forest into the cluster of villages is unnavigable by car. At one point, we build an impromptu bridge of grass and vegetation across a sludgy impasse; the last stretch of the journey is made on foot. It would be costly and labor-intensive to extend the national grid here.

Palm trees give way to tin roofs propped up by wooden poles, and Andrew Obot is waiting at the meeting point. He was Mbiabet’s vice youth president when Prado Power first contacted the community; now he’s the site manager. He steers his okada—a local motorbike—up the bumpy red dirt road to go see the solar panels.

Along the way, we see transmission lines threading through thick foliage. “That’s the solar power,” shouts Andrew Obot over the drone of the okada engine. All the lines were built by Prado Power to supply households in the two villages.

We enter a grassy clearing where three rows of solar panels sit behind wire gates. Collectively, the 39 panels have a capacity of over 20 kilowatts—enough to power just one large, energy-intensive American household but more than enough for the lightbulbs, cooker plates and fans in the 180 households in Mbiabet Esieyere and Mbiabet Udouba.

Whereas before, electricity was more conservatively used, now it is everywhere. An Afrobeats tune blares from a small barbershop on the main road winding through Mbiabet Esieyere. Inside, surrounded by walls plastered with shiny posters of trending hairstyles — including a headshot of popular musician Davido with the tagline “BBC—Big Boyz Cutz”—two young girls sit on a bench near a humming fan, waiting for their heads to be shaved.

The salon owner, Christian Aniefiok Asuquo, started his business two years ago when he was 16, just before the panels were installed. Back then, his appliances were powered by a diesel generator, which he would fill with 2,000 naira worth (around $1.20) of fuel daily. This would last around an hour. Now, he spends just 2,000 naira a month on electricity. “I feel so good,” he says, and his customers, too, are happy. He used to charge 500 naira ($0.30) per haircut, but now charges 300 naira ($0.18) and still makes a profit. He has more customers these days.

For many Mbiabet residents, “it’s an overall boost in their economic development,” says Suleiman Babamanu, the Rocky Mountain Institute’s program director in Nigeria. Also helping to encourage residents to take full advantage of their newly available power is the installation of an “agro-processing hub,” equipped with crop-processing machines and a community freezer to store products like fish. Provided by the company Farm Warehouse in partnership with Prado Power, the hub is leased out to locals. It includes a grinder and fryer to process cassava—the community’s primary crop—into garri, a local food staple, which many of the village women sell to neighboring communities and at local markets.

The women are charged around 200 naira ($0.12) to process a small basin of garri from beginning to end. Sarah Eyakndue Monday, a 24-year-old cassava farmer, used to spend three to four hours processing cassava each day; it now takes her less than an hour. “It’s very easy,” she says with a laugh. She produces enough garri during that time to earn up to 50,000 naira ($30.25) a week—almost five times what she was earning before.

Prado Power also installed a battery system to save some power for nighttime (there’s a backup diesel generator should batteries become depleted during multiple overcast days). That has proved especially valuable to women in Mbiabet Esieyere and Mbiabet Udouba, who now feel safer. “Everywhere is … brighter than before,” says Eyakndue Monday.

Other African communities have experienced similar benefits, according to Renewvia Energy, a US-based solar company. In a recent company-funded survey, 2,658 Nigerian and Kenyan households and business owners were interviewed before and after they got access to Renewvia’s mini-grids. Remarkably, the median income of Kenyan households had quadrupled. Instead of spending hours each day walking kilometers to collect drinking water, many communities were able to install electricity-powered wells or pumps, along with water purifiers.

“With all of that extra time, women in the community were able to either start their own businesses or just participate in businesses that already exist,” says Renewvia engineer Nicholas Selby, “and, with that, gain some income for themselves.”

Navigating mini-grid challenges

Solar systems require regular maintenance—replacing retired batteries, cleaning, and repairing and addressing technical glitches over the 20- to 25-year lifetime of a panel. Unless plans for care are built into a project, they risk failure. In some parts of India, for example, thousands of mini-grids installed by the government in recent decades have fallen into disrepair, according to a report provided to The Washington Post. Typically, state agencies have little long-term incentive to maintain solar infrastructure, Kansuk says.

Kansuk says this is less likely in situations where private companies that make money off the grids help to fund them, encouraging them to install high-quality devices and maintain them. It also helps to train locals with engineering skills so they can maintain the panels themselves—companies like Renewvia have done this at their sites. Although Prado Power hasn’t been able to provide such training to locals in Mbiabet or their other sites, they recruit locals like Andrew Obot to work as security guards, site managers and construction workers.

Over the longer term, demographic shifts may also leave some mini-grids in isolated areas abandoned—as in northern Nigeria, for instance, where banditry and kidnapping are forcing rural populations toward more urban settings. “That’s become a huge issue,” Malo says. Partly for this reason, some developers are focusing on building mini-grids in regions that are less prone to violence and have higher economic activity—often constructing interconnected mini-grids that supply multiple communities.

Eventually, those close enough to the national grid will likely be connected to the larger system, says Chibuikem Agbaegbu, a Nigeria-based climate and energy expert of the Africa Policy Research Institute. They can send their excess solar-sourced electricity into the main grid, thus making a region’s overall energy system greener and more reliable.

The biggest challenge for mini-grids, however, is cost. Although they tend to offer cheaper, more reliable electricity compared to fossil-fuel-powered generators, it is still quite expensive for many people — and often much more costly than power from national grids, which is frequently subsidized by African governments. Costs can be even higher when communities sprawl across large areas that are expensive to connect.

Mini-grid companies have to charge relatively high rates in order to break even, and many communities may not be buying enough power to make a mini-grid worthwhile for the developers — for instance, Kansuk says, if residents want electricity only for lighting and to run small household appliances.

Kansuk adds that this is why developers like Prado Power still rely on grants or other funding sources to subsidize construction costs so they can charge locals affordable prices for electricity. Another solution, as evidenced in Mbiabet, is to introduce industrial machinery and equipment in tandem with mini-grids to increase local incomes so that people can afford the electricity tariffs.

“For you to be able to really transform lives in rural communities, you need to be able to improve the business viability—both for the mini-grid and for the community,” says Babamanu. The Rocky Mountain Institute is part of an initiative that identifies suitable electrical products, from cold storage to rice mills to electric vehicle chargers, and supports their installation in communities with the mini-grids.

Spreading mini-grids across the continent

Energy experts believe that these kinds of solutions will be key for expanding mini-grids across Africa. Around 60 million people in the continent gained access to electricity through mini-grids between 2009 and 2019, in countries such as Kenya, Tanzania and Senegal, and the United Nations Development Program is working with a total of 21 African countries, Kansuk says, including Mali, Niger and Somalia, to incentivize private companies to develop mini-grids there.

But it takes more than robust policies to help mini-grids thrive. Malo says it would help if Western African countries removed import tariffs for solar panels, as many governments in Eastern Africa have done. And though Agbaegbu estimates that Nigeria has seen over $900 million in solar investments since 2018—and the nation recently announced $750 million more through a multinationally funded program that aims to provide over 17.5 million Nigerians with electricity access—it needs more. “If you look at what is required versus what is available,” says Agbaegbu, “you find that there’s still a significant gap.”

Many in the field argue that such money should come from more industrialized, carbon-emitting countries to help pay for energy development in Global South countries in ways that don’t add to the climate problem; some also argue for funds to compensate for damages caused by climate impacts, which hit these countries hardest. At the 2024 COP29 climate change conference, wealthy nations set a target of $300 billion in annual funding for climate initiatives in other countries by 2035—three times more than what they had previously pledged. But African countries alone need an estimated $200 billion per year by 2030 to meet their energy goals, according to the International Energy Agency.

Meanwhile, Malo adds, it’s important that local banks in countries like Nigeria also invest in mini-grid development, to lessen dependence on foreign financing. That’s especially the case in light of current freezes in USAID funding, she says, which has resulted in a loss of money for solar projects in Nigeria and other nations.

With enough support, Reber says, mini-grids—along with rooftop and larger solar projects—could make a sizable contribution to lowering carbon emissions in Africa. Those who already have the mini-grids seem convinced they’re on the path toward a better, economically richer future, and Babamanu knows of communities that have written letters to policymakers to express their interest.

Eyakndue Monday, the cassava farmer from Mbiabet, doesn’t keep her community’s news a secret. Those she has told now come to her village to charge their phones and watch television. “I told a lot of my friends that our village is … better because of the light,” she says. “They were just happy.”

This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.

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Knowable Magazine explores the real-world significance of scholarly work through a journalistic lens.

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Rocket Report: ULA confirms cause of booster anomaly; Crew-10 launch on tap


The head of Poland’s space agency was fired over a bungled response to SpaceX debris falling over Polish territory.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the company’s Dragon spacecraft on top is seen during sunset Tuesday at Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Credit: SpaceX

Welcome to Edition 7.35 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX’s steamroller is still rolling, but for the first time in many years, it doesn’t seem like it’s rolling downhill. After a three-year run of perfect performance—with no launch failures or any other serious malfunctions—SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has suffered a handful of issues in recent months. Meanwhile, SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket is having problems, too. Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX’s vice president of launch, addressed some (but not all) of these concerns in a post on X this week. Despite the issues with the Falcon 9, SpaceX has maintained a remarkable launch cadence. As of Thursday, SpaceX has launched 28 Falcon 9 flights since January 1, ahead of last year’s pace.

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.

Alpha rocket preps for weekend launch. While Firefly Aerospace is making headlines for landing on the Moon, its Alpha rocket is set to launch again as soon as Saturday morning from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The two-stage, kerosene-fueled rocket will launch a self-funded technology demonstration satellite for Lockheed Martin. It’s the first of up to 25 launches Lockheed Martin has booked with Firefly over the next five years. This launch will be the sixth flight of an Alpha rocket, which has become a leader in the US commercial launch industry for dedicated missions with 1 ton-class satellites.

Firefly’s OG … The Alpha rocket was Firefly’s first product, and it has been a central piece of the company’s development since 2014. Like Firefly itself, the Alpha rocket program has gone through multiple iterations, including a wholesale redesign nearly a decade ago. Sure, Firefly can’t claim any revolutionary firsts with the Alpha rocket, as it can with its Blue Ghost lunar lander. But without Alpha, Firefly wouldn’t be where it is today. The Texas-based firm is one of only four US companies with an operational orbital-class rocket. One thing to watch for is how quickly Firefly can ramp up its Alpha launch cadence. The rocket only flew once last year.

Isar Aerospace celebrates another win. In last week’s Rocket Report, we mentioned that the German launch startup Isar Aerospace won a contract with a Japanese company to launch a 200-kilogram commercial satellite in 2026. But wait, there’s more! On Wednesday, the Norwegian Space Agency announced it awarded a contract to Isar Aerospace for the launch of a pair of satellites for the country’s Arctic Ocean Surveillance initiative, European Spaceflight reports. The satellites are scheduled to launch on Isar’s Spectrum rocket from Andøya Spaceport in Norway by 2028.

First launch pending … These recent contract wins are a promising sign for Isar Aerospace, which is also vying for contracts to launch small payloads for the European Space Agency. The Spectrum rocket could launch on its inaugural flight within a matter of weeks, and if successful, it could mark a transformative moment for the European space industry, which has long been limited to a single launch provider: the French company Arianespace. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

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Mother Nature holds up Oz launch. The first launch by Gilmour Space has been postponed again due to a tropical cyclone that brought severe weather to Australia’s Gold Coast region earlier this month, InnovationAus.com reports. Tropical Cyclone Alfred didn’t significantly impact Gilmour’s launch site, but the storm did cause the company to suspend work at its corporate headquarters in Southeast Queensland. With the storm now over, Gilmour is reassessing when it might be ready to launch its Eris rocket. Reportedly, the delay could be as long as two weeks or more.

A regulatory storm … Gilmour aims to become the first Australian company to launch a rocket into orbit. Last month, Gilmour announced the launch date for the Eris rocket was set for no earlier than March 15, but Tropical Cyclone Alfred threw this schedule out the window. Gilmour said it received a launch license from the Australian Space Agency in November and last month secured approvals to clear airspace around the launch site. But there’s still a hitch. The license is conditional on final documentation for the launch being filed and agreed with the space agency, and this process is stretching longer than anticipated. (submitted by ZygP)

What is going on at SpaceX? As we mention in the introduction to this week’s Rocket Report, it has been an uncharacteristically messy eight months for SpaceX. These speed bumps include issues with the Falcon 9 rocket’s upper stage on three missions, two lost Falcon 9 boosters, and consecutive failures of SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket on its first two test flights of the year. So what’s behind SpaceX’s bumpy ride? Ars wrote about the pressures facing SpaceX employees as Elon Musk pushes his workforce ever-harder to accelerate toward what Musk might call a multi-planetary future.

Headwinds or tailwinds? … No country or private company ever launched as many times as SpaceX flew its fleet of Falcon 9 rockets in 2024. At the same time, the company has been attempting to move its talented engineering team off the Falcon 9 and Dragon programs and onto Starship to keep that ambitious program moving forward. This is all happening as Musk has taken on significant roles in the Trump administration, stirring controversy and raising questions about his motives and potential conflicts of interest. However, it may be not so much Musk’s absence from SpaceX that is causing these issues but more the company’s relentless culture. As my colleague Eric Berger suggested in his piece, it seems possible that, at least for now, SpaceX has reached the speed limit for commercial spaceflight.

A titan of Silicon Valley enters the rocket business. Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt has taken a controlling interest in the Long Beach, California-based Relativity Space, Ars reports. Schmidt’s involvement with Relativity has been quietly discussed among space industry insiders for a few months. Multiple sources told Ars that he has largely been bankrolling the company since the end of October, when the company’s previous fundraising dried up. Now, Schmidt is Relativity’s CEO.

Unclear motives … It is not immediately clear why Schmidt is taking a hands-on approach at Relativity. However, it is one of the few US-based companies with a credible path toward developing a medium-lift rocket that could potentially challenge the dominance of SpaceX and its Falcon 9 rocket. If the Terran R booster becomes commercially successful, it could play a big role in launching megaconstellations. Schmidt’s ascension also means that Tim Ellis, the company’s co-founder, chief executive, and almost sole public persona for nearly a decade, is now out of a leadership position.

Falcon 9 deploys NASA’s newest space telescope. Satellites come in all shapes and sizes, but there aren’t any that look quite like SPHEREx, an infrared observatory NASA launched Tuesday night in search of answers to simmering questions about how the Universe, and ultimately life, came to be, Ars reports. The SPHEREx satellite rocketed into orbit from California aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, beginning a two-year mission surveying the sky in search of clues about the earliest periods of cosmic history, when the Universe rapidly expanded and the first galaxies formed. SPHEREx will also scan for pockets of water ice within our own galaxy, where clouds of gas and dust coalesce to form stars and planets.

Excess capacity … SPHEREx has lofty goals, but it’s modest in size, weighing just a little more than a half-ton at launch. This meant the Falcon 9 rocket had plenty of extra room for four other small satellites that will fly in formation to image the solar wind as it travels from the Sun into the Solar System. The four satellites are part of NASA’s PUNCH mission. SPHEREx and PUNCH are part of NASA’s Explorers program, a series of cost-capped science missions with a lineage going back to the dawn of the Space Age. SPHEREx and PUNCH have a combined cost of about $638 million. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

China has launched another batch of Internet satellites. A new group of 18 satellites entered orbit Tuesday for the Thousand Sails constellation with the first launch from a new commercial launch pad, Space News reports. The satellites launched on top of a Long March 8 rocket from Hainan Commercial Launch Site near Wenchang on Hainan Island. The commercial launch site has two pads, the first of which entered service with a launch last year. This mission was the first to launch from the other pad at the commercial spaceport, which is gearing up for an uptick in Chinese launch activity to continue deploying satellites for the Thousand Sails network and other megaconstellations.

Sailing on … The Thousand Sails constellation, also known as Qianfan, or G60 Starlink, is a broadband satellite constellation spearheaded by Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (SSST), also known as Spacesail, Space News reported. The project, which aims to deploy 14,000 satellites, seeks to compete in the global satellite Internet market. Spacesail has now launched 90 satellites into near-polar orbits, and the operator previously stated it aims to have 648 satellites in orbit by the end of 2025. If Spacesail continues launching 18 satellites per rocket, this goal would require 31 more launches this year. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

NASA, SpaceX call off astronaut launch. With the countdown within 45 minutes of launch, NASA called off an attempt to send the next crew to the International Space Station Wednesday evening to allow more time to troubleshoot a ground system hydraulics issue, CBS News reports. During the countdown Wednesday, SpaceX engineers were troubleshooting a problem with one of two clamp arms that hold the Falcon 9 rocket to its strongback support gantry. Hydraulics are used to retract the two clamps prior to launch.

Back on track … NASA confirmed Thursday SpaceX ground teams completed inspections of the hydraulics system used for the clamp arm supporting the Falcon 9 rocket and successfully flushed a suspected pocket of trapped air in the system, clearing the way for another launch attempt Friday evening. This mission, known as Crew-10, will ferry two NASA astronauts, a Japanese mission specialist, and a Russian cosmonaut to the space station. They will replace a four-person crew currently at the ISS, including Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who have been in orbit since last June after flying to space on Boeing’s Starliner capsule. Starliner returned to Earth without its crew due to a problem with overheating thrusters, leaving Wilmore and Williams behind to wait for a ride home with SpaceX.

SpaceX’s woes reach Poland’s space agency. The president of the Polish Space Agency, Grzegorz Wrochna, has been dismissed following a botched response to the uncontrolled reentry of a Falcon 9 second stage that scattered debris across multiple locations in Poland, European Spaceflight reports. The Falcon 9’s upper stage was supposed to steer itself toward a controlled reentry last month after deploying a set of Starlink satellites, but a propellant leak prevented it from doing so. Instead, the stage remained in orbit for nearly three weeks before falling back into the atmosphere February 19, scattering debris fragments at several locations in Poland.

A failure to communicate … In the aftermath of the Falcon 9’s uncontrolled reentry, the Polish Space Agency (POLSA) claimed it sent warnings of the threat of falling space debris to multiple departments of the Polish government. One Polish ministry disputed this claim, saying it was not adequately warned about the uncontrolled reentry. POLSA later confirmed it sent information regarding the reentry to a wrong email address. Making matters worse, the Polish Space Agency reported it was hacked on March 2. The Polish government apparently had enough and fired the head of the space agency March 11.

Vulcan booster anomaly blamed on “manufacturing defect.” The loss of a solid rocket motor nozzle on the second flight of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur last October was caused by a manufacturing defect, Space News reports. In a roundtable with reporters Wednesday, ULA chief executive Tory Bruno said the problem has been corrected as the company awaits certification of the Vulcan rocket by the Space Force. The nozzle fell off the bottom of one of the Vulcan launcher’s twin solid rocket boosters about a half-minute into its second test flight last year. The rocket continued its climb into space, but ULA and Northrop Grumman, which supplies solid rocket motors for Vulcan, set up an investigation to find the cause of the nozzle malfunction.

All the trimmings … Bruno said the anomaly was traced to a “manufacturing defect” in one of the internal parts of the nozzle, an insulator. Specific details, he said, remained proprietary, according to Space News. “We have isolated the root cause and made appropriate corrective actions,” he said, which were confirmed in a static-fire test of a motor at a Northrop test site in Utah in February. “So we are back continuing to fabricate hardware and, at least initially, screening for what that root cause was.” Bruno said the investigation was aided by recovery of hardware that fell off the motor while in flight and landed near the launch pad in Florida, as well as “trimmings” of material left over from the manufacturing process. ULA also recovered both boosters from the ocean so engineers could compare the one that lost its nozzle to the one that performed normally. The defective hardware “just stood out night and day,” Bruno said. “It was pretty clear that that was an outlier, far out of family.” Meanwhile, ULA has trimmed its launch forecast for this year, from a projection of up to 20 launches down to a dozen. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

March 14: Falcon 9 | Crew-10 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 23: 03 UTC

March 15: Electron | QPS-SAR-9 | Mahia Peninsula, New Zealand | 00: 00 UTC

March 15: Long March 2B | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 04: 10 UTC

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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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