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New Report Finds That China's Space Program Is Rapidly Outstripping NASA

While the sitting US government strips NASA of its expert leadership and funding, it seems China is more than happy to take up the mantle. A new report from the Commercial Space Federation, a lobbying group fighting for the interests of the privatized space industry, found that China's space program is experiencing a meteoric rise, and will soon pose a significant challenge to the US' dominant position in space. Posed as a "risk assessment" of the pressure Chinese competition puts on "American

Police Puzzled by 180 Kilos of SpaceX-Branded Cocaine Found at Crash Site

A single-engine plane crashed landed in a field of sugar cane in Brazil over the weekend, according to local news media Alagoas 24 Horas, killing the pilot and leaving behind 180 kilograms — or almost 400 pounds — of cocaine. So far, it just sounds like a tale of drug smuggling gone awry. Except that the coke, stacked together in neat bricks and wrapped in plastic, as shown in a video from local police obtained by Alagoas, sported a distinctive label: the official SpaceX logo, in blue and white

Jumbo Cargo Spacecraft Stumbles on Its Inaugural Trip to the ISS

Northrop Grumman’s upgraded Cygnus XL vehicle experienced an engine issue on Tuesday, delaying its arrival to the International Space Station until further notice. This is the first flight of the larger version of the company’s solar-powered spacecraft, which is carrying 11,000 pounds of science investigations, food, supplies, and equipment to the space station’s crew. The cargo ship launched on Sunday at 6:11 p.m. ET on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in

Experimental Spacecraft Headed to Space Station Suddenly Shuts Down

Lost in space. A whopping 11,000 pounds of supplies and scientific instruments that were headed to the International Space Station are in limbo after a high-profile malfunction. Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL spacecraft encountered a serious problem with its main engine during its maiden voyage, NASA announced on Tuesday. The spacecraft, which is just over five feet longer than the aerospace giant's Cygnus spacecraft, launched from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Sunday eve

Biggest Cygnus Cargo Ship Delayed on Its Way to the ISS Due to Engine Shutdown

Northrop Grumman’s upgraded Cygnus XL vehicle experienced an engine issue on Tuesday, delaying its arrival to the International Space Station until further notice. This is the first flight of the larger version of the company’s solar-powered spacecraft, which is carrying 11,000 pounds of science investigations, food, supplies, and equipment to the space station’s crew. The cargo ship launched on Sunday at 6:11 p.m. ET on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in

AT&T's new AI receptionist will answer calls for you - and block spam

AT&T Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways AT&T's digital receptionist will use AI to screen your calls. The goal is to determine if a call is legitimate or spam. The feature will roll out this year as a test for select AT&T customers. How often do you receive a call from an unknown number and debate whether to answer it? Spam calls continue to plague us all, often making us hesitant to answer our phones unless we know who's calling. Now AT&T is turni

Icarus raises $6.1M to take on space’s “warehouse work” with embodied-AI robots

Icarus Robotics cofounders Ethan Barajas and Jamie Palmer spent hours interviewing astronauts about what it was like working in space as they homed in on their startup idea. Their big takeaway: the work was often more cargo logistics than cutting-edge science. “We’re Amazon warehouse workers with PhDs,” one astronaut said. If an experiment takes two hours on station, the person continued, the first ninety minutes are spent just moving around cargo and preparing tools. It’s a dismal waste of to

A record supply load won’t reach the International Space Station as scheduled

A problem with the main engine on Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL spacecraft will keep it from delivering 11,000 pounds of supplies and experiments to the International Space Station as scheduled on Wednesday. In a statement released Tuesday afternoon, NASA said ground teams are evaluating backup plans that might still allow the Cygnus spacecraft to reach the space station, just not on schedule. The problem arose early Tuesday when the spacecraft's main engine shut down earlier than expected durin

Same-day delivery comes to space, as Impulse promises satellite transport in hours, not months

Amazon made same-day delivery the benchmark on Earth. Impulse Space is pitching a similar concept for satellites bound for geostationary orbit about 22,000 miles above Earth, compressing what is typically a months-long transit into a matter of hours. In the span of a week, the in-space propulsion startup announced a trio of deals aiming to unlock geostationary orbit (GEO) for commercial and defense users. That includes a demonstration mission with defense contractor Anduril planned for 2026; a

Don't Miss This Claustrophobic Sci-Fi Nightmare Streaming Free on Tubi

There's something about sci-fi horror that hits all the buttons for me. Derelict spaceships the size of cities, creatures engineered by science or nature to be perfect predators and the claustrophobia of space all manage to get me excited every time. The Alien franchise made me fall in love with this sub-genre, along with gems like Dark City and Event Horizon. One of my lesser-known favorites is Pandorum. Released in 2009, it's a claustrophobic trip into space where a mechanic wakes up on a col

Superhero Workplace Game ‘Dispatch’ Suits Up in October

Developer AdHoc Studio revealed its debut game, Dispatch, will release on October 22 for Steam and PlayStation 5. Revealed at the 2024 Game Awards, the adventure title puts players in the shoes of Robbie Robertson, an ex-superhero who works at the Superhero Dispatch Network. As an SDN employee, Robbie deploys a team of supers to various crimes and events in the city, choosing which hero is best for the situation. Imagine Telltale’s The Walking Dead games mixed with some 9-1-1 (and superheroes,

A new report finds China’s space program will soon equal that of the US

As Jonathan Roll neared completion of a master's degree in science and technology policy at Arizona State University three years ago, he did some research into recent developments by China's ascendant space program. He came away impressed by the country's growing ambitions. Now a full-time research analyst at the university, Roll was recently asked to take a deeper dive into Chinese space plans. "I thought I had a pretty good read on this when I was finishing grad school," Roll told Ars. "That

60 years after Gemini, newly processed images reveal details

Six decades have now passed since some of the most iconic Project Gemini spaceflights. The 60th anniversary of Gemini 4, when Ed White conducted the first US spacewalk, came in June. The next mission, Gemini 5, ended just two weeks ago, in 1965. These missions are now forgotten by most Americans, as most of the people alive during that time are now deceased. However, during these early years of spaceflight, NASA engineers and astronauts cut their teeth on a variety of spaceflight firsts, flying

visionOS 26 now available starting today: Here’s what’s new for Apple Vision Pro

Apple today has released visionOS 26, the latest version of its spatial operating system for Apple Vision Pro. While it doesn’t have a dramatic Liquid Glass redesign like the other releases this year, it still has a number of meaningful upgrades that are certainly worth updating for. Spatial widgets First and foremost, widgets are coming to Apple Vision Pro in a real-world way. You can now have photos, weather, calendar, and more – pinned in your environment. They seamlessly integrate into you

Northrop Grumman’s new spacecraft is a real chonker

What happens when you use a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to launch Northrop Grumman's Cygnus supply ship? A record-setting resupply mission to the International Space Station. The first flight of Northrop's upgraded Cygnus spacecraft, called Cygnus XL, is on its way to the international research lab after launching Sunday evening from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. This mission, known as NG-23, is set to arrive at the ISS early Wednesday with 10,827 pounds (4,911 kilograms) of cargo to

Nudists and Surfers Protest SpaceX’s Plans to Launch Starship From Florida

SpaceX isn’t very popular among beachgoers in Florida at the moment. The rocket company applied for a permit to launch its Starship rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, which threatens to restrict beach access for surfers and casual nudists. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recently hosted a series of public meetings where residents of the area got to weigh in on its upcoming decision to allow Starship to lift off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. During the meeting, membe

Data Centers Are Crushing the Planet. Can Space Save Us?

The companies frantically building and leasing data centers are well aware that they’re straining grids, driving emissions, and guzzling water. The electricity demand of AI data centers in particular could increase as much as 165% by 2030. Over half of the energy powering these sprawling facilities comes from fossil fuels, threatening to reverse progress toward addressing the climate crisis. Some of the biggest names in artificial intelligence say they have a solution: Just stick these colossal

Language models pack billions of concepts into 12k dimensions

In a recent 3Blue1Brown video series on transformer models, Grant Sanderson posed a fascinating question: How can a relatively modest embedding space of 12,288 dimensions (GPT-3) accommodate millions of distinct real-world concepts? The answer lies at the intersection of high-dimensional geometry and a remarkable mathematical result known as the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma. While exploring this question, I discovered something unexpected that led to an interesting collaboration with Grant and a

Russia Tests Hypersonic Missile at NATO’s Doorstep—and Shares the Video

On Sunday, Russia released images of its launch of a 3M22 Zircon hypersonic missile from a frigate in the Barents Sea, in the Arctic Ocean, near NATO borders. The launch comes against a backdrop of rising tensions with the West, just days after several Russian drones violated the airspace of North Atlantic Treaty Organization member countries Poland and Romania. The Zircon test is part of the Zapad 2025 joint maneuvers with Belarus, a week of military exercises aimed at assessing defensive and

CubeSats are fascinating learning tools for space

These are CubeSats. Satellites that are going to space—or at least, the ones I have here are prototypes. But these have one thing in common: they're all powered by either a Raspberry Pi, or a microcontroller. There are already Pis in space, like on Mark Rober's SatGus, on GASPACS, and the Astro Pis on the Space station. Another Pi is going up this weekend, which is why I'm posting this today. I'll get to that one, but I wanted to spend some time talking about two things that fascinate me: Raspb

NASA closing its original repository for Columbia artifacts to tours

NASA is changing the way that its employees come in contact with, and remember, one of its worst tragedies. In the wake of the 2003 loss of the space shuttle Columbia and its STS-107 crew, NASA created a program to use the orbiter's debris for research and education at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Agency employees were invited to see what remained of the space shuttle as a powerful reminder as to why they had to be diligent in their work. Access to the Columbia Research and Preservation Off

Language Models Pack Billions of Concepts into 12k Dimensions

In a recent 3Blue1Brown video series on transformer models, Grant Sanderson posed a fascinating question: How can a relatively modest embedding space of 12,288 dimensions (GPT-3) accommodate millions of distinct real-world concepts? The answer lies at the intersection of high-dimensional geometry and a remarkable mathematical result known as the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma. While exploring this question, I discovered something unexpected that led to an interesting collaboration with Grant and a

Language Models Pack Billions of Concepts into 12,000 Dimensions

In a recent 3Blue1Brown video series on transformer models, Grant Sanderson posed a fascinating question: How can a relatively modest embedding space of 12,288 dimensions (GPT-3) accommodate millions of distinct real-world concepts? The answer lies at the intersection of high-dimensional geometry and a remarkable mathematical result known as the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma. While exploring this question, I discovered something unexpected that led to an interesting collaboration with Grant and a

Woman Sends Money to "Stranded Astronaut" So He Can "Buy Oxygen"

"In space on a spaceship right now." The sky's the limit for how outrageously implausible some scams can get. Actually, try beyond the atmosphere. An elderly woman in Japan sent thousands of dollars to a trickster who claimed to be an astronaut trapped in space and in danger of suffocating, Agence France-Presse reports. In fairness to the lady, though, she thought they were in love. The 80-year-old pensioner, who lives in Sapporo, the capital of Japan's northern island Hokkaido, met the scamm

60 years after Gemini, newly processed images reveal incredible details

Six decades have now passed since some of the most iconic Project Gemini spaceflights. The 60th anniversary of Gemini 4, when Ed White conducted the first US spacewalk, came in June. The next mission, Gemini 5, ended just two weeks ago, in 1965. These missions are now forgotten by most Americans, as most of the people alive during that time are now deceased. However, during these early years of spaceflight, NASA engineers and astronauts cut their teeth on a variety of spaceflight firsts, flying

When Astronauts Enter Space, a "Dark Genome" Activates in Their DNA

Image by Getty / NASA / Futurism Studies Researchers have found that human stem cells are constantly under stress in the microgravity of space — activating hidden, ancient sections of DNA called the "dark genome." In a study published in the journal Cell Stem Cell last week, a team of researchers led by Sanford Stem Cell Institute director Catriona Jamieson used a cellphone-sized device on board the International Space Station to watch how stem cells behave in space for the first time. They f

SpaceX Targets 2026 to Test Orbital Flight for Next-Gen Starship Vehicle

It has been two weeks since SpaceX’s last Starship test flight, and engineers have diagnosed issues with its heat shield, identified improvements, and developed a preliminary plan for the next time the ship heads into space. Bill Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX executive in charge of build and flight reliability, presented the findings Monday at the American Astronautical Society’s Glenn Space Technology Symposium in Cleveland. The rocket lifted off on August 26 from SpaceX’s launch pad in Starbase, Te

A polyglot's guide to multiple-dispatch (2016)

This is the first article in a series dedicated to multiple dispatch - an advanced abstraction technique available to programmers out-of-the-box in some languages, and implementable in others. This first post in the series presents the technique and explains the problem it intends to solve. It uses C++ as the presentation language because C++ does not support multiple dispatch directly, but can be used to implement it in various ways. Showing how multiple dispatch is implemented in a language th

Pentagon begins deploying new satellite network to link sensors with shooters

The first 21 satellites in a constellation that could become a cornerstone for the Pentagon's Golden Dome missile defense shield successfully launched from California Wednesday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The Falcon 9 took off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, at 7:12 am PDT (10:12 am EDT; 14:12 UTC) and headed south over the Pacific Ocean, heading for an orbit over the poles before releasing the 21 military-owned satellites to begin several weeks of activations and checkouts.

A polyglot's guide to multiple-dispatch

This is the first article in a series dedicated to multiple dispatch - an advanced abstraction technique available to programmers out-of-the-box in some languages, and implementable in others. This first post in the series presents the technique and explains the problem it intends to solve. It uses C++ as the presentation language because C++ does not support multiple dispatch directly, but can be used to implement it in various ways. Showing how multiple dispatch is implemented in a language th