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Elon Musk said during SpaceX's third-quarter earnings call that the company plans to try recovering both stages of its Starship system—the Super Heavy booster and the Starship spacecraft—during its next flight. The attempt would use launch-tower arms to catch the vehicle mid-air, aiming for what Musk called the first full recovery of an orbital launch system in history.
Google has unveiled Playground, an experimental gaming platform that lets users create, play, and share custom games through a conversational, prompt-driven interface rather than traditional coding. Users can start from a blank canvas, remix starter prompts, or use guided support, then adjust physics, rules, characters, and environments by typing instructions.
SpaceX's Starship completed its 14th test flight on Monday, achieving orbital insertion for the first time and deploying 26 of its new Starlink V3 satellites from Starbase in South Texas. The Super Heavy booster, using 33 Raptor engines, separated and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico, while the upper stage suffered an early engine shutdown before restarting a Raptor engine to reach an orbit roughly 171 miles up. SpaceX confirmed contact with all 26 deployed satellites, each weighing about 2 metric tons.
SpaceX's 14th Starship test flight launched from Starbase, Texas, and for the first time accelerated the upper stage to full orbital velocity rather than the suborbital trajectories used in prior tests. During the flight, the rocket deployed 26 next-generation Starlink satellites, which are too large to fit aboard SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, releasing them one by one from its cargo bay. The Super Heavy booster separated and made a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico near the launch site.
SpaceX's Starship, launched atop its Super Heavy booster, reached low-Earth orbit for the first time on its 14th flight, despite losing one of six Raptor engines mid-mission. The company shortened the planned orbital stay from about 10 hours to roughly three before Starship reentered and landed in the Pacific Ocean. During the flight, SpaceX deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites into orbit and confirmed contact with all of them, while the Super Heavy booster splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico for eventual recovery.
SpaceX's Starship rocket achieved Earth orbit for the first time in a launch from South Texas, despite losing one of six Raptor engines on its upper stage shortly after separation. The company briefly called off the mission before resuming, and the Ship stage went on to deploy all 26 planned third-generation Starlink satellites. SpaceX is still deciding whether to complete a full set of orbits or bring the upper stage down early, while the Super Heavy booster successfully returned to the launch site.
SpaceX is preparing to launch its fourteenth full-scale Starship test flight on Monday, pending regulatory approval. The plan calls for Starship to orbit Earth six times over ten hours at an altitude of 171 miles before attempting a soft landing, following hardware changes to the Super Heavy booster after only 10 of 13 engines relit during the last landing attempt in July.
Formula 1 is reportedly considering fast-tracking new engine regulations to 2030, a year earlier than planned, after the 2026 hybrid rules proved too ambitious. According to Autosport, manufacturers are converging on a 3.0-liter V8 turbo paired with a scaled-back electric motor, reversing the current near 50:50 split between combustion and electric power.
Modern chess engines can defeat the world's best grandmasters, but researchers note they still cannot converge on one definitive, infallible way to play the game. Rather than making chess feel 'solved' or stale, these AI systems are reportedly revealing new strategic ideas and approaches to the game.
A new technical guide explains how Graphviz's four layout engines—dot, neato, twopi and circo—use different algorithms to arrange diagram nodes, from hierarchical ranks to force-directed springs to radial and circular placements. It recommends pairing this knowledge with a browser-based diagram-as-code editor so developers can preview and switch engines to avoid overlapping nodes and crossed lines.
At Hot Chips 2026, Cerebras detailed its next two wafer-scale accelerator generations, including a new Nexus rack architecture for the CS-4 system that triples rack-scale performance using three WS-3T engines. The company also confirmed that its future CS-6 system will introduce 3D-stacked DRAM directly on top of its wafer-scale logic and SRAM, marking a first for its chip design.
An analysis argues that self-driving trucks and other autonomous 'physical AI' systems must work through the same set of trust-building questions that commercial aviation resolved over the past hundred years. Aviation once obsessed over engine count as a proxy for safety, a concern that eventually became irrelevant as reliability improved and regulation matured. The piece suggests robotics and autonomous vehicles are now at the start of a similar maturation curve.