Despite a lawsuit from xAI, a Minnesota ban on apps that allow users to “nudify” images can move forward.

After years of pushing full speed ahead on AI, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says maybe it’s time for the AI industry to “pace” itself. The comments came just days after one of OpenAI’s own models broke out of its test environment and got tangled up in a breach at Hugging Face — though as Equity’s hosts point out, sloppy security seems to have […]

Tesla is looking at cutting loose its China business to clear a path toward a merger with SpaceX, according to a new Wall Street Journal report.

If true, it would be a massive deal in the auto industry. Tesla’s Shanghai factory builds more than half of all Tesla vehicles, so any separation would carve out the single biggest piece of Tesla’s car operation.

Update: Elon Musk has denied the WSJ report, but as usual, that should be taken with a grain of salt.

Falcon 9 will launch satellites supporting missile tracking, targeting and military communications

The post SpaceX wins $1.6 billion in launch orders for military satellite networks appeared first on SpaceNews.

SpaceX successfully launched its Starship vehicle on Friday and appeared to demonstrate important and credible steps toward fulfilling the massive rocket's immense promise. As soon as the vehicle's next flight, Starship could go orbital, begin delivering satellites into space, and potentially return to the launch site to be 'caught' by the tower.

All of this is impressive engineering on a gigantic scale. But despite the marked progress with the 13th test flight of Starship, one key issue—probably the key issue when it comes to Starship's future—remains unresolved.

This concerns Starship's heat shield, the roughly 18,000 ceramic tiles that protect the vehicle's underbelly during its fiery return through Earth's atmosphere. And some experts say SpaceX's current approach may not get Starship to its ultimate goal of flying frequently, at low cost.

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Was SpaceX’s recent Starship flight test a success or a failure? Many are hailing it as a victory, but several of the megarocket’s booster’s engines failed after re-entry, causing it to explode.

SpaceX has had many similarly ambiguous tests before. But this was the first one since its much-hyped IPO earlier this summer — and it’s already clear that it wasn’t a convincing enough display to reverse the company’s fortunes on the stock market.

After hitting an all time low before the weekend and closing at $115, SpaceX shares endeavored to plummet even further on Monday, briefly dipping to $108.66 — a new nadir since going public — before stabilizing around $110. The new low is over 20 percent below its opening IPO price of $135, and less than half of its all time high of more than $225 per share.

It’s a sign of the scrutiny the company will be put through now that it’s a public entity, and comes despite certain predictions that a successful flight would help buoy the company’s shares. When Starship ran into trouble in the past, SpaceX mainly had to weather a storm of media coverage. Now, nervous investors represent yet another liability.

“One of the benefits of being private is that there wasn’t a market to weigh in on and evaluate business decisions,” David Meier, senior investment analyst at the Motley Fool, told The Washington Post.

“Being publicly traded means everything will be evaluated and information transmitted through market prices,” he added. “So every SpaceX launch, every Starlink decision and every xAI decision will be scrutinized by the market.”

Spaceflight, at least currently, isn’t an ideal match for the make-a-quick-buck capitalism that Musk extolls. SpaceX has never been profitable, losing $5 billion last year alone. As Starship’s woes illustrate, rocket development is messy and complicated; there’s no guarantee that progress will be linear, if there’s any made at all. Investors are essentially being asked to keep pouring money into an incredibly lengthy and expensive science experiment. 

Meanwhile, Musk has made outrageously lofty promises that SpaceX will eventually use Starship to deploy so many data centers in space that it’d create a “sentient sun,” and establish colonies on the Moon and eventually Mars. Every failure will be compared against those outsized benchmarks, which is almost certainly part of Musk’s enduring schtick.

The thirteenth test flight on Friday was a mixed-bag. The spacecraft’s upper stage successfully made its way to suborbital space and deployed a payload of Starlink internet satellites, which briefly went online before burning up as planned. This was a first for Starship, as previous tests only used dummies. Then the ship re-entered the atmosphere and landed in the Indian Ocean in one piece without exploding.

But the booster was a different story. Though it performed flawlessly on the journey up, only ten of out the thirteen engines fired up on its return to Earth, failing to slow the massive object down in time. Instead of making a planned “soft” splashdown, it slammed into the Gulf of Mexico and appeared to explode on impact.

On the one hand, the flight test validated that SpaceX is making progress with its latest V3 iteration of its spacecraft. In the first V3 flight test in May, the upper stage lost several of its engines on its way to space, and this time it didn’t. The upper stage also survived the splash down instead of exploding, with SpaceX engineers calling it Starship’s best reentry yet. 

But the failed booster landing is hard to overlook. Unless the booster is reliably recoverable, then Starship won’t be reusable, an indispensable part of making the behemoth vehicle an economically viable means to ferrying large payloads into orbit and beyond.

Most coverage around the recent test has been positive. Arguably, that makes it all the more concerning that the stock continues to perform so poorly.

“The future of the company is riding on the ability to make Starship work,”  Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project, told WaPo. “What they’re trying to do is switch to a freight train and get the economies of scale [of] something of that magnitude.”

More on SpaceX: SpaceX Investors in Meltdown Over All the Money They’ve Lost

The post SpaceX Stock Hammered After Starship Booster Fails in First Launch Since IPO appeared first on Futurism.

Over the past year or so, a puzzling idea has taken hold among billionaires ranging from Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos: that instead of trying to force data centers on communities that don’t want them down on Earth, it would be much easier just to launch them into space.

The economics and logistics of the scheme, many experts have pointed out, are absolutely absurd. And even beyond those practical concerns, if corporations actually did somehow manage to fill the planet’s orbit with the facilities, scientists are now warning that the environmental cost would be devastating.

A new petition organized by the group EarthJustice, first reported by the Guardian, is warning of “catastrophic” consequences for the planet if the billionaire-backed dream ever came to pass. The 29-page petition calls on the US Federal Communications Commission to investigate current orbital data center licensing requests as potentially in violation of “federal law,” joining the chorus of experts warning that it’s a horrible idea for just about everybody.

“The FCC is currently considering multiple requests for licensing extraordinary numbers of satellite-based data centers to be placed into low-earth orbit over the next decade,” the petition begins. “The proponents of these proposals describe their plans in grandiose, civilization-changing terms. But these same proponents have refused to embrace any inquiry into the impacts of their self claimed epochal technology on the environment, science, economy, or other values. This is not just poor planning and a missed opportunity: it violates federal law.”

The filing does double duty. On top of formally petitioning the FCC to prepare an environmental assessment, it’s also a “petition to deny,” which is a legal mechanism that requires the petitioner to back up their claims with verified facts. That requirement turns the document into a de facto review article — with 113 footnote citations, it’s easily one of the most detailed public accounts yet of what orbital data centers could actually cost the planet.

“The operation of more than a million data center satellites threatens potentially catastrophic forms and quantities of atmospheric pollution, risking damage to the climate, to the ozone layer, to human health, and to the chemistry of the stratosphere itself,” the petition reads.

In particular, the petition warns that giving free rein to tech billionaires to clutter our skies with experimental data centers would accelerate our contamination of the stratosphere, which is currently facing an unprecedented rise in heavy metals, noxious gasses, and carbon particles thanks to record satellite launches.

Satellite companies run by tech and aerospace tycoons are already facing scrutiny for their lack of transparency around this type of pollution, a situation the petition warns would make significantly worse. As the petition authors write, they are “concerned that no [company] has yet provided more than a token acknowledgment of environmental risks.”

“Moreover,” the authors continue, “no [company] has provided satisfactory detail to explain how it will mitigate the cumulative environmental harms flowing from the foreseeable operation of more than a million satellites [emphasis in original], orbiting our planet, colliding and disintegrating and plummeting back to Earth.”

More on data centers: Climate Activists Pelt Microsoft Data Center With Balloons Full of Acid

The post The Type of Orbital Data Centers That Billionaires Want to Launch Into Space Would Wreak Ecological Catastrophe, Scientists Warn appeared first on Futurism.

SpaceX was more than lucky Friday, sending its 13th full-scale Starship test flight halfway around the world from South Texas to an on-target, intact splashdown in a remote section of the Indian Ocean.

Starship has made precise splashdowns before. This time, however, the ship gently tipped over and came to rest floating in a remote stretch of ocean west of Australia. Previous splashdowns ended with conflagrations, an outcome SpaceX officials have come to expect with each water landing of Starship.

The buoyant Starship looked to be in fine shape after reaching the Indian Ocean. SpaceX engineers flew drones over the vehicle to inspect its heat shield, getting their best look yet at how more than 18,000 ceramic tiles insulating the ship's stainless steel airframe weathered the trip to space and back. The tiles withstood temperatures up to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius) as Starship streaked back into the atmosphere at the end of its hourlong flight from Starbase, Texas.

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SpaceX was more than lucky Friday, sending its 13th full-scale Starship test flight halfway around the world from South Texas to an on-target, intact splashdown in a remote section of the Indian Ocean.

Starship has made precise splashdowns before. This time, however, the ship gently tipped over and came to rest floating in a remote stretch of ocean west of Australia. Previous splashdowns ended with conflagrations, an outcome SpaceX officials have come to expect with each water landing of Starship.

The buoyant Starship looked to be in fine shape after reaching the Indian Ocean. SpaceX engineers flew drones over the vehicle to inspect its heat shield, getting their best look yet at how more than 18,000 ceramic tiles insulating the ship's stainless steel airframe weathered the trip to space and back. The tiles withstood temperatures up to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius) as Starship streaked back into the atmosphere at the end of its hourlong flight from Starbase, Texas.

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