Welcome to Edition 8.46 of the Rocket Report! We don't mention Starship in the body of this week's report, so I'll give a brief update here. The next test flight of SpaceX's mega-rocket—Flight 13—could happen as soon as next month, according to Gwynne Shotwell, the company's president and chief operating officer, in a recent interview with CNBC. There's still a fair bit of work to do before Flight 13, so don't count on a launch next month just yet. What we do know, based on Shotwell's comments to CNBC, is the next Starship test flight will look a lot like the previous one last month, with a suborbital flight path and a splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX is holding off on an orbital flight until at least the following launch, Flight 14, after the ship was unable to complete a critical engine restart in space on the last flight.
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.
Isar test flight scrubbed again. Isar Aerospace still commands top position among a new generation of European rocket startups, but the company’s efforts to launch a critical test flight of its Spectrum rocket continue to encounter roadblocks, Ars reports. The latest delay came Monday, when Isar scrubbed a launch attempt after "detecting off nominal behavior in the vehicle’s fluid systems," according to a social media post. "The teams are analyzing the new data to isolate the root cause." Isar is flush with cash, having raised nearly $1 billion to date, but is still lacking in the critical currency of flight experience. The Spectrum rocket has flown just once to date, on a failed launch last year that lasted less than 30 seconds.
© Relativity Space
Welcome to Edition 8.46 of the Rocket Report! We don't mention Starship in the body of this week's report, so I'll give a brief update here. The next test flight of SpaceX's mega-rocket—Flight 13—could happen as soon as next month, according to Gwynne Shotwell, the company's president and chief operating officer, in a recent interview with CNBC. There's still a fair bit of work to go before Flight 13, so don't count on a launch next month just yet. What we do know, based on Shotwell's comments to CNBC, is the next Starship test flight will look a like like the previous one last month, with a suborbital flight path and a splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX is holding off on an orbital flight until at least the following launch, Flight 14, after the ship was unable to complete a critical engine restart in space on the last flight.
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.
Isar test flight scrubbed again. Isar Aerospace still commands top position among a new generation of European rocket startups, but the company’s efforts to launch a critical test flight of its Spectrum rocket continue to encounter roadblocks, Ars reports. The latest delay came Monday, when Isar scrubbed a launch attempt after "detecting off nominal behavior in the vehicle’s fluid systems," according to a social media post. "The teams are analyzing the new data to isolate the root cause." Isar is flush with cash, having raised nearly $1 billion to date, but is still lacking in the critical currently of flight experience. The Spectrum rocket has flown just once to date, on a failed launch last year that lasted less than 30 seconds.
© Relativity Space
Welcome to Edition 8.46 of the Rocket Report! We don't mention Starship in the body of this week's report, so I'll give a brief update here. The next test flight of SpaceX's mega-rocket—Flight 13—could happen as soon as next month, according to Gwynne Shotwell, the company's president and chief operating officer, in a recent interview with CNBC. There's still a fair bit of work to do before Flight 13, so don't count on a launch next month just yet. What we do know, based on Shotwell's comments to CNBC, is the next Starship test flight will look a lot like the previous one last month, with a suborbital flight path and a splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX is holding off on an orbital flight until at least the following launch, Flight 14, after the ship was unable to complete a critical engine restart in space on the last flight.
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.
Isar test flight scrubbed again. Isar Aerospace still commands top position among a new generation of European rocket startups, but the company’s efforts to launch a critical test flight of its Spectrum rocket continue to encounter roadblocks, Ars reports. The latest delay came Monday, when Isar scrubbed a launch attempt after "detecting off nominal behavior in the vehicle’s fluid systems," according to a social media post. "The teams are analyzing the new data to isolate the root cause." Isar is flush with cash, having raised nearly $1 billion to date, but is still lacking in the critical currency of flight experience. The Spectrum rocket has flown just once to date, on a failed launch last year that lasted less than 30 seconds.
© Relativity Space
When Colin Farrell was doing press for the first season of the detective series Sugar, he had to be very careful with how he spoke. Sugar is a story about a quirky private detective, but it's also secretly a work of science fiction, something that doesn't become clear until halfway through the season. "I knew that I could get the show in deep shit if I revealed certain things," he tells me. Now as Sugar heads into its next season, which starts streaming on Apple TV on June 19th, Farrell says he feels "unburdened" by the previous veil of secrecy. "There are certain things I wouldn't mention here about season 2," he says, "but nothing as big a …
Five months after returning to OpenAI, Barret Zoph - the company's head of enterprise AI sales - has departed, The Verge has learned.
Zoph returned to OpenAI in mid-January after a stint as co-founder and CTO of Thinking Machines Lab, the competing AI company founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Shortly after Zoph returned to OpenAI, the company said he would lead its push into enterprise - a significant role at OpenAI, since in recent months it had vowed to stop chasing so-called "side quests" and focus on key revenue drivers like enterprise and coding ahead of its planned IPO.
OpenAI confirmed to The Verge that Zoph will be depart …
When three Amazon software engineers testified earlier this month at Seattle City Council hearings about data centers, they started their testimony by citing a city law barring employment discrimination over political speech. Now, they're accusing their employer of breaking that law by retaliating against them.
On June 10th - one week after the hearing, and one day after the City Council passed a milestone moratorium on data centers - Patrick Schloesser, Darius Irani, and Liesl Wigand were each called into an impromptu meeting with Amazon's "Employee Relations." HR representatives told the employees that the company was investigating them …
Physicians and researchers at the Netherlands Cancer Institute have unveiled a groundbreaking artificial intelligence (AI) model that fundamentally reshapes how treatment responses in pleural mesothelioma—a notoriously challenging cancer—are evaluated. This model, called ARTIMES, excels beyond traditional clinical methods, surpassing expert human judgment in accuracy and efficiency. By precisely measuring the entire tumor volume instead of relying on conventional diameter-based assessments, ARTIMES promises to revolutionize patient care and accelerate clinical research in this difficult-to-treat disease.
Pleural mesothelioma poses unique diagnostic challenges because it develops as a thin, irregular layer along the lining of the lungs rather than forming discrete masses. This morphology renders existing international standards like the RECIST (Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors) inadequate. RECIST depends primarily on simple diameter measures, which poorly represent the tumor’s true progression or regression in mesothelioma’s diffuse growth pattern. Clinicians have expressed frustration and uncertainty in evaluating treatment efficacy using these parameters, highlighting a pressing need for a more refined and reliable approach.
To address these limitations, an interdisciplinary team of AI scientists, radiologists, and pulmonologists collaborated at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. Leveraging an extensive dataset comprising over 11,000 computed tomography (CT) scans from more than 2,000 patients across 121 hospitals worldwide, they developed ARTIMES, an AI-driven volumetric response evaluation tool. Unlike humans, who face near-impossible challenges in manually delineating tumor boundaries at the pixel level on complex images, ARTIMES can effortlessly segment entire tumors and calculate their true volume with exceptional precision.
Pulmonologist Sjaak Burgers emphasizes that ARTIMES advances clinical practice by eliminating tedious and error-prone manual tumor assessments. While verifying the AI’s output remains essential, the review process is far less labor-intensive. This reduces interobserver variability and enables clinicians to obtain more consistent and objective insights into tumor dynamics. The ability to evaluate the full tumor burden rather than a single diameter mark dramatically increases sensitivity for detecting true positive or negative treatment responses.
The scientific community is witnessing a milestone with ARTIMES being the first AI model worldwide to demonstrably outperform clinicians in assessing treatment outcomes for pleural mesothelioma. Kevin Groot Lipman, lead author and technical physician, highlights that their study, published in The Lancet Oncology, cements AI’s potential to become an integral clinical decision support tool. Importantly, ARTIMES enhances rather than replaces physician judgment, interfacing smoothly into existing workflows while enabling rapid, data-driven decision-making.
Beyond measuring tumor volume, the researchers have undertaken the critical task of integrating ARTIMES measurements into actionable clinical guidelines. Since knowing the tumor size alone does not dictate specific treatment changes, these criteria empower pulmonologists to determine when to modify or cease therapies. This synergy ensures that patients receive individualized care tailored to their tumor behavior patterns, reducing exposure to ineffective treatments and unnecessary side effects while optimizing healthcare resources.
One of ARTIMES’s most transformative capabilities is its ability to detect non-response to therapy earlier than ever before. This timely recognition allows physicians to pivot treatment plans sooner, offering patients alternative therapeutic avenues or sparing them from futile and potentially harmful continuation of ineffective regimens. The combination of predictive accuracy and clinical oversight represents a major leap forward in precision oncology for pleural mesothelioma patients.
Currently, EU regulations restrict ARTIMES’s use exclusively to the Netherlands Cancer Institute under an in-house exemption, given that the model was developed internally. Nonetheless, the research team is actively pursuing regulatory approval to deploy ARTIMES globally in other hospitals. There is hopeful anticipation surrounding proposed EU frameworks aimed at streamlining the certification process for AI-enabled medical devices, which could accelerate widespread adoption and patient benefit.
The advent of ARTIMES is poised to deliver a shockwave across oncology fields by demonstrating the tangible superiority of AI over human evaluators in complex tumor assessments. To foster transparency and collaborative innovation, the Netherlands Cancer Institute has made the mesothelioma AI model publicly accessible online, enabling researchers worldwide to explore and extend its applications. This open science approach is expected to catalyze new studies and adaptations for other tumor types with challenging morphologies.
Already, the NKI team is extending their AI methodologies to address lung cancer and brain metastasis tumor evaluations. The success of ARTIMES signals the dawn of a new epoch in oncological imaging, where volumetric and morphological complexities that previously hindered precise quantification become tractable. Such breakthroughs unlock significant potential to enhance clinical trial design by furnishing robust, reproducible endpoints that more faithfully capture therapeutic impact.
Clinical trials for novel treatments stand to gain markedly from ARTIMES’s introduction. Using data from eight distinct trials, the research team validated that AI-guided volumetric criteria yield significantly improved accuracy relative to traditional RECIST assessments. This refined precision enables better evaluation of an investigational drug’s efficacy, ultimately accelerating regulatory approval timelines and facilitating faster patient access to promising therapies.
In summary, ARTIMES exemplifies how synergistic integration of AI and clinical expertise can surmount longstanding challenges in tumor measurement. By transitioning from simplistic unidimensional diameter metrics to comprehensive volumetric analysis, this technology brings unprecedented clarity and confidence to oncological decision-making. As this AI model becomes more widely disseminated and refined, it heralds a paradigm shift in cancer treatment evaluation, with rippling benefits for patients, clinicians, and research worldwide.
Subject of Research: People
Article Title: Development and validation of artificial intelligence-assisted volumetric response criteria in pleural mesothelioma (ARTIMES): a retrospective, multicohort, multicentre study
News Publication Date: 17-Jun-2026
Web References:
References:
Groot Lipman K, Burgers S, et al. Development and validation of artificial intelligence-assisted volumetric response criteria in pleural mesothelioma (ARTIMES): a retrospective, multicohort, multicentre study. The Lancet Oncology, 2026.
Image Credits: ©Netherlands Cancer Institute
Keywords: Cancer treatments, Artificial intelligence, Imaging analysis, Pleural mesothelioma, Tumor volumetrics, Clinical trials, Precision oncology
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