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Space

Blue Origin Rocket Exploded Thursday Night During Hot-Fire Test (cbsnews.com) 73

Spaceflight Now shared their video of the explosion, which the Orlando Sentinel describes as showing Blue Origin's rocket "become engulfed in flames. The fireball expands out and covers the entire launch pad as the fuselage of the rocket can be seen crumbling into the flames."

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos said on X.com "It's too early to know the root cause but we're already working to find it. Very rough day, but we'll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It's worth it." (SpaceX founder Elon Musk posted "Sorry to see this, I hope you recover quickly.")

It's unclear how this will impact future launches. "The rocket was destroyed," reports CBS News, "and as the smoke cleared, there was no sign of the erector-gantry used to move the New Glenn from its hangar to the pad and to raise it from horizontal to vertical. Likewise, one of two tall lightning towers was no longer visible." It was the first such on-pad explosion at the Cape since a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blew up on nearby pad 40 on Sept. 1, 2016... Blue Origin only has one New Glenn pad, the one that was damaged in the Thursday test. The New Glenn, which has launched three times, is a heavy lift rocket designed to compete head-to-head with SpaceX Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. During New Glenn's most recent flight in April, an upper stage malfunction prevented a commercial internet satellite from reaching its planned orbit...

The New Glenn destroyed Thursday was to send 48 Leo internet satellites owned by Amazon into space [which were not on board for the hot-fire test]

Blue Origin posted on X.com that "Debris from our recent hotfire anomaly may wash ashore in the coming days/weeks. If you encounter any debris, do not touch or approach it for your safety."

"Spaceflight is unforgiving, and developing new heavy-lift launch capability is extraordinarily difficult..." NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman posted on X.com. "âWe will provide information on any impacts to the Artemis and Moon Base programs as it becomes available."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader symbolset for sharing the news.

Comment Re:No actual shortage (Score 1) 364

What's happening right now is all those crude oil tankers normally loading up in the Persian Gulf are now all heading to loading up from American ports, of all things! And some may head towards Venezuela, shiping heavier Venezuelan crude oil to European refineries equipped to process the denser crude.

Comment Availability will be quite limited, though. (Score 1) 31

I think when JR Central introduces these new modified 700S Series train sets, they will likely cater specifically to business passengers willing to pay for more comfortable seating. As such, trains will run on the "Nozomi" trains that run only between Tokyo and Shin-Osaka stations.

Submission + - Tracy Kidder, Author of "The Soul of a New Machine", has died.

wiredog writes: Tracy Kidder, author of "The Soul of a New Machine" has died at the age of 80.

"The Soul of a New Machine" is about the people who designed and built the Data General Nova, one of the 32 bit superminis that were released in the 1980's, just before the PC destroyed that industry. It was excerpted in The Atlantic.

"I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."

Comment Comcast is becoming an ISP anyway (Score 2) 102

Especially once they started to use DOCSIS technology to push faster Internet services. And they were able to keep up (mostly) with fiber Internet, They now offer symmetric 1.2 gigabit speed Internet with DOCSIS 4.0, which has started its national rollout. I expect Comcast once it achieves near-natonal coverage of DOCSIS 4.0 to push it to 4 gigabit symmetric access.

In short, I expect Comcast to be less in the cable TV business and more in the cable modem Internet business. And very likely they may widely offer a cloud storage DVR with effectively unlimited storage to save video from cable TV channels and streaming services for later viewing.

Comment Re:Stupid idea (Score 1) 79

The big issue is HOW to get the age verification. This isn't a cellphone where verification can be done by biometrics like reading a fingerprint or Apple's Face ID. Relatively few laptops out there can do biometric verification unless it's newer Apple MacBook models with Touch ID fingerprint verification.

Comment AI data centers in power-cheap locations (Score 1) 96

This is why I've always contended the majority of AI data centers will be located in countries where power is cheap and plentiful. China has a good number of them because they're probably located near one of the many coal-fired powerplants built in the last 35 years.

As such, I expect both Iceland and Norway to be major locations for AI data centers. Iceland because of its vast available geothermal power and Norway because of its vast available hydropower.

Submission + - AI found 12 New OpenSSL zero-days (lesswrong.com)

wiredog writes: "Our goal was to turn what used to be an elite, artisanal hacker craft into a repeatable industrial process. We do this to secure the software infrastructure of human civilization before strong AI systems become ubiquitous. Prosaically, we want to make sure we don't get hacked into oblivion the moment they come online."

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