A monthslong "Star Wars"-themed festival called Season of the Force is now happening at Disneyland — including John Williams compositions in the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge land during the park's fireworks. SFGate reports: Before the show starts, a voice rings through the land. "Black Spire Outpost has a long and colorful history of heroes and legends, Jedi and Sith, royalty and resistance," it says. "Those who would rule and those who refuse to bow. Here we celebrate that fiery spirit tonight." Then as the first fireworks fly into the sky, the majestic "Star Wars" music begins...

During the day, the land is overrun with tiny robots. Season of the Force also includes daily appearances from the new BDX Droids, cute little "explorer companions," per Disneyland, designed to assist with "exploration and research." These new audio-animatronics interact with guests, clicking and whirring with a surprising amount of personality.

Sabine Wren from "Ahsoka" is also making appearances in Galaxy's Edge during Season of the Force, and there are specialty food offerings in the land like the Celto Slush (a green, pandan-flavored horchata cold brew coffee drink) and the return of Dewback Chili Noodles (spicy fettuccine with ginger-spiced ground pork, broccolini stems and shredded red cabbage).
For the event, Disneyland's long-running Star Tours ride now includes appearances from the Mandalorian (and Grogu), Ahsoka, and Cassian Andor, according to the article. "Also back this year is Hyperspace Mountain, the seasonal overlay of Space Mountain that puts riders into an intergalactic fight between the Resistance and the First Order."

After nearly 11 years as CNN's space correspondent, Miles O'Brien found himself in 2003 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida covering the launch of the space shuttle Columbia: As part of the post-launch routine, NASA began sharing several replays of the launch from various cameras trained on the vehicle. And that was when we saw it. Producer Dave Santucci called me into our live truck, and said, "You got to look at this." It was kind of a grainy image of what looked like a puff of smoke, as if someone dropped a bag of flour on the ground and it broke open. We played it over and over again, and it did not look good at all. The giant orange fuel tank was filled with super cold liquid hydrogen and oxygen, so it was enveloped in insulating foam. A big piece of the foam had broken away near a strut called the "bipod," striking the leading edge of the orbiter's left wing. It was made of reinforced carbon to protect the aluminum structure of the spacecraft from the searing heat of re-entry from space.

I reached out to some of my sources inside the shuttle program. Everyone had seen it, of course, but the people I spoke with cautioned me not to worry. The foam was very light, and it had fallen off on earlier missions and nothing of concern had happened as a result... I wish I hadn't taken my eye off the ball. Space was my beat, and I was uniquely positioned to put this concerning event into the public domain. Like NASA's leadership, I went through a process of convincing myself that it was going to be okay. But I had this sinking feeling. It didn't feel right. A spacecraft re-entering the atmosphere at 17,500 miles an hour — much faster than a rifle bullet — is enveloped in a glowing inferno of plasma...

[As it returned to earth 16 days later] the communication between the ground and the orbiter became non-routine. Producers in the control room realized the gravity of the situation, and we cut to a commercial break to get me off the couch. As I was making my way across the newsroom, I started heaving. I knew in an instant that they were all gone. There was no survivable scenario. I was sickened. It was like a body blow. Somehow I got my act together and started talking. I felt like it was my responsibility to mention the foam strike, to get the information out there to the public. About an hour after Columbia had disintegrated, I shared with a huge global audience what I knew... "That bipod is the place where they think a little piece of foam fell off and hit the leading edge of that wing."

During the mission, I could have easily done a story about the foam strike, spreading the word that some NASA engineers believed there may be some reason for concern. What if I had done that? It might have made a difference.
"A rescue mission would not have been impossible," the article concludes, "and I feel certain that if NASA managers saw that gaping hole in Columbia's wing, they would've tried.

"We will never know for sure, but I do know how so many of us on the ground failed to do our jobs during that mission. It still haunts me."


CNN broadcasts the last two episodes of its four-part series Space Shuttle Columbia: The Final Flight tonight at 9 p.m. EST (time-delayed on the west coast until 9 p.m.PST). CNN's web site offers a "preview" of its live TV offerings here.

The news episodes (along with past episodes) will also be available on-demand starting Monday — "for pay TV subscribers via CNN.com, CNN connected TV and mobile apps." It's also available for purchase on Amazon Prime.

In the view of Jim VandeHei, CEO of Axios, artificial intelligence will eviscerate the weak, the ordinary, the unprepared in media," reports the New York Times: VandeHei says the only way for media companies to survive is to focus on delivering journalistic expertise, trusted content and in-person human connection. For Axios, that translates into more live events, a membership program centered on its star journalists and an expansion of its high-end subscription newsletters. "We're in the middle of a very fundamental shift in how people relate to news and information," he said, "as profound, if not more profound, than moving from print to digital." "Fast forward five to 10 years from now and we're living in this AI-dominated virtual world — who are the couple of players in the media space offering smart, sane content who are thriving?" he added. "It damn well better be us."

Axios is pouring investment into holding more events, both around the world and in the United States. VandeHei said the events portion of his business grew 60% year over year in 2023. The company has also introduced a $1,000-a-year membership program around some of its journalists that will offer exclusive reporting, events and networking. The first one, announced last month, is focused on Eleanor Hawkins, who writes a weekly newsletter for communications professionals. Her newsletter will remain free, but paying subscribers will have access to additional news and data, as well as quarterly calls with Hawkins... Axios will expand Axios Pro, its collection of eight high-end subscription newsletters focused on specific niches in the deals and policy world. The subscriptions start at $599 a year each, and Axios is looking to add one on defense policy...

"The premium for people who can tell you things you do not know will only grow in importance, and no machine will do that," VandeHei said....VandeHei said that although he thought publications should be compensated for original intellectual property, "that's not a make-or-break topic." He said Axios had talked to several AI companies about potential deals, but "nothing that's imminent.... One of the big mistakes a lot of media companies made over the last 15 years was worrying too much about how do we get paid by other platforms that are eating our lunch as opposed to figuring out how do we eat people's lunch by having a superior product," he said.
"VandeHei said Axios was not currently profitable because of the investment in the new businesses," according to the article.

But "The company has continued to hire journalists even as many other news organizations have cut back."

Engadget warns Windows 11 users that Microsoft is "exploring the idea" of putting ads in their Start menu. Sort of... To be specific, it's looking to place advertisements for apps you can find in the Microsoft Store in the menu's recommended section....

At the moment, Microsoft will only show ads in this version if you're in the US and a Windows Insider in the Beta Channel. You won't be seeing them if you're not a beta tester or if you're using a device managed by an organization. Further, you can disable the advertisements altogether. To do so, just go to Personalization under Settings and then toggle off "Show recommendations for tips, app promotions, and more" in the Start section.

Like any other Microsoft experiment, it may never reach wider rollout, but you may want to remember the aforementioned steps, since the company does have history of incorporating ads into its desktop platforms.

An anonymous reader shared this report from ScienceAlert: The Fermi Paradox is the discrepancy between the apparent high likelihood of advanced civilizations existing and the total lack of evidence that they do exist. Many solutions have been proposed for why the discrepancy exists. One of the ideas is the 'Great Filter.' The Great Filter is a hypothesized event or situation that prevents intelligent life from becoming interplanetary and interstellar and even leads to its demise....

[H]ow about the rapid development of AI?

A new paper in Acta Astronautica explores the idea that Artificial Intelligence becomes Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) and that ASI is the Great Filter. The paper's title is "Is Artificial Intelligence the Great Filter that makes advanced technical civilizations rare in the universe?"
"Upon reaching a technological singularity, ASI systems will quickly surpass biological intelligence and evolve at a pace that completely outstrips traditional oversight mechanisms, leading to unforeseen and unintended consequences that are unlikely to be aligned with biological interests or ethics," the paper explains... The author says their projects "underscore the critical need to quickly establish regulatory frameworks for AI development on Earth and the advancement of a multiplanetary society to mitigate against such existential threats."

"The persistence of intelligent and conscious life in the universe could hinge on the timely and effective implementation of such international regulatory measures and

Aboard the deck of a World War II-era aircraft carrier, University of Washington scientists flicked the switch on a glorified snow-making machine," reports the Seattle Times. They describe the scientists "blasting a plume of saline spray off the coast of Alameda, California... trying to perfect a shot of salty particles that would make clouds better at reflecting sunlight back toward space, and help cool the Earth.

"It's called marine cloud brightening." Compressed air was pumped at hundreds of pounds per square inch through a nozzle full of a salty mix with a similar composition to seawater housed in an apparatus similar to a snow-making machine. The New York Times reported the machine produced a deafening hiss, releasing a fine mist that traveled hundreds of feet through the air. The scientists wanted to see if the machine could generate a consistent spray of the right size salt aerosols, taking samples downwind with instruments mounted on scissor lifts, commonly used in construction.
"This study is not yet large enough to affect local weather," the article points out. Yet "the idea of interfering with nature is so contentious, organizers of Tuesday's test kept the details tightly held, concerned that critics would try to stop them," reported the New York Times.

If it works, the next stage would be to aim at the heavens and try to change the composition of clouds above the Earth's oceans..."I hope, and I think all my colleagues hope, that we never use these things, that we never have to," said Sarah Doherty, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington and the manager of its marine cloud brightening program. She said there were potential side effects that still needed to be studied, including changing ocean circulation patterns and temperatures, which might hurt fisheries. Cloud brightening could also alter precipitation patterns, reducing rainfall in one place while increasing it elsewhere. But it's vital to find out whether and how such technologies could work, Doherty said, in case society needs them. And no one can say when the world might reach that point.
More from the Seattle Times: Some scientists warn that human influence on natural phenomena has rarely yielded the desired outcome, and often comes with unintended consequences. But, as the fossil-fueled world hurtles toward the internationally approved global warming limit to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, some argue there's a need to study backup plans.

"When I started graduate school in 1995, climate change, global warming was on the horizon, but there was still time to do something like reduce emissions at a scale that would allow us to avoid serious climate disruption," program manager Sarah Doherty said in an interview. "I think it's come to the point where the science community recognizes that a fairly significant degree of climate disruption and damage and suffering is pretty inevitable...." Doherty and the team are not advocating that anyone try cloud brightening now, but instead are hoping to develop a foundation for research that future decision-makers could rely on if they are evaluating geoengineering as a means of reducing suffering.
More info here from Politico and San Francisco Chronicle.

The New York Times notes that Bill Gates began funding early research in 2006.

Under a new agreement between the U.S. and Japan, the first non-American on the Moon as part of the Artemis lunar exploration campaign will be a Japanese astronaut. SpaceNews reports: At an event in Washington, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Japanese Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) Masahito Moriyama signed an agreement regarding an additional Japanese contribution to Artemis, a pressurized lunar rover called Lunar Cruiser. NASA will deliver the rover to the moon, which the agencies said should take place ahead of the Artemis 7 mission scheduled for no earlier than 2031. NASA will also provide two seats on future Artemis lunar landing missions to astronauts from the Japanese space agency JAXA, the first agency other than NASA to secure spots on landing missions.

The Japanese rover will support extended expeditions from Artemis landing sites that are beyond the range of the Lunar Terrain Vehicle that three American companies are developing for NASA under contracts announced April 3. The rover is designed to accommodate two astronauts for up to 30 days, with an overall lifetime of 10 years. The announcement, though, offered no details about when the Japanese astronauts would fly to the moon. "It depends," Nelson said at an April 10 briefing when asked about schedules, noting that the two countries "announced a shared goal for a Japanese national to land on the moon on a future NASA mission assuming benchmarks are achieved."

"No mission has been currently assigned to a Japanese astronaut," added Lara Kearney, manager of NASA's extravehicular activity and human surface mobility program, at the briefing. The implementing agreement (PDF) said several factors will go into crew assignments, including progress on the pressurized rover, or PR: "The timing of the flight opportunities will be determined by NASA in line with existing flight manifesting and crew assignment processes and will take into account program progress and constraints, MEXT's request for the earliest possible assignment of the Japanese astronauts to lunar surface missions, and major PR milestones such as when the PR is first deployed on the lunar surface." The assumption among many in the industry, though, is that at least one of the astronauts will fly before the rover is delivered, and possibly as soon as the Artemis 4 mission, the second crewed landing, in the late 2020s.

Andrew Jones reports via IEEE Spectrum: The European Space Agency will launch a mission late this year to demonstrate precision formation flying in orbit to create artificial solar eclipses. In a press conference last week, the agency announced details of the mission and the technology the orbiters will use to pull off its exquisitely-choreographed maneuvers. ESA's Proba-3 (PRoject for On-Board Autonomy) consists of a pair of spacecraft: a 300-kilogram Coronagraph spacecraft and a 250-kilogram Occulter. The pair are now slated to launch on an Indian PSLV rocket in September and ultimately enter a highly elliptical, 600-by-60,530-kilometer orbit. The aim, the agency says, is to move the separate spacecraft to some 144 meters apart, with the Occulter, as a disc, blocking out the sun.

Achieving this formation will allow the Coronagraph to study our star's highly ionized, extremely hot atmosphere -- but also demonstrate the technology as a precursor for more ambitious, future, formation-flying endeavors. [...] ESA has science objectives for Proba-3, using observations made in space to study solar astrophysics without any intervention of the Earth's atmosphere. The agency's Association of Spacecraft for Polarimetric and Imaging Investigation of the Corona of the Sun (ASPIICS) coronagraph will help to discern why the solar corona is significantly hotter than the Sun itself. This could further our understanding of the Sun and assist solar weather predictions. However, it is the precision formation flying that Proba-3 aims to demonstrate which could help unlock future breakthroughs. [...]

Precisely-controlled Occulter spacecraft could be used with space telescopes to block light from a star in order to directly detect potential orbiting planets, while a constellation of spacecraft can, through interferometry, create large-scale observatories, achieving large apertures and long focal lengths than possible with large solo satellites. Further applications include Earth observation, space-based gravitational wave detection, and a range of missions in which two or more spacecraft need to interact, such as rendezvous, docking, and in-orbit servicing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Mac: Following moves of other tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft, Apple is reportedly set to open a new office space in a Miami suburb. This won't be the first corporate space for Apple in the city, but it will be larger than the existing office. Reported by Bloomberg, anonymous sources close to the matter say that Apple's new Miami office will be 45,000 square feet in the affluent Coral Gables suburb of Miami. It's not clear yet what part of Apple's business the new office will focus on but it will be larger than its existing small Miami office that handles Latin America and advertising operations. The specific property of the new Apple offices will be at The Plaza Coral Gables.

China is rapidly advancing its space capabilities to challenge the United States' dominance in space, as evidenced by its significant increase in on-orbit intelligence and reconnaissance satellites and the development of sophisticated counterspace weapons. Space.com reports: "Frankly, China is moving at a breathtaking speed. Since 2018, China has more than tripled their on-orbit intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites," Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of U.S. Space Command, said here on Tuesday, during a talk at the 39th Space Symposium. "And with these systems, they've built a kill web over the Pacific Ocean to find, fix, track and, yes, target United States and allied military capabilities," he added. And that's not all. China has also "built a range of counterspace weapons, from reversible jamming all the way up to kinetic hit-to-kill direct-ascent and co-orbital ASATs," Whiting said.

Indeed, China demonstrated direct-ascent ASAT, or anti-satellite, weapon technology back in January 2007, when it destroyed one of its defunct weather satellites with a missile. That test was widely decried as irresponsible, for it generated thousands of pieces of debris, many of which are still cluttering up Earth orbit. Such activities show that China is now treating space as a war-fighting domain, Whiting said. And so, he added, is Russia, which has also conducted ASAT tests recently, including a destructive one in November 2021. Russia has also been aggressively building out its orbital architecture; since 2018, the nation has more than doubled its total number of active satellites, according to Whiting. The U.S. government has taken notice of these trends.

"We are at a pivotal moment in history," Troy Meink, principal deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds and operates the United States' fleet of spy satellites, said during a different talk on Tuesday here at the symposium. "For the first time in decades, U.S. leadership in space and space technology is being challenged," Meink added. "Our competitors are actively seeking ways to threaten our capabilities, and we see this every day." The U.S. must act if it wishes to beat back this challenge, Meink and Whiting stressed; it cannot rely on the inertia of past success to do the job. For example, Meink highlighted the need to innovate with the nation's reconnaissance satellites, to make them more numerous, more agile and more resilient. U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu also emphasized the importance of increasing resilience, a goal that she said could be achieved by diversifying the nation's space capabilities. "We must assess ways to incorporate radiation-hardened electronics, novel orbits, varied communication pathways, advancements in propulsion technologies and increased cooperation with our allies," Shyu said in another talk on Tuesday at the symposium.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hardware sold for years by the likes of Intel and Lenovo contains a remotely exploitable vulnerability that will never be fixed. The cause: a supply chain snafu involving an open source software package and hardware from multiple manufacturers that directly or indirectly incorporated it into their products. Researchers from security firm Binarly have confirmed that the lapse has resulted in Intel, Lenovo, and Supermicro shipping server hardware that contains a vulnerability that can be exploited to reveal security-critical information. The researchers, however, went on to warn that any hardware that incorporates certain generations of baseboard management controllers made by Duluth, Georgia-based AMI or Taiwan-based AETN are also affected.

BMCs are tiny computers soldered into the motherboard of servers that allow cloud centers, and sometimes their customers, to streamline the remote management of vast fleets of servers. They enable administrators to remotely reinstall OSes, install and uninstall apps, and control just about every other aspect of the system -- even when it's turned off. BMCs provide what's known in the industry as "lights-out" system management. AMI and AETN are two of several makers of BMCs. For years, BMCs from multiple manufacturers have incorporated vulnerable versions of open source software known as lighttpd. Lighttpd is a fast, lightweight web server that's compatible with various hardware and software platforms. It's used in all kinds of wares, including in embedded devices like BMCs, to allow remote administrators to control servers remotely with HTTP requests. [...] "All these years, [the lighttpd vulnerability] was present inside the firmware and nobody cared to update one of the third-party components used to build this firmware image," Binarly researchers wrote Thursday. "This is another perfect example of inconsistencies in the firmware supply chain. A very outdated third-party component present in the latest version of firmware, creating additional risk for end users. Are there more systems that use the vulnerable version of lighttpd across the industry?"

The vulnerability makes it possible for hackers to identify memory addresses responsible for handling key functions. Operating systems take pains to randomize and conceal these locations so they can't be used in software exploits. By chaining an exploit for the lighttpd vulnerability with a separate vulnerability, hackers could defeat this standard protection, which is known as address space layout randomization. The chaining of two or more exploits has become a common feature of hacking attacks these days as software makers continue to add anti-exploitation protections to their code. Tracking the supply chain for multiple BMCs used in multiple server hardware is difficult. So far, Binarly has identified AMI's MegaRAC BMC as one of the vulnerable BMCs. The security firm has confirmed that the AMI BMC is contained in the Intel Server System M70KLP hardware. Information about BMCs from ATEN or hardware from Lenovo and Supermicro aren't available at the moment. The vulnerability is present in any hardware that uses lighttpd versions 1.4.35, 1.4.45, and 1.4.51. "A potential attacker can exploit this vulnerability in order to read memory of Lighttpd Web Server process," Binarly researchers wrote in an advisory. "This may lead to sensitive data exfiltration, such as memory addresses, which can be used to bypass security mechanisms such as ASLR." Advisories are available here, here, and here.

Sierra Space CEO Tom Vice told Yahoo Finance it plans to go public within the next 18 months at a valuation of $5.3 billion. Since being spun out of defense contractor Sierra Nevada Corporation in 2021, the company has "placed its bets on building out the growing space economy, from developing rocket propulsion technology to a commercial space station with Blue Origin." From the report: Its ambitions have fueled the development of its cargo space plane, the Dream Chaser, set to have its inaugural mission to the International Space Station (ISS) in the second half of this year. Built to land on any commercial runway, the plane will lower the barrier to entry into low-earth orbit and open up business opportunities, Vice said. "Since the 1960s, every science experiment or human being that's come back to earth from space, even today, is still landing in a capsule in the ocean," he said. "We think changing and revolutionizing the way that we bring things back from space, both humans and cargo, and landing [the spacecraft] back at a commercial runway will completely accelerate the new space economy."

"We believe that the next big breakthrough products in oncology, longevity, and industrialized components like glass will be produced in low Earth orbit," Vice said, noting that many of those opportunities are likely to come from the development of commercial space stations to replace the decades-old ISS. Sierra Space has partnered with Blue Origin to build out the Orbital Reef, a commercially owned and operated space station, though recent reports have hinted at tension between the corporate partners. "We're transitioning from decades of government-run space stations with just a handful of government-trained astronauts to the full commercialization of low Earth orbit," Vice said. "We think that's going to create, we believe, probably the most profound industrial revolution and grow that space economy well over a trillion dollars by 2040."

After 64 years of service, ULA on Tuesday launched its last-ever Delta rocket carrying a classified payload for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). "The powerful booster departed Space Launch Complex-37 (SLC-37) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 12:53 p.m. EDT (1653 GMT), literally setting itself on fire for the 16th and final time," reports Space.com. From the report: That spectacle, which was unique to the Delta IV in its heaviest configuration, was the result of hydrogen building up in the flame trench and then rising up alongside the rocket after it was used to cool down the three RS-68A engines to cryogenic temperatures. When the engines fired, the hydrogen ignited and flames lapped at the orange insulation covering the core stage and its two side-mounted boosters. The two boosters were jettisoned about four minutes into the flight, followed by the core, or first stage, separating one minute and 45 seconds later. A single RL10C-2-1 engine on the Delta cryogenic second stage then took over, propelling the NROL-70 payload into space. Due to national security concerns, coverage of the launch ceased following fairing jettison at about 6 minutes and 40 seconds into the flight.

ULA is retiring the Delta IV, and eventually its other legacy rocket, the Atlas V, in favor of its newly introduced Vulcan, which flew a near-perfect first mission in January. The Vulcan was developed to replace both long-flying rockets in all of their configurations. "This is a great mission to think about that transition, because national security space missions is our core and the unique set of missions there require a high-energy launch vehicle. We designed Vulcan specifically for that," said [Tory Bruno, chief executive officer of United Launch Alliance]. In addition to being the 16th Delta IV Heavy, Tuesday's launch was also the 45th liftoff of a Delta IV, the 35th Delta IV to fly from Florida and the 389th Delta launch of any kind since 1960 (of which 294 were sent skyward from Cape Canaveral). Half of the Delta IV Heavy launches were devoted to sending NRO payloads into orbit. The rocket and its less powerful configurations were also used in support of NASA, NOAA (the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), U.S. Air Force and commercial payloads.

We're seeing a boom in journaling apps as safer, easier ways to ease us back into posting everything online. From a report: Last year, Apple released a journal app with iOS 17. Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer just unveiled a photo app called Shine, which is made to share photos and memories with a select group of people. Today, Retro -- a startup that we called "the new Instagram" -- is launching a feature called Journals within the app, which lets you record both photos and notes for a select group of people.

As a lifelong journaler, it's hard to forget that I already have an intimate, safe space to record my life and share memories. It is a notebook. I don't have to worry about marketers selling my information, because it's not accessible. What if creating a safe space all of your own means just getting off the internet altogether? Most of these apps are based on the central premise that most of us would rather talk to family or close friends than with a pretty stranger shilling snack boxes. As we reported previously, Retro has a few standout features. Once you join the app, you're prompted to select a few pictures to post per week. In order to see your friends' and family's photos, you have to share photos of your own. That keeps people actively participating instead of lurking.

"Varda Space Industries has closed a massive tranche of funding," reports TechCrunch, "just weeks after its first drug manufacturing capsule returned from orbit."

Varda has now raised $145 million to date, the article points out, and the $90 million in new Series B funding "marks an inflection point for the company, which is now gearing up to scale from the initial demonstration mission to a regular set of missions carrying customer payloads, Varda founder Delian Asparouhov told TechCrunch." El Segundo-based Varda was founded in 2021 by Asparouhov, who is also a partner at Founders Fund, and Will Bruey, a spacecraft engineer who cut his teeth at SpaceX. The pair had an audacious goal to commercialize what until very recently was promising but ultimately small-scale research into the effects of microgravity on pharmaceutical crystals... Astronauts have been conducting protein crystallization experiments in space for decades on the International Space Station and before that, the Space Shuttle. But the business case for expanding this research has never materialized — until now...

Part of the reason Varda is possible today is due to the availability of regular, low-cost rideshare launches from SpaceX and Rocket Lab's innovations in satellite bus manufacturing. Even beyond these external partnerships, the startup has made significant headway in its own right, as the success of the first mission showed: Their reentry capsule appears to have performed flawlessly and the experiment to reformulate the HIV medicine ritonavir was executed without a hitch, it says. Varda has also started publishing the results of its internal R&D efforts, including a scientific paper on its hyper-gravity (as opposed to microgravity) crystallization platform, which the startup developed as a sort of screening method prior to sending drugs to space. [The paper is titled "Gravity as a Knob for Tuning Particle Size Distributions of Small Molecules."] It's an entirely new field of research that takes advantage of the ability to truly unlock gravity as a variable in scientific experiments. "Over time, we will be able to generate data sets between both hyper-gravity and microgravity and start to show correlations," he said....

In a recent podcast appearance, he specified that the all-in initial mission cost around $12 million, which will drop to $5-6 million by mission 4 and $2.5 million or less by mission 10.) Larger capsules are also in the longer-term pipeline, though also not until the 2027 time frame. Asparouhov also confirmed that pharmaceuticals will be Varda's sole focus for the next 10-20 (or more) years, based on the company's conviction that pharmaceutical products will generate more economic value compared to other materials. A lot of that comes down to the fact that there are a significant set of drugs that require only a "seed" of the material that can only be made in microgravity, and the rest of the drug formulation can be completed here on Earth...

The company is also aiming to improve the processing capabilities of the on-board pharmaceutical reactor. The first mission carried just one drug protein, but in the future the company hopes to process multiple drug products that could be run through different processing regimes. In the future, other missions could carry larger reactors for drugs that do need more than the "seed" crystal, and those mission profiles would be closer to something like mass manufacturing.
Varda already has "a handful" of signed contracts with biotech companies, according to the article — and Varda's next manufacturing mission "will launch later this year."

CNN revisits 2003's disastrous landing of the Space Shuttle Columbia tonight with two "immersive" specials co-produced by BBC and Mindhouse Productions "featuring exclusive interviews and revealing never-before-broadcast footage," according to an announcement — with two more specials airing next week.

You can watch a trailer here. Across four episodes, the story of the ticking-clock of Columbia's final mission is told in dramatic detail, beginning months before the troubled launch, unfolding across the sixteen days in orbit, and concluding with the investigation into the tragic loss of the seven astronauts' lives. Weaving together intimate footage shot by the astronauts themselves inside the orbiter, exclusive first-hand testimony from family members of the Shuttle's crew, key players at NASA — some of whom have never spoken before — and journalists who covered the story on the ground, the series paints an intimate portrait of the women and men onboard and uncovers in forensic detail the trail of events and missed opportunities that ultimately led to disaster.
CNN says the first two episodes will livestream tonight at 9 p.m. EST (time-delayed on the west coast until 9 p.m.PST) — and then be available on-demand starting Monday — "for pay TV subscribers via CNN.com, CNN connected TV and mobile apps." CNN's web site offers a "preview" of its live TV offerings here.

They're promising "the inside story of one America's most iconic institutions, uncovering how financial pressures and a culture of complacency may have contributed to the events of February 1, 2003. The series also reflects on the legacy of the Space Shuttle era, serving as a timely exploration of the challenges and inherent dangers that remain relevant to space travel today."

On its web site CNN has also published two companion articles — one by Rice history professor Douglas Brinkley arguing that NASA "was America's crown jewel. After the Columbia disaster it was never quite the same." Because other shuttle missions had returned safely with "shredded" surface tiles — and because the stalwart Columbia had brought astronauts home from 27 previous flights — many NASA officials were lulled into complacency. They went so far as to assure the pilot and commander via email that "there is no concern ... We have seen the same phenomenon on several other flights and there is absolutely no concern for entry."

NASA officials also decided against enlisting spy satellite photography to examine the shuttle damage more thoroughly. If they had, it's possible that the astronauts could have repaired the spaceplane or at least abandoned it for refuge on the International Space Station...

As the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) noted in its final report, "the NASA organizational culture had as much to do with this accident as the foam." All of NASA's launches were suspended for two years. While the shuttles eventually flew again, post-Columbia, the program was stunted and curtailed.
The article notes that since then SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the United Launch Alliance (Lockheed Martin and Boeing) "are thriving today in the space industry," along with Virgin Galactic and Axiom Space. "NASA, far from feeling threatened, has encouraged many of the private companies with massive contracts. The agency already had a long history of dealing with sub-contractors, using its pocketbook to steer aerospace development; that tradition has adjusted seamlessly to the current space economy."

In the other article CNN Space & Science writer Jackie Wattles notes that when America later retired its Space Shuttle program in 2011, "no U.S. astronaut would travel to space on an American-made rocket for nearly a decade."

The European Space Agency has a Planetary Defence Office, which includes its Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre. "It has come to our attention," they wrote in the April edition of their monthly newsletter, "that a recent trend among journalists has been to come up with creative comparisons to convey the size of an asteroid to the public."

So then, as explained by RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) "they propose a number of standardised units of comparison for journalists describing 'death from the skies'".

An excerpt from that April 1 newsletter: In the absence of a handy skyscraper, animals commonly used have included giraffes, corgis and an entire colony of penguins. But how do these comparisons stack up? Let's look at some of our favourite unusual suspects:

- Corgi: At around 30 cm tall, a space rock the size of a corgi wouldn't pose much of a threat.

- Half a giraffe: An adult giraffe can reach up to 5.5 metres in height, so half a giraffe would be about 2.75 metres. While not as impressive as a full skyscraper, an asteroid that size could certainly destroy a building or two...

- Elephants: An adult African elephant can reach 7 metres at the shoulder. Ninety elephants stacked on top of each other would form a staggering pile over 630 metres high, creating a devastating but probably not planet-ending event.

As this menagerie of animals can cause a lot of confusion, we at the NEOCC recommend the use of a Standardised Giraffe Unit (SGU, 1 SGU = 5 penguins) for ease of comparison.
RockDoctor shares this additional thought in his original submission about the newly proposed standardized unit.

"The world may be turtles all the way down, but it's giraffes all the way up."

NASA engineers have traced the Voyager 1 spacecraft's transmitted gibberish to corrupted memory hardware in its flight data system (FDS). "The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn't working," NASA wrote in an update. Gizmodo reports: FDS collects data from Voyager's science instruments, as well as engineering data about the health of the spacecraft, and combines them into a single package that's transmitted to Earth through one of the probe's subsystems, the telemetry modulation unit (TMU), in binary code. FDS and TMU have been having trouble communicating with one another. As a result, TMU has been sending data to mission control in a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes. NASA's engineers aren't quite sure what corrupted the FDS memory hardware; they think that either the chip was hit by an energetic particle from space or that it's just worn out after operating for 46 years. [...] The engineers are hoping to resolve the issue by finding a way for FDS to operate normally without the corrupted memory hardware, enabling Voyager 1 to begin transmitting data about the cosmos and continue its journey through deep space.

Whenever a rocket launch occurs, air traffic controllers ensure the safety of commercial flights by managing airspace closures and monitoring rocket debris, without receiving compensation from commercial space companies like SpaceX for these services. The Biden administration's budget proposal aims to change this by suggesting that for-profit space companies begin paying for their use of government air traffic control resources. The New York Times reports: Commercial space companies are exempt from aviation excise taxes that fill the coffers of the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, which pays for the F.A.A.'s work and will get roughly $18 billion in tax revenues for the current fiscal year. The taxes are paid primarily by commercial airlines, which are charged 7.5 percent of each ticket price and an additional fee of about $5 to $20 per passenger, depending on the destination of each flight. Mr. Biden's budget proposal vows to work with Congress to overhaul the tax structure and split the cost of operating the nation's air traffic control system. His promise is based in part on an independent safety review report commissioned by the F.A.A., which advises that the federal government update the excise taxes to charge commercial space companies.

Mr. Biden's call for revising the decades-old excise tax structure is part of his push to make richer Americans and wealthy corporations "pay their fair share." In his State of the Union speech last month, Mr. Biden also called for raising taxes on private and corporate jet users, including increasing the tax that they pay on jet fuel to $1.06 per gallon from 21.8 cents per gallon over five years. That tax on fuel currently makes up around 3 percent of the annual revenue of the trust fund, which depends heavily on what commercial airlines and its passengers pay. Yet commercial space companies do not contribute to that fund or share any of the cost that the public bears when rockets are launched, said William J. McGee, a former F.A.A.-licensed aircraft dispatcher and a senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project, a consumer advocacy group. "This is a question of fundamental fairness," Mr. McGee said. "It would be the equivalent of having a toll system on a highway and waving through certain users and not others."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Kotaku: A new patent recently filed by TV and streaming device manufacturer Roku hints toward a possible future where televisions could display ads when you pause a movie or game. For Roku, the time in which the TV is on but users aren't doing anything is valuable. The company has started leasing out ad space in its popular Roku City screensaver -- which appears when your TV is idle -- to companies like McDonald's and movies like Barbie. As tech newsletter Lowpass points out, Roku finds this idle time and its screensaver so valuable that it forbids app developers from overriding the screensaver with their own. But, if you plug in an Xbox or DVD player into the HDMI port on a Roku TV, you bypass the company's screensaver and other ads. And so, Roku has been figuring out a way to not let that happen.

As reported by Lowpass on April 4, Roku recently filed a patent for a technology that would let it inject ads into third-party content -- like an Xbox game or Netflix movie -- using an HDMI connection. The patent describes a situation where you are playing a video game and hit pause to go check your phone or grab some food. At this point, Roku would identify that you have paused the content and display a relevant ad until you unpaused the game. Roku's tech isn't designed to randomly inject ads as you are playing a game or watching a movie, it knows that would be going too far and anger people. Instead, the patent suggests several ways that Roku could spot when your TV is paused, like comparing frames, to make sure the user has actually paused the content. Roku might also use the HDMI's audio feed to search for extended moments of silence. The company also proposes using HDMI CEC -- a protocol designed to help devices communicate better -- to figure out when you pause and unpause content. Similarly, Roku's patent explains that it will use various methods to detect what people are playing or watching and try to display relevant ads. So if it sees you have an Xbox plugged in, it might try to serve you ads that it thinks an Xbox owner would be interested in.