Last month, Elon Musk sent out a teaser image of the slim new black-and-white spacesuit that will be used on the planned SpaceX mission to Mars. Today on Instagram, he shared a full-body picture of someone wearing the suit standing next to a prototype of the Crew Dragon capsule.
The new image of what a SpaceX astronaut might look like shows the design of the boots and gloves, as well as the padding on the pants. These pressure suits are meant to be worn by crew members while riding inside the Crew Dragon. They’re not for spacewalks, but rather they’re designed to keep the astronauts alive during an emergency situation, such as a rapid depressurization.
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The sleek capsule itself, dubbed “Dragon 2,” looks very different than the more conventional “Dragon 1” capsule that’s currently in use delivering cargo to the International Space Station. In August, a Dragon 1 capsule successfully docked with the ISS, delivering a payload that included a Hewlett Packard Enterprises supercomputer planned for use on an eventual Mars mission.
When the capsule splashes down on Earth later this month with 3,000 pounds of cargo from the ISS, it will mark the last time a new Dragon 1 will be used for supply missions. From this point forward, SpaceX plans to fly only refurbished Dragons it has used previously for the NASA missions.
In 2015, SpaceX received a $2.6 billion contract from NASA to carry astronauts to the ISS, and development of the new suits is an important step towards that goal. A demonstration mission is planned for February 2018, with another launch in June with two crew members aboard.
A whole new space race is brewing, however, with Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner also vying for the first commercial astronaut delivery to the ISS. Boeing unveiled its own design of snazzy blue spacesuits earlier this year, and they also have plans for the first Starliner test flights this summer.
The next few years will mark a new chapter in the history of space exploration, with private companies filling a role only previously held by government agencies. Whether the crew will be wearing white or blue on an eventual mission to the red planet remains to be seen, but space fans the world over are eagerly anticipating what comes next.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.