Elon Musk has had a busy year so far, what with sending his sports car into orbit and trying to get flamethrowers through customs. He still found time, however, to blow one of the old SpaceX rocket boosters (which had “landed” in the ocean) into smithereens after its mission was over.
On January 31, a reused SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sent Luxembourg’s GovSat-1 into orbit, and there was no planned landing and recovery of the older-model booster. As the rocket was going to be scrapped anyway, the company decided to use it to test a new technique for a more fuel-efficient landing. Rather than send out one of its landing ships, SpaceX simply “landed” the booster on the surface of the water.
SpaceX obviously didn’t expect the booster to remain intact, but it did. “Amazingly it has survived,” Musk tweeted. “We will try to tow it back to shore.”
This rocket was meant to test very high retrothrust landing in water so it didn’t hurt the droneship, but amazingly it has survived. We will try to tow it back to shore. pic.twitter.com/hipmgdnq16
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 31, 2018
Towing it to shore is not as easy as tossing a rope around the tail fin, however. AmericaSpace called the floating booster a potential “ticking time bomb,” especially if the onboard circuitry was damaged during the splashdown and didn’t allow high-pressure areas to safely vent.
Several anonymous sources then confirmed to the website that the U.S. Air Force had carried out an air strike to destroy the floating booster. Other sites picked up the story and ran with it, despite no official confirmation from SpaceX or the U.S. military.
After repeated requests for comment, SpaceX finally confirmed that, although the Air Force was initially considered to dispose of the hazardous booster via an air strike, eventually a commercial demolition company was contracted to destroy it.
“While the Falcon 9 first stage for the GovSat-1 mission was expendable, it initially survived splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean,” SpaceX said in a statement. “However, the stage broke apart before we could complete an unplanned effort to recover the booster. Reports that the Air Force was involved in SpaceX’s recovery efforts are categorically false.”
It’s unclear whether SpaceX had planned for this contingency, and no further details were available about how the booster was destroyed or what company was hired to break it apart and sink it.
SpaceX will conduct another launch for the same satellite company later this year, with the SES-12 satellite scheduled for liftoff atop a Falcon 9 in April.
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.