SpaceX will try again today to launch its 20th Dragon spacecraft mission to the International Space Station (ISS), one day after the planned launch was scrapped due to unfavorable weather. You can watch the event in its entirety on NASA’s free livestream above.
Using the Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX’s 18th operational cargo delivery flight to the ISS, known as CRS-18, will (hopefully) take off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 3:01 p.m. PT on Thursday, July 25.
The mission was delayed at the last possible minute on Wednesday due to cloudy, stormy weather in the area. Forecasts for Thursday aren’t looking much better — there’s a 25% chance of precipitation around launch time, and there might be thunderstorms earlier in the day.
Wednesday was a rough day for SpaceX. After it scrubbed the Falcon 9 launch in Florida, it had to abort a separate test launch of its Starhopper spacecraft in South Texas.
The resupply mission will deliver a significant amount of new tools for the experiments and investigations on the ISS, including a 3D printer that may eventually be able to “print” human organs using stem cells. The CRS-18 shipment will also bring along supplies for an expertiment that will determine how low gravity affects rocks and microbes, with the goal of extracting resources from rocks themselves. There are also some supplies for space gardening — one experiment will try to grow moss in space, which could eventually be used as food or to produce oxygen for future missions to the space station or even Mars.
On top of equipment for experiments and essentials like food, water, and oxygen, the Dragon spacecraft will deliver a new docking adapter to the ISS. The payload weighs more than 2,500 kilograms (5,500 pounds) and is expected to arrive at the station by Saturday, assuming the latest launch attempt goes well.
The next Falcon 9 launch will take place in August and deliver the Amos 17 communication satellite, which is meant to provide broadband over Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.
NASA’s live coverage of the launch will kick off at 2:45 p.m. PT on Thursday. You can watch it live in the player above.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
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.