SpaceX had to once again delay its latest Falcon 9 rocket launch on Wednesday, this time due to poor weather, delaying a planned supply run to the International Space Station.
Elon Musk’s private space company called off the launch just before 3:30 p.m. PT because of cloudy skies above Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. SpaceX’s team waited until almost the last possible second to abort the mission, announcing that it would scrub the launch with less than a minute before the scheduled launch at 3:24 p.m.
“Standing down today due to weather; backup launch opportunity is tomorrow at 6:01 p.m. EDT, 22:01 UTC,” SpaceX tweeted after scrubbing the mission.
Standing down today due to weather; backup launch opportunity is tomorrow at 6:01 p.m. EDT, 22:01 UTC
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) July 24, 2019
The company had said that weather was “30% favorable” for the launch earlier on Wednesday morning.
“I notice plenty of humidity out there, but another thing we have to deal with is the direction of the steering flow, or where the winds in the atmosphere are going to steer those afternoon showers and thunderstorms,” U.S. Air Force weather officer Will Ulrich said during a pre-launch news conference Wednesday. “Today, we have winds that will concentrate the majority of today’s showers and thunderstorms near the spaceport.”
Officials had hoped for a break in the clouds as there had been earlier in the day, but didn’t have quite such good luck. The company now plans to try again on Thursday, though the forecast for the area calls for thunderstorms, which may delay the launch once again. The launch had previously been delayed from earlier in July.
SpaceX’s 20th Dragon spacecraft mission to the International Space Station will eventually bring 5,000 lbs of supplies to the ISS. The cargo includes a 3D printer that could someday “print” human organs and other supplies for ongoing experiments.
The past few months have been full of ups and downs for SpaceX. In June, the company managed to successfully launch its Falcon Heavy rocket at night, a feat that Musk called its “most difficult launch ever.” But the company also had to deal with its Starhopper rocket being engulfed in flames last week. Musk said there was no major damage caused by the fire.
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.