After a long series of delays and unexpected setbacks, SpaceX successfully completed a static fire engine test for its Falcon Heavy rocket today at Pad 39A of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At around 12:30 PM local time, the rocket’s massive engines roared to life, sending huge plumes of smoke into the air surrounding it, and sending spaceflight enthusiasts into a frenzy on social media.
This static fire test (in which the engines are fired but the rocket does not lift off), is a critical step toward the Falcon Heavy’s maiden launch — a much-anticipated event in which the rocket will — no joke — attempt to put SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s red Tesla Roadster into orbit around Mars. While SpaceX has not set a date for the full launch, a successful static fire test suggests it could happen very soon.
The Falcon Heavy is a product of SpaceX’s reusable rocket program, designed as three Falcon 9 rockets together with a single upper stage. At 230-feet tall, the massive rocket is equipped with 27 Merlin engines, which are capable of generating 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. This is equal to that of 18 Boeing 747s, according to SpaceX.
If the rocket’s Maiden voyage goes according to plan, it will likely be quite a spectacle. After sending its payload into orbit, the rocket’s boosters will detach, fall back to and (hopefully) land safely back on Earth — a feat that SpaceX has achieved multiple times in the past with its Falcon 9 rockets. The mission itself is far from a guaranteed success, however; Musk is aware that the launch may fail, and even if it succeeds, the rocket might never make it into orbit.
More fun facts: Apparently, the Tesla will (hilariously) be playing a recording of David Bowie’s legendary song, Space Oddity, which was released five days before the launch of Apollo 11 and 10 days before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked on the surface of Earth’s moon. Fingers crossed that there’s some sort of stream available.
If you’re wondering what an actual launch might look like, the video above — a rendering published by SpaceX in 2015 — should give you an idea.
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.