SpaceX took a big step by showcasing its claim that reusable rockets are the future of space flight. The two-stage Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral and it featured not only a reused booster, but a reused Dragon capsule that’s already visited the International Space Station (ISS) a few months ago. What’s more, NASA may have gotten a discount on the flight.
Elon Musk has long touted the re-usability concept for his SpaceX program, and it kicked into high gear in 2017. Back in March, SpaceX made history by utilizing a reused Falcon 9 to send a satellite for the communications firm SES into orbit. In May, the company launched a recycled Dragon capsule for a resupply mission to the ISS.
The most recent launch marks the first time both a reused capsule aboard a reused rocket has made the journey. After a successful launch and landing back on Earth, the boosters and capsules are inspected, refurbished, and subject to a battery of tests to ensure they’re ready for another mission.
SpaceX has now completed 20 successful first-stage landings, and it’s reused the boosters on four occasions. In the pre-launch briefing for the most recent mission, Jessica Jensen of SpaceX said, “In the long run, reusability is going to significantly reduce the cost of access to space, and that’s what’s going to be required to send future generations to explore the universe.”
NASA probably got a deal on the mission as well. Last year, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell explained that reused rockets are cheaper to fly and some of that savings would be passed on to the consumer. “We are not decreasing the price by 30 percent right now for recovered and reused vehicles. We’re offering about a 10 percent price reduction,” she said. “At this point that is a reasonable reduction and then, as we recover some of the costs associated with the investment that we put into the Falcon 9 to achieve that, then we might get a little bit more.”
After the first stage’s successful launch and landing, the disposable second stage is powering the Dragon on to its December 17 rendezvous with the ISS. The cargo it’s carrying is not a Tesla Roadster, but the usual array of crew supplies and scientific experiments.
However, there may be something extra this time around. “I cannot confirm nor deny the presence of Christmas presents,” Kirk Shireman of NASA said. “There are crew care packages, and as program manager I don’t have to go inspect all those. So it wouldn’t surprise me, but I can’t say for certain.”
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.