SpaceX ran into trouble Tuesday evening when a small fire erupted from the engine of a prototype rocket it was testing at the company’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas.
The rocket in question is an early prototype of the company’s Starship rocket called Starhopper. Ultimately Starship is expected to be used for space tourism, specifically to transport up to 100 passengers from Earth to the moon and Mars.
The fire, captured on video by Everyday Astronaut, produced a large burst of flames just after SpaceX tested the rocket’s engine. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Starhopper was damaged in the incident. We’ve reached out to SpaceX to find out how exactly the fire impacted the rocket — if at all — and will update this story if we hear back.
Unlike some other space vessels, Starship, Spacehopper’s big brother, is expected to be completely reusable. Much like an airplane, it will be able to take off and land multiple times. SpaceX’s Falcon series of rockets are currently partially reusable.
The vessel was originally named “Big Falcon Rocket.” CEO Elon Musk changed the name of the rocket to Starship last year. When he announced the name change on Twitter a commenter mentioned “unless this starship is sent on a mission to another star system it can’t be called a starship” to which Musk replied, “Later versions will.”
Starhopper is meant to be a test rocket for the Starship project. During tests, the spacecraft has been flying short flights at a low altitude as a way of proving the technology used to power it actually works. If the project takes off, it could revolutionize space travel (and make it significantly less expensive by reusing the same rocket).
The spacecraft uses SpaceX’s “Raptor” rocket engines, and the company plans to gradually add more of those engines over time, ultimately reaching the seven engines expected to be included in the final Starship rocket. That rocket will also have an additional 31 Raptor engines as part of a “Super Heavy” booster. SpaceX completed its first test of Starhopper in April.
Inaugural missions for Starship are expected to happen as early as 2021.
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.