SpaceX’s Starhopper rocket managed to successfully “hop” on Tuesday afternoon, August 27, with the Starship prototype hovering about 150 meters (492 feet) above ground for several seconds before touching down on a nearby landing pad.
This is the second successful test of the Starhopper rocket’s Raptor engines. It’s an early iteration of SpaceX’s Starship, which is designed to be reusable and able to launch and land on surfaces – including the surface of the moon and Mars.
The daytime test in Boca Chica, Texas, came a day after SpaceX was forced to abort its planned Monday test due a wiring problem with the engine’s igniters, according to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
Raptor uses dual redundant torch igniters. Better long-term, but more finicky in development.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 26, 2019
By proving that the Starship concept works, SpaceX has taken the first step in a major leap forward for space travel. Instead of shooting a ship into space with a rocket that is essentially useless afterward, Starship could theoretically leave Earth’s orbit, land on another planet, then launch itself back into space – sort of like a ship in your favorite science fiction movie.
Musk himself tweeted out his congratulations on the successful test.
Congrats SpaceX team!! pic.twitter.com/duckYSK0D4
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 27, 2019
Starhopper completed its first successful hop in July, hovering in the air for a few seconds at about 65 feet in the air. That nighttime test came after an earlier attempt ended with Starhopper’s rocket bursting into flames.
That’s not to say Tuesday’s test was quiet: public officials in Boca Chica warned that the test could be a “potential risk to health and safety,” and that a malfunction during the flight could shoot out so much pressure that it could break windows. Cameron County officials told residents to go outside – and take their pets with them – in case of broken glass caused by the test.
Now that it has had a second successful test, SpaceX will continue work on a Starship, with the goal of helping set up a colony on Mars, bringing people on a trip around the moon, and even being used for transcontinental travel.
Assuming everything goes well, the first real missions for the Starship are expected to launch 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.