SpaceX CEO Elon Musk confirmed Wednesday, January 23 in a tweet that high winds damaged a section of the company’s prototype Mars Starship. According to Musk, “50 miles per hour winds broke the mooring blocks” and blew over the fairing, the large nosecone at the top of the rocket. The damage to the nosecone section will take a few weeks to repair.
The accident happened overnight on Tuesday during a wind advisory for the Brownsville and Rio Grande Valley area. Wind gusts up to 45 mph were expected overnight Tuesday and into the morning Wednesday. According to images posted to NASASpaceFlight.com forum by Boca Chica Gal, the nosecone was laying on the ground after its unfortunate fall. According to Musk and photos of the crash, the nosecone, which was empty at the time, suffered the brunt of the fall, while the more critical fuel tanks survived the wind storm and its aftermath.
I just heard. 50 mph winds broke the mooring blocks late last night & fairing was blown over. Will take a few weeks to repair.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 23, 2019
Formerly known as the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR), the test Starship craft is being built and tested at SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility near the south Texas city of Brownsville. The space vehicle consists of the Super Heavy rocket booster and the Starship spacecraft which will carry cargo and people on crewed missions. Initially, Musk hopes to launch the vehicle on small short “hop” tests that will send the rocket to low altitudes and hopefully safely return it to earth. Musk originally planned to conduct these first test flights of the system in the next month, but these launches likely will be delayed because of the accident.
As SpaceX’s next-generation space vehicle, the Starship is being designed to transport cargo and people initially to orbit and then eventually to Mars. The spacecraft has undergone several changes throughout its development. Musk recently confirmed the vehicle would be constructed with stainless steel alloy instead of the carbon-fiber composites in the original blueprints. The company also has radically changed the design of the vehicle’s Raptor engines.
SpaceX hopes to launch its first cargo mission to Mars in 2022, and plans to devote the mission to the study of the environment and to putting down the early infrastructure for a future propellant depot and base on Mars. The next Mars flight, slated for 2014, will bring a crew to begin building the foundation for a future self-sustaining civilization on the Martian surface. SpaceX isn’t the only company gunning for Mars, there are plans for a myriad of missions from companies and government agencies worldwide.
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.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.