What happened: It sounds like something out of a spy movie, but it’s completely real. A team of researchers from UC San Diego and the University of Maryland bought a satellite receiver for about $800, the kind of thing you can get off the shelf, and pointed it at the sky. For three years, they just listened.
Why is this important: This basically blows a massive hole in the belief that our satellite communications are secure. Governments, phone companies, and huge corporations rely on this system, assuming it’s safe.
Why should I care: So why should this matter to you? Because it’s not just about spies and corporations.
What’s next: Okay, so there’s a little bit of good news. After the researchers told them, companies like T-Mobile and AT&T started scrambling to encrypt their signals. But tons of others still haven’t. To turn up the heat, the researchers are releasing their tools to the public so more people can check for themselves.
But the chilling reality is that experts are pretty sure spy agencies have known about this for years and are likely already taking advantage. Without a massive, global push to fix this, huge amounts of our most sensitive data will just keep being beamed out into the open, free for anyone who simply decides to look up.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.