"It was three years of my, life you?" a 93-year-old William Shatner tells the Guardian when asked about playing Captain Kirk on the original Star Trek series from 1967 to 1969: It gladdens him to see how much joy the series has brought its many fans, but the richest rewards came in his introduction to science fiction, which activated and nurtured a lifelong curiosity about our species. He reminisces about meeting the great writers of the genre fondly yet frankly, honest enough to sort Ray Bradbury into "the category right below friend, I think". He devoured their novels and developed a fascination with the principle of defamiliarization, that concepts taken for granted can be understood anew when viewed through the vantage of a stranger in a strange land. "Good science fiction is humanity, moved into a different milieu," he says.
Even on a grander scale, "The universe charms him with its mysteries," writes the Guardian, calling it "the key to maintaining wonder through nearly a century of life. He likes the not-knowing."

You can see this at play when the TV starship captain became a real-life spacefarer in 2021: Liberated by weightlessness, he found himself utterly transformed by the rush of perspective one can only assume miles above the Earth. "It's very personal, what you see from up there, what you read into the stillness," he says. "I saw the blankness of space as death, but an astronaut will see something else entirely. And when I looked back at the Earth, I saw life."

The question of mortality hangs over Shatner, albeit not in a morbid way. He's entranced by the paradox of death, that the absolute unknowability of what happens will be inevitably supplanted by the certainty of finding out... For a man accustomed to boldly going where no man has gone before, it's all just the next phase of a single ongoing adventure.
In fact, Shatner told Jimmy Kimmel Friday that he was always disappointed by the way he'd performed Captain Kirk's death. "I think you die the way you live," Shatner says. "So Captain Kirk always had these grotesque things happening... but without fear. But with joy, and love, and an opportunity to see what's better." So when performing Kirk's death, he'd imagined him actually gazing upon death itself — and looking upon it with wonder. "I ad libbed the 'Oh my'." Shatner's regret? That it "sounded fearful. And I didn't want to be fearful."

"Would you like a do-over?" Kimmel asks. (Adding "I've got some debris...") And Shatner agrees, performing — one more time — the death of Captain Kirk.

The video also includes an appropriate clip from a newly-released documentary about Shatner's life. "Don't do it half-heartedly," Shatner says at one point. "Whatever it is you do — do it fully. Do it passionately. Do it with your whole being."

CNN looks back to when "dial-up internet (and its iconic dial tone) was 'still a thing..." "File-sharing services like Napster and LimeWire were just beginning to take off... And in sweaty dorm rooms and sparse basements across the world, people brought their desktop monitors together to set up a local area network (LAN) and play multiplayer games — "Half-Life," "Counter-Strike," "Starsiege: Tribes," "StarCraft," "WarCraft" or "Unreal Tournament," to name just a few. These were informal but high-stakes gatherings, then known as LAN parties, whether winning a box of energy drinks or just the joy of emerging victorious. The parties could last several days and nights, with gamers crowded together among heavy computers and fast food boxes, crashing underneath their desks in sleeping bags and taking breaks to pull pranks on each other or watch movies...

It's this nostalgia that prompted writer and podcaster Merritt K to document the era's gaming culture in her new photobook "LAN Party: Inside the Multiplayer Revolution." After floating the idea on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, she received an immediate — and visceral — response from old-school gamers all too keen to share memories and photos from LAN parties and gaming conventions across the world... It's strange to remember that the internet was once a place you went to spend time with other real people; a tethered space, not a cling-film-like reality enveloping the corporeal world from your own pocket....

Growing up as a teenager in this era, you could feel a sense of hope (that perhaps now feels like naivete) about the possibilities of technology, K explained. The book is full of photos featuring people smiling and posing with their desktop monitors, pride and fanfare apparent... "It felt like, 'Wow, the future is coming,'" K said. "It was this exciting time where you felt like you were just charting your own way. I don't want to romanticize it too much, because obviously it wasn't perfect, but it was a very, very different experience...."

"We've kind of lost a lot of control, I think over our relationship to technology," K said. "We have lost a lot of privacy as well. There's less of a sense of exploration because there just isn't as much out there."
One photo shows a stack of Mountain Dew cans (remembering that by 2007 the company had even released a line of soda called "Game Fuel"). "It was a little more communal," the book's author told CNN. "If you're playing games in the same room with someone, it's a different experience than doing it online. You can only be so much of a jackass to somebody who was sitting three feet away from you..."

They adds that that feeling of connecting to people in other places "was cool. It wasn't something that was taken for granted yet."

Slashdot reader christoban writes: In what may be an issue for Sun-obscuring strategies to combat global warming, it turns out that during solar eclipses, low level cumulus clouds rapidly disappear, reducing by a factor of 4, researchers have found. The news comes from the science magazine Eos (published by the nonprofit organization of atmosphere/ocean/space scientists, the American Geophysical Union). Victor J. H. Trees, a geoscientist at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and his colleagues recently analyzed cloud cover data obtained during an annular eclipse in 2005, visible in parts of Europe and Africa. They mined visible and infrared imagery collected by two geostationary satellites operated by the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites. Going to space was key, Trees said. "If you really want to quantify how clouds behave and how they react to a solar eclipse, it helps to study a large area. That's why we want to look from space...." [T]hey tracked cloud evolution for several hours leading up to the eclipse, during the eclipse, and for several hours afterward.

Low-level cumulus clouds — which tend to top out at altitudes around 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) — were strongly affected by the degree of solar obscuration. Cloud cover started to decrease when about 15% of the Sun's face was covered, about 30 minutes after the start of the eclipse. The clouds started to return only about 50 minutes after maximum obscuration. And whereas typical cloud cover hovered around 40% in noneclipse conditions, less than 10% of the sky was covered with clouds during maximum obscuration, the team noted. "On a large scale, the cumulus clouds started to disappear," Trees said... The temperature of the ground matters when it comes to cumulus clouds, Trees said, because they are low enough to be significantly affected by whatever is happening on Earth's surface...

Beyond shedding light on the physics of cloud dissipation during solar eclipses, these new findings also have implications for future geoengineering efforts, Trees and his collaborators suggested. Discussions are underway to mitigate the effects of climate change by, for instance, seeding the atmosphere with aerosols or launching solar reflectors into space to prevent some of the Sun's light from reaching Earth. Such geoengineering holds promise for cooling our planet, researchers agree, but its repercussions are largely unexplored and could be widespread and irreversible.

These new results suggest that cloud cover could decrease with geoengineering efforts involving solar obscuration. And because clouds reflect sunlight, the efficacy of any effort might correspondingly decrease, Trees said. That's an effect that needs to be taken into account when considering different options, the researchers concluded.
Another article on the site warns that "Planting Trees May Not Be as Good for the Climate as Previously Believed."

"The climate benefits of trees storing carbon dioxide is partially offset by dark forests' absorption of more heat from the Sun, and compounds they release that slow the destruction of methane in the atmosphere."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from InterestingEngineering: A concept that began as a doodle at a conference years ago is now becoming a reality. RocketStar Inc. has showcased (PDF) its advanced nuclear-based propulsion technology called the FireStar Drive. It is said to be the world's first electric device for spacecraft propulsion boosted by nuclear fusion. Recently, the company announced the successful initial demonstration of this electric propulsion technology.

The FireStar Drive harnesses the power of nuclear fusion to improve the performance of RocketStar's "water-fueled pulsed plasma thruster." A spacecraft's thrusters perform various functions, including propulsion, orbital changes, and even docking with other orbiting platforms. Moreover, the device employs a unique sort of aneutronic nuclear fusion, which is a fusion reaction that generates few to no neutrons as a byproduct. "The base thruster generates high-speed protons through the ionization of water vapor," noted the press release. Therefore, these protons collide with the nucleus of a boron atom, which starts the fusion reaction. The FireStar Drive begins a fusion process by adding boron into the thruster exhaust, resulting in high-energy particles that increase thrust.

RocketStar's current thruster is dubbed M1.5. Plans to test the FireStar Drive are now ongoing. The in-space technological demonstration will take place aboard D-Orbit's patented OTV ION Satellite Carrier. The SpaceX Transporter rideshare mission will likely launch the demo test in July and October 2024. Furthermore, the team plans to undertake ground tests this year, with more in-space demonstrations scheduled for February 2025. The FireStar Drive will undergo testing as a payload aboard Rogue Space System's Barry-2 spacecraft in the same month. The thruster M1.5 is already ready for delivery to clients.

Boom Supersonic's first aircraft, the XB-1, completed its first flight today and met "all of its test objectives." From a report: This initial test only saw the aircraft 7,120 feet above sea level and fly at a top speed of 238 knots (274 mph) -- far from Mach 1, the speed of sound. The first flight of XB-1 took place at the Mojave Air & Space Port in California, in the same airspace where the X-1 broke the sound barrier, the X-15 conducted test flights for altitude and speed records, and the SR-71 Blackbird was also tested. According to Boom, the XB-1 will be testing, among other things:

Augmented reality vision system: Two nose-mounted cameras, digitally augmented with attitude and flight path indications, feed a high-resolution pilot display enabling excellent runway visibility. This system allows for improved aerodynamic efficiency without the weight and complexity of a movable nose.
Digitally-optimized aerodynamics: Engineers used computational fluid dynamics simulations to explore thousands of designs for XB-1. The result is an optimized design that combines safe and stable operation at takeoff and landing with efficiency at supersonic speeds.
Carbon fiber composites: XB-1 is almost entirely made from carbon fiber composite materials, enabling it to realize a sophisticated aerodynamic design in a strong, lightweight structure.
Supersonic intakes: XB-1's engine intakes slow supersonic air to subsonic speeds, efficiently converting kinetic energy into pressure energy and allowing conventional jet engines to power XB-1 from takeoff through supersonic flight. Another thing being tested by XB-1 is the construction of a safety culture.

With XB-1 now a flying test vehicle, there are many flights ahead before we get to Overture One's first flight, much less dramatically expanding access to supersonic flight. This work will require much engineering and a resilient safety culture. But the first flight of the first step was carried out by Boom Supersonic today, March 22, 2024.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: The nonprofit organization that supports the Firefox web browser said today it is winding down its new partnership with Onerep, an identity protection service recently bundled with Firefox that offers to remove users from hundreds of people-search sites. The move comes just days after a report by KrebsOnSecurity forced Onerep's CEO to admit that he has founded dozens of people-search networks over the years. Mozilla only began bundling Onerep in Firefox last month, when it announced the reputation service would be offered on a subscription basis as part of Mozilla Monitor Plus. Launched in 2018 under the name Firefox Monitor, Mozilla Monitor also checks data from the website Have I Been Pwned? to let users know when their email addresses or password are leaked in data breaches. On March 14, KrebsOnSecurity published a story showing that Onerep's Belarusian CEO and founder Dimitiri Shelest launched dozens of people-search services since 2010, including a still-active data broker called Nuwber that sells background reports on people. Onerep and Shelest did not respond to requests for comment on that story.

But on March 21, Shelest released a lengthy statement wherein he admitted to maintaining an ownership stake in Nuwber, a consumer data broker he founded in 2015 -- around the same time he launched Onerep. Shelest maintained that Nuwber has "zero cross-over or information-sharing with Onerep," and said any other old domains that may be found and associated with his name are no longer being operated by him. "I get it," Shelest wrote. "My affiliation with a people search business may look odd from the outside. In truth, if I hadn't taken that initial path with a deep dive into how people search sites work, Onerep wouldn't have the best tech and team in the space. Still, I now appreciate that we did not make this more clear in the past and I'm aiming to do better in the future." The full statement is available here (PDF).

In a statement released today, a spokesperson for Mozilla said it was moving away from Onerep as a service provider in its Monitor Plus product. "Though customer data was never at risk, the outside financial interests and activities of Onerep's CEO do not align with our values," Mozilla wrote. "We're working now to solidify a transition plan that will provide customers with a seamless experience and will continue to put their interests first." KrebsOnSecurity also reported that Shelest's email address was used circa 2010 by an affiliate of Spamit, a Russian-language organization that paid people to aggressively promote websites hawking male enhancement drugs and generic pharmaceuticals. As noted in the March 14 story, this connection was confirmed by research from multiple graduate students at my alma mater George Mason University.

Shelest denied ever being associated with Spamit. "Between 2010 and 2014, we put up some web pages and optimize them -- a widely used SEO practice -- and then ran AdSense banners on them," Shelest said, presumably referring to the dozens of people-search domains KrebsOnSecurity found were connected to his email addresses (dmitrcox@gmail.com and dmitrcox2@gmail.com). "As we progressed and learned more, we saw that a lot of the inquiries coming in were for people." Shelest also acknowledged that Onerep pays to run ads on "on a handful of data broker sites in very specific circumstances." "Our ad is served once someone has manually completed an opt-out form on their own," Shelest wrote. "The goal is to let them know that if they were exposed on that site, there may be others, and bring awareness to there being a more automated opt-out option, such as Onerep."

"Vernor Vinge, who three times won the Hugo for best novel, has died," writes Slashdot reader Felix Baum. Ars Technica reports: On Wednesday, author David Brin announced that Vernor Vinge, sci-fi author, former professor, and father of the technological singularity concept, died from Parkinson's disease at age 79 on March 20, 2024, in La Jolla, California. The announcement came in a Facebook tribute where Brin wrote about Vinge's deep love for science and writing. "A titan in the literary genre that explores a limitless range of potential destinies, Vernor enthralled millions with tales of plausible tomorrows, made all the more vivid by his polymath masteries of language, drama, characters, and the implications of science," wrote Brin in his post.

As a sci-fi author, Vinge won Hugo Awards for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep (1993), A Deepness in the Sky (2000), and Rainbows End (2007). He also won Hugos for novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High (2002) and The Cookie Monster (2004). As Mike Glyer's File 770 blog notes, Vinge's novella True Names (1981) is frequency cited as the first presentation of an in-depth look at the concept of "cyberspace." Vinge first coined the term "singularity" as related to technology in 1983, borrowed from the concept of a singularity in spacetime in physics.

When discussing the creation of intelligences far greater than our own in an 1983 op-ed in OMNI magazine, Vinge wrote, "When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding." In 1993, he expanded on the idea in an essay titled The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era.

schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: Sound waves fossilized in the maps of galaxies across the Universe could be interpreted as signs of a Big Bang that took place 13 billion years earlier than current models suggest. Last year, theoretical physicist Rajendra Gupta from the University of Ottawa in Canada published a rather extraordinary proposal that the Universe's currently accepted age is a trick of the light, one that masks its truly ancient state while also ridding us of the need to explain hidden forces. Gupta's latest analysis suggests oscillations from the earliest moments in time preserved in large-scale cosmic structures support his claims. "The study's findings confirm that our previous work about the age of the Universe being 26.7 billion years has allowed us to discover that the Universe does not require dark matter to exist," says Gupta. "In standard cosmology, the accelerated expansion of the Universe is said to be caused by dark energy but is in fact due to the weakening forces of nature as it expands, not due to dark energy." [...]

Current cosmological models make the reasonable assumption that certain forces governing the interactions of particles have remained constant throughout time. Gupta challenges a specific example of this 'coupling constant', asking how it might affect the spread of space over exhaustively long periods of time. It's hard enough for any novel hypothesis to survive the intense scrutiny of the scientific community. But Gupta's suggestion isn't even entirely new -- it's loosely based on an idea that was shown the door nearly a century ago. In the late 1920s, Swiss physicist Fritz Zwicky wondered if the reddened light of far distant objects was a result of lost energy, like a marathon runner exhausted by a long journey across the eons of space. His 'tired light' hypothesis was in competition with the now-accepted theory that light's red-shifted frequency is due to the cumulative expansion of space tugging at light waves like a stretched spring.

The consequences of Gupta's version of the tired light hypothesis -- what is referred to as covarying coupling constants plus tired light, or CCC+TL -- would affect the Universe expansion, doing away with mysterious pushing forces of dark energy and blaming changing interactions between known particles for the increased stretching of space. To replace existing models with CCC+TL, Gupta would need to convince cosmologists his model does a better job of explaining what we see at large. His latest paper attempts to do that by using CCC+TL to explain fluctuations in the spread of visible matter across space caused by sound waves in a newborn Universe, and the glow of ancient dawn known as the cosmic microwave background. While his analysis concludes his hybrid tired light theory can play nicely with certain features of the Universe's residual echoes of light and sound, it does so only if we also ditch the idea that dark matter is also a thing. The research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The European Union has agreed to launch four Galileo navigation satellites on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket at a 30 percent premium over the standard launch price. Ars Technica reports: According to Politico, the security agreement permits staff working for the EU and European Space Agency to have access to the launch pad at all times and, should there be a mishap with the mission, the first opportunity to retrieve debris. With the agreement, final preparations can begin for two launches of two satellites each, on the Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. These Galileo missions will occur later this year. The satellites, which each weigh about 700 kg, will be launched into an orbit about 22,000 km above the planet.

The heightened security measures are due to the proprietary technology incorporated into the satellites, which cost hundreds of millions of euros to build; they perform a similar function to US-manufactured Global Positioning System satellites. The Florida launches will be the first time Galileo satellites, which are used for civilian and military purposes, have been exported outside of European territory. Due to the extra overhead related to the national security mission, the European Union agreed to pay 180 million euros for the two launches, or about $196 million. This represents about a 30 percent premium over the standard launch price of $67 million for a Falcon 9 launch. Over the past two years, the European Space Agency (ESA) had to rely on SpaceX for several launches, including significant projects like the Euclid space telescope and other ESA satellites, due to the cessation of collaborations with Roscosmos after the invasion of Ukraine and delays in the Ariane 6 rocket's development. With the Ariane 5 retired and no immediate replacement, Europe's access to space was compromised.

That said, the Ariane 6 is working towards a launch window in the coming months, promising a return to self-reliance for ESA with a packed schedule of missions ahead.

The Associated Press reports on the passing of astronaut Thomas P. Stafford, the commander of a dress rehearsal flight for the 1969 moon landing and the first U.S.-Soviet space linkup. He was 93. From the report: Stafford, a retired Air Force three-star general, took part in four space missions. Before Apollo 10, he flew on two Gemini flights, including the first rendezvous of two U.S. capsules in orbit. He died in a hospital near his Space Coast Florida home, said Max Ary, director of the Stafford Air & Space Museum in Weatherford, Oklahoma. Stafford was one of 24 NASA astronauts who flew to the moon, but he did not land on it. Only seven of them are still alive. After he put away his flight suit, Stafford was the go-to guy for NASA when it sought independent advice on everything from human Mars missions to safety issues to returning to flight after the 2003 space shuttle Columbia accident. He chaired an oversight group that looked into how to fix the then-flawed Hubble Space Telescope, earning a NASA public service award.

"Tom was involved in so many things that most people were not aware of, such as being known as the 'Father of Stealth,'" Ary said in an email. Stafford was in charge of the famous 'Area 51' desert base that was the site of many UFO theories, but the home of testing of Air Force stealth technologies. The Apollo 10 mission in May 1969 set the stage for Apollo 11's historic mission two months later. Stafford and Gene Cernan took the lunar lander nicknamed Snoopy within 9 miles (14 kilometers) of the moon's surface. Astronaut John Young stayed behind in the main spaceship dubbed Charlie Brown. "The most impressive sight, I think, that really changed your view of things is when you first see Earth," Stafford recalled in a 1997 oral history, talking about the view from lunar orbit. Then came the moon's far side: "The Earth disappears. There's this big black void." Apollo 10's return to Earth set the world's record for fastest speed by a crewed vehicle at 24,791 mph (39,897 kph).

After the moon landings ended, NASA and the Soviet Union decided on a joint docking mission and Stafford, a one-star general at the time, was chosen to command the American side. It meant intensive language training, being followed by the KGB while in the Soviet Union, and lifelong friendships with cosmonauts. The two teams of space travelers even went to Disney World and rode Space Mountain together before going into orbit and joining ships. "We have capture," Stafford radioed in Russian as the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft hooked up. His Russian counterpart, Alexei Leonov, responded in English: "Well done, Tom, it was a good show. I vote for you." [...] The 1975 mission included two days during which the five men worked together on experiments. After, the two teams toured the world together, meeting President Gerald Ford and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. "It helped prove to the rest of the world that two completely opposite political systems could work together," Stafford recalled at a 30th anniversary gathering in 2005. Later, Stafford was a central part of discussions in the 1990s that brought Russia into the partnership building and operating the International Space Station.

Databricks CTO Matei Zaharia "said that Databricks had to keep track of scheduling a million things," remembers adjunct MIT professor Michael Stonebraker. " He said that this can't be done with traditional operating system scheduling, and so this was done out of a Postgres database. And then he started to whine that Postgres was too slow, and I told him we can do better than that...."

This resulted in DBOS — short for "database operating system" — which they teamed up to build with teams Stanford and MIT, according to The Next Platform: They founded a company to commercialize the idea in April 2023 and secured $8.5 million initial seed funding to start building the real DBOS. Engine Ventures and Construct Capital led the funding, along with Sinewave and GutBrain Ventures...

"The state that the operating system has to keep track of — memory, files, messages, and so on — is approximately linear to the resources you have got," says Stonebraker. "So without me saying another word, keeping track of operating system state is a database problem not addressed by current operating system schedulers. Moreover, OLTP [Online Transaction Processing] database performance has gone up dramatically, and that is why we thought instead of running the database system in user space on top of the operating system, why don't we invert our thinking 180 degrees and run the operating system on top of the database, with all of the operating services are coded in SQL...?"

For now, DBOS can give the same kind of performance as that full blown Linux operating system, and thanks to the distributed database underpinnings of its kernel, it can do things that a Linux kernel just cannot do... One is provide reliable execution, which means that if a program running atop DBOS is ever interrupted, it starts where it left off and does not have to redo its work from some arbitrary earlier point and does not crash and have to start from the beginning. And because every little bit of the state of the operating system — and therefore the applications that run atop it — is preserved, you can go backwards in time in the system and restart the operating system if it experiences some sort of anomaly, such as a bad piece of application software running or a hack attack. You can use this "time travel" feature, as Stonebraker calls it, to reproduce what are called heisenbugs — ones that are very hard to reproduce precisely because there is no shared state in the distributed Linux and Kubernetes environment and that are increasingly prevalent in a world of microservices.

The other benefit of the DBOS is that it presents a smaller attack surface for hackers, which boosts security, and that you analyze the metrics of the operating system in place since they are already in a NoSQL database that can be queried rather than aggregating a bunch of log files from up and down the software stack to try to figure out what is going on...

There is also a custom tier for DBOS, which we presume costs money, that can use other databases and datastores for user application data, stores more than three days of log data, can have multiple users per account, that adds email and Slack support with DBOS techies, and that is available on other clouds as well as AWS.
The operating system kernel/scheduler "is itself largely a database," with services written in TypeScript, according to the article. The first iteration used the FoundationDB distributed key-value store for its scheduling core (open sourced by Apple in 2018), according to the article — "a blazingly fast NoSQL database... Stonebraker says there is no reason to believe that DBOS can't scale across 1 million cores or more and support Java, Python, and other application languages as they are needed by customers..."

And the article speculates they could take things even further. "There is no reason why DBOS cannot complete the circle and not only have a database as an operating system kernel, but also have a relational database as the file system for applications."

The Street interviewed Chad Anderson, founder/managing partner of the "space economy" investment firm Space Capital, who calls SpaceX's progress "unprecedented," and believes their next launch could carry "operational" payloads like Starlink satellites. Anderson added that Starship reaching orbital velocity and reentering the atmosphere at those speeds (roughly 16,000 miles per hour) was "a really big deal," though it's specifically important for the reusability of the vehicle, which would further cheapen the cost of launch.

"The fact that they did all those things and they can now move into operations as an investor is hugely important and significant," Anderson said. "Having an operational Starship vehicle is really important because, at the moment, they just can't launch Starlink satellites fast enough. Starship is going to be able to launch 10 times more than Falcon 9 can, and that's really important...."

The ship is so big that, according to Anderson, Starship could conceivably serve as a space station, or a hotel, or a manufacturing facility. There is also the potential of Starship actually competing with commercial airlines, flying, for example, from New York to Shanghai in 45 minutes.
Clayton Swope, senior fellow at CSIS, also believes Starship could be used for "last-mile delivery... where you could move something in less than an hour, anywhere from a point on Earth to another point on Earth, and you're just kind of using space as that transit point."

There's also defense applications. Defense One notes the U.S. Defense Department uses SpaceX to launch most of its satellites. "With a payload capacity of 100 to 150 tons, Starship could carry a bunch of satellites simultaneously and increase the Space Force's launch rate as it builds out a network of hundreds of satellites in low-Earth orbit." Once Starship is operational, it will be able to put things into higher orbits, which is key for the Pentagon's push to operate in the cislunar environment, the area between the geosynchronous orbit and the moon. "The Chinese have already begun cislunar operations and have put vehicles on the far side of the moon, which is something the U.S. doesn't really have the ability to do right now," said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

However, the advantage the U.S. will get with Starship "won't last forever," and it will take years to build satellites specifically designed to take advantage of the rocket's payload capacity, said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. "At this rate, they will have Starship operational this year. We need payloads to go on that, if we're actually going to take advantage of it during this window of opportunity when it's a capability only we have. If you want those payloads available next year, you needed to start building them five years ago," Harrison said.

Starship could be used to put very large objects into space, such as fuel barges or energy stations, at a reasonable cost. "You could use this to put up an orbital bus that you can then put on and remove payloads from, so you can have a satellite on orbit that's basically a large docking station," Clark said... "[I]t could be a way to do that kind of thing where you establish essentially an unmanned, little space station that can carry various payloads."

"Engineers have sent a 'poke' to the Voyager 1 probe," reports CNN, "and received a potentially encouraging response..."

"A new signal recently received from the spacecraft suggests that the NASA mission team may be making progress in its quest to understand what Voyager 1 is experiencing..." [T]hey hope to fix a communication issue with the aging spacecraft that has persisted for five months. Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, are venturing through uncharted cosmic territory along the outer reaches of the solar system. While Voyager 1 has continued to relay a steady radio signal to its mission control team on Earth, that signal has not carried any usable data since November, which has pointed to an issue with one of the spacecraft's three onboard computers...

On March 3, the team noticed that activity from one part of the flight data system stood out from the rest of the garbled data. While the signal wasn't in the format the Voyager team is used to when the flight data system is functioning as expected, an engineer with NASA's Deep Space Network was able to decode it... The decoded signal included a readout of the entire flight data system's memory, according to an update NASA shared.

"The (flight data system) memory includes its code, or instructions for what to do, as well as variables, or values used in the code that can change based on commands or the spacecraft's status," according to a NASA blog post. "It also contains science or engineering data for downlink. The team will compare this readout to the one that came down before the issue arose and look for discrepancies in the code and the variables to potentially find the source of the ongoing issue."
"The source of the issue appears to be with one of three onboard computers, the flight data subsystem (FDS), which is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it's sent to Earth," according to NASA's statement.

CNN reminds readers that Voyager 1 "is currently the farthest spacecraft from Earth at about 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away." Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are now in interstellar space.

Thanks to Slashdot reader Thelasko for sharing the news.

The Washington Post reports: Nearly a decade ago, Congress passed a law that allows private American space companies the rights to resources they mine on celestial bodies, including the moon.

Now, there's a private venture that says it intends to do just that.

Founded by a pair of former executives from Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos, and an Apollo astronaut, the company, Interlune, announced itself publicly Wednesday by saying it has raised $18 million and is developing the technology to harvest and bring materials back from the moon... Specifically, Interlune is focused on Helium-3, a stable isotope that is scarce on Earth but plentiful on the moon and could be used as fuel in nuclear fusion reactors as well as helping power the quantum computing industry.

The company, based in Seattle, has been working for about four years on the technology, which comes as the commercial sector is working with NASA on its goal of building an enduring presence on and around the moon... Rob Meyerson, the former president of Blue Origin, co-founded Interlune with Gary Lai, another former executive at Blue, and Harrison Schmitt, a geologist who flew to the moon during Apollo 17... In an interview, Meyerson said that the company intends to be the first to collect, return and then sell lunar resources and test the 2015 law. There is a large demand for Helium-3 in the quantum computing industry, which requires some of its systems to operate in extremely cold temperatures, and Interlune has already lined up a "customer that wants to buy lunar resources in large quantities," he said.

"We intend to be the first to go commercialize and deliver and support those customers," he said. NASA might want to be a customer as well. In 2020, it said it was looking for companies to collect rocks and dirt from the lunar surface and sell them to NASA as part of a technology development program that would eventually help astronauts "live off the land...." The company's funding round was led by the venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, whose founder and general partner, Alexis Ohanian, said that the space sector has become far more appealing to investors. "The space economy is something we can actually talk about with a straight face now, and I think some of the smartest people on the planet are making those efforts," he said...

He said he was aware that it might take years, or longer for a moon mining business to make money. But he said that, "we're comfortable waiting for a decade plus to see those returns."
NASA is planning more missions like the Intuitive Machines landing earlier this year, according to the article, "which it says will not only help pave the way for humans to return to the moon but for private industry to begin commercial operations there as well." Interlune plans "a prospecting machine" as soon as 2026, followed by an "end-to-end demonstration" in 2028 that harvests and returns a small quanity of Helium-3, and then full-scale operations by 2030.

"China has also said that it is interested in extracting other resources, including Helium-3, which it said was present in a sample it returned from the moon in 2020."

With funding from NASA, researchers from Villanova University have obtained a never-before-seen view of the central engine at the heart of our galaxy. Space.com reports: The new map of this central region of the Milky Way, which took four years to assemble, reveals the relationship between magnetic fields at the heart of our galaxy and the cold dust structures that dwell there. This dust forms the building blocks of stars, planets, and, ultimately, life as we know it. The central engine of the Milky Way drives this process. That means a clearer picture of dust and magnetic interactions builds a better understanding of the Milky Way and our place within it. The team's findings also have implications beyond our galaxy, offering glimpses of how dust and magnetic fields interact in the central engines of other galaxies.

"The center of the Milky Way and most of the space between stars is filled with a lot of dust, and this is important for our galaxy's life cycle," David Chuss, research team leader and a physics professor at Villanova University, told Space.com. "What we looked at was light emitted from these cool dust grains produced by heavy elements forged in stars and dispersed when those stars die and explode." [...] Chuss and colleagues received funding from NASA to investigate this dusty central zone using the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), which was a telescope that circled the globe at an altitude of 45,000 feet (13,716 meters) aboard a Boeing 747 plane. The project's Far-Infrared Polarimetric Large Area CMZ Exploration (FIREPLACE) created an infrared map that spans around 500 light-years across the center of the Milky Way over nine flights. Using measurements of the polarization of the radiation emitted from dust that is aligned with magnetic fields, the intricate structure of those magnetic fields themselves was inferred by the team. This was then overlaid onto a three-color map that shows warm dust with a pink hue and cool dust clouds in blue. The image also shows radio-wave-emitting filaments in yellow.

"This is a journey, not a destination, but what we've found is this is a very complicated thing. The directions of the magnetic field vary all across the clouds at the center of the Milky Way," Chuss explained. "This is the first step in trying to figure out how the field that we see in the radiowaves across these large organized filaments may relate to the rest of the dynamics of the center of the Milky Way." Chuss explained that this complicated picture of magnetic fields was something that he and the FIREPLACE team had expected to see with the new SOFIA map; the observations agreed with smaller-scale infrared and radio wave observations previously made of the heart of the Milky Way. Where this new map, however, really comes into its own is the sheer scale. It manages to reveal some never-before mapped regions. The fine detail woven into it is stunning as well. A preprint version of the SOFIA data is available on arXiv.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a legal complaint against two companies based in Cyprus on Wednesday that it claims are behind a wave of malicious pop-ups that trick people into downloading a fake piece of antivirus software that generated tens of millions of dollars for its operators, according to court records. From a report: The scam also involved misrepresenting results on malware repository VirusTotal as infections on the user's own computer. (Update: after the publication of this piece the FTC announced that Restoro and Reimage will pay $26 million to settle the FTC's charges.)

The move is the latest from the FTC in a series of actions in the privacy and cybersecurity space. In January, the FTC banned a data broker called X-Mode from selling sensitive location data after I revealed it was harvesting location data from Muslim prayer and dating apps. In this case, the FTC says it went "undercover" against the two related companies, called Restoro and Reimage, to buy the deceiving software and have phone calls with company representatives. "Since at least January 2018, Defendants have operated a tech support scheme that has bilked tens of millions of dollars from consumers, particularly older consumers," the FTC's complaint reads. The complaint is seeking a permanent injunction against the two companies as well as monetary relief.

Scientists have discovered a giant volcano on Mars, as well as a possible sheet of buried glacier ice near the planet's equator. Phys.Org reports: Imaged repeatedly by orbiting spacecraft around Mars since Mariner 9 in 1971 -- but deeply eroded beyond easy recognition, the giant volcano had been hiding in plain sight for decades in one of Mars' most iconic regions, at the boundary between the heavily fractured maze-like Noctis Labyrinthus (Labyrinth of the Night) and the monumental canyons of Valles Marineris (Valleys of Mariner). Provisionally designated "Noctis volcano" pending an official name, the structure is centered at 7 degrees 35' S, 93 degrees 55' W. It reaches +9022 meters (29,600 feet) in elevation and spans 450 kilometers (280 miles) in width. The volcano's gigantic size and complex modification history indicate that it has been active for a very long time. In its southeastern part lies a thin, recent volcanic deposit beneath which glacier ice is likely still present. This combined giant volcano and possible glacier ice discovery is significant, as it points to an exciting new location to study Mars' geologic evolution through time, search for life, and explore with robots and humans in the future. The announcement was made at the 55th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. You can read more about it here (PDF).

Sheraz Sadiq reports via Oregon Public Broadcasting: An area that's nearly half the size of New Jersey in southern Oregon was recently named the world's largest dark sky sanctuary by DarkSky International. The nonprofit works to combat light pollution through advocacy and conservation, including a program that has certified more than 200 places around the world to protect the night sky. The Oregon Outback International Dark Sky Sanctuary spans 2.5 million acres of mostly public land in eastern Lake County, and could eventually grow to more than four times that size to include parts of Harney and Malheur Counties. To win certification as a Dark Sky Sanctuary, the applicants had to work with numerous stakeholders to draw the site's boundaries, monitor night sky quality, inventory outdoor lights and replace more than 60 lights on public and private lands. With the inclusion of parts of Harney and Malheur Counties, the sanctuary would surpass 11 million acres, notes KLCC. More than half of the area is under the control of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

sixoh1 writes: On the third attempt, SpaceX's Super Heavy booster lofted the Starship vehicle to space on a sub-orbital parabolic trajectory. The test was successful for nearly all of the objectives, including payload delivery functions on Starship that will be used for Starlink deployment and in-space fuel transfers. Unfortunately the booster did not soft-land, and the Starship vehicle was destroyed during re-entry, likely due to unspecified issues with re-starting the Raptor engine and then maintaining attitude control during re-entry. You can watch Starship's third flight test here.

Amazon is telling workers to close their eyes and dream of being somewhere else while they're standing in a warehouse. From a report: A worker in one of Amazon's fulfillment centers, who we've granted anonymity, sent 404 Media a photo they took of a screen imploring them to try "savoring" the idea of something that makes them happy -- as in, not being at work, surrounded by robots and packages. "Savoring," the screen says, in a black font over a green block of color. "Close your eyes and think about something that makes you happy." Under that text -- which I can't emphasize enough: it looks like something a 6th grader would make in Powerpoint -- there's a bunch of white space, and a stock illustration of a faceless person in an Amazon vest. He's being urged on by an anthropomorphic stack of Amazon packages with wheels and arms. There's also a countdown timer that says "repeat until timer ends." In the image we saw, it said 10 seconds.