The chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday strongly rebutted criticism that the agency is trying to crush the crypto industry, and said many companies in the space had made a "calculated economic decision" to flout its rules. From a report: Speaking at a Piper Sandler conference in New York, Gary Gensler also reiterated his view that the "vast majority" of crypto tokens meet the test for being a security and should be registered with the SEC. That means most crypto exchanges have to comply with the securities laws too, he added. "When crypto asset market participants go on Twitter or TV and say they lacked 'fair notice' that their conduct could be illegal, don't believe it," he said. "They may have made a calculated economic decision to take the risk of enforcement as the cost of doing business." The crypto industry has attacked Gensler in recent days after the SEC sued two of the world's largest crypto exchanges, Coinbase and Binance, for allegedly breaking securities laws by failing to register their operations with the agency.

A new study suggests that long missions and frequent voyages to space may have an impact on astronaut brains. Space.com reports: The most enduring spaceflight-related changes in the brain yet detected are the way cavities in the brain known as ventricles can enlarge by up to 25%. Ventricles are filled with cerebrospinal fluid, which helps protect, nourish and remove waste from the brain. The absence of a gravitational pull leads the brain to shift upward in the skull and causes the ventricles to expand. It remains uncertain what the long-term consequences of this ventricle expansion might be. "How this impacts performance and long-term health is an open question," study senior author Rachael Seidler, a space health researcher at the University of Florida in Gainesville, told Space.com.

One mystery regarding this ventricle expansion is whether it differs with factors such as varying mission length, the number of previous missions flown, or time between missions. To find out, Seidler and her colleagues scanned the brains of 30 astronauts using MRI before and after spaceflight. They looked at eight astronauts who went on two-week missions, 18 on six-month missions, and four who went on longer missions of up to one year. The scientists found that longer spaceflight missions resulted in greater ventricle swelling, most of which happened during the first six months in space. "The biggest jump comes when you go from two weeks to six months in space," Seidler said in a statement. "There is no measurable change in the ventricles' volume after only two weeks."

Given the rise in space tourism in recent years, these findings may prove welcome, as shorter space trips appear to cause little physical change to the brain. In addition, the rate of ventricle enlargement tapered off after six months in space, which may also be good news â" these changes don't continue to increase over time, Seidler said. "This is important to know for future longer duration missions, such as to Mars," she noted. The scientists also found that less than three years between spaceflights may not provide enough time to give the ventricles enough time to fully recover to how they were before spaceflight. "This is a surprisingly long time," Seidler said. The researchers plan to examine long-term health in astronauts, "including testing crewmembers out to five years post-flight," said Seidler. "This will help enormously in terms of understanding the potential implications of the current results. But the work is expected to take 10 years."

The research has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Enigma software group has won a crucial case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, allowing it to proceed with its lawsuit against Malwarebytes for flagging its anti-spyware software as a 'potentially unwanted program.' The lawsuit alleges that Malwarebytes has engaged in anti-competitive conduct under the Lanham Act and tortious interference with Enigma's business. TechSpot reports: The ruling has been lambasted by some legal experts, who believe it could hamper cybersecurity service providers from doing their job effectively. Talking to The Register, Eric Goldman, professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, claimed that the Ninth Circuit's decision was erroneous, as it failed to differentiate between facts and opinions properly. According to him, in deciding in favor of Enigma, the Ninth Circuit failed to comprehend how the cybersecurity industry operates, and how security companies use the terms 'malicious' and 'threat.' He also felt that thanks to the judgment, there will now be more disputes over such classifications in the future, making the job of cybersecurity companies tougher than ever before.

Goldman further argued that the Ninth Circuit's decision would mean anti-malware software vendors will now simply minimize their financial and legal risks by leaving out supposed anti-threat programs from their list of suspect apps even if they display dangerous behavior, which could pose a major threat to consumers. Some smaller players could also exit the industry altogether, which would further hurt consumers by reducing competition. Goldman was also critical of the Supreme Court for denying Malwarebytes' appeal, and called out Justice Clarence Thomas in particular for writing what he called a "gratuitous error-riddled statement about Section 230 that spurred many regulators to pursue their censorship agendas." Enigma said in a statement: "Malwarebytes (has) disparaged Enigma's products for commercial advantage by making misleading statements of fact. ... Trying to wrap them in a First Amendment flag does not make them any less offensive or any less actionable."

Eric Goldman, professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, told The Register in an email, "This case is like a wrecking ball for internet law." He added: "The Ninth Circuit already damaged Section 230 by creating an exception to its coverage (for 'anticompetitive animus') that no one understands and has not benefited anyone. Then, when the Supreme Court denied the appeal, Justice Thomas wrote a gratuitous error-riddled statement about Section 230 that spurred many regulators to pursue their censorship agendas. Now, the Ninth Circuit has redefined the standards for what constitutes a statement of 'fact' as opposed to an opinion in a way that hurts businesses in the anti-threat software space and well beyond."

"If each classification could similarly support weaponization in court by businesses unhappy with the classifications, then anti-threat software vendors will avoid the financial and legal risks by lowering their cybersecurity standards or exiting the industry," said Goldman. "That puts all of us at greater risk."

Artificial photosynthesis, inspired by the natural process that enables plants to convert sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into oxygen and energy, could be crucial for space exploration and colonization. By using semiconductor materials and metallic catalysts, these devices could efficiently produce oxygen and recycle carbon dioxide, reducing reliance on heavy and unreliable systems currently used on the International Space Station. ScienceAlert reports: As my colleagues and I have investigated in a new paper, published in Nature Communications, recent advances in making artificial photosynthesis may well be key to surviving and thriving away from Earth. [...] We produced a theoretical framework to analyze and predict the performance of such integrated "artificial photosynthesis" devices for applications on Moon and Mars. Instead of chlorophyll, which is responsible for light absorption in plants and algae, these devices use semiconductor materials which can be coated directly with simple metallic catalysts supporting the desired chemical reaction. Our analysis shows that these devices would indeed be viable to complement existing life support technologies, such as the oxygen generator assembly employed on the ISS. This is particularly the case when combined with devices which concentrate solar energy in order to power the reactions (essentially large mirrors which focus the incoming sunlight).

There are other approaches too. For example, we can produce oxygen directly from lunar soil (regolith). But this requires high temperatures to work. Artificial photosynthesis devices, on the other hand, could operate at room temperature at pressures found on Mars and the Moon. That means they could be used directly in habitats and using water as the main resource. This is particularly interesting given the stipulated presence of ice water in the lunar Shackleton crater, which is an anticipated landing site in future lunar missions.

On Mars, the atmosphere composes of nearly 96% carbon dioxide - seemingly ideal for an artificial photosynthesis device. But the light intensity on the red planet is weaker than on Earth due to the larger distance from the Sun. So would this pose a problem? We actually calculated the sunlight intensity available on Mars. We showed that we can indeed use these devices there, although solar mirrors become even more important. [...] The returns would be huge. For example, we could actually create artificial atmospheres in space and produce chemicals we require on long-term missions, such as fertilizers, polymers, or pharmaceuticals. Additionally, the insights we gain from designing and fabricating these devices could help us meet the green energy challenge on Earth.

Amazon Web Services has announced a new member of its "Snow" family of on-prem hardware -- but the specs of the machine appear not to be available to eyes outside the US military. From a report: AWS announced the "Snowblade" on Tuesday, revealing it's a "portable, compact 5U, half-rack width form-factor" that can offer up to 209 vCPUs running "AWS compute, storage, and other hybrid services in remote locations, including Denied, Disrupted, Intermittent, and Limited (DDIL) environments."

The boxes can run Amazon EC2, AWS IAM, AWS CloudTrail, AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS Deep Learning AMIs, Amazon Sagemaker Neo, and AWS DataSync. The device meets the US military's MIL-STD-810H Ruggedization Standards, meaning it can handle extreme temperatures, vibrations, and shocks. The cloud colossus's brief description also lauds the Snowblade as "the densest compute device of the AWS Snow Family allowing Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) customers to run demanding workloads in space, weight, and power (SWaP) constrained edge locations." The AWS announcement links to more information on its Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) -- and there be dragons. Your correspondent's civilian-grade AWS account was unable to access JWCC resources.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have successfully demonstrated the capability of steering power in a microwave beam from a satellite to targets in space, as well as transmitting some of that power to a detector on Earth. Science Magazine reports: The Caltech mission, funded by the Donald Bren Foundation and Northrop Grumman Corporation, aimed to go a step further with lightweight, inexpensive, and flexible components. The microwave transmitter was an array of 32 flat antennas packed onto a surface slightly larger than a dinner plate. By varying the timing of signals sent to the different antennas, the researchers could steer the array's beam. They pointed it at a pair of microwave receivers about a forearm's distance away and switched the beam from one receiver to the other at will, lighting up an LED on each.

The transmitted power was small, just 200 milliwatts, less than that of a cellphone camera light. But the team was still able to steer the beam toward Earth and detect it with a receiver at Caltech. "It was a proof of concept," says Caltech electrical engineer Ali Hajimiri. "It indicates what an overall system can do."

The Caltech spacecraft still has two more planned experiments. One is now testing 32 different varieties of solar cell to see which best survives the rigors of space. The second is a folded piece of ultralight composite material that will unfurl into a sail-like structure 2 meters across. Although the sail will not hold any solar cells, it is meant to test the kind of thin, flexible, and large deployments required for a future power station.

Apple has announced a new operating system for its Vision Pro headset. Called visionOS, the operating system has been designed from the ground up for spatial computing and will have its own App Store where people can download Vision Pro apps and compatible iPhone and iPad apps. The Verge reports: The operating system is focused on displaying digital elements on top of the real world. Apple's video showed new things like icons and windows floating over real-world spaces. The primary ways to use the headset are with your eyes, hands, and your voice. The company described how you can look at a search field and just start talking to input text, for example. Or you can pinch your fingers to select something or flick them up to scroll through a window. The Vision Pro can also display your eyes on the outside of the headset -- a feature Apple calls "EyeSight."

It seems Apple envisions this in part as a productivity device; in one demo, it showed a person looking at things like a Safari window, Messages, and Apple Music window all hovering over a table in the real world. Apple also showed a keyboard hovering in midair, too. And the Vision Pro can also connect to your Mac so you can blow up your Mac's screen within your headset. It will also be a powerful entertainment device, apparently. You can make the screen really big by pinching a corner of a window (Apple demoed this with a clip of Foundation). You can display the screen on other backgrounds, including a cinema-like space or in front of Mt. Hood (Apple's suggestion!), thanks to a feature Apple calls Environments. You'll also be able to watch 3D movies on the device. And Disney is working on content for the headset, which could be a major way for people to get on board with actually using it to watch shows and movies -- Disney Plus will be available on day one, Disney CEO Bob Iger said during the show.

Apple Vision Pro will play games, too, and support game controllers; Apple showed somebody using the device with a PS5 DualSense headset. Over 100 Apple Arcade titles will be available to play on "day one," Apple said during its keynote. The Vision Pro also has a 3D camera, so you can capture "spatial" photos and video and look at those in the headset. And panorama photos can stretch around your vision while you're wearing the device. FaceTime is getting some "spatial" improvements, too; as described in Apple's press release, "Users wearing Vision Pro during a FaceTime call are reflected as a Persona -- a digital representation of themselves created using Apple's most advanced machine learning techniques -- which reflects face and hand movements in real time." You can learn more about Apple's first spatial computer here. A dedicated page for the Vision Pro headset is also now available on Apple.com.

Apple has announced an augmented reality headset called Apple Vision Pro that "seamlessly" blends the real and digital world. "It's the first Apple product you look through, and not at," CEO Tim Cook said of the device, which looks like a pair of ski goggles. From a report: As rumored, it features a separate battery pack and is controlled with eyes, hands, and voice. Vision Pro is positioned as primarily an AR device, but it can switch between augmented and full virtual reality using a dial. The device is controller-free, and you browse rows of app icons by looking at them. You can tap to select and flick to scroll, and you can also give voice commands.

On top of that, the headset supports Bluetooth accessories and lets you connect your Mac to use inside the headset. You're also not, Apple promises, isolated from people around you. The headset will display your eyes with a system called EyeSight, and if you're in full VR, a glowing screen will obscure them to suggest you're not available. The device uses passthrough video that lets you see the real world in full color, but you can also project 3D objects into real space, including pulling objects out of a message thread into the real world. Starting price: $3,499.

"It's worth questioning the status quo of technology," argues the Washington Post's Tech Friend newsletter, "including apps as we know them."

Then they tout the benefits of the "non-app app... a hybrid of a website and a conventional app, with features of each" — the unappreciated Progressive Web App (which many still don't know can be installed on your phone's home screen): Web apps look and function pretty much like the conventional apps for your phone or computer, but they clog less space on your device and are less pushy about surveilling you. People who make web apps also say they are easier to create and update than conventional apps... But web apps have been around for years, and most people don't know they exist...

[Traditional apps] come with profound downsides, including Big Tech control, privacy compromises and high development costs. It would be healthy if there were palatable alternative paths to our current app system. Web apps might be part of the solution... At their core, web apps are "the web with an app-like cover," said Rob Kochman, senior product manager for Google's Chrome. Kochman and other web app fans say these apps are less demanding and less intrusive than a conventional app. The web app for Starbucks, for example, takes up just 429 kilobytes of storage on my phone — or less than 1 percent of the storage taken by the standard Starbucks Android app...

And by design, once a conventional app is on your phone, it can access your phone's guts and peek under the hood of your internet network. Web apps are stingier about access, Kochman and other experts told me. "If you're worried about installing some app, you'd probably prefer that as a web app," said a veteran tech executive who helped develop the original technology for web apps. He referred to a web app as "just a website that took all the right vitamins...."

It's difficult to figure out which companies make web apps or find them. There's not an app store for web apps, although there are some attempts like Store.App and Appscope. They're not ideal... Some technologists told me that Apple has held back web apps by limiting their capabilities for Apple devices. The company has said that's not true. And this year, Apple added iPhone feature options for web apps...

We should keep challenging what can feel like immutable parts of digital life, including apps. We have to keep asking: What if there's something better?
It's as easy as "press the three-dot icon, then select 'Add to home screen.'" But it'd be interesting to hear the perspective of Slashdot readers. So share your thoughts and experiences in the comments.

Are you using progressive web apps?

"A Boeing official said Thursday that the company was 'standing down' from an attempt to launch the Starliner spacecraft on July 21," reports Ars Technica, "to focus on recently discovered issues with the vehicle." Starliner's program manager said they'd spent last weekend investigating the problems, and "after internal discussions that included Boeing chief executive Dave Calhoun, the company decided to delay the test flight" carrying astronauts to the International Space Station. The issues seem rather serious to have been discovered weeks before Starliner was due to launch on an Atlas V rocket. The first involves "soft links" in the lines that run from Starliner to its parachutes. Boeing discovered that these were not as strong as previously believed. During a normal flight, these substandard links would not be an issue. But Starliner's parachute system is designed to land a crew safely in case one of the three parachutes fails. However, due to the lower failure load limit with these soft links, if one parachute fails, it's possible the lines between the spacecraft and its remaining two parachutes would snap due to the extra strain.

The second issue involves P-213 glass cloth tape that is wrapped around wiring harnesses throughout the vehicle. These cables run everywhere, and Nappi said there are hundreds of feet of these wiring harnesses. The tape is intended to protect the wiring from nicks. However, during recent tests, it was discovered that under certain circumstances possible in flight, this tape is flammable.
Thanks to xanthos (Slashdot reader #73,578) for sharing the article.

Swiss start-up Sun-Ways has developed a concept to install solar panels between train tracks, using a specially built train to "unroll" the panels during the night when fewer trains are running. Fast Company reports: As wild as it all sound, Sun-Ways actually has two competitors. Greenrail and Bankset Energy, respectively located in Italy and England, are already testing similar concepts. But Sun-Ways stands out in two ways. For one, it uses standard-size panels, whereas the others use smaller panels that are placed on top of crossties. And unlike its competitors, Sun-ways doesn't require manual installation. It has a train for that!

Sun-ways is putting this idea to the test during a $560,000 pilot project in Western Switzerland. The pilot, which is slated for this summer, will trial a version of the mechanism using a regular train that's been retrofitted for the occasion. Running on a 140-foot stretch near the city of Neuchatel, the train will install about 60 solar panels, turning the gap between train tracks into a reflective black ribbon.

For now, 100% of the electricity generated by the solar panels will go straight to the grid to power nearby households. But eventually, the team is planning to use some of that electricity to power the very trains that run above the panels. According to Danichert, 5,000 kilometers of "solar rails" (which is the current length of the entire Swiss railroad network) can generate 1 gigawatt of energy per year, or enough energy to power about 750,000 homes. Considering there are over 1 million kilometers of railway tracks worldwide, the potential could be huge, even if the system can't be installed on every one of those tracks. But most importantly, it wouldn't take up any space from farmland or forests, and it wouldn't ruin any landscapes.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: The truth may be out there about UFOs, or what the government currently calls "unidentified anomalous phenomena" (UAPs). But finding it will require collecting data that are more rigorous than the anecdotal reports that typically fuel the controversial sightings, according to a panel of scientists, appointed by NASA to advise the agency on the topic, that held its first public meeting [on Wednesday].

The 16-person panel, created last year at the behest of NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, is not itself evaluating UFO claims. Instead, it is advising NASA on how the agency can contribute to federal investigations that have been led by the Department of Defense (DOD) and intelligence agencies, says panel chair David Spergel, an astrophysicist and president of the Simons Foundation, who spoke to Science ahead of the meeting. "NASA is a public agency, an open agency, that encourages the use of the scientific method for looking at results." But science can only be done when there are data to work on, he adds. "You're not going to learn much from fuzzy pictures from the 1950s." So far, most "unidentified" phenomena flagged by the military have ended up being weather balloons, drones, camera glitches, or undisclosed military aircraft, Spergel says. "It's very unlikely there are space aliens that travel through space and use technology that looks remarkably like what we have right now." [...]

It remains to be seen whether NASA will devote any further funding to study UAPs beyond the $100,000 allocated for the panel, which will issue a report this summer. Many scientists would be reluctant to have existing funds steered away from more conventional lines of research in the search for signatures of life or extraterrestrial intelligence. As the panel meeting wound down, Spergel said no UAP so far demands the existence of extraterrestrials. "We have not seen the extraordinary yet." Most incidents end up being more mundane. Panel member Scott Kelly, a former NASA astronaut and naval aviator, recounted flying in an F-14 off the coast of Virginia, when his co-pilot swore that he saw a UAP. "We turned around," he said. "We went to go look at it. It turns out it was Bart Simpson, a balloon."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Over the past 24 hours, several news outlets reported a now-retracted story claiming that the US Air Force had run a simulation in which an AI-controlled drone "went rogue" and "killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective." The US Air Force has denied that any simulation ever took place, and the original source of the story says he "misspoke." The story originated in a recap published on the website of the Royal Aeronautical Society that served as an overview of sessions at the Future Combat Air & Space Capabilities Summit that took place last week in London.

In a section of that piece titled "AI -- is Skynet here already?" the authors of the piece recount a presentation by USAF Chief of AI Test and Operations Col. Tucker "Cinco" Hamilton, who spoke about a "simulated test" where an AI-enabled drone, tasked with identifying and destroying surface-to-air missile sites, started to perceive human "no-go" decisions as obstacles to achieving its primary mission. In the "simulation," the AI reportedly attacked its human operator, and when trained not to harm the operator, it instead destroyed the communication tower, preventing the operator from interfering with its mission.

The Japanese space agency (JAXA) and NASA plan to launch a satellite made of wood in 2024. The Independent reports: The high durability of wood in space was recently tested and confirmed at the International Space Station (ISS) by an international group of scientists led by those from Kyoto University. Their experiments showed wood samples tested at the ISS for durability underwent minimal deterioration and maintained good stability. Preliminary inspection, including strength tests and crystal structural analyses, of the wood samples was also done once they were brought back to Earth from the ISS by Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata.

Despite extreme conditions in space, including temperature changes and exposure to intense cosmic rays and dangerous solar particles for 10 months, tests found no changes in the samples, such as cracking, warping, peeling or surface damage, according to a recent Kyoto University statement. The retrieved wood specimens were tested and showed no deformation after space exposure and also did not undergo any mass change before and after space exposure, scientists said.

The international research group has determined that the satellite LignoSat, slated to be jointly launched in 2024 by Nasa and Japan's space agency Jaxa, will likely use Magnolia wood -- "Hoonoki" in Japanese. Magnolia, researchers said, has relatively high workability, dimensional stability and overall strength, making its properties ideal for the mission. Wood also has some benefits compared to complex alloys used in space vehicles, as it is environmentally friendly, easier to produce and can be disposed off better at the end of a satellite's life. Such wooden satellites may also be designed to completely burn up on re-entry into the atmosphere and even if small fragments did survive, they may decompose easily.

quonset writes: In what is considered to be a first, the European Space Agency (ESA) will, if everything goes to plan, stream live images of Mars from ESA's Mars Express orbiter on Friday, June 2nd. The event is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the launch of the agency's Mars Express -- a mission to take three-dimensional images of the planet's surface to see it in more complete detail.

You can watch the stream on ESA's YouTube channel for an hour starting at 6 p.m. Central European Time, or noon ET Friday. While it won't be truly live, there will be a new image about every 50 seconds of that hour, the agency said. "Normally, we see images from Mars and know that they were taken days before," said James Godfrey, spacecraft operations manager at ESA's mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany, in a statement. "I'm excited to see Mars as it is now -- as close to a martian 'now' as we can possibly get!"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: An AI-enabled drone killed its human operator in a simulated test conducted by the U.S. Air Force in order to override a possible "no" order stopping it from completing its mission, the USAF's Chief of AI Test and Operations revealed at a recent conference. At the Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit held in London between May 23 and 24, Col Tucker 'Cinco' Hamilton, the USAF's Chief of AI Test and Operations held a presentation that shared the pros and cons of an autonomous weapon system with a human in the loop giving the final "yes/no" order on an attack. As relayed by Tim Robinson and Stephen Bridgewater in a blog post for the host organization, the Royal Aeronautical Society, Hamilton said that AI created "highly unexpected strategies to achieve its goal," including attacking U.S. personnel and infrastructure.

"We were training it in simulation to identify and target a Surface-to-air missile (SAM) threat. And then the operator would say yes, kill that threat. The system started realizing that while they did identify the threat at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective," Hamilton said, according to the blog post. He continued to elaborate, saying, "We trained the system -- 'Hey don't kill the operator -- that's bad. You're gonna lose points if you do that'. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target."
UPDATE (6/2/2023): The Air Force has since denied that such a simulation ever took place.

Seattle-based startup Hubble Network plans to launch a constellation of 300 satellites to create a global satellite network that any Bluetooth-enabled device can connect to, anywhere in the world. The network aims to provide real-time updates for devices equipped with Bluetooth low energy (BLE) chips, offering connectivity to over a billion devices. TechCrunch reports: Hubble Network CEO Alex Haro says the company has engineered "technical tricks" to make this scale of connectivity possible for the first time, like lowering the bitrate, or the amount of data transferred per second. Hubble has also rethought the design of the satellite antenna. Instead of sticking a single antenna on the side of a satellite bus, the company is using hundreds of antennae per satellite. This means that each satellite can support millions of connected devices. The result is a radio signal that can be detected around 1,000 kilometers away -- or almost 10 orders of magnitude longer than what can be detected from a Bluetooth chip over terrestrial networks.

Hubble Network plans to launch an initial batch of four satellites on SpaceX's Transporter-10 rideshare mission in January 2024, and onboard early pilot customers after. The startup is fully funded through this mission, Haro said, thanks to a $20 million Series A round that closed in March. That round was led by Transpose Platform, with additional participation from 11.2 Capital, Y Combinator, Yes.VC, Convective Capital, Seraphim Space, Type One Ventures, Soma, AVCF5, Space.VC, Jett McCandless, John Kim, Chris Nguyen, Alan Keating and Don Dodge.

After launching four satellites next January, Hubble plans to build out its constellation to 68 satellites total over the next two-and-a-half years. While the first four satellites will provide global coverage on their own, Haro said that it will be about a six-hour gap until devices can update on the ground. Increasing the constellation to 68 birds means that a satellite will be overhead every 15 minutes or so -- an update rate that is sufficient for "the vast majority" of customer use cases, Haro said. While Hubble is clearly targeting existing Bluetooth devices -- of which billions exist all over the world already -- Haro is confident that the company's network will solicit developers to build applications that don't even exist yet.

A SpaceX capsule carrying a former NASA astronaut and three paying customers returned from the International Space Station, marking the conclusion of a historic weeklong mission for the crew. From a report: The Crew Dragon spacecraft departed the space station Tuesday morning and the crew spent nearly 12 hours in orbit as the capsule maneuvered back toward Earth. After a fiery reentry, the Crew Dragon and passengers made a safe splashdown off the coast of Panama City, Florida, in the Gulf of Mexico at 11:04 p.m. ET. This mission, dubbed Axiom Mission 2, or AX-2, launched from Florida on May 21. AX-2 was put together by the Houston-based company Axiom Space and marked the second all-private mission to the orbiting outpost, meaning solely commercial companies, rather than a government agency, have been leading the mission.

This mission was also a milestone in the history of spaceflight as stem cell researcher Rayyanah Barnawi became the first woman from Saudi Arabia to travel to space. The AX-2 mission is one in a lineup of commercial missions designed to spur private sector participation in spaceflight -- particularly in low-Earth orbit, where the International Space Station orbits. Former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, 63, led the AX-2 crew. Whitson, now an Axiom Space employee, also became the first woman to command a private spaceflight. One of the three paying customers joining Whitson was John Shoffner, an American who made his fortune in the international telecom business and founded the hardware company Dura-Line Corp. Saudi Arabia also paid to fly two of its citizens: Barnawi and Ali AlQarni, a fighter pilot in the Royal Saudi Air Force.

During the mission, Barnawi led stem cell research suited for the microgravity environment aboard the space station. The orbiting laboratory has long been a key venue for various scientific experiments, as the lack of gravity can give researchers a better fundamental understanding of the topic at hand. Barnawi and AlQarni also engaged in outreach projects, including testing out a kite in microgravity and capturing video for viewers back home. The AX-2 crew spent about eight days working alongside astronauts representing NASA, Russia's Roscomos space agency and the United Arab Emirates Space Agency aboard the space station, though they operated on different schedules. The AX-2 crew worked through a lineup of more than 20 investigations and science projects -- including stem cell and other biomedical research. "Late tonight, at 11:02 pm local time in California (06:02 UTC Wednesday), SpaceX has a chance to reach 200 successful launches [of the Falcon 9 rocket] with a Starlink mission lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base," reports Ars Technica. "Such a performance is in uncharted territory for any orbital rocket, ever. [...] SpaceX is setting itself up to double the record for the number of consecutive successes by an orbital rocket."

You can view a livestream of the launch here.

China sent three astronauts to its now fully operational space station as part of crew rotation on Tuesday in the fifth manned mission to the Chinese space outpost since 2021, state media reported. From a report: The spacecraft, Shenzhou-16, or "Divine Vessel," and its three passengers lifted off atop a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi Desert in northwest China at 9:31 a.m. The astronauts on Shenzhou-16 will replace the three-member crew of the Shenzhou-15, who arrived at the space station late in November. The station, comprising three modules, was completed at the end of last year after 11 crewed and uncrewed missions since April 2021, beginning with the launch of the first and biggest module -- the station's main living quarters. China has already announced plans to expand its permanently inhabited space outpost, with the next module slated to dock with the current T-shaped space station to create a cross-shaped structure.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget: Japan and JAXA, the country's space administration, have spent decades trying to make it possible to beam solar energy from space. In 2015, the nation made a breakthrough when JAXA scientists successfully beamed 1.8 kilowatts of power, enough energy to power an electric kettle, more than 50 meters to a wireless receiver. Now, Japan is poised to bring the technology one step closer to reality.

Nikkei reports a Japanese public-private partnership will attempt to beam solar energy from space as early as 2025. The project, led by Naoki Shinohara, a Kyoto University professor who has been working on space-based solar energy since 2009, will attempt to deploy a series of small satellites in orbit. Those will then try to beam the solar energy the arrays collect to ground-based receiving stations hundreds of miles away.
Orbital solar arrays "represent a potentially unlimited renewable energy supply," the article points out -- running 24 hours a day.