There was a time when Elon Musk and Sam Altman were friends. But the two tech billionaires are now embroiled in a bitter legal battle in the United States that could reshape not just OpenAI, the artificial intelligence (AI) firm behind ChatGPT they cofounded in 2015, but also the future of the technology more broadly.

Launched by Musk in 2024, the lawsuit is the culmination of a years-long feud that centers on the evolution of OpenAI from a non-profit to a for-profit enterprise.

The trial, which kicked off this week in California, is expected to last roughly three weeks. But its ripple effects could be felt for many years to come.

The case and the cast

The lawsuit pits Musk against Altman, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, OpenAI itself, and Microsoft, the AI firm's largest backer.

Musk cofounded and helped fund OpenAI to the tune of about US$44 million. By his own account from the witness stand this week, he "came up with the idea, the name, recruited the key people, taught them everything I know, provided all of the initial funding".

Brockman served as technical cofounder; Altman became chief executive in 2019. Their alliance with Musk fractured as the organization grew. Musk departed the board in 2018. He says he was pushed out.

However, OpenAI says he walked when denied majority control. Musk subsequently launched his own rival AI venture, xAI, which is now part of SpaceX.

What Musk is alleging

As part of the lawsuit, Musk is alleging breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, false advertising and unfair business practices.

His core claim is that Altman and Brockman induced him to donate on the understanding that any artificial general intelligence – or AGI – built at OpenAI would stay "open" and shared with humanity.

Instead, Musk argues, the founders turned the charity into a "wealth machine". They did this in two stages. First, via a 2019 capped-profit subsidiary. Here, OpenAI's for-profit unit limited the returns, with the excess handed back to the nonprofit. Second, through a full restructure into a public benefit corporation, which is now valued at roughly US$852 billion.

Musk's lawyers told jurors Altman and Brockman "stole a charity, full stop". Outside court, Musk has been throwing insults at his opponents, prompting the judge to threaten a gag order.

OpenAI flatly rejects Musk's narrative. As its lead counsel, William Savitt, told jurors:

The company alleges, as described in two pre-trial blog posts, that Musk himself proposed merging OpenAI with Tesla in 2017 and walked away when denied majority control.

The lawsuit, OpenAI says, is "motivated by jealousy" and designed to damage a competitor.

A company under pressure

The trial arrives at a precarious moment for OpenAI.

The New Yorker magazine recently published an investigation describing Altman as a "pathological liar". The investigation drew on an internal dossier compiled by OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever which alleged a "consistent pattern of lying" to the company's board.

Altman called the piece "incendiary" but acknowledged "a bunch of mistakes". Musk has been amplifying the article to his X followers throughout the trial.

Financially, OpenAI is bleeding.

Internal projections point to roughly US$14 billion in losses for 2026 alone, with cumulative losses expected to top US$44 billion before any profit materializes.

Shortly before the trial began, OpenAI quietly shut down Sora, its flagship video-generation model.

Before closing, it burned around US$1 million a day in computing costs. The closure took down a US$1 billion Disney partnership with it.

Even a fresh US$122 billion fundraise from Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank has not eased the pressure.

What Musk wants

Musk wants the jury to unwind OpenAI's for-profit conversion, remove Altman from the nonprofit board, and strip both Altman and Brockman of their roles in the for-profit entity.

He is also demanding US$130 billion in damages from OpenAI — for what his team calls "ill-gotten gains".

He has accused Microsoft of "aiding and abetting" and argues it is liable for a share.

His legal team argues OpenAI's existing models already constitute AGI, because they have surpassed human intelligence in many tasks. Under the founding agreement, AGI could not be commercially licensed. This would include the licence currently used by Microsoft for CoPilot.

What's at stake

If Musk wins, the consequences would be significant.

OpenAI's planned initial public offering would almost certainly be derailed. This is expected in late 2026 at a US$1 trillion valuation. Investors in the recent funding round could face clawbacks.

Altman, the public face of the AI boom, could be removed from the company he has led since 2019. The broader question of whether AI labs founded as charities can lawfully pivot into commercial enterprises would be settled, at least in California. This has potential implications for Anthropic and other mission-driven peers.

Even a defeat for Musk would not end the controversy.

The trial has already pried open Silicon Valley's normally sealed boardrooms, surfacing diaries, Slack threads and HR memos that paint an unflattering portrait of OpenAI's governance.

The case crystallizes a wider public anxiety: an incredibly powerful technology is being built and controlled by a tiny number of feuding tech bros. And it's the rest of us who have to live with the consequences.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Mars is out; the moon is in. And this time, we may be going there to stay.

On March 24, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman announced new plans to build a "sustained human presence" on the moon, complete with a permanent lunar base. Construction of humanity's new home away from Earth could begin as soon as 2027, Isaacman said.

The announcement came just a month after SpaceX CEO Elon Musk similarly ditched his company's plans to visit Mars in favor of establishing a "lunar self-growing city" within the next 10 years.

It's an exciting prospect — but scientists say lunar colonization won't be as simple as packing up and lifting off. The moon's environment is harsh: think razor-sharp, electrified dust and a constant stream of radioactive particles travelling at light speed. Scientists still aren't sure how this increased dose of cosmic radiation, coupled with the moon's weaker gravitational pull, relative to Earth, will affect the human body in the medium- to long-term.

And then there's technological feasibility: Where will astronauts live, and with what resources? At the moment, these big questions are still awaiting answers that may not arrive in time for NASA and Musk's proposed plans.

"I don't think we're quite ready," Caitlin Ahrens, a researcher at University of Maryland and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who studies the lunar environment, told Live Science. "A decade may seem far away to some people. To a scientist, it's the blink of an eye."

Satellite of horrors

Moondust is rather different from what we call dust on Earth. Without wind and liquid water, the moon's dust doesn't soften over time. "We're talking very, very sharp little pollen[-size] shards here," Ahrens said.

It's also easily electrified. Simply walking on the moon kicks up dust clouds, and rovers traversing the lunar landscape shoot up "rooster tails" of electrically charged, levitating dust, which sticks to anything in its path, Ahrens said. Energized dust can clog breathing vents in potential living quarters, scratch up spacesuits and coat solar panels, potentially overheating and breaking them. (Dust clogs have already spelled doom for several Mars rovers).

Without the soft blankets of Earth's atmosphere and magnetic shield, moon inhabitants would also be constantly blasted by radiation. Cosmic radiation is "pretty much omnipresent anywhere you go into space," including on the moon, Dr. Emmanuel Urquieta, an aerospace medicine researcher at the University of Central Florida, told Live Science. "It's incredibly difficult to shield."

Cancer is a potential risk, but because health effects of radiation take time to develop, we wouldn't know for certain if this is a major risk factor until potentially decades after landing human settlers on the moon. "Every person that goes to space… will absolutely be test subjects," Urquieta said.

We're not ready for self-defense

Humans on the moon would need hefty building materials to protect lunar habitats against these hazards. Metal or glass domes, subterranean habitats and housing made of 3D-printed moon soil are all potential options being investigated.

But Ahrens, who also works on lunar risk assessment, doesn't think we're ready to plan construction. For example, if NASA decides to invest in an underground habitat — perhaps the most surefire way to avoid radiation — scientists still have no idea how to dig on the moon, she said.

Even with sufficiently protective living quarters, the moon's weaker gravitational pull — just one-sixth that of Earth — may pose health risks. From previous space travel we know that, without the gravitational force humans evolved with, our bones and muscles need significant amounts of exercise to prevent them from withering away. But it wouldn't be practical to lug heavy treadmills, like those used on the International Space Station, to the moon, Urquieta said.

A lack of gravity may also redistribute the body's natural balance of fluids, with potentially disastrous effects. Normally, due to the downward tug of gravity, up to 80% of our blood is in our legs at any given time, Urquieta said. But on the moon, more fluids would flow to the body's upper half, causing loss of blood as the body attempts to rebalance itself, as well as potential swelling at the back of the eye and jugular vein thrombosis, a condition that causes potentially fatal blood clots in the neck. Compared to zero gravity, lunar partial gravity may or may not pose similar health risks. Urquieta said researchers won't know until people spend some time there.

The future of lunar settlement

Ultimately, Ahrens said, these challenges boil down to the need for more data, which scientists are hoping to gather with missions like NASA's Artemis campaign to return humans to the lunar surface as soon as 2028. But she envisions a much slower timeline than Musk's and Isaacman's plans; scientists haven't even taken a sample of the moon's ice yet — a resource lunar settlement planners are banking on.

Depending on its depth and composition, lunar ice could provide water, rocket fuel and rare earth metals. But until scientists get a physical sample of ice, they can't rely on its usefulness or economic prospects. For now, scientific knowledge of the ice's actual chemical composition is very limited: "We know it's cold, and we kind of know where it is," Ahrens said.

When it comes to the moon and its offerings, "we have to be very careful not to sell something which [we] don't have," said Giuseppe Reibaldi, president of the Moon Village Association, a non-profit group focused on international collaboration in lunar activities.

Reibaldi told Live Science that what we find in the moon's ice could be the difference between the lunar equivalent of California's gold rush boomtowns — where settlements sprang up in response to mining opportunities — and Antarctica, where a small number of scientists come and go for solely research purposes.

But even if permanent settlement doesn't happen as soon as hoped, Ahrens said she is optimistic about the forecast for lunar development. "I think it's not all sunshine and rainbows, but it's also not dark rainy clouds either," she said.

Editor's note: The headline and lead art for this story were changed on April 29, 2026.

Moon landing quiz: How quickly can you name all 12 Apollo astronauts that walked on the moon?

When Elon Musk talks about robotics, he rarely hides the ambition behind the dream.

Tesla's Optimus is pitched as an all-purpose humanoid robot that can do the heavy lifting on factory floors and free us from drudgery at home. Tesla is targeting a million of these robots in the next decade.

But is Musk likely to succeed? A few years ago, the thought of a friendly, capable household robot belonged in science fiction. We could imagine machines that danced, shifted boxes or played chess, but not ones that understood us well enough to be genuinely helpful. Then came generative artificial intelligence, or gen AI.

Whether your first encounter was with ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot, many of us felt the same jolt of surprise. Here was a bot that seemed to understand us in a way we didn't expect. That has made Musk's dream of a robot companion feel if not close then certainly closer.

Imagine leafing through a catalogue of robots the way we browse for home appliances. If a personal robot still feels too expensive, perhaps we might hire one part time. Maybe a dance instructor that doubles as a therapist. Families could club together to buy a robot for an elderly relative. Some people might even buy one for themselves.

The future Musk describes isn't just mechanical, it's emotional.

Why the humanoid shape matters

The idea of robots that look like us can seem creepy and threatening. But there's also a practical explanation for the drive to make robots that look like us.

A dishwasher is essentially a robot but you have to load it yourself. A humanoid robot with hands and fingers could clear the table, load the dishwasher and then feed the pets too. In other words, engineers create humanoid robots because the world is designed for human bodies.

But the humanoid form also carries an emotional charge. A machine with a face and limbs hints at something more than functionality. It's a promise of intelligence, empathy or companionship. Optimus taps into that deep cultural imagery. It is part practical engineering, part theatre and part invitation to believe we are close to creating machines that can live alongside us.

There are moments when a personal robot might be genuinely welcoming. Anyone who has been ill, or cared for someone who is, can imagine the appeal of a helper that preserves dignity and independence. Robots, unlike humans, are not born to judge. But there is also a risk in outsourcing too much of our social world to machines.

If a robot is always there to tidy up the mess, practical or emotional, we may lose some of the tolerance and empathy that come from living among other people.

That is where the question of design becomes crucial. In the most dystopian version of life with generative AI-powered, chatty, dexterous robots, we retreat indoors, sealed into our homes and attended to by machines that are endlessly "understanding" and quietly adoring. Convenience is maximised, but something else is lost.

If sociability really does matter — if it is worth a little extra inconvenience to practise being human with other humans rather than only with chatbots — then the challenge becomes a practical one. How do we engineer a future that nudges us towards one another, instead of gently pulling us apart?

One option is to rethink where conversation lies. Rather than building all-purpose, ever-chatty assistants into every corner of our lives, we could distribute AI across devices and limit what those devices talk about. For example, a washing machine might discuss laundry, while a navigation system might discuss routes. But open-ended chatter, the kind that shapes identity, values and relationships, remains something that people do with people.

At a collective level, this kind of design choice could reshape workplaces and shared spaces, turning them back into environments that cultivate human conversation. That is, of course, only possible if people are encouraged to show up in person, and to put their phones away.

The real design challenge is not how to make machines more attentive to us, but how to make them better at guiding us back towards one another

So, it is worth asking what kind of domestic future we are quietly building. Will the robots we invite inside help us connect, or simply keep us company?

Good bots, bad bots

A good bot could help a socially anxious child get to school. It may nudge a lonely teenager towards local activities. Or it may tell a cantankerous old person: "There's a crime club starting in an hour at the library. We can pick up a paper on the way."

A bad bot leaves us exactly where we are: increasingly comfortable with a machine and less comfortable with each other.

Musk's humanoid dream may yet become real. The question is whether machines like Optimus will help us build stronger communities, or quietly erode the human connections we need most.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Pronatalism — the belief that low birth rates are a problem that must be reversed — is having a moment in the U.S.

As birth rates decline in the U.S. and throughout the world, voices from Silicon Valley to the White House are raising concerns about what they say could be the calamitous effects of steep population decline on the economy. The Trump administration has said it is seeking ideas on how to encourage Americans to have more children as the U.S. experiences its lowest total fertility rate in history, down about 25% since 2007.

As demographers who study fertility, family behaviors and childbearing intentions, we can say with certainty that population decline is not imminent, inevitable or necessarily catastrophic.

The population collapse narrative hinges on three key misunderstandings. First, it misrepresents what standard fertility measures tell us about childbearing and makes unrealistic assumptions that fertility rates will follow predictable patterns far into the future. Second, it overstates the impact of low birth rates on future population growth and size. Third, it ignores the role of economic policies and labor market shifts in assessing the impacts of low birth rates.

Fertility fluctuations

Demographers generally gauge births in a population with a measure called the total fertility rate. The total fertility rate for a given year is an estimate of the average number of children that women would have in their lifetime if they experienced current birth rates throughout their childbearing years.

Fertility rates are not fixed — in fact, they have changed considerably over the past century. In the U.S., the total fertility rate rose from about 2 births per woman in the 1930s to a high of 3.7 births per woman around 1960. The rate then dipped below 2 births per woman in the late 1970s and 1980s before returning to 2 births in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Since the Great Recession that lasted from late 2007 until mid-2009, the U.S. total fertility rate has declined almost every year, with the exception of very small post-COVID-19 pandemic increases in 2021 and 2022. In 2024, it hit a record low, falling to 1.6. This drop is primarily driven by declines in births to people in their teens and early 20s — births that are often unintended.

But while the total fertility rate offers a snapshot of the fertility landscape, it is not a perfect indicator of how many children a woman will eventually have if fertility patterns are in flux — for example, if people are delaying having children.

Picture a 20-year-old woman today, in 2025. The total fertility rate assumes she will have the same birth rate as today's 40-year-olds when she reaches 40. That's not likely to be the case, because birth rates 20 years from now for 40-year-olds will almost certainly be higher than they are today, as more births occur at older ages and more people are able to overcome infertility through medically assisted reproduction.

A more nuanced picture of childbearing

These problems with the total fertility rate are why demographers also measure how many total births women have had by the end of their reproductive years. In contrast to the total fertility rate, the average number of children ever born to women ages 40 to 44 has remained fairly stable over time, hovering around two.

Americans continue to express favorable views toward childbearing. Ideal family size remains at two or more children, and 9 in 10 adults either have, or would like to have, children. However, many Americans are unable to reach their childbearing goals. This seems to be related to the high cost of raising children and growing uncertainty about the future.

In other words, it doesn't seem to be the case that birth rates are low because people are uninterested in having children; rather, it's because they don't feel it's feasible for them to become parents or to have as many children as they would like.

The challenge of predicting future population size

Standard demographic projections do not support the idea that population size is set to shrink dramatically.

One billion people lived on Earth 250 years ago. Today there are over 8 billion, and by 2100 the United Nations predicts there will be over 10 billion. That's 2 billion more, not fewer, people in the foreseeable future. Admittedly, that projection is plus or minus 4 billion. But this range highlights another key point: Population projections get more uncertain the further into the future they extend.

Predicting the population level five years from now is far more reliable than 50 years from now — and beyond 100 years, forget about it. Most population scientists avoid making such long-term projections, for the simple reason that they are usually wrong. That's because fertility and mortality rates change over time in unpredictable ways.

The U.S. population size is also not declining. Currently, despite fertility below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman, there are still more births than deaths. The U.S. population is expected to grow by 22.6 million by 2050 and by 27.5 million by 2100, with immigration playing an important role.

Will low fertility cause an economic crisis?

A common rationale for concern about low fertility is that it leads to a host of economic and labor market problems. Specifically, pronatalists argue that there will be too few workers to sustain the economy and too many older people for those workers to support. However, that is not necessarily true — and even if it were, increasing birth rates wouldn't fix the problem.

As fertility rates fall, the age structure of the population shifts. But a higher proportion of older adults does not necessarily mean the proportion of workers to nonworkers falls.

For one thing, the proportion of children under age 18 in the population also declines, so the number of working-age adults — usually defined as ages 18 to 64 — often changes relatively little. And as older adults stay healthier and more active, a growing number of them are contributing to the economy. Labor force participation among Americans ages 65 to 74 increased from 21.4% in 2003 to 26.9% in 2023 — and is expected to increase to 30.4% by 2033. Modest changes in the average age of retirement or in how Social Security is funded would further reduce strains on support programs for older adults.

What's more, pronatalists' core argument that a higher birth rate would increase the size of the labor force overlooks some short-term consequences. More babies means more dependents, at least until those children become old enough to enter the labor force. Children not only require expensive services such as education, but also reduce labor force participation, particularly for women. As fertility rates have fallen, women's labor force participation rates have risen dramatically — from 34% in 1950 to 58% in 2024. Pronatalist policies that discourage women's employment are at odds with concerns about a diminishing number of workers.

Research shows that economic policies and labor market conditions, not demographic age structures, play the most important role in determining economic growth in advanced economies. And with rapidly changing technologies like automation and artificial intelligence, it is unclear what demand there will be for workers in the future. Moreover, immigration is a powerful — and immediate — tool for addressing labor market needs and concerns over the proportion of workers.

Overall, there's no evidence for Elon Musk's assertion that "humanity is dying." While the changes in population structure that accompany low birth rates are real, in our view the impact of these changes has been dramatically overstated. Strong investments in education and sensible economic policies can help countries successfully adapt to a new demographic reality.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

SpaceX's Starship has finally pulled off a successful test flight in a stunning reversal of fortunes for Elon Musk's most ambitious rocket.

The uncrewed 403-foot-tall (123 meters) rocket, the largest ever built, blasted off from SpaceX's Starbase at Boca Chica, Texas, at 7:30 p.m. EST on Tuesday (Aug. 26).

Starship completed a nerve-wracking, hour-long flight, reaching a maximum altitude of 124 miles (200 kilometers) above Earth's surface, before its upper stage splashed down in the Indian Ocean. Earlier, after separation, the rocket's Super Heavy booster landed in the Gulf of Mexico.

Ecstatic applause erupted as SpaceX's engineering teams celebrated the rocket completing its journey. Unlike previous attempts, Starship was finally able to use its satellite deployment system to drop mock Starlink satellites into space for the first time.

Much more was riding on this 10th test launch than dummy satellites. The gargantuan rocket is key to SpaceX majority shareholder Elon Musk's ambitions to transport crewmembers, spacecraft, satellites and cargo into orbit around Earth — and eventually to the moon and Mars. SpaceX has a $2.9 billion contract with NASA to carry astronauts to the lunar surface as early as 2027.

The latest test flight, coming two days later than planned due to issues with Starbase's ground systems and bad weather, marks a comeback for the company after a string of failures.

Starship's ninth launch fell short of its target, while its eighth and seventh launches ended in dramatic explosions that hurled fiery debris across the Caribbean. In June, a Starship rocket also exploded on the launch pad while preparing for a flight. Last year, scientists revealed that a previous explosion, during the second test flight in November 2023, temporarily ripped a "hole" in the atmosphere.

"Congratulations to @SpaceX on its Starship test. Flight 10's success paves the way for the Starship Human Landing System that will bring American astronauts back to the Moon on Artemis III," NASA's acting administrator Sean Duffy wrote on X following the flight. "This is a great day for @NASA and our commercial space partners."

Related: 'Catastrophic' SpaceX Starship explosion tore a hole in the atmosphere last year in 1st-of-its-kind event, Russian scientists reveal

Propelled by a record-breaking 16.5 million pounds (7.5 million kilograms) of thrust from its 33-engine Super Heavy booster rocket, Starship can carry 10 times the payload of SpaceX's current Falcon 9 rockets.

Starship is designed primarily with cheap and efficient manufacturing in mind, using inexpensive stainless steel for its construction and methane — which SpaceX says can be collected on Mars — to power the rocket.

Yesterday's mission was intended as a test for the ship's new heat shield tiles and its ability to deploy payloads in orbit, alongside many other upgrades to improve on previous flights. It was also a demonstration of SpaceX's "fail fast, learn fast" mantra, where test rockets are flown beyond their technical limits — the company treats failures as opportunities to gather more data.

Despite the 10th launch's success, signs of stress on the rocket were evident during flight, with the rocket's flaps catching on fire and swinging back and forth.

The rocket's hexagonal heat shield tiles were also licked by fire during the rocket's blazing-hot supersonic reentry. They were developed as a fully reusable orbital heat shield, a historical departure from traditional shields that take refurbishment after each flight. For example, NASA's retired Space Shuttle took nine months to refurnish its heat shields between flights, Musk noted during a webcast on Monday (Aug. 25.)

"What we're trying to achieve here with Starship is to have a heat shield that can be flown immediately," he said.

The speed of the rocket's development is driven by SpaceX's NASA contract, which will see a modified version of the craft take humans to the moon as part of its Artemis programme in 2027. Musk has also suggested that the rocket could start uncrewed test flights to Mars in the next 12 months.

Yet remaining technical challenges could force these key dates to slip. SpaceX still needs to demonstrate that the rocket can be refueled in orbit, a key test before it can carry out missions further into space.

SpaceX's Starship has exploded once again — adding to a growing list of setbacks for the company's rocket.

The upper stage of the rocket, the largest ever built, was undergoing routine testing to prepare for its 10th test flight at SpaceX's South Texas Starbase site on Wednesday night (June 18) when it "suffered a catastrophic failure and exploded," local authorities wrote on Facebook.

The gigantic fireball adds to a string of recent headaches for the rocket's upper stages. The ship exploded mid-flight during two previous test flights in January and March, and fell to pieces during an earlier-than-planned reentry in May.

In a post on X, SpaceX has attributed the latest explosion to "a major anomaly while on a test stand at Starbase," yet the exact cause of the malfunction is unclear.

"A safety clear area around the site was maintained throughout the operation and all personnel are safe and accounted for," SpaceX added in the post. "Our Starbase team is actively working to safe the test site and the immediate surrounding area in conjunction with local officials. There are no hazards to residents in surrounding communities, and we ask that individuals do not attempt to approach the area while safing [sic] operations continue."

Starship is key to SpaceX majority shareholder Elon Musk's ambitions to transport spacecraft, crew members, satellites and cargo into orbit around Earth and to the moon and Mars.

Related: 'Catastrophic' SpaceX Starship explosion tore a hole in the atmosphere last year in 1st-of-its-kind event, Russian scientists reveal

Standing 403 feet (123 meters) tall and propelled by a record-breaking 16.5 million pounds (7.5 million kilograms) of thrust from its 33-engine Super Heavy booster rocket, Starship can carry 10 times the payload of SpaceX's current Falcon 9 rockets.

Designed primarily with affordable and efficient manufacturing in mind, the gargantuan rocket uses inexpensive stainless steel for its construction and methane — which SpaceX claims can be collected on Mars — to power the rocket.

These early failures are unlikely to deter SpaceX from further developing the rocket. Musk announced in March that he expects the ship to carry Tesla's Optimus humanoid robots to Mars by the end of 2026, and the rocket is also set to carry some of the Starlab private space station into orbit once the International Space Station retires after 2030.

SpaceX has also won around $4 billion in NASA contracts to develop the Human Landing System (HLS). This is a lunar lander variant of the spacecraft, and has been selected by NASA to carry American astronauts to the moon aboard the 2027 Artemis III mission — the first time humans will have walked on the moon in more than 50 years.

The impact of yesterday's explosion on SpaceX's launch date for Starship’s 10th flight is unclear. Currently, the company is investigating what happened to cause Flight 9's failed reentry alongside the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

An explosive, and very public, feud between President Donald Trump and SpaceX founder Elon Musk on Thursday (June 5) has raised doubts over the future of America's space industry.

The war of words could place $22 billion of SpaceX’s government contracts with multiple U.S. space programs at risk, according to one estimate, although the real figure — which remains classified — could be significantly higher.

Following threats from the president on his social media platform Truth Social that the U.S. could cancel the government contracts and subsidies awarded to Musk's companies, the CEO of SpaceX retorted that his space company would "begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately."

Hours later, Musk responded to a follower telling him to "cool off" by saying "Good advice. Ok, we won't decommission Dragon."

The disagreement began on Tuesday (June 3) when Musk criticized the administration's proposed tax and spending bill on his social media platform X.

"This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it," Musk wrote on X.

Related: 'No radio astronomy from the ground would be possible anymore': Satellite mega-swarms are blinding us to the cosmos — and a critical 'inflection point' is approaching

This then escalated into a full-blown social media feud on Thursday, with Musk claiming that Trump's name appears in unreleased files relating to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The White House condemned these allegations. "This is an unfortunate episode from Elon, who is unhappy with the One Big Beautiful Bill because it does not include the policies he wanted," representatives wrote on X.

Trump then claimed Musk "just went CRAZY," posting: "The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon's Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn't do it!"

What is SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, and why would decommissioning it be a problem?

SpaceX's Dragon capsule is a reusable spacecraft capable of carrying up to seven passengers and cargo to and from Earth orbit, according to SpaceX. NASA currently relies on the capsule to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), so canceling these government contracts effectively eliminates America's ability to launch astronauts to space from American soil, Live Science's sister website, Space.com, reported.

NASA also heavily relies on SpaceX for other space programs, having selected the Starship Human Landing System (HLS), a lunar lander variant of the company's next-generation Starship spacecraft, to carry American astronauts to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years aboard the 2027 Artemis 3 mission.

NASA is investing $4 billion into Starship's development, and canceling its contract could seriously handicap NASA and the future of U.S.-led space exploration.

While other competitors exist, such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin and Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, they lag far behind SpaceX.

The Starliner capsule is not yet certified to fly operational astronaut missions and was responsible for "stranding" two astronauts on the ISS for nine months last year. The astronauts returned to Earth on March 18 aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule, and neither Boeing nor NASA have offered any significant updates into fixes that will make Starliner flightworthy.

SpaceX's lead on its competitors is reflected in the size of its government subsidies. In April, the U.S. Space Force, the military branch of U.S. space exploration, awarded the company nearly $6 billion in launch contracts, while the United Launch Alliance received $5.4 billion and Blue Origin $2.4 billion.

In response to the feud between Musk and Trump, NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens declined to comment on SpaceX, but she did tell Reuters that "we will continue to work with our industry partners to ensure the president's objectives in space are met."

NASA's deputy administrator Lori Garver told Reuters that, as well as not being in national interests, canceling SpaceX's contacts would probably not be legal. However, she also added that "a rogue CEO threatening to decommission spacecraft, putting astronauts' lives at risk, is untenable."

The first 10 weeks of the Trump administration have sent shock waves through the science community. Many expected the second Trump administration to follow the pattern of the first. But I certainly didn't expect a broad-scale assault on the U.S. science enterprise itself.

Elon Musk emerged as Trump's leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). There seems to be no strategy behind the department's decisions. As the U.S. comptroller general stated, "There needs to be changes, but it needs to be done in a more systematic, thoughtful way…" Without careful planning, "you can introduce more risk."

There is no sign of systematic analysis led by Musk; no stated goals other than reducing the federal workforce, for minimal budget savings.

Recently, many federal scientists lost their jobs despite years of training and experience — all without notice or cause. Early career scientists were especially hard hit. The stories are heartbreaking. I fail to see how money will be saved or efficiency gained: Not doing the science doesn't lead to efficiency.

One area where this wanton cutting could have dramatic impacts is in my own field of research. I have worked in fisheries and marine science for many years, including with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA Fisheries), which operates six science centers to inform policymaking for marine resources. Over the last two and half decades, this research led to policy decisions that reversed huge losses due to overfishing.

But then the wrecking ball came.

While cuts to NOAA's National Weather Service have captured most of the attention, cuts to NOAA Fisheries were also large, with many staff lost from a workforce of 4,200.

Most of the American public likely doesn't know about NOAA Fisheries, even if they are familiar with NOAA. But coastal communities are. And more than two-thirds of NOAA Fisheries' work is dedicated to basic science. As you deplete science capabilities such that we no longer understand the responses of the marine ecosystems to exploitation, fisheries, fishers and coastal economies lose the very basis for sustainability.

Setting catch limits starts with science and includes understanding the demographics of commercially important species, the economics of the commercial and recreational fishing fleets, the social impacts on communities and the impacts on other aspects of the marine environment. NOAA Fisheries is emblematic of the role science plays in public policy — as well as understanding the three-quarters of the globe that is the ocean.

The Trump and Musk cuts to fisheries aren't just directly affecting NOAA staff and the fishery management process. Cutting grants — which is seemingly being done using searches for keywords — undercuts the ability of fishers to adapt their businesses to changing conditions and requirements. Some of those grants are to develop new gear with lower environmental impacts, such as more fuel-efficient engines and cooling systems. Others are to go beyond annual monitoring to inform managers and fishers about new challenges and emerging opportunities.

Therein is the folly of these cuts: The grants help to reduce carbon emissions, but for businesses, the grants can also help reduce operating costs. Can it really be that DOGE wants to cut efforts to make a part of our economic activity more efficient?

Tragically, firing staff en masse reduces the country's science capacity and ability to detect and respond to myriad risks to the public. The wrecking ball hits well beyond the scientists who lost their jobs. Canceling research and training grants across the entire science community and in every discipline has far-ranging effects. Scientific research is the lifeblood of our economy.

American science is great because it is underpinned by federal research grants to universities and research institutes. Researchers across the nation rely on government funding for basic research that is being slashed with no clear plan of what happens when it is gone. Make no mistake, private industry and philanthropy will not step in to fill the gap. That model just doesn't work.

Modern research takes real investment in facilities to do science. The one-off story of a garage miracle doesn’t make a dent in the vast reach of American science upon which our prosperity is based. It takes a lot of bricks and mortar. Musk and Trump have science facilities in their sights, canceling federal leases and changing the way the government supports the maintenance of university science capacity. "Overheads" mean keeping a lab or field station or computational resources functional for science.

The loss of grants and loans to students, meanwhile, targets the scientists of the future, not just to work in government but everywhere. These are the elements that will weaken or even shatter the U.S. science enterprise.

The U.S. science community must choose whether to look inward, hoping for better days, or to fight back. We can try to save individual programs, one by one. But a few trees don't make a forest.

We need to fight together to save the forest of science. We need to talk to the media, write op-eds, mobilize students and colleagues. Protest in the streets. Battle in the courts. Use our collective and individual constituency with every member of Congress to save science — not just the trees but the forest.

Opinion on Live Science gives you insight on the most important issues in science that affect you and the world around you today, written by experts and leading scientists in their field.

NASA has added SpaceX's giant Starship rocket to a major commercial contract, putting the world's most powerful launch vehicle in contention for future missions — even though the shiny spacecraft keeps exploding in mid-air, and has yet to deliver a single payload into space.

On March 28, the American space agency announced that Starship was being added to the NASA Launch Services (NLS) II contract, which lists all the privately built spacecraft that can be considered for future missions. Starship is the 10th rocket to be added to the contract, which also includes SpaceX's Super Heavy and Falcon 9. Other listed rockets include United Launch Alliance's new Vulcan Centaur and Northrop Grumman's Pegasus XL, which has been used by NASA since the early 1990s.

The contract does not guarantee Starship's use in any NASA missions. However, there is also no upper limit on how many times each rocket in the contract can be selected for missions between now and the end of the contract's current lifespan in December 2032.

The launch vehicles listed in the NLS II contract are separated into three groups based on how they have performed in the past: Category 1 (high risk), Category 2 (medium risk) and Category 3 (low risk), with Category 3 rockets the most likely to be used in missions.

It is unclear which category Starship will be put in. However, Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, which was the most recent rocket to be added to the NLS II, was initially listed in Category 1, despite successfully making it to orbit on the first attempt in January. This suggests that Starship will likely be put in the same bracket, according to Space News.

Related: SpaceX rockets keep tearing blood-red 'atmospheric holes' in the sky, and scientists are concerned

SpaceX aims to have Starship operational in time for the third Artemis mission, currently slated for mid-2027, which will put humans back on the moon for the first time since 1972. However, the initial test flights may raise questions about that timeline.

The company's CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly expressed a strong desire to use Starship to send humans to Mars.

Musk's plans to expand Starbase — a spaceport in Texas dedicated to future Starship production and launches — in addition to his close ties to the Trump administration and incoming NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, may have influenced the decision to include Starship in NLS II despite its recent issues, Futurism reported.

Explosive tests

Starship is the world's tallest rocket, standing 403 feet (123 meters) tall when perched upright on a launchpad. It is made up of two stages, both of which are designed to be reusable, in a similar way to SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets. To date, Starship has been launched eight times, with varying degrees of success.

The first test launch was carried out in April 2023. The rocket exploded around four minutes after liftoff, when engine failures caused it to go into an uncontrollable spin. Launch controllers then intentionally detonated the craft to prevent it from crashing back to the surface. However, the self-destruction took longer than expected and, as a result, large amounts of debris rained down on the area surrounding the launchpad, triggering a federal investigation and angering environmental groups.

During the second test, in November 2023, two different parts of the rocket exploded. First when the rocket's booster unexpectedly detonated shortly after separation, and again when the upper stage underwent a "rapid unscheduled disassembly." The latter punched a temporary hole in the upper atmosphere, studies later revealed.

Nothing exploded during the third test launch. However, SpaceX lost control of the rocket shortly after it entered suborbital flight, and it crashed back to Earth at an unknown location in the Indian Ocean. The next three test flights were less eventful, although none of the rockets' upper stages reached low-Earth orbit before crashing back into the same ocean.

However, this year, Starship experienced back-to-back explosions during the seventh test flight on Jan. 16 and the eighth test flight on March 6. The former was arguably the most impressive detonation yet, creating a spectacular fireball above the Caribbean and littering several islands with shrapnel, while also releasing large amounts of atmospheric pollution.

Despite the setbacks, the tests have yielded some positive results. For example, during the fourth, fifth and sixth test flights, SpaceX was able to land the rocket's first stage by catching it with robotic arms, like a pair of giant chopsticks. Every failed test also produces data that is useful to the scientists building the next iteration of the rocket.

The next test flight is scheduled for later this month, although the exact date is yet to be announced.

NASA has launched its Crew-10 mission, bringing relief to the U.S. astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — who’ve been stuck aboard the International Space Station (ISS) for the last nine months — and finally allowing them to return to Earth.

The Falcon 9 rocket launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:04 p.m. EDT on Friday (March 14), as part of a routine ISS staff rotation.

Riding aboard its top-mounted Dragon capsule are four astronauts: NASA’s Nichole Ayers and Anne McClain, Roscosmos astronaut Kirill Peskov and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Takuya Onishi. If everything goes to plan, the capsule will dock at the ISS at 11:30 p.m. EDT Saturday (March 15).

Wilmore and Williams arrived at the ISS as part of Boeing's first Starliner Crew Test Flight. Starliner blasted off on its inaugural crewed test flight from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on June 5, 2024. But not long after entering orbit, a number of issues cropped up — including five helium leaks and five failures of its reaction control system (RCS) thrusters.

Related: NASA offers SpaceX $843 million to destroy the International Space Station

This caused the mission, originally slated to last as few as eight days, to drag on for more than two months before NASA announced its abandonment on Aug. 24. The Starliner capsule undocked from the ISS on Sep. 6, returning to Earth without a crew.

While awaiting the Crew-10 rotation, Wilmore and Williams have been performing a number of maintenance tasks and participating in scientific projects.

Their stay has been largely safe but not entirely without incident. On June 27, a defunct Russian satellite broke apart in orbit, sending debris toward the ISS and forcing Williams and Wilmore, along with the other seven astronauts on board, to take cover inside their respective space capsules.

Following a handover ceremony from Crew 9 to Crew 10, Wilmore and Williams, along with the NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos's Aleksandr Gorbunov, will return home aboard the docked Crew-9 capsule on March 19. The Starliner astronauts’ total time in space will amount to nearly 300 consecutive days — nowhere near the current record of 437 days set by Russian Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov in 1995, but still a long haul.

Tonight’s launch is the third attempt to launch the Crew-10 mission, the first on Wednesday (March 12) being scrubbed after a hydraulic system issue and the next on Thursday (March 13) being grounded by high winds and precipitation across the rocket’s flight path, according to NASA.

"We came up prepared to stay long, even though we planned to stay short," Wilmore said during a news conference beamed back from the ISS on March 4. "That's what we do in human spaceflight. That's what your nation's human spaceflight program's all about — planning for unknown, unexpected contingencies. And we did that."

SpaceX's Starship has dramatically exploded mid-flight, leaving smears of confetti-like wreckage across the sky as its remains tumbled back to Earth. The fireball triggered diversions and delays to air traffic in Florida and the Caribbean amid warnings of falling debris.

The uncrewed rocket, the largest ever built, blasted off from SpaceX's Starbase at Boca Chica, Texas at 6:30 p.m. EST on March 6.

But the vessel spun out of control about nine minutes after launch, resulting in "a rapid unscheduled disassembly", SpaceX representatives said in a post on the social platform X.

Starship struggles

This is the eighth Starship launch since April 2023 and the second consecutive failure this year for SpaceX's rocket. Less than two months ago, the seventh Starship flight ended in an explosion that hurled fiery debris across skies above the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Just like after the previous failed launch, the Federal Aviation Administration has grounded further flights of the rocket pending a mishap investigation, which will be conducted by SpaceX.

"We will review the data from today's flight test to better understand [the] root cause," company representatives wrote on X. "As always, success comes from what we learn, and today's flight will offer additional lessons to improve Starship's reliability."

Related: 'Catastrophic' SpaceX Starship explosion tore a hole in the atmosphere last year in 1st-of-its-kind event, Russian scientists reveal

Standing 403 feet (123 meters) tall and propelled by a record-breaking 16.5 million pounds (7.5 million kilograms) of thrust from its 33-engine Super Heavy booster rocket, Starship can carry 10 times the payload of SpaceX's current Falcon 9 rockets.

The gargantuan rocket is key to SpaceX majority shareholder Elon Musk's ambitions to transport crewmembers, spacecraft, satellites and cargo into orbit around Earth and to the moon and Mars.

Starship is designed primarily with cheap and efficient manufacturing in mind, using inexpensive stainless steel for its construction and methane — which SpaceX says can be collected on Mars — to power the rocket.

The mission was a test flight, with the aim of testing the rocket's capabilities by deploying four mock Starlink satellites and restarting its engines in space before plopping down in the Indian Ocean. The exact cause of the explosion is currently unclear, although SpaceX representatives attributed it to "an energetic event in the aft portion of Starship" that caused the loss of several Raptor engines.

The explosion caused delays at Fort Lauderdale, Miami International and Philadelphia International airports between an average of 30 to 45 minutes, while planes flying over the Caribbean altered their flight paths to avoid the wreckage, imagery from Flightradar24 shows.

Flying wreckage from the previous failed launch, which is still being recovered, reportedly caused minor damage to a car in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

SpaceX said at the time that there were no toxic materials among the debris, although anyone who finds a piece of debris is advised not to handle it directly and to instead contact local authorities or the SpaceX Debris Hotline.

Following the previous explosion, SpaceX announced it had made upgrades to the Starship spacecraft that flew yesterday, including the installation of additional vents and a purge system that used nitrogen to flush fuel leaks and make the aft less flammable. It's clear that these didn’t get rid of the problem, but company representatives are optimistic that they can find and fix the faults.

"Unfortunately this happened last time too, so we've got some practice now," Dan Huot, a communications manager at SpaceX, said on a live stream of the launch.

Astronomers have been left red-faced after announcing the discovery of a new near-Earth asteroid — only to realize that the supposed space rock was the remains of Elon Musk's cherry-red Tesla Roadster and its spacesuit-clad driver "Starman."

The misidentified object, which was launched into space on board a SpaceX rocket in 2018, highlights a growing problem in astronomy that could lead to costly errors, researchers say.

On Jan. 2, the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC) added a new object, dubbed 2018 CN41, to its list of near-Earth asteroids. The supposed space rock was identified by an unnamed amateur astronomer in Turkey using years of publicly available data, Astronomy.com reported. However, just 17 hours later, the MPC released an editorial notice retracting the discovery after the citizen scientist realized they had made a mistake.

The Tesla Roadster, which was previously used by Elon Musk, was launched into space on Feb. 6, 2018, as the test payload for the maiden launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. The publicity stunt garnered widespread attention at the time, partly due to Starman — a mannequin in the car's driving seat that was wearing a likely defective spacesuit and "listening" to David Bowie's album "Space Oddity" on loop.

The car and its driver headed toward Mars after escaping Earth's gravity and were supposed to enter a stable orbit around the Red Planet, which raised alarms at the time that it could become a potential Martian "biothreat" if it accidentally crash-landed there. However, the pair overshot their target and instead entered a stable orbit around the sun. Now, it circles the sun and occasionally zooms past Mars.

Related: 15 of the weirdest things we have launched into space

The Tesla has now completed roughly 4.5 trips around the sun, traveling at roughly 45,000 mph (72,000 km/h), according to whereisroadster.com. This means that the car has now exceeded its initial 36,000-mile warranty around 100,00 times.

However, the car is probably unrecognizable now after being exposed to years of intense radiation from the sun and bombarded by tiny fragments of space rocks, which have likely stripped the outer layers of the car and shredded Starman.

Mistaken identity

This is not the first time that human-made objects have been mistaken for near-Earth asteroids. The MPC has temporarily listed a number of spacecraft as space rocks over the last two decades — including the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft, NASA's Lucy probe, the joint European-Japanese BepiColombo mission and others — as well as rocket boosters and other debris, according to Astronomy.com.

This type of confusion will also likely increase as more human-made objects are launched into space.

These misidentifications could lead to more false alarms for near-Earth asteroids, which could in turn result in costly errors, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Astronomy.com. "Worst case [scenario], you spend a billion [dollars] launching a space probe to study an asteroid and only realize it's not an asteroid when you get there," he said.

While space agencies and private companies are required to accurately track their products in orbit around Earth, there is currently no legislation that forces them to do the same for spacecraft and debris that escape Earth's gravity, like the Tesla Roadster.

However, "such transparency is essential for promoting space situational awareness, reducing interference between missions, [and] avoiding interference with observations of natural objects," members of the American Astronomical Society warned in a 2024 statement.

Technologies such as brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence (AI), predictive texting and autocomplete are already transforming language as we know it.

But how significant will that change be? And exactly what will those changes be? We sat down with Philip Seargeant, author of the book "The Future of Language" (Bloomsbury, 2024 ), to chat about what language is, why scientists spent years trying to create a special language for nuclear waste, and whether we'll ever live in a silent world devoid of spoken language.

Ben Turner: Let's start with a question that's much easier to ask than it is to answer: How do we define language?

Philip Seargeant: Language is so integral to our lives — our social lives and our mental lives — that often you get this sort of slightly simplistic idea of it being just a means of communication. Sure, it's a means of relaying information from one person to another, but that's really only a part of it. Language is tied up with the way that we organize society and our relationships, how we present our identity, and how we understand other people's identities. I think that's one of the things that we need to be mindful of as we try to get a handle on how new technologies are going to change the way we communicate.

BT: A key idea that you return to in the book is the myth of the Tower of Babel. It's a story that has articulated our desire to bridge the gaps between languages since history began. How close are we to AI acting as a universal translator between human languages? Is a universal translator even possible?

PS: These are very good questions. The Babel myth is an idea from fairly early in the beginning of history that suggests that language use is somehow impaired — that there's something wrong with it. It's the foundation of what it means to be human, yet at the same time, there's some sort of essential flaw in it. There's two aspects to that: One is that we can't speak across language barriers, and two [is] that how we use language isn't exact or precise enough.

It seems we're at a point where technologies will imminently allow for instantaneous, real-time translation between big languages (at least the ones we have enough data for). The quality of this translation is pretty good; it's very workable.

My best guess is that it will work quite functionally for some things but will exist alongside the broader aspects of how we use language.

BT: It's interesting that humans call upon language to explain why we're so unique, yet we also feel insecure that we're not quite good enough at it.

PS: One of the reasons language is so endlessly flexible is because it lacks precision. Now we live in a world of "'fake news,'" where language is seen as unreliable and used for malicious purposes. The paradox is that language is so successful because it can be exploited and reshaped all of the time.

BT: A fascinating example in the book about the fickleness of language was the U.S. government's Human Interference Task Force, which, in order to warn future generations about where radioactive waste was buried, tried to predict the possible futures of the English language. But it failed. Why?

PS: Their problem was, how do you communicate to future generations when you know that, over the course of millenia, the English language will have changed to be almost unrecognizable?

Unless we had specifically learned it, you and I would not be able to read something from 1,000 years ago, and when we're talking about nuclear waste, it remains harmful for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. So how on Earth do we communicate a warning into the future when language doesn't have that stability? The whole point about language is that it's adaptable.

BT: In 1981, when the task force and the field of nuclear semiotics was founded, the scientists working on it came up with all sorts of mad proposals to communicate that danger — genetically engineering flowers and cats to glow around radiation, for instance. You mention that they realized that even symbols, such as a skull and crossbones, could lose the meaning they carry today over time.

PS: Pretty much, yeah. There's no intrinsic relationship between a word and a thing, or a symbol and a thing. We know that a skull and crossbones has a traditional meaning of a warning, but it could be interpreted another way. It's all about the meaning we put into it, and that's why it changes and continues to change to keep up with an evolving society.

BT: Just how much capacity does language have to change? Some tech moguls — notably, Elon Musk — have suggested that brain-computer interfaces could bypass spoken, embodied language altogether and put us in a wordless future. Is this likely, or is it the result of flawed thinking?

PS: I think it's just flawed thinking. It will be interesting to see what happens if this ever becomes mainstream and sits alongside how we communicate now, but it sounds like it's an awful long way off. Right now, people can tap out things on a keyboard using their brain waves very slowly.

Elon Musk has called the device attempting to do this "telepathy," but I think that's science fiction thinking bleeding into actual innovation. What that actual innovation will end up as seems unlikely to match some of his pronouncements.

Even if it does happen, I can't imagine it will supersede lots of the ways we use language. As we were saying, language isn't just about information transfer; the voice is integral to huge aspects of our lives. Take singing, for example — how are you going to do that telepathically? The whole creativity and identity aspect of language doesn't seem to fit into that model at all.

What often happens is that, instead of things replacing each other, new and old language technologies exist side by side and mix in interesting ways. I would imagine something along those lines being much more likely to happen.

BT: People had the same discussion when emoji first made their way into mainstream use — some feared that they would somehow supplant traditional words.

PS: Yes, and that hasn't happened at all either. Instead, you see them being used together, rather than what the discourse was, which is that we're going to forget how to write instead.

BT: Let's say we soon have brain-computer interfaces and AI acting as widespread intermediaries for languages. What are the implications for free speech?

PS: The thing about free speech is that the more mediation you have — the more people, organizations or apparatuses that sit between a person and their audience — the more chance there is for communication to be regulated. Laws [related to free speech] try to make sure that mediation can't be misused.

In the popular conversation about free speech, most of the discussion is about "Can I use this word or that word?" and so forth. But in the past, laws related to the freedom of the press enabled the press to publish what it wanted, and if it overreached the law, it would then be punished. But with AI, it's much easier to do that censorship at the moment someone is speaking.

Chinese social media, for example, filters out speech before you even get a chance to say it out loud, and you're not even going to know that because the filtering is embedded in the mediating technology.

That could very well be problematic, especially in terms of who owns the mediating technology — big companies who have mixed motivations, want good PR and don't want to be criticized. That's an issue, because it will become even more easy to intervene purely because of how the technology works.

BT: We're not necessarily in a hopeless situation, though, because as you mention in the book, people throughout history have always been very good at finding inventive ways to sidestep censorship.

PS: Yeah, it's still probably quite effective in China, and there are risks in circumventing it — especially when you consider the surveillance aspect of data. But people have always been historically pretty good at finding ways to push back on it.

That's the thing with free speech: It's never one thing or the other. It's always a continuing struggle, a constantly revised political battle. But it's because the technology is posing problems in a different and new way that one needs to keep on top of it.

BT: Stepping beyond human language for a moment, scientists are also using AI on whale songs in a bid to decode what they're saying. Is this even a remote possibility, in your view?

PS: Gosh. Basically, I think yes. Our fundamental experience of life is so different that language is just the first part of the challenge.

I imagine it's possible to understand how different species communicate in more nuanced ways with this sort of technology, but that's not the same as speaking to them. It's like trying to teach chimps sign language — it works insofar as there's some sort of communication possible between us and them anyway.

I think the assumption is that language is the answer to something that it's not. Like the idea of a universal language being the solution to world peace — it could help, but in practice, it's much more complicated.

BT: Taking one step further, if language is so tied to our immediate experience and environment, how far can we really anticipate the problems of communicating one day with extraterrestrial intelligence?

PS: I'm by no means an expert on this, but I read a lot about it for the book. It's another interesting idea, and the challenge is that we just don't know. With animals, we know they exist in the first place, we know the kind of life they have, we know aspects of their cognitive abilities, and we know they can make sounds and gestures. With aliens, we don't even have that basic information.

That makes everything we say pure speculation, but the interesting thing is that that speculation helps us get a better idea of what human language is and does. Sending a message across millions of light-years and reaching anyone is highly unlikely, but it's still not pointless.

My book, as you say, is a history of futurism, and part of that history is science fiction. Science fiction feeds into actual technological innovation and the questions we ask ourselves, even though it's just fiction.

Language is fundamental, and because of that, it's hugely complex and there's still an awful lot that we have to learn and understand about it — even without considering all the technological aspects of it.

BT: What do you think we still need to learn?

PS: My particular interest is sociolinguistics — the relationship between language and society — but there are all sorts of interesting questions in cognitive linguistics and how we generate language in the brain, and there's not a lot of consensus out there.

And how we understand language, even if it's scientifically wrong, feeds into the way we use it. People think there's "correct" and "incorrect" grammar, for instance, and make judgments based on that, even if a sociolinguist will tell you that everything's equal from a scientific point of view.

I think there will always be evolving questions about language, so even if there are unresolved questions, it's not like there's ever going to be a settled knowledge about it.

Editor's note: This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Elon Musk's recent announcement on Twitter that "Tesla will have genuinely useful humanoid robots in low production for Tesla internal use next year" suggests that robots that have physical human-like characteristics and provide "genuinely useful" function might be with us soon.

However, despite decades of trying, useful humanoid robots have remained a fiction that never seems to quite catch up with reality. Are we finally on the crux of a breakthrough? It's relevant to question whether we really need humanoid robots at all.

Tesla's Optimus robot is just one of several emerging humanoid robots, joining the likes of Boston Dyanmic's Atlas, Figure AI's Figure 01, Sanctuary AI's Phoenix and many others. They usually take the form of a bipedal platform that is variously capable of walking and sometimes, jumping, along with other athletic feats. On top of this platform a pair of robot arms and hands may be mounted that are capable of manipulating objects with varying degrees of dexterity and tactility.

Behind the eyes lies artificial intelligence tailored to planning navigation, recognising objects and carrying out tasks with these objects. The most commonly envisaged uses for such robots are in factories, carrying out repetitious, dirty, dull and dangerous tasks, and working alongside humans, collaboratively, carrying a ladder together for example.

RELATED: Self-healing 'living skin' can make robots more humanlike — and it looks just as creepy as you'd expect

They are also proposed for work in service industry roles, perhaps replacing the current generation of more utilitarian "meet and greet" and "tour guide" service robots. They could possibly be used in social care, where there have been attempts to lift and move humans, like the Riken Robear (admittedly this was more bear than humanoid), and to deliver personal care and therapy.

There is also a more established and growing market in humanoid sex robots. Interestingly, while many people recognise the moral and ethical issues related to these, the use of humanoid robots in other areas seems to attract less controversy. It is, however, proving challenging to deliver humanoid robots in practice. Why should this be so?

There are numerous engineering challenges, such as achieving flexible bipedal locomotion on different terrain. It took humans about four million years to achieve this, so where we are now with humanoid robots is pretty impressive. But humans learn to combine a complex set of sensing capabilities to achieve this feat.

Similarly, achieving the dexterous manipulation of objects, which come in all shapes, sizes, weights, levels of fragility, is proving stubborn with robots. There has been significant progress, though, such as the dexterous hands from UK company Shadow Robot.

Compared to the human body that is covered in a soft and flexible skin that continuously senses and adapts to the world, robots' tactile capabilities are limited to only a few points of contact such as finger tips.

Moving beyond automating specific tasks on factory assembly lines to improvising general tasks in a dynamic world demands greater progress in artificial intelligence as well as sensing and mechanical capabilities. Finally, if you are going to make a robot look human, then there is an expectation that it would also need to communicate with us like a human, perhaps even respond emotionally.

However, this is where things can get really tricky, because if our brains, which have evolved to recognise non-verbal elements of communication, don't perceive all the micro-expressions that are interpreted at a subconscious level, the humanoid robot can come across as positively creepy.

These are just a few of the major research challenges that are already taxing communities of researchers in robotics and human-robot interaction across the globe. There's also the additional constraint of deploying humanoid robots in our ever-changing noisy real world, with rain, dust and heat. These are very different conditions to the ones they're tested in. So shouldn't we focus on building systems that are more robust and won't succumb to the same pitfalls that humans do?

Recreating ourselves

This brings us to the question of why Musk and many others are focused on humanoid robots. Must our robotic companions look like us? One argument is that we have gradually adapted our world to suit the human body. For example, our buildings and cities are largely constructed to accommodate our physical form. So an obvious choice is for robots to assume this form as well.

It must be said, though, that our built environments and tools often assume a certain level of strength, dexterity and sensory ability which disadvantages a vast number of people, including those who are disabled. So would the rise of stronger metal machines among us, further perpetuate this divide?

Perhaps we should see robots as being part of the world that we need to create which better accommodates the diversity of human bodies. We could put more effort into integrating robotics technologies into our buildings, furniture, tools and vehicles, making them smarter and more adaptable, so that they become more accessible for everyone.

It is striking how the current generation of limited robot forms fails to reflect the diversity of human bodies. Perhaps our apparent obsession with humanoid robots has other, deeper roots. The god-like desire to create versions of ourselves is a fantasy played out time and time again in dystopian science fiction, from which the tech industry's readily appropriates ideas.

Or perhaps, humanoid robots are a "Moon shot", a vision that we can all understand but is incredibly difficult to achieve. In short, we may not be entirely sure why we want to go there, but impressive engineering innovations are likely to emerge from just trying.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The first person with Neuralink's computer-linked chip implanted in the surface of their brain showed off their "telekinetic" online chess-playing skills while discussing the "life-changing" procedure for the first time in a surprise livestream. 

Noland Arbaugh, a 29-year-old with quadriplegia (or paralysis that affects the body from the neck down), volunteered to have the device implanted as part of Neuralink's ongoing trial of the technology. Until now, his identity had remained a closely guarded secret.

In the video, which was posted March 20 on X, formerly known as Twitter, Arbaugh played a game of online chess on a laptop while controlling the cursor with his thoughts. He said that controlling computers with his mind felt "like using The Force" and joked that he planned to dress as the telepathic superhero Professor X for Halloween this year.

Arbaugh described learning to use the brain chip to control a computer cursor, initially by attempting to move his hand to generate the necessary brain signals. 

"From there, I think it just became intuitive for me to start imagining the cursor moving," he said in the livestream. "Just stare somewhere at the screen and it would move where I wanted to, which was such a wild experience."

Related: New 'thought-controlled' device reads brain activity through the jugular

Neuralink is a U.S.-based company founded and owned by SpaceX mogul Elon Musk. It specializes in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), devices that read brain activity and translate it into commands that operate a computer system. 

The Neuralink device being tested, called Telepathy, is around the size of a coin and is implanted into a small hole in the skull, which is drilled by a robot. Once inserted, the device releases electrode threads that connect to "a region of the brain that controls movement intention," Neuralink representatives wrote in a previous statement. The device then detects the brain's electrical signals and wirelessly transmits that data to an app, which ultimately translates it into computer commands that can control a keyboard and mouse.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration cleared the device to be tested in human trials in June 2023. In January this year, Musk announced that the first device had successfully been implanted into a human patient, who we now know was Arbaugh.

The livestream was completely unexpected and is the first update from Neuralink on the company's X account since it reposted Musk's announcement in January.

Arbaugh, who said he sustained his injuries after a diving accident eight years ago, appeared to be at ease in the video as he played the chess game and talked to Neuralinks' BCI software lead Bliss Chapman. He also used the cursor to pause a song that was playing in the background.

"It's all being done with my brain," Arbaugh said in the video. "It's crazy!"

In addition to playing chess, Arbaugh said he has used the device to play the computer game Civilization VI and to help him learn Japanese and French, presumably through the use of online programs.

Before receiving the Neuralink device, Arbaugh's computer-based exploits were limited to using a mouth stick or relying on family members to press buttons for him. "Now I can lie in bed and play to my heart's content," Arbaugh said.

Arbaugh also revealed that the surgery to implant the device was "super easy" and that he was discharged from the hospital a day later. He also said that he has had "no cognitive impairment" since the device was implanted.  

Regarding why he entered the trial, Arbaugh said, "I wanted to be a part of something that I feel like is going to change the world." 

"It has already changed my life," he added. "I'm so freaking lucky to be a part of this."

However, last month, experts expressed concerns at the lack of transparency surrounding Neuralink's first human trial and cautioned that, in general, BCIs could be susceptible to hacking, so transparency is warranted. 

In the past, critics have also voiced concerns about the ethics of artificially augmenting people's brains, specifically those without a need for such devices. Neuralink's devices are currently being tested as assistive technologies for people with paralysis, as are other similar devices made by other companies. But Musk has talked of people — including himself — eventually using Neuralink's implants for self-enhancement.

Chapman said in the livestream that Nerualink would release more information about the device and the initial trial in "the coming days."

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SpaceX's Starship rocket just reached orbit for the very first time, but now it's gotten lost upon reentry. 

The giant rocket — the biggest and most powerful ever built — blasted off from its launchpad in Boca Chica, Texas, on Thursday (March 14) at 9:25 a.m. EDT (1:25 p.m. GMT), entering the stratosphere just minutes later with a record-breaking 16.5 million pounds (7.5 million kilograms) of thrust. Standing 394 feet (120 meters) tall, Starship can carry 10 times the payload of SpaceX's current Falcon 9 rockets. 

The launch is the rocket's third test flight, and its first one to reach orbit; the previous two ended in dramatic explosions of the craft's 33-engine Super Heavy booster rocket that culminated in an environmental lawsuit. After conducting a number of maneuvers during the spacecraft's hour-long flight in orbit, mission control reportedly lost contact with Starship as it reentered Earth's atmosphere somewhere over the Indian Ocean.

Starship likely broke up or exploded over the ocean, SpaceX confirmed.

"The team has made the call that the ship has been lost, so no splashdown today," Dan Huot, SpaceX's communications manager, said during the company's livestream of the launch. "But again, just it's incredible to see how much further we got this time around."

Related: Controversial paper claims satellite 'megaconstellations' like SpaceX's could weaken Earth's magnetic field and cause 'atmospheric stripping.' Should we be worried?

"Starship reached orbital velocity!" Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX wrote in a post on X, formerly called Twitter, shortly after the successful launch. "Congratulations SpaceX team!!"

Once the rocket was in flight, mission engineers completed a number of tests, including re-lighting its engines in space and opening its payload door, before steering the craft back to splash down in the Indian Ocean. However, during reentry, the team lost contact with Starlink — SpaceX's satellite internet service — and the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System that it uses to keep an eye on its rockets.

SpaceX intends to use future versions of Starship to transport crews, spacecraft, satellites and cargo to various locations in the solar system — both for its own purposes and on behalf of NASA. The U.S. space agency is slated to use Starship's Human Landing System to transport humans to the moon's surface for the first time since 1972, for the upcoming Artemis 3 and 4 missions.

Starship is designed primarily with cheap and efficient manufacturing in mind, using inexpensive stainless steel for its construction and methane — which SpaceX says can be collected on Mars — to power the rocket. It is designed to be reusable and can carry a payload of up to 275 tons (250 metric tons) in its non-reusable state, around 10 times that of SpaceX's current Falcon 9 rockets.

SpaceX doesn't appear to be too concerned about its misplaced rocket and often states that failures during early test phases are normal.

"Each of these flight tests continue to be just that: a test," SpaceX said in a statement released before the launch. "They aren't occurring in a lab or on a test stand, but are putting flight hardware in a flight environment to maximize learning."

Putting a computer inside someone's brain used to feel like the edge of science fiction. Today, it's a reality. Academic and commercial groups are testing "brain-computer interface" devices to enable people with disabilities to function more independently. Yet Elon Musk's company, Neuralink, has put this technology front and center in debates about safety, ethics and neuroscience.

In January 2024, Musk announced that Neuralink implanted its first chip in a human subject's brain. The Conversation reached out to two scholars at the University of Washington School of Medicine —  Nancy Jecker, a bioethicst, and Andrew Ko, a neurosurgeon who implants brain chip devices —  for their thoughts on the ethics of this new horizon in neuroscience.

How does a brain chip work?

Neuralink's coin-size device, called N1, is designed to enable patients to carry out actions just by concentrating on them, without moving their bodies.

Subjects in the company's PRIME study —  short for Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface —  undergo surgery to place the device in a part of the brain that controls movement. The chip records and processes the brain's electrical activity, then transmits this data to an external device, such as a phone or computer.

The external device "decodes" the patient's brain activity, learning to associate certain patterns with the patient's goal: moving a computer cursor up a screen, for example. Over time, the software can recognize a pattern of neural firing that consistently occurs while the participant is imagining that task, and then execute the task for the person.

Neuralink's current trial is focused on helping people with paralyzed limbs control computers or smartphones. Brain-computer interfaces, commonly called BCIs, can also be used to control devices such as wheelchairs.

A few companies are testing BCIs. What's different about Neuralink?

Noninvasive devices positioned on the outside of a person's head have been used in clinical trials for a long time, but they have not received approval from the Food and Drug Administration for commercial development.

There are other brain-computer devices, like Neuralink's, that are fully implanted and wireless. However, the N1 implant combines more technologies in a single device: It can target individual neurons, record from thousands of sites in the brain and recharge its small battery wirelessly. These are important advances that could produce better outcomes.

Why is Neuralink drawing criticism?

Neuralink received FDA approval for human trials in May 2023. Musk announced the company's first human trial on his social media platform, X —  formerly Twitter —  in January 2024.

Information about the implant, however, is scarce, aside from a brochure aimed at recruiting trial subjects. Neuralink did not register at ClinicalTrials.gov, as is customary, and required by some academic journals.

Some scientists are troubled by this lack of transparency. Sharing information about clinical trials is important because it helps other investigators learn about areas related to their research and can improve patient care. Academic journals can also be biased toward positive results, preventing researchers from learning from unsuccessful experiments.

Fellows at the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank, have warned that Musk's brand of "science by press release, while increasingly common, is not science." They advise against relying on someone with a huge financial stake in a research outcome to function as the sole source of information.

When scientific research is funded by government agencies or philanthropic groups, its aim is to promote the public good. Neuralink, on the other hand, embodies a private equity model, which is becoming more common in science. Firms pooling funds from private investors to back science breakthroughs may strive to do good, but they also strive to maximize profits, which can conflict with patients' best interests.

In 2022, the U.S. Department of Agriculture investigated animal cruelty at Neuralink, according to a Reuters report, after employees accused the company of rushing tests and botching procedures on test animals in a race for results. The agency's inspection found no breaches, according to a letter from the USDA secretary to lawmakers, which Reuters reviewed. However, the secretary did note an "adverse surgical event" in 2019 that Neuralink had self-reported.

In a separate incident also reported by Reuters, the Department of Transportation fined Neuralink for violating rules about transporting hazardous materials, including a flammable liquid.

What other ethical issues does Neuralink's trial raise?

When brain-computer interfaces are used to help patients who suffer from disabling conditions function more independently, such as by helping them communicate or move about, this can profoundly improve their quality of life. In particular, it helps people recover a sense of their own agency or autonomy —  one of the key tenets of medical ethics.

However well-intentioned, medical interventions can produce unintended consequences. With BCIs, scientists and ethicists are particularly concerned about the potential for identity theft, password hacking and blackmail. Given how the devices access users' thoughts, there is also the possibility that their autonomy could be manipulated by third parties.

The ethics of medicine requires physicians to help patients, while minimizing potential harm. In addition to errors and privacy risks, scientists worry about potential adverse effects of a completely implanted device like Neuralink, since device components are not easily replaced after implantation.

When considering any invasive medical intervention, patients, providers and developers seek a balance between risk and benefit. At current levels of safety and reliability, the benefit of a permanent implant would have to be large to justify the uncertain risks.

What's next?

For now, Neuralink's trials are focused on patients with paralysis. Musk has said his ultimate goal for BCIs, however, is to help humanity —  including healthy people —  "keep pace" with artificial intelligence.

This raises questions about another core tenet of medical ethics: justice. Some types of supercharged brain-computer synthesis could exacerbate social inequalities if only wealthy citizens have access to enhancements.

What is more immediately concerning, however, is the possibility that the device could be increasingly shown to be helpful for people with disabilities, but become unavailable due to loss of research funding. For patients whose access to a device is tied to a research study, the prospect of losing access after the study ends can be devastating. This raises thorny questions about whether it is ever ethical to provide early access to breakthrough medical interventions prior to their receiving full FDA approval.

Clear ethical and legal guidelines are needed to ensure the benefits that stem from scientific innovations like Neuralink's brain chip are balanced against patient safety and societal good.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The neurotechnology company Neuralink implanted a brain chip into its first human subject on Nov. 28, founder Elon Musk announced on X.

The brain-computer interface (BCI), called Telepathy, is intended to translate a user's brain signals into information that can be processed by a computer, via Bluetooth. This should allow users to control devices, such as phones, using just their thoughts, the company says.

The device is surgically implanted into a small hole in the skull drilled by a robot, which then places electrode threads in "a region of the brain that controls movement intention," according to a Sept. 2023 press release from Neuralink.

The initial goal of Neuralink's in-human trial — which was cleared by the Food and Drug Administration last year — will be to enable participants to control a computer cursor or keyboard with their minds. In his X post, Musk wrote that the trial's first participant "is recovering well" from surgery, and "initial results show promising neuron spike detection," meaning the device is presumably picking up the person's brain signals.

Related: Brain-computer interface helps patient with locked-in syndrome communicate

The company recruited people with quadriplegia, or some level of paralysis that affects their body from the neck down, to participate in the trial, according to a recruitment pamphlet.

Alongside Neuralink, other groups are also testing BCIs to help people with paralysis communicate via devices. So far, the field has shown promise.

Broadly, "the idea of brain-nervous system interfaces has great potential to help people with neurological disorders in future and is an excellent example of how fundamental neuroscience research is being harnessed for medical advances," Tara Spires-Jones, president of the British Neuroscience Association, said in a statement from the Science Media Centre.

But Neuralink’s journey has been far from smooth sailing. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Agriculture launched a federal probe into Neuralink investigating claims of animal welfare violations during their preclinical brain chip tests. Less than a year later, WIRED revealed that several of Neuralink's primate subjects had to be put down due to health complications, including one that contracted an infection after a piece of the implant broke off during surgery.

Neuralink isn't the first company to insert BCIs into human subjects. For example, in 2022, biotechnology company Synchron announced promising trial results for its own implanted device that helps people operate assistive technologies with their thoughts.

Although Neuralink is currently focused on the medical applications of its device, the company wants to eventually broaden the use of the chip. Its goal is "to restore autonomy to those with unmet medical needs today and unlock human potential tomorrow," according to Neuralink's website.

Musk even said in 2022 that he would eventually receive the implant himself one day, CNBC reported.

However, some experts are concerned by the ethical implications of using the device for self-enhancement. 

"A society where some people are cognitively enhanced and others aren't could create a class divide like nothing ever," Allan McCay, a fellow at the University of Sydney’s Law School, told The Washington Post.

Ever wonder why some people build muscle more easily than others or why freckles come out in the sun? Send us your questions about how the human body works to community@livescience.com with the subject line "Health Desk Q," and you may see your question answered on the website!

SpaceX's giant Starship rocket apparently performed better on its second-ever test flight than its explosive end would suggest.

The mission launched from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas on Nov. 18 of last year. It ended about eight minutes after liftoff, when Starship's upper-stage spacecraft (called, somewhat confusingly, Starship), detonated high in the Texas sky.

But the vehicle was performing quite well until that point, and likely would have continued on that successful path had it been a normal, operational flight, according to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk.

"So, Flight 2 actually almost made it to orbit," Musk said in a recent company update, which SpaceX posted on X on Jan. 12. The explosion was caused by a venting of liquid oxygen, he added — and there was liquid oxygen left to vent only because Starship wasn't hauling any satellites that day.

"We normally wouldn't have that liquid oxygen if we had a payload," Musk said in the update, which he gave at Starbase to a crowd of SpaceX employees. "So, ironically, if it had had a payload, it would have reached orbit."

SpaceX is developing Starship to help humanity settle Mars and achieve other bold exploration feats. The vehicle consists of a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and the Starship upper stage, which is about 165 feet (50 meters) tall. Both of these elements are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.

SpaceX has launched two Starship test flights to date, both of them from Starbase. The first, which lifted off on April 20 of last year, ended about four minutes into flight with a controlled detonation. SpaceX ordered that explosion because Starship suffered several serious problems, most notably the failure of its two stages to separate.

The Nov. 18 flight went much more smoothly, as Musk noted, giving him optimism for future missions.

"I think we've got a really good shot of reaching orbit with Flight 3, and then a rapid cadence to achieve full and rapid reusability," he said in the recent update. SpaceX plans to launch Flight 3 next month, provided the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issues a license in time. (The FAA is currently overseeing an investigation into what happened on Flight 2.)

Musk hopes this anticipated rapid development leads to an operational capability soon; he said SpaceX aims to start launching its big, next-generation Starlink internet satellites aboard Starship by the end of the year.

NASA wants to see Starship get up and running soon as well; the agency selected the vehicle to be the first crewed lander for its Artemis program of moon exploration. Starship will put astronauts down on the lunar surface for the first time on the Artemis 3 mission, which is currently targeted to launch in September 2026.

Starship is already the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. It stands about 400 feet (122 meters) tall and generates 16.7 million pounds of thrust at liftoff — nearly twice as much thrust as NASA's Space Launch System megarocket, a core part of the Artemis program.

But the current Starship is just a prototype. The final, operational version will be even bigger, Musk said in the recent update.

SpaceX is working on "a sort of a Version 2 ship that will be more reliable, better performance, [with better] endurance," he said. "We've got a Version 3 ship design that will stretch, that will be even taller — probably end up being, I don't know, 140 meters [459 feet] before it's all said and done, maybe 150 [492 feet] in the end, in length."

"So, it'll be even taller than it currently is," Musk added with a chuckle.

Originally posted on Space.com.

A new video shows Tesla's eerie new humanoid robot walking like an old man, doing squats and handling delicate objects like eggs. 

The Optimus Gen 2 machine is an upgrade on the first version of Optimus, which was revealed in March. In the firm's promotional video, Optimus Gen 2 demonstrates fine control over its hands and fingers using six actuators — devices that convert energy and signals into motion. 

Its fingers also possess tactile sensing, which means it can understand how much pressure it needs to apply in certain contexts — when holding eggs, for example. It can also manipulate objects delicately, according to Tesla's video.

Related: Who was the first cyborg?

The machine's neck is also designed with two degrees of freedom (2-DoF), which is a basic level of motion in robotics that's suited to many everyday tasks.

Its fingers also possess tactile sensing, which means it can understand how much pressure it needs to apply in certain contexts — when holding eggs, for example. It can also manipulate objects delicately, according to Tesla's video.

A previous update showed an earlier version of Optimus Gen 2 and the technology built into it, including motor torque control and environment scanning. The artificial intelligence (AI) technology that drives the robot was also revealed to have trained on footage and motion-capture data from a human demonstrating specific actions, such as gripping different objects from a tray. 

Tesla's released its first robot, Bumble-C in September 2022.  The robot doesn't have the advanced capabilities of some competitor robots, such as Atlas from Boston Dynamics. The purpose of Tesla's machines, however, is similar to those of Boston Dynamics, which aims to create robots that reduce the danger and physical demands of work. 

The field is advancing at some pace. Researchers in November created a robotic hand that was exceptionally human-like thanks to a new 3D-printing technique. On the other end of the scale to the likes of Atlas or Optimus, scientists also recently created the first shape-shifting robot, which can manipulate its form as it navigates its terrain.   

Within five years, Tesla envisions using follow-up versions of their humanoid bots to work alongside humans in real-world industrial environments, like factories, according to Elon Musk, speaking at Bumble-C's launch in 2022.

Elon Musk's brain-implant company Neuralink has been given clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to carry out its first trials in humans, according to news reports.

Neuralink aims to use its brain-computer interface (BCI) technology to restore movement in people with quadriplegia, meaning complete or partial paralysis of the arms, legs and trunk. Musk has also said that the brain implants could be used to restore sight in blind people. 

Neurons, or nerve cells, communicate via electrical signals to coordinate our thoughts, feelings and behavior. Neuralink's implants, which have only been tested in animals, would theoretically work by interpreting these electrical signals and transmitting the decoded information to a computer via Bluetooth. In the case of helping to restore movement, for example, the computer would then analyze the incoming information and respond by sending signals back to the body, stimulating nerves and muscles to control movement. 

The implant is inserted into a small hole in the skull created by a surgery-performing robot and the implant's electrodes are then embedded just a few millimeters into the cortex, the brain's outer layer. The procedure can be done in 30 minutes, without general anesthesia, Musk has claimed — although again, this has never been attempted in humans.

Related: 1st patient with new 'mind-reading' device uses brain signals to write 

Neuralink is not the only company working on BCI technology. For example, in 2022 Synchron implanted its Stentrode system into its first human patient after gaining FDA clearance to begin in-human trials; the device is designed to let people with paralysis operate assistive technologies using only their thoughts. Synchron also aims to restore movement in severely paralyzed people, according to Forbes.

Musk once reportedly approached Synchron's founder about a potential deal. This approach came just months before a federal investigation into Neuralink was launched to look into potential violations of animal welfare and Neuralink staff raised complaints that the company's animal testing was being rushed, leading to unnecessary animal suffering and deaths, Reuters reported.

An animal rights group, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), filed a complaint in February 2022 that accused Neuralink of "botching surgeries." The group claimed that surgeons had used an unapproved glue on two occasions to fill the holes in the monkeys' skulls, which then leaked onto the animals' brains and ultimately killed them. Separately, based on a PCRM tip, the Department of Transportation is investigating whether Neuralink is taking the required precautions when transporting implants that have been removed from monkey brains. 

Neuralink has killed an estimated 1,500 animals since 2018, including sheep, pigs and monkeys, Reuters reported. While it is unclear how many died due to complications with Neuralink's brain implants, Futurism reported that, in one Neuralink experiment involving 23 monkeys, five, or 21%, of the test subjects were euthanized due to device-related issues.

Neuralink's first attempt at gaining FDA approval in 2022 was rejected on safety grounds, according to an exclusive Reuters report. Musk, however, remains confident in the safety of Neuralink, claiming that he would be willing to implant the technology in his children's brains and even his own brain.

The upcoming in-human trials must prove the safety and efficacy of Neuralink's brain implants before they can become FDA-approved and widely available. Recruitment for clinical trials is not yet open, Neuralink wrote in a tweet. 

Environmental activists are suing the U.S. government to prevent any further launches of SpaceX's Starship rocket, following an explosive launch over a South Texas wildlife reserve. 

The lawsuit — filed in a Washington, D.C., federal court Monday (May 1) — claims that Starship "scattered debris and ash over a large area" during its April 20 launch. The plaintiffs seek to force the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the agency responsible for regulating civil aviation in the U.S., into revoking Starship's launch license, pending a yearslong environmental review.

SpaceX's giant rocket, the biggest and most powerful ever built, began its dramatic debut flight by punching a crater into the concrete beneath its launchpad and ended it roughly four minutes later with a midair explosion. 

Related: Geomagnetic storm sends 40 SpaceX satellites plummeting to Earth

The launch reportedly smashed windows in Port Isabel, Texas (a town roughly 6 miles, or 10 kilometers, from the rocket's launchpad), while starting a 3.5-acre (1.4 hectares) fire in state park lands and hurling concrete, metal and ash over the habitats of endangered animals.

In the filing, the plaintiffs — who include the Center for Biological Diversity, the American Bird Conservancy and the Carrizo-Comecrudo Nation of Texas — claim that the FAA "failed to take the requisite hard look at significant environmental effects of the project," which include "contributions to climate change; the impacts of beach closures on the community … the potential for highly destructive wildfires; and the impacts to wildlife from increased traffic, lighting, and the noise and heat associated with rocket launches." 

Located in Boca Chica, Texas, SpaceX's Starbase facility stands in the middle of a previously undeveloped region surrounded by National Wildlife Refuge lands and beaches that are home to endangered birds and sea turtles, including the Kemp's Ridley (Lepidochelys kempii), the most endangered sea turtle on the planet. 

Before the launch, the FAA worked with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to issue a "Final Programmatic Environmental Assessment" for SpaceX's Starship and Super Heavy spacecrafts, stipulating a number of steps SpaceX was to take before launch to protect the surrounding environment. 

However, the plaintiffs say the FAA should have instead investigated and produced an in-depth report called an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) — a much longer process that can take an average of 3.4 years.

"Permitting SpaceX to launch the largest rockets known to humankind is the type of significant federal action that requires full analysis," the document authors wrote. The document claims that over the past five years, at least eight rockets have exploded on the site. 

Following the most recent launch, the FAA grounded further flights of the Starship rocket pending the results of a "mishap investigation," which is standard practice when rockets go astray. The FAA's investigation will need to conclude that Starship does not affect public safety before it can launch again. As debris spread much farther than anticipated, the FAA's "anomaly response plan" has also come into force, meaning SpaceX must complete extra "environmental mitigations" before reapplying for its launch license.

How much this could stall further launches of the mammoth rockets is yet unclear. SpaceX founder Elon Musk said he expects the next Starship to blast off in six to eight weeks.

Standing 394 feet (120 meters) tall and propelled by a record-breaking 16.5 million pounds (7.5 million kilograms) of thrust, Starship can carry 10 times the payload of SpaceX's current Falcon 9 rockets. The gargantuan rocket was designed to transport crewmembers, spacecraft, satellites and cargo to locations around the solar system, both for SpaceX and on behalf of NASA.

Unlike other launch sites for large rockets, SpaceX's Boca Chica site lacks both a deluge system, which floods pads with shock-wave-suppressing water or foam, and a flame trench to safely channel away burning exhaust.

During an April 29 discussion on Twitter Spaces, Musk said the debris was "just basically sand and rock" and "not toxic" and that the company was taking measures to prevent another messy launch, including installing a steel plate beneath the launchpad and using a water deluge system.

"Basically, the outcome was roughly sort of what I expected, and maybe slightly exceeded my expectations," Musk said. "To the best of our knowledge, there has not been any meaningful damage to the environment that we're aware of."

The FAA does not comment on ongoing litigations, but the agency previously said that SpaceX had met all public safety and environmental requirements to go ahead with the launch.

SpaceX's Starship has been grounded by the U.S. government following claims that the rocket's explosive first launch spread plumes of potentially hazardous debris over homes and the habitats of endangered animals.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) — the U.S. civil aviation regulator — has stopped SpaceX from conducting any further launches until it has concluded a "mishap investigation" into Starship's April 20 test launch. The massive rocket’s dramatic flight began by punching a crater into the concrete beneath the launchpad and ended when the giant rocket exploded in mid-air around 4 minutes later.

Dust and debris from the test reportedly rained down on residents in Port Isabel, Texas — a town roughly 6 miles (10 kilometers) from the launchpad — and across Boca Chica's beaches, which are nesting grounds for endangered animals, including birds and sea turtles. 

Related: Geomagnetic storm sends 40 SpaceX satellites plummeting to Earth

Dave Cortez, a chapter director for the Sierra Club environmental advocacy group, said that Port Isabel residents reported broken windows in their businesses and ash-like particles covering their homes and schools. 

SpaceX's launchpad was also left with extensive damage that includes charred, twisted metal and shattered concrete. The force from the rocket's engines blew a hole in the launchpad and created a crater beneath it. "Concrete shot out into the ocean," Cortez told CNBC, creating shrapnel that "risked hitting the fuel storage tanks which are these silos adjacent to the launch pad." 

Unlike other launch sites for large rockets, SpaceX’s Boca Chica site lacks both a deluge system, which floods pads with shockwave-suppressing water or foam, and a flame trench to safely channel burning exhaust away.

"Aspiring to have no flame diverter in Boca, but this could turn out to be a mistake," SpaceX founder Elon Musk wrote in an October 2020 tweet.

The FAA's mishap investigation is standard practice when rockets go astray. The FAA’s investigation will need to conclude that Starship does not affect public safety before it can launch again. As debris spread far further than anticipated, the FAA's "anomaly response plan" has also come into force, meaning SpaceX must complete extra "environmental mitigations" before reapplying for its launch license.

Musk wrote on Twitter that SpaceX began work on "a massive water-cooled, steel plate to go under the launch mount" three months prior to the launch, but it wasn't ready in time.

"Looks like we can be ready to launch again in 1 to 2 months," he added.

Standing at 394 feet (120 meters) tall and propelled by a record-breaking 16.5 million pounds (7.5 million kilograms) of thrust, SpaceX's Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. Able to carry 10 times the payload of SpaceX's current Falcon 9 rockets, Starship was designed to transport crew members, spacecraft, satellites and cargo to locations in the solar system.

After blasting off from its launchpad at Boca Chica, Starship climbed to a maximum altitude of 24 miles (39 km) before problems with as many as eight of the rocket's 33 Raptor 2 engines caused Starship to flip and roll, leading SpaceX to order the rocket to self-destruct.

Despite the rocket's unexpectedly messy takeoff and fiery demise, SpaceX and Musk have hailed the test as a success that enabled engineers to gather essential data for the next launch. On April 16, four days before the test, Musk lowered expectations, warning in a Twitter discussion that if any of the rocket's engines went wrong "it's like having a box of grenades, really big grenades."

"This is really kind of the sort of first step in a very long journey that will require many, many flights," Musk said. "For those that have followed the history of Falcon 9, and Falcon 1 actually, and our attempts at reusability, I think it might have been close to 20 attempts before we actually recovered a stage. And then it took many more flights before we had reusability that was meaningful, where we didn't have to rebuild the whole rocket."

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wants to have a city of a million people on Mars by 2050. That may sound astronomically ambitious considering humans have never set foot on the Martian surface. But is it feasible? How long would it take for humans to colonize another planet? And could it ever be possible for people to colonize worlds outside the solar system?

The answers to these questions depend heavily on which planet you're talking about. For Mars, decades isn't necessarily an unrealistic time frame. Serkan Saydam, deputy director of the Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research and a professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, said human colonization of Mars is possible within decades.  

"I believe by 2050 we will have a human colony on Mars," Saydam told Live Science.  

Saydam is a mining engineer who specializes in researching future mining. The first major step in establishing a successful Mars colony will be water, and that can be extracted from ice and/or hydrated minerals, according to Saydam. He thinks water will then facilitate agriculture and the ability to grow food on Mars, like in the 2015 movie "The Martian," while hydrogen from the ice and minerals could also be used as an energy source for rocket propellant. 

But there isn't a scientific consensus on Mars colonization by 2050, and other scientists have offered less optimistic opinions. Louis Friedman, an astronautics engineer and co-founder of the nonprofit The Planetary Society, suggested to Gizmodo in 2019 that Mars colonization was unlikely for the foreseeable future, while Rachael Seidler, a neuroscientist at the University of Florida who has worked with NASA astronauts, told Gizmodo that people like to be optimistic about colonizing Mars, but it sounded "a bit pie-in-the-sky."

Humanity will, however, likely reach Mars within decades. China plans to start sending human crews to Mars in 2033, while NASA aims to send astronauts there by the late 2030s or early 2040s. Once humans get there, the next step could be to build a colony. 

Related: How many humans could the moon support?

Colonization implies some degree of self-sufficiency but not necessarily complete independence from Earth. Saydam compares Mars with a remote island where you'd still need to import things occasionally. "Most of the equipment and tools will be sent from Earth," Saydam said. "I don't think you can manufacture a truck on the Mars surface."

Mars would need to produce something for a long-term colony to be financially viable. Space tourism is one option, but Saydam pointed to mineral extraction as key to colonization success. For example, space mining on nearby asteroids for valuable materials such as platinum could create new space economies, thereby driving further investment and exploration.

Though Mars is our most realistic option for extraterrestrial colonization, our red neighbor isn't exactly the most accommodating planet for humans. Mars' atmosphere is more than 95% carbon dioxide; it's really cold, with an average temperature of around minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 60 degrees Celsius); it takes spacecraft from Earth about 8.5 months to reach; and it's bombarded with harmful radiation.

There's almost certainly more hospitable new homes to be found on planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets. The problem with exoplanets is that they're very, very far away. We haven't even sent a spacecraft to an exoplanet, and the only probes to leave our solar system were Voyager 1 and 2, which took 35 years and 41 years, respectively, to go interstellar. Exoplanets are much farther away. 

"The closest exoplanet would take several tens of thousands of years to reach with our current technology," Frédéric Marin, a black hole astrophysicist at the Astronomical Observatory of Strasbourg at the University of Strasbourg in France, told Live Science. 

Those travel times may make exoplanet colonization sound impossible. But Marin, who runs computer simulations for interstellar travel as a scientific curiosity, expects them to plummet in the near future, thanks to faster spacecraft.

"We know in science that every hundred years, every century, the velocity of your means of propulsion increases by a factor of 10," Marin said. In other words, as humans learn how to travel faster and faster in space with each passing century, the potential travel time to exoplanets could drop from tens of thousands of years to thousands of years, and then to hundreds of years. 

Marin laid out a hypothetical scenario of reaching an exoplanet that's at least hospitable to humans within 500 years. A journey lasting centuries would still require a spaceship piloted by multiple generations of humans, most of whom would never see the exoplanet that's eventually colonized. 

Marin's simulations suggest that around 500 people is a suitable starting population for a multigenerational colony ship. But how humans would cope with spending the rest of their lives on a spaceship and how their offspring would handle being born into interstellar travel life raise ethical questions and uncertainties. And with climate change and other Earth-based challenges threatening to drive humans to extinction before we crack interstellar travel, there's no guarantee we'll ever colonize exoplanets.

Russian space chief Dmitry Rogozin has apparently threatened Elon Musk, but the SpaceX founder and CEO doesn't seem too bothered. 

On Sunday (May 8), Musk posted on Twitter a note that he said Rogozin, the head of Russia's federal space agency Roscosmos, had sent out to Russian media. The note claimed that equipment for SpaceX's Starlink satellite-internet system had been delivered to Ukrainian marines and "militants of the Nazi Azov battalion" by the U.S. military.

"Elon Musk, thus, is involved in supplying the fascist forces in Ukraine with military communication equipment," Rogozin wrote, according to an English translation that Musk posted. (He also tweeted out a Russian version.) "And for this, Elon, you will be held accountable like an adult — no matter how much you'll play the fool."

Related: Elon Musk says SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service is active in Ukraine with more terminals on the way
Live updates: Ukraine invasion's impacts on space exploration

This sounds very much like a threat, as Musk acknowledged in a follow-up tweet on Sunday.

"If I die under mysterious circumstances, it's been nice knowin ya," he wrote.

Musk's mom, Maye, didn't appreciate that glib response, tweeting, "That's not funny" along with two angry-face emojis. The billionaire entrepreneur responded, "Sorry! I will do my best to stay alive." (It was Mother's Day, after all.)

It doesn't seem like Musk is terribly concerned about his safety, which isn't surprising given that Rogozin is prone to bluster and hyperbole. For example, the Roscosmos chief has repeatedly suggested that Russia may leave the International Space Station (ISS) program if sanctions imposed in the wake of the invasion aren't lifted, but it continues to be more or less business as usual on the orbiting lab.

And Musk and Rogozin have traded barbs before. In 2014, for example, Rogozin remarked that the United States should use a trampoline to get its astronauts to the ISS — a reference to the fact that the nation was, at the time, completely dependent on Russian Soyuz spacecraft for crewed orbital missions. (Rogozin, who was Russia's deputy prime minister at the time, was mad about sanctions imposed shortly after the nation invaded and annexed Crimea, which had been Ukrainian territory.)

In May 2020, SpaceX ended that reliance when it launched two NASA astronauts to the ISS on its landmark Demo-2 mission. Just after that liftoff, Musk delivered a riposte to Rogozin six years in the making: "The trampoline is working!" 

SpaceX, Musk and the United States Agency for International Development have been open about sending Starlink terminals to Ukraine, to help the country maintain some of its communications infrastructure during the ongoing invasion by Russia. Ukrainian officials asked for such equipment in late February, shortly after the invasion began.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or on Facebook.  

Elon Musk thinks SpaceX needs to ramp up production of its next-generation Raptor engine soon or face potentially dire consequences, according to media reports.

Raptors will power Starship, the huge, fully reusable vehicle that SpaceX is developing to take people and cargo to the moon, Mars and other distant destinations. Each Starship will need a lot of Raptors — 33 for the giant first-stage booster, called Super Heavy, and six for the upper-stage spacecraft, known as Starship.

SpaceX wants to operate a large fleet of Starships in the coming years. Indeed, perhaps 1,000 of the vehicles will be needed to colonize Mars, one of Musk's long-held dreams, the billionaire entrepreneur said earlier this month at the joint fall meeting of the Space Studies Board and the Board on Physics and Astronomy, both of which are part of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 

Related: SpaceX Inspiration4 astronauts return to Earth with historic splashdown off Florida coast

So SpaceX aims to manufacture a lot of Raptors in the relatively near future. And the company is apparently not on track to meet that challenge at the moment, according to an email Musk sent to SpaceX employees over the Thanksgiving weekend.

In the email, which was obtained by Space Explored, Musk describes the Raptor production situation as a "crisis" that is "much worse than it had seemed a few weeks ago." He says that he was foregoing a planned Thanksgiving weekend break to work on the Raptor production line and implores all SpaceX employees to pitch in if they can.

"Unless you have critical family matters or cannot physically return to Hawthorne, we will need all hands on deck to recover from what is, quite frankly, a disaster," reads the email, which Space.com has not seen directly. (SpaceX's headquarters are in Hawthorne, part of the Los Angeles metropolitan area.)

Musk explains that Starship is needed to launch Version 2 of SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites. The company has already lofted more than 1,600 V1 Starlink craft, and roughly 100 of the more-advanced V1.5 line, with its Falcon 9 rocket. But that workhorse launcher (which employs Merlin engines) cannot accommodate the bigger V2 satellites, which Musk sees as vital moneymakers for the company.

"Satellite V1, by itself, is financially weak, while V2 is strong," the email reads, according to Space Explored. "In addition, we are spooling up terminal production to several million units per year, which will consume massive capital, assuming that satellite V2 will be on orbit to handle the bandwidth demand. These terminals will be useless otherwise."

Time is of the essence to get the Raptor problem fixed, Musk stresses in the email.

"What it comes down to is that we face a genuine risk of bankruptcy if we can’t achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year," the missive reads.

Given that Starship is designed to be completely and rapidly reusable, SpaceX should need just a few operational vehicles to be able to fly twice a month. But right now it doesn't have any, as Starship remains in the test-flight phase. 

That could change relatively soon. SpaceX is gearing up to launch the program's first orbital test flight, which will involve a Starship prototype called SN20 and a Super Heavy known as Booster 4. That landmark mission could occur as soon as January or February, provided the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration wraps up its environmental review of Starship's orbital launch site in South Texas by the end of the year, Musk has said.

Space.com reached out to SpaceX for comment about Musk's email and the Raptor production situation but has not yet heard back from the company. You can read more about the email in the Space Explored story, which is full of interesting details.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or on Facebook. 

The biggest rocket ever built may be ready to fly surprisingly soon.

The first full-size prototype of SpaceX's Starship vehicle should be ready to launch on an orbital test flight "in a few weeks," company founder and CEO Elon Musk said via Twitter on Saturday (Aug. 14).

That target seems very soon, given that SpaceX has yet to run the 395-foot-tall (120 meters) rocket through its usual battery of preflight tests. And there's a big logistical hurdle to overcome as well: The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is conducting an environmental assessment of SpaceX's South Texas orbital launch site, where Starship will lift off.

Related: SpaceX's Starship becomes the world's tallest rocket
Photos: SpaceX lifts huge Super Heavy rocket onto launch stand

The FAA has not yet released its draft review, and the agency will accept public comments about the report for 30 days after it comes out. So Starship's orbital jaunt cannot feasibly happen just a few weeks from now — a reality that Musk acknowledged in his Saturday tweet, which ended with the words "pending regulatory approval."

In fact, Musk's tweet may have been designed to put a little pressure on the FAA to pick up the pace. After all, he has expressed frustration with FAA regulations in the past, stressing that such rules need to be streamlined if humanity is ever going to achieve game-changing launch frequencies.

And SpaceX intends Starship to be a game changer. The vehicle, which consists of a huge first-stage booster known as Super Heavy and a spacecraft called Starship, is designed to take people and cargo to the moon, Mars and other distant destinations.

Related: See the Evolution of SpaceX's Rockets in Pictures

SpaceX has conducted test flights of previous Starship prototypes, sending the spacecraft 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) into the sky from the South Texas site, which is near the Gulf Coast village of Boca Chica. But the upcoming test flight will mark the first time a fully stacked Starship — a Super Heavy topped with a Starship spacecraft — takes flight, and the first time the system reaches orbit.

If all goes according to plan, Super Heavy will splash down in the Gulf of Mexico shortly after liftoff. Starship, meanwhile, will power its way to orbit, loop around our planet once and come down in the Pacific Ocean, near the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

SpaceX has already taken some steps toward this landmark flight. On Aug. 6, for example, the company stacked the two Starship components — a 29-engine Super Heavy called Booster 4 and a six-engine Starship prototype known as SN20 — atop the South Texas orbital launch mount for the first time ever. But the duo was de-stacked later that day so technicians could perform some more work on each element.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

SpaceX's next Starship prototype got the black-and-white treatment in a suave new photo shared by company founder Elon Musk.

The picture appears to show the Starship SN20 ("Serial No. 20") prototype during fit checks on Aug. 4 with the first-stage Super Heavy rocket, when the stacked rocket briefly became the tallest one in the world.

The picture provides a close-up view of the mating procedure between Starship and Super Heavy, with engineers perched underneath. The picture is reminiscent of the famous black-and-white "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper Photograph" taken by Charles Clyde Ebbets on Sept. 20, 1932, during construction of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan.

Related: NASA picks SpaceX's Starship to land Artemis astronauts on the moon

Musk didn't post any comment with the picture Aug. 6, although he had lots to say on his Twitter feed about the fit check. In several tweets, Musk wrote that it is "an honor to work with such a great team," and added that it's a "Dream come true," to see the vehicle stacked.

Super Heavy alone stands 230 feet (70 meters) tall, and the Starship craft adds another 165 feet (50 m) of height. Together, they stand 395 feet (120 m), taller than any other rocket, including NASA's famous Saturn V moon rocket, which was 363 feet (110 m) tall.

But when the duo will blast off for the first-ever Starship orbital flight attempt is unknown. The spacecraft and its rocket must undergo numerous technical examinations before getting clearance to lift off from the launch pad near the village of Boca Chica, Texas. Both the Super Heavy and Starship SN20 are expected to undergo separate static fire tests. SpaceX is also waiting on a Starship launch operations environmental review from the Federal Aviation Administration, which has an unclear completion date.

On Twitter, Musk also wrote that Starship and its Super Heavy booster need at least "4 significant items" before they'd be ready to fly. Those items are final heat shield tiles for Starship, thermal protection for Super Heavy's engines, more ground system propellant storage tanks, and a quick-disconnect arm for Starship, which will likely be attached to the pad's gantry tower.

SpaceX has tested several prototypes in flight, but this will be the first orbital attempt for the Starship program. The orbital flight plan submitted to the FAA suggests the Super Heavy Booster 4, after hefting its first Starship prototype to orbit, will splash down in the Gulf of Mexico roughly 20 miles (32 kilometers) offshore. Starship will boost itself to orbit, circle Earth once and return over the Pacific Ocean, near the Hawaiian island of Kauai, about 90 minutes after launch. 

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

We now know why SpaceX's latest Starship prototype went up in flames last week.

The stainless-steel vehicle, known as SN11 ("Serial No. 11"), launched on a test flight last Tuesday (March 30) from SpaceX's South Texas facilities, near the Gulf Coast village of Boca Chica. 

SN11 soared to a maximum altitude of 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) as planned, and the 165-foot-tall (50 meters) craft checked a number of boxes on the way down as well. But SN11 didn't stick its landing, instead exploding in a massive fireball — because of a plumbing problem, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk announced today (April 5).

Video: Watch SpaceX's Starship SN11 launch on a test flight

"Ascent phase, transition to horizontal & control during free fall were good. A (relatively) small CH4 leak led to fire on engine 2 & fried part of avionics, causing hard start attempting landing burn in CH4 turbopump. This is getting fixed 6 ways to Sunday," Musk said via Twitter today.

CH4 is methane, the propellant for SpaceX's powerful, next-generation Raptor engine. And a "hard start" refers to ignition when there's too much fuel in the combustion chamber and the pressure is therefore too high — not a good thing for any engine.

SpaceX is developing Starship to take people and cargo to the moon, Mars and other distant destinations. The transportation system consists of two elements, both of which will be fully reusable: the Starship spacecraft and a giant first-stage booster called Super Heavy.

Both Starship and Super Heavy will be powered by Raptors — six for the final Starship and about 30 for the huge booster, Musk has said. SN11 sported three Raptors, as did each of its three predecessors, SN8, SN9 and SN10, which launched on 6-mile-high test flights in December, February and early March, respectively.

All four flights were broadly similar, with the prototypes performing well until the very end. SN10 even landed in one piece, in fact, but exploded about eight minutes later.

SpaceX will keep trying to get the landing right. The company has already built the next Starship prototype, known as SN15, and it should take to the skies soon. (Yes, SpaceX is going directly from SN11 to SN15.)

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

SpaceX's latest Starship prototype is a big step closer to liftoff.

Elon Musk's company is gearing up to launch that vehicle, known as SN10, on a 6-mile-high (10 kilometers) test flight from its South Texas site in the near future. 

And such preparations can really ramp up now, because SpaceX and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have just concluded an investigation of the last such flight, a Feb. 2 jaunt that ended with SN10's predecessor, SN9, exploding upon touchdown.

Starship and Super Heavy: SpaceX's Mars-colonizing vehicles in images

"The FAA closed the investigation of the Feb. 2 SpaceX Starship SN9 prototype mishap today, clearing the way for the SN10 test flight pending FAA approval of license updates," an FAA spokesperson said Feb. 19 in an emailed statement.

"The FAA provided oversight of the SN9 mishap investigation conducted by SpaceX. The SN9 vehicle failed within the bounds of the FAA safety analysis," the statement continued. "Its unsuccessful landing and explosion did not endanger the public or property. All debris was contained within the designated hazard area. The FAA approved the final mishap report, including the probable causes and corrective actions."

SpaceX is developing Starship to take people and cargo to Mars and other distant destinations. The architecture consists of two reusable elements: a 165-foot-tall (50 meters) spacecraft called Starship and a giant rocket known as Super Heavy.

Both of these vehicles will be powered by SpaceX's next-generation Raptor engine. The final Starship will have six Raptors and Super Heavy will sport about 30 of them, Musk has said.

SpaceX is iterating its way toward the operational Starship via a series of increasingly complex prototypes, several of which have already gotten off the ground. The SN8 and SN9 vehicles — both of which had three Raptors, as SN10 does — flew about 6 miles high on Dec. 9, 2020 and Feb. 2, respectively. Both performed well until the very end, failing to stick their landings.

Such test flights require FAA approval. SpaceX launched SN8 in December despite having been denied a waiver to exceed the maximum public-safety risk that federal regulations allow, FAA officials said earlier this month. SpaceX then had to halt all testing at the South Texas site that could affect public safety until it completed an investigation into the incident and took FAA-approved corrective actions. 

The resulting delay seemed to irritate Musk, who vented in a Jan. 28 Twitter post that "the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure."

Unsurprisingly, the ambitious Musk has an aggressive envisioned timeline for Starship. He said recently that he wants a prototype to reach Earth orbit this year and that the vehicle should be flying people regularly by 2023. 

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

SpaceX's Starship spaceflight system just took a big step on its path to Mars.

The latest Starship prototype, a shiny silver vehicle known as SN8, launched on an epic high-altitude test flight today (Dec. 9), taking off at 5:45 p.m. EST (2245 GMT) from SpaceX's facility near the South Texas village of Boca Chica.

The goal was to soar about 7.8 miles (12.5 kilometers) into the sky, perform some complex aerial maneuvers — including a "belly flop" like the one the final Starship will perform when coming back to Earth on operational flights — and then land safely near the launch stand. 

Starship and Super Heavy: SpaceX's Mars-colonizing vehicles in images

The 165-foot-tall (50 meters) SN8 appeared to notch all of these big milestones, except for the final one: The vehicle hit its landing mark but came in too fast, exploding in a dramatic fireball 6 minutes and 42 seconds after liftoff.

SN8's rapid unplanned disassembly did nothing to dampen the spirits of SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, who was thrilled by the results of today's flight.

"Fuel header tank pressure was low during landing burn, causing touchdown velocity to be high & RUD, but we got all the data we needed! Congrats SpaceX team hell yeah!!" Musk tweeted this evening. 

"Mars, here we come!" he added in another tweet.

Musk was not expecting complete, wire-to-wire success today; he had previously given SN8 (short for "Serial No. 8") just a 1-in-3 chance of landing in one piece. 

That's because today's flight was far more complex and demanding than any previous Starship prototype test. The previous altitude record was about 500 feet (150 m), achieved by three different Starship vehicles — the stubby Starhopper, SN5 and SN6.

All three of those predecessors were pretty bare-bones; they looked like flying silos and featured just one of SpaceX's next-generation Raptor engines. SN8 was much more capable and complex. It was powered by three Raptors and had a nose cone and stabilizing body flaps.

These new pieces did their jobs well today, Musk said in another tweet: "Successful ascent, switchover to header tanks & precise flap control to landing point!"

SpaceX is developing Starship to carry people and cargo to the moon, Mars and other distant destinations. The system consists of two elements: a stainless-steel spacecraft called Starship, which will sport six Raptors, and a giant rocket known as Super Heavy, which will have about 30 of the engines.

Both of these vehicles will be fully and rapidly reusable, Musk has said. Starship will be capable of making many trips from Earth to Mars and back, and each Super Heavy will rack up many launches during its life. (Starship will be powerful enough to launch itself off the moon and Mars, but it will need Super Heavy to get off our much more massive Earth.)

SpaceX wants Starship and Super Heavy to be operational soon. NASA's Artemis program is considering using Starship to land astronauts on the lunar surface, for example, and the first of those touchdowns is targeted for 2024. And Musk recently said he's confident that SpaceX will launch its first crewed Mars mission by 2026, with the milestone possible in 2024 "if we're lucky."

SpaceX aims to meet this ambitious timeline by iterating fast and flying often. The company is building multiple Starship prototypes at its South Texas site, and we should expect those coming vehicles to get off the ground fairly soon — especially SN9, which is apparently nearly done.

SN9 and SN10 will be quite similar to the three-engine SN8, featuring "many small improvements" over the vehicle that flew today, Musk said via Twitter on Nov. 24. "Major upgrades are slated for SN15," he said in another tweet that day.

Today's launch was originally scheduled to take place yesterday (Dec. 8). But SN8 detected something abnormal with one or more of its Raptors and aborted the attempt automatically less than two seconds before liftoff.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

Update Wednesday, Dec. 9 at 4:27 p.m. EST: The launch is now on "hold," and now anticipated to take place at 5:40 p.m. EST.

Update Wednesday, Dec. 9 at 4:02 p.m. EST: SpaceX is getting ready to launch again any minute. A livestream is below.

Update Tuesday, Dec. 8 at 5:41 p.m. EST: An automatic engine abort with 1 second to go before launch prevented a test flight from taking place Tuesday. This page will be updated if SpaceX says it will re-attempt a launch.

SpaceX plans to test its enormous Starship prototype over Boca Chica, Texas, on Tuesday (Dec. 8).

Starship is SpaceX's big, shiny rocket standing 160 feet (49 meters) tall and 30 feet (9 m) wide. Unlike the Crew Dragon, which is currently docked to the International Space Station, or the company's fleet of more standard rockets, Starship hasn't been built to serve a specific space agency or private customer's needs. Instead, it's designed to further CEO Elon Musk's stated goal of delivering large numbers of people or heavy payloads to the moon and eventually Mars — a goal NASA supported earlier this year with a $135 million investment, Spaceflight Now reported. The anticipated test will mark the first opportunity to see a completed Starship prototype in action.

Related: Here's every spaceship that's ever carried an astronaut into orbit

Today's 41,000-foot (12,500 m) test flight will top out slightly below the 50,000 feet (15,240 m) Musk initially projected, Dave Mosher reported for Business Insider. There's no official start time, but SpaceX said in the caption of a livestream posted to YouTube that if the flight doesn't take place by 5 p.m. CST it will likely be bumped to Wednesday (Dec. 9) or Thursday (Dec. 10). Spaceflight Now reporter Stephen Clark tweeted to point out that a NASA surveillance plane will be in the area around 3 p.m. CST, making that a plausible launch window.

SpaceX has previously tested a Starship prototype, Starship Serial Number 4 (SN4), which exploded just after an engine test. This test of Starship Serial Number 8 (SN8) will take the rocket high into the atmosphere, turn it on its side, then have it attempt to right itself again for a landing. SpaceX has cautioned that a total success, including a safe landing, is unlikely, and that a failure at some stage would be normal for a test flight.

Several YouTube channels are livestreaming the launch site. The stream below includes a checklist of steps SpaceX will take before launch, giving viewers clues as to when the test might occur.

 Originally published on Live Science.

Update Nov. 13, 6:00 p.m. EST:  NASA announced Saturday’s Crew-1 launch has been delayed until Sunday, Nov. 15 at 7:27 p.m. EST, due to weather.

NASA and SpaceX are all set to launch a full crew into space tomorrow (Nov. 14) from Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. This will be the first operational crew mission leaving U.S. soil, since the final space shuttle launch in July 2011. Just six months ago, SpaceX became the first private spaceflight company to launch American astronauts from American soil with their successful Demo-2 Crew Dragon test flight.

The astronauts — Americans Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi — will ride a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule mounted atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station (ISS). This mission's name is Crew-1, and the astronauts have named their spacecraft Resilience. Weather permitting, liftoff will take place at 7:49 p.m. EST. NASA TV's broadcast covering the launch will begin at 3:30 p.m. EST. Watch it here:

As with any launch, there's always the possibility of a weather delay. Meteorologists will watch the skies over Cape Canaveral in the minutes leading up to the launch, looking for weather patterns that could stop the countdown. A pre-published list of NASA rules states, for example, "Do not launch within 10 nautical miles of a detached thunderstorm anvil cloud."

NASA also forbids launching if the rocket would end up flying over bad weather on its way into space. That's because NASA wants to avoid an emergency splashdown in dangerous conditions if something goes wrong with the rocket, forcing the astronauts to abort and detach the crew capsule.

Demo-2, the two-person Crew Dragon test flight in May, was delayed for three days due to bad weather, Live Science previously reported. The backup date for the Crew-1 launch is just one day later: Nov. 15.

Related: Here's every spaceship that's ever carried an astronaut into orbit

If everything goes as planned, the Crew-1 astronauts should reach the orbiting space station 8.5 hours after liftoff. Hopkins, Glover, Walker and Noguchi will join Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, as well as NASA astronaut Kathleen Rubins, who rode together to the ISS in a Russian Soyuz capsule on Oct. 21. All seven ISS tenants will together make up "Expedition 64," the 64th group to work on the ISS. They are expected to remain in orbit for six months, until spring 2021.

Rocket engine troubles and a COVID-infected billionaire

There are two potential hiccups that could hinder a smooth launch for Crew-1 tomorrow. 

First, while Falcon 9 rockets have been in use for years without major incidents, an Oct. 2 Falcon 9 satellite launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base was aborted at the last second because of a new manufacturing flaw involving a red "masking lacquer" blocking a valve. SpaceX delayed further Falcon 9 launches until the defective engines could be swapped out, Live Science previously reported. SpaceX launched a GPS satellite aboard a Falcon 9 with the new engines on Nov. 5, without incident. 

Crew-1 will be the second launch on the new engines.

Another cause for concern emerged earlier today (Nov. 13), when SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk announced on Twitter that he had tested positive for COVID-19. (He also said "something extremely bogus is going on" because two of four tests he had taken Nov. 12 had come back negative. Musk seems unaware that false negatives are possible with any test, as Live Science has reported.)

"We're looking to SpaceX to do any contact-tracing that is appropriate," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said during a news conference today, Live Science sister site Space.com reported. "Of course if there are changes that need to be made, we will look at those. But it's very early right now to know if any changes are necessary at this point."

Bridenstine said he was not aware of any contact between Musk and the CREW-1 astronauts.

Originally published on Live Science.

With SpaceX on the eve of launching four astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA in a historic flight, CEO Elon Musk has announced that he has received mixed results from recent tests for the novel coronavirus..

Musk made the announcement on Twitter early today (Nov. 13). It's not yet clear what, if anything, those results might mean for SpaceX's Crew-1 launch with NASA, currently scheduled to lift off from the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida tomorrow night at 7:49 p.m. EST (0049 GMT on Nov. 15). NASA has been cautious about crew health since long before COVID-19 burst on the scene and has directed agency employees to work remotely as much as possible to slow the disease's spread.

"When somebody tests positive for COVID here at the Kennedy Space Center and across NASA, it is our policy for that person to quarantine and self-isolate, so we anticipate that that will be taking place," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said during a news conference today when asked about tweets in which Musk said he had received both positive and negative tests. Bridenstine said he had talked to Musk two days ago, before the testing issue arose.

Live updates: SpaceX's Crew-1 astronaut launch for NASA
Related: NASA urges COVID caution for spectators of SpaceX Crew-1 launch

"We're looking to SpaceX to do any contact-tracing that is appropriate," Bridenstine said. "Of course if there are changes that need to be made, we will look at those. But it's very early right now to know if any changes are necessary at this point."

Bridenstine emphasized that he is unaware of any contact between Musk and the four astronauts scheduled to ride Crew-1. NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi are scheduled to remain in space for six and a half months, living and working on the International Space Station.

When asked whether the launch would be delayed if any contact between Musk and crewmembers was identified, Bridenstine declined to say. According to Steve Stich, program manager for NASA's Commercial Crew Program, speaking on Oct. 28, the crew entered "soft quarantine," when they could still remain at home with family, the weekend of Oct. 24 and Oct. 25 and was scheduled to enter a more stringent quarantine on Oct. 31.

Related: SpaceX's Crew-1 astronaut mission in photos

"There's a lot to learn," he said. "Our astronauts have been in quarantine for weeks, and they should not have had contact with anybody. They should be in good shape."

When SpaceX's first crewed flight for NASA, dubbed Demo-2, first attempted launch on May 27, Musk visited NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken with Bridenstine after the spaceflyers donned their suits and before they headed to the launch pad. Musk and Bridenstine wore masks and stood at a distance from the astronauts guided by a cordon. That launch was scrubbed due to weather; Musk did not visit them before their successful launch on May 30, although he was seen maskless (as were with others) in the launch control center at Kennedy Space Center.

Whether Musk now has COVID-19 is unclear.

"Was tested for covid four times today," Elon Musk wrote in a tweet posted in the wee hours today. "Two tests came back negative, two came back positive. Same machine, same test, same nurse. Rapid antigen test from BD."

In his tweet, Musk also wrote that the results indicated "something extremely bogus," but no diagnostic test, especially no rapid test, is perfect. Every testing method for every infection will produce a certain number of false positive and false negative detections: some number of positive tests when there is no infection and negative results when there is infection.

For the specific test Musk used, false positives are more likely when COVID-19 infection rates are low and false negatives are more likely when disease rates are high, according to materials about the test published by the Food and Drug Administration. That document also notes that the test is less reliable at detecting infections when a sample is taken more than five days into the illness.

In separate tweets, Musk wrote that he has had "Mild sniffles & cough & slight fever past few days," and no symptoms beyond those typical of a cold, so it isn't clear how far into the infection he would have been when the tested samples were gathered. In general, people begin showing symptoms about five days after exposure and are infectious for a day or two before showing symptoms.

Musk also wrote that he is getting PCR diagnostic tests as well but does not yet have those results. Although a polymerase chain reaction test is typically more accurate, it will still produce false negatives and more rarely, false positives. 

Testing is a public health tool, not a certificate of personal safety; results are vital in helping officials grasp the status of a local outbreak. But the individual response to a negative test varies. "If a person has not had any known exposure to COVID-19 and is not experiencing symptoms, there is no need to quarantine if a test is negative," according to experts at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health. "If symptoms are present but a person has a negative COVID-19 test, that person should still follow home isolation recommendations." Isolation recommendations currently call for staying at home for 10 days with no contact with the outside world, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

As of publication, SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment about Musk's current location, existing safety measures and any potential impacts to the launch.

You can watch SpaceX's Crew-1 launch for NASA live here at Space.com on Saturday beginning at 3:30 p.m. EST (1930 GMT).

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

 We're likely just days away from the first fully-crewed SpaceX launch.

Elon Musk's company has launched two people into space to date: NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken, who rode to the International Space Station May 30 aboard a Crew Dragon capsule mounted on a Falcon 9 rocket. That test flight, termed DEMO-2, marked the first-ever commercial crewed launch, and the first launch from American soil since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011. But it was a test flight, with just two astronauts aboard, lasting just 64 days with most of that time in zero-gravity spent on the International Space Station (ISS). On Nov. 14, if all goes according to plan, four astronauts will take a Crew Dragon to the ISS and remain on the space station for six months. It will mark the beginning of the era of practical commercial spaceflight.

The mission, termed CREW-1, will deliver four of the seven members of Expedition 64 to the ISS: NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi. Expedition 64 is the term for this 64th group of people to inhabit and work on the ISS long term.

The four began quarantining Oct. 31, a standard pre-launch move with added significance in the age of COVID-19, and arrived at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, for final preparations Nov. 8.

Related: Here's every spaceship that's ever carried an astronaut into orbit

(The other three Expedition 64 members, Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, as well as NASA astronaut Kathleen Rubins, are already aboard the ISS, having arrived Oct. 14 in a Russian Soyuz capsule.)

Expedition 64 will last until April 18, 2021, and it will grow the usual ISS occupancy from six to seven. (The Crew Dragon capsule will hang around, docked to the ISS, the entire time.) The astronauts will have work to do outside the station: spacewalks to turn on a suite of currently inactive scientific instruments attached to the outside of the station.

CREW-2's biggest question

The Crew Dragon capsule has completed at least one successful launch of astronauts into Earth orbit. But some concerns about the equipment remain.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket — part of a fleet that's been used for years with good results — aborted seconds before launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base on Oct. 2. That's the same type of rocket that's set to carry CREW-1's Crew Dragon capsule into space.

The aborted rocket, as Space News reported, was supposed to launch a GPS satellite. But a red "masking lacquer" used to protect engine components had blocked a relief valve in a SpaceX Merlin engine used on the Falcon 9, rendering it dangerous to use.

Tests of other Merlin engines revealed similar problems, including two intended for the CREW-1 engine and another intended for a now-delayed Nov. 10 ocean science satellite launch. SpaceX replaced those engines, as well as the GPS 3 launch engines. The GPS 3 satellite launched successfully Nov. 5, indicating that the replacement engines did their job.

Still, CREW-1 will now be just the second launch since the Merlin engine problem. All indications are that it will go forward without a hitch at 7:49 p.m. EST Saturday, Nov. 14 (12:49 a.m. GMT Nov. 15), and reach the ISS 8.5 hours later.

If weather delays the Nov. 14 launch to Nov. 15, NASA has said it will then take 27.5 hours for the Crew Dragon to reach the ISS.

Originally published on Live Science.

In the 2013 science fiction film "Elysium" starring Matt Damon, Earth's wealthiest 0.01% move to the ultimate gated community, a luxurious orbiting space colony, leaving a poverty-stricken humanity to fend for themselves on a ravaged planet.

Interestingly, it is indeed some of today's 0.1% who are leading the way into space to build communities beyond Earth. However, quite the opposite of the movie, their goals are of the highest order, from democratizing access to space by lowering costs, to creating new products and ideas, to helping save the planet and opening space to future generations.

Yet, given the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, social justice and green movements, even as entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson spend billions to support a human breakout into space, there is a backlash building that holds these projects as icons of extravagance — even as their work may help save the Earth. This is the "Elysium effect."

Related: 'Billions and Billions': Space exploration is not just for billionaires 

As in any good social movement, there is a need for bad guys, and these guys are easy icons of evil to many. And there may be no easier target they could present than a shiny private rocketship or space station — even if it is for a good cause.

Though they have many flaws, including the accumulation of lots of money, these space pioneers are actually trying to do something good for humanity and the planet. And while they may not be the cuddliest of people, just look at their other projects and goals: Musk builds electric cars and solar power systems, Bezos wants to move polluting heavy industry off planet - even as Amazon pushes towards zero emissions, and Branson is a long time champion of social and environmental causes. 

Yet these visionaries, who author Christian Davenport called "The Space Barons" are often portrayed as rich boys with fancy toys.

Things will get worse when the next wave of terribly branded "space tourists" begin to fly. Bezos' Blue Origin and Branson's Virgin Galactic will charge over $200,000 for excursions to the edge of space, while newcomer Axiom Space Systems and SpaceX will offer flights to and beyond the International Space Station for a few tens of millions, and even loop the Moon for a just few hundred million more.

Prodded by the tears in our social fabric revealed by the coronavirus pandemic and the social justice movement now underway, the Elysium effect will escalate dramatically after the 2020 presidential election, as a rising "green generation" of socially active post millennials begins a long needed cultural shift towards planetary stewardship. The mood will become increasingly anti-waste, anti-greed and anti-corporate, as social agendas blend with environmental goals. 

It will not matter that throughout history it has often been the wealthy who invested in or supported major research programs, built the railroads, funded the ships that opened seas and the planes that opened the skies — their investments eventually creating the low-cost infrastructure for the rest of society to utilize. In the eyes of today's cultural rebels, the pioneering efforts of these space revolutionaries will be seen as stereotypical of the same extreme, concentrated male wealth and power that has driven the Earth to the brink of disaster.

Of course the situation is ironic. A social movement ready to upend the social order in the name of saving the planet and its people will attack the very people investing their wealth to try and save the people and the planet.

While those in the space field understand the goal is to open space to everyone by lowering costs over time, the fact that the initial spaceflight customers aren't "everyone" sends a bad message. And frankly, when it comes to positive messaging, the Space Barons suck. Be it Musk and his President Donald Trump-style tweeting, Branson playing the playboy, or Bezos building his billions on what some see as the backs of an underpaid Amazon workforce, they paint their own targets on themselves.

This wouldn't be so bad if we didn't need to open space quickly, or if governments hadn't blown the job over the last few decades. But we do, and they have. With the climate almost literally melting down, economies cracking under the coronavirus pandemic and people lost in a fog of disunity and pessimism, we need the space revolution to succeed, not instead of or in spite of these other challenges, but because it can help us win them all.

We need to get our best minds out there, to observe and help us understand what is happening down here, but also to develop new technologies and ways to save the planet, create new products such as medicines and to begin utilizing the resources of space to take the pressure off our home world. Governments have shown they are unable to make it efficient, and they certainly can't take it to scale.

Look, if you're reading this, you probably already "get it" when it comes to the importance of opening what Dr. G.K. O'Neill called "The High Frontier" (the seminal book on space settlement that converted Bezos and became one of his early products). There isn't much time for the space community to act, and as members of a society of nerds for whom it is as patently obvious that we must open space as that there will be another "Star Trek" spinoff, we need to get much better at engaging the rest of the world in this new conversation about space.

It really is critical that these space revolutionaries not only be allowed to, but are supported in their quests. The best thing we can do is to understand and speak to the concerns of those who don't yet understand why this is happening and what the true drivers are behind it all.

Perhaps answering the old question: "Why are we spending money in space when we have so many problems down here?" before it is asked again, might be a good start.

Related: Of course space exploration is worth the money (op-ed) 

First, the money "we" the taxpayers spend on space is relatively trivial. In fact, the U.S. Department of Defense spends the entire NASA budget every two weeks or so. Of course in the case of the billionaires leading the charge the best answer is: "It's mainly not our money, it's theirs." Yes, in some cases they are taking government money to carry payloads and astronauts to space, but it is largely private money being invested, money that is and will save us billions of dollars over traditional government programs. 

So let's talk about saving money for a moment — taxpayer money. SpaceX is carrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station for about $30 million less than the Russians were charging NASA. The agency's old school Space Launch System megarocket has already run up over $25 billion in costs and is forecast to hit $30 billion by the time it delivers a few astronauts to the moon. (It can only deliver a few as it is not reusable.) It's estimated that SLS will cost about $30,000/kilogram to put something there, while SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket can do so for around $10,000/kg and the upcoming Starship may cost a measly $2,000/kg!

At these prices amazing things become possible in space, things we can barely imagine, and things that may well not just help us save the Earth but make life a lot better for everyone. 

Most importantly, why the Space Barons are doing this is not what many people think. While at some point in the future space economy, if they succeed, there will be immense profits made in space, the little known fact is that the billionaires who are part of the space revolution aren't doing space to make money — they made their money to do space. Go read their biographies. In many ways they are donating their money to build a better future. 

After all, these folks aren't pouring their money into sports teams or fashion lines (ok, Branson does have an island). Their investment has already created tens of thousands of high tech jobs and a whole ecosystem of startups is taking off around them. It is no accident, and it is no frivolous pastime; it is their life's dream and their legacy for humanity.

Of course, while working on their dream of opening space to all, they still have to chart their way through the economics. They may be making the downpayment on this train to space, but they're going to have to pay for the railroad somehow. That's where some of these early high priced private customer flights come in. Picking up a few hundred million from human payloads that pay for themselves is a good way to prime the pump. Keep in mind, economics and technology also have another characteristic — the more who fly, the lower the cost becomes. For example, while we take flying on an airline to be a normal thing to do, it was once so expensive and unusual that the people who could afford to do so had a name: "jet setters."

This drive to bring down costs is a central theme for the space revolution. Musk has said he wants to get the price per ticket to fly to Mars down to a few hundred thousand dollars. Bezos' focus is on funding enough space infrastructure that "two kids in a dorm room" can start a viable space company — much as having the post office, internet and fed-ex allowed kids like him to start Amazon.

Just being able to go out there, and the effects on those who go may also be profound, and well worth the cost of it all. As mentioned in the Democratic Convention, we need more people, including cultural and political leaders, to see the mother world from space and experience Frank White's transformational "overview effect," perhaps changing the nature of what it means to be people of Earth. This alone may be worth the price of today's investment.

Projects like Space For Humanity are designed to help as wide a range of people as possible to experience space travel, and Branson intends to make some seats available on his SpaceShipTwo suborbital flights to those without the means to buy them. While democratizing spaceflight is their long term goal, Bezos and Musk need to do more in this arena in the short term. 

While the recent billionaire who bought a trip around the moon on SpaceX's Starship is taking along an entourage of artists, scientists and others who would never otherwise get the chance, more needs to be done. In fact, all of these companies should announce programs to carry "regular" people into space on their flights — perhaps using a lottery system with a commitment that a set number of rides will always be available to the winners. Personally, I think this should include a lot of teachers, nominated by their students — and when safe enough, students nominated by their teachers. Talk about inspiration to excellence!

Over time, the economics will solve the problem, as spaceships begin to operate as routinely as airliners — as is the plan with SpaceX's Starship I mentioned earlier. Already being tested in south Texas, it is possible this one breakthrough rocketship program alone will throw open the airlock to our future in space.

Far from being a way for the elite to escape a dying world, the new space revolution must also show how it will transform life on Earth and support the battle to save the planet. Early priorities should be projects with direct benefit to the people. Examples include pure fiber optics able to multiply the speed of communications, labs growing organs such as lungs in space (much harder to do on Earth) and a thousand other people-oriented possible breakthroughs. 

There are also major projects such as mining resources such as the rare earth elements we will need to move to an all electric economy, reducing carbon emissions on Earth by generating electricity in space, even an emergency backup plan to slow down global warming in case we can't transition to net zero emissions quickly enough by placing a sunshade between us and the sun, or protecting us from asteroids so we don't have yet another global catastrophe. Real, beneficial projects like these are already on the boards. What is needed now is better communication about how, through the lowering of costs to be gained by their investments, these billionaires really are financing what will lead to the next human renaissance.

The public also needs to be able to directly profit from what is happening. As with Virgin Galactic's stock offering, there should be more paths to enable the non-wealthy to invest in space, so more regular people's IRAs and retirement funds share in the equity of the frontier. This will demand more successes and increased transparency in the new space industry, and is of course a long-term investment, but startup space companies are being born all the time and while most will fail, some may well turn into the Apples and Fords of the next era.

Then there is the intangible inspiration of it all. We know space travel has magic in it. Just recall the pause in the middle of the coronavirus crisis when the SpaceX Crew Dragon launched and successfully delivered NASA astronauts to the space station, and how the world held its breath as they safely plunged back to Earth. For just a moment between the darkness of disease, partisan politics and the riots of unrest the people of Earth saw something amazing happen, something that showed what we can do when we are excellent. 

How many young minds, locked at home and witness to the darkness of hate flooding the airwaves and internet watched in awe and wonder as the fires of their hopes ignited when that rocket ship launched? How many of tomorrow's heroes will now trace their careers to that moment?

If these rich dreamers are going to fund our future with money they have earned, I'll take it. We need them to do it. Not for themselves, and not to abandon a wounded world, but for our children and to make sure this world survives.

"Elysium" was just a movie, "Star Trek" is a creation of the imagination. But science fiction can also help us choose between possible realities. Applying the analogy of robber barons to this generation of space pioneers is convenient, but it does not hold. These people are not perfect, but they are trying to do the right thing and I am clear that at their core they believe life is precious, and that even as we work to save the Earth today, they are putting their money down on ways to build a better tomorrow for all of us.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Starman — the dummy riding a cherry-red Tesla Roadster through space — has made his closest approach ever to Mars.

That electric convertible with its mannequin passenger bolted to the top of a Falcon Heavy rocket as a stunt during the SpaceX rocket's first test launch Feb, 6, 2018. (It's common for test launches to include heavy payloads, but they're usually more boring than cherry-red sportscars.) Two years later, the Falcon Heavy upper stage and the vehicle at its tip are making their second trip around the sun. Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astrophysicist who tracks space objects as a side project, found that Starman passed 4.6 million miles (7.4 million kilometers) from Mars at 2:25 a.m. EDT Oct. 7. That's about 19 times the distance from Earth to the moon, and 35 times closer than anyone on Earth has gotten to Mars.

(The closest recent approach between the two planets was 34.8 million miles (56 million km) in 2003, according to World Atlas, though the planets are often hundreds of millions of miles apart.)

Related: 8 ways you can see Einstein's theory of relativity in real life

No one can see the Falcon Heavy upper stage at its current distance. And the strange, beautiful images it once beamed home to Earth have long since ceased. But orbits over periods of a few years are fairly straightforward to predict, and McDowell used data about how the rocket was moving when it left Earth's gravity behind to pinpoint its recent movements.

The Roadster-bearing rocket stage is on an asymmetrical orbital course that takes it as far as 1.66 times Earth's distance from the sun at one end of its trek — out beyond the orbit of Mars — and then back within Earth's orbit at the other end, 0.99 times Earth's distance from the sun.

Last time Starman circled the sun, McDowell said, it crossed Mars' orbit while the Red Planet was quite far away. But this time the crossing lined up with a fairly close approach — though still not close enough to feel a strong tug of Martian gravity.

At this point, if you were to go look at the Roadster, it probably would look pretty different. As Live Science reported in 2018, the harsh solar radiation environment between the planets would probably have wrecked all the exposed organic materials (red paint, rubber tires, leather seats and the like), breaking the carbon bonds that hold them together. And without Earth's protective atmosphere and magnetic shielding, even the robust plastics in the windshield and carbon fiber materials would start to disintegrate. Over the course of decades or centuries, the car should be reduced to its aluminum frame and sturdiest glass parts — assuming none of them get destroyed in impacts with passing space rocks.

Originally published on Live Science.

SpaceX is almost ready to start building a permanent human settlement on Mars with its massive Starship rocket.

The private spaceflight company is on track to launch its first uncrewed mission to Mars in as little as four years from now, SpaceX's founder and CEO Elon Musk said Friday (Oct. 16) at the International Mars Society Convention. 

"I think we have a fighting chance of making that second Mars transfer window," Musk said in a discussion with Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin. You can watch a replay of the talk here.

That window Musk referred to is a launch opportunity that arises every 26 months for mission to Mars. NASA, China and the United Arab Emirates all launched missions to mars in July of this year. The next window opens in 2022 with Musk referring to the 2024 Mars launch opportunity. 

The mission will launch to the Red Planet on a SpaceX Starship vehicle, a reusable rocket-and-spacecraft combo that is currently under development at the company's South Texas facility. SpaceX is also planning to use Starship for missions to the moon starting in 2022, as well as point-to-point trips around the Earth.

Related: Starship and Super Heavy: SpaceX's Mars-colonizing vehicles in images

Musk has long said that humans need to establish a permanent and self-sustaining presence on Mars to ensure "the continuance of consciousness as we know it" — just in case planet Earth is left uninhabitable by a something like a nuclear war or an asteroid strike. 

But SpaceX doesn't have any plans to actually build a Mars base. As a transportation company, its only goal is to ferry cargo (and humans) to and from the Red Planet, facilitating the development of someone else's Mars base.

"SpaceX is taking on the biggest single challenge, which is the transportation system. There's all sorts of other systems that are going to be needed," Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin said during the convention. 

"My personal hope is that we're gonna see Starship in the stratosphere before this year's out, and if Elon is right, reach orbit next year or the year after," Zubrin added. "This will change people's minds as to what is possible. And then, you know, we'll have NASA seeking to fund the remaining pieces of the puzzle or entrepreneurs stepping forward to develop remaining pieces of the puzzle."

If Musk's projections are correct — he is known for offering overly ambitious timelines — SpaceX's first Mars mission would launch in the same year that NASA astronauts return to the moon under the Artemis program. SpaceX is also planning to fly space tourists on a Starship mission around the moon in 2023. NASA has also picked SpaceX as one of three commercial teams to develop moon landers for the Artemis program.

Musk said Friday that if it weren't for the orbital mechanics that call for Mars launches every 26 months, SpaceX "would maybe have a shot of sending or trying send something to Mars in three years," Musk said, adding that Earth and Mars won't be in the best position. "But the window is four years away, because of them being in different parts of the solar system."

Musk unveiled plans for SpaceX's Starship plans in 2016. The project aims to launch a 165-foot (50 meters) spacecraft atop a massive booster for deep-space missions to the moon, Mars and elsewhere. Both the Starship and its Super Heavy booster will be reusable. 

This year, SpaceX launched two test flights of Starship prototypes, called SN5 and SN6, from its Boca Chica test site in Texas. Those flights reached an altitude of 500 feet (150 meters). 

SpaceX is currently preparing another Starship prototype, called SN8, for a 12-mile-high (20 kilometers) test flight in the near future. 

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her on Twitter @hannekescience. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

The next big leap for SpaceX's Mars-colonizing Starship spacecraft appears to be right around the corner.

Two full-size Starship prototypes, known as SN5 and SN6, recently performed 500-foot-high (150 meters) test hops at SpaceX's South Texas facilities, near the village of Boca Chica. And the next vehicle in line is nearly ready to soar much higher, company founder and CEO Elon Musk said.

"SN8 Starship with flaps & nosecone should be done in about a week. Then static fire, checkouts, static fire, fly to 60,000 ft [18,300 m] & back," Musk said via Twitter on Saturday (Sept. 12).

 In photos: SpaceX's SN5 Starship prototype soars on 1st test flight

Static fires are routine engine tests conducted while a vehicle is tethered to the ground. The engines that will be tested in this case are SpaceX's next-generation Raptors — likely three of them, to get the SN8 up so high. SN5 and SN6 sported only a single Raptor, and those vehicles didn't have nosecones or control-improving body flaps, either. (SN7 was a test tank that SpaceX intentionally burst during a pressure trial this past June, in case you were wondering.)

SpaceX is iterating toward a final version of Starship that will feature six Raptors and, Musk has said, be capable of carrying up to 100 people to the moon, Mars and other distant destinations. 

The 165-foot-tall (50 m) Starship will launch from Earth atop a gigantic rocket known as Super Heavy, which will be powered by about 30 Raptors of its own. The Starship vehicle will be powerful enough to blast itself off the moon and Mars, whose gravitational pulls are much weaker than that of our planet, Musk has said.

Both Starship and Super Heavy are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a technological breakthrough that SpaceX believes will make ambitious exploration feats such as Mars colonization economically feasible. 

Related: SpaceX's Starship and Super Heavy rocket in pictures

SpaceX has already booked one Starship customer — Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who will fly around the moon on the vehicle. The target launch date for that mission is 2023. 

Starship is also in the running to land NASA astronauts on the moon, as part of the space agency's Artemis program. Artemis aims to put two astronauts down near the lunar south pole in 2024 and establish a sustainable human presence on and around the moon by the end of the decade.

Starship will fly a wide variety of missions to many different destinations, if all goes according to plan. SpaceX plans to phase out all of its other spaceflight hardware over time, handing all duties over to Starship and Super Heavy eventually.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

SpaceX is a top-tier military contractor now.

The Department of Defense announced Friday (Aug. 7) that Elon Musk's company and United Launch Alliance (ULA) — a joint project of Boeing and Lockheed Martin — would share the job between 2022 and 2026 of launching into space the military's highest-priority satellites, "national security" cargo which would do things like intelligence gathering, GPS and military communications. Established military supplier Northrop Grumman and Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos' company Blue Origin also competed for this multi-billion dollar contract, but lost out to ULA and SpaceX, which will split the contract 60-40, respectively. 

This award marks the start of "Phase 2" of the Air Force's National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program, whose goal is to ensure the U.S. military has infrastructure to get satellites into  space. The Pentagon said the decision came down to money and the technical expertise demonstrated by the SpaceX-ULA venture.

"We evaluated every proposal by the published award criteria, technical factors being first and foremost, then followed by past performance, their ability to work with small business, and then finally totally evaluated price," Will Roper, assistant secretary of the U.S. Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics, said in a conference call reported by Spaceflight Now. For instance, the SpaceX rockets, called Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, are more cost-efficient compared with Lockheed Martin and Boeing's older rockets. ULA is also developing a new rocket called the Vulcan Centaur, which is thought to offer cost-savings similar to that of the SpaceX rockets. 

In addition, the Pentagon is trying to wean from its reliance on Russian-made RD-180 rocket engines to shoot satellites into Earth orbit. 

"Today's awards mark a new epoch of space launch that will finally transition the Department off Russian RD-180 engines," Roper said in a statement from the Space Force, a branch of the military established in 2019 to coordinate space activities.

Until 2014, relying on Russian-made engines for military launches seemed more or less fine. But that year, relations between the U.S. and Russia seriously soured after Russia invaded Ukraine.

"While the engine is built in Russia, access to the engine had never appeared to be in serious jeopardy despite the ups and downs in US-Russia relations since the end of the Cold War," analyst Jeff Foust wrote at the time for The Space Review. "But what a difference a year — or even a few months — makes. Worsening relations with Russia over the Ukraine crisis have raised concerns that Russia could block exports of the engine to the U.S."

SpaceX's Musk has long argued that the . large U.S. purchases of imported RD-180 engines closes off competition for smaller, American companies to produce rocket engines. In fact, he won a temporary court order that halted RD-180 imports as part of a three-way legal battle between SpaceX, the Air Force and ULA. (SpaceX argued that an Air Force bulk rocket purchase from ULA didn't offer other companies enough opportunity to compete.)

The Pentagon decided, Foust reported, to find another source for RD-180-type rockets. All of the companies that competed for this contract proposed relying on U.S.-made engines.

The details still aren't set in stone however. ULA is expected to launch a Vulcan Centaur no earlier than 2021, and the rocket still has to be certified for national security missions. Spaceflight Now reported that if the rocket isn't certified by 2021, ULA will likely use older, rockets for at least two 2022 missions. 

Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman can bid their way into Phase 2 later on 

Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman, the two companies that lost out on this contract will continue to provide support equipment like solid rocket boosters for national security missions. The companies can also continue to launch less-critical equipment for the military and other customers.

And while the companies lost out to Musk and the rocket conglomerate ULA this round, companies have fallen in and out of favor with the Air Force's space launch programbefore.

Back in 2018, the Pentagon handed $967 million to ULA, $792 million to Northrop Grumman and $500 million to Blue Origin in contracts to support their rocket development programs. SpaceX, left out, sued, arguing the funds were "wrongly awarded," as CNBC reported.

While Blue Origin and Northrup Grumman have two rockets that they're still developing, tor the next several years, and likely several dozen national security launches, the most elite roles in military spaceflight belong to ULA and SpaceX.

Originally published on Live Science.

A relieved SpaceX CEO Elon Musk welcomed home the first NASA astronauts to fly to space on his company's Crew Dragon vehicle.

Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken returned to Earth after two months in orbit and safely splashed down in the Gulf Coast waters off Florida on Sunday (Aug. 2). The astronauts, finally back on their home planet, then caught a plane ride home to Houston, where NASA's astronaut corps is based. There, Musk joined NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine to welcome the pair home from the test flight and share his excitement about what comes next.

"I do think what this heralds really is fundamentally a new era in spaceflight," Musk said. "We're going to go to the moon, we're going to have a base on the moon, we're going to send people to Mars and make life multiplanetary and I think this day heralds a new age of space exploration. That's what it's all about."

In photos: SpaceX's historic Demo-2 test flight with astronauts

Hurley and Behnken's flight, dubbed Demo-2, was the first crewed flight in NASA's commercial crew program to outsource astronaut rides to the space station to companies, an initiative that began in 2014. A second company, Boeing, also holds a contract with the program and is expected to refly an uncrewed test flight of its Starliner vehicle after a mishap in December left the capsule unable to reach the space station.

Spaceflight is always risky, but particularly so during a test flight, a fact that astronauts and mission leaders alike have acknowledged throughout the lead-up to the Demo-2 flight. Musk referenced the riskiness obliquely in his welcoming remarks.

"I think, like, my entire adrenaline just dumped, you know? Like, thank God," Musk said. "I'm not very religious, but I prayed for this one."

Musk also pointed to the context in which Hurley and Behnken made their flight. The pair flew to and from space as a pandemic ravaged the country, among other ongoing crises.

"I think this is something that the whole world can take some pleasure in and can really look at this as an achievement of humanity," Musk said. "These are difficult times, when there's not that much good news. I think this is one of those things that is universally good, no matter where you are on planet Earth. This is a good thing, and I hope it brightens your day."

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

SpaceX satellites are ruining skywatchers' views (and photographs) of NEOWISE, the brightest comet in the Northern Hemisphere since the 1995-96 show of Hale-Bopp. 

Visible just above the horizon right now, the comet appears faint and small to the naked eye, but can be seen clearly through cameras with long, telephoto lenses. Usually, when photographers capture objects like this in the night sky they use long exposure times, leaving the camera aperture open to collect light over the course of several seconds. But now comet-chasers report that a new fleet of SpaceX's Starlink satellites is leaving bright smears across their NEOWISE snaps, as the shiny orbiters streak through their frames during long exposures. 

 Related: 5 strange, cool things we've recently learned about the moon

This isn't the first time SpaceX has come under fire for these new sources of overhead light pollution. When the first satellites in the Starlink constellation, part of the company's plan to deliver internet access from orbit, launched in 2019, astronomers immediately raised concerns about their reflective properties. Telescopes, like consumer cameras, usually use long exposures in their scientific work. Starlink seems to be particularly reflective and to orbit at an elevation that can leave bright smears across telescope sensors and pollute data.

 "When we develop new, big facilities, big observatories, big surveys to go and do things like discover hazardous asteroids, we design them to within an inch of their lives. We do so to make sure that every [risk] is accounted for," Alex Parker, a Colorado-based astronomer, told Live Science in May 2019. "This is one of those confounding factors that, generally speaking, we haven't prepared for because it hasn't been an issue up 'til now."

Parker told Live Science that the Starlink fleet, which could eventually number in the thousands, seems to be particularly inclined to shine brightly at night. (Currently, 422 Starlink satellites are in orbit.)

NEOWISE's appearance in the dawn sky has created a rush of interest in astrophotography, and with it a new batch of skywatchers disappointed to see their view of the universe obscured by Starlink's satellites in low-Earth orbit. 

SpaceX, which has not returned a request for comment, has said it's taking steps to reduce Starlink's light pollution. But, as of this writing, the bright streaks remain an issue.

Originally published on Live Science.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk was choked up with emotion after his company successfully launched astronauts to space for the first time on Saturday (May 30). 

"I'm really quite overcome with emotion on this day, so it's kind of hard to talk, frankly," Musk said in a post-launch press conference at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida Saturday evening. "It's been 18 years working towards this goal, so it's hard to believe that it's happened."

Musk's comments came a few hours after SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from the center's historic Launch Complex 39A, carrying a Crew Dragon spacecraft with NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on board. 

By successfully launching its new Crew Dragon spacecraft with astronauts on board for the first time, SpaceX became the first private company to launch astronauts for NASA. The test flight, called Demo-2, is also the first crewed launch from the United States since the space shuttle program ended in 2011. SpaceX and Boeing were both selected for NASA's commercial crew program to wean the agency off its dependence on Russia's Soyuz to fly  astronauts after the shuttle program was retired. 

In photos: SpaceX's historic Demo-2 test flight with astronauts

"I think this is something that's particularly important in the United States but appeals to everyone throughout the world who has within them the spirit of exploration," Musk said. "This is something that I think humanity should be excited about proud of occurring on this day."

If all goes well with the Demo-2 test flight, SpaceX will soon begin launching astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA as well as other space agencies and private companies. The first operational Crew Dragon mission, called Crew-1, could launch to the ISS as early as Aug. 30, with three NASA astronauts and one astronaut from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency on board. 

This isn't the first time SpaceX has launched a Crew Dragon spacecraft to the ISS. Another Crew Dragon launched to the station in March 2019 for a weeklong demonstration mission called Demo-1, and there were no astronauts on board — only a test dummy named Ripley. Musk was an emotional wreck after that mission, too. 

Behnken and Hurley will arrive at the ISS Sunday morning (May 30), and the Crew Dragon spacecraft is scheduled to autonomously dock with the orbiting lab at 10:29 a.m. EDT (1429 GMT). You can watch the docking live here on Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV.

The Demo-2 astronauts, who will be joining the three-person crew of ISS Expedition 63, will spend anywhere from one to four months at the station. SpaceX and NASA will determine the duration of their stay after they assess the condition of the Crew Dragon spacecraft in orbit as well as the Crew Dragon that will fly the Crew-1 mission this summer.

When asked about his conversations with the Demo-2 astronauts' kids, Musk — who recently became a dad again(he has six sons) — got choked up. 

"It really hit home," he said of the time he told their two boys that he would do everything in his power to bring their dads home safely. 

"I think it was an argument that the return is more dangerous in some ways than the ascent, so in order to declare victory yet, we need to bring them home safely [and] make sure that we're doing everything we can to minimize that risk of reentry and return," Musk said. 

You can watch the Demo-2 mission live here and on Space.com's homepage through docking tomorrow (May 31).

• Trump hails SpaceX's 1st astronaut launch success for NASA
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• SpaceX just launched 2 astronauts into orbit. What's next for the NASA crew?

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

We've gotten our hopes up before.

The success of NASA's Apollo moon missions half a century ago, for example, made Mars seem very much within reach for human explorers. Indeed, the space agency drew up plans to put boots on the Red Planet by the early 1980s, but shifting political and societal winds killed that idea in the cradle.

In 1989, President George H.W. Bush announced the Space Exploration Initiative, which aimed to send astronauts back to the moon by the end of the 1990s and get people to Mars in the 2010s. His son, President George W. Bush, also aimed for a crewed lunar return, with a program called Constellation, whose contours were outlined in 2004. Each program was soon axed by the next administration to come into power.

Full coverage: SpaceX's historic Demo-2 astronaut launch explained

So it's natural for space fans to greet the grand pronouncements occasioned by SpaceX's first crewed launch on Saturday (May 30) with a bit of skepticism. Yes, the Demo-2 mission to the International Space Station (ISS), the first orbital human spaceflight to depart from American soil since NASA retired its space shuttle fleet in 2011, is a big deal. But does it really show that "the commercial space industry is the future," as President Donald Trump said shortly after liftoff?

Actually, it very well might. 

Demo-2 is far from a one-off, after all. It's a test flight designed to fully validate SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket for crewed missions to the ISS. The company holds a $2.6 billion NASA contract to conduct six such operational flights, the first of which is targeted for late August, provided Demo-2 goes well.

SpaceX is a highly ambitious company that has already accomplished a great deal in the final frontier; it's been flying robotic cargo flights to the ISS for NASA since 2012, for example. So, there's little reason to doubt SpaceX's ability to fulfill that contract, and to execute a variety of other missions in Earth orbit as well.

Elon Musk's company has in fact already inked Crew Dragon deals with other customers. For example, Houston-based company Axiom Space, which aims to build a commercial space station in Earth orbit, has booked a Crew Dragon flight to the ISS, with liftoff targeted in late 2021. And the space tourism outfit Space Adventures plans to use the capsule at around the same time, to carry passengers on a mission to high Earth orbit, far above the ISS. 

Then there's Boeing. Like SpaceX, Boeing signed a contract with NASA's Commercial Crew Program to fly six crewed missions to and from the ISS. Boeing will fulfill the deal with a capsule called CST-100 Starliner, which has made one uncrewed trip to orbit to date. 

That flight, which launched this past December, didn't go as planned; Starliner was supposed to meet up with the ISS but suffered a glitch with its onboard timing system and got trapped in the wrong orbit. But Boeing plans to refly the uncrewed ISS mission later this year and put astronauts on Starliner shortly thereafter, provided everything goes well.

Related: Four new US spaceships may start launching people into space soon

Activity is heating up in the suborbital realm as well. 

For example, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic has already flown two piloted missions to suborbital space with its newest SpaceShipTwo vehicle, VSS Unity. The company is in the final phases of its test campaign and looks poised to begin carrying space tourists aboard the six-passenger Unity soon.

And Blue Origin, the spaceflight company run by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, has reached space numerous times with its suborbital vehicle, known as New Shepard. Those test flights have been uncrewed to date, but it probably won't be long before New Shepard begins carrying customers as well.

The names on this list chip away at the skepticism even more. We aren't talking about cash-strapped startups here; Bezos is the world's richest man, and Musk and Branson are both billionaires. And Boeing is an aerospace giant with a long history of achievement in the human spaceflight realm. The company is the prime contractor for the ISS, for example, and it built the first stage of NASA's huge Saturn V rocket, which launched the Apollo moon missions. 

So there's real reason to hope that an exciting new era of human spaceflight has dawned — perhaps one that will even see people riding private spaceships to the moon, Mars and other destinations in deep space. 

Musk has long stressed that he founded SpaceX back in 2002 primarily to help humanity colonize the Red Planet, and the company is already building and testing prototypes of Starship, the vehicle designed to make that happen. And Bezos has repeatedly said that his overarching vision for Blue Origin involves helping to get millions of people living and working in space.

This coming private boom isn't booting NASA off the human-spaceflight block, of course. The space agency has deep space ambitions of its own. Its Artemis program aims to land two astronauts near the moon's south pole in 2024 and establish a long-term human presence on and around the moon by 2028. 

And the moon will be a stepping stone, if all goes according to NASA's plan, teaching the agency the skills and techniques required to put boots on Mars.

NASA wants to make that giant leap in the 2030s. We'll see if the political will and the funding hold long enough for the agency to do it.

• SpaceX just launched 2 astronauts into orbit. What's next for the NASA crew?
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• SpaceX's Starship and Super Heavy rocket in pictures

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

The SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft is now scheduled to launch tomorrow (May 30) after weather forced a launch delay Wednesday (May 27). If bad weather strikes the Cape Canaveral, Florida launch site again at the wrong time, the launch will once more be delayed.

But why should some ugly weather scrub a Falcon 9 rocket launch? When NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken do take off in their SpaceX-built rocket, it will mark the first attempt to put humans in orbit from U.S. soil in a decade. And the  rocket is powerful enough to punch through the atmosphere and into space. Why should a few clouds bother it?

First, launches like these have to be perfectly timed. For the craft to reach the International Space Station it must launch at the scheduled minute, or wait for another opportunity. So any weather delay is important.

And the fact is, NASA has had a long and unfortunate history with launch weather, as NASA Spaceflight.com noted May 24. Freezing weather before a 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger launch wrecked the rubber O-ring seals on the solid rocket boosters. The shuttle exploded 73 seconds after launch and all seven astronauts on board died. The Apollo 12 mission survived a pair of lightning strikes, but they scrambled instruments during takeoff and triggered alerts that nearly led NASA to abort the mission.

Related: How to watch the historic SpaceX astronaut launch online

Wednesday's launch was canceled within half an hour of the planned takeoff because of lightning in the area and a storm cloud with an "anvil" formation. That cloud was close enough to the launch site that, when it didn't clear up, NASA said it violated the agency's weather rules. And the launch itself could have triggered lightning strikes on the spacecraft, according to NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine.

Lighting isn't the only weather feature NASA tracks before a launch though. During the Space Shuttle era, NASA published criteria for those launches. Some of the rules included:

• The temperature must not have fallen below freezing in the last 24 hours, and must have remained above a 41 degree Fahrenheit (5 degree Celsius) average in the same period.
• The temperature must not exceed 99 F (37.2 C) for more than 30 consecutive minutes after fueling begins.
• Wind must be forecast to stay under 48 mph (77 km/h) for the three hours after fueling begins, and can't peak higher than 39 mph (62 km/h) during launch.
• There must be no rain, snow or hail on the launch pad or in the flight path.

There were also a complex series of rules related to electric fields and lighting designed to avoid lightning strikes on the vehicle. But the most straightforward was this:

"Do not launch when lightning is observed and the cloud that produced the lightning is within 10 nautical miles of flight path. Launch may not occur until  30 minutes has elapsed since the lightning flash, or the cloud has moved more than 10 nautical miles away."

All this could spell further trouble for NASA and SpaceX's commercial crew plans for the weekend. National Weather Service reports show rain and thunderstorms coming and going all day today (May 29) at Cape Canaveral, and similar conditions are in the forecast for tomorrow's launch.

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Originally published on Live Science.

SpaceX will have to wait a few days to make history.

Elon Musk's company was scheduled to launch its first-ever crewed mission, a test flight to the International Space Station (ISS) called Demo-2, this afternoon (May 27) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. But bad weather has nixed that plan, pushing the liftoff back to Saturday (May 30) at the earliest, NASA and SpaceX officials announced today.

"We continue to violate a couple different weather rules that we now do not expect to clear in time to allow for a launch today," SpaceX launch director Mike Taylor said about 20 minutes before the planned liftoff. "We’re going to go ahead and end today’s launch attempt."

Full coverage: SpaceX's historic Demo-2 astronaut launch explained

Saturday's launch would occur at 3:22 p.m. EDT (1922 GMT). If that doesn't work out, SpaceX could try again on Sunday (May 31) at 3 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT). (Demo-2 has an instantaneous launch window; the capsule must launch at a specific time, when the space station is at a certain spot in its orbital path.) 

Whenever the liftoff occurs, you can watch it live here at Space.com.

Demo-2 will send NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the ISS aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule. The mission will be a milestone for the entire nation as well as for SpaceX: no orbital human spaceflight has launched from the U.S. since NASA retired its space shuttle fleet in July 2011.

Since then, Russian Soyuz spacecraft have been astronauts' only rides to and from the ISS, at a cost (most recently) of about $90 million per seat. NASA isn't thrilled with this dependence and is counting on SpaceX and Boeing to break it.

In 2014, the two companies signed multibillion-dollar contracts with NASA's Commercial Crew Program to complete development of their astronaut taxis and fly six operational missions to and from the ISS for the agency. Demo-2 is the last big hurdle SpaceX must clear before it can start those contracted flights.

Boeing still has some work to do before its vehicle, a capsule called CST-100 Starliner, can carry astronauts. Starliner did not manage to rendezvous with the space station as planned during an uncrewed test flight this past December; Boeing will refly that mission before attempting a crewed flight. 

SpaceX aced its uncrewed ISS flight, a mission called Demo-1, in March of 2019. The company performed another critical uncrewed flight test in January of this year, demonstrating Crew Dragon's emergency-escape system, which is designed to blast astronauts to safety in the event of a problem during launch.

This latter test was a dramatic affair, involving the intentional destruction of one of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets mid-flight.

Visit Space.com for complete coverage of SpaceX's Crew Dragon Demo-2 flight. 

• Meet the NASA astronauts launching on SpaceX's historic Crew Dragon test flight 
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• SpaceX's Crew Dragon Demo-1 test flight in pictures

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

Appropriately enough, the name of Elon Musk's newborn son contains a tribute to pioneering aerospace tech.

The decidedly unusual (and apparently illegal, at least in California) name, X Æ A-12, was devised primarily by the boy's mother, electronic pop musician Grimes, Musk said on comedian Joe Rogan's podcast.

"A-12 is my contribution," the SpaceX founder and CEO told Rogan, in an interview that was posted online Thursday (May 7). "Archangel 12, the precursor to the SR-71, coolest plane ever."

Related: Elon Musk: revolutionary private space entrepreneur

Though Musk's wording there is a bit ambiguous, Grimes indicated in a tweet on Tuesday (May 5) that the "coolest plane" reference is to the SR-71, which she called "our favorite aircraft." 

The SR-71, also called "Blackbird," was a high-altitude spy plane built by the Lockheed Corporation that could fly three times faster than the speed of sound. "No weapons, no defenses, just speed. Great in battle, but nonviolent," Grimes said in that Tuesday tweet.

The Blackbird, as Musk explained to Rogan, was based on the A-12, which Lockheed developed for the CIA's Archangel project. ("Archangel" is also Grimes' favorite song, she said in that same tweet.)

The A-12, which performed its first test flight in 1962, flew operational missions only briefly, from 1967 through its retirement a year later. The SR-71 had a much longer life, getting off the ground for the first time in 1964 and plying the skies through the late 1990s.

"Æ" needs a bit of explanation as well. This "ligature," a combination of "a" and "e," was a letter of the Old English Latin alphabet and remains a recognized letter in Norwegian, Danish and some other languages. We still come across it in English from time to time, in old-fashioned spellings such as "archæology" and "mediæval."

"Æ" is pronounced "ash," as Musk explained to Rogan. Indeed, that's the name of the letter; the moniker was taken from a related character in the runic alphabet that meant "ash tree."

There are other layers to this part of the name as well; Grimes explained that Æ is "my elven spelling of Ai (love &/or Artificial intelligence)." And X, she added, is "the unknown variable."

X Æ A-12 Musk's birthday is also notable: the child was born on May 4, "Star Wars Day," as the billionaire entrepreneur pointed out to Rogan.

"May the fourth be with him," Rogan said. "It has to be."

"I sure hope so," replied Musk, who shares custody of his five other sons with ex-wife Justine Wilson.

This was Musk's second appearance on Rogan's podcast. During the first appearance, in September 2018, both men smoked a bit of marijuana. Weed is legal in California, where Rogan records his shows, but NASA was none too pleased nonetheless. 

The space agency soon initiated an investigation into the "culture" of SpaceX and Boeing, both of which hold contracts to ferry NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station. (SpaceX also holds a separate NASA deal to fly cargo missions to the orbiting lab.)

Musk apparently learned from that episode; recreational drugs don't make an appearance in the newly posted interview.

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Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites will soon sport an accessory to tamp down their surprising brightness.

That brightness worries many astronomers, who say that the huge Starlink constellation could seriously disrupt a variety of scientific observations. And Starlink will indeed be huge, if all goes according to SpaceX's plan: The company has approval to launch 12,000 craft to low Earth orbit (LEO) and has applied for permission to loft 30,000 more. (For perspective, humanity has launched just 9,400 objects to orbit since the dawn of the space age in 1957).

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said that the company will find a way to make Starlink craft fade from scientists' sight, predicting that the constellation will end up having no impact whatsoever on astronomical discoveries. SpaceX has been working with the astronomical community to help make this happen, researchers say, and the company has already tried out some mitigation measures.

Related: Starlink: SpaceX's satellite internet project

For example, one of the 60 Starlink satellites that launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket this past January sported an experimental coating to make it less reflective. Observations show that this "DarkSat" is considerably dimmer than its brighter Starlink cohorts, but probably not dim enough to quell most astronomers' concerns about the megaconstellation. 

But SpaceX is taking additional measures as well, which brings us to the new accessory. Musk tweeted the following on Wednesday (April 22), in response to a Twitter follower who wished SpaceX luck on a 60-satellite Starlink launch that day: "Thanks! We are taking some key steps to reduce satellite brightness btw. Should be much less noticeable during orbit raise by changing solar panel angle & all sats get sunshades starting with launch 9."

He gave some details about the sunshades, which will presumably reduce solar reflection off the satellites' bodies, in a subsequent tweet that day: "It’s made of a special dark foam that’s extremely radio transparent, so as not to affect the phased array antennas. Looks a lot like a car sun visor."

The sunshade-equipped satellites will begin flying soon, because Starlink Launch 9 should be just around the corner. Wednesday's liftoff was Launch 7, and Launch 8 is targeted for May.

Each Starlink mission lofts 60 spacecraft. To date, SpaceX has launched 422 of the satellites to LEO, counting two prototypes that went up in February 2018. Musk has said that Starlink can provide "minor" internet coverage with at least 400 satellites and "moderate" service with about 800, so the constellation will likely be operational relatively soon.

The sunshades' effectiveness should also be apparent in short order. Astronomers will doubtless be tracking the modified satellites, hoping they don't stand out too much against the dark sky.

• SpaceX's Starlink constellation could swell by 30,000 more satellites
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• 'Whoa, it worked': Elon Musk tweets via SpaceX's Starlink satellites

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

Well, that was fast.

Last Wednesday (March 18), SpaceX and Tesla chief Elon Musk offered to start manufacturing ventilators for coronavirus patients if need be. Medical practitioners and politicians urged him to do so, stressing that many hospitals around the country will have a shortage of breathing machines as the pandemic progresses.

So, Musk's engineers got to work — and they've apparently been very busy.

Related: Live updates about the coronavirus pandemic

"We expect to have over ~1,200 [ventilators] to distribute this week. Getting them delivered, installed & operating is the harder part," Musk said via Twitter on Sunday (March 22).

SpaceX and Tesla are both well suited to make ventilators, Musk said last week. After all, every Tesla car features a heating, ventilation and air conditioning system, and SpaceX engineers developed a life-support system for the company's Crew Dragon astronaut taxi, which is scheduled to launch its first crewed mission in May.

That being said, Musk and his teams are still seeking advice from experts.

"Just had a long engineering discussion with Medtronic about state-of-the-art ventilators. Very impressive team!" Musk said in a tweet on Saturday (March 21). (Medtronic builds and sells a variety of medical devices.)

Both SpaceX and Tesla are working on the new ventilators, Musk said. And other companies are doing so as well. On Sunday, for example, President Donald Trump gave Ford and General Motors, along with Tesla, an official manufacturing green light.

Musk is helping hospitals deal with the outbreak in other ways as well. Over the weekend, he told CleanTechnica that his companies will soon start distributing 250,000 N95 masks, critically needed medical respirators that help keep doctors and nurses safe during the outbreak.

Some of this protective gear has already hit the road, making its way to UCLA Health Hospital in Los Angeles and the Seattle home of a doctor at the University of Washington Medical Center who's researching the novel coronavirus and the disease it causes, which is known as COVID-19.

Musk is also offering advice about the outbreak via Twitter. For instance, he has stressed repeatedly that panic about COVID-19 could end up being worse than the disease itself.

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Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

No, you haven't been sucked into a low-res video game — the new Tesla Cybertruck just looks like an animated armored vehicle whose pixels are taking a while to render. 

In September, Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk teased that Tesla's new electric pickup truck would look "futuristic-like" and "cyberpunk," as if it were plucked from the sci-fi movie "Blade Runner," the Observer reported. And indeed, with its triangular profile, it looks a bit like a shiny, gabled roof on wheels. 

When Musk rolled out the Cybertruck last night (Nov. 21), the truck's strikingly angular design certainly caught people's eyes, but auto experts say the look has as much to do with function as form.

Unlike many pickup trucks, the Cybertruck has a unibody design, meaning the vehicle is built around a metal scaffolding, according to TechCrunch. In standard pickup trucks, the vehicle's body rests atop a metal frame that both supports the engine and absorbs physical stresses. A unibody design, common in passenger cars and many SUVs, significantly cuts down on a vehicle's overall bulk while also providing a protected place to stash batteries inside the body — a key feature for a Tesla. In the Cybertruck, the batteries sit under the vehicle but remain shielded by the body of the car; the same arrangement which would not work in a bed-on-frame truck.

But the Cybertruck isn't the only pickup with a unibody design, TechCrunch noted. The Honda Ridgeline has the same basic structure, and both trucks require extra reinforcements to match the might of bulkier pickups. Traditional pickup trucks can tow huge loads because their hefty frames take on the stress from the towed weight. To prevent unibody trucks from bending and twisting under pressure, engineers place reinforcing pillars at strategic points within the vehicles, according to TechCrunch. The sharp edges of the Cybertruck's frame belie the location of some of these pillars.

With these reinforcing pillars in place, the Cybertruck boasts a maximum towing capacity of 14,000 lbs. (6,350 kilograms) and a payload of 3,500 lbs. (1,580 kg), according to Outside magazine. Although powerful, the truck body remains lightweight thanks to its stainless steel monocoque frame. The reduced weight enables the all-wheel-drive model to accelerate from 0 to 60 mph (100 km/h) in just 2.9 seconds, even though its battery alone weighs more than 1,000 lbs. (450 kg). 

The same stainless steel used for the Cybertruck encases SpaceX's Starship spacecraft, the Observer reported, and Tesla claims the metal will resist dents, corrosion and even bullets. The truck's "armored glass" windows proved less impressive, though. Tesla's chief designer, Franz von Holzhausen, chucked a steel ball at not one, but two windows during the unveiling event, shattering both. 

"It didn't go through, so that's a plus side," Musk said; "room for improvement."

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Originally published on Live Science.