Category Archives: Futurism

SpaceX is trying a new strategy.Third Time

SpaceX is ramping up to launch its third full-scale Starship rocket this week but this time, the company will attempt a new strategy.

The prototype, called SN10, could be rocketing high into the sky from its launch pad in Boca Chica, Texas as early as Wednesday afternoon, Teslarati reports, according to flight restrictions announced by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

This time, the strategy will be different. Both predecessors attempted to use only two out of their three Raptor engines to slow their descent before landing and both exploded when they slammed into the ground.

With SN10, though, SpaceX is igniting its third engine for landing. With all three lit, the idea is that the rockets onboard computers will have enough time to select the two enginesit needs to burn to make a safe landing, depending on the angle of its descent.

In other words, SN10 will have more redundancy to make sure it has time to figure out which engines to fire in order to land safely. Three lit engines will reduce possible points of failure and ensure the prototype has the best chance of sticking its landing.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk revealed in early February that all three of SN9s Raptor engines not just two should have been ignited to eliminate possible points of failure, something that SpaceX was too dumb to do, according to Musk. In fact, one of the two engines SN9 was using for landing failed to ignite as well.

Following some back and forth and an investigation into the companys safety practices, SpaceX finally received permission from the FAA to fly the 165-foot stainless steel rocket late last month.

SN10 did, however, hit a snag during testing. Its second triple-Raptor static fire test had to be delayed due to an issue with one of the rockets engines. A speedy engine swap brought the space company back on schedule, completing the second test fire within just 48 hours of the first, according to Teslarati.

Will SN10 come crashing back down to Earth? Its hard to tell. In mid-February, following SN9s epic fireball, Musk tweeted that theres a 60 percent chance its successor will land successfully.

READ MORE: SpaceX gears up for Starships first triple-engine landing attempt [Teslarati]

More on Starship: Elon Musk: Starship Floating Launchpad to Start Operation by End of Year

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There's Something Very Different About Tomorrow's Starship Test - Futurism

Defense Against the Dark Arts (In Space)

A new report released Friday shined a light on the growing need for the US space defense system.

Researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies called attention to the lack of defenses to guard against yes threats in space, in a new report published on Feb 26. Titled Defense Against the Dark Arts in Space: Protecting Space Systems from Counterspace Weapons, the study warns of the vulnerabilities of the United States current satellite infrastructure that belligerent nations could potentially exploit.

While space weapons might seem like a more recent development (with initiatives such as the US Space Force), weapons have been prevalent in orbit since the Cold War. Militarization initiatives have included arming satellites with ballistic missiles.

As a result, nations have begun to invest in technology such as missiles, jammers, lasers, and cyberattack systems to take down these satellites.

What we wanted to do with this report is look at the other side of the equation, CSIS analyst and co-author of the report Todd Harrison told Space News. Yes, we see all these threats to space systems, but what do you do about it?

The report recommends a number of ways for the US government to protect its satellites orbiting Earthand they can be broken down into two categories: passive and active defenses.

Passive defenses make our satellites and other infrastructure harder to target or better capable of withstanding attacks, according to the report. They include things like awareness systems that warn of impending attacks and dangers to satellites.

Active defenses focus on taking out the threat directly. Think the best defense is a good offense. It includes measures like lasers to disrupt incoming anti-satellite weapons, as well as spacecraft that physically intercept and capture threatening satellites.

The report is an interesting, if slightly scary, look into the ever-growing militarization of space. With the Biden administrations blessing of the US Space Force, it wouldnt be unreasonable to expect investment into orbital weapons and defense systems if not the idea of them flying into orbit a little more in the future.

READ MORE: Report: Space weapons are a fact of life, but there are many ways to counter them [Space News]

More on related: The White House Says That Space Force Has Its Full Support

Read more:
Study: The US Needs To Build More Space Weapons - Futurism

Its hard to believe that Marine Serre, the 29-year-old French designer whose work was featured in Beyoncs Black is King visual album and who kicked off Paris Fashion Week with perhaps the most human, immersive, fully realized digital activation of the entire fashion month, founded her brand only three years ago.

Not only does she have a widely recognizable logo that has nothing to do with her initials (its a moon print), not only was she upcycling long before it became a trend (and sensed the need for face masks long before they were a medical necessity), but she has her own ideology: ecofuturism.

Sounds like a movement, doesnt it? But what does it even mean?

In theory, it means exalting nature and the idea of rebirth; replacing the machine worship of the futurists with veneration for the earth. In fashion, its a terrific collection.

Or, to be specific: a book, a documentary and clothes that looked awfully appealing to wear.

Eschewing her past apocalyptic visions of the natural disaster we may have wrought clothes for the wasteland; the pods of humanity that will be left after the storm Ms. Serre created filmed vignettes of family and friends going about their lives (cooking, gardening, playing on tire swings) while wearing her reworked leather greatcoats and trousers and repurposed knitwear, lacy shirts made from old household linen, and lilac suiting from regenerated moir.

A virtual wormhole was built into each of the scenes, so with a click you would suddenly find yourself in the back story of the garment: the ateliers and scrap factories where the goods get made, watching the team deconstruct and reconstruct the raw materials, giving them new life.

If a chimera was real, this is what it would look like. And that offers hope not just for the planet and our festering piles of stuff, but fashion itself.

Maybe because they have less to lose, or maybe because they have little allegiance to the fashion system that was, much of the most provocative work this season is being made by a new generation of designers. Its the kind of work that jolts you out of the haze of hours spent zombielike in front of various Zooms and makes you start to think not just about the problems of now, but about whats next.

Ms. Serre may be at the forefront, but shes not alone.

Theres Thebe Magugu, from South Africa, who takes the idea of fashion storytelling to a new level in guerrilla films that use clothes to teach cultural truths this time about the new embrace of traditional faith healing among his urbanized millennial peers. Working with the director Kristin-Lee Moolman, he etched out a story of gang warfare and spiritual union told in both action and cloth. Safari suiting was made from textiles created to mimic the straw mats a friend used to throw bones (complete with said bone). A black jacket was scarified along the spine with Braille threads reading, What you do to your ancestors, your children will do to you.

Then theres the Vaquera gang, Claire Sullivan, Patric DiCaprio and Bryn Taubensee, whose work has grown from blowing raspberries at the establishment to nimbly skewing tropes of aspiration, elitism and gender. This season that meant blowing them out and decontextualizing them, so that satin undies, flamenco flounces and baggy sweats demand a rethink.

And Eckhaus Latta, where Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta, working bi-coastally (she in Los Angeles, he in Brooklyn) cut holes in sequin shirts and skirts, shredded denim, snapped (or not) quilted nylon up the side and otherwise used shape to gently confront just how much weve come undone.

Not that the disrupters who came before are fading into the torpor of comfortable maturity.

Dries Van Noten, one of the last members of the Antwerp Six (the group of Belgian designers that shook up fashion in the late 1980s and 1990s) still on the official Paris schedule, swapped moody romance for an exhalation of pent-up energy, frustration and desire. Forty-six dancers and models, one or two at a time, writhed, twisted and collapsed on a darkened stage in a visceral mash-up of masculine tailoring and feminine clich: sugar-sweet Valentine-pink sequins and slithery duchesse silks in boudoir pastels were paired with no-nonsense dark overcoats; crushed taffeta was scanned and superimposed on wool; marabou fuzzed out the lines.

It was a powerhouse of a collection, as was that of Rick Owens, the dark prince of Paris, whose roots lie in the underbelly of the California dream, and who titled his show Gethsemane, after the garden in Jerusalem where Jesus prayed before the final reckoning (as the show notes read). Because the last year, they went on, was almost biblical in its drama.

And so was Mr. Owenss collection, filmed live on a pier on the Lido, in front of his house in Venice.

Fog rolled across the water as the models streamed forth in puffer robes that framed attenuated insect silhouettes with skinny metallic leggings or sequined thongs atop cashmere body suits. Exaggerated down sleeves (like duvets for the arms) slipped off the shoulders and flopped down far below the fingers; fluted, shredded gowns suggested decaying notions of royalty and pilgrimage.

It was gorgeous and alarming in equal measure, connecting to the aggression of Mr. Owenss January mens wear show (some of the bomber jackets and coats were lifted straight off that runway without being downsized for the female form) but with a sense of communion that dangled the promise of something more.

I know were supposed to be all about hope and moving forward, but the menace has not disappeared, Mr. Owens said before the show, talking over FaceTime from Venice.

On the other hand, he added cheerfully, good has triumphed over evil so far. Thus turns the fashion cycle of life.

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The Avant-Garde Is Alive and Well and Making Fashion - The New York Times

"Warming up for a marathon of science."Wake Up

Its been 14 days since NASAs Mars rover Perseverance landed on the Martian surface.

Over that period, the lonely rover has been able to stretch and get ready for show time.

This week Ive been doing lots of health checkouts, getting ready to get to work, NASA tweeted from the rovers official Twitter account on Wednesday. Ive checked many tasks off my list, including instrument tests, imaging, and getting my arm moving.

Warming up for a marathon of science, the six-wheeled rover tweeted.

Perseverance, lovingly nicknamed Percy by the media, is decked out with a host of sophisticated scientific instruments to look for signs of ancient life in the surrounding Jezero Crater, a region suspected to be an ancient, dried up river delta.

Some of those instruments are attached to a seven-foot robotic arm. The arm has five degrees of freedom thanks to specially designed actuators. At the end of its arm is the turret, which carries scientific cameras, mineral and chemical analyzers for studying the past habitability of Mars, according to NASAs website.

The arm also holds a drill designed to extract core samples. Some of these samples will be packaged up to be returned to Earth during a later mission to Mars.

Its exciting to see Perseverance jump into action. It wont be long until the rover will be able to send back its first set of invaluable scientific data.

Stay tuned: NASA will be holding a press conference tomorrow at 3:30 pm EST for an update.

READ MORE: Perseverance rover flexes its arm on Mars for the 1st time [Space.com]

More on Perseverance: All the Easter Eggs NASA Engineers Left on the Mars Rover

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NASA's Mars Rover "Percy" Stretches Its Arm for the First Time - Futurism

The Perseverance rover doesn't care about your nine-to-five.Mars Time

NASAs Perseverance Mars rover is currently approaching the surface of Mars, where its expected to touch down in the next few hours.

Assuming it lands successfully, the Perseverance mission team at NASA is going to need to make some major lifestyle changes, Space.com reports. Most notably? Theyre going to have to start living and working on whats called Mars time, meaning theyll shift their schedule to match whats happening on the Red Planet instead of back home on Earth.

A day on Mars lasts about 24 hours and 37 minutes, meaning that the NASA teams shifts will actually start and end at different Earth times each day, since the two planets arent in perfect sync with one another.

2PM will be our start time and then that will adjust by 40 minutes every day, deputy project manager Jennifer Trosper said during a Tuesday news conference. While it works, we only ask people to do this for three months.

During past rover landings, NASA engineers would often set up cots and sleep at work as they adjusted to their constantly-shifting schedules, Space.com reports. But because of the pandemic, many of the team members will be working from home and have to sort out their calendars on their own.

But thankfully, the engineers will only go through three cycles of Mars time each just over a month on Earth before they can return to a normal working schedule, Space.com reports. Then, theyll finally be able to live on their own planets local time and recover from what Trosper said will feel a whole lot like constant jet-lag.

READ MORE: NASAs Perseverance rover team will have to live on Mars time after landing on the Red Planet [Space.com]

Watch the Perseverance landing: How to Watch NASAs Perseverance Rover Land on Mars

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NASA Scientists Need to Live and Work on "Mars Time" - Futurism

Electric Jaguars and potentially even hydrogen-powered ones are coming very soon.Big Shift

British Automaker Jaguar Land Rover Limited announced on Monday that its making an ambitious and speedy transition away from gas-burning cars to go almost entirely electric in the future.

Most prominently, the entire Jaguar brand will go entirely electric within the next four years, according to a company press release about the pivot. In addition, the company will start to launch all-electric Land Rover SUV models in 2024. Both are ambitious timelines, but symbolically important if the iconic automaker can show the switch is possible, it could push the entire industry away from gas-burning cars and toward greener technologies.

Jaguar Land Rover is far from the only company pivoting or at least heavily investing in electric vehicles. President Biden said he wanted to electrify the entire federal fleet of vehicles, and General Motors plans to sell only electric cars, trucks, and SUVs by 2035.

But if all goes according to plan, Jaguar will already be long-done with its electrification by then. The company giving itself just four years to pivot is an ambitious and perhaps lofty goal, so it will be interesting to see how it shakes out.

The cleaner Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles of the future may not be powered by electricity alone, according to the press release. The company is also looking into hydrogen fuel technology as a possible means to power its cars, providing multiple avenues to pursue clean energy.

Of course, these are luxury vehicles that were talking about, so a fleet of electric Jaguars wont do much to make electric car technology more accessible for the average person. That said, progress is progress.

READ MORE: Reimagine Press Release [Jaguar]

More on electric cars: Electric Cars Are About to Become Cheaper Than Gas Ones

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Jaguar Says All Its Cars Will Be Electric in Just Four Years - Futurism

More than 4,000 SpaceX employees took part in a study, helmed by Elon Musk, to track the spread of COVID-19 throughout the company.

Musk partnered with researchers from Harvard and MIT to develop the antibody testing program, which required volunteer SpaceX employees to submit to monthly blood tests.

This week, the group published a peer-reviewed study Musk, known as an unusually hands-on executive, carries a byline on it in the journal Nature Communications.

The findings shed new light on how the severity of COVID symptoms impact the amount of antibodies each person has,and suggests those who experienced mild symptoms from the virus are less likely to have long-term immunity.

People can have antibodies, but it doesnt mean they are going to be immune, Dr. Galit Alter, co-author of the study and member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard, told The Wall Street Journal.

The findings have the potential to help public health officials identify who is most vulnerable to the coronavirus and then prioritize them for vaccinations. Of course, more research is needed before it can be more widely applied.

To really nail this down at a public-health level would require doing reinfection studies and following people for reinfection, Joshua T. Schiffer, associate professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centers vaccine and infectious-disease division, told the WSJ.

SpaceX is continuing to research, test, and monitor its employees for infection and reinfection each month. As the vaccine is distributed throughout the country, itll also examine the impact the vaccine on antibody production.

Hopefully, their boss has changed his own mind on getting the vaccine.

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Elon Musk Collaborated With MIT to Track COVID Infections at SpaceX - Futurism

Watching NASAs Perseverance rover touch down on the Red Planet this week, it was impossible not to be struck by a sense of awe at humanitys scientific achievements in our race to the stars. The spectacle invited us to dwell on our place in the universe and the countless ways in which we reach toward even the most distant frontiers.

It also brought to mind a pressing question. If I were dropped in Jezero crater with a pressurized spacesuit, could I defeat NASAs mighty rover in hand-to-hand or at least hand-to-robot-arm combat?

In the red corner we have the most technologically advanced robot ever to explore beyond Earth. Its bristling with sensors, armed with a fearsome drill and a laser, fueled by a plutonium power system, and ruggedly constructed to withstand the harsh Martian environment.

And in the blue corner we have me, a physically unremarkable representative of a species which likes to think of itself as the apex predator of the nearby planet of Earth.

In reality, I like to think that Perseverance and I would be the best of friends. The rover is a peaceful scientific investigator, searching Mars for signs of ancient life. And its controlled by humans on Earth, which means its subject to a communications delay of up to 20 minutes. But to make things interesting, lets assume that its been reprogrammed to use every tool in its arsenal for maximum autonomous lethality.

I wanted to know if I stood a chance in such a scenario, so I called up Roger Wiens of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, who led the development of Perseverances SuperCam instrument and is broadly familiar with the rovers capabilities.

Wiens suggested that my best bet might be to flip it over like a beetle on its back. But given that Perseverance is approximately the size and weight of my first car in a recent interview with Futurism, NASA head Steve Jurczyk characterized it as a robot the size of a Mini Cooper Id probably struggle, even with the planets weak gravity.

One advantage I would have is speed. My fitness levels are deeply unimpressive, exacerbated by a year spent alternately sitting at my desk and rewatching old episodes of Star Trek from my couch. But even my dumpy, unathletic body could maintain a leisurely pace of 3 mph enough to easily overtake the rovers glacial top speed of just 0.1 mph.

Even if the rover could crush my squishy organic frame beneath its formidable wheels, it would have to catch me first. And as a lifelong specialist in avoiding confrontation, I can run away like a champ.

One strategy would be to use my cunning and construct a trap. I could build a ramp from Martian rocks and sand and lie in wait for the Mars rover to investigate, hoping the steep terrain would tip it over. But Wiens isnt sure about my chances.

That might be a little difficult, he said. Ive seen a model drive right up over a rock that was nearly one meter tall.

Indeed, the rover can make amazing maneuvers over tricky terrain thanks to its suspension system called, and I swear I am not making this up, a rocker-bogie mechanism which keeps its weight evenly distributed over all six sturdy wheels. It can climb over rocks and through depressions, and the chunky tread of its wheels can handle both soft sand and hard rocks.

Another possibility would be to use my highly evolved monkey brain to perform a sneak attack. In the great tradition of early man, I could locate a hefty Mars rock and try to bludgeon the rover into submission.

Wiens thinks that might work, at least to some extent. Most of the hardware which makes up instruments like SuperCam is custom-built to withstand the extreme forces of launch and landing, not to mention the planets frigid temperatures. But certain components, such as the infrared detectors, are commercially built devices and can contain fragile parts.

We dont really expect any Martians to be attacking the rover, Wiens admitted.

So I might have a chance at harming it, because some parts are a bit sensitive if someone is throwing rocks or small pebbles at it, in Wiens analysis. Theres a glass window in front of the SuperCam instrument, for instance, which he thinks I could smash to disorient the rover.

To do that, though, Id need to get close, and that would be hard due to its keen-eyed sensors. The SuperCam instrument alone includes a camera with a zoom powerful enough to spot a human hair from two meters away, and infrared sensors for studying mineralogy via reflected sunlight, which means it could spot me in the dark. It also has a microphone, which will be the first instrument to record the sounds of Mars, so even my footfalls could betray me.

The rover might defend itself by attacking me with its Ingenuity marscopter, with its whirling rotors, which NASA intends to be the first aircraft to fly on a world other than Earth. And what really scares me about melee combat is Perseverances laser, also part of SuperCam, which is designed to fire in brief pulses of five billionths of a second, focused on an area of just a fraction of a millimeter. The laser can fire at targets more than 20 feet away with great accuracy.

It packs a lot of energy into a really small spot, Wiens explained, to turn little pieces of rock into a high-energy plasma so that the camera can detect the color spectrum they give off, revealing their elemental composition.

Thats awesome for analyzing Martian rocks. But its unclear what it would mean for me as the target of the rovers ire. What would happen, I asked, if I put my hand in front of the laser?

It would make a little burn mark, Wiens said. Dont do that.

I might get some protection from the laser with my spacesuit. But the rover would have yet another weapon in the form of its drill, which is designed to bore into rocks in order to collect samples. The Sample Caching System includes a carousel of no less than nine drill bits for different types of sample, which are attached to a seven-foot arm that reaches out to drill into rock or, terrifyingly, into me.

All told, when even one of the scientists who was intimately involved in the design of the rover is skeptical about my chances, Im not feeling confident. Thats a chilling thought, especially when I imagine Im on Mars and its growing dark, and through the thin atmosphere an ominous whisper carries a distant whirring of gears which tells me my ruthless robotic adversary is out there, just waiting for its chance to attack.

Dan Robitzski contributed reporting.

More on NASAs Perseverance rover: NASA Releases Amazing Photo of Rover Parachuting to Mars Surface

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Could I Defeat NASAs New Mars Rover in Hand-to-Hand Combat? - Futurism

A fifth dimension could finally explain the mysteries of dark matter.5D Everything

A team of German and Spanish scientists says theyve found a natural explanation for dark matter and other unresolved scientific mysteries but their work depends on the existence of a new theoretical subatomic particle and an entire fifth dimension of the universe.

The new particle, a yet-undiscovered type of fermion, would be able to traverse this new dimension and bind dark matter to the luminous matter that makes up everything in the universe we can see or touch, Motherboard reports, in a way that doesnt contradict any of the other models we have on how dark matter behaves. Its seems a bit far-fetched physicists creating new rules for the universe in order to explain their own theory but if it pans out, it could vastly improve our understanding of the cosmos.

The scientists explained to Motherboard that this new particle would likely be similar to and interact with the Higgs Boson, but that it would be too heavy to detect with the current generation of particle accelerators and colliders.

But assuming the particle and the fifth dimension it navigates both exist, it represents a unique window into dark matter, according to the teams paper, published in The European Physical Journal C last month.

If this heavy particle exists, it would necessarily connect the visible matter that we know and that we have studied in detail with the constituents of the dark matter, assuming that dark matter is composed out of fundamental fermions, which live in the extra dimension, a member of the team told Motherboard.

In lieu of a tangible way to prove that this mysterious particle or the fifth dimension exists, the researchers told Motherboard they hope that other scientists keep their model in mind as they continue to study particle physics and cosmology.

This could also eventually lead to an interesting cosmological history of the universe and might lead to the production of gravitational waves, the team told Motherboard. This is an interesting line of research, which we plan to follow in the months ahead.

READ MORE: Scientists Have Proposed a New Particle That Is a Portal to a 5th Dimension [Motherboard]

More on dark matter: Astronomers Find Over 1,200 Dark Matter Hot Spots

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The Universe May Have a Fifth Dimension, According to New Research - Futurism

Image by Hakan Nural via Unsplash / Futurism

The United Kingdom is beginning an unusual new experiment. Government scientists want to know what happens if patients mix and match vaccines made by two different pharmaceutical companies.

Right now, the coronavirus vaccines developed by Moderna, Pfizer, and Oxford University all require two spaced-out doses to maximize their protective abilities. Requiring everyone to show up to two appointments and securing enough of the correct vaccine has been a logistical challenge, so the UK government is exploring whether it really matters which vaccine people get for their second injection, according to Axios.

If two doses from different pharmaceuticals are effective, distributing coronavirus vaccines could become far simpler but its far too soon to make any guesses.

If we do show that these vaccines can be used interchangeably in the same schedule this will greatly increase the flexibility of vaccine delivery, Oxford University virologist and project leader Matthew Snape said in a press release.

The experiment will test eight different possible vaccination combinations, according to the press release. Study participants will either get two doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, two doses of the Pfizer vaccine, or one of each before the other.

Then, within those four groups, half of the participants will get the two doses four weeks apart and the rest will get them 12 weeks apart. In other words, theyre trying as many combinations as logically possible and tracking what happens.

The work is speculative for now, scientists said in the press release, but they think its worth investigating in hopes of simplifying the vaccine rollout.

This study will give us greater insight into how we can use vaccines to stay on top of this nasty disease, flu expert and Englands Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van-Tam said in the release.

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Scientists Are Sticking the Same People With Multiple Vaccines - Futurism