Welcome to Edition 8.06 of the Rocket Report! After years of disappointing results from SPACs and space companies, it is a good sign to see Firefly's more traditional initial public offering doing so well. The company has had such a long and challenging road over more than a decade; the prospect of their success should be heartening to the commercial space industry.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Virgin Galactic delays resumption of spaceflights . The Richard Branson-founded company plans to resume private space tourism trips in the autumn of 2026 after its Delta spacecraft’s first commercial flight, a research mission that was delayed from summer 2026 to also occur in the fall, Bloomberg reports . Virgin Galactic announced an updated timeline on Wednesday, when it reported quarterly financial results that fell short of analysts’ expectations. Revenue was about $410,000 for the second quarter.

Read full article

Comments

On Thursday, the Trump administration issued an executive order asserting political control over grant funding, including all federally supported research. The order requires that any announcement of funding opportunities be reviewed by the head of the agency or someone they designate, which means a political appointee will have the ultimate say over what areas of science the US funds. Individual grants will also require clearance from a political appointee and "must, where applicable, demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities."

The order also instructs agencies to formalize the ability to cancel previously awarded grants at any time if they're considered to "no longer advance agency priorities." Until a system is in place to enforce the new rules, agencies are forbidden from starting new funding programs.

In short, the new rules would mean that all federal science research would need to be approved by a political appointee who may have no expertise in the relevant areas, and the research can be canceled at any time if the political winds change. It would mark the end of a system that has enabled US scientific leadership for roughly 70 years.

Read full article

Comments

The Federal Communications Commission is hamstringing its upcoming review of broadband availability by ignoring the prices consumers must pay for Internet service, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez said in a statement yesterday.

"Some point to existing law to argue that availability is the only metric Congress allows to measure broadband deployment success. But the law does not require this agency to view broadband availability with one eye closed and the other one half-open," said Gomez, the only Democrat on the Republican-majority commission.

The FCC said on Tuesday that it voted to kick off the next annual review with a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) that "reorients the Commission's approach to the Section 706 Report by adhering more closely to the plain language of the statute and takes a fresh look at this question of whether broadband 'is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.'" That would remove affordability as a factor in the review.

Read full article

Comments

Some stone tools found near a river on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi suggest that the first hominins had reached the islands by at least 1.04 million years ago. That's around the same time that the ancestors of the infamously diminutive “Hobbits” may have reached the island of Flores.

Archaeologist Budianto Hakim of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency and his colleagues were the ones who recently unearthed the tools from a site on Sulawesi. Although a handful of stone flakes from that island don't tell us who the ancestors of the small species were or how they reached remote islands like Flores and Luzon, the tools are one more piece in the puzzle. And this handful of stone flakes may eventually play a role in helping us understand how other hominin species conquered most of the world long before we came along.

Crossing the ocean a million years ago

Sometimes the deep past leaves the smallest traces. At the Calio site, a sandstone outcrop in what's now a cornfield outside the village of Ujung in southern Sulawesi, people left behind just a handful of sharp stone flakes roughly a million years ago. There are seven of them, ranging from 22 to 60 millimeters long, and they're scratched, worn, and chipped from tumbling around at the bottom of a river. But it's still clear that they were once shaped by skilled human—or at least human-like—hands that used hard stones as hammers to make sharp-edged chert flakes for cutting and scraping.

Read full article

Comments

In June, Google said it unearthed a campaign that was mass-compromising accounts belonging to customers of Salesforce. The means: an attacker pretending to be someone in the customer's IT department feigning some sort of problem that required immediate access to the account. Two months later, Google has disclosed that it, too, was a victim.

The series of hacks are being carried out by financially motivated threat actors out to steal data in hopes of selling it back to the targets at sky-high prices. Rather than exploiting software or website vulnerabilities, they take a much simpler approach: calling the target and asking for access. The technique has proven remarkably successful. Companies whose Salesforce instances have been breached in the campaign, Bleeping Computer reported, include Adidas, Qantas, Allianz Life, Cisco, and the LVMH subsidiaries Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Tiffany & Co.

Better late than never

The attackers abuse a Salesforce feature that allows customers to link their accounts to third-party apps that integrate data with in-house systems for blogging, mapping tools, and similar resources. The attackers in the campaign contact employees and instruct them to connect an external app to their Salesforce instance. As the employee complies, the attackers ask the employee for an eight-digit security code that the Salesforce interface requires before a connection is made. The attackers then use this number to gain access to the instance and all data stored in it.

Read full article

Comments

After seeking advice on health topics from ChatGPT, a 60-year-old man who had a "history of studying nutrition in college" decided to try a health experiment: He would eliminate all chlorine from his diet, which for him meant eliminating even table salt (sodium chloride). His ChatGPT conversations led him to believe that he could replace his sodium chloride with sodium bromide, which he obtained over the Internet.

Three months later, the man showed up at his local emergency room. His neighbor, he said, was trying to poison him. Though extremely thirsty, the man was paranoid about accepting the water that the hospital offered him, telling doctors that he had begun distilling his own water at home and that he was on an extremely restrictive vegetarian diet. He did not mention the sodium bromide or the ChatGPT discussions.

His distress, coupled with the odd behavior, led the doctors to run a broad set of lab tests, revealing multiple micronutrient deficiencies, especially in key vitamins. But the bigger problem was that the man appeared to be suffering from a serious case of "bromism." That is, an excess amount of the element bromine had built up in his body.

Read full article

Comments

Human remains from 11 individuals recovered from El Mirador Cave in Spain showed evidence of cannibalism, archaeologists have concluded. According to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, the cannibalism was likely the result of a violent episode between competing Late Neolithic herding communities about 5,700 years ago.

“Cannibalism is one of the most complex behaviors to interpret, due to the inherent difficulty of understanding the act of humans consuming other humans," said co-author Palmira Saladié, a researcher at IPHES-CERCA and the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV). "Moreover, in many cases we lack all the necessary evidence to associate it with a specific behavioral context. Finally, societal biases tend to interpret it invariably as an act of barbarism.”

The El Mirador Cave is located at Sierra de Atapuerca , an archaeological site in the Burgos province of northern Spain. There is prior evidence of cannibalism at the Atapuerca site, including the remains of six Early Bronze Age humans, which included skull caps possibly used as containers during ceremonial consumption. In addition, since 1994, more than 160 bone fragments have been recovered from the Aurora Stratum (TD-6) in the Gran Dolina cavern at Sierra de Atapuerca. Over 30 percent of those fragments showed signs of butchering and consumption, such as slice marks, scrape marks, and chop marks.

Read full article

Comments

On Thursday, OpenAI announced GPT-5 and three variants—GPT-5 Pro, GPT-5 mini, and GPT-5 nano—what the company calls its "best AI system yet," with availability for some of the models across all ChatGPT tiers, including free users. The new model family arrives with claims of reduced confabulations, improved coding capabilities, and a new approach to handling sensitive requests that OpenAI calls "safe completions."

It's also the first time OpenAI has given free users access to a simulated reasoning AI model, which breaks problems down into multiple steps using a technique that tends to improve answer accuracy for logical or analytical questions.

GPT-5 represents OpenAI's latest attempt to unify its various AI capabilities into a single system. The company says the GPT-5 family acts as a "unified system" with a smart, efficient model that answers most questions, a deeper reasoning model called "GPT-5 thinking" for harder problems, and a real-time router that decides which approach to use based on conversation type, complexity, tool needs, and user intent. Like GPT-4o, GPT-5 is a multimodal system that can interact via images, voice, and text.

Read full article

Comments

REIDEN, Germany—There is a lot to be said for testing a car on the roads it was developed on. A Kei car , for example, makes more sense in downtown Tokyo than on one of Nashville's arterial highways , surrounded by construction trucks. Likewise the German supersedans. For decades, an arms race has been conducted between rival engineers in Munich, Ingolstadt, Stuttgart, and Zuffenhausen, each trying to best the others and build the ultimate four-door, four-wheel Autobahn crusher, fit for the fattest fat-cat captains of industry. The Panamera Turbo S E-Hybrid is Porsche's entry into this heavyweight bout.

In most of the world, the horsepower war has little relevance. Huge engine outputs, short acceleration times, and ridiculous top speeds that result from a casual indifference to fitting a speed limiter are at best of interest to the bench racers and are otherwise academic. Not so in Germany. After inventing the motorway in 1932, the country declined to impose speed limits on some sections, a practice it maintains as long as there's daylight and the weather is good. And drivers there make use of that privilege—in the fast lane, at least.

Seen in this context, the $239,000 Panamera Turbo S starts making more sense. It's the most powerful Panamera to date, combining a (fruity-sounding) 591 hp (441 kW) 4.0 L V8 that has been reworked compared to the version you might find under the hood of the last version . New monoscroll turbochargers and a higher peak combustion chamber pressure help warm up the catalytic converters quicker, and instead of cylinder deactivation at low load, the engine can change how much and how long it opens its intake valves, shortening the travel and duration under those conditions.

Read full article

Comments