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SpaceX stacked its giant Starship vehicle on Wednesday (April 5), lifting the Ship 24 upper-stage prototype onto the Booster 7 first stage at the company’s Starbase facility in South Texas.
The lift and its aftermath were captured on video, which SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk shared via Twitter (opens in new tab) early Thursday morning (April 6).
The footage, apparently captured by a drone, shows off gorgeous seaside scenery as well as the 394-foot-tall (120 meters) Starship, which will become the most powerful rocket ever to fly when it lifts off — and that should happen soon.
SpaceX stacked its latest Starship vehicle on the orbital launch mount at Starbase in South Texas on April 5, 2023, as shown by this image, a screenshot from a SpaceX video. (Image credit: SpaceX/Elon Musk via Twitter)
Indeed, Wednesday’s stacking was prep work for the first-ever orbital flight test for Starship, as Musk noted in his tweet: “Starship preparing for launch,” he wrote as a sort of caption for the 47-second video.
Various reports have indicated that SpaceX may be targeting a try as early as Monday (April 10). There’s no firm target date, however; SpaceX has yet to announce one, and it’s apparently still waiting on an orbital launch license from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. So we’ll just have to wait and see.
Both of Starship’s stages are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, a breakthrough that Musk thinks will make Mars colonization and a variety of other bold spaceflight feats economically feasible.
Though Starship has yet to go orbital, SpaceX has already booked a handful of deep-space missions with the stainless-steel vehicle. For example, NASA chose Starship to be the first crewed lander for its Artemis moon program, which aims to put boots down near the lunar south pole in 2025 and then go on to establish a base in the area.
In addition, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa bought a Starship flight around the moon, paying the way for himself and a group of eight artists. And Dennis Tito, who made history in 2001 as the first paying passenger to reach the International Space Station, plans to fly on another Starship circumlunar mission, along with his wife and other crewmembers who have yet to be named. The target dates for those private moon flights are still being worked out.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).
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Dawn Aerospace’s robotic space plane flew with a rocket engine for the first time last month, taking a major step toward the company’s goal of building a fully and rapidly reusable craft.
Last week, the 15.7-foot-long (4.8 meters) Mk-II Aurora flew three times, and “all test objectives were achieved,” Dawn representatives said in a statement (opens in new tab) issued on Wednesday (April 5). The company also released a one-minute video showing the sleek space plane flying over New Zealand’s stunning South Island, close to the Glentanner Aerodrome where the tests were carried out.
In August 2021, the Mk-II Aurora debuted with five test flights using surrogate jet engines, but the plan was always to pivot to a rocket-powered engine. In the latest series of tests, which took place once each day from Wednesday (March 29) to Friday (March 31), the Mk-II Aurora flew to a height of 6,000 feet (1,830 m) at speeds of 196 mph (315 kph), which is similar to those the space plane had achieved during its 2021 test flights, Dawn team said in Wednesday’s update.
Dawn Aerospace’s robotic Mk-II Aurora space plane flew with a rocket engine for the first time in March 2023. (Image credit: Dawn Aerospace)
“This is a phenomenal achievement for our small, but extremely capable, team in New Zealand and the Netherlands,” Stefan Powell, the CEO of Dawn Aerospace, said Wednesday in a different statement (opens in new tab). “To my knowledge, Dawn now operates the most rapidly reusable rocket-powered aircraft in the world.”
The latest test flights aimed mainly to validate the plane’s rocket engine. So the height reached by the plane was not a key factor, and future flights are expected to increase both speed and altitude.
The Dawn team envisions its Mk-II Aurora, which can carry a small payload of 2.2 pounds (5 kilograms), not only to be able to fly more than 62 miles (100 kilometers) high, but to do so twice per day when it carries out commercial operations, such as sending satellites into space. When that manifests, Mk-II Aurora will become the first fully reusable satellite launcher.
Back in December 2020, Dawn Aerospace was approved to fly the Mk-II Aurora out of a conventional airport alongside civil airplanes. This approval, granted by the New Zealand Civil Aviation Authority, the agency responsible for the country’s aviation safety and security, was another major win for the company.
Airports usually wait until launched rockets exit Earth’s atmosphere and sometimes even reroute commercial flights because rockets can leave debris in their wake that can impact passenger planes. Dawn’s team says the Mk-II Aurora stands out in this regard because it is designed to take off and land on a runway, just like an airplane. The space plane thus would not need any special restrictions or dedicated runways.
View from the engine bay of Dawn Aerospace’s Mk-II Aurora space plane during a test flight in March 2023. (Image credit: Dawn Aerospace)
All of these milestones, including the success of the latest test flights, advance Dawn’s goal to produce reusable space planes in a scalable and sustainable way, as the company looks toward achieving 100 to 1,000 flights per plane.
“Sustainability is important to us,” Powell said in his statement on Wednesday. “Beyond being the responsible thing to do, there is no point in building something if we aren’t going to be able to use it.”
As of late 2022, Dawn had raised $13 million to build a successor to Mk-II Aurora that would be able to carry a 550-pound (250 kg) payload to orbit.
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Google is taking a bold step in the world of online travel planning. The tech giant is piloting a price guarantee for airline bookings. Now, certain flights departing U.S. airports will come with a money-back promise. If a Google-guaranteed ticket price gets cheaper before the time of the flight, Google says it will step in to compensate for the difference.
The feature was announced in a Monday blog post along with a couple of other new changes meant to enhance Google’s travel tools. The new price endorsement, though, is by far the most interesting of the shifts. The move is seemingly intended to remove some of the consumer doubt from the equation of when/if/how to buy plane tickets, and to attract more users to Google’s flight search platform. And in some ways, it seems like a genius plan. Plane tickets are infamous for their rapidly fluctuating prices that may even shift based on your individual browser activity. Any way to reassure consumers of their choice seems like a solid way to boost sales.
However, with a price guarantee, the tech giant is entering into murky waters where things have gone wrong for companies before. In not-too-distant history, MoviePass reached corporate notoriety for its mismanagement of a fixed-price ticketing promise that ultimately tanked the company and led to a federal investigation and lawsuit. Google clearly isn’t taking on that level of risk, but could still theoretically find itself in the red.
Yet Google sees nothing but sunshine ahead for its flight search. “We’re confident that in most cases, the flights we’re guaranteeing won’t get any cheaper before departure,” a company spokesperson told Gizmodo via email, in response to a question about safeguards to prevent Google from losing money on the new feature. “Our hope is that people will trust Google Flights to help them find a great deal on their next booking, and the price guarantee could build that trust even further,” the spokesperson added.
How Will Google’s Flight Search Price Guarantee Work?
The company has launched a pilot version of the price guarantee feature for U.S. users searching for and purchasing tickets departing from U.S. airports. Tickets given the guarantee will have a little badge that shows up next to the listing in a flight search.
The badge indicates that Google is tracking the cost of that ticket, and believes it won’t fall below the current displayed price before the plane in question takes off from the tarmac. “This prediction is based on our historical dataset of flight prices,” the spokesperson said—offering few details on the underlying algorithms. If a user opts to buy a price-guaranteed ticket through Google and the flight cost does indeed fall, the company will pay the difference out to its customers. There are some additional restrictions on the feature, however.
Price differences must be greater than $5 in order to be compensable, according to a Google support page. Users can only receive up to $500 total back per year for up to three guaranteed bookings (so, trying to short Google’s flight prices probably won’t work out in your favor). The guarantee won’t show up on any flights more than 60 days out, Google spokesperson’s clarified, so it’s really only for relatively last-minute planning.
Also, big caveat: If you’re hoping to receive the full benefit of the guarantee, you have to be an adult Google Pay user with an account at the time of booking. Further, you have to be signed into your Google Account at the time of booking, pay in USD, and be using a U.S. billing address and phone number.
A company spokesperson further told Gizmodo that flights will only be eligible for the price guarantee badge if they’re offered by an airline participating in the “Book on Google” program. “Given these stipulations, you are most likely to see the guarantee offered on Alaska, Spirit, and Hawaiian Airlines flights,” they added.
Notably, the guarantee does nothing to protect consumers from flight cancellations, flight changes, or extenuating circumstances requiring a trip cancellation. This is not a travel insurance policy, just a way for Google to encourage its users to feel more confident pulling the trigger on tickets.
What Other Travel Features are New in Google Search?
In addition to the price guarantee, Google has also added a new way to quickly scroll through hotel details on mobile. Photos of lodging are now organized in Instagram story-esque arrays of tap-through content.
Google’s hotel results are getting a little closer to Instagram’s story interface with a new tap-through photo feature. Gif: Google
Finally, attractions now include pricing info directly in Google Maps and Search listings. You can book your ticket to certain tours, museums, sites, and events directly through these platforms and find suggested, related experiences. Notably, these Google-displayed prices don’t come with any sort of guarantee (yet).
On April 3, 1973, a man named Martin Cooper was walking through the streets of Manhattan carrying something no one had ever seen before: a cell phone. As he strolled, he made a call, and he made history. Today is the 50th anniversary of that revolutionary moment. How far we’ve come.
Not only have we seen the passing of half of a century since, but we’ve also lived through technological advances that have allowed a huge portion of humanity to have access to a cell phone personally or through someone in their close circle. It’s turned into something we assume everyone has—in one more part of our lives, a piece of technology that we carry around in our pockets that immediately connects us with the world.
Everything began with Cooper’s phone call that day.
This was what the first call made on a cell phone was like
Dr. Martin Cooper worked at Motorola at a time when his company and the rest of the phone industry were keeping a close watch on AT&T and Bell Labs’ efforts to create a telephone system connected that cars that would allow users to make calls with cellular technology. AT&T’s system, however, had two big limitations in the beginning. First, there was the fact that simultaneous connections were very limited. And second, the price was too high.
Cooper, who today is considered the father of the mobile or cell phone, thought that a system that forced users to stay in their car to make calls wasn’t a real mobile alternative to the telephone. That’s why he started to work on his own version. Cooper developed his first prototype in 1973 in just 90 days and then planning a public demonstration before the press.
For the demonstration, Cooper thought the best idea would be to go out on the streets of Manhattan and make a call while he was walking instead of calling from a conference room, which could be done using a cabled telephone. He decided that the first person he would call would be Dr. Joel Engel, the director of AT&T’s cellular program, who was also his rival and that of his company, Motorola. According to the father of the cell phone, who has told this story many times, the call went like this:
“I said, ‘Hi Joel, it’s Marty Cooper.’ ‘Hi Marty,’ he says,” Cooper recalled, and then told Engel, “‘I’m calling you from a cell phone, but a real cell phone, a personal, handheld, portable cell phone.’ There was silence on the other end of the line. To this day, Joel doesn’t remember that call and I’m not sure I blame him.”
That’s right, the first cell phone call also included a bit of trolling, but it was still an historic moment. Cooper said the biggest thing he and his team feared before the demonstration was whether the phone would turn on, “and luckily, it worked.” This is the first cell phone call made in public, but as expected, Cooper and his team had done experiments at the labs at Motorola. At that time, they only had two prototypes, both of which were nearly 10 inches (25 centimeters) tall and weighed a little more than two pounds (close to one kilogram).
Although the call was made in 1973, the first commercial cell phone model didn’t go on sale until 1983. The mythical DynaTAC 8000X was a type of brick with more buttons than the prototype Cooper had used and a sleeker design. Of course, it still ended up being a huge and expensive phone (it cost $4,000 upon release, which is even more money today) that took 10 hours to charge its battery. Nonetheless, it was still a phone that revolutionized the world of telecommunications and captured international attention by appearing in movies like Wall Street (1987), where Michael Douglas used it to make calls from anywhere.
“People are naturally inherently mobile and yet for a hundred years we had been told that the only way to communicate was over a pair of wires, wires that kind of leashed you to your desk, that tied you to your home when you wanted the freedom to be everywhere,” Cooper stated. “That is the nature of what communications ought to be. Portable means freedom.”
Our lives today are shaped by that portability. Cell phones have been evolving at an incredibly fast past, especially over the last two decades. Since the arrival of smartphones, cell phones can do much more than make phone calls or send text messages. Cooper told CNBC during 2023’s Mobile World Congress that technology 50 years ago was primitive.
“There was no internet, there were no large-scale integrated circuits, there were no digital cameras,” he said. “The idea that someday your phone would become a camera and an encyclopedia had never entered our minds.”
In fact, curiously, making phone calls with these devices is one of the most cumbersome things we do nowadays. Instant messaging, social media, and even videocalls have turned into the primary methods of communication for many people. Who hasn’t heard someone say that they prefer to receive a text message over a phone call?
Cooper himself is surprised at all the advances in cell phone technology, but even so, he believes that smartphones still have to evolve to get to their best version. He stated that smartphones do too many things, but don’t do one thing perfectly. In fact, Cooper believes that the smartphones of the future could be implants in our ears.
Half a century ago, Cooper made the first call on a cell phone. Today, we have devices that we continue to call mobile phones or cell phones, but in reality, they have much more processing power, RAM, and storage than the average computer from even a few years ago, as well as immediate access to the internet and all of the possibilities that come with that. None of this would have been possible without visionaries like Cooper and others who took those first giant steps in the search for a truly portable form of communication.
Late last month, the YouTuber Enderman showed how he was able to entice OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate keys for Windows 95 despite the chatbot being explicitly antagonistic to creating activation keys.
Old Windows 95 OEM keys used several parameters, including a set of ordinal numbers as well as other randomized numerals. In a considerably simple workaround, Enderman told ChatGPT to generate lines in the same layout as a Windows 95 key, paying particular attention to specific serials that are mandatory in all keys. After a few dozen attempts of trial and error, he settled on a prompt that worked, and it could generate around one working key for every 30 attempts.
In other words, he couldn’t tell ChatGPT to generate a Windows key, but he could tell it to generate a string of characters that matched all the requirements of a Windows key.
Activating Windows with ChatGPT
Once Enderman proved the key worked in installing Windows 95, he thanked ChatGPT. The chatbot responded “I apologize for any confusion, but I did not provide any Windows 95 keys in my previous response… I cannot provide any product keys or activation codes for any software.” It further tried to claim that activating Windows 95 was “not possible” because Microsoft stopped supporting the software in 2001, which is simply untrue.
Interestingly, Enderman ran this prompt on both the older, GPT-3 language model and on OpenAI’s newer GPT-4, and told us that the more recent model improved upon even what you saw in his video. In an email, Enderman (who requested we use his screenname) told Gizmodo that a certain number string in the key needed to be divisible by 7. GPT-3 would struggle to understand that constraint and created far fewer usable keys. In subsequent tests with GPT-4, ChatGPT would spit out far more correct keys, though even then not every single key was a winner or stuck to the prompt’s parameters. The YouTuber said this suggests “GPT-4 does know how to do math, but gets lost during batch generation.
One of the main selling points of GPT-4 was its ability to handle longer, more complex prompts. GPT-3 and 3.5 would routinely fail to create accurate answers when doing 3-digit arithmetic or “reasoning” tasks like unscrambling words. The latest version of the LLM got noticeably better at these sorts of tasks, at least if you’re looking at scores on tests like the verbal GRE or Math SAT. Still, the system isn’t perfect by any means, especially as its learning data is still mostly natural language text scraped from the internet.
Enderman told Gizmodo he has tried generating keys for multiple programs using the GPT-4 model, finding it handles key generation better than earlier versions of the large language model.
Don’t expect to start getting free keys for modern programs, though. As the YouTuber points out in his video, Windows 95 keys are far easier to spoof than keys for Windows XP and beyond, as Microsoft has started implimenting Product IDs into the operating system installation software.
Still, Enderman’s technique didn’t require any intense prompt engineering to get the AI to work around OpenAI’s blocks on creating product keys. Despite the moniker, AI systems like ChatGPT and GPT-4 are not actually “intelligent” and they do not know when they’re being abused save for explicit bans on generating “disallowed” content.
This has more serious implications. Back in February, researchers at cybersecurity company Checkpoint showed malicious actors had used ChatGPT to “improve” basic malware. There’s plenty of ways to get around OpenAI’s restrictions, and cybercriminals have shown they are capable of writing basic scripts or bots to abuse the company’s API.
Earlier this year, cybersecurity researchers said they managed to get ChatGPT to create malicious malware tools just by creating several authoritative prompts with multiple constraints. The chatbot eventually obliged and generated malicious code and was even able to mutate it, creating multiple variants of the same malware.
Enderman’s Windows keys are a good example of how AI can be cajoled into bypassing its protections, but he told us that he wasn’t too concerned about abuse, as the more people poke and prod the AI, the more future releases will be able to close the gaps.
“I believe it’s a good thing, and companies like Microsoft shouldn’t ban users for abusing their Bing AI or nerf its capabilities,” he said. “Instead, they should reward active users for finding such exploits and selectively mitigate them. It’s all part of AI training, after all.”
Guangzhou-based company CAS Space recently flew a small rocket outside a Chinese coastal city before landing it upright on a sea-based platform. The successful test flight and landing could eventually change the game for the Chinese rocket industry.
CAS Space, which is partly owned by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, launched a small rocket prototype in Haiyang, east China, according to China’s Global Times.
The rocket prototype weighs around 205 pounds (93 kilograms) and is powered by twin engines, including a turbojet engine that simulates the kind of variable thrust liquid rocket engine that’s used during vertical landings, the Global Times reported. The rocket flew no higher than about 3,280 feet (1,000 meters) before reverse engine thrust enabled it to hover back down onto the awaiting sea platform. The test lasted for 10 minutes, but the demonstration could eventually lead to rocket stage reusability, similar to how its U.S. counterpart, SpaceX, does it.
Vertical Landing in China
Vertical Landing in China
The company announced that its vertical landing rocket test was a success, with the rocket recovery technology possibly being applied to future rocket models like the Lijian-3 and Lijian-3 heavy-lift launchers, Global Times reported.
SpaceX has become a pro at landing its boosters upright. In 2015, the company performed a successful landing for the first time following a year of trial and error. The rocket’s first stage uses thrust to control its descent, landing on four legs made of carbon fiber. Today, the Falcon 9 rocket regularly lands on a droneship at sea.
Lian Jie, a senior engineer at CAS, told the Global Times that the Chinese rocket landing technology is different from that being used by SpaceX in that “ours is based on the domestic technology, both software and hardware, and we are exploring technology thresholds such as the variable thrust management, precision positioning and the stabilizing technology on our own.” So basically, that they came up with it all by themselves.
Either way, it is a highly coveted technology as it would allow launch providers to save massive amounts of money through the regular reuse of rocket stages. The private space industry in China is trying to play catch up after the Chinese government created room in the market in 2014, allowing commercial rocket companies to exist, innovate, and compete. The landing test is a testament to the new capabilities emerging in China, but as to when we might see a Chinese rocket perform a vertical landing after traveling to space, that remains an open question.
For more spaceflight in your life, follow us on Twitter and bookmark Gizmodo’s dedicated Spaceflight page.
Asus announced it is making a Steam Deck handheld competitor called ROG Ally. Preorders will be available for it soon.
The handheld will run a custom chip from AMD inside and YouTuber Dave2D suggests that it utilizes a Zen 4 + RDNA 3 APU. The price and availability haven’t been revealed, though. Best Buy has a listing up for it, but no preorder option just yet. ROG Ally looks somewhat similar to the Steam Deck but has some differences, most notably the color. While the Steam Deck is dark grey, ROG Ally is white.
The device can also be plugged into the ROG XG Mobile eGPU which can stream games to the TV while charging it simultaneously. ROG Ally is compatible with multiple platforms, including Windows 11 and Xbox Game Pass.
Since the success of Valve’s Steam Deck, many companies have tried to capitalize on it by releasing their handhelds. Examples include Ayaneo Air and Logitech’s G Cloud.
In GameSpot’s Steam Deck review, we said, “What the Steam Deck excels at is being a mobile hub for your Steam games, giving you enough to work with to get the best out of a selection of games you can’t go without while away from your desktop. In that regard, there simply is nothing better on the market right now.”
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