It’s official: Valve’s SteamOS will be available on more platforms soon, and the first handheld PC gaming device to adopt the operating system will be the new Lenovo Legion Go S. At CES 2025, it was revealed that the slim Lenovo unit will run on the Linux-based OS–, the same one used on Valve’s Steam Deck.
Lenovo Legion Go S
The big draw here is that SteamOS is more intuitive to use and better suited for smaller screens when compared to its Windows 11 counterparts. While you are losing out on the flexibility of being able to load games from multiple storefronts, SteamOS makes up for it by being quick and easy to use thanks to its design. Essentially, if you’re looking for a pick-up-and-play handheld gaming PC that isn’t a chore to use and you don’t mind sticking to Steam, these new Lenovo devices could be perfect for you.
As for the new Lenovo model, the Legion Go S looks like it’ll be a direct competitor to the Steam Deck thanks to several hardware changes. Most notable is that it won’t offer Switch-like removable controllers, but it will keep the small trackpad found underneath the face buttons. These handhelds will be flexing some impressive power thanks to the new AMD Z2 Go chip. These will also be equipped with a 120Hz variable-refresh-rate display and customizable levers on the rear.
Did you get enough about Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips in 2024? To start off 2025, the chipmaker known for finally bringing ARM to PC—and usable this time—now aims to carve a niche in the cheap laptop or mini-PC market. The new Snapdragon X platform isn’t plus and it isn’t elite, although if you want to get your mother a ARM-based small PC for nothing but browsing and streaming, this could be your first CPU of choice..
The current staple of Oryon-based Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips include an 8-core variant. The Snapdragon X has the same number of cores, though it’s dialed back to 3 GHz clock speeds on the same 4nm processor node and a 30 MB cache. It has a 135 mb/s memory bandwidth but maintains the same 45 TOPS neural processor as the other Snapdragon PC CPUs.
Does the NPU really matter so much when its made for a PC that has a limited amount of onboard RAM? Likely not. The Snapdragon X is more meant to compete against other, low-end CPUs like the Intel Core Ultra 5 120U from early last year. Qualcomm claims its new chip is capable of close to 60% better benchmarks in Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024, though for a low-end PC the most important thing is how it handles browsing tasks with better power efficiency. Qualcomm claimed it should get 157% better power efficiency at ISO power than the last-gen Intel chip.
Intel just released new CPUs for both its Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake lineup, including a new U line. Without benchmark comparisons, all we have to go off is the company’s specs. Otherwise, the Snapdragon X supports Bluetooth 5.4 and WiFi 7. Devices with this chip should be able to support 4K HDR video capture and HiFi audio.
There should be several OEMs debuting new Snapdragon X-based PCs during this year’s CES. Lenovo is first out the gate with two mini-PCs, the ThinkCentre neo 50q QC and Lenovo IdeaCentre Mini x (1L, 10). Both include the Snapdragon X Plus, though the IdeaCentre is geared more toward creatives looking for a Mac mini alternative.
For as long as humans have suffered at the hands of the storms they have dreamed of controlling the weather. The United States, like all great empires lost to hubris, has long sought to manipulate the skies to its own ends. A new Federal report has revealed America sucks at it.
The report comes from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a nonpartisan watchdog group that investigates the U.S. government. It’s narrowly focused on “cloud seeding,” the practice of adding silver iodide crystals to clouds to make them bust and give up that sweet sweet rain. As droughts hit the western states on a routine basis, many local governments are attempting to use cloud seeding to bring the rains.
It’s not working well. The GAO conceded there’s some validity to cloud seeding, but that it’s almost impossible to measure its effectiveness. “Cloud seeding may increase water availability and result in economic, environmental, and human health benefits. In the studies GAO reviewed, estimates of the additional precipitation ranged from 0 to 20 percent,” the report said. “However, it is difficult to evaluate the effects of cloud seeding due to limitations of effectiveness research.”
The idea of seeding clouds with something to make them rain started in the late 19th century but wasn’t studied and perfected until after World War II. “Scientists demonstrated the basis of cloud seeding in the 1940s when they observed in the laboratory that water present in clouds could be artificially induced to create ice crystals using dry ice or silver iodide crystals,” the GAO said in its report. “Extensive federal funding of research and development, including field experimentation, followed this discovery. For example, in fiscal year 1978, total federal funding for weather modification was approximately $68 million, in 2024 dollars.”
Scientists could never quite prove it worked. Or, if it did, how effective the seeding was. In the 1980s, the federal government slashed cloud seeding funds. These days, most cloud seeding schemes are local affairs. According to the GAO, nine states (California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming) are seeding the clouds.
Methods and specifics of seeding differ greatly between countries and even states. It can be done from an aircraft flying above or through a cloud system, or from a large cannon on the ground that pumps particulates into the air. It’s often done with silver iodide, but sodium chloride, dry ice, liquid propane, and other salts are used too.
The GAO report is a list of the limitations of the tech. Utah alone is dumping $12 million a year into seeding the clouds without too much to show for it. It’s hard to estimate how much it would have rained without cloud seeding, so there’s not a great way to make a control group for any study. It’s also hard to know how much the seeding affected rainfall in a specific area. Many previous studies of seed-based rainfall showed results that weren’t statistically significant.
“While one study found an average increase in precipitation of 3 percent across 118 randomized cases, this effect was not statistically distinguishable from zero,” the GAO said. “One study reported an average precipitation increase of 3 percent between 1977 and 2018 across nine cases, but the statistical results could not conclusively determine an effect from cloud seeding in seven of the cases.”
The GAO also noted that no one knows what pumping silver iodine crystals and other particulates into the clouds to generate rain does to flora and fauna on the ground. More water in dry areas is, generally, better. But changing the water levels in delicate and complicated ecosystems can have unintended consequences. “One stakeholder said it is not clear if cloud seeding could improve fish outcomes through higher water levels and lower water temperatures, and it is uncertain how increased soil moisture from cloud seeding might translate into healthier, less dry forests with reduced susceptibility to wildfires.”
Silver iodine appears non-toxic in small doses, but the science is far from settled. “Silver iodide is nearly insoluble in water,” the report said. “However, when it dissolves it releases a small number of silver ions. In high enough quantities, silver ions—a known antimicrobial substance—could have harmful effects on beneficial bacteria in the environment and water resources.”
The GAO also called out another problem with cloud seeding programs: conspiracy theories. Government weather control has long been a feature of conspiracy theories. It’s a popular topic for Alex Jones and gained prominence this year after Georgia GOP rep Marjorie Taylor Greene spread it around following Hurricane Helene.
This has led some lawmakers to view cloud seeding as a threat. Tennessee lawmakers passed a bill in April that banned all forms of cloud seeding in the state. In interviews with media, the Tennessee lawmakers said they’d taken the action to prevent chemtrails in the skies. A ban on cloud seeding will do nothing to prevent chemtrails, which are just the plumes of condensation and exhaust aircraft leave in their wake.
History tells us that all freedoms are conditional. In 1920, the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to legalize abortion, as part of a socialist commitment to women’s health and well-being. Sixteen years later, that decision was reversed once Stalin was in power and realized that birth rates were falling.
The pressure on all nations to keep up their population levels has never gone away. But in 2025, that demographic crunch is going to get even crunchier—and the casualty will be gender rights. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, the rate at which babies are being born has been plummeting for 15 years. In Japan, Poland, and Canada, the fertility rate is already down to 1.3. In China and Italy, it is 1.2. South Korea has the lowest in the world, at 0.72. Research published by The Lancet medical journal predicts that by 2100, almost every country on the planet won’t be producing enough children to sustain its population size.
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A good deal of this is because women have more access to contraception, are better educated than ever, and are pursuing careers that mean they are more likely to avoid or delay having children. Parents are investing more in each child that they do have. The patriarchal expectation that women should be little more than babymakers is thankfully crumbling.
But the original dilemma remains: How do countries make more kids? Governments have responded with pleas and incentives to encourage families to procreate. Hungary has abolished income tax for mothers under the age of 30. In 2023, North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un was seen weeping on television as he urged the National Conference of Mothers to do their part to stop declining birth rates. In Italy, Premier Giorgia Meloni has backed a campaign to reach at least half a million births a year by 2033.
As these measures fail to have their intended effect, though, the pressure on women is taking a more sinister turn. Conservative pro-natalist movements are promoting old-fashioned nuclear families with lots of children, achievable only if women give birth earlier. This ideology at least partly informs the devastating clampdown on abortion access in some US states. Anyone who thinks that abortion rights have nothing to do with population concerns should note that in the summer of 2024, US Senate Republicans also voted against making contraception a federal right. This same worldview feeds into the growing backlash against sexual and gender minorities, whose existence for some poses a threat to the traditional family. The most extreme pro-natalists also include white supremacists and eugenicists.
The more concerned that nations become about birth rates, the greater the risk to gender rights. In China, for instance, the government has taken a sharply anti-feminist stance in recent years. President Xi Jinping told a meeting of the All-China Women’s Federation in 2023 that women should “actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and child-bearing.”
For now, most women are at least able to exercise some choice over if and when they have children, and how many they have. But as fertility rates dip below replacement levels, there is no telling how far some nations may go to buoy their population levels. 2025 looks to be a year in which their choice could well be taken away.
Inhabitants of the Marshall Islands—a chain of coral atolls in the center of the Pacific Ocean—rely on sea transportation for almost everything: moving people from one island to another, importing daily necessities from faraway nations, and exporting their local produce. For millennia they sailed largely in canoes, but much of their seafaring movement today involves big, bulky, diesel-fueled cargo ships that are heavy polluters.
They’re not alone, of course. Cargo shipping is responsible for about 3% of the world’s annual greenhouse-gas emissions, and at the current rate of growth, the global industry could account for 10% of emissions by 2050.
Marshallese shipping represents just a drop in the ocean of global greenhouse-gas pollution; larger, more industrially developed countries are responsible for far more. But the islands have been disproportionately experiencing the consequences of human-made climate change: warming waters, more frequent extreme weather, and rising sea levels.
All this has created a sense of urgency for people like Alson Kelen, who lives and works in Majuro, the islands’ capital. He’s the founder of Waan Aelõñ, a Marshallese canoeing organization that is focused on keeping the region’s ancient and more environmentally sustainable maritime traditions alive. In doing so, he hopes to help his nation fully decarbonize its fleets. Efforts include training local youths to build traditional Marshallese canoes (to replace small, motor-powered speedboats) and larger sailboats fitted with solar panels (to replace medium-size cargo ships). He was also an advisor on construction of the Juren Ae, a cargo sailboat (shown at right) inspired by traditional Marshallese vessels, which made its maiden voyage in 2024 and can carry 300 metric tons of cargo. The Marshall Islands Shipping Corporation hopes it offers a blueprint for cleaner cargo transportation across the Pacific; relative to a fuel-powered cargo ship, the vessel could decrease emissions by up to 80%. It’s “a beautiful big sister of our little canoes,” says Kelen.
Though hyperlocal, Kelen’s work is part of a global project from the International Maritime Organization to reduce emissions associated with cargo shipping to net zero by 2050. Beyond these tiny islands, much of the effort to meet the IMO’s goals focuses on replacing gasoline with alternatives such as ammonia, methane, nuclear power, and hydrogen. And there’s also what the Marshallese people have long relied on: wind power. It’s just one option on the table, but the industry cannot decarbonize quickly enough to meet the IMO’s goals without a role for wind propulsion, says Christiaan De Beukelaer, a political anthropologist and author of Trade Winds: A Voyage to a Sustainable Future for Shipping. “If you take time into consideration, wind is indispensable,” he says. Studies show that deploying wind power on vessels could lower the shipping industry’s carbon dioxide emissions by 20%.
“What wind does is it effectively cuts out a few uncertainties,” says De Beukelaer—variables such as the fluctuation of fuel prices and the costs from any carbon pricing scheme the industry may adopt. The IMO is technology agnostic, meaning it sets the goals and safety standards but lets the market find the best ways to attain them. A spokesperson from the organization says wind propulsion is one of many avenues being explored.
Sails can be used either to fully power a vessel or to supplement the motors as a way of reducing fuel consumption for large bulk carriers, oil tankers, and the roll-on/roll-off vessels used to transport airplanes and cars worldwide. Modern cargo sails come in several shapes, sizes, and styles, including wings, rotors, suction sails, and kites.
“If we’ve got five and a half thousand years of experience, isn’t this just a no-brainer?” says Gavin Allwright, secretary-general of the International Windship Association.
Older cargo boats with new sails can use propulsive energy from the wind for up to 30% of their power, while cargo vessels designed specifically for wind could rely on it for up to 80% of their needs, says Allwright, who is still working on standardized measurement criteria to figure out which combination of ship and sail model is most efficient.
“There are so many variables involved,” he says—from the size of the ship to the captain steering it. The 50th large vessel fitted with wind-harnessing tech set sail in October 2024, and he predicts that maritime wind power is set to boom by the beginning of 2026.
COURTESY OF OCEANBIRD
Hard wings
One of the more popular designs for cargo ships is a rigid sail—a hard, winglike structure that is placed vertically on top of the vessel.
“It’s very much like an airplane wing,” says Niclas Dahl, managing director of Oceanbird, a Swedish company that develops these sails. Each one has a main and a flap, which creates a chamber where the wind speed is faster on the outside than the inside. In an aircraft, that discrepancy generates lift force, but in this case, says Dahl, it propels the ship forward. The wings are rigid, but they can be swiveled around and adjusted to capture the wind depending on where it’s coming from, and they can be folded and retracted close to the deck of the ship when it is nearing a dock.
One of Oceanbird’s sails—the 40-meter-high, 14-meter-wide Wing 560, made of high-strength steel, glass fiber, and recycled polyethylene terephthalate—could help cargo ships reduce fuel use by up to 10% per trip, according to the company’s calculations. Oceanbird is installing its first set of wings on a cargo vessel that transports cars, which was scheduled to be ready by the end of 2024.
Oceanbird, though, is just one manufacturer; by late 2024, eight cargo vessels propelled by hard wings were cruising around the world, most of them generalized bulk carriers and oil tankers.
COURTESY OF CARGOKITE
Kites
Other engineers and scientists are working to power cargo vessels with kites like those that propel paragliders. These kites are made from mixtures of UV-resistant polyester, and they are tethered to the ship’s bow and fly up to 200 to 300 meters above the ship, where they can make the best use of the constant winds at that altitude to basically tug the boat forward. To maximize lift, the kites are controlled by computers to operate in the sweet spot where wind is most constant. Studies show that a 400-square-meter kite can produce fuel savings of 9% to 15%.
“The main reason for us believing in kites is high-altitude winds,” says Tim Linnenweber, cofounder of CargoKite, which designs micro cargo ships that can be powered this way. “You basically have an increasing wind speed the higher you go, and so more consistent, more reliable, more steady winds.”
COURTESY OF BOUND4BLUE
Suction sails
Initially used for airplanes in the 1930s, suction sails were designed and tested on boats in the 1980s by the oceanographer and diving pioneer Jacques Cousteau.
Suction sails are chubby metal sails that look something like rotors but more oval, with a pointed side. And instead of making the whole sail spin around, the motor turns on a fan on the inside of the sail that sucks in wind from the outside. Cristina Aleixendri, cofounder of Bound4Blue, a Spanish company building suction sails, explains that the vent pulls air in through lots of little holes in the shell of the sail and creates what physicists call a boundary layer—a thin layer of air blanketing the sail and thrusting it forward. Bound4Blue’s modern model generates 20% more thrust per square meter of sail than Cousteau’s original design, says Aleixendri, and up to seven times more thrust than a conventional sail.
Twelve ships fitted with a total of 26 suction sails are currently operating, ranging from fishing boats and oil tankers to roll-on/roll-off vessels. Bound4Blue is working on fitting six ships and has fitted four already—including one with the largest suction sail ever installed, at 22 meters tall.
COURTESY OF NORSEPOWER
Rotor sails
In the 1920s, the German engineer Anton Flettner had a vision for a wind-powered ship that used vertical, revolving metal cylinders in place of traditional sails. In 1926, a vessel using his novel design, known as the Flettner rotor, crossed the Atlantic for the first time.
Flettner rotors work thanks to the Magnus effect, a phenomenon that occurs when a spinning object moves through a fluid, causing a lift force that can deflect the object’s path. With Flettner’s design, motors spin the cylinders around, and the pressure difference between the sides of the spinning object generates thrust forward, much like a soccer player bending the trajectory of a ball.
In a modern upgrade of the rotor sail, designed by the Finnish company Norsepower, the cylinders can spin up to 300 times per minute. This produces 10 times more thrust power than a conventional sail. Norsepower has fitted 27 rotor sails on 14 ships out at sea so far, and six more ships equipped with rotor sails from other companies set sail in 2024.
“According to our calculations, the rotor sail is, at the moment, the most efficient wind-assistive power when you look at eurocent per kilowatt-hour,” says Heikki Pöntynen, Norsepower’s CEO. Results from their vessels currently out at sea suggest that fuel savings are “anywhere between 5% to 30% on the whole voyage.”
Sofia Quaglia is a freelance science journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, National Geographic, and New Scientist.
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The next generation of Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi 8, is currently being developed behind closed doors. This time, the emphasis isn’t on pure speed, but instead on improving the user experience.
Wi-Fi 8, known right now as IEEE 802.11bn Ultra High Reliability, still remains years away. Wireless technology is in a constant state of improvement: Each progression in the evolution of Wi-Fi takes several years to discuss, approve, and then deploy. Wi-Fi 7, the “current” standard, hasn’t even been formally ratified quite yet.
But that’s not stopping the development of Wi-Fi 8 behind the scenes, and we already know some details. MediaTek’s Filogic wireless division has released some of what you can expect, with the caveat that final details won’t be nailed down until the final specification is released around Sept. 2028.
The key phrase that you should think of in the context of Wi-Fi 8? Not peak throughput, but effective throughput.
According to the Wi-Fi Alliance and MediaTek, the United States isn’t the driving force behind the wireless evolution. Instead, it’s China: The country has 650 million broadband subscribers and more than a quarter have 1Gbps broadband connections to their homes. Overall, the average connection speed is 487.6Mbps, which grew 18 percent in a year’s time.
MediaTek
Theoretically, 802.11bn / Wi-Fi 8 set out (Word document, via the IEEE) to provide enough wireless bandwidth to accommodate your broadband gateway supplying a few gigabits per second, and factoring in the ability of Ethernet to provide even more. EverythingRF interpreted that 2022 document, known as Project Authorization Request (PAR), as one that would provide a minimum aggregate throughput of 100Gbps.
Since then, the PAR was approved in 2023, and the working group has begun hammering out more details. As of Nov. 2024, MediaTek believes that Wi-Fi 8 will look virtually identical to Wi-Fi 7 in several key areas: The maximum physical layer (PHY) rate will be the same at 2,880Mbps x 8, or 23Gbits/s. It will also use the same three frequency bands (2.4, 5, and 6GHz) and the same 4096 QAM modulation across a maximum channel bandwidth of 320MHz.
(A Wi-Fi 8 router won’t get 23Gbps of bandwidth, of course. According to MediaTek, the actual peak throughput in a “clean,” or laboratory, environment is just 80 percent or so of the hypothetical peak throughput, and actual, real-world results can be far less.)
MediaTek
Still, put simply, Wi-Fi 8 should deliver the same wireless bandwidth as Wi-Fi 7, using the same channels and the same modulation. Every Wi-Fi standard has also been backwards-compatible with its predecessors, too. What Wi-Fi 8 will do, though, is change how your client device, such as a PC or a phone, interacts with multiple access points.
Think of this as an evolution of how your laptop talks to your home’s networking equipment. Over time, Wi-Fi has evolved from communications between one laptop and a router, across a single channel. Channel hopping routed different clients to different bands. When Wi-Fi 6 was developed, a dedicated 6GHz channel was added, sometimes as a dedicated “backhaul” between your home’s access points. Now, mesh networks are more common, giving your laptop a variety of access points, channels, and frequencies to select between.
How Wi-Fi 8 will improve Wi-Fi technology
MediaTek sees several opportunities to improve the coordination between access points and devices. (To be fair, we’re identifying these as MediaTek’s efforts, only because we can’t be sure that they’ll eventually be approved by the 802.11bn working group for Wi-Fi 8 as a whole.)
Coordinated Spatial Reuse (Co-SR): This technology was first implemented in Wi-Fi 6 as Spatial Reuse. The problem occurred when there was a difference in transmission power between an access point “talking” to a nearby device, and simultaneously communicating with a second access point a great distance away. If the first access point reduced its power to communicate with the nearby device, it couldn’t be “heard” by the access point.
Wi-Fi 8’s Co-SR is a “maturation” of the Spatial Reuse technology, and will solve the problem by allowing the access points to talk to one another and coordinate their power output, MediaTek said. “Our preliminary trials show that Co-SR could increase the overall system throughput by 15 percent to 25 percent,” MediaTek says.
Congestion: the throughout killer.
MediaTek
Coordinated Beamforming (Co-BF): There’s a trend here: Taking earlier Wi-Fi technologies and extending them to multiple access points. Spatial nulling was a feature that was launched in 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5), which allowed the router to basically stop signaling in certain directions. By doing so, the router would send the signals to where they were requested, and avoid jamming devices that didn’t want to talk to the router.
This technique attempts to solve a fairly common problem in connected households, or in a public space served by Wi-Fi: two devices that sit very close to one another. Coordinated beamforming allows the access points to talk to one another, figure out which device wants the signal and which doesn’t, and align the mesh access point to “steer” the signal away from the device that isn’t communicating to the network by basically refusing to transmit to the region in which it sits.
“The throughput offered by Coordinated Beamforming (Co-BF) in next-generation MediaTek Filogic is significantly enhanced, with increases ranging from 20 percent to 50 percent in a mesh network setup with one Control AP and one Agent AP,” MediaTek said.
Dynamic Sub-Channel Operation: You’re probably aware that the latest devices support for the latest wireless standards, like Wi-Fi 7. But certain devices may also have more or improved Wi-Fi antennas that allow them higher throughput. In the past, that information would be passed to the router, and stored there.
That wouldn’t be a problem under most conditions. But in a scenario where a number of different devices were downloading the same file, DSO would create a dynamic scenario where a more advanced device would receive a subchannel for downloading the file, faster. The difference between the older approach and Wi-Fi 8’s DSO would be that the access point would be able to decide, “knowing” the capabilities of each device and what they were asking for, and route the data accordingly.
Here, MediaTek believes that DSO could push data throughput 80 percent higher than without the technology.
A common Wi-Fi scenario: As you move around your home, your wireless data rate adjusts accordingly.
MediaTek
New data rates: You may not be aware of what’s called the MCS Index, the Modulation Coding Scheme for Wi-Fi. It’s basically a table to help your Wi-Fi router determine what the link speed should be, so that you can actually connect and stream data without errors. If your throughput slows down as you move around your house, that’s in part due to your device and router “deciding” what connection speed your device should stream at.
The problem, MediaTek believes, is that the “step” down to slower rates is too profound, and additional gradations should be introduced, such as 16-QAM with a 2/3 coding rate. The idea would not be to introduce sharp drops and increases in throughput as you moved your phone or laptop around the home, but smaller increments. Again, MediaTek believes that these finer MCS divisions can improve overall transmission rates between 5 percent and 30 percent.
A change of pace
Again, the evolution of Wi-Fi 8 depends on how quickly the standard moves through the regulatory process. Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) was expected to be approved this past September, and it has not, yet. Sony’s PlayStation 5 may not be approved for India because the country has yet to approve the 6GHz wireless channel that the Wi-Fi 7 standard depends upon. That would hinder Wi-Fi 8, too.
The probable roadmap for Wi-Fi standards approval.
MediaTek
Wireless standards take about six years to develop — and impatient hardware makers rarely wait. As MediaTek notes, Wi-Fi 7 products have shipped since the end of 2023, even though the standard hasn’t been formally approved. In part, that’s because the IEEE committee in charge of the standard rarely makes dramatic changes between the approval of the draft standard and the final standard. For Wi-Fi 8, the first products are expected to be available in early 2028, even as the final approval should be due by the end of that year.
It’s worth noting, however, that the race to perpetually higher and higher speeds is pausing, for now, in two different segments of the PC market. CPUs have slowed their rush toward higher clock speeds — at Qualcomm and at Intel — in favor of lower power. With Wi-Fi 8, the emphasis now appears to be on improving the overall user experience first and foremost.
Correction: Wi-Fi 8 will use the 2.4GHz frequency band, not the 2 and 4GHz frequency bands. The author sincerely regrets that error.
The 200-foot Vulcan Centaur rocket could do more than just launch satellites to orbit. As the rocket awaits certification to launch military payloads, United Launch Alliance (ULA) suggests that Vulcan can also be used to ward off space enemies and protect U.S. assets in orbit.
During the Spacepower Conference held earlier this month, ULA CEO Tory Bruno revealed that he had alternative plans for the heavy-lift launch vehicle, SpaceNews reported. Bruno’s suggestion includes utilizing the rocket’s upper stage as a “space interceptor” to thwart attacks against the U.S. Space Force’s assets in space. “Our vision is the ability to have a platform that is lightning fast, long range, and, if necessary, very lethal,” he said during the conference. “What I’ve been working on is essentially a rocket that operates in space.”
Well, that’s certainly an idea. The 202-foot-tall (61.6-meter) Vulcan Centaur is an expendable heavy-lift launch vehicle that was first conceived in 2006. The rocket borrows design elements from both ULA’s Atlas V and Delta IV rockets, and finally made its debut on January 8, launching Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander toward the Moon. The rocket’s inaugural flight was originally scheduled to take place in 2019, but Vulcan faced several challenges and hiccups that delayed its big day.
Vulcan Centaur is crucial to the commercial space industry as well as U.S. national security. With its Vulcan rocket, ULA is hoping to compete with industry favorite SpaceX. The U.S. military has grown more dependent on SpaceX to launch its payload to orbit, a market share that used to be dominated by ULA.
However, Vulcan is not yet ready to launch military payloads. The rocket carried out its second certification flight in October, but ULA’s marquee flight vehicle hit a snag. Following a nominal liftoff, the rocket experienced an issue about 35 seconds after launch, when a plume of material suddenly appeared to be coming off one of its two boosters.
The main purpose of the Cert-2 mission was for the U.S. Space Force to certify Vulcan for national security missions, with the rocket slated to carry two U.S. military payloads to orbit this year. The not-so-ideal flight has delayed the rocket’s certification process.
Bruno’s recent suggestion to turn the rocket into a space superhero may be an act of desperation as ULA continues to fall behind its main competitor, SpaceX. During the conference, the ULA CEO suggested that Vulcan’s upper stage could be upgraded to serve as a long-endurance vehicle that operates in space and respond rapidly to incoming threats.
“We know that the Chinese are going to come after us in space,” Bruno said, according to SpaceNews. “If we watch an attack developing where a Chinese asset is spending a few days or a week approaching something we care about, we have something we can move there in a few hours and interrupt that attack before it starts.”
Mentioning China’s increasing capabilities in space is one way to get folks behind your plan. Still, Bruno’s remarks reflect a larger concern shared by both national and commercial spaceflight players: that space is headed toward a militarized future where orbital warfare may be inevitable.
