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An exact plan moving forward, which could mean a second test and delay before transport to Florida, had not yet been released by Saturday evening.

NASA said the RS-25 engines have been upgraded and refurbished since their last missions and the agency has placed an order with Aerojet Rocketdyne, recently acquired by Northrop Grumman, for 24 brand new versions.

The four RS-25s can generate 1.6 million lbs (7 Meganewtons) of thrust

This will make it 15% more powerful than the giant Saturn V rocket that sent astronauts to the Moon in the 1960s and 70s.

The metaphors affected how the students saw the problem, and how they proposed to fix it.

So metaphors can influence opinions and choices, but how strong are their effects really? At the end of their experiments, Thibodeau and Boroditsky asked the students to state their gender and political affiliation. As you might expect, men and Republicans were more likely to emphasise enforcement, while women and Democrats leant towards social reforms. But these factors only created differences of around 8 to 9 percentage points. The metaphors, on the other hand, created shifts of between 18 to 22 percentage points!

it’s virtually impossible to talk about complex issues like crime, the economy, health and so on, without resorting to metaphors.

bad metaphors can do a great disservice to the public understanding of science. The idea of the “evolutionary ladder” perpetuates the myth that evolution is about a steady linear march towards complexity.

The capsule, named CST-100 Starliner, is part of a NASA program called Commercial Crew, an effort to launch astronauts to the ISS from the U.S. The agency has not had that capability since the space-shuttle program ended in 2011 under the weight of cost, safety, and political factors.

According to NASA officials, after Starliner separated from the rocket, the capsule missed the moment it needed to ignite its engines for a carefully timed and fully automated process known as an orbital insertion burn. Without that step, the spacecraft couldn’t fire the thrusters to shove itself into the correct orbit.

Engineers watched, unable to help from below, as the spacecraft became disoriented.

Jim Chilton, the senior vice president of Boeing Space and Launch, said engineers don’t know why the clock went off track. Nicole Mann, who would have made her first trip to space on the next mission, said that the astronauts “train extensively for this type of contingency, and had we been on board, there could have been actions that we could have taken,” such as manually controlling the spacecraft.

Now the future of the program is uncertain, particularly for Boeing. It’s unclear what additional tests NASA might now require from Boeing before letting astronauts fly, including, perhaps, another attempt at an uncrewed mission. The capsule’s failure will certainly reshuffle schedules and could contribute to further delays for Boeing, already under scrutiny for its sluggishness in a recent report from NASA’s inspector general.

The spacecraft failure means yet another cycle of bad news for Boeing. The company has a long history with NASA; it was the prime contractor for the ISS and also worked on the space shuttles. But the company is better known for its airplanes, and in recent months the flaws of its 737 Max, which contributed to two deadly crashes, have put Boeing under intense pressure to prove that its aircraft are safe.

In the coming days, NASA and Boeing teams will review data from Starliner’s short-lived mission. And the space agency will continue its negotiations to buy more seats on the Soyuz, Russia’s transportation system, which can cost as much as $86 million. NASA’s last trip on the Soyuz system is scheduled for April. If neither company’s crew capsule is ready by then, NASA will have to buy more slots to ensure that American astronauts can launch to space.

said it was capable of miniaturizing its nuclear weapons and attaching them to rockets, meaning it would feasibly be able to blast them at all its imperialist pig-dog enemies in the USA—but obviously, these claims haven't yet been verified.

HRW's experts take a close look at witness statements and photographs and video of the victims and -- above all -- the remains of the weapons that appear to have been used.

The report provides another map that shows that there were several military bases around Zamalka and Moadimiyeh on August 21st, that were within the correct firing distanc

prefer print when reading both for pleasure and for school or work.

But the real nail in the coffin for one-size-fits-all electronic reading is concentration. Over 92 percent of those I surveyed said they concentrate best when reading a hard copy. The explanation is hardly rocket science. When a digital device has an Internet connection, it’s hard to resist the temptation to jump ship: I’ll just respond to that text I heard come in, check the headlines, order those boots that are on sale.

Readers are human. If you dangle distractions in front of us (or if we know they are just a click or swipe away), it’s hard not to take the bait.

"SpaceX is alive by the skin of its teeth, and so is Tesla - if things had just gone a little differently, both companies would be dead," he said.

Mr Musk remains convinced that life on Mars is both possible and necessary. He fears another "dark age" should a third world war occur, and feels that Mars will be integral to helping the human race survive and regenerate.He also feels there are plentiful business opportunities there.

Regime ChangeThe Soviet space program faced interesting times as Union began to crumble in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Instead of the Soviet space agency, Mir and its Soviet cosmonauts (who became Russian citizens when the country changed) came under the aegis of Roscosmos, the newly formed Russian space agency. Many of the design bureaus that had dominated space and aerospace design were either shut down or reconstituted as private corporations. The Russian economy went through major crises, which affected the space program. Eventually, things stabilized and the country moved ahead with plans to participate in the International Space Station, plus resume launches of weather and communications satellites.

Time and again, we learned there was never a grand plan or big ideas—just weapons-grade ego, incompetence, thin skin, and prejudice against those who don’t revere him.

Despite all the incredible, damning reporting coming out of Twitter and all of Musk’s very public mistakes, many people still refuse to believe—even if they detest him—that he is simply incompetent.

What is amazing about the current moment is that, despite how ridiculous it all feels, a fundamental tenet of reality and logic appears to be holding true: If you don’t know what you’re doing or don’t really care, you’ll run the thing you’re in charge of into the ground, and people will notice.

And so the moment feels too dumb and too on the nose to be real and yet also very real—kind of like all of reality in 2022.

I don’t really know where any of this will lead, but one interesting possibility is that Musk gets increasingly reactionary and trollish in his politics and stewardship of Twitter.

Leaving the politics aside, from a basic customer-service standpoint this is generally an ill-advised way for the owner of a company to treat an elected official when that elected official wishes to know why your service has failed them. The reason it is ill-advised is because then the elected official could tweet something like what Senator Markey tweeted on Sunday: “One of your companies is under an FTC consent decree. Auto safety watchdog NHTSA is investigating another for killing people. And you’re spending your time picking fights online. Fix your companies. Or Congress will.”

It seems clear that Musk, like any dedicated social-media poster, thrives on validation, so it makes sense that, as he continues to dismantle his own mystique as an innovator, he might look for adoration elsewhere

Recent history has shown that, for a specific audience, owning the libs frees a person from having to care about competency or outcome of their actions. Just anger the right people and you’re good, even if you’re terrible at your job. This won’t help Twitter’s financial situation, which seems bleak, but it’s … something!

Bankman-Fried, the archetype, appealed to people for all kinds of reasons. His narrative as a philanthropist, and a smart rationalist, and a stone-cold weirdo was something people wanted to buy into because, generally, people love weirdos who don’t conform to systems and then find clever ways to work around them and become wildly successful as a result.

Bankman-Fried was a way that a lot of people could access and maybe obliquely understand what was going on in crypto. They may not have understood what FTX did, but they could grasp a nerd trying to leverage a system in order to do good in the world and advance progressive politics. In that sense, Bankman-Fried is easy to root for and exciting to cover. His origin story and narrative become more important than the particulars of what he may or may not be doing.

the past few weeks have been yet another reminder that the smug-nerd-genius narrative may sell magazines, and it certainly raises venture funding, but the visionary founder is, first and foremost, a marketing product, not a reality. It’s a myth that perpetuates itself. Once branded a visionary, the founder can use the narrative to raise money and generate a formidable net worth, and then the financial success becomes its own résumé. But none of it is real.

Adversarial journalism ideally questions and probes power. If it is trained on technology companies and their founders, it is because they either wield that power or have the potential to do so. It is, perhaps unintuitively, a form of respect for their influence and potential to disrupt. But that’s not what these founders want.

even if all tech coverage had been totally flawless, Silicon Valley would have rejected adversarial tech journalism because most of its players do not actually want the responsibility that comes with their potential power. They want only to embody the myth and reap the benefits. They want the narrative, which is focused on origins, ambitions, ethos, and marketing, and less on the externalities and outcomes.

Looking at Musk and Bankman-Fried, it would appear that the tech visionaries mostly get their way. For all the complaints of awful, negative coverage and biased reporting, people still want to cheer for and give money to the “‘smug nerds building castles in the sky.’” Though they vary wildly right now in magnitude, their wounds are self-inflicted—and, perhaps, the result of believing their own hype.

That’s because, almost always, the smug-nerd-genius narrative is a trap. It’s one that people fall into because they need to believe that somebody out there is so brilliant, they can see the future, or that they have some greater, more holistic understanding of the world (or that such an understanding is possible)

It’s not unlike a conspiracy theory in that way. The smug-nerd-genius narrative helps take the complexity of the world and make it more manageable.

Putting your faith in a space billionaire or a crypto wunderkind isn’t just sad fanboydom; it is also a way for people to outsource their brain to somebody else who, they believe, can see what they can’t

the smug nerd genius is exceedingly rare, and, even when they’re not outed as a fraud or a dilettante, they can be assholes or flawed like anyone else. There aren’t shortcuts for making sense of the world, and anyone who is selling themselves that way or buying into that narrative about them should read to us as a giant red flag.

Musk’s concern with bots isn’t only a bullshit tactic he’s using to snake out of a bad business deal and/or get a better price for Twitter; it’s also a great example of his shallow thinking. The man has at least some ability to oversee complex engineering systems that land rockets, but his narcissism affords him a two-dimensional understanding of the way information travels across social media.

He is drawn to the conspiratorial nature of bots and information manipulation, because it is a more exciting and easier-to-understand solution to more complex or uncomfortable problems. Instead of facing the reality that many people dislike him as a result of his personality, behavior, politics, or shitty management style, he blames bots. Rather than try to understand the gnarly mechanics and hard-to-solve problems of democratized speech, he sorts them into overly simplified boxes like censorship and spam and then casts himself as the crusading hero who can fix it all. But he can’t and won’t, because he doesn’t care enough to find the answers.

Musk isn’t playing chess or even checkers. He’s just the richest man in the world, bored, mad, and posting like your great-uncle.