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On Sunday, SpaceX will make a historic attempt to catch the returning Starship booster

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The spacecraft is prepared to fly again — and for the first time, SpaceX will try to bring the booster back to the launch site to catch it with a pair of huge “sticks.”

SpaceX will launch the giant Starship on Sunday in a launch window that opens at 5 a.m. PST (7 a.m. local time) from the company’s Starbase in southeast Texas. The flight, the fifth in the spacecraft development program, will come a little sooner than expected: The Federal Aviation Administration has previously said it doesn’t anticipate issuing a modified launch license for this test before the end of November.

This timeline deeply offended SpaceX, prompting the company to repeatedly highlight what it described as regulatory inefficiencies. However, the world’s strongest launcher will take to the skies sooner than expected, and on Saturday the FAA announced it had approved tomorrow’s launch.

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“The FAA has determined that SpaceX has met all safety, environmental and other licensing requirements for the suborbital test flight,” the regulator said in a statement. It’s value noting that the authorization also includes approval for an additional test flight, on condition that “the changes requested by SpaceX for Flight 6 are within the scope of what has been previously analyzed,” the FAA said.

The nearly 400-meter-long spacecraft is at the center of SpaceX’s stated ambitions to make life multi-planetary, but more directly concerns NASA’s ambitious Artemis campaign to return humans to the lunar surface. SpaceX anticipates quickly reusing the entire Starship, which incorporates the upper stage (also called the Starship) and super-heavy booster, but meaning demonstrating the ability to get better each stages and quickly refurbish them for future flights.

Therefore, it is sensible that the primary goals of the fifth flight test are two-fold: attempting to “catch” the super-heavy booster at the launch site for the first time in history, and re-entry the spacecraft to its goal and splash down in the Indian Ocean.

The latter goal has already been achieved: SpaceX performed a controlled reentry and splashdown of the spacecraft’s upper stage during its last test mission in June. But the booster clip, as the company put it in a blog post, can be “uniquely innovative” in rocket history.

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The closest analogue currently is the routine landings of Falcon 9 rockets on autonomous barges and ground landing zones. However, the plan is that in the case of tomorrow’s launch, the booster will decelerate to a hover and gently position itself in the zone of two “stick” arms attached to the launch tower. These arms would then close around the booster and hold it in place when its motors stopped working.

– SpaceX noted in an update posted on its website that for a catch attempt to occur, “thousands” of criteria should be met, indicating that the systems in the vehicle and on the pad are functional. If these conditions are met, the mission flight director will manually command the booster before completing a trajectory adjustment maneuver, called the afterburner burn, roughly 3 minutes and 40 seconds after liftoff.

“If this command is not sent before the booster burn is completed, or if automatic health checks indicate unacceptable conditions for the Superheavy or tower, the booster will default to a trajectory that will cause it to burn out on landing and make a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico,” the company said.

The entire booster startup and return should take just 7 minutes. Once detached, Starship will proceed to ascend into orbit before descending into the Indian Ocean about an hour after liftoff.

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While waiting for the launch license, SpaceX engineers have been very busy: in recent months, they conducted quite a few tests on the launch tower, completely replaced the rocket’s entire thermal protection system with newer boards and a spare ablative layer, and updated the re-entry vehicle’s software. This week, engineers accomplished tests of propellant loading and tests of the launcher flooding system, which is designed to protect the launcher from the powerful fire of the 33 Raptor engines positioned on the launch pad.

The company plans to eventually move Starship’s upper stage back to the landing site as well, though we’ll have to wait to see that in future test launches.

“When each flight builds on the lessons learned from the previous flight, testing hardware and performance improvements across all aspects of Starship, we are on the cusp of demonstrating techniques critical to a Starship design that allows for full and rapid reusability,” the company says. “By continuing to use our equipment in the aerospace environment, and doing so as safely and frequently as possible, we will quickly bring Starship online and revolutionize humanity’s ability to access space.”

Watch the live test webcast starting roughly half-hour before launch (7:00 a.m. PST). SpaceX website Or on X

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This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com

Technology

The latest model AI Google Gemma can work on phones

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It grows “open” AI Google, Gemma, grows.

While Google I/O 2025 On Tuesday, Google removed Gemma 3N compresses, a model designed for “liquid” on phones, laptops and tablets. According to Google, available in a preview starting on Tuesday, Gemma 3N can support sound, text, paintings and flicks.

Models efficient enough to operate in offline mode and without the necessity to calculate within the cloud have gained popularity within the AI ​​community lately. They will not be only cheaper to make use of than large models, but they keep privacy, eliminating the necessity to send data to a distant data center.

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During the speech to I/O product manager, Gemma Gus Martins said that GEMMA 3N can work on devices with lower than 2 GB of RAM. “Gemma 3N shares the same architecture as Gemini Nano, and is also designed for incredible performance,” he added.

In addition to Gemma 3N, Google releases Medgemma through the AI ​​developer foundation program. According to Medgemma, it’s essentially the most talented model to research text and health -related images.

“Medgemma (IS) OUR (…) A collection of open models to understand the text and multimodal image (health),” said Martins. “Medgemma works great in various imaging and text applications, thanks to which developers (…) could adapt the models to their own health applications.”

Also on the horizon there may be SignGEMMA, an open model for signaling sign language right into a spoken language. Google claims that Signgemma will allow programmers to create recent applications and integration for users of deaf and hard.

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“SIGNGEMMA is a new family of models trained to translate sign language into a spoken text, but preferably in the American sign and English,” said Martins. “This is the most talented model of understanding sign language in history and we are looking forward to you-programmers, deaf and hard communities-to take this base and build with it.”

It is value noting that Gemma has been criticized for non -standard, non -standard license conditions, which in accordance with some developers adopted models with a dangerous proposal. However, this didn’t discourage programmers from downloading Gemma models tens of tens of millions of times.

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(Tagstransate) gemma

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Trump to sign a criminalizing account of porn revenge and clear deep cabinets

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President Donald Trump is predicted to sign the act on Take It Down, a bilateral law that introduces more severe punishments for distributing clear images, including deep wardrobes and pornography of revenge.

The Act criminalizes the publication of such photos, regardless of whether or not they are authentic or generated AI. Whoever publishes photos or videos can face penalty, including a advantageous, deprivation of liberty and restitution.

According to the brand new law, media firms and web platforms must remove such materials inside 48 hours of termination of the victim. Platforms must also take steps to remove the duplicate content.

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Many states have already banned clear sexual desems and pornography of revenge, but for the primary time federal regulatory authorities will enter to impose restrictions on web firms.

The first lady Melania Trump lobbyed for the law, which was sponsored by the senators Ted Cruz (R-TEXAS) and Amy Klobuchar (d-minn.). Cruz said he inspired him to act after hearing that Snapchat for nearly a 12 months refused to remove a deep displacement of a 14-year-old girl.

Proponents of freedom of speech and a group of digital rights aroused concerns, saying that the law is Too wide And it will probably lead to censorship of legal photos, similar to legal pornography, in addition to government critics.

(Tagstransate) AI

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Microsoft Nadella sata chooses chatbots on the podcasts

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Satya Nadella at Microsoft Ignite 2023

While the general director of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, says that he likes podcasts, perhaps he didn’t take heed to them anymore.

That the treat is approaching at the end longer profile Bloomberg NadellaFocusing on the strategy of artificial intelligence Microsoft and its complicated relations with Opeli. To illustrate how much she uses Copilot’s AI assistant in her day by day life, Nadella said that as a substitute of listening to podcasts, she now sends transcription to Copilot, after which talks to Copilot with the content when driving to the office.

In addition, Nadella – who jokingly described her work as a “E -Mail driver” – said that it consists of a minimum of 10 custom agents developed in Copilot Studio to sum up E -Mailes and news, preparing for meetings and performing other tasks in the office.

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It seems that AI is already transforming Microsoft in a more significant way, and programmers supposedly the most difficult hit in the company’s last dismissals, shortly after Nadella stated that the 30% of the company’s code was written by AI.

(Tagstotransate) microsoft

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