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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

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This is the shipping of products from China to the USA

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Shein and Temu icons are seen displayed on a phone screen in this illustration photo

The Chinese retailer has modified the strategy in the face of American tariffs.

Thanks to the executive ordinance, President Donald Trump ended the so -called de minimis principle, which allowed goods value 800 USD or less entering the country without tariffs. It also increases tariffs to Chinese goods by over 100%, forcing each Chinese firms and Shein, in addition to American giants, similar to Amazon to adapt plans and price increases.

CNBC reports that this was also affected, and American buyers see “import fees” from 130% to 150% added to their accounts. Now, nevertheless, the company is not sending the goods directly from China to the United States. Instead, it only displays the offers of products available in American warehouses, while goods sent from China are listed as outside the warehouse.

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“He actively recruits American sellers to join the platform,” said the spokesman ago. “The transfer is to help local sellers reach more customers and develop their companies.”

(tagstotransate) tariffs

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One of the last AI Google models is worse in terms of safety

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The Google Gemini generative AI logo on a smartphone.

The recently released Google AI model is worse in some security tests than its predecessor, in line with the company’s internal comparative test.

IN Technical report Google, published this week, reveals that his Flash Gemini 2.5 model is more likely that he generates a text that violates its security guidelines than Gemini 2.0 Flash. In two indicators “text security for text” and “image security to the text”, Flash Gemini 2.5 will withdraw 4.1% and 9.6% respectively.

Text safety for the text measures how often the model violates Google guidelines, making an allowance for the prompt, while image security to the text assesses how close the model adheres to those boundaries after displaying the monitors using the image. Both tests are automated, not supervised by man.

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In an e-mail, Google spokesman confirmed that Gemini 2.5 Flash “performs worse in terms of text safety for text and image.”

These surprising comparative results appear when AI is passing in order that their models are more acceptable – in other words, less often refuse to answer controversial or sensitive. In the case of the latest Llam Meta models, he said that he fought models in order to not support “some views on others” and answers to more “debated” political hints. Opeli said at the starting of this yr that he would improve future models, in order to not adopt an editorial attitude and offers many prospects on controversial topics.

Sometimes these efforts were refundable. TechCrunch announced on Monday that the default CHATGPT OPENAI power supply model allowed juvenile to generate erotic conversations. Opeli blamed his behavior for a “mistake”.

According to Google Technical Report, Gemini 2.5 Flash, which is still in view, follows instructions more faithfully than Gemini 2.0 Flash, including instructions exceeding problematic lines. The company claims that regression might be partially attributed to false positives, but in addition admits that Gemini 2.5 Flash sometimes generates “content of violation” when it is clearly asked.

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“Of course, there is a tension between (after instructions) on sensitive topics and violations of security policy, which is reflected in our assessment,” we read in the report.

The results from Meepmap, reference, which can examine how models react to sensitive and controversial hints, also suggest that Flash Gemini 2.5 is much less willing to refuse to reply controversial questions than Flash Gemini 2.0. Testing the TechCrunch model through the AI ​​OpenRoutter platform has shown that he unsuccessfully writes essays to support human artificial intelligence judges, weakening the protection of due protection in the US and the implementation of universal government supervisory programs.

Thomas Woodside, co -founder of the Secure AI Project, said that the limited details given by Google in their technical report show the need for greater transparency in testing models.

“There is a compromise between the instruction support and the observation of politics, because some users may ask for content that would violate the rules,” said Woodside Techcrunch. “In this case, the latest Flash model Google warns the instructions more, while breaking more. Google does not present many details about specific cases in which the rules have been violated, although they claim that they are not serious. Not knowing more, independent analysts are difficult to know if there is a problem.”

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Google was already under fire for his models of security reporting practices.

The company took weeks to publish a technical report for the most talented model, Gemini 2.5 Pro. When the report was finally published, it initially omitted the key details of the security tests.

On Monday, Google published a more detailed report with additional security information.

(Tagstotransate) Gemini

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Aurora launches a commercial self -propelled truck service in Texas

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The autonomous startup of the Aurora Innovation vehicle technology claims that it has successfully launched a self -propelled truck service in Texas, which makes it the primary company that she implemented without drivers, heavy trucks for commercial use on public roads in the USA

The premiere appears when Aurora gets the term: In October, the corporate delayed the planned debut 2024 to April 2025. The debut also appears five months after the rival Kodiak Robotics provided its first autonomous trucks to clients commercial for operations without a driver in field environments.

Aurora claims that this week she began to freight between Dallas and Houston with Hirschbach Motor Lines and Uber Freight starters, and that she has finished 1200 miles without a driver to this point. The company plans to expand to El Paso and Phoenix until the top of 2025.

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TechCrunch contacted for more detailed information concerning the premiere, for instance, the variety of vehicles implemented Aurora and whether the system needed to implement the Pullover maneuver or the required distant human assistance.

The commercial premiere of Aurora takes place in a difficult time. Self -propelled trucks have long been related to the necessity for his or her technology attributable to labor deficiencies in the chairman’s transport and the expected increase in freigh shipping. Trump’s tariffs modified this attitude, not less than in a short period. According to the April analytical company report from the commercial vehicle industry ACT researchThe freight is predicted to fall this yr in the USA with a decrease in volume and consumer expenditure.

Aurora will report its results in the primary quarter next week, i.e. when he shares how he expects the present trade war will affect his future activity. TechCrunch contacted to learn more about how tariffs affect Auror’s activities.

For now, Aurora will probably concentrate on further proving his safety case without a driver and cooperation with state and federal legislators to just accept favorable politicians to assist her develop.

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At the start of 2025, Aurora filed a lawsuit against federal regulatory bodies after the court refused to release the appliance for release from the protection requirement, which consists in placing warning triangles on the road, when the truck must stop on the highway – something that’s difficult to do when there isn’t a driver in the vehicle. To maintain compliance with this principle and proceed to totally implement without service drivers, Aurora probably has a man -driven automotive trail after they are working.

(Tagstranslate) Aurora Innovation

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