Welcome to Edition 7.45 of the Rocket Report! Let's talk about spaceplanes. Since the Space Shuttle, spaceplanes have, at best, been a niche part of the space transportation business. The US Air Force's uncrewed X-37B and a similar vehicle operated by China's military are the only spaceplanes to reach orbit since the last shuttle flight in 2011, and both require a lift from a conventional rocket. Virgin Galactic's suborbital space tourism platform is also a spaceplane of sorts. A generation or two ago, one of the chief arguments in favor of spaceplanes was that they were easier to recover and reuse. Today, SpaceX routinely reuses capsules and rockets that look much more like conventional space vehicles than the winged designs of yesteryear. Spaceplanes are undeniably alluring in appearance, but they have the drawback of carrying extra weight (wings) into space that won't be used until the final minutes of a mission. So, do they have a future?

As always, we welcome reader submissions . If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

One of China's commercial rockets returns to flight. The Kinetica-1 rocket launched Wednesday for the first time since a failure doomed its previous attempt to reach orbit in December, according to the vehicle's developer and operator, CAS Space. The Kinetica-1 is one of several small Chinese solid-fueled launch vehicles managed by a commercial company, although with strict government oversight and support. CAS Space, a spinoff of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said its Kinetica-1 rocket deployed multiple payloads with "excellent orbit insertion accuracy." This was the seventh flight of a Kinetica-1 rocket since its debut in 2022.

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By late 2021, major updates for Windows' built-in Notepad text editor had been so rare for so long that a gentle redesign and a handful of new settings were rated as a major update . New updates have become much more common since then, but like the rest of Windows, recent additions have been overwhelmingly weighted in the direction of generative AI.

In November, Microsoft began testing an update that allowed users to rewrite or summarize text in Notepad using generative AI. Another preview update today takes it one step further , allowing you to write AI-generated text from scratch with basic instructions (the feature is called Write, to differentiate it from the earlier Rewrite).

Like Rewrite and Summarize, Write requires users to be signed into a Microsoft Account, because using it requires you to use your monthly allotment of Microsoft's AI credits. Per this support page , users without a paid Microsoft 365 subscription get 15 credits per month. Subscribers with Personal and Family subscriptions get 60 credits per month instead.

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In recent written testimony to a US House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees the military, the senior official responsible for purchasing launches for national security missions blistered one of the country's two primary rocket providers.

The remarks from Major General Stephen G. Purdy, acting assistant secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration, concerned United Launch Alliance and its long-delayed development of the large Vulcan rocket.

"The ULA Vulcan program has performed unsatisfactorily this past year," Purdy said in written testimony during a May 14 hearing before the House Armed Services Committee's Subcommittee on Strategic Forces. This portion of his testimony did not come up during the hearing, and it has not been reported publicly to date.

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Earlier this month, Nintendo received a lot of negative attention for an end-user license agreement (EULA) update granting the company the claimed right to render Switch consoles "permanently unusable in whole or in part" for violations such as suspected hacking or piracy. As it turns out, though, Nintendo isn't the only console manufacturer that threatens to remotely brick systems in response to rule violations. And attorneys tell Ars Technica that they're probably well within their legal rights to do so.

Sony's System Software License Agreement on the PS5 , for instance, contains the following paragraph of "remedies" it can take for "violations" such as use of modified hardware or pirated software (emphasis added).

If SIE Inc determines that you have violated this Agreement's terms, SIE Inc may itself or may procure the taking of any action to protect its interests such as disabling access to or use of some or all System Software, disabling use of this PS5 system online or offline , termination of your access to PlayStation Network, denial of any warranty, repair or other services provided for your PS5 system, implementation of automatic or mandatory updates or devices intended to discontinue unauthorized use , or reliance on any other remedial efforts as reasonably necessary to prevent the use of modified or unpermitted use of System Software.

The same exact clause appears in the PlayStation 4 EULA as well. The PlayStation 3 EULA was missing the "disabling use... online or offline" clause, but it does still warn that Sony can take steps to "discontinue unauthorized use" or "prevent the use of a modified PS3 system, or any pirated material or equipment."

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An outdated Meta AI model was apparently at the center of the Department of Government Efficiency's initial ploy to purge parts of the federal government.

Wired reviewed materials showing that affiliates of Elon Musk's DOGE working in the Office of Personnel Management "tested and used Meta’s Llama 2 model to review and classify responses from federal workers to the infamous 'Fork in the Road' email that was sent across the government in late January."

The "Fork in the Road" memo seemed to copy a memo that Musk sent to Twitter employees , giving federal workers the choice to be "loyal"—and accept the government's return-to-office policy—or else resign. At the time, it was rumored that DOGE was feeding government employee data into AI, and Wired confirmed that records indicate Llama 2 was used to sort through responses and see how many employees had resigned.

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E-bike batteries are, for the most part, a collection of 18650 batteries , packaged together and welded in series and parallel , attached to a battery management system (BMS). A "dead" e-bike battery may only have two or three truly dead cells inside, while the remainder work fine. This is useful knowledge that, for the most part, very few e-bike owners can really use. Arc welders are not a common tool to own, and most e-bike batteries are not designed to be opened, safely or otherwise.

French firm Gouach, essentially a three-person company, is pitching its Infinite Battery as the opposite of this status quo. It's a durable, fireproof casing into which you can place and replace 18650 batteries using only a screwdriver . It keeps you updated on the status of cell performance and heat through a Bluetooth-connected app. And it's designed for compatibility with "90% of existing e-bike brands," or you can upgrade an existing "acoustic" model.

Credit: Gouach

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Researchers have found malicious software that received more than 6,000 downloads from the NPM repository over a two-year span, in yet another discovery showing the hidden threats users of such open source archives face.

Eight packages using names that closely mimicked those of widely used legitimate packages contained destructive payloads designed to corrupt or delete important data and crash systems, Kush Pandya, a researcher at security firm Socket, reported Thursday . The packages have been available for download for more than two years and accrued roughly 6,200 downloads over that time.

A diversity of attack vectors

“What makes this campaign particularly concerning is the diversity of attack vectors—from subtle data corruption to aggressive system shutdowns and file deletion,” Pandya wrote. “The packages were designed to target different parts of the JavaScript ecosystem with varied tactics.”

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When web services shut down and have time to put up a blog post about it, there's typically some real understatement in their explanation of "why." Bookmarking service Pocket's goodbye post truly delivers on this front, noting almost off-handedly that "the way people use the web has evolved." Yes, you might just say that.

Both Pocket and another browser add-on, Fakespot, are being shut down by Firefox maker Mozilla in early July. In a post about the closures , Mozilla cites the need to "invest our time and resources so we can make the biggest impact." Pocket's saving and curation powers will be implemented into Firefox, while Fakespot's analysis of online shopping reviews "didn't fit a model we could sustain."

Pocket started in 2007 as Read It Later, a way to bookmark web articles for later reading. It's not just the focus on published text articles that now seems quaint but also the idea that there was a finite amount of web material you would get back to and would have the time to do so. Those who do want that nice-sounding media experience can cobble it together in most modern browsers, which have built-in tools for managing bookmarks, distinct "reading lists," and even creating stripped-down "readable" versions of articles.

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The Federal Aviation Administration gave the green light Thursday for SpaceX to launch the next test flight of its Starship mega-rocket as soon as next week, following two consecutive failures earlier this year.

The failures set back SpaceX's Starship program by several months. The company aims to get the rocket's development back on track with the upcoming launch, Starship's ninth full-scale test flight since its debut in April 2023. Starship is central to SpaceX's long-held ambition to send humans to Mars and is the vehicle NASA has selected to land astronauts on the Moon under the umbrella of the government's Artemis program.

In a statement Thursday, the FAA said SpaceX is authorized to launch the next Starship test flight, known as Flight 9, after finding the company "meets all of the rigorous safety, environmental and other licensing requirements."

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