#newglenn — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #newglenn, aggregated by home.social.
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🚀 Le prochain lancement de #NewGlenn se prépare : le second étage GS2 est en route pour le site Stennis de la NASA pour un essai statique à chaud (hotfire).
Le premier étage baptisé « Never Tell Me the Odds » a regagné le bâtiment d'intégration au complexe de lancement 36 (LC-36) de Cap Canaveral, un peu plus de 3 mois après que Blue Origin l'a retiré pour les opérations de nettoyage du pas de tir consécutives à l'explosion de la New Glenn le 28 mai.
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Weekly output: not-so-independent agencies, location privacy, Virginia’s data-center tax, Blue Origin’s return-to-flight plans, civil supersonic flight, astronomy in VR, Backblaze
The list below would be a lot of published work for a five-workday week, and yet I didn’t write any of those things or deal with edits to them on Friday. The Supreme Court bears much of the responsibility for this pace, the aerospace-industry news cycle did its own part, and then I had two pieces that I’d started weeks before finally get published on the one day that I gave this keyboard a decent rest.
But wait, there was more: I wrote an extra post for Patreon readers Tuesday about the business calculations I’m working through as I decide if going to Berlin for the IFA tech trade show can pencil out for me.
6/29/2026: Supreme Court Gives Trump the Green Light to Fire Heads of FTC, Other Agencies, PCMag
Since I’ve been following President Trump’s attempts to expel the Democratic minority on the Federal Trade Commission, commissioners Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, since first writing about this story last March, I felt obliged to cover the Court’s conclusion of this case.
6/30/2026: Supreme Court: Fourth Amendment Protects Your Phone’s Location History, PCMag
I felt just as obliged to cover the Court ruling that Google’s Location History tool incurs Fourth Amendment protections–and to note that the majority opinion describes this as if Google hadn’t since turned Location History into an on-device, end-to-end-encrypted feature that Google can no longer access if presented with a “geofence warrant.”
6/30/2026: The State With the Most Data Centers Will Now Tax Their Energy Use, PCMag
I had been meaning to write about how Virginia has begun to change its approach to the data centers that now sprawl across Loudoun and Prince William counties. But until the General Assembly reached a belated budget compromise in the closing days of June, I didn’t know what sort of change we’d get.
7/1/2026: Blue Origin: Here’s How We’ll Return New Glenn to Flight Faster Than Expected, PCMag
Blue Origin posted an update Tuesday about its plans to resume launches of its New Glenn rocket. But in addition to having my hands full Tuesday, I needed part of Wednesday to take notes from videos of recent discussions–a panel with Blue founder Jeff Bezos and CEO Dave Limp, another panel led by Ars Technica space reporter Eric Berger, and a NASA press conference featuring administrator Jared Isaacman–that yielded some insight into the company’s situation.
7/2/2026: FAA Moves to Allow Civil Supersonic Flights Over Land, If They’re Quiet Enough, PCMag
This was my longest story published this week, because it had to cover not only the Federal Aviation Administration’s opening of a rulemaking process to legalize commercial supersonic flights over land but also the current state of affairs at Boom Supersonic and NASA’s debut of flight tests of its “low-boom” X-59 aircraft. That was a lot of detail to pack in, and I missed one error in my copy until a few hours after the story posted–I had described Boom’s XB-1 testbed aircraft as a single-engine plane when I meant single-seat.
7/3/2026: Visiting the stars (and planets, and telescopes) in VR, Ars Technica
Earlier in June, I spent a fascinating 40 minutes with a computer strapped to my face in a windowless room in downtown D.C., enjoying a VR tour of some of the universe’s more interesting places. I thought that would be a good fit for a site that routinely covers both technology and astronomy, and that’s how I’ve now had two pieces run at Ars this year after going three years since my previous contribution to one of my daily tech-news reads.
7/3/2026: Backblaze: Backup May Be a ‘Declining’ Business, But We’re Not Backing Away
This post was originally going to start with my talking to an exec with this computer-backup and cloud-storage firm at the TechEx North America conference in the middle of May, but my having the appointment on my calendar did not prevent me from completely spacing about it. We then punted to having the conversation over video but next had to reschedule the call multiple times. And now that the piece is finally published, we need to correct a few small items in it.
#AlvaroBedoya #BlueOrigin #BoomSupersonic #boomlessCruise #ChatrieVUnitedStates #dataCenterTax #dataCenters #FTC #MachCutoff #nasa #NewGlenn #RebeccaKellySlaughter #SCOTUS #Smithsonian #Starstruck #supersonicTravel #SupremeCourt #TrumpVSlaughter #VirginiaPolitics #virtualReality #VR #X59 -
FCC ratuje kosmiczny internet Amazona. Firma zyskała więcej czasu na walkę ze Starlinkiem
Amerykańska Federalna Komisja Łączności (FCC) poszła na rękę gigantowi e-commerce.
Amazon opóźnia się z budową swojej konstelacji satelitarnej Amazon Leo (wcześniej znanej jako Project Kuiper). Urząd zniósł jednak kluczowy termin narzucony firmie w licencji, otwarcie przyznając, że rynek desperacko potrzebuje konkurencji dla usług dostarczanych przez firmę Elona Muska.
Terminy kontra rzeczywistość
Zgodnie z pierwotną licencją przyznaną w 2020 roku, Amazon zobowiązał się do umieszczenia na orbicie połowy ze swojej docelowej konstelacji (liczącej 3232 satelity) do 30 lipca bieżącego roku. Osiągnięcie pułapu 1616 urządzeń w nieco ponad miesiąc od teraz jest fizycznie niemożliwe – obecnie na orbicie znajduje się zaledwie 333 satelitów Amazona.
Firma złożyła wniosek o wydłużenie tego czasu. FCC zdecydowała się na niemal całkowite zniesienie rygorystycznego wymogu z lipca 2026 roku. W swoim oświadczeniu instytucja uzasadniła, że ścisłe trzymanie się przepisów uderzyłoby w amerykańskich konsumentów, ograniczając ich wybór. Obecnie SpaceX jest jedynym operatorem dostarczającym szerokopasmowy internet z niskiej orbity okołoziemskiej.
Warto jednak zaznaczyć, że ostateczny termin ukończenia budowy całej sieci, wyznaczony na 30 lipca 2029 roku, pozostaje w mocy.
Rakiety uziemione, satelity czekają w magazynach
Głównym problemem Amazona nie jest tempo produkcji satelitów, lecz brak sprawnych rakiet, które mogłyby je wynieść w kosmos. Firma dysponuje wyprodukowanymi urządzeniami, jednak nowej generacji rakiety o dużej nośności zmagają się z poważnymi problemami technicznymi.
Blue Origin New Glenn miała być koniem pociągowym całego projektu. Plany te legły w gruzach 28 maja, gdy rakieta eksplodowała na stanowisku startowym na Florydzie. Na szczęście 48 satelitów Amazona nie było wtedy jeszcze zamontowanych na jej pokładzie.
Jeżeli chodzi o alternatywę to ULA Vulcan też nie poleci: producent zawiesił loty tego nośnika, aby zbadać i wyeliminować powtarzający się problem z rakietami pomocniczymi na paliwo stałe.
W rezultacie główny ciężar operacji opiera się obecnie na europejskiej rakiecie Ariane 6 oraz wycofywanej już z użytku rakiecie Atlas V, dla której Amazon zarezerwował ostatni dostępny lot.
Paradoks rynkowej walki
Decyzja FCC została podjęta wbrew oficjalnym protestom ze strony SpaceX, które aktywnie sprzeciwiało się wnioskowi Amazona o taryfę ulgową.
Co ciekawe, wspomniane wcześniej opóźnienia u zewnętrznych dostawców rakiet zmusiły Amazona do weryfikacji swoich założeń biznesowych. Firma, która początkowo celowo unikała usług SpaceX, musiała ostatecznie wykupić u tego operatora 13 misji na pokładzie sprawdzonych rakiet Falcon 9. Doprowadziło to do nietypowej sytuacji rynkowej, w której Amazon płaci swojemu największemu konkurentowi miliony dolarów za pomoc w budowie usługi, która docelowo ma odebrać mu klientów.
#Amazon #AmazonLeo #BlueOrigin #FCC #kosmicznyInternet #NewGlenn #ProjectKuiper #satelity #SpaceX #Starlink #technologieKosmiczne #Vulcan -
Hate Elon Musk as much as you want, but SpaceX denial still isn’t a good look
Last week’s catastrophic explosion of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket didn’t just incinerate that heavy-lift launch system and much of its support infrastructure at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Launch Complex 36; it also sparked a new round of Space Billionaire Schadenfreude.
Which is understandable. Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos may not have groveled for President Trump’s favor as obsequiously as such fellow tech CEOs as Apple’s Tim Cook or Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, but he seems more than content to be seen in Trump’s corner. And around my city, Bezos has richly earned D.C.’s contempt for his incompetent lackeys’ wanton dismantling of the Washington Post.
But Bezos is nowhere near the worst space billionaire. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to convince voters to return the worst president to office, oversaw the DOGE ransacking of large parts of the federal government, and continues to exploit his overlordship of X to broadcast racist, misogynistic, transphobic, antisemitic and Islamophobic garbage while amplifying some of the stupidest people on the Internet.
Musk’s accumulation and abuse of economic and political power far exceeds Bezos’s and strikes me as much more dangerous. So my first reaction to Blue’s bad day, after sympathy for engineers who saw years of work go up in a fiery mushroom cloud, was that it represents an unfortunate setback to competition for Musk’s space company on multiple levels, from inflight WiFi to landing astronauts on the Moon. I wrote as much at PCMag and, in compressed form, on Bluesky.
I should have known the reaction that post would get: people bashing not only Blue Origin but also SpaceX and the entire concept of NASA inking commercial contracts to send astronauts to space. Each mishap of SpaceX’s Starship rocket–I have written up every launch of that heavy-lift vehicle in my unofficial role as a PCMag space scribe–reliably generates comments along those lines, suggesting that not only is Starship a doomed design but that SpaceX is a failing exercise in crony capitalism.
That sentiment seems to be widely felt. And it’s nonsense.
Fact: SpaceX’s partly reusable Falcon 9–the core of its launch business, the vehicle on which customers from NASA to would-be rivals to SpaceX’s Starlink keep buying rides–is one of the most reliable rockets ever made.
Per the count at Wikipedia, out of 644 Falcon 9 launches through Thursday, only three have failed to deliver a payload to the right orbit; just one has ended with the loss of a rocket and payload. Only United Launch Alliance’s soon-to-be-retired Atlas V can beat that among launch vehicles with more than 100 liftoffs. The Space Shuttle, as much as I loved seeing it fly, was nowhere near that safe.
SpaceX also deserves credit for terminating a Russian monopoly on crew transport to and from the International Space Station with the Falcon 9-launched Crew Dragon capsule. NASA privatizing that role, years after SpaceX successfully took on delivering supplies to the ISS with the cargo version of Dragon pictured above, stands as an extraordinary accomplishment for the agency.
And yet the Obama administration struggled to sell that notion to Congress 14 years ago; many legislators, leery of a startup proposing to fly even cargo to the ISS, wanted NASA to give all that business to Boeing. Instead, that aerospace giant won one of two commercial-crew awards, and now Boeing’s Starliner capsule has yet be certified for crewed missions six years after Crew Dragon’s debut with astronauts strapped in.
To opine as if this history didn’t happen in public view–or to suggest that NASA could have procured itself an ISS crew system using the traditional contracting processes that yielded the Space Launch System’s years of delay and billions of dollars in cost overruns–is to exhibit a MAGA level of denial.
That doesn’t mean I have the same confidence in SpaceX developing a version of Starship’s upper stage as a Human Landing System for NASA’s Artemis missions to the Moon. More than three years after Starship’s failed debut–followed by 11 more launches that have yet to reach orbit–Starship looks a little star-crossed. I imagine that people at NASA now wonder where we might be if SpaceX had proposed a simpler, smaller lander that could fly on the Falcon 9-derived Falcon Heavy system that NASA already trusts for some of its most important robotic planetary missions.
And yet with New Glenn grounded until at least the end of this year, probably longer, NASA now needs the complex Starship HLS concept to work more than ever. If you would rather not have the next words spoken from the lunar surface be in Mandarin, this should not be a confidence-inducing scenario.
But asking nuanced questions–about whether SpaceX is aiming too high with Starship, if Musk has lost his focus from spending too much time engaging with sycophantic superfans on X, or if recent minor issues with Falcon 9 launches suggest SpaceX is nearing its speed limit for aggressive iteration–clearly can’t be as exciting as posting hot takes on social media.
#AmazonLeo #Artemis #BlueOrigin #Boeing #ElonMusk #Falcon9 #hotTakes #InternationalSpaceStation #ISS #JeffBezos #nasa #NewGlenn #newSpace #SpaceX #Starliner #Starlink #Starship -
Just days after the #FAA accepted the findings of a launch mishap investigation, Jeff Bezos' #BlueOrigin space venture announced that its #NewGlenn rocket will soon send 48 satellites into orbit for the high-speed internet network that Bezos approved when he was #Amazon CEO. https://www.geekwire.com/2026/blue-origin-new-glenn-rocket-amazon-leo-satellites/ #Space #AmazonLeo #ProjectKuiper #NG4 #LN01
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Blue Origin gets ready to launch Amazon Leo satellites
Five weeks after experiencing its first launch failure, Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin is getting ready to put its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket back in service to launch 48 satellites into low Earth orbit for the growing Amazon Leo constellation.The
https://cosmiclog.com/2026/05/27/blue-origin-gets-ready-to-launch-amazon-leo-satellites/
#GeekWire #Amazon #AmazonLeo #BlueOrigin #Broadband #NewGlenn #ProjectKuiper #Satellites #Space -
Wait, it was an upper stage failure? That's nice to hear. I was worried that reusing the lower stage was being problematic, but it might just be that Blue Origin needs more experience in orbital launches.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl-ktnZKepQ
#Astronautics #BlueOrigin #NASA #Artemis #Artemis3 #NewGlenn
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Blue Origin just successfully reused the lower stage of their heavy-life launch vehicle. The engines were new and some of the avionics were upgraded, but it's still really exciting. Especially since they landed it again.
I can't wait to see what kind of impact this will have on the launch market.
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The first #LIFE module for #OrbitalReef is a three-story structure, 8 meters in diameter 📏, a massive amount of open, configurable volume. #Blue Origin is providing the #NewGlenn heavy-lift launch 🚀 capability. A realistic operational date is estimated to be post-📆 2028.
#Starlab launch date 📆 2028: if the single launch on #Starship works, they will have a complete station in orbit overnight ⏱️.
As of late 2025, #Axiom is winning the hardware race https://newspaceeconomy.ca/2025/11/14/what-is-orbital-reef
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When will #SpaceTourism to orbit 🌌 or beyond be available other than to the #ISS, #Tiangong or (to stay) in a #Dragon / #Starliner capsule ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tourism#Orbital_space_tourism
#Haven2 #Starlab #OrbitalReef #VoyagerSpace #VoyagerStation #journalism #SpaceHotel #Starship #NewGlenn #Gaganyaan #HumanSpaceflight
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New Glenn Update – Blue Origin
#HackerNews #NewGlenn #BlueOrigin #SpaceX #RocketUpdates #AerospaceInnovation
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Blue Origin planning next New Glenn flight for early next year
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Wie KI und neue Trends die Raumfahrtbranche antreiben
Mit dem rasanten technischen Wandel, insbesondere durch künstliche Intelligenz (KI), transformiert sich die Raumfahrtbranche grundlegend. Immer mehr Unternehmen, von Startups bis zu Branchenriesen, profitieren von ak
https://www.apfeltalk.de/magazin/news/wie-ki-und-neue-trends-die-raumfahrtbranche-antreiben/
#KI #News #Artemis #BlueOrigin #Datenzentren #Innovation #KI #NewGlenn #ProjectKuiper #Raumfahrt #Satellit #Sicherheit #Starship -
Weekly output: Arc Boats, data brokers, Mark Vena podcast, New Glenn, Starship, TikTok
Ideally, the week after CES would be a relaxing time with at least one day spent entirely disconnected from work. Because we don’t live in an ideal world, my week instead featured the Supreme Court blowing up TikTok and SpaceX blowing up the second stage of its giant Starship rocket.
And on top of that, I wrote a post Wednesday for Patreon readers sharing further observations from CES.
1/13/2025: This Speedy Electric Sport Boat Leaves Internal Combustion in Its Wake, PCMag
My CES coverage almost wrapped up with this report of a fun outing on Lake Mead on a battery-electric boat–“almost” as in I have a couple of other stories that began with notes and quotes from that trade show, but which can’t be finished without additional reporting.
1/13/2025: Even the Experts Have Trouble Getting Data Brokers to Stop Tracking Them, PCMag
After covering ShmooCon Saturday, I spent part of Sunday watching that hacker conference’s closing panels remotely and part of it writing a recap of Yael Grauer’s talk about the futility of trying to opt out of data brokers without any help from the federal privacy law that Congress keeps failing to pass.
1/15/2026: Ep 106 SmartTechCheck Podcast — CES recap, TikTok, Zoox, TSMC, Apple, Mark Vena
I joined my industry analyst friend Mark and my fellow tech journalists Stewart Wolpin and John Quain for this CES recap.
1/16/2025: Blue Origin’s Giant New Glenn Rocket Reaches Orbit on Its First Try, PCMag
The 1 to 4 a.m. launch window that Blue Origin apparently picked to minimize interference with air traffic maximized interference with my sleep–especially when the first attempt on Monday morning saw five resets of the countdown clock before finally getting scrubbed a little after 3 a.m. The second one resulted in a successful launch at 2:03 a.m., but then writing the post (and eyeing my bleary-eyed copy carefully before pasting it into the CMS) had me up until after 3 a.m. anyway.
1/16/2025: SpaceX Catches a Booster But Loses an Upper Stage on Starship’s Seventh Flight, PCMag
About 17 hours after watching one rocket launch Thursday, I watched a second one that was not so successful–and not in the way that I’d thought Starship’s seventh test might go awry, a failed booster catch.
1/17/2025: Supreme Court Upholds TikTok Ban, Finds No First Amendment Violations, PCMag
I wrote more than 500 words of background material in advance, plus ledes and closing sentences that would go with a court opinion against TikTok or for it. That let me get a completed story filed within half an hour of the court’s mercifully brief opinion getting posted at 10 a.m. Friday. That afternoon, I added another section with reactions from various parties, including two of my favorite tech-policy experts who also happen to be among two of the fastest sources I know to answer an e-mail request for comment.
#ArcBoats #BlueOrigin #ces #dataBrokers #electricBoat #FirstAmendment #LasVegas #MarkVena #NewGlenn #Shmoocon #SpaceX #Starship #SupremeCourt #TikTok #YaelGrauer
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The cost of a #NewGlenn (45 tons) launch will be about $67 million 💰. Elon Musk says that a #Starship (150 tons) launch would cost only $10 million 💵. #RocketLab is targeting the price of a #Neutron (13 tons) launch to be $50 million. #GwynneShotwell noted that 400 Starships will launch 🚀 in the next four years https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/5004815-blue-origin-new-glenn-launch
