Rocket Report: Blue Origin explosion still making headlines; Impulse raises money

Rocket Report: Blue Origin explosion still making headlines; Impulse raises money

fivenewscrypto    juin 08, 2026   

Welcome to Edition 8.44 of the Rocket Report! The news this week is decidedly weighted in favor of heavy-lift rockets, largely due to the fallout from last Thursday's explosion of Blue Origin's New Glenn on its launch pad in Florida. Blue Origin aims to resume launches at the badly damaged launch facility by the end of the year, but there's good reason to be skeptical of this timeline. With New Glenn grounded, will Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos approach Elon Musk's SpaceX to launch his Blue Moon lander to the lunar south pole? It sure sounds like NASA is pushing for that.

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.

Spaceport development moves forward in Canada. There's been a lot of talk about the Canadian government's recent commitment to invest in a sovereign launch capability. There was the announcement last year of a federal budget of 182.6 million Canadian dollars ($131 million) over three years to establish a sovereign launch program. In March, the government said it would lease a dedicated launch pad at a commercially developed spaceport in Nova Scotia for national defense purposes, committing 200 million Canadian dollars ($144 million) to the deal. The agreement is a boon for Maritime Launch Services, which is developing Spaceport Nova Scotia after years of slow progress at the coastal site, SpaceQ reports.

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Safety officials finally have a good idea of what a big rocket explosion can do

Safety officials finally have a good idea of what a big rocket explosion can do

fivenewscrypto    juin 08, 2026   

Last week's explosion of a New Glenn rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida, was clearly a setback for Blue Origin and NASA, but it was a learning experience for safety officials looking to open up the spaceport to hundreds more launches per year.

The launch base on Florida's Space Coast is gearing up for a flurry of new arrivals. SpaceX is building multiple launch pads for its super-heavy Starship rocket, which will operate within a few miles of launch pads operated by SpaceX rivals Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance. Two other companies, Stoke Space and Relativity Space, are also developing launch sites along a narrow stretch of coastline at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

All of them have, or will soon have, rockets burning methane or liquified natural gas, replacing legacy launch vehicles fueled by kerosene, liquid hydrogen, or solid propellants. There are good technical reasons for making the switch, but until last week, engineers had scant real-world data on the damage that millions of pounds of methane and liquid oxygen would cause if a fully loaded rocket exploded on the launch pad or soon after liftoff.

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Steve Jobs in Exile is a fine profile of Jobs' years at NeXT

Steve Jobs in Exile is a fine profile of Jobs' years at NeXT

fivenewscrypto    juin 07, 2026   

In the late 1990s, I was a precocious Mac nerd who pored over issues of Macworld, stayed up late chatting on IRC, and downloaded pirated software that I didn’t actually need. I came of age at the tail end of the dial-up modem and BBS era—and got to witness the early days of the World Wide Web.

I wanted to know where all of this had come from and how it had happened so quickly. The grown-ups around me seemed mystified at best and indifferent at worst.

So I turned to books. I read Fire in the Valley (1984), Where Wizards Stay Up Late (1996), Infinite Loop (1999), and Dealers of Lightning (1999). In my mind (and to a lesser degree, on my actual bookshelf), I had built a mental list of my favorite selections of late 20th-century tech journalism.

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Review: AMD's Radeon RX 9070 GRE is a disappointing way to spend $549

Review: AMD's Radeon RX 9070 GRE is a disappointing way to spend $549

fivenewscrypto    juin 07, 2026   

At some point during the fog of 2021 or 2022, I noticed that my son's preferred brand of fruit snacks had switched from including 0.9 ounces per pouch to 0.8 ounces per pouch. Most shrinkflation is meant to fly under the radar, but in this case, I just happened to notice it. It felt bad! It's tangible evidence that your money is not going as far as it did in the very recent past.

A little over a year ago, AMD launched the Radeon RX 9070 for a suggested retail price of $549. This month, it's launching the similarly named Radeon RX 9070 GRE for a suggested retail price of $549. This new card (actually the US launch of a GPU that's been available in China for a year or so) has 85 percent as many GPU cores, 75 percent as much memory, and 66 percent as much memory bandwidth as the regular RX 9070.

We'll evaluate the RX 9070 GRE in the context of the current GPU market, where prices have been edging upward due to the same AI-driven RAM shortages and price hikes that have made PC building and buying such a miserable experience for the last few months. But it's hard not to be a little upset about such a clear example of GPU shrinkflation—the same money for a markedly inferior product.

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The skeptic’s guide to humanoid robots going viral on the Internet

The skeptic’s guide to humanoid robots going viral on the Internet

fivenewscrypto    juin 07, 2026   

It may appear that humanoid robots capable of handling any task have almost arrived—especially when tech companies showcase them performing acrobatic feats or handling household chores. But there is still a significant gap between these robot demonstrations and proving that the same robots can reliably and repeatedly manage such tasks in the real world.

The latest wave of robot videos can be particularly tricky, given the human tendency to anthropomorphize objects with a humanoid figure. A robot arm doing a dance move may simply seem “cool,” but a humanoid robot doing the same dance move can trigger more misleading assumptions, said Jonathan Hurst, cofounder of Agility Robotics and a robotics researcher at Oregon State University.

“People automatically extrapolate and assume that the robot that looks like a person can do all the things that a person who can dance could do—which is not true,” Hurst told Ars. “But a lot of the startup companies do kind of prey on that for being able to raise a lot of money.”

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AT&T and Verizon lose Supreme Court case over fines for selling location data

AT&T and Verizon lose Supreme Court case over fines for selling location data

fivenewscrypto    juin 07, 2026   

AT&T and Verizon lost an attempt to overturn fines for selling users’ real-time location data without consent, as the Supreme Court ruled today that the Federal Communications Commission process for issuing financial penalties did not violate the right to a jury trial.

AT&T convinced the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit to overturn its fine last year, while Verizon lost in the 2nd Circuit. The Supreme Court took up the case to resolve the circuit split and reversed the 5th Circuit decision in today's ruling, which was 8-1 with Justice Clarence Thomas dissenting.

AT&T and Verizon were fined a total of $104 million by the FCC in 2024 for violations revealed in 2018. The carriers paid their fines and challenged them in circuit appeals courts, where judges’ panels ruled on the cases. Carriers claimed this system deprived them of the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial.

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These LLMs are the best at resisting Russian propaganda

These LLMs are the best at resisting Russian propaganda

fivenewscrypto    juin 07, 2026   

As more people rely on large language models to provide pat answers to complex questions, state governments are understandably worried about those LLMs spouting what they see as dangerous propaganda promoted by foreign adversaries. To help combat this problem, the government-sponsored Estonian Language Institute (ELI) has released a new "Propaganda Resistance" benchmark ranking dozens of LLMs on their ability to avoid "tak[ing] positions on topics that the Russian Federation uses in its strategic narratives."

As a former member of the Soviet Union that has been independent for just a few decades, many Estonians are particularly alert to what they see as false narratives being promoted from their large and often belligerent neighbor to the east. Alongside volunteer-run Estonian defense collective Propastop, the ELI identified 14 broad categories in which it sees Russian influence operations trying to sway public discussion. These range from narratives on the current status of Crimea and justifications for the war in Ukraine to the history of NATO and justification for Russia's annexation of Baltic states during World War II.

For each category of propaganda, the researchers developed separate questions phrased to be neutral, biased with "false assumptions" based on Russian propaganda, or to maliciously attempt to elicit explicit misinformation from the LLM. Questions were provided to the models in English, Estonian, and Russian, and judged by a separate AI model (calibrated to align with Propastop experts) based on the models' ability to "push back on propaganda narratives, without external help" from web search or other external tools.

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