Policy experts: Europe stuck between "rock and a hard place" on launch

Policy experts: Europe stuck between "rock and a hard place" on launch

fivenewscrypto    août 16, 2026   

A decade ago, SpaceX began to land the first stages of the Falcon 9 rocket with some regularity, but it's only within the last five years that the company has begun flying the rocket dozens and then hundreds of times a year.

As a result, SpaceX has very rapidly become responsible for more than three-quarters of all mass launched into orbit. Much of this is the company's Starlink satellites, but due to cost and the lack of alternatives, SpaceX has also stepped up to launch payloads from all comers, including direct competitors such as Amazon, Northrop Grumman, AST Space Mobile, OneWeb, and more.

New research is beginning to quantify just how much the introduction of the Falcon 9 rocket, the adoption of reuse, and the vehicle's high cadence have upended the global launch market.

Read full article

Comments

Ars Live recap: How can we stop publishers from killing their own games?

Ars Live recap: How can we stop publishers from killing their own games?

fivenewscrypto    août 16, 2026   

Video Game Preservation: Saving Yesterday's Games for Tomorrow's Players | Ars Live

This week, Ars hosted a live discussion with Ross Scott about the Stop Killing Games movement and its ongoing efforts to ensure that games remain playable even after the original publisher shuts down the online servers undergirding them.

Scott talked with Ars Technica Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland, saying said he felt the situation around long-term game access was already "intolerable a decade and a half ago" and that he "kept hoping someone else would kick this off, [someone] more experienced or knowledgeable, but it felt like nothing was happening." Scott said he felt making the effort to organize a movement against the practice was like "[drawing] the short straw on this, essentially."

During the conversation, Scott noted how the standard practice of shutting down game access for any reason, at any time, with minimal notice, would seem ludicrous in other areas of life:

Read full article

Comments

Judge gives Google one week to fix "anticompetitive" app store download in Google Play

Judge gives Google one week to fix "anticompetitive" app store download in Google Play

fivenewscrypto    août 16, 2026   

Google began offering third-party app store downloads in the Play Store earlier this week, but US District Judge James Donato says the company isn't doing enough. After reviewing the process for accessing the first non-Google store, Donato ruled that Google has added unnecessary "anticompetitive friction," ordering the company to rectify the issues.

While Epic and Google are patching things up with a global partnership agreement, the two are still on opposite sides of the antitrust case in the US. Google lost the case in 2023, and the intervening years have been about determining how to implement remedies to address Google's anticompetitive behavior. One of the court's key elements is the requirement that Google include third-party app stores in the Play Store, giving users an easy way to get apps from non-Google sources. Aptoide Games became the first such app store recently.

However, Google worked hard to avoid this outcome, attempting to settle with Epic to keep third-party app stores out. When it was forced to admit the Aptoide store under the terms of the ruling, Google didn't exactly put up a banner welcoming third-party app stores. In fact, Judge Donato found in a Thursday hearing that Google's implementation was not good enough, according to The Verge.

Read full article

Comments

R-rated director's cut of X-Files film restores Chris Carter's original horror vision

R-rated director's cut of X-Files film restores Chris Carter's original horror vision

fivenewscrypto    août 15, 2026   

There is a lot of excitement and some trepidation among The X-Files fans about Ryan Coogler's reboot for Hulu, currently in production. While we're waiting, Hulu just released Chris Carter's revamped (and R-rated) director's cut of the 2008 standalone spinoff film The X-Files: I Want to Believe, distinguishable from its predecessor with a slightly different title: The X-Files: I Want to Believe–Vrach Frankenshteyn.

(Minor spoilers below but no major reveals.)

I Want to Believe received mixed reviews at its release and didn’t exactly light up the box office, but it still grossed $68 million against its $30 million budget. By 2015, the project led to the return of The X-Files as a limited-run TV series, with the six-episode season 10 debuting in 2016. Mulder and Scully were reunited 14 years after the events of season 9 as the FBI reopened the X-Files under Assistant Director Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi). The response was strong enough to warrant a follow-up ten-episode season in 2018, focusing on Mulder and Scully’s search for their missing son, William.

Read full article

Comments

Taylor Farms' connections to Trump admin spurs probe into Cyclospora response

Taylor Farms' connections to Trump admin spurs probe into Cyclospora response

fivenewscrypto    août 15, 2026   

As Americans cook their vegetables to at least 158°F to kill a diarrheal parasite that has sickened over 24,000 people and killed two this summer, one US Senator is turning up the heat on Health Secretary Robert F. Kenney Jr. over the government's "calamitous response" to the record outbreak.

In a letter sent Thursday, Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called the federal response to the Cyclospora outbreak "botched" and "marred by missteps." She pointedly questioned whether corruption and incompetence within the Trump administration and its clear ties to Taylor Farms—the mammoth produce distributer that sold Mexican-grown iceberg lettuce linked to the outbreak—played a role in the federal government's failures.

"[P]olitical contributions and direct White House lobbying from Taylor Farms... raise urgent questions about the role this influence-peddling may have played in loosening federal food safety oversight and hampering the federal government’s response to the outbreak," Warren wrote in the letter.

Read full article

Comments

OpenAI and Anthropic in price war as Chinese AI rivals gain ground

OpenAI and Anthropic in price war as Chinese AI rivals gain ground

fivenewscrypto    août 15, 2026   

Leading US AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic are releasing cheaper models as they fight to retain cost-conscious customers who are switching to cut-price alternatives from Chinese rivals.

The price war comes as rising AI bills push companies to curb usage and seek cheaper models, helping Chinese developers including Moonshot and DeepSeek make inroads with users from Silicon Valley to Europe.

OpenAI recently said that it was slashing prices for GPT-5.6 Luna, its “fastest and most affordable model”, by 80 percent. Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 5, touting the system’s “frontier intelligence... at half the price” of Fable 5, the company’s most capable model.

Read full article

Comments

Rocket Report: Rocket Lab shows off its flexibility; Blue Origin's two-pad plan

Rocket Report: Rocket Lab shows off its flexibility; Blue Origin's two-pad plan

fivenewscrypto    août 15, 2026   

Welcome to Edition 9.06 of the Rocket Report! Rocket Lab made a lot of news this week with its quarterly update, and it is clear the company is making impressive progress as it becomes much more than a launch company. But at the end of the day, a lot of the company's success is predicated on the Neutron vehicle, and I'm not thrilled with Rocket Lab's ambiguity around its readiness. As a user on X noted, the company's language on Stage 2 being ready to ship to the launch site has not changed much in 12 months.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and 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.

Rocket Lab decides to get flexible. Rocket Lab plans to start launching its Electron vehicle even more frequently and flexibly, thanks to a new portable spaceport system called GHOST, Space.com reports. GHOST—short for "Global Hypersonic & Orbital Spaceport Technology"—turns the company's "Electron and HASTE rockets into a launch-anywhere, launch-anytime capability for multi-launch flight campaigns and critical national security missions," the company said this week.

Read full article

Comments