Ars Live: What's the latest in the aftermath of the New Glenn catastrophe?

Ars Live: What's the latest in the aftermath of the New Glenn catastrophe?

fivenewscrypto    juin 28, 2026   

Nearly a month has passed since the New Glenn rocket exploded on its launch pad in Florida, creating a massive fireball. It was likely the largest ever rocket explosion at the historic Florida spaceport, and we are still dealing with its implications today.

The rocket's explosion took out its only launch pad, LC-36A. So even if Blue Origin can quickly diagnose the cause of the failure, it has nowhere to launch the New Glenn rocket from. Company officials, including founder Jeff Bezos, have said the vehicle will return to flight at LC-36A before the end of this year, though there is widespread skepticism about that timeline.

Meanwhile, we have more questions than answers about a rocket that had become increasingly central to the needs of NASA and commercial customers. What does this failure mean for the Artemis Program to land humans on the Moon? What do we know about the timing of Artemis III and the lunar landing mission, Artemis IV? What about the Moon base?

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VW may close four factories to adapt to the future, report says

VW may close four factories to adapt to the future, report says

fivenewscrypto    juin 28, 2026   

Volkswagen Group is considering what was previously unthinkable: closing up to four factories in Germany and instituting layoffs that would shrink the workforce by 15 percent.

2025 was a bad year for Europe's largest automaker. Its sales were essentially flat, but profits were anything but, dropping 44 percent to just 6.9 billion euros ($7.9 billion) as operating margins more than halved. The red ink looks set to continue bleeding through 2026, and in March, the company announced it would cut 50,000 jobs in Germany by 2030 as part of a plan to adapt. Now, according to a report in Manager Magazin, those job losses may double.

The automaker did well selling EVs in Europe last year, but sales in North America and China fell and continue to fall, and tariffs have had a significant effect.

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Feedbacks upon feedbacks: Rock weathering and the climate

Feedbacks upon feedbacks: Rock weathering and the climate

fivenewscrypto    juin 28, 2026   

Since the early 1980s, Earth scientists have understood that erosion and weathering of rock slowly removes CO₂ from the atmosphere, regulating Earth’s climate on geological timescales. But recent studies have shown that erosion can also emit CO₂ by oxidizing organic carbon contained in eroding sediments. It hasn’t been clear how this competition between removal by rock weathering and emission by organic carbon weathering ends up affecting Earth’s climate.

A new study in the journal Nature Communications uses the geological past to test how these competing effects added up. Doctor Madeleine Stow of the University of Oxford, with colleagues from across the UK and France, examined a volcanically triggered episode of global warming that happened in the early part of the Jurassic period, 183 million years ago, known as the “Toarcian Ocean Anoxic Event.”

They found that eroding organic carbon amplified climate warming at the time, suggesting that the same process may apply to modern climate change. But the extent to which the past is prologue is uncertain.

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SpaceX plans to launch Starlink mobile service in the US

SpaceX plans to launch Starlink mobile service in the US

fivenewscrypto    juin 28, 2026   

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has told investors that it plans to launch a new Starlink mobile service for US consumers, in a move that would upend the country’s multibillion-dollar phone network market.

The company’s president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, told investors during a recent IPO roadshow that the group was considering launching a Starlink retail product and could build its own terrestrial US mobile network, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The move would require Starlink to build a new retail offering by selling mobile contracts to individual customers, competing directly with the three big US network operators Verizon Wireless, AT&T. and T-Mobile.

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Rocket Report: China may soon attempt booster landing; Rocket Lab does rapid response

Rocket Report: China may soon attempt booster landing; Rocket Lab does rapid response

fivenewscrypto    juin 28, 2026   

Welcome to Edition 8.47 of the Rocket Report! We have now very nearly reached the midpoint of 2026, a year in which several new US rockets were advertised as potentially making their debuts. But now, we have to wonder whether any of them—Rocket Lab's Neutron, Stoke Space's Nova, Relativity Space's Terran R, and Astra's Rocket 4—will make it. I'd probably put the over/under at something like 0.5 of these launching. Please share your thoughts in the comments below!

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 executes rapid response mission. Last Friday Rocket Lab launched the Victus Haze mission just 16 hours and 42 minutes after receiving the US Space Force’s Notice to Launch, beating the previous record by more than 10 hours, the company said. The launch was scarcely announced in advance, Ars reports. The only public indication of an impending launch was the release of a warning for pilots and sailors to steer clear of the rocket’s flight path. Rocket Lab did not provide a livestream of the launch, as it does for most of its missions.

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Microsoft adds another year to Windows 10 extended update program

Microsoft adds another year to Windows 10 extended update program

fivenewscrypto    juin 27, 2026   

Microsoft ended official support for Windows 10 in 2025, but the company may have a harder time than expected putting the operating system out to pasture. After promising a year of optional extended update support, Microsoft has changed its policy, tacking on another year to its Extended Security Updates (ESU) program. If you are still clinging to Windows 10, you don't have to do anything but enjoy that extra year.

The last regular updates rolled out to Windows 10 in October of last year, but the Internet can be a dangerous place for unpatched Windows machines. That was a problem for Microsoft, as Windows 11 usage had only barely surpassed Windows 10 when support ended. Microsoft's solution was to give everyone on the old OS a free year of extended updates.

That program was set to end on October 12, 2026, but Microsoft has updated its policy with hardly a whisper, pushing back the end of extended updates to October 12, 2027. The ESU support page was updated with that date, and Microsoft's blog post on the program has a new editor's note confirming the change.

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FCC may kill $2B program that connects schools and libraries to Internet

FCC may kill $2B program that connects schools and libraries to Internet

fivenewscrypto    juin 27, 2026   

The Federal Communications Commission was roundly criticized today for proposing to scale back or eliminate E-Rate, a $2 billion-a-year Universal Service program that provides discounts for telecom services and equipment in schools and libraries.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said E-Rate should be changed because students are getting too much screen time. He led a 2-1 vote to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that proposes changes and asks the public to comment on them.

"Over the last decade, school districts across the country experimented with a massive increase in screen time for students," Carr said at today's meeting.

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