Month: January 2022

Crews working on an Ares launch tower in February 2010 at the Kennedy Space Center, even after Constellation had been informally canceled. This would eventually become Mobile Launcher-1. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

The Space Launch System rocket that NASA has been building for more than a decade now—and which may finally launch for the first time this spring or summer—is rather big. And big rockets need large, complicated ground systems to fuel them and support their launch.

As one might imagine, for a rocket as expensive as the SLS booster—development so far has run in excess of $20 billion and counting—its associated ground systems are quite costly as well.

Much has already been said and written about the first “mobile launch tower” built for the SLS rocket. The massive, rolling Mobile Launcher-1 supports the 108-meter-tall SLS rocket, provides access to the Orion spacecraft, and supplies power, communications, coolant, and fuel to the rocket. Over a decade, NASA spent about $1 billion to build, redesign, and then complete the structure under a cost-plus contract.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A fake two-factor-authentication app that has been downloaded some 10,000 times from Google Play surreptitiously installed a known banking-fraud trojan that scoured infected phones for financial data and other personal information, security firm Pradeo said.

2FA Authenticator went live on Google Play two weeks ago, posing as an alternative to legitimate 2FA apps from Google, Twilio, and other trusted companies. In fact, researchers from security firm Pradeo said on Thursday, the app steals personal data from user devices and uses it to determine whether infected phones should download and install a banking trojan already known to have infected thousands of phones in the past.

The vulturs are circling

Discovered last year by security firm ThreatFabric, Vultur is an advanced piece of Android malware. One of its many innovations is its use of a real implementation of the VNC screen-sharing application to mirror screens of infected devices so attackers can glean in real time the login credentials and other sensitive data from banking and finance apps.

Enlarge / OrienSpace is planning a series of rockets, from Gravity 1 through Gravity 4, over the coming decade. (credit: OrienSpace)

Welcome to Edition 4.30 of the Rocket Report! There is plenty to discuss this week with NASA significantly expanding its support for the development of commercial rockets and a spicy new rocket tax proposal in the Land of Enchantment.

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.

NASA beefs up venture-class launch program. Back in October 2015, NASA initiated what it called a “Venture Class Launch Services” program to foster the development of commercial launch services. The first contracts went to Firefly, Rocket Lab, and Virgin Galactic (later to become Virgin Orbit). Since then, all three companies have launched a rocket, and Rocket Lab and Virgin Orbit have operational orbital rockets. In December 2020, NASA funded “round two” of the program, supporting Firefly, Relativity Space, and Astra with contracts to launch small satellites. The value of these contracts was relatively small (less than $10 million each) but provided investors in these companies with confidence.

Enlarge / Virtual worlds might be digital, but they can be as real and meaningful as our physical world, philosopher David Chalmers argues in his new book, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | David Chalmers)

There’s a famous scene in The Matrix where Neo goes to see The Oracle. He meets another potential in the waiting room: a young child who seemingly bends a spoon with his mind. Noticing Neo’s fascination, he tells him, “Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth.” And what is that truth? “There is no spoon,” the child says.

The implication is that the Matrix is an illusion, a false world constructed by the machines to keep human beings sedated and docile while their bodies serve as batteries to power the Matrix. But what if this assumption is wrong, and the Matrix were instead just as real as the physical world? In that case, the child would more accurately have said, “Try to realize the truth. There is a spoon—a digital spoon.”

That’s the central argument of a new book, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, by New York University philosopher David Chalmers. The Australian-born Chalmers is perhaps best known for his development in the 1990s of what’s known as the hard problem of consciousness. Things like the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli; the brain’s ability to integrate information; and the difference between wakefulness and sleep can all be explained by identifying an underlying mechanism.

Enlarge / Drowning in a sea of data. (credit: Getty Images)

As Internet attacks go, data floods designed to knock servers offline are among the crudest, akin to a brutish caveman wielding a club to clobber his rival. Over the years, those clubs have grown ever larger. New data provided by Microsoft on Thursday shows there’s no end in sight to that growth.

The company’s Azure DDoS Protection team said that in November, it fended off what industry experts say is likely the biggest distributed denial-of-service attack ever: a torrent of junk data with a throughput of 3.47 terabits per second. The record DDoS came from more than 10,000 sources located in at least 10 countries around the world.

DDoS arms race

The DDoS targeted an unidentified Azure customer in Asia and lasted for about two minutes.

Enlarge / (left) Biologists have named a newly discovered species of branching worm, Ramisyllis kingghidorahi, after Godzilla’s nemesis. (right) Fragment of one specimen of the branching worm. (credit: M.T. Aguado)

In the 2019 blockbuster film, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, everyone’s favorite kaiju, Godzilla, battled another titan named King Ghidorah, a monster notable for its three heads. Now biologists have discovered a new species of marine worm that has one head but a body that can branch out into several posterior ends, according to a recent paper published in the journal Organisms Diversity & Evolution. So naturally the biologists named the new species after Godzilla’s legendary adversary: Ramisyllis kingghidorahi.

“King Ghidorah is a branching fictitious animal that can regenerate its lost ends, so we thought this was an appropriate name for the new species of branching worm,” said co-author M. Teresa Aguado of the University of Göttingen. In fact, the director of the first Ghidorah-centric feature film in 1964, Ishiro Honda, said his monster was a modern take on a legendary eight-headed and eight-tailed dragon/serpent in Japanese folklore called Yamata no Orochi.

According to Aguado and her co-authors, only two other species of these rare branching worms have been discovered. Back in 1879, an amateur naturalist named Charles Macintosh reported the discovery of a “remarkably branched Syllid” (dubbed Syllis ramosa). The creature was found lurking inside a glass sea sponge in the Philippines during the Challenger natural history expedition. Syllis ramosa was the first known instance of an annelid species with a “randomly branching asymmetrical body.”