SpaceX Starship breaks apart after launch in second failure in a row
SpaceX launched its huge Starship rocket on the program's eighth test flight Thursday, but a malfunction of some sort triggered multiple upper stage engine shutdowns and the vehicle failed to reach its planned sub-orbital altitude, breaking apart in a spectacular shower of debris.
It was the second failure in a row for a Starship upper stage, a vehicle critical to NASA's plans to return astronauts to the moon in the next few years.
"Obviously, a lot to go through, a lot to dig through. We're going to go right at it," said SpaceX launch commentator Dan Huot. "The primary reason we do these flight tests is to learn. We have some more to learn about this vehicle, but we're going to be right back here in the not-too-distant future, and we're going to get a ship to space."
Added commentator Kate Tice: "We fly to learn, and we're learning a lot. As is the case with developmental programs such as the Starship program, progress isn't always linear."
Three days after a last-minute scrub due to unspecified technical issues, SpaceX fired up the Super Heavy first stage's 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines at 6:30 p.m. EST. Two seconds later, the tallest, most powerful rocket in the world majestically lifted off from the company's launch site on the Texas Gulf Coast.
Capable of generating up to 16 million pounds of thrust — more than twice the power as NASA's Saturn 5 moon rocket — the Super Heavy-Starship arced away to the east atop of long jet of bluish flame.
After boosting the Starship upper stage out of the dense lower atmosphere, the 230-foot-tall, 30-foot-wide Super Heavy first stage booster flew itself back to the launch site and into the grasp of two giant mechanical arms known as "chopsticks" mounted on the side of the launch tower.
The chopsticks closed around the slowly descending booster, locking onto structural capture fixtures on both sides of the rocket. The dramatic launch pad capture, SpaceX's third, is a key element in the company's plan to enable rapid refurbishment and reuse.
The 160-foot-tall Starship upper stage, meanwhile, climbed toward space as planned on the power of six Raptor engines, appearing to work flawlessly as it soared skyward toward the planned sub-orbital trajectory.
But a little more than eight minutes after liftoff, telemetry shown on SpaceX's live webcast indicated four of the six engines had prematurely shut down. A camera on the Starship showed the spacecraft starting to spin about and several seconds later contact was lost.
Multiple videos posted on YouTube showed a dramatic shower of debris arcing back toward Earth after the vehicle broke up. It wasn't immediately clear if the breakup was triggered by the Starship's self-destruct system or by extreme structural loads as it fell back into the lower atmosphere.
While SpaceX will no doubt attempt its usual rapid recovery, the Federal Aviation Administration will almost certainly order another failure investigation. Given two destructive breakups in a row, it could take longer to return to flight status this time around.
The flight plan called for a battery of tests, including the deployment of four simulated Starlink satellites to test the Starship's payload release system, the in-space restart of one of the rocket's Raptor engines and tests of new heat shield materials and components needed for the eventual pad capture of returning Starships.
At the conclusion of the sub-orbital flight, the Starship was expected fall back into the atmosphere belly first. Once past the region of maximum atmospheric heating, the rocket was programmed to flip into a vertical orientation before settling to a tail-first rocket-powered "soft landing" in the Indian Ocean near Australia.
But it was not to be.
During the program's seventh integrated flight test, or IFT, in January, a fire developed just above the Super Heavy first stage engines and contact was lost eight minutes and 20 seconds after launch.
Three minutes after that, the rocket's self-destruct system triggered an explosion that broke the Starship apart, producing a spectacular shower of flaming debris that rained down along the flight path.
Telemetry indicated the fire broke out after propellant lines leading to one of the Raptors ruptured due to unexpected harmonic vibrations. SpaceX carried out a 60-second engine test firing of the Starship launched Monday, studying responses to various thrust levels.
Based on the test results, propellant feed lines were modified, fuel temperatures were changed and thrust levels were adjusted to avoid any such harmonic responses. Additional vents were installed in the area where the fire broke out and a nitrogen purge system was added to minimize the chance of fire.
It was not immediately known what went wrong Thursday.
Working the bugs out of the Super Heavy-Starship is critical to both SpaceX and NASA. SpaceX is under contract to NASA to supply a modified Starship to carry astronauts to landings near the moon's south pole in the agency's Artemis program.
To get a Starship lander to the moon, SpaceX must first get it into low-Earth orbit, then launch multiple Super Heavy-Starship "tankers" to refuel the moon-bound Starship for the trip to lunar orbit.
The astronauts will launch atop NASA's Space Launch System rocket and fly to the moon aboard a Lockheed Martin-built Orion capsule. The crew will transfer to the waiting Starship for the descent to the lunar surface. NASA hopes to send the first woman and the next man to the moon in the 2027-28 timeframe, after an unpiloted Starship moon landing.
Rapid reusability is a key element of the program given the number of Super Heavy-Starships that will be required for a single moon landing. Multiple successful test flights will be needed to perfect the system and demonstrate the reliability required to carry astronauts.
The latest mishap comes amid ambitious SpaceX plans for major upgrades to the company's facilities at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, building a 380-foot-tall building where Super Heavy boosters and Starships can be refurbished and processed for launch from one and possibly two Florida launch pads.
The towering "Gigabay" facility will provide 46.5 million cubic space for processing with 815,000 square feet of work space. Construction is expected to be completed by the end of 2026. Another facility is planned where Starships can be built from scratch in Florida, similar to a facility already in place at Boca Chica.
"To enable initial Starship flights from Florida while our Space Coast Starship manufacturing, integration, and refurbishment facilities are being completed, we will first transport completed Super Heavy boosters and Starship upper stage ships from Starbase via barge to build up a Starship fleet in Florida," SpaceX said in a statement Monday.
"With production, integration, refurbishment, and launch facilities in Florida as well as Texas, we will be in a position to quickly ramp Starship's launch rate via rapid reusability."
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Somehow, while we were all thumbing through TikTok or commenting on tweets or working three jobs to (not) be able to afford rent, we allowed the world's richest man to pay roughly $250 million to help reinstall Donald Trump in the White House and then create an unelected position for himself in which he — with a bevy of programmers too young to rent cars from Hertz — slashed government programs, fired nuclear safety workers (then frantically tried to hire them back), and basically treated the infrastructure of the American government like an evil monster in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Meanwhile Elon Musk's old frenemy and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, the first of the Silicon Valley tycoons to endorse Trump way back in the innocent times of 2016, had paid $15 million to help get his protégé J.D. 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Should it concern us that power and tech — and the power of tech — are so concentrated in so few hands and that Trump appears to be a Trojan horse for Silicon Valley's most neo-reactionary ambitions? Absolutely! Do we want America remade in the image of a tech startup by men who like to move fast and break things (especially when most of the systems they're breaking are ones that they, in fact, would never rely on)? Not I! But also: What is going on with this idea that humans should even want to live in space? What sort of lack of reality testing are we dealing with here? Musk, whose wealth has lately hovered well over $400 billion, has enough money that he could, should he desire, end world hunger and still have billions to spare. If Jeff Bezos had a mind to, he could eliminate homelessness in America and still be one of the richest people in the world. Yet of the half-dozen tech billionaires Trump displayed like trophies at his inauguration, most seem less concerned with the fate of the common American than they do with a sci-fi fantasy future that involves transhumanism, superhuman AI, and the survival of humanity as an interplanetary species (starting, perhaps, with launching Katy Perry into space). Which, truth be told, seems like more than just a moral failing. It seems … unhinged? Deranged? Batshit? At the very least, current circumstances might lead one to wonder: How the heck does someone get this way? And what does it mean for the rest of us? In 2011, a Berkeley grad student named Paul Piff conducted an experiment that has since become famous in the world of social psychology. Over the course of several weekends, Piff and his research team crouched behind bushes at the intersection of Interstate 80 and Lincoln Highway in Berkeley, California. When a vehicle passed, they would catalog it — 'five' for a brand-new BMW, for instance; 'one' for a beat-up Honda. Then the researchers would observe the behavior of the car's driver. For centuries, humans have studied and tried to understand our own hierarchies — how and why we arrange ourselves into tribes and nations and by what means certain groups and individuals rise to the top. But Piff had realized that we had little data on how wealth — a prime marker of power in our current times — affects the psychology of those who hold it. 'In the U.S., we spend a lot of time pathologizing poverty and valorizing aspects of the rich,' he tells me. 'I was really interested in the flip side of poverty: If poverty has these effects, then wealth must also, and let's start to try to uncover what those are. There must be some pathologies there too, right?' What Piff and his team found at that intersection is profound — and profoundly satisfying — in that it offers hard data to back up what intuition and millennia of wisdom (from Aristotle to Edith Wharton) would have us believe: Wealth tends to make people act like assholes, and the more wealth they have, the more of a jerk they tend to be. At the intersection the researchers were monitoring, drivers of the most expensive cars were roughly four times more likely to cut others off and three times less likely to stop for pedestrians, even when controlling for factors like the driver's perceived gender and amount of traffic at the time they were collecting data. When someone from the research team posed as a pedestrian heading into the crosswalk, almost half of the grade-five cars failed to stop, as if they didn't even see the person. 'People find the car study infinitely relatable,' Piff says now of this research, the results of which were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 'It's almost like science masquerading as allegory, or allegory masquerading as science.' For all the attention it has received, the car study was admittedly small, but other research has backed up its findings — and augmented them. Wealth makes you less generous (lower-income individuals have been shown to give a greater proportion of their income than wealthier ones), less compassionate (people with more money and status report less distress when confronted with another person's suffering), and more narcissistic. In a hilariously pointed study that was also included in the PNAS article, people primed to think of themselves as upper-class were more likely to take candy from a jar that they had been told was meant for kids in a nearby lab. In other words, they were more likely to literally steal candy from children. Yet the Berkeley team wasn't just interested in the correlation between assholery and wealth; it also was interested in causation: Were people with less empathy more likely to become wealthy, or did wealth tend to deprive people of empathy? To find out, Piff and his colleagues developed experiments in which the participants' status was artificially manipulated — making them feel higher or lower status — to see if there would be a behavioral effect based on that variable alone. In one such experiment, Monopoly players tossed a coin at the beginning of the game to determine who would be given an unfair advantage — starting with twice as much money, collecting twice as much when they passed 'go,' and rolling two dice at every turn instead of one. The results of the study were never published, but as videos of the experiment show, players with the advantage soon began displaying more dominant behavior, taking up more room at the table, moving their opponent's piece for them, even eating more pretzels from a shared bowl. Other researchers found that simply making subjects think about money (sitting them near a screensaver showing images of bills, for instance) had an antisocial effect: Subjects picked up fewer pencils that an assistant pretended to accidentally drop and arranged a stranger's chair further from their own. When it came to determining the mechanism behind this antisocial shift, researchers hypothesize that socialization itself is key. Wealthy people tend to have more space, literally and figuratively. They spread themselves out into bigger homes, they send their children to less crowded schools, they interact less with the hoi polloi and even, research has shown, with members of their own social class. And they have less need to: Wealthy people are insulated from relying on the types of pro-social engagement that the rest of us need to survive and thrive in an interconnected world. For them, it does not take a village; it takes a staff. Turns out, this disengagement can even be quantified. A 2020 study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that wealthy people are less adept at reading other people's facial expressions. Another, published in Psychological Science in 2016, used eye trackers to determine that higher-income individuals spend less time looking at others directly, which might explain why they are less able to remember people's faces. Even their physiology changes: A study published in Emotion showed that poorer participants experienced a significantly larger deceleration in heart rate — a sign of compassion — when watching videos of kids receiving chemotherapy. In another study, from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, poorer people who were shown images of suffering exhibited a stronger response in their vagus nerve, which is known to activate emotional sensations. According to Sukhvinder Obhi, a professor of social neuroscience and the director of the Social Brain, Body and Action Lab at McMaster University, having more money tends to suppress or curtail the mirror neuron system, the parts of the brain that light up when you execute an action and when you witness someone else execute that same action, allowing humans to cognitively put themselves in someone else's shoes. 'It's giving you a neurophysiological measure of what we've called social attunement,' he says. 'High status and high power just reduce that activity in the premotor cortex.' 'As your wealth increases, your empathy decreases,' says psychotherapist Clay Cockrell. 'It can be toxic.' Obhi is quick to point out, however, that these effects are not necessarily hardwired: In laboratory settings, at least, efforts to get wealthier study participants to socially engage have proven beneficial. And antisocial tendencies could certainly be influenced or even overruled by other factors that encourage community-mindedness or consideration of the needs of others, which might explain the more radical philanthropy of some billionaires in historically marginalized groups — like Jeff Bezos' ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott — or investor Warren Buffett, who never traded in the fairly modest house he purchased in 1958 for an isolated mansion, and continues to drive his 2014 Cadillac XTS through the McDonald's drive-through for lunch. Buffett, appropriately, has been dubbed 'the conscience of capitalism.' If left unchecked, however, wealth-related disengagement seems to not be so great for a species for which pro-social cooperation is programmed into our hunter-gatherer DNA. Clay Cockrell, a psychotherapist who caters to ultra-high-net-worth individuals, tells me he thinks of great wealth as subtractive: It doesn't really add to one's happiness, but it does take away struggles that can make someone unhappy. Yet it's subtractive in a different sense, too — contributing to isolation, paranoia, grandiosity, and risk-taking behavior, as well as a pronounced lack of empathy. 'As your wealth increases, your empathy decreases. Your ability to relate to other people who are not like you decreases.… It can be very toxic.' Social psychologist Michael Kraus, who participated in much of the Berkeley research with Piff, puts it even more pointedly: 'You come to this idea that all of your thoughts and feelings matter, all your ways of interpreting the world matters, and everybody else is just kind of noise.… You just don't care.' For much of recent American history, the social contract necessitated that the wealthiest Americans had to at least pretend to care. The OG robber barons of the Gilded Age had found themselves confronted with a sociological — and psychological — situation that was distinct from that of most extremely wealthy people who had come before them. They did not head up armies. They were not divinely anointed. They were not manor born. They derived their power from money — and money alone — and the amount of money they had was basically unthinkable. According to historian David Nasaw, who has written biographies of Andrew Carnegie, William Randolph Hearst, and Joseph P. Kennedy, 'This new species of rich men needed some rationale, some moral justification for the accumulation of this wealth. They needed, in a very visceral, intimate sense, a sign that their wealth was not a matter of chance or crime or robbery, that they were not simply robber barons, but that what they were doing was beneficial to all of mankind.' Some of these men found such a justification in social Darwinism and the ideas of Herbert Spencer, a 19th-century psychologist and anthropologist who coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest' not to explain biological evolution but rather to legitimize social hierarchies: Rich and powerful people are rich and powerful because they have innate traits that make them superior. Never mind the effects of systemic oppression (Spencer was an unapologetic racist) or the fact that, in a functioning democracy, no billionaire is entirely 'self-made' (where would Bezos be without taxpayers paving the roads his Amazon trucks clog?) — historians today see a direct line from the social Darwinism of the Gilded Age to DOGE. '[With] tech leadership nowadays, I think the arguments are a little different: They don't make explicit appeals to survival of the fittest,' says Luke Winslow, author of Oligarchy in America. 'But you get phrases like 'make the world a better place' and 'move fast and break things.' Well, that's very Darwinian, because if you break things, if you have disruption, catastrophe, the hope is that the strong will survive. You don't have this crutch of a government allowing the losers and the weaklings to survive; you'll weed them out. And this idea is really big in Silicon Valley, this justification of the concentration of wealth and power based on this idea that they deserve it. How do you know they deserved it? Well, geez, look at how rich Elon Musk is.' In a certain sense, it's easy to buy into this (flawed) logic to one degree or another. Even plebeians can take comfort in the idea that there is justice in the world, that people get what they deserve, despite obvious and frequent proof to the contrary. But psychologists have found that wealthier people are significantly more likely to believe in nature over nurture, to think that traits are ingrained and immutable. And, surrounded by yes-men who don't call them on their bullshit, they are also more likely to have an inflated sense of their own abilities, to overstate the power of the traits they possess. While observations of the rigged Monopoly game proved informative, for instance, the Berkeley researchers noticed that the strangest thing actually happened after the game was over: When the 'rich' players were asked why they'd won, they didn't tend to mention the random coin toss that had given them the obvious advantage; they tended to credit their own abilities, the good, strategic choices they'd made. Even knowing that the game was rigged, they thought they'd earned, and therefore deserved, their victory. For someone with mega billions, this type of self-delusion could become mega pronounced. 'These guys think they're Superman, that they're genetically endowed with superior characteristics, and that their genes should populate the Earth,' says Dartmouth sociology professor Brooke Harrington, who studies the ultra-rich and has helped popularize the term 'broligarchy.' As Harrington points out, the messaging is pretty overt, from venture capitalist Marc Andreessen's 2023 'Techno-Optimist Manifesto' — which talked up such things as 'becoming technological supermen' and 'conquering dragons' — to Thiel's obsession with living forever and the fact that he named his data-mining company Palantir, after the far-seeing crystals in The Lord of the Rings. Then there's Musk's 'breeding farm,' as Harrington puts it, and his edgelord displays of dominance, like brandishing a chain saw at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference or doing what many perceived to be a Nazi salute at Trump's post-inauguration rally. Using his preferred form of social engagement, Musk recently reposted on X an argument that 'a Republic of high status males is best for decision making.' 'Interesting observation,' he commented, as if one could actually observe something that is patently untrue. (For what it's worth, I reached out to Musk, Thiel, Bezos, and Andreessen, none of whom responded.) Naturally, this grandiosity also extends to the tech elite's accelerationist agenda. Musk believes that in 20 years — and thanks to his own genius — a million humans will be living on Mars. (Never mind that his budget-travel version of spaceships keep exploding.) Bezos wants humanity spread throughout the solar system on enormous space stations (that a galactic Amazon presumably stocks). And Silicon Valley is steeped in the idea that all of this will come about thanks to the imminent arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a point at which artificial intelligence equals that of humans and then iterates upon itself, growing exponentially more brilliant with every version. Once we reach this singularity — and assuming that the tech is aligned with the forces of good and not evil — we can rely on AI to solve any problem, from reversing aging to curtailing climate change to colonizing space so that humanity's growth is not limited by the resources on just this measly planet Earth. Which means that, when it comes to noblesse oblige, such as it were, we have in fact entered a new frontier. A Gilded Age oligarch who exploited his workers or cheated his customers might build a library or concert hall or train station to burnish his image. Now, the technocrats have framed their contribution as an algorithmically guaranteed utopia that will bring about the salvation of mankind. The concern is not with the general welfare of humans who are alive today (those forlorn Amazon drivers peeing in bottles) but rather with the potential future happiness of trillions of potential future humans, spread joyously throughout the cosmos — the offspring of those wealthy enough to afford a ticket off planet Earth. (Musk has said that he hopes to get the cost of a ticket to Mars below $500,000, though in 2020, it cost $3 billion to send one rover, one tiny helicopter, and zero people to the planet.) Such thinking not only reduces every problem to one that can be solved with technology, but it also casts the growth of the technocrats' businesses as a moral imperative, while implying that those who question their 'genius' are enemies of not just progress but of all humankind. And that, in turn, explains much of what has recently happened in America's particular corner of the cosmos. The hubris of extreme wealth might once have aligned itself with views of American exceptionalism; and, indeed, to the extent that Trump's populism could ever mesh with the libertarian vein of Silicon Valley, it's because of their shared strongman vibe. But as their wealth has grown, the tech right's long-standing opposition to government regulation has shifted — publicly — toward a more extreme, neo-reactionionary, and antidemocratic frame of mind. Why should the 'fittest' men submit themselves to taxes, regulation, DEI accountability? Why shouldn't they be the ones in charge, if not here in America then in their floating island 'network states' or on their interplanetary colonies? And if pesky government interference threatens the development of the miraculous tech that will allow these things to come to pass, why shouldn't the American government be bought, infiltrated, and managed just like a tech startup, with total corporate control and the 'fittest' guys at the top of the roster? 'These guys think they're Superman,' says sociology professor Brooke Harrington. 'This is an extremist ideological movement that sees democracy as outdated, and it's amazing how much they talk about it,' says Gil Duran, a former editor of The Sacramento Bee whose Substack, 'The Nerd Reich,' has painstakingly drawn connections between certain antidemocratic ideas and the would-be kings in tech who seem taken with them. Duran has particularly highlighted tech's embrace of people like Curtis Yarvin, a once-obscure programmer now famous for his assertion that America suffers from 'chronic kinglessness' and that we should 'get over [our] dictator-phobia' and submit to a CEO-in-chief who would govern like a 'joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents' opinions' (Yarvin has floated Andreessen as a possible man for the job). Thiel, who once famously defended his contention that democracy has not been served by granting women the vote, had Yarvin to his home to watch the 2016 election results (Yarvin has said that he's 'coaching Thiel' and that he is 'fully enlightened'). Both Thiel and Andreessen have, through their companies, invested in Yarvin's software startup, Tlon. In a 2021 interview with a right-wing podcast, J.D. Vance name-checked Yarvin and seemed inspired by his proposal for 'rebooting' the government with a program called RAGE (Retire All Government Employees) that many see as a clear preview of Trump and Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The weekend of Trump's inauguration, Yarvin dined with Michael Anton, now a senior member of Trump's State Department. 'It was when Vance got on the ticket,' says Duran, 'that it suddenly escalated to: This shit's going into the White House.' As Harrington sees it, that was the next logical move once the tech elite had enough money to pull it off. 'The broligarchs believe they are entitled to own everything and rule everything,' she says. 'If your goal is to own everything worldwide, if that is actually your ketamine-addled goal, then you need to destroy any institution that has the power to hold you accountable. Buying the U.S. government is a brilliant strategy: 'Fuck democracy. We own it, we bought it, and we're running it the way we want.' ' (Musk has recently denied reports about his frequent ketamine use.) 'P.S.,' Harrington wrote to me shortly after our interview. 'I hope that I'm completely wrong about the broligarchs and their aims. I've never hoped so hard to be wrong.' One sunny day this spring, on the floor of a building so high above Manhattan that helicopters occasionally fly by below us, I meet a man wearing a suit and glasses and an unreadable expression. We sit together at a long table, the man's back to floor-to-ceiling glass and a peerless blue sky. For decades, this man has worked among the right-wing elite. 'If I wrote Peter Thiel right now, he would write me back,' he tells me. 'I met J.D. Vance at Peter's house — the one in the Bay Area, before he moved to L.A.' In measured tones, this man confirms Harrington's fears. He tells me that the tech billionaires he knows are in fact staging a sort of siege on the American government, building what he calls 'a new techno-feudalism in which there's a patchwork quilt of these billionaires who can deliver everything that society needs.' 'The money isn't the goal here, right?' he says. 'Everybody tries to make it about the money. That's not what it's about. It's about socialization and control.… They would like to see an end to democratic liberalism and constitutional republics.… They view laws not as laws, but as conventions meant to be disrupted in an attempt to right the ship.' It's not a conspiracy — 'They don't have the alliances, they're not coordinated,' the man states. But he is adamant that the wealthiest men in the world are often motivated by a certain set of 'core principles': Liberal democracy is weak and ineffectual; the wealthiest tech titans know best; nothing and no one should be allowed to stand in their way. 'Everything to them is a structure to optimize,' the man in the tower tells me. 'The psychology of I-think-I-should-be-in-charge is the original factory setting for anybody who is at that level of wealth. I just think the difference is between people who do it well and people who do it poorly.' Suffice it to say the technocrats are doing it pretty poorly, if one's concern is the plight of the common man alive on Earth, today. But, as it happens, they are also doing it pretty poorly if one's concerns happen to include physics, AI engineering, and the laws of science. 'Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,' says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. 'There are so many reasons why it's such a bad idea, and this is not about, 'Oh, we'll never have the technology to live on Mars.' That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.' Then again, you don't have to do a cursory examination of the facts of Mars if you believe tech is close to inventing a machine that can change the physical properties of the universe. In 2023, billionaire OpenAI CEO Sam Altman conceded that climate change was a huge problem, but brushed off its hugeness with the contention that super intelligent AI would soon be able to tell us how to make a lot of clean-energy facilities, how to amp up carbon capture, and how to do both of those things quickly and at scale. 'What he said was, 'A good way to solve global warming is to build a kind of machine without a clear definition that no one knows how to build, and then ask it for three wishes,' ' Becker says with a sigh. According to some who work in the field of AI, that's more than just wishful thinking. 'I can't believe I even have to talk about these people. That's how ridiculous it is,' says Timnit Gebru, an electrical engineer and founder and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute. 'They were like some fringe group that nobody took seriously,' she says of how the tech billionaires who talked up AGI were viewed by those who worked in her field. 'Everybody sort of laughed at them out of the room. But because of the money, the billions of dollars that were going into it, they started slowly taking over. Fast-forward to now, this conversation about superintelligence is basically mainstream.' Yet, Gebru argues, the conversation ignores what AI like ChatGPT really is: Not a form of intelligence — which, in and of itself, is almost impossible to define — but rather a large language model that simply scrapes the (inherently flawed) internet and predicts the most likely sequence of words. We are made to think that AI is 'thinking,' but that's just marketing, and misleading marketing at that. A machine that doesn't really think at all can't teach itself to think better. And it certainly can't figure out how to alter the habitability of Mars. Likewise, though Altman claimed in January that nuclear fusion — potentially an inexhaustible source of energy — was only a few years away, the scientists working to bring it about scoff at that timeline (there's a joke that it's been 30 years away for the past 60 years). Crypto continues to have dubious (legal) utility as compared with other forms of currency, but in 2023, it gobbled up as much energy as the entire continent of Australia. In October, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, said the solution to the climate crisis was to use more energy: Since we aren't going to meet our climate goals anyway, we should pump energy into AI that might one day evolve to solve the problem for us. ('Yeah, that's a quote that he gave in public without, like, a mask over his face or anything,' says Becker. 'And he still walks around, unashamed.') In his first week in office, Trump invited Altman, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son to the White House to gleefully announce the building of 20 more AI data centers. 'The broligarchs believe they are entitled to own everything and rule everything,' Harrington says. 'First, you kill the environment in the process of getting to so-called AGI, and then that AGI is going to somehow magically stop forest fires and storms and the wind?' Gebru asks, dumbfounded. 'It doesn't make any sense. There are no specifics of how this could happen.' Meanwhile, in the name of bringing about an imaginary techno-utopia, real damage is being done. Real people lose their jobs to AI or suffer discrimination thanks to the racism, sexism, and classism the technology replicates from its internet scrubs. Real energy is being wasted. Real problems are being brushed aside in favor of ones that have been invented by the men who've tapped themselves to solve them. 'When you're aiming at utopia, it offers the promise of transcendence of all limits and the ability to ignore everything else,' Becker argues. 'If you know what the end goal is, if you know what the future holds, then you don't have to worry about laws. You don't have to worry about morality.' And you certainly don't have to worry about building a library. It's survival of the fittest on a disastrous, interplanetary scale. It's possible that all this nonsense might someday soon get seen for what it is. Trump seems to be tiring of these guys (as I write this, Musk is skulking back to Tesla to presumably try to jump-start its stock after an explosive breakup with the president). And it's possible that enough people could rise up and speak out and push back against the technocratic takeover that strength in numbers would prevail. The Gilded Age ushered in the Progressive Era; it stands to reason that such a shift could happen again. But it's also possible that a threshold could be reached in which the amount of wealth these men possess exceeds the power of any possible guardrails even a collection of nations could devise. In the amount of time it took me to write that sentence, Musk's fortune grew by about $30,000. In the time it took you to read that last one, he gained about $3,000 more. In other words, we may eventually reach a sort of wealth singularity, a point when the wealth of a few grows so exponentially that it basically reaches the point of infinity. It seems safe to assume that that singularity is actually the one that is most near. After my conversation with the man in the glass tower, we rode the elevator together down through the clouds and back to the Earth's surface, where the building's lobby teemed with Earthlings going blithely about their day, tiny computers clutched in their hands. I asked the man if he saw any solution to the predicament we were in. 'I do think that the most radical idea is a radical unplugging, the radical removal of ourselves from all of their platforms. There would be a manifesto: These things, you cannot do.' Somewhere nearby, a phone dinged. The man exhaled deeply. His plan might work, theoretically, but it seemed as likely as living on Mars. Best of Rolling Stone Every Super Bowl Halftime Show, Ranked From Worst to Best The United States of Weed Gaming Levels Up
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ULA rocket launch in Florida: Map shows visibility from Tennessee, Georgia, New Jersey, Massachusetts
Billionaire Jeff Bezos' Project Kuiper: Round two. United Launch Alliance will launch the second batch of Amazon satellites into space − and it's possible people can see the Atlas V rocket far outside of Florida. When ULA launches its massive rocket, depending on cloud cover, Floridians (and visitors) as far as Jacksonville, Cape Coral and Miami could see it light up the sky after liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Visibility from most of Florida is possible, according to ULA. What's on board ULA Atlas V? Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is launching Project Kuiper, a global network of satellites, to compete with SpaceX CEO-billionaire Elon Musk and Starlink satellites. It begins with the second-ever launch of the Amazon Project Kuiper production satellites, courtesy of the ULA Atlas V rocket. Online, the mission has been called the "Amazon rocket launch" or "the Amazon rocket launch from Florida,' but it's accurate to call it the Amazon satellite rocket launch or Amazon-ULA rocket launch. Business is booming: Florida's Space Coast is one of fastest-growing economies in U.S. In Florida, we can best see this moment in person, particularly if you're anywhere on the Space Coast (Melbourne, Florida area), the Fun Coast (Daytona Beach area) or the Treasure Coast (Vero Beach, Jensen Beach and Fort Pierce). The Amazon satellite rocket launch is extra special because of the potential to see it in other states. In the past, readers have submitted photos or posted on social platforms pictures of SpaceX Falcon Heavy, which is made up of three Falcon 9 rocket first stages, visible from Myrtle Beach. Other rocket launches have been spotted in New Jersey and Georgia. ULA's Atlas V rocket should be visible outside of Florida pending weather and clouds. Below is information on ULA's powerful rocket, the Atlas V, how to watch the Amazon satellite rocket launch and suggestions on where to watch it from Florida and beyond. Rocket launches in Florida (a big list): Here's a roundup of all 2025 missions from Cape Canaveral and NASA's Kennedy Space Center Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is launching Project Kuiper, a global constellation of 3,232 broadband satellites that will compete for customers with SpaceX founder Elon Musk's sprawling Starlink network. It began with the first-ever launch of Project Kuiper production satellites, courtesy of the massive United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, on April 28, 2025 (see photos above). Rocket launches from the Space Coast of Florida − either from NASA's Kennedy Space Center or Cape Canaveral Space Force Station − have significantly increased within the past few years, with the bulk of launches from SpaceX and Starlink satellites. But Bezos' Amazon satellite rocket launch, the premiere was known as KA-01 mission, will "deploy all of the satellites safely in orbit, which means they can independently maneuver and communicate with our team on the ground," according to an Amazon news release. "Once the satellites have successfully separated from the rocket, they will begin a series of mostly automated steps to activate onboard systems and use their electric propulsion systems to gradually ascend to their assigned orbit of 392 miles (630 km)," the release said. "The satellites will travel at a speed of more than 17,000 miles per hour (27,359 km per hour) on orbit and circle the planet approximately every 90 minutes." All told, ULA will launch eight Atlas V and 38 Vulcan rockets on Project Kuiper missions. The Amazon initiative has also contracted with SpaceX, Blue Origin and Arianespace, upping the total to 80-plus pending launches. The Monday, June 16, 2025, Amazon satellite rocket launch from Cape Canaveral would be the second for Project Kuiper. A two-hour Amazon rocket launch window is scheduled for 1:25 p.m. EDT Monday, June 16, 2025, from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Equipped with five side-mounted rocket boosters, the Atlas V will lift the $10 billion internet constellation's second set of satellites (see above) into low-Earth orbit. In Florida, we can best see this historic moment in person if you're anywhere on the Space Coast (Brevard County) or certain spots in the First Coast or Fun Coast (Volusia County) or the Treasure Coast (Indian River County, St. Lucie County and Martin County). However, people in Jacksonville, far north of Cape Canaveral, and West Palm Beach, far south of Cape Canaveral, have posted rocket launch photos and video on X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter, and Instagram. Pro tip: If you do watch it in person, especially on Florida's Space Coast, get to your viewing destination early and prepare to stay later after the launch because of heavy traffic. A rocket launch can be a treat for the ears, too: On the Space Coast, a 'rumble' can be heard or window-shaking can be expected in some parts of Brevard County after liftoff. Where to watch Amazon satellite rocket launch in Daytona Beach area of Florida List of Brevard County cities to watch Amazon satellite rocket launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida Where to watch Amazon satellite rocket launch from Treasure Coast of Florida Where to watch Amazon rocket launch from West Palm Beach area of Florida Where to watch Amazon satellite rocket launch in Jacksonville, Florida Shown is the National Weather Service-Melbourne radar, which shows conditions in real-time for the Space Coast, Brevard County, Orlando and other parts of Florida. The current date and time show up on the bottom right of this radar embed; otherwise, you may need to clear your cache. ULA provided a helpful graphic (see above) that shows the Atlas V launch of Kuiper 2 for Amazon and its intended flight path and launch visibility. Note: Cities in the Space Coast of Florida, which is in Brevard County and measures 72 miles of coast, include Titusville, Mims, Port St. John, Merritt Island, Cocoa, Cocoa Beach, Melbourne, West Melbourne, Palm Bay, Satellite Beach, Indian Harbour Beach, Indialantic, Melbourne Beach, Grant-Valkaria and Sebastian. Launch, Space Coast, east Orlando, near University of Central Florida, Bithlo, the northern part of the Treasure Coast, Indian River County, Sebastian, Vero Beach, parts of Daytona Beach, New Smyrna Beach and Oak Hill 1: Launch + 30 seconds, Space Coast, Orlando, the Treasure Coast, Indian River County, Sebastian, Vero Beach, Daytona Beach, New Smyrna Beach and Oak Hill, Volusia County, St. Augustine, Ocala, Lakeland area 2: Launch + 90 seconds, which includes PLF Jettison or separation and jettison of the payload fairing: Space Coast, Daytona Beach, New Smyrna Beach, Oak Hill, Port Orange, Volusia County, Treasure Coast, Indian River County, Martin County, St. Lucie County, Orlando, Sanford, Kissimmee, Central Florida, Ocala, Lakeland, St. Augustine, Ponte Vedra Beach 3: Launch + 150 seconds, which includes solid rocket booster jettison, visibility extends to Sebring, Winter Haven, Palatka, Gainesville, Jacksonville, Sarasota, Manatee County, Sarasota County, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Cape Coral, Fort Myers, Naples, Collier County, Lee County, Clearwater, West Palm Beach, Lake Worth Beach, Wellington, Jupiter, Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, southern Georgia, Savannah, Georgia, parts of the Caribbean, the Bahamas 4: Launch + 210 seconds, which includes booster separation, Tallahassee, Panama City, Panhandle, Big Bend area of Florida; visibility extends beyond Florida to Georgia, South Carolina, parts of North Carolina 5: Launch + 270 seconds, ULA Atlas V rocket launch visibility extends beyond Florida to these other states and cities: Georgia; Savannah, Georgia; Atlanta, Georgia; Columbus, Georgia Alabama; Dothan, Alabama; just outside Birmingham, Alabama Tennessee; Knoxville, Tennessee; just outside Huntsville, Tennessee; just outside Nashville, Tennessee Kentucky South Carolina; Spartanburg, South Carolina North Carolina; High Point, North Carolina; Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Charlotte, North Carolina; Wilmington, North Carolina Virginia; Virginia Beach, Virginia; Richmond, Virginia West Virginia; Charleston, West Virginia Maryland; Washington, Maryland Delaware; Annapolis, Delaware; Dover, Delaware 6: Launch + 330 seconds, ULA Atlas V rocket launch visibility extends beyond Florida to these other states and cities: New Jersey: Trenton, New Jersey; New York, New Jersey Pennsylvania: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Erie, Pennsylvania Ohio: Cleveland, Ohio; Columbus, Ohio; Cincinnati, Ohio; Toledo, Ohio Indiana: just outside Indianapolis, Indiana; Fort Wayne, Indiana Michigan: Detroit, Michigan Kentucky: just outside Louisville, Kentucky Rhode Island: Providence, Rhode Island Connecticut: Hartford, Connecticut Massachusetts: Boston, Massachusetts New York: Binghamton, New York; Albany, New York 7: Launch + 390 seconds, visibility of Atlas V rocket may be possible in these states: Alabama Tennessee Kentucky Georgia South Carolina North Carolina Virginia West Virginia Ohio Indiana Michigan Delaware Maryland New Jersey Pennsylvania New York Rhode Island Connecticut Massachusetts New Hampshire Vermont Maine Toronto, Canada The above guidelines are estimates based on the graphic provided by ULA. When and where: Full coverage of the launch, including a live webcast with live tweets and updates, kicks off two hours before liftoff at (you can type this on your browser on your phone) and will feature in-depth coverage. Ask our FLORIDA TODAY space team reporters Rick Neale and Brooke Edwards questions and strike up a conversation. You also can watch coverage via the FLORIDA TODAY app, which is available in the App Store or Google Play. You can download the free app for iPhone or Android or type into your browser. FLORIDA TODAY is part of the USA TODAY Network. Click here to download FLORIDA TODAY app on App Store Click here to download FLORIDA TODAY app on Google Play Sangalang is a lead digital producer for USA TODAY Network. Follow her on Twitter or Instagram at @byjensangalang. Support local journalism. Consider subscribing to a Florida newspaper. This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Amazon-ULA rocket launch in Florida after Father's Day: When is liftoff
