First Space Force-sanctioned flight blasts off
The 200-foot spacecraft with four rocket boosters lifted off at 8:56 p.m. EDT from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
'It's an exciting day for us as we launched the first NSSL flight of Vulcan, an outstanding achievement for United Launch Alliance and the nation's strategic space lift capability. This is an important milestone for the Space Force and all involved,' Col. Jim Horne, USSF-106 mission director, said in a statement Wednesday morning.
'After years of development, technical collaboration and dedication by all involved, including our government mission partners and the entire ULA team, I'm proud to say the first Vulcan NSSL mission delivered its payloads safely into space,' Horne added.
The spacecraft separation took place roughly seven hours after the rocket lifted into geosynchronous Earth orbit, according to the Space Force.
The experiment taking off on USSF-106, the Navigation Technology Satellite-3 (NTS-3), which is the first U.S.-integrated navigation satellite experiment in close to five decades, according to the agency.
The flight featured at least two satellites on board, CBS News reported. One experimental satellite will test navigation technology and the other is fully classified.
'And with NTS-3, we are going to be experimenting with a number of different technologies that look at how we can continue to evolve and augment GPS to make sure that it remains the gold standard that our warfighters need,' Joanna Hinks, the senior aerospace engineer with the Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, told CBS.
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Gizmodo
7 minutes ago
- Gizmodo
‘Star Trek' Is Born on ‘Strange New Worlds'
A few weeks ago in Strange New Worlds' up-and-down third season, 'A Space Adventure Hour' delivered a deeply unsubtle paean to the creation of Star Trek. This week, Strange New Worlds does much the same: but this time the birth of Star Trek is within the text itself, making for a much more interesting lens on the birth of an the moment that it opens, it becomes clear that 'The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail' (named for a Vulcan idiom that Spock uses later on) is not going to be a typical episode of Strange New Worlds. Not in that 'oh, something's going to be kooky and fun!' way that you might expect after last week's dire-stakes episode and the season's general back-and-forth in tone swaps so far, but because we do not open on the Enterprise, or with her crew at all: instead, on the personal log of Commander Kirk, aboard the U.S.S. Farragut. At which point the planet the Farragut was monitoring—and Kirk was butting heads with his captain, V'Rel (Zoe Doyle), over beaming down and surveying—explodes. Just like last week, everyone immediately locks in, especially Jim, when V'Rel is incapacitated by the extreme damage caused by the Farragut's proximity to an exploding planet. But things go somehow even more badly when, of course, the Enterprise beams to respond to the Farragut's distress signal—beaming over an assist team of Nurse Chapel, Scotty, Spock, and Uhura. As everyone races into action and Kirk begins slowly realizing that he's getting the command experience he's been waiting for at the worst possible time, the vessel responsible for destroying a planet in a single blast, a massive, tendriled junk ship comes flying along and gobbles the Enterprise up before promptly warping away. The Farragut is alone, and barely holding together, let alone capable of pursuit. It's operating on a skeleton crew, most beamed away to Enterprise before its abduction. And James T. Kirk is staring at a captain's chair, with Mr. Spock, Mr. Scott, Uhura, and Chapel at his side. If 'A Space Adventure Hour' was an episode talking about the metanarrative about the birth of Star Trek as a television show, then suddenly, you realize: this is an episode about the birth of Star Trek, the team that we know will go on to appear in the original series. At long last, the crucible that will one day forge one of the franchise's defining heroes has begun. So it's great then that 'The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail' is really an episode about rocking Kirk's shit for 45 minutes. The episode splits between the Farragut and the captured Enterprise, disabled in the interior of the junk ship as its systems are drained of power, effectively doing one of Strange New Worlds' 'disaster on a spaceship' episodes twice over. Kirk has to rally a group of officers who don't really know, and don't really trust, him as he tries to figure out what kind of a leader he is in time to rescue Enterprise and stop this junker ship on a collision course with destroying another world called Sullivan's Planet. Pike, meanwhile, has to deal with shadowy infiltrators sucking his ship dry, a ticking time bomb that will kill both the Enterprise crew and the Farragut's wounded. The stuff aboard Enterprise is fun and definitely tense, even if it is also definitely the b-plot of the episode. Pike and La'an have the mystery of the junkers to solve, Carol Kane gets to ham it up and get everyone to wire up rotary telephones to overcome the ship's power loss and communications blockage. There's intrigue and whimsy, but still, the focus of 'The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail' is clear: this is the making of Kirk's moment. It gives Wesley material that, for the most part up to now, he's lacked the chance to chew on. Most of Kirk's appearances on Strange New Worlds have been technicalities: alternate realities, through the lens of episodes like the musical or 'Space Adventure Hour' and its holodeck metanarrative (thankfully, Wesley does not go hard on the Shatnerisms as he was encouraged to then). This is Kirk, the man who is going to become Captain Kirk, and he has been thrust into an incredible challenge, with a team that he doesn't know yet and arguably before he may even have really wanted to be in it. Thankfully, Strange New Worlds realizes that it's important to not suddenly supercharge this character into the man that we already know. We see elements of the man we will come to love in the original Star Trek, his braggadocio and his desire to always challenge and take risks, but crucially, we also see the deeply human elements of Kirk that people often forget in their memories, especially amplified here in his younger self. This is a Kirk that doubts, and loses his cool, and is allowed to react to the stress of the situation he's found himself in, and react poorly, and fairly so given the circumstances. Likewise, this gives the proto-TOS crew that he finds himself leaning on to get the Farragut even remotely close to shipshape a chance to react to this Kirk, and begin to feel out the seeds of what will become their relationships. It's fun to watch Martin Quinn's Scotty absolutely hate working with this guy, a thickheaded commander who wants to push systems an engineer knows can't be pushed, just as it's fun to watch Kirk's relationship with Uhura, and the trust they already established together last season, flourish even further as that bond deepens. It is, of course, also fun to watch the early days of Spock and Kirk's understanding of each other begin to coalesce. That becomes crucial here when the stress does get to Kirk when his plan to juice Farragut's engines almost literally blows up in his and Scotty's faces, leaving the ship dead in the water between the junker ship and its next target at Sullivan's planet, which is home to a pre-warp civilization. Kirk blows up, needing to get off the bridge, and his more senior fellows among the Enterprise crew realize that the young commander is in a very precarious moment. It takes Spock confronting and comforting him, removed from an emotional response to the stress everyone is feeling, to get Kirk to rearticulate and find the confidence he needs to deal with the setbacks and pressure the situation has demanded of him. It's a wonderful moment between the two as they start feeling each other out, how comfortable they can be even in this nascent phase of their relation, what boundaries there still are, and what can be bonded over to create a friendship that we know will span lifetimes. Again, crucially, Strange New Worlds understands here that it cannot just speedrun these characters into their original Trek selves just yet. We can see glimmers of those bonds, but just as it's vital for this episode to give us a Kirk that is flawed and still learning, and willing to both make and accept his mistakes, it's just as vital that we come out of this episode feeling that the crew that will one day serve aboard the Enterprise together are still not yet that crew. They're just closer than they were an episode before. This is the most important thing 'The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail' arguably needed to nail, and so when the day is saved by some Kirkian ingenuity (and some assists from Scotty, Uhura, Spock, and Chapel) to free the Enterprise and destroy the junker ship before it can consume Sullivan's Planet, we can perhaps forgive that the last twist the episode makes doesn't quite land as effectively as the rest of it does. Amid the destruction of the junker ship, Spock manages to confirm, right as Pike and La'an do, ridding the Enterprise of its last infiltrator, that the mysterious foe they faced was a colony ship of 7,000 human beings, life signs blinking out as the junker ship tears apart. It turns out, as the Enterprise discovers during debrief, the vessel was, in its core form, a ship sent from Earth just after the end of World War III, staffed with scientists who believed that Earth may not be able to recover, and humanity's hope lay in the stars. Whatever happened to them in the generations since to transform their descendants into monstrous, planet-and-ship-devouring scavengers is left unsaid as Kirk's first victory in the chair is tinged with the discomfort that he is responsible for having to have slaughtered thousands of people to save millions, and both the Farragut's interim commander and the Enterprise crew find themselves humbled by the revelation. While it does again build on this episode as not being about the establishment of the legend of Jim Kirk but the flawed and deeply human man that he will come to be (and always was beneath our memory of that legend), what sits as odd in this final twist is the sudden swerve Strange New Worlds has to take to serve it. Would the climax of the episode have labored this consternation if this crew of disenfranchised descendants were early Vulcans, or Romulans, or another Federation species? What if they were some other alien species that we either knew or didn't know? Or is the point meant to be that our deeply human heroes are now touched and aggrieved at the revelation that they have had to kill other humans, specifically, before they could kill them? After all, up to the moment of this revelation 'The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail', both through its characters and the narrative itself, framed these mysterious junkers as explicitly monstrous, just as this season did with the Gorn in its premiere. They had destroyed worlds, killed countless crews of ships whose vessels were consumed in its growth, and were on the precipice of indiscriminately extinguishing a population in the millions. The fact that it suddenly wants Kirk and the rest of the characters to wrestle with remorse because the perpetrators of these atrocities were human raises some uncomfortable questions about who and what gets to be treated with sympathy on the show that the episode simply does not have time to answer, saving this moment for its very end. But again, for the worse this time, that was never meant to be the focus of this episode. From beginning to end, 'The Sehlat Who At Its Tail' is about the genesis of the unit that would go on to become the original Star Trek, forging them together amid a grand trial. There, at least, it delivers one of the season's best episodes yet, albeit in a slightly compromised form. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
Medscape
4 hours ago
- Medscape
Tibremciclib for Advanced Breast Cancer: Is It Worth It?
Adding the novel CDK4/6 inhibitor tibremciclib (Betta Pharmaceuticals) to second-line fulvestrant significantly extended progression-free survival (PFS) in patients with HR-positive/HER2-negative advanced breast cancer, but with the tradeoff of increased toxicity, new data suggest. Compared with fulvestrant alone, the combination prolonged median PFS for these patients by 11 months, according to results from the phase 3 TIFFANY trial. However, similar to existing CDK4/6 inhibitors, the tibremciclib-fulvestrant combination added to treatment side effects — including substantially higher rates of diarrhea, hematologic toxicities, and hypokalemia. The authors of the analysis, published in JAMA Oncology , described the toxicities as "manageable," emphasizing that few patients stopped treatment because of them. Study author Xichun Hu, MD, of Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center, told Medscape Medical News that tibremciclib compares favorably with other CDK4/6 inhibitors in terms of dose reduction and discontinuation rates. However, Hu noted, that's based on cross-trial comparisons, which have to be interpreted with caution. Kathy Miller, MD, who was not involved in the trial, had a similar take. 'Toxicity actually looks similar to ribociclib and palbociclib, with primarily myelosuppression and little non-heme toxicity,' Miller, of the Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center at Indiana University, told Medscape Medical News. Tibremciclib plus fulvestrant was recently approved in China for HR-positive/HER2-negative advanced breast cancer following results from the trial, but the combination has yet to be approved in the US. The Benefits vs the Risks In the trial, Hu and colleagues studied the safety and efficacy of the new agent among patients from 69 centers in China who had experienced progression while on endocrine therapy and had received no more than one line of chemotherapy. A total of 274 patients were randomized (2:1) to receive either tibremciclib (400 mg orally, once daily) or placebo plus fulvestrant until disease progression, death, or treatment discontinuation over a median follow-up of 13 months. Eighty patients (43.5%) in the tibremciclib arm and 64 (71.1%) in the placebo arm experienced a PFS event (disease progression or death). Tibremciclib plus fulvestrant significantly improved PFS to 16.5 months versus 5.6 months with fulvestrant alone, reducing the risk of progression by 63% (hazard ratio [HR], 0.37; P < .001). As for safety, adverse events were higher in the treatment arm. The most common treatment-emergent adverse events were diarrhea (79.3% in the tibremciclib arm vs 13.3% in placebo arm), neutropenia (75.5% vs 15.6%), leukopenia (73.9% vs 16.7%), and anemia (69% vs 21.1%). Nausea and vomiting were also more common with tibremciclib, at 37% and 40.2%, respectively — versus 18.9% and 11.1% in the placebo group. Most often, those adverse events were grade 1 or 2. However, 50.5% of patients in the tibremciclib group had a grade 3 or higher treatment-emergent adverse event, versus 21.1% in the placebo group. The most common were neutropenia (15.2% vs 5.6%), anemia (12.0% vs 4.4%), and hypokalemia (12% vs 0%). Hypokalemia was often due to diarrhea and was managed with electrolyte monitoring and potassium supplementation, Hu said. One-third of patients in the tibremciclib arm developed hypertriglyceridemia (5.4% grade 3 or higher) — a rate higher than that seen with other CDK4/6 inhibitors. Cases were managed with lipid-lowering agents such as atorvastatin. More patients on tibremciclib experienced dosing interruptions due to adverse events (54% vs 23%), and dose reductions were also more common with the combination therapy (18.5% vs 4.4%). However, only four patients (all in the tibremciclib arm) discontinued treatment due to side effects. Overall, the adverse event profile of tibremciclib lines up with that of other CDK4/6 inhibitors and comes with better PFS, Hu said, noting that "the benefit-risk balance of tibremciclib plus fulvestrant appears highly favorable." In TIFFANY, the authors note d that cases of neutropenia and leukopenia were numerically lower than in trials of abemaciclib, dalpiciclib, and palbociclib plus fulvestrant. According to Hu, tibremciclib is structurally different from other drugs in its class, with a greater selectivity for CDK4 and less inhibition of CDK6 and CDK9, which may reduce the incidence of neutropenia as well as severe diarrhea. Plus, the PFS improvement seen in TIFFANY was greater, Hu said. Pa lbociclib in PALOMA-3 showed a median PFS of 9.5 months vs 4.6 months for fulvestrant alone (HR, 0.46); abemaciclib in MONARCH led to a PFS of 11.5 months vs 5.6 months (HR, 0.38, a Chinese population); and dalpiciclib in DAWNA-1 achieved 16.6 months vs 7.2 months (HR, 0.50, also in Chinese patients). While these are cross-trial comparisons, it's still unclear exactly how tibremciclib stacks up against other drugs in its class (including its impact on overall survival). The authors also caution that, because the trial exclusively enrolled Chinese patients without prior CDK4/6 inhibitor exposure, the findings may not be generalizable to broader populations, particularly in regions like North America and Europe. Miller pointed to the generalizability question as well, noting that fulvestrant monotherapy is typically not the standard of care in the US and other Western countries. 'This [study] joins a long list of second-line endocrine studies that show drug activity but don't compare to standard of care and don't really tell us how to best use the drug,' Miller said.
a day ago
Stargazers dazzled as spirals of light appear in night sky
Stargazers on the lookout for the Perseid meteor shower were treated to an extra nighttime spectacular on Tuesday night as spirals appeared in the sky along the East Coast. The unusual light show -- which appeared to show circling lights in the heavens -- was on display after multiple rocket launches. Videos began circulating online in several states, including Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Tennessee, Illinois, Ohio and Nebraska, after 9 p.m. ET Tuesday, social media posts show. ABC Philadelphia station WPVI began receiving calls and messages from viewers around 10:30 p.m. to report the phenomenon, the station reported. The spiraling lights seemed to appear "out of nowhere," Blake Brown, who witnessed the dazzling display from Algonquin, Illinois, while watching for the meteor shower, told ABC News. The majority of the spiraling light sightings likely stemmed from the launch of Ariane 6, said Jonathan C. McDowell, an astrophysicist for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. That rocket lifted off from the Guiana Space Centre at Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, at about 8:37 p.m. ET, according to Eumetsat, a European operational satellite agency for monitoring weather. Ariane 6, about 196-feet tall, has the ability to launch both heavy and light payloads for applications such as Earth observation, telecommunication, meteorology, science and navigation, according to the European Space Agency. The appearance of the spirals in the sky was likely the result of the upper stage of the rocket tumbling as it underwent a disposal rocket firing at the end of the launch, McDowell told ABC News. The spiral light occurs when reflection from sunlight interacts with the frozen plume of fuel from the exhaust of rockets. "It's a nice, perfect spiral because it's way out in space with no air to distort the shape," McDowell said. Tuesday's launch, which brought a weather satellite to orbit, is the third-ever mission for the powerful rocket, according to Another rocket, the Vulcan Centaur Rocket, successfully lifted off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 8:56 p.m. ET, according to the United Launch Alliance. The 202-foot rocket was carrying a pair of experimental navigation satellites on behalf of the United States Space Force's first-ever mission, according to "The Vulcan launched east and went to a high orbit, and was still coasting upward [without the rocket firing] when the spiral was seen," McDowell said. "If people in Florida saw something at 9:37, 9:45 pm ET, that could have been the Vulcan."
