Latest news with #spacejunk
Forbes
3 days ago
- Science
- Forbes
The Prototype: AI Tools May Degrade Doctors' Skills
In this week's edition of The Prototype, we look at the risk of depending on AI to 'think' for you, mass-producing satellites, a startup helping NASA avoid space junk, and more. To get The Prototype in your inbox, sign up here . A study published this week in The Lancet examined the impact of an AI tool for colonoscopies on the skills of doctors. The researchers tested doctors' abilities to find certain abnormalities in patients for three months before using AI, then tested them again after they'd used the tool for three months. They found that doctors' ability to spot those abnormalities on their own degraded after using AI. And while that might not be a big deal a few decades down the road when AI-assisted detections are the norm, it does pose a problem right now, because these tools aren't universal. A doctor accustomed to using AI at one hospital might find their performance declines working at a hospital that hasn't adopted it yet. It also raises larger questions about letting AI do your 'thinking' for you, because what's lost might be more than one particular skill. Studies have shown, for example, that overreliance on GPS for driving could degrade your spatial memory. As we enter a brave new world of AI, it will be increasingly important to not only know how to use it, but also when not to use it. Stay tuned. Apex Wants To Bring Henry Ford-Style Mass Production To Satellites S atellite manufacturing has long been a bespoke business with spacecraft customized for the missions they are sent on. Elevated costs and delays come with the territory. With more and more small satellites being launched into low-Earth orbit, Lost Angeles-based Apex has developed standardized spacecraft it says are a faster and more affordable option. The company is marketing three standardized satellite bodies with power and control systems that can be quickly customized by clients with sensors and payloads. Like, say, weapons to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles, as envisioned for President Trump's Golden Dome. Similar to automakers, Apex offers different versions of its satellites, with options like more power, a fancier communications system and a choice between electrical or chemical propulsion. 'You either take it or you leave it,' CEO Ian Cinnamon said. Read the whole story at Forbes . DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK: DEVICE LETS USERS COMMUNICATE WITH THOUGHTS Neurological disorders like ALS can make it difficult for people to communicate. And while there are devices that can help them speak, they're often much slower than the speech that people take for granted. A team of researchers have invented a new device that may change this: a computer device implanted in the brain that can pick up the neural activity associated with speech-based thinking and translate it into words. The technology is still in its infancy, but opens the door to brain-computer interfaces that may one day give patients the ability to communicate as quickly as they think. FINAL FRONTIER: LEOLABS WANTS TO HELP NASA AVOID SPACE JUNK Menlo Park, Calif.-based space startup LeoLabs has entered into an agreement for NASA to evaluate its data for use in evaluating the risk of satellite and spacecraft collisions. The goal would be to integrate LeoLabs' data, which is collected by multiple radar systems around the world, with the Air Force radar systems that NASA currently uses to track objects in space. (To learn more about LeoLabs, check out a story I wrote about the company a few years back.) FORBES CALLED IT: HELPING DOGS LIVE LONGER Every year, Forbes selects 25 VC-backed companies for our Next Billion-Dollar Startups List, highlighting those whose growth puts them on track to become worth $1 billion or more. Making the list this year is biotech startup Loyal, which is developing pills that could extend dogs' lifespans. The company is currently testing its medication on several hundred canines in a clinical trial, with hopes of bringing it to market soon. We've had our eye on Loyal for a few years now: its founder, Celine Halioua, is an alumna of our 30 Under 30 list, and I wrote about her company's progress a couple of years ago. If Loyal is successful in extending the life of dogs, its next goal will be even more ambitious: extending ours. 'I think the general public will be blown away when they realize they can go to the vet and get a drug to extend their dogs' lifespan,' Halioua told my colleague Amy Feldman. 'Then they'll ask, 'Why can't I do this for my grandma?'' WHAT ELSE I WROTE THIS WEEK Earlier this week, I wrote about biotech startup Tahoe Therapeutics, which just raised $30 million in investment to support scaling up its dataset of how different molecules interact with living cells. Their goal? To train AI models to simulate cells as a way to accelerate the discovery of new medicines. Right now, data is the limiting factor in training AI, but recently the company released a dataset with 100 million cellular datapoints to improve those models. In my other newsletter, InnovationRx, Amy Feldman and I looked at how misinformation about vaccines led to the recent shooting at the CDC, a company building programmable mRNA to fight cancer, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s fight with a medical journal, and more. SCIENCE AND TECH TIDBITS The federal government has pulled funds for California's high-speed rail, but the project may have an unlikely savior: AI data centers. Google is teaming up with pollster Scott Rasmussen for a project that would use AI to produce better political polling outcomes. Researchers at Texas A&M have developed a new carbon-fiber material that can heal itself when broken and is harder than steel. Scientists have developed a 'skin in a syringe'—a gel that contains living skin cells–that can be 3D printed into a skin graft and applied to a wound, enabling burns to heal without leaving scars. PRO SCIENCE TIP: THINK OUTSIDE THE SEARCH ENGINE Have you ever fired up Google during a brainstorming session to help your teammates generate ideas? You might think twice about doing so again. A recent study explored how creativity varies between groups when one has access to the internet and one doesn't. 244 people were divided into small groups with half of them given access to a search engine. The groups were tasked with coming up with as many ideas as possible for using a particular object. One object didn't have many results on Google when searching; the other had many. The researchers found that those who didn't use Google tended to come up with more creative and effective ideas than those who did. What's more, when there were a lot of Google search results, the groups tended to converge on the top answers given rather than coming up with their own creative responses. WHAT'S ENTERTAINING ME THIS WEEK I'm a few episodes into the new season of King of the Hill , the first since it was cancelled in 2010. The show's creators chose to advance the series in time a little bit, meaning that we get to see Hank and Peggy Hill struggling to navigate retirement while their son navigates early adulthood. If you're a fan of the original iteration, you won't be disappointed by the new episodes. And my favorite touch? In the year 2025, resident conspiracy theorist character Dale Gribble doesn't have his craziest ideas ignored anymore. Instead, he's got a Substack and a bunch of willing subscribers. MORE FROM FORBES Forbes Meet The Mastermind Behind The $1.9 Billion Poppi Deal By Chloe Sorvino Forbes As Trump Rolls Back Federal Financial Regulation, Blue State Regulators Step Up By Jeff Kauflin Forbes Why Paramount's $7.7 Billion UFC Gamble Will Pay Off By Matt Craig
Bloomberg
16-07-2025
- Politics
- Bloomberg
Trump Tries to Ax Space Junk System That He Started
Hello, this is Melos Ambaye in New York. During his first term, President Donald Trump started a space traffic safety program to keep track of objects in orbit, including space junk. Now, at a time when the risks from collisions with space debris are growing, he's trying to cut it. But first ... Three things you need to know today:
Yahoo
01-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
This Satellite Died in 1967. For Some Reason, It Just Spoke to Us Again.
Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: A fast radio burst (FRB) was detected coming from near-Earth orbit, which is unusually close considering the closest known FRB was detected tens of thousands of light-years away. It turned out that the signal came from a satellite that had been decommissioned in the late 1960s after its instruments broke down. What triggered the electrostatic discharge that caused the signal is still uncertain, but investigating further could help us figure out how to prevent damage to live spacecraft. Space is chock-full of mysterious signals. While most come from natural cosmic phenomena, one recent fast radio burst (FRB) had all the markings of advanced technology, which baffled scientists until they traced it back to a surprising source: our own space junk. The accumulation of human junk has gone beyond Earth's landfills. Orbiting our planet is an entire cosmic dumpster of space garbage, from the 23,000-ish larger pieces of refuse, such as decommissioned satellites, to over 100 million stray fragments of metal and glass and whatever else is flying around. Satellites that retire are deorbited into a graveyard orbit within 25 years of their missions ending. This is the case with NASA's Relay 2 satellite, which took off in 1964 until its transponders glitched. It hung dead in near-Earth orbit by 1967 and has beamed nothing down since—until now. Get the Issue Get the Issue Get the Issue Get the Issue Get the Issue Get the Issue Get the IssueGet the Issue Get the Issue Relay 2 didn't suddenly reactivate. Instead, something triggered it to send a FBR so fast it was gone in a nanosecond, to the surface, which was then picked up by the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP). Astronomer Clancy James and his research team found the source coming just 4,500 km (about 2,796 miles) from Earth. This meant that it couldn't possibly have issued from a neutron star, magnetar or zombie galaxy. When the researchers tracked it to Relay 2, they figured something must have been interacting with the Apollo-era relic. 'The charging of spacecraft in orbit due to interactions with the space environment has been a well-known phenomena since the early days of the space program,' the scientists said in a study recently accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and posted on ArXiv. 'Accumulation of electrons and ions can lead to large voltage differentials between spacecraft surfaces, and between the spacecraft and space plasmas.' The most likely culprits? Electrostatic discharge (ESD) or plasma discharge caused by a collision with a rogue micrometeoroid. Spacecraft that are still alive and carrying out their missions need to be designed to avoid hazardous ESD currents. That still doesn't make spacecraft totally immune. Most don't have onboard monitors to detect levels of charge buildup, and that buildup usually isn't detected until after damage has been done. This is why scientists have proposed that ground-based radio monitors watch for ESD, but no system is yet capable of simultaneously observing large numbers of spacecraft. On June 13, 2024, ASKAP caught the FRB from Relay 2 using its Commensal Realtime ASKAP Transients Survey (CRAFT) detection system. FRBs are so powerful that they take only milliseconds to emit the radio energy of 500 million suns. They can travel anywhere from millions to billions of light-years through the void of space, with the closest one coming from a magnetar in our galaxy that is 30,000 light-years away. This is why finding an FRB so close to Earth threw James off until he found it originated from Relay 2. While this FRB could have been set off by a micrometeoroid, which can also produce radio emissions, James thinks it is more likely the signal was the result of electrostatic discharge. The electrons and ions accumulated by satellites can eventually reach a high enough voltage to release discharge. ESD is already known to cause radio frequency pulses. Such a powerful burst as an FRB was unexpected, and the researchers have yet to find what exactly the trigger was. Future investigations could help them figure out ways to protect live spacecraft. 'When sufficient voltage is achieved, electrostatic discharge (ESD) occurs, typically be- tween nearby surfaces/materials on the spacecraft. ESD does not depend on the operational nature of the spacecraft,' the scientists said. 'So ESD from a satellite decommissioned 60 years ago is entirely plausible.' You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
The Independent
29-06-2025
- Climate
- The Independent
People in six states see mystery ‘fireball' streak across sky
A mysterious object streaking across the sky has left hundreds of residents across the southern United States baffled, with over 200 reports pouring in from at least six states. The unidentified phenomenon, witnessed on Thursday around 12:30 p.m., prompted widespread speculation, though authorities suggest it was likely either a meteor or space junk. The majority of sightings, described as a streak of light and a fireball, originated from Georgia and South Carolina, according to a report from the National Weather Service office in Peachtree City, Georgia. As of Friday afternoon, the American Meteor Society had received at least 215 reports from people expressing a mix of wonder and amazement. Witnesses recounted vivid details of the event. A woman in Bethlehem, Georgia, described it as "a bright fireball." She added, "It did have a bright tail that disappeared with it, and left behind a smoke trail. I've never seen anything like it before." Meanwhile, a man in Milledgeville, Georgia, said "I believe it hit the ground." The roof of a Georgia home is pierced A resident of Henry County, Georgia, reported a rock coming through their roof around the time they heard the sonic boom from the fireball. It left behind a hole in the ceiling about the size of a golf ball and a crack in a laminate floor at the home southeast of Atlanta, according to the National Weather Service office in Peachtree City, Georgia. 'We are presuming that a piece of the object fell through their roof,' the weather service said in a brief statement on social media. Dashboard and doorbell cameras across several states in the southeastern U.S. states caught glimpses of the fireball that appeared to be plummeting straight down. Broad daylight sighting is rare Meteors and other space debris frequently enter Earth's atmosphere, but it is rare for an object to be so bright it can easily be seen in broad daylight. Videos of the event showed clear skies on Thursday, allowing many to see the object falling. 'First time to ever see an event in daylight like this,' a man in Cumming, Georgia, north of Atlanta, said in his report to the meteor society. 'It was so bright in the middle of the day... brighter than the sun,' a woman in Dublin, Georgia reported. Bright fireballs are caused by friction as an object enters the atmosphere and slows down considerably. Almost all objects break into minuscule pieces before striking the ground, according to Nasa.
Yahoo
29-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Satellites keep breaking up in space. Insurance won't cover them.
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Airplane passengers crossing the Indian Ocean who peered out their windows on Oct. 19, 2024, might have seen what looked like a fast-moving star suddenly flash and fade. Above their heads, a $500 million satellite was exploding. Operators confirmed the destruction of the Intelsat-33e satellite two days later. There was a bright flash as the satellite's fuel ignited, followed by the flickering of the debris cloud as it fragmented into at least 20 pieces. Those satellite parts are now zooming around Earth, along with around 14,000 tonnes of space debris. The satellite wasn't insured. As space junk increases, more operators are choosing to launch without any insurance at all. To compensate, companies are cutting back on the cost of satellites and launching more of them at faster rates, thus creating a feedback loop as the cheaper satellites break up more easily and add to the problem. "I don't think it's sustainable," said Massimiliano Vasile, an aerospace engineer and professor at the University of Strathclyde Glasgow. Behind the predicament are two vectors moving in opposite directions: The cost of launching satellites is falling, while the cost of insuring them continues to soar. Even as record-low-cost launches are improving internet coverage and cell service, they're worsening the space junk problem. Low Earth orbit, where most communications satellites are circling, is becoming increasingly crowded. Satellite insurance, meanwhile, has never been more expensive. 2023 was likely the worst ever for the market, with reports suggesting satellite insurers faced loss claims of more than $500 million. 2024 may have been even worse, according to Insurance Insider. Satellite operators are responding predictably, by foregoing coverage. There are 12,787 satellites above the Earth as of the time of publication, according to the website Orbiting Now, which tracks active satellites, but only about 300 are actually insured for in-orbit accidents, David Wade, an underwriter at Atrium Space Insurance Consortium, told Data Center Dynamics. European and UK operators are legally required to insure their satellites, which puts them at a cost disadvantage compared with India, China, Russia and the U.S. American companies such as SpaceX have also been able to reduce launch costs because of reusable rocket parts. Europe's upcoming Ariane 6 rocket program, for example, is expected to cost between $80-120 million per launch, compared with SpaceX's Starship program which is anticipated to cost between $2-10 million per launch because of its reusable rockets. In the U.S., launchers are required by law to procure liability insurance for launch, but once the satellite is in orbit, insurance is no longer needed. SpaceX, for example, is self-insured, meaning it seeks third-party insurance for almost none of its Starlink satellites. "Typically, the launch cover is literally just for that [launch] stage, and once a satellite gets into orbit, you are off risk," said Steve Evans, owner of insurance data provider Artemis (which is unaffiliated with NASA's lunar program of the same name). The satellite "either makes it, or it doesn't," he told The space insurance market began in 1965, when Lloyds Bank insured Intelsat I, which broadcast the Apollo 11 moon landing. The first known satellite failures occurred in 1984, though some later recovered, including the $87 million Intelsat 5 ($2.82 billion in today's money). The industry has generally hovered around a 5% failure rate since 2000, with Data Center Dynamics reporting that there have been only 165 claims for more than $10 million across the history of the industry. The 2019 failure of a military observation satellite for the United Arab Emirates, called the Vega rocket, led to $411 million in claims — the largest such loss in history, Reuters reported. That year, total satellite insurance losses became greater than insurance premiums for the first time, according to Bloomberg. Insurers were hoping to claw that money back in following years, but Reuters reported in 2021 that Assure Space and AmTrust Financial were both stopping insurance due to collisions. Insurers were looking for a payout in 2023, but instead, that year saw close to $1 billion in claims and some $500 million in losses. For many long-standing insurers, it was the last straw; Brit, AGCS, AIG, Swiss Re, Allianz and Aspen Re all exited the space insurance market. Canopius, a specialist space insurance provider acquired by Lloyds in 2019, told via email that it was no longer underwriting space business. Of the satellites in Earth orbit, around 42% are inactive, according to Seradata. The number of active satellites increased by 68% from 2020 to 2021 and by more than 200% from 2016 to 2021. Much of space insurance is modeled off the aviation industry, but space premiums are 10 to 20 times aviation premiums, Reuters reported in 2021. A satellite in low Earth orbit typically needs $500,000 to $1 million of coverage, whereas a satellite in geostationary orbit requires $200 million to $300 million, according to the same report. Behind the rush to exit the satellite insurance industry is a fundamental problem with satellite insurance: There's usually no way to determine who was at fault. When a house burns down or a car crashes, insurers often send investigators to verify a claim before approving a payout. But in the dark reaches of space, they can't operate that way. "In the event of a loss and a claim by the insured, it is almost impossible, if not entirely impossible, for insurers to investigate the cause of the loss, whether total or partial, and thus determine the amount to compensate the insured," José Luis Torres Chacón, a professor in the department of economic theory and history at the University of Málaga in Spain, told "I think this is where the root of the problem lies." Liability insurance is problematic for satellites, too, since it's extremely difficult to tell whether a satellite broke up because of an internal explosion or because of a collision with someone else's space junk. And if the latter, it's very hard to identify where the debris came from. "At the moment, it's not possible to say it was actually a fragment from that original explosion or collision that damaged the satellite," Vasile said. "So, in terms of insurance, it's a bit of a nightmare.' Vasile believes the market is moving toward legal liability for any operator responsible for creating space debris at all. "I think the government needs to set the rules, precisely as the government sets the rules for road traffic or shipping," he said. But a switch to stricter liability could create big problems for an increasing number of launch companies that are moving to cubesats — cheaper, short-duration satellites that are eventually abandoned by their operators as gravity slowly pulls them into Earth's atmosphere. Some climate satellites are in danger of colliding with space junk. Analysis of data from NASA's Land Data operation Products Evaluation, which tracks research satellite maneuvers, reveals at least seven occasions where NASA's Terra and Aqua climate satellites lost data while having to avoid space debris. Spacecraft in low-earth orbit are already under continuous threat. On Nov. 19, 2024, the International Space Station shifted its orbit to avoid another piece of space debris — this time, from a destroyed meteorological satellite. "Even a speck of paint is enough to destroy a satellite," Jakub Drmola, who studies the politics of satellite and missile defense systems at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, told The worst-case scenario is Kessler syndrome, a chain reaction in which the breakup of a few satellites cascades into a wipeout of everything in orbit. Some researchers think Kessler syndrome is already happening, only very slowly, and that we've already reached the stage where the cost of cleaning up space far outstrips the benefits. "The world has now begun to depend on space in ways that we never thought were going to be possible," said Gen. C. Robert Kehler, former head of Air Force Strategic Command, speaking to reporters at the 2024 Outrider Nuclear Reporting Summit in Washington DC. He favors introducing a regulatory system similar to air traffic control. "We need rules of the road," he said. RELATED STORIES — Related: 3 big hunks of space junk crash to Earth every day — and it's only going to get worse — Space debris from a SpaceX Dragon capsule crashed in the North Carolina mountains. I had to go see it (video) —NASA satellite's 'shocking' space junk near-miss was even closer than thought The problem isn't staying above our heads. On March 8, 2024, a discarded piece of hardware from the International Space Station fell through the Florida home of Alejandro Otero, shaking the whole house. His 19-year-old son was inside. NASA had jettisoned the spare battery carrier, assuming it would either burn up or land in the Gulf of Mexico. But the agency's calculations were wrong. If the debris had landed just a few feet away, someone likely would have been seriously hurt or killed, according to Mica Nguyen Worthy, an attorney who is now litigating the first-ever case of property damage from space debris against NASA. Nguyen Worthy described space debris litigation as the 'next frontier' of outer space law. Without a clear set of rules, she said, future satellites launches and space travel itself could become impossible. 'I think it's important for the space community, and why they do take it so seriously, because they don't want there to be a situation where we have trapped ourselves on Earth, [and] we can't get out."
