It’s official—NASA will subject the SLS rocket to another hot fire test

“A second, longer hot fire test should be conducted and would pose minimal risk.”

SLS Green Run Test

Enlarge / The SLS core stage at NASA's Stennis Space Center after firing up for the Green Run test on January 16, 2021. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

After completing a review of data collected from a hot fire test of its Space Launch System rocket in mid-December, NASA has decided it needs to test the large vehicle again. The all-up engine firing is scheduled to occur as early as the fourth week of February.

During the December 16 test firing, when NASA intended to run the rocket's four main engines for up to eight minutes, the test was aborted after just 67.2 seconds. NASA said the engine firing was stopped due to a stringent limit on hydraulic pressure in the thrust vector control mechanism used to gimbal, or steer, the engines.

In the days after the mid-December test firing, officials from NASA and Boeing were coy about whether they would need to test-fire the rocket a second time. While it would be useful to gain additional data, they said, there were concerns about putting the core stage, with its four space shuttle main engines and large liquid oxygen and hydrogen fuel tanks, through the stress of repeated tests. (The SLS rocket is expendable, so it is intended to be launched only a single time.)

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Trump-Entscheidung: Xiaomi verklagt US-Regierung

Nachdem Xiaomi von der Trump-Regierung als “kommunistisches chinesisches Militärunternehmen” klassifiziert wurde, hat das Unternehmen Klage eingereicht. (Xiaomi, Huawei)

Nachdem Xiaomi von der Trump-Regierung als "kommunistisches chinesisches Militärunternehmen" klassifiziert wurde, hat das Unternehmen Klage eingereicht. (Xiaomi, Huawei)

Ars Technicast special edition, part 2: Open systems and the “joint force”

How the military is striving to make its technology a little more Lego-like.

Fancy desks and cool blue lighting dominate this control room at Northrop Grumman's Colshire location.

Enlarge / Fancy desks and cool blue lighting dominate this control room at Northrop Grumman's Colshire location. (credit: Northrop Grumman)

Welcome back to the second part of our two-part Ars Technicast special edition on the future of connectivity on the battlefield, presented in partnership with Northrop Grumman. In part one, we talked about the Internet of Military Things and how warfighters face many of the same challenges with IoT that consumers face—just at a different scale.

For part two—which you can listen to right here—we look at the role open systems play in bringing together all the different components that are necessary for a modern military to command, communicate, and control its way through an engagement. Most Ars readers probably see the words "open systems" and immediately think FOSS, but that's not really the meaning we're going for here. Instead, "open systems" in this context refers to things that share an inherent interoperability—like being able to utilize a single sensor pod on multiple different types of aircraft. It has been said that logistics is the true strength of any modern military, and designing open systems is a tremendous force multiplier. If nothing else, coming to war with a bunch of interchangeable weapons and sensors helps drastically simplify one's supply lines.

Our guest for this conversation is Richard Sullivan, Northrop Grumman's vice president of program management. Richard has been with Northrop since 1995 and has worked on a number of high-profile projects, including the development of the stealthy B-2 bomber. His current role involves figuring out how to drive warfighting system design toward more common and open solutions, so this topic is pretty much his bag, baby.

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Verschlüsselung: GPG muss endlich weg

Das Team von GnuPG missachtet grundlegende Sicherheitspraktiken und reagiert bei Hinweisen obendrein pampig. Zum Glück gibt es Ersatz. Ein IMHO von Sebastian Grüner (GPG, Verschlüsselung)

Das Team von GnuPG missachtet grundlegende Sicherheitspraktiken und reagiert bei Hinweisen obendrein pampig. Zum Glück gibt es Ersatz. Ein IMHO von Sebastian Grüner (GPG, Verschlüsselung)

As Virgin Galactic gets swept up in GameStop mania, it gets back to flying

Company says its next window for a test flight opens on February 12.

VMS <em>Eve</em> carries VSS <em>Unity</em> for its first captive-carry flight  over Mojave.

Enlarge / VMS Eve carries VSS Unity for its first captive-carry flight over Mojave. (credit: Virgin Galactic)

At a time when non-traditional investors are buying up heavily shorted stocks like GameStop and AMC Networks, the hunt is on to find other targets among the most-shorted stocks in the market.

Among those stocks is Virgin Galactic, which has a "short percent of float" of about 70 percent. This means that institutional traders have shorted about 70 percent of the shares of stock that are available for public trading. This is a big bet by investors that the company will fail.

In the year or so since it joined the New York Stock Exchange as SPCE, Virgin Galactic has typically traded between $15 and $25 a share. This last week it spiked to $58.65 and has remained comfortably above $40 since then in trading attributed to shorted stock-buying mania.

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Goldeneye 007’s lost Xbox 360 remaster has leaked—as a full-game speedrun

Speedrunner talks to Ars, claims the remake is (mostly) on par with N64 original.

Goldeneye 007's official remake project, as co-helmed by Rare, Microsoft, and 4J Studios before being quietly canceled, is one of the gaming industry's wildest lost projects. We've discussed this canceled Xbox 360 game at length over the years, with updates coming mostly in the form of increasingly detailed leaks—and this week's is easily the biggest yet. The rumored N64 update's dam, as it were, has burst open, with a legitimate playable copy having leaked.

A longtime Spanish game streamer, who goes by Graslu00, was handed the veritable GoldenEye key in the form of one of the game's near-complete ROMs, as made by Rare during the 2010s for Xbox 360 consoles and then indefinitely shelved. Graslu00 loaded the ROM in a PC emulator, confirmed it was real, and pre-recorded a full "00 Agent" gameplay session (meaning, the hardest difficulty with the most required objectives) before hosting a chat while showing the footage to viewers on Friday. Which made me wonder: how the heck did he get the ROM?

"I was sent the build anonymously and told to wait" until a certain date to reveal it, Graslu00 tells Ars Technica in an email interview. The files came with a peculiar note: "Never say never, release coming soon, James."

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