Month: February 2022

Enlarge / A fully stacked Starship and Super Heavy rocket on Thursday morning in South Texas. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann / Ars Technica)

Welcome to Edition 4.32 of the Rocket Report! There are plenty of international happenings this week, with progress in Europe, Asia, and North America. But the biggest news may have come from SpaceX's Starship presentation last night, hosted by company founder Elon Musk in South Texas. Expect full coverage on Ars Technica later this morning.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe via the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets and a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Astra launch attempt from Florida fails. The California company's Rocket 3.3 failed to reach orbit after entering into a tumble about three minutes into flight on Thursday afternoon, Spaceflight Now reports. The rocket launch was Astra's first attempt from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Four NASA-sponsored CubeSats were lost in the mishap.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

About 500 e-commerce websites were recently found to be compromised by hackers who installed a credit card skimmer that surreptitiously stole sensitive data when visitors attempted to make a purchase.

A report published on Tuesday is only the latest one involving Magecart, an umbrella term given to competing crime groups that infect e-commerce sites with skimmers. Over the past few years, thousands of sites have been hit by exploits that cause them to run malicious code. When visitors enter payment card details during purchase, the code sends them to attacker-controlled servers.

Fraud courtesy of Naturalfreshmall[.]com

Sansec, the security firm that discovered the latest batch of infections, said the compromised sites were all loading malicious scripts hosted at the domain naturalfreshmall[.]com.