Month: March 2023

Enlarge / Astra's Rocket 3.1 takes off on September 11, 2020. It failed 30 seconds into flight. (credit: Astra/John Kraus)

One of the most honest moments in a new book, When the Heavens Went on Sale, comes during a discussion between two aerospace technicians working at the rocket company Astra in December 2018. On a Sunday, Les Martin and Dave Flanagan were watching football inside an RV parked at Astra's facilities near Oakland, California.

Martin in particular had a lot of experience at launch companies, having worked primarily on test stands for SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Firefly Space, and now Astra. The two were discussing the challenges of the launch industry and musing about how any company ever made money launching rockets.

Martin: The challenge is to get there before you run out of money.

Flanagan: Right.

Martin: Because it doesn't take long. I mean, you raise a little money, you can run through it quick. All the money that is being dumped into this is absurd. There's some charlatans in this business for sure. And what's it all for? I don't see the need for all of it. It doesn't make sense. These VCs made their money in software or whatever. And you know, they just love space. I think a lot of it is it's just cool for them to invest their money in this.

Even with us, the whole goal is for us to launch daily. I'm either going to be dead in the ground before that happens or I'll be walking down the street with money falling out of my pockets and won't care that they're launching daily.

Spoiler alert: Astra is not launching daily. In fact, after five failures in seven orbital launch attempts of its Rocket 3 vehicle, the company binned that design. Martin and Flanagan have both been gone from Astra for nearly three years. In hindsight, the exchange offers a succinct and largely accurate summary of the US commercial launch industry's wild ride during the last decade or so. Billions have been invested. We have heard wildly optimistic predictions for launch cadences—such as Astra's preposterous goal of launching daily. Behind it all has been a crap-ton of hard work, sacrifice, and effort, with relatively little to show for it.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

Apple is readying a new batch of Macs to launch "between late spring and summer," according to a report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.

The most significant of the three would be a 15-inch MacBook Air, but a new Mac Pro refresh would complete the Mac's transition from Intel's CPUs and AMD's GPUs to Apple Silicon, and a new 13-inch MacBook Air could also be in the cards. Apple is also said to be planning a new 24-inch iMac that could be the first of its Macs to use its next-generation M3 chip.

The 15-inch MacBook Air would be a new product category for Apple: a larger-screened laptop that costs less than a MacBook Pro. Apple's consumer-focused laptops—from the old PowerPC iBook to the first Intel MacBooks to the current MacBook Air—have all ranged somewhere between 11 and 13 inches. The 15- to 17-inch PowerBook and MacBook Pro models always required a step up in CPU and GPU power that drove the price up; the cheapest MacBook Air starts at $999, while the cheapest 16-inch MacBook Pro costs $2,499.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Researchers on Wednesday announced a major cybersecurity find—the world’s first-known instance of real-world malware that can hijack a computer’s boot process even when Secure Boot and other advanced protections are enabled and running on fully updated versions of Windows.

Dubbed BlackLotus, the malware is what’s known as a UEFI bootkit. These sophisticated pieces of malware infect the UEFI—short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface—the low-level and complex chain of firmware responsible for booting up virtually every modern computer. As the mechanism that bridges a PC’s device firmware with its operating system, the UEFI is an OS in its own right. It’s located in an SPI-connected flash storage chip soldered onto the computer motherboard, making it difficult to inspect or patch.

Because the UEFI is the first thing to run when a computer is turned on, it influences the OS, security apps, and all other software that follows. These traits make the UEFI the perfect place to run malware. When successful, UEFI bootkits disable OS security mechanisms and ensure that a computer remains infected with stealthy malware that runs at the kernel mode or user mode, even after the operating system is reinstalled or a hard drive is replaced.