Month: May 2024

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket launches the NROL-146 mission from California this week. (credit: SpaceX)

Welcome to Edition 6.45 of the Rocket Report! The most interesting news in launch this week, to me, is that Firefly is potentially up for sale. That makes two of the handful of US companies with operational rockets, Firefly and United Launch Alliance, actively on offer. I'll be fascinated to see what the valuations of each end up being if/when sales go through.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using 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 as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Firefly may be up for sale. Firefly Aerospace investors are considering a sale that could value the closely held rocket and Moon lander maker at about $1.5 billion, Bloomberg reports. The rocket company's primary owner, AE Industrial Partners, is working with an adviser on "strategic options" for Firefly. Neither AE nor Firefly commented to Bloomberg about the potential sale. AE invested $75 million into Texas-based Firefly as part of a series B financing round in 2022. The firm made a subsequent investment in its Series C round in November 2023.

Enlarge / Messier 78 is a nursery of star formation enveloped in a shroud of interstellar dust. (credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA et. al.)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's May 24, and today's photo comes from the European Space Agency's new Euclid space telescope.

Launched in July 2023, the mission is intended to create a giant map of the Universe, across more than one-third of the nighttime sky. Its big-ticket goal is to help scientists better understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy, which account for the vast majority of the mass in the Universe—but about which we know almost nothing.

Enlarge / This is fine. (credit: Getty Images)

If you use Google regularly, you may have noticed the company's new AI Overviews providing summarized answers to some of your questions in recent days. If you use social media regularly, you may have come across many examples of those AI Overviews being hilariously or even dangerously wrong.

Factual errors can pop up in existing LLM chatbots as well, of course. But the potential damage that can be caused by AI inaccuracy gets multiplied when those errors appear atop the ultra-valuable web real estate of the Google search results page.

"The examples we've seen are generally very uncommon queries and aren’t representative of most people’s experiences," a Google spokesperson told Ars. "The vast majority of AI Overviews provide high quality information, with links to dig deeper on the web."