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A ground-based test of the Super Heavy rocket that is intended to boost a Starship upper stage into orbit ended in flames on Monday afternoon at SpaceX's launch site in South Texas. A fire burned in the vicinity of the pad, on and off, for more than an hour.

This is the first time SpaceX has tested a booster stage—this one bears the designation Booster 7—equipped with a full complement of 33 Raptor rocket engines. Monday's test was not intended to lead to a static fire test, during which the engines are briefly ignited, so seeing fire erupt from the aft end of the vehicle at 4:20 pm CT local time was a surprise.

The methane-fueled Raptor engine has a complicated sequence of events that must unfold precisely in order for it to ignite, and SpaceX was testing the "spin start" portion of this ignition sequence when the anomaly occurred. Something must have caused methane propellant to ignite, with the ambient oxygen in the air serving as an oxidizer, inside the vehicle.

Enlarge / It will be many years before the battery packs in these ID.4s need recycling, but when that happens VW and Redwood will be ready. (credit: Volkswagen)

Volkswagen is in the midst of a huge electrification effort, spurred on by a combination of dieselgate and stringent fleet emissions targets in Europe. Last week, the company broke ground on the first of six European battery factories and is actively looking at building one or more similar plants here in the US. If and when that happens, Volkswagen may well make those batteries using material recycled from older electric vehicle batteries, thanks to a new collaboration with Redwood Materials.

"Redwood Materials is a great partner to help us accelerate EV adoption in America. This collaboration allows us to move closer toward our goal of closing the loop for a circular EV economy, giving American consumers yet another reason to go electric," said Scott Keogh, president and CEO of VW Group of America.

As we explored yesterday, the lithium-ion battery in an electric vehicle should see little loss of storage capacity over the course of a decade. But eventually, batteries will degrade to the point where it makes more sense to repurpose them as static storage (once they can only hold 60–70 percent of their original charge) or eventually recycle them.

Enlarge (credit: NASA)

After months of anticipation and a day after President Joe Biden himself was involved in the release of an image of the early Universe, NASA has now released four other images from the Webb Space Telescope. The agency already told us that targets would include a couple of nebulas, a galaxy cluster, and an exoplanet.

But it wasn't clear exactly what features of these objects would be the focus or how NASA would process the images so that features that exist in the infrared area of the spectrum could be perceived in the visible area of the spectrum. Scientists we spoke to at the Webb launch event suggested that everyone was aware that aesthetics matter and that officials would be experimenting with different methods to do this processing in a way that balanced scientific accuracy with the "wow" factor everyone expects.

The results are finally being made available, and they definitely managed to wow.