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Enlarge / The mighty "Dominator" Atlas V 541 goes supersonic with our newest Mars rover. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

Welcome to Edition 3.10 of the Rocket Report! Now that Mars Perseverance is safely on its way to the Red Planet, we're happy to congratulate space agencies in the UAE, China, and the United States on successful launches to Mars this summer. It's great to go three-for-three in the 2020 launch window. In February, we'll see how many safely reach their final destination.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below. Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, perhaps a little snark, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Virgin Galactic unveils look of interior cabin. Virgin Galactic has released the first images of what the interior of its VSS Unity spacecraft will look like. The design shows a seating capacity for up to six passengers who will fly on board the rocket-powered space plane, crest at an altitude above 80km, and experience a few minutes of weightlessness. The company says it plans for one or two more powered tests, followed by final test flights from New Mexico, before commencing a full commercial service for passengers.

Enlarge / We're already accustomed to data being encrypted while at-rest or in-flight—FHE offers the possibility of doing computations on it as well, without ever actually decrypting it. (credit: IBM)

Yesterday, Ars spoke with IBM Senior Research Scientist Flavio Bergamaschi about the company's recent successful field trials of Fully Homomorphic Encryption. We suspect many of you will have the same questions that we did—beginning with "what is Fully Homomorphic Encryption?"

FHE is a type of encryption that allows direct mathematical operations on the encrypted data. Upon decryption, the results will be correct. For example, you might encrypt 2, 3, and 7 and send the three encrypted values to a third party. If you then ask the third party to add the first and second values, then multiply the result by the third value and return the result to you, you can then decrypt that result—and get 35.

You don't ever have to share a key with the third party doing the computation; the data remains encrypted with a key the third party never received. So, while the third party performed the operations you asked it to, it never knew the values of either the inputs or the output. You can also ask the third party to perform mathematical or logical operations of the encrypted data with non-encrypted data—for example, in pseudocode, FHE_decrypt(FHE_encrypt(2) * 5) equals 10.