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SpaceX's giant rocket, the third Starship test flight, has been "lost".

SpaceX's huge Starship rocket, which will eventually be used for journeys to the Moon and Mars, was "lost" during re-entry into the atmosphere on its way back down to Earth, the company said on Thursday. However, it flew much longer on this third test flight, as the previous ones ended in explosions.

"The craft has been lost," announced a commentator on the live video feed from billionaire Elon Musk's company. "So no water landing today", he added. According to the flight plan, the spacecraft was to end its journey in the Indian Ocean.

The head of SpaceX acknowledged that his rocket would have to carry out hundreds of unmanned missions before eventually carrying its first humans.

Take-off for this third test flight took place shortly after 8 a.m. local time (2 p.m. in Switzerland) from SpaceX's "Starbase" spaceport in Boca Chica, in the far south of Texas, and lasted almost half an hour. The flight nevertheless enabled the spacecraft to reach low-Earth orbit for the first time.

Putting mankind on Mars

At 120 metres high, Starship is the world's largest rocket. It is also the most powerful. SpaceX is counting on it to achieve its stated goal: to make humankind a multi-planetary species by putting it on Mars.

Its development is also very important for NASA, which is counting on this spacecraft to land its astronauts on the Moon during its mission. Artemis IIIscheduled for 2026.

The rocket has two stages: the Super Heavy propulsion stage and, above it, the Starship, which by extension gives its name to the entire rocket.

Two unsuccessful tests

The last test took place four months ago. The two stages of the rocket separated successfully in flight for the first time, but then both exploded. The flights lasted just four minutes in the first test and eight minutes in the second.

However, the spacecraft had reached an altitude of around 150 kilometres, crossing the boundary of space.

SpaceX then proposed 17 "corrective measures" to the US aviation regulator, the FAA, which had to be put in place in order to obtain a new flight licence, which was finally obtained on Wednesday.

"Ambitious objectives

For this third test, SpaceX had said it wanted to achieve several "ambitious objectives". One of these was to carry out a "controlled re-entry" of the spacecraft, which should have fallen back into the Indian Ocean to end the test after about an hour.

SpaceX also wanted to test the opening of the hatch, which could be used in the future to release cargo, such as satellites, into space.

The company also wanted to "demonstrate a fuel transfer" in flight. According to the specialist press, this transfer should have taken place between two tanks inside the spacecraft. Developing this function is essential, because to reach the Moon, Starship will have to refuel once in space, using a vessel that has already been filled by others, and acting as a kind of space service station.

In addition to its inordinate size, Starship's real innovation is that it should eventually be fully reusable. Currently, only the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket returns to land after each launch to be reused.

Text by RTS afp/juma

Twitter becomes "X", Elon Musk announces a change of name and logo for the social network

Gone is the little blue bird, 'X' replaces Twitter and the social network becomes accessible from the address 'x.com'.

MEDIA - "X". This is the incomplete message published by Elon Musk in the early hours of Monday 24 July to announce Twitter's new name and logo. The social network is thus living out its final hours in this form and is set to undergo a complete identity change: no more blue and no more bird. At 11am on Monday, the application's logo had already become an "X" on a black background.

Several months ago, the whimsical businessman and SpaceX boss announced that he wanted to turn Twitter into an "X", in homage to his favourite letter, as reported by the online media Numerama.

On Saturday evening, the project gathered pace when the billionaire tweeted: "we'll soon be saying goodbye to the Twitter brand and, gradually, to all the birds".before suggesting that the new logo could be a " X ".

The new logo projected onto the headquarters in San Francisco

On Sunday, playing with suspense, he pinned to his Twitter profile a video posted by a user of the platform showing the current Twitter logo, a blue bird, replaced by a flashing X. "If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we'll put it online worldwide tomorrow".he added.

Linda Yaccarino, Twitter's new CEO since May, has confirmed this project. X will create "a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities".she said on her account on Monday, adding: "Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we've only just begun to imagine".. She also posted an image of the new logo projected onto Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco.

After buying Twitter last year for 44 billion dollars, Elon Musk changed the name of the company to "X Corp in April 2023, and regularly mentions its nebulous plans to transform it into a multi-faceted application, with financial services, like WeChat in China.

Tweets become 'X's

In response to a question from an Internet user asking whether Twitter would be accessible from the x.com address, Elon Musk replied: "Of course. X.com was the name and website of the online bank founded by the businessman which later became the online payment service PayPal.

Asked by another user, Musk also said that tweets would be called Xs after the name change.

The name change comes at a time of difficulty for Twitter, where Elon Musk has laid off around half the staff and advertising revenues have halved, according to the billionaire. The social network faces a myriad of competing applications, including newcomer Threads, launched by Meta.

Text by Le HuffPost with AFP

"No hands!" Elon Musk posts a video of a monkey playing a video game via a brain implant

TECHNOLOGY "Soon our monkeys will be on Twitch and Discord haha", tweeted the billionaire entrepreneur

The video has already been viewed more than 300,000 times. On Friday, the American billionaire Elon Musk posted a video on his Twitter account of a monkey playing the video game Pong with no controller other than the power of its brain, thanks to a connected chip implanted in its skull by the start-up Neuralink.

"A monkey plays a video game telepathically thanks to a chip in its brain", tweeted the futuristic entrepreneur, boss of Neuralink and founder of Tesla and SpaceX. "Soon our monkeys will be on Twitch and Discord haha", he added.

In the video, Pager the macaque can be seen using his eyes to control the movements of a racket to prevent the ball from falling into the void, as you might do with a joystick, a touch screen or the arrows on a keyboard.

"Helping people who are paralysed or suffer from neurological diseases".

The aim of the operation is to unveil Neuralink's potential to the general public. "The first Neuralink products will enable a paralysed person to use their smartphone by thought faster than someone using their fingers," said Elon Musk. He hopes that Neuralink's chips will initially be used to help people who are paralysed or suffering from neurological diseases. But the long-term goal is to make the implants so safe, reliable and simple that they would be elective (comfort) surgery.

Last August, the start-up presented pigs to which she had implanted the prototype wireless chip23 mm in diameter and 8 mm thick (like a small coin).

Other brain-machine interfaces are currently being developed. Facebook is funding a project to translate brain activity into words, using algorithms, to enable people rendered mute by neurodegenerative diseases to speak again.

The flight of SpaceX's Starship SN11 has ended badly again

SpaceX has failed to land its Starship SN11 prototype correctly. This is the fourth unsuccessful attempt by the American company.

Initially scheduled for 26 March, then 29 March, SpaceX finally organised another test of a prototype Starship spacecraft on 30 March. But while the flight could have turned the page on the previous tests, which all ended in one way or another with an explosion, either directly on landing or a few minutes later, things did not go according to plan.

The circumstances surrounding the loss of the SN11 prototype are still not very clear. It has to be said that the weather conditions were frankly poor, preventing a clear view of the launcher - fog had set in at Boca Chica, Texas, on the very day of the test launch. To make matters worse, the live broadcast provided by SpaceX was just as poor, with jerks and interruptions.

A POSSIBLE PROBLEM WITH ONE OF THE ENGINES

It was clearly during the second half of the flight that the SN11 prototype encountered an unforeseen event: the rocket was able to take off normally from its launch pad, reach the desired altitude, shut down each of the three Raptor engines one after the other, and flip onto its side to return to Earth. We were able to see this in the few moments when the video managed to display an image.

However, as Starship SN11 continued its descent, with the four ailerons on the sides adjusting the rocket's aerodynamics, it was clearly at the moment when the rocket was due to recover to the vertical position that there was a problem. The video doesn't show anything, but at an altitude of one kilometre, the engines started up again. It was then that an unusual noise could be heard.

Did the rocket disintegrate in flight or did it explode when it hit the ground? According to Elon Musk, it was the second scenario: " At least the crater's in the right place! "he wrote on Twitter. An initial lead shared by the entrepreneur suggests that it was the No. 2 engine that was experiencing problems, and that this happened as soon as the rocket ascended - something that was difficult to ascertain due to the lack of a suitable live feed.

" It seems that engine 2 had problems during ascent and did not reach the chamber operating pressure level during combustion on landing, but in theory this was not necessary. "continued the SpaceX founder. " Something important happened shortly after the start of the landing burn "he added, referring to the debris scattered around the site.

In the sequence below, a huge explosion can be heard more clearly at the test site, followed by a shower of debris falling from the sky. Given the direction of the objects, the hypothesis of a remote explosion, while the rocket was still in the air, has been put forward. In fact, the shrapnel does not appear to have come from the launch pad - i.e. from the opposite direction, in the video embedded in the tweet.

The good news, obviously, is that SpaceX seems to have mastered most of the manoeuvres expected of the Starship, at least those performed as part of its tests (jumps of no more than 10 or 20 kilometres in altitude, to test the final stages of the return to Earth, with a limited number of Raptor engines). This was even after engine 2 had encountered a glitch.

However, the company still has problems with the final phase of its round trips, when the rocket has to decelerate hard enough not to land heavily on the launch pad. This is the most perilous stage, as it requires the rocket to be quickly tilted back into the vertical position while aiming for the landing zone. But at least SpaceX has data from four identical tests.

text numerama.com by Julien Lausson

SpaceX gets America flying again

The launch of the SpaceX flight is a powerful symbol for American space exploration. The United States, which for nine years has depended on Russian launchers to send astronauts into space, has no shortage of projects in this area. While Trump is dreaming of the Moon by 2024, Elon Musk already has his sights set on Mars.

Source: La Croix