Google says its Gemma family of open models has passed a billion downloads. Developers have published more than 100,000 Gemma variants over the past two years, the company said in a blog post on Thursday. Clement Farabet, a vice president at Google Dee…
We were going to write a constipation joke here, but it wouldn’t come out.
Starcloud has raised $250mn to put AI compute in orbit, and a large part of the money is earmarked for rockets it cannot yet book. The Series A extension values the company at $2.3bn post-money, the company said. Its total raised now stands at $450mn. …
There’s about to be a big fight to secure access to space.
The United States conducted 178 orbital launches and re-entries last year, but the White House now wants at least a thousand a year by 2030. President Donald Trump signed a memorandum on Thursday directing federal agencies to clear the path to that num…
A company that plans to beam sunlight from space to Earth on demand might unintentionally brighten the night sky for many more people than intended, according to a new study. Later this year, the US company Reflect Orbital plans to launch a test satellite called Eärendil-1 that will extend an 18-by-18-meter mirror in orbit. The…
Plans to rescue NASA’s Swift Observatory satellite from falling into Earth’s atmosphere are seemingly dead in the water. The agency and Katalyst Space announced yesterday that the Link spacecraft will no longer capture or boost the Swift telescope to a higher altitude due to an ongoing “attitude control issue,” but will instead conduct rendezvous and […]
Muon Space has raised $250m in a round backed by Google and Salesforce, according to their announcement. It is the largest cheque yet written to a company whose best-known product is a constellation that watches for wildfires. The rise had been visible…
The Chinese startup LandSpace recovered the first stage of its Zhuque-3 rocket on Wednesday. It is one of only a handful of private companies to land an orbital-class booster. Reuters reported that the feat places LandSpace alongside SpaceX and Blue Or…
When the four astronauts on board NASA’s Artemis II swung around the moon earlier this year, they set a new record for the farthest humans have ever ventured from Earth, surpassing the distance set by Apollo 13 in 1972 by some 4,000 miles. While no space mission can live up to the historic touchdown of…