NASA selected SpaceX for Jupiter
NASA on Friday said it had selected SpaceX to launch a planned voyage to Jupiter's icy moon Europa, a huge win for Elon Musk's company as it sets its sights deeper into the solar system.
The Europa Clipper mission will launch in October 2024 on a Falcon Heavy rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with the total contract worth $178 million.
The mission was previously supposed to take off on NASA's own Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which has been plagued by delays and cost overruns, with critics calling it a "jobs program" for the state of Alabama where much of the development work is taking place.
While SLS isn't yet operational, Falcon Heavy has deployed on both commercial and government missions since its maiden flight in 2018 when it carried Musk's own Tesla Roadster into space.
It generates more than five million pounds of thrust (22 million Newtons) at liftoff, equal to approximately eighteen 747 aircraft.
The Europa clipper orbiter will make about 40 to 50 close passes over Europa to determine whether the icy moon could harbor conditions suitable for life.
Its payload will include cameras and spectrometers to produce high-resolution images and compositional maps of the surface and atmosphere, as well as radar to penetrate the ice layer to search for liquid water below.
NIST Graded Our Post-Quantum Cryptography. Zero Failures.
NIST's Algorithm Validation Test System generated test vectors nobody had seen, we answered them over the ACVP protocol, and NIST graded the result: 2,130 cases across ML-KEM, ML-DSA and SLH-DSA in every parameter set offered, zero failures, demo certificate A11025. This is what that proves, where we deliberately drew the claim narrower than NIST's own matrix, and why the FIPS 140-2 sunset on 21 September makes the distinction between being graded and grading yourself worth understanding.
The Problem Is Not the Problem
People treat the Jack Sparrow line as a joke. The attribution is a joke. The sentence is not. Forty years in markets says the same thing Epictetus said in 125 CE and Robert Merton named in 1948: the event is finite, and the story you appoint to govern it is not. This essay walks the quote back to its actual sources, draws the loop that turns a feeling into an order, and sets out the four places a rule written in advance cuts the loop. Faith is not a hedge. It is a stance.
What KXCO Is, and Why the Hard Problem Was Never Intelligence
The prevailing enthusiasm assumes the hard problem is intelligence. It is not. It is that banks, hospitals, courts and governments are being asked to let software act on their behalf with no way to establish who decided, on what basis, or whether the record will still read in a decade. KXCO founder Shayne Heffernan sets out the architecture that answers those questions, drawn as a graph, and argues that properly constructed AI is an amplifier of human judgement rather than a replacement for it.
AI Intelligence Scales. Accountability Does Not. Why KXCO Is Built for It.
Capability is becoming abundant and everything abundant gets cheap. What does not get cheap is the person who has to sign, and they can only carry what they can see. Four conditions follow from that, and four independent authorities reached the first of them last month without knowing it.
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