Company Wants To Slingshot Satellites Into Space

Can you use a giant slingshot to hurl projectiles into space? One California company is trying to turn that simple idea into a new way to send satellites skyward, replacing fire and fuel with electric power and motion.

SpinLaunch, founded in 2014, has built a launch system that skips the dramatic blastoff people usually associate with rockets. Instead of burning propellant on the ground, the company uses a rotating arm inside a vacuum chamber to hurl payloads at extreme speed. The goal is to reach low Earth orbit with small satellites while cutting both launch costs and pollution.

"This is not a rocket," said Jonathan Yaney, SpinLaunch's founder and CEO. "And clearly our ability to perform in just 11 months this many tests and have them all function as planned really is a testament to the nature of our technology."

He made that remark after the company's 10th successful test flight, part of a steady push to prove that the concept can work outside theory and animation.

The underlying physics are not new. Long before modern spaceflight, siege weapons used stored energy to launch heavy objects over walls. Trebuchets and other machines turned force into motion with brutal efficiency. SpinLaunch is working from that same basic principle, though with materials, electronics, and engineering that belong to the 21st century.

That link to the past is part of what makes the company's approach so striking. The method has even drawn comparisons to pumpkin-launching contests, where hobbyists use giant machines to send gourds flying for sport. The difference here is that the payload is not a pumpkin, and the target is not a field. It is orbit.

To make that leap possible, the company depends on high-strength carbon fiber and increasingly compact satellite hardware. Smaller electronics give payloads a better chance of surviving the violent trip. SpinLaunch says, "Modern electronics, materials, and simulation tools allow for satellites to be adapted to the kinetic launch environment with relative ease."

That does not make the challenge gentle. Any satellite riding this system must survive crushing acceleration and then keep working in space.

At its New Mexico test site, the company has carried out a series of launch demonstrations that look more like controlled shock experiments than traditional liftoffs. In one video, a sleek capsule disappears from the chamber almost instantly, moving so fast that it is hard to follow with the naked eye.

The forces involved are enormous. SpinLaunch says its system has already handled loads of 10,000 Gs, or 10,000 times Earth's gravity. That is enough to expose weak points in almost any design. So far, the company says, the hardware has held together.

That performance has helped attract backing and cooperation from major names, including NASA, Airbus, and Cornell University. Their equipment has played a role in testing, giving the effort outside validation as SpinLaunch tries to move from experimental launches to a working orbital system.

The company's stated target is ambitious: launching satellites into orbits below 600 miles by 2026. A coastal orbital launch site is already in development, a sign that SpinLaunch sees this as more than a string of eye-catching tests.

"It has proven that it's a system that is repeatedly reliable," Yaney said.

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Greenpeace Blocks Rice That Could Have Saved 100k Children

Greenpeace and its activists allies have blocked for more than two decades the adoption of Golden Rice, which is genetically enhanced to produce the vitamin A precursor beta-carotene.

The result, according to new calculations by DC Abundance founder and research director at the Golden Gate Institute for AI Abi Olvera, is that "delay has killed about 106,000 children and left another 210,000 to 425,000 blind."

Her conservative calculations of the deaths and disabilities caused by Greenpeace's scientifically ridiculous opposition to Golden Rice are focused on 11 countries in which the consumption of rice makes up a significant proportion of their people's diets.

As Olvera reports, the World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that "250 000–500 000 children who are vitamin A-deficient become blind every year, and half of them die within 12 months of losing their sight." Vitamin A deficiency contributes to increased morbidity and mortality from common childhood infections.

As the WHO notes, "Even mild, subclinical deficiency can be a problem, because it may increase children's risk for respiratory and diarrhoeal infections, decrease growth rates, slow bone development and decrease the likelihood of survival from serious illness." And it is the world's leading preventable cause of childhood blindness.

I have been debunking Greenpeace's unscientific opposition to Golden Rice since 2000 when the activist group claimed: "Greenpeace opposes golden rice because it has all the risks of any [genetically modified] crop." In my 2013 article, "Scientists Call Out Greenpeace for Killing and Blinding Kids," I hailed the blistering editorial in Science that asserted, "If ever there was a clear-cut cause for outrage, it is the concerted campaign by Greenpeace and other nongovernmental organizations, as well as by individuals, against Golden Rice."

In 2016, I reported the open letter by 100 Nobel Prize laureates calling on "Greenpeace to cease and desist in its campaign against Golden Rice specifically, and crops and foods improved through biotechnology in general." The laureates suggested that Greenpeace was committing a "crime against humanity." And as recently as 2024, I warned that Greenpeace's crusade against Golden Rice will continue to blind and kill children when reporting that the anti-technology activist group had persuaded a Philippine court to block local farmers from planting the grain.

For over 25 years, Greenpeace and its anti-technology allies have blocked this lifesaving crop. Although it is way past time, Greenpeace's blockade may be coming to an end. As it has become more normal for poorer countries to engineer their own genetically enhanced crops, Olvera optimistically concludes, "the harder it gets to keep blocking the one that should have come first."

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What's The Difference Between A Rocket And A Space Shuttle?

With SpaceX now launching its reusable Falcon 9 rocket up to several times a week, the U.S. company has quickly become a giant of global spaceflight.

This is a far cry from the days of America's Space Shuttle, which launched an average of 4.5 times a year during its lifetime between 1981 and 2011. People sometimes use the terms "rocket" and "Space Shuttle" interchangeably, but there's an important difference between the two.

A rocket is the launch vehicle that carries a crew or payload to space, while the Space Shuttle was a specific reusable orbiter that used rockets to get to orbit before returning to land like an airplane. Put simply, the rocket is the delivery system, while the Space Shuttle is the vehicle riding on it.

If you watch a Space Shuttle launch, you can clearly see its two side rockets powering the vehicle to space. After a couple of minutes, when the Space Shuttle is well on its way, these two side boosters detach and fall into the ocean before being recovered for reuse.

Meanwhile, the Space Shuttle's three integrated rocket engines continue to propel the vehicle into orbit. Similarly, a Falcon 9 launch involves the first-stage rocket booster powering the upper stage, including the crew or payload, toward space. Like the Space Shuttle, the booster detaches from the rest of the vehicle, but instead of being recovered from the ocean, it lands upright back on Earth.

Modern rockets like SpaceX's Falcon 9 comprise a first stage and an upper stage supporting the crew capsule or payload, which sits atop the vehicle. The Space Shuttle had three main components: two side rocket boosters that fell away and were later recovered, an external fuel tank that was discarded, and the plane-like section for the crew. The shuttle launched in a similar way to conventional rockets, using rocket engines to thrust upward to escape Earth's gravity.

But differences emerge once a mission starts. The shuttle, for example, released its two rocket boosters and fuel tank before reaching orbit, whereas Falcon 9's first stage returns to Earth for reuse, and the upper stage delivers the crew capsule to orbit before separating from it.

Coming home, the shuttle reentered Earth's atmosphere at high speed, with the underside heat shield resisting the extreme temperatures. It then glided like a plane toward its destination, landing on a runway before deploying brakes and a parachute system to bring it to a stop.

After 30 years of operations, the U.S space agency's final Space Shuttle mission took place in 2011. Becoming one of NASA's most expensive space projects ever, it found the system too costly to maintain. Safety was also an ongoing concern following two tragic accidents — Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 — in which all of the crew members perished.

To reduce spending, NASA encouraged private firms to start making commercial rockets to carry crews to orbit in separate capsules — similar to how the space agency sent astronauts to orbit in the Gemini and Apollo programs in the 1960s and 70s.

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Science: There Are Only Two Sexes

Are there only two sexes? A generation ago, this might have seemed like a silly question. But given the rise of gender theory, transgenderism, intersexuality, and all of their related phenomena, the question now appears to be both complex and pressing.

What differentiates human males from human females? Is it the number of sex chromosomes? Is it the possession of the appropriate sex organs? Is it the amount of testosterone or estrogen? The difficulty is that none of these standards always works: some individuals are born with extra chromosomes, such as XXYY or XYY. Some individuals are born with both pairs of sex organs. Some females have higher testosterone levels than many men.

Any single instance of an outlier counts as a serious objection to the binary sex distinction. Individual human beings are by nature either male or female just as by nature a number is either odd or even.

If one encountered even one number that is neither odd nor even, then this strange number would be enough to show that numbers are not "by nature either odd or even." If one encountered even one triangle that was four-sided, this would be enough to show that triangles are not "by nature three-sided." Similarly, if one encountered even one individual who did not fit the binary sex norm, then this single counterexample would be enough to disprove the traditional sex distinction.

Luckily, there are no non-odd-nor-even numbers. Nor are there no four-sided triangles, because four-sided triangles are a contradiction in terms. But is an intersex human being a contradiction in terms?

Biologically, intersex individuals seem to exist, as do people with other non-binary sex conditions. Hermaphrodites have male and female sexual organs. Some individuals with male organs have XX chromosomes. Some genetically male individuals have incomplete female sexual organs. What non-arbitrary but universal standard can there possibly be for determining sex?

Our sex—male or female—is determined by our basic capacity to engage in sexually reproductive acts. Consider the following thought experiment by Christopher Martin:

"Suppose we met a race of creatures—fairly clearly non-rational animals—that was very different from us: on Mars, say. And the question arises: are these creatures sexed? and if so, can we distinguish male and female? We need to think now how we would go about finding out these answers. We would not do it by investigating their psyches, nor even merely by just looking at (or cutting up) individuals. We would try to find out how they reproduced and what was the role of the different organs of the different individuals involved in reproduction. Thus, sex is a biological and teleological notion. Anything else which is called sexual is so called ultimately because it has some relation to this process, to these organs."

If we observe that the members of a species reproduce asexually, then we rightly conclude that neither male nor female exist in that species. But if we observe that two are required for reproduction to occur, we rightly conclude that the species reproduces sexually by the union of the two.

We name these two types differently — as male and female — based upon the roles they play in reproduction. Such is why Aquinas held to a binary account of sex: "The distinction of the sexes is ordained in animals to the generation which occurs through coitus." If human beings had no ordering to reproduction, or no sexual reproduction occurred, not only would one have no concept of gender, there would be no biological sex in human beings.

There, thus, can only be two biological sexes for human beings. In syllogistic form:

1. Biological sex is defined in relation to the roles played in sexual reproduction.
2. Sexual reproduction involves only two, namely, male and female.
3. Thus, biological sex is only two, namely, male or female.

Defects occur in nature, but defects imply a norm from which they deflect. A castrated man is still a male; a female with a mastectomy is still a female. The fact that one is born with ambiguous genitalia does not do away with one’s true sex. That it is hard to identify someone as male or female does not mean one is neither. Identical twins are hard to distinguish, but they are still distinct persons. Epistemological problems need not entail ontological ones.

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Ceasefire With Iran Is Likely, But Nuclear Deal Needs More Time

There is a possible agreement to end the war between the United States and Iran and it was announced last 14 June by U.S. President Donald Trump and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.

The deal includes stopping military actions, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and eventually lifting U.S. restrictions on Iranian ports. Still, Iran’s nuclear program, a key issue, has not been settled and will be discussed in future talks.

Even with this diplomatic progress, negotiators have delayed decisions about Iran’s nuclear activities.

According to Iranian officials, discussions during the ceasefire period will focus on sanctions relief and the future of Tehran’s nuclear program. Sources indicate that the issue remains among the most difficult issues facing both sides.

The dispute goes back years. During Trump’s first term, the U.S. withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal negotiated under President Obama. After that, Iran increased its uranium enrichment and built up more than 400 kilograms (about 900 pounds) of uranium close to weapons-grade.

Former Biden administration State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller criticized the framework, saying: "We have no assurances the nuclear program will ever be addressed, but Iran has shown the world it can take the global economy hostage and get something from the U.S. in return."

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham welcomed the ceasefire but stressed that future nuclear talks will be watched closely. "Under our law, any nuclear deal with Iran will be sent to Congress for review and a vote,” he said. “Congratulations to all on getting us to this point."

As negotiators prepare for formal talks in Switzerland, the focus is now on whether the ceasefire will last and if both sides can agree on Iran’s nuclear future.

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