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United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan rocket blasts off on first Space Force-sanctioned flight

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United Launch Alliance fired off its first operational Vulcan rocket Tuesday, boosting two military satellites into space in the first U.S. Space Force-sanctioned flight of a new launcher that eventually will replace the company’s Atlas 5 and already-retired Deltas.

Equipped with four solid-fuel strap-on boosters for additional takeoff power, the 198-foot-tall Vulcan’s two methane-fueled BE-4 engines thundered to life at 8:56 p.m. EDT, instantly propelling the rocket away from pad 41 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

A United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket, making its first flight for the U.S. Space Force, majestically climbs away from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to kick off a high-priority military mission.

United Launch Alliance


Arcing over the Atlantic Ocean on an easterly trajectory, the Vulcan put on a spectacular sky-lighting show as it roared aloft atop nearly 3 million pounds of thrust and a jet of brilliant exhaust visible for miles around.

The four strap-on boosters were jettisoned about 90 seconds after liftoff, followed three-and-a-half minutes later by burnout and separation of the Vulcan’s 109-foot-tall first stage.

The Centaur second stage’s two hydrogen-fueled Aerojet Rocketdyne RL10C engines ignited and took over from there, but in keeping with standard policy for military missions, ULA ended its launch commentary at that point and the rest of the flight was carried out in secrecy.

At least two satellites were believed to be on board: one fully classified spacecraft and an experimental satellite that will carry out tests of upgraded atomic clocks and navigation technology that could lead to more accurate, jam-proof Global Positioning System-type data for military and commercial users.

Both satellites were bound for geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles above the equator, where spacecraft take 24 hours to complete one orbit, thus appearing stationary in the sky.

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An artist’s impression of the NTS-3 experimental navigation technology satellite.

Air Force Research Laboratory


GPS satellites operate in 12,500-mile-high orbits, but Navigation Technology Satellite 3, or NTS-3, will operate from its much higher perch using an advanced phased array antenna that can electronically direct signals to receivers in multiple locations across broad regions.

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The NTS-3 antenna.

Air Force Research Laboratory


It is the Pentagon’s first experimental navigation satellite since GPS precursors were launched in the 1970s. Along with the NTS-3 satellite, designed and built by L3Harris Technologies, the program includes a ground-based control system and receivers linked by software that enable rapid reprogramming as needed for upgrades or to utilize different signals.

“GPS is such an integral part of our lives today,” said Joanna Hinks, a senior aerospace engineer with the Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. “You probably all use it in ways that you didn’t even realize throughout your morning.

“And with NTS-3, we are going to be experimenting with a number of different technologies that look at how we can continue to evolve and augment GPS to make sure that it remains the gold standard that our warfighters need.”

While the major goal of the flight is launching the USSF-106 payloads, the launch marked a major milestone for United Launch Alliance.

It was the third launch of the powerful new Vulcan after two test flights last year and the first to be “certified” by the Space Force to carry costly national security spy satellites and other expensive military spacecraft.

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The United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket on pad 41 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station during pre-launch preparations.

Spaceflight Now


“This mission is headed directly to geosynchronous orbit and will be one of our longest missions to date,” said Gary Wentz, ULA vice president of government and commercial programs. “This is the sole purpose of this vehicle. It was purposely designed to support these missions doing direct inject to geo for the Space Force.”

The Vulcan is replacing ULA’s already-retired Delta family of rockets and the venerable Atlas 5, which is powered by a Russian-built RD-180 first stage engine. Criticism of ULA’s use of Russian engines for launches of American military satellites and NASA spacecraft helped fuel congressional pressure for a new all-American launcher.

Thirteen Atlas 5’s are left in ULA’s inventory, all of them slated for civilian launches as ULA, a partnership of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, transitions to an all-Vulcan fleet.

In the meantime, SpaceX dominates the world launch market with its partially reusable and highly successful kerosene-fueled Falcon 9 and triple-core Falcon Heavy rockets. So far this year, SpaceX has launched 97 Falcon 9s.

But ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno said the Vulcan’s first stage, using high-performance BE-4 engines provided by Blue Origin — owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — and its high-power Centaur upper stage make the rocket particularly well suited for launching heavy military payloads into hard-to-reach orbits.

“It is specifically designed for these exotic orbits that are primarily for the government,” he said. “And this particular mission is the quintessential example. It is a direct injection to geosynchronous orbit. That means that it is a very, very long-duration mission.”

He said the first stage is, in effect, delivering the Centaur to space with a full load of propellant “to go from LEO (low-Earth orbit) to somewhere else, like all the way to the geo belt, which is 20 times higher up. And what that translates to in capability (is) certainly more mass and more accuracy than is easily done by others.”

While he didn’t mention SpaceX or its Falcon Heavy by name, or ULA’s retired Delta 4 Heavy, Bruno said “if you’re a typical three-core heavy launch vehicle and … really derived from a vehicle optimized for that LEO mission, you’re going to have to have three cores to get out there, and you’re going to have to expend all of them.

“And here’s the really complicated rocket science. You know, one core is cheaper and more efficient than three expendable cores. It’s literally that simple.”

That, coupled with the high-energy Centaur upper stage, gives ULA the capability to launch heavy payloads directly to high orbits without requiring satellites to use their own thrusters — and limited propellant — in transit.

ULA is expanding its ground infrastructure and expects to launch nine flights in 2025, reaching a cadence of two per month by the end of the year. The company expects to launch between 20 and 25 flights in 2026. 



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Texas vs. Ohio State live updates: Arch Manning headlines as Longhorns, Buckeyes clash in top-three showdown

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The biggest season opener in college football history has arrived. No. 1 Texas. Vs. No. 3 Ohio State. Arch Madness against the reigning national champions.

Rarely do we see the preseason No. 1 team open the year as an underdog, and yet here is Texas, sprinting into Week 1 against the Buckeyes, the slight favorites who aim to defend their national title by taking down the hyped-up Longhorns, who carry the No. 1 ranking next to their name in the preseason for the first time in their long history as a blue blood.

The two biggest names in the sport — Texas quarterback Arch Manning and Ohio State receiver Jeremiah Smith — lead their teams into Ohio Stadium with SEC and Big Ten pride on the line. Manning is not your ordinary quarterback, though this will be his first career start on the road. He has a lineage of superiority to defend. Smith, who electrified the country as a freshman last year, already has a national championship ring.

Who wins? We won’t have to ask that question much longer. Kickoff is set for 12 p.m. ET.

Keep it locked here as CBS Sports provides you with live updates, highlights and analysis as Texas battles Ohio State to open the 2025 season in Week 1. 





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Firefighter arrested by US border agents was on track for legal status, lawyers say | Oregon

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Lawyers are demanding the release of a longtime Oregon resident arrested by US border patrol while fighting a Washington state wildfire, saying Friday that the firefighter was already on track for legal status after helping federal investigators solve a crime against his family.

His arrest was illegal, the lawyers said, and violated Department of Homeland Security polices that say immigration enforcement must not be conducted at locations where emergency responses are happening.

He is one of two firefighters arrested this week while working the Bear Gulch fire in the Olympic national forest, which as of Friday had burned about 14 sq miles (36 sq km) and was only 13% contained, forcing evacuations.

US Customs and Border Protection said in a statement on Thursday that it had been helping the Bureau of Land Management with a criminal investigation into two contractors working at the fire when it discovered two firefighters who they said were in the country without permanent legal status.

The firefighter, whose name has not been made public, has lived in the US for 19 years after arriving with his family at the age of four. He received a U-visa certification from the US attorney’s office in Oregon in 2017 and submitted his U-visa application with US Citizenship and Immigration Services the following year.

The U-visa program was established by Congress to protect victims of serious crimes who assist federal investigators, and the man has been waiting since 2018 for the immigration agency to decide on his application, according to Stephen Manning, a lawyer with Innovation Law Lab, a Portland-based non-profit representing the firefighter.

Another homeland security policy says agents cannot detain people who are receiving or have applied for victim-based immigration benefits, his lawyer said. Charging the man with an immigration violation was “an illegal after-the-fact justification” given his U-visa status.

His lawyers said Friday that they located him in the immigration detention system and were able to make contact. They were still processing information and are demanding his immediate release, they told the AP in an email.

A senior DHS official said in a statement to the AP on Friday that the two men apprehended were not firefighters and were not actively fighting the fire. Officials said they were providing a supporting role by cutting logs into firewood.

“The firefighting response remained uninterrupted the entire time,” the statement said. “No active firefighters were even questioned, and US Border Patrol’s actions did not prevent or interfere with any personnel actively engaged in firefighting efforts.”

When the Bureau of Land Management was asked to provide information about why its contracts with two companies were terminated and 42 firefighters were escorted away from the state’s largest wildfire, it declined. It would only say it cooperates with other federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security.

“These law enforcement professionals contribute to broader federal enforcement efforts by maintaining public safety, protecting natural resources, and collaborating with the agencies, such as the Border Patrol,” interior department spokesperson Alyse Sharpe told the Associated Press in an email.

Manning said in a letter to Oregon senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat, that the arrest violated homeland security policy.

Wyden was critical of the border patrol’s operation, saying the Trump administration was more concerned about conducting raids on fire crews than protecting communities from catastrophic fires. Firefighters put their lives on the line, Wyden emphasized, including the Oregon firefighter who died on Sunday while battling a wildfire in south-western Montana.

“The last thing that wildland firefighter crews need is to be worried about masked individuals trampling their due process rights,” Wyden said in an email to the AP.

Meanwhile, wildfire officials were still trying to get control of the Bear Gulch fire. The number of personnel working on the blaze was listed at 303 on Friday, down from 349 on Thursday.



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Why Wall Street has developed an unhealthy obsession with Nvidia

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A version of this story appeared in CNN Business’ Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.


New York
 — 

For markets, the most important story of the week was, somehow, not the president’s attempted firing of a top Federal Reserve official. Instead, it was Nvidia’s earnings report, a quarterly event that, in the financial world, has taken on Super Bowl-level enthusiasm. (Seriously, the company has fans who throw watch parties for the occasion, complete with Mardi Gras beads.)

It’s not hard to see why folks are all fired up. If you’d invested $1,000 in Nvidia (NVDA) shares just two years ago, you’d be sitting on a $3,000 profit right now. The stock is up 30% this year, versus the S&P 500’s 10% gain. And quarter after quarter, Nvidia tends to blow past the consensus forecast on Wall Street. What’s not to love?

Well, for some investors, at least, the market around Nvidia is starting to look awfully bubbly. And not just because Sam Altman, the CEO of one of Nvidia’s customers, has publicly speculated that AI was a bubble.

Here are some of the reasons people are beginning to worry about the Nvidia story.

Reason No. 1: Nvidia is huge. But not just, like, “Oh, it’s a big company!” It is bigger, in terms of market value, than any public company ever. We often toss around its market capitalization — $4 trillion — as if that number makes any sense.

Consider that the world had never seen a $1 trillion public company until Apple crossed the threshold in 2018. Now we have nearly a dozen, almost all of them in the American tech sector.

Reason No. 1(a): That size makes Nvidia (pronounced in-vid-ee-uh) on its own account for 8% of the S&P 500. So, even if you don’t hold Nvidia shares, you gotta watch its results because they could swing the entire market. Zoom out even further: Nvidia’s market cap accounts for 3.6% of global GDP, according to Deutsche Bank. Yes. One single company, which gets half its revenue from just three customers, is that huge.

Reason No. 2: When we talk about the AI industry, we’re mostly talking about Nvidia. If you use ChatGPT, that’s powered by Nvidia chips. The same goes for Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, Amazon’s…whatever Amazon’s chatbot is called — all of those products are powered by the processors made by this company that up until a few years ago was just a tech workhorse churning out processors that make video games look cooler.

(You may be thinking, Hey, Nvidia sounds kinda like a monopoly, to which I say, Please do not use the m-word around here, or else I’ll have to call the lawyers. Let’s just say Nvidia almost exclusively controls the supply of vital resources to an entire industry and enjoys monopoly-esque profit margins.)

So, if you follow the Gospel of AI and believe that the technology has the power to dismantle the entire global economy, Nvidia is your clear picks-and-shovels play.

But — and here’s why the focus on Nvidia is getting even more intense — what if the technology Nvidia is powering turns out to be, I dunno, not quite the revolution that your Sams Altman or Darios Amodei have promised? What happens to the picks and shovels when the gold rush goes bust?

Last week, I wrote that the AI vibe shift was underway, nearly three years after ChatGPT’s public debut set off a frenzy of investment and a nauseating amount of corporate pablum about how AI is going to change everything. A rash of bad AI headlines, combined with signs of a weakening economy, has rattled investors, sparking a tech sell-off last week and a lot of nail-biting ahead of Nvidia’s earnings.

To be fair, AI chatbots like ChatGPT have changed a lot — like how much we talk about AI, and it has seriously increased the use of the word “trillion” in the financial media. Chatbots have also been accused of pushing multiple people to suicide and fueling delusional spirals that ruin lives.

What AI hasn’t done is demonstrate a single use case that would even come close to justifying the hundreds of billions of dollars companies are pouring into it.

The frenzy isn’t limited to speculative delusions on Wall Street. There is actually so much real money behind the AI race that capital expenditures from American tech giants have contributed more to GDP growth this year than consumer spending has, according to Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research.

I’m going to repeat that, because it’s one of the craziest things I’ve ever read: AI-related capex has contributed more to US economic growth this year than consumer spending.

Consumer spending! That’s the engine of the economy — some 70% of our GDP. That’s just an insane concentration of capital to build infrastructure for what could end up being just another vial of Silicon Valley snake oil.

“Ultimately, investment only makes sense insofar as it raises productivity and real wages and consumer spending,” Dutta said in a podcast. “That’s not yet happening.”





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