U.S. President-elect Donald Trump says he wants the United States to be the world leader in artificial intelligence and crypto currency. To that end, he has tapped a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor to be the AI and crypto czar. Michelle Quinn has the story.
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Day: January 16, 2025
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — Blue Origin’s giant New Glenn rocket blasted off from Florida early Thursday morning on its first mission to space, an inaugural step into Earth’s orbit for Jeff Bezos’ space company as it aims to rival SpaceX in the satellite launch business.
Thirty stories tall with a reusable first stage, New Glenn launched around 2 a.m. ET (0700 GMT) from Blue Origin’s launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, its seven engines thundering for miles under cloudy skies on its second liftoff attempt this week.
Hundreds of employees at the company’s Kent, Washington headquarters and its Cape Canaveral, Florida rocket factory roared in applause as Blue Origin VP Ariane Cornell announced the rocket’s second stage made it to orbit, achieving a long-awaited milestone.
“We hit our key, critical, number-one objective, we got to orbit safely,” Cornell said on a company live stream. “And y’all we did it on our first go.”
The rocket’s reusable first stage booster was due to land on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean after separating from its second stage, but failed to make that landing, Cornell confirmed. Telemetry from the booster blacked out minutes after liftoff.
“We did in fact lose the booster,” Cornell said.
The culmination of a decade-long, multi-billion-dollar development journey, the mission marks Blue Origin’s first trek to Earth’s orbit in the 25 years since Bezos founded the company.
Bezos told Reuters on Sunday, before Blue Origin’s first launch attempt, that he was most nervous about landing the booster.
But he added that sticking the landing would be the “icing on the cake” if they could achieve the milestone of getting the payload to its intended orbit.
Secured inside New Glenn’s payload bay for the mission is the first prototype of Blue Origin’s Blue Ring vehicle, a maneuverable spacecraft the company plans to sell to the Pentagon and commercial customers for national security and satellite servicing missions.
The rocket’s first attempt to launch on Monday was scrubbed around 3 a.m. ET because ice had accumulated on a propellant line. On Thursday, the company cited no issues ahead of launch.
Bezos monitored the launch from a few miles away in Blue Origin’s mission control room, wearing a large headset and flanked by dozens of launch staff. The company’s CEO, Dave Limp, was next to him.
New Glenn is expected to press ahead with a backlog of dozens of missions worth hundreds of millions of dollars, including up to 27 launches for Amazon’s Kuiper satellite internet network that will rival SpaceX’s Starlink service.
New Glenn is the latest U.S. rocket to debut in recent years as governments and private companies beef up their space programs and race to challenge Elon Musk’s SpaceX and its workhorse Falcon 9.
NASA’s giant Space Launch System rocket had a successful debut in 2022, as did the Vulcan rocket last year from United Launch Alliance, Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s joint launch venture.
New Glenn is roughly twice as powerful as Falcon 9, the world’s most active rocket, with a payload bay diameter two times larger to fit bigger batches of satellites. Blue Origin has not disclosed the rocket’s launch pricing. Falcon 9 starts at around $62 million.
The development of New Glenn has spanned three Blue Origin CEOs and faced numerous delays as SpaceX grew into an industry juggernaut.
SpaceX’s giant, next-generation Starship rocket in development, which New Glenn will also compete with, is expected to further rattle the industry with cheap rides to space and full reusability.
Bezos in late 2023 moved to speed things up at Blue Origin, prioritizing the development of New Glenn and its BE-4 engines. He named Limp, an Amazon veteran, as CEO, who employees say introduced a sense of urgency to compete with SpaceX.
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MUMBAI — Bollywood actor Saif Ali Khan was stabbed repeatedly by an intruder at his home in Mumbai on Thursday, but doctors treating him said he was out of danger after surgery.
Khan, 54, was “on the path to complete recovery” after receiving stab wounds on his spine, neck and hand, the doctors told reporters.
“He sustained a major injury to the thoracic spinal chord due to a lodged knife in the spine. Surgery was performed to remove the knife and also repair the leaking spinal fluid,” said Nitin Dange, one of the doctors operating on Khan.
Khan was attacked just after midnight when he tried to stop the intruder, believed to be a burglar, from entering his apartment in the upscale neighborhood of Bandra, police and local media said.
A female employee at the apartment was also attacked and was being treated, police said.
Among the country’s most bankable stars, Khan, 54, is the son of India’s former cricket captain Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi and actress Sharmila Tagore. He is married to actor Kareena Kapoor, and his daughter from a previous marriage, Sara, is also a Bollywood actor.
Police had identified the perpetrator and had launched a search for him, senior police official Dikshit Gedam told reporters. “The accused attempted to enter through a fire escape. It appears to be a robbery attempt,” he said.
Khan, who has featured in more than 70 films and television series, is a regular on the red carpet. He and Kapoor have two young sons and are one of Bollywood’s most well-known couples.
Khan has acted in several notable films and series, including Sacred Games, Netflix’s first Indian production, which released in 2018.
Film stars and opposition leaders called for police to beef up security measures in the city.
“If such high-profile people with … security can be attacked in their homes, what could happen to common citizens?” Clyde Crasto, spokesperson of the Nationalist Congress Party, asked on X.
India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies won November elections in the western state of Maharashtra, the capital of which is Mumbai.
Actor and filmmaker Pooja Bhatt also called for a greater police presence in the suburb home to many in the film industry.
“The city, and especially the queen of the suburbs, have never felt so unsafe before,” she said on X, using a popular description for the trendy Bandra area.
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BENGALURU — India became the world’s fourth nation on Thursday to achieve the feat of space docking, a technological milestone that underscores its ambitions to expand its share of a rapidly growing $400-billion global space market.
Target and Chaser, two satellites of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) that are each roughly the size of a large refrigerator, successfully latched onto each other Thursday morning, an agency spokesperson said.
The indigenous technology, crucial for satellite servicing, space station operations, and interplanetary missions, positions India for a key role in commercial and exploratory space efforts.
“India has ambitious missions planned and to achieve those, this is an important technology,” astrophysicist Jayant Murthy said.
“Various missions, like building a space station, need assembly in space, which is not possible without space docking.”
ISRO said the two satellites participating in its Space Docking Experiment (SpaDeX), will now be controlled as a single object, with power transfer checks made in the next few days.
The mission had been postponed twice, first because the docking process needed further validation through ground simulations, and then to resolve an issue stemming from excess drift between the satellites.
SpaDeX, launched on Dec. 30 from India’s main spaceport, deployed the satellites in orbit with an Indian-made rocket.
Among 24 payloads and experiments were eight cowpea seeds, sent to space to study plant growth in microgravity conditions, which germinated within four days of the mission’s launch.
Scientists say this is a critical step demonstrating that food can eventually be grown in space during long missions.
The mission also will demonstrate the transfer of electric power between docked spacecraft, key to applications such as in-space robotics, composite spacecraft control and payload operations after undocking.
Such techniques are essential for missions requiring multiple rocket launches.
Space exploration and commercialization is a key part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s efforts to position India as a global superpower.
The successful SpaDeX mission “is a significant stepping stone for India’s ambitious space missions in the years to come,” Modi said on X.
On Thursday, India approved the setting-up of a third launch pad in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, to be completed in four years at a cost of $461 million, giving a further boost to its space plans.
ISRO is focused on deep-space exploration and enabling private companies to commercialize the sector, with projects ranging from solar studies to orbital astronaut missions and planetary defense, in collaboration with NASA.
With the global commercial space market expected to reach $1 trillion by 2030, India aims to grow its share to $44 billion by 2040, up from $8 billion, or a slice of just 2%, now.
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