If you’ve ever had your car start sluggishly, or not at all, on a particularly frigid winter morning, you know standard batteries do not like extreme cold. That’s why NASA researchers are working to develop a battery that could function in the brutal cold of the Moon’s South Pole, where nighttime temperatures plunge to minus 328 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 200 Celsius). 

For future lunar operations, a battery will need to work immediately when warmed up and be able to power everything from an astronaut’s emergency kit to a rover capable of exploring the Moon’s darkest craters — all without posing a fire hazard. 

A team of NASA researchers is working to make all that happen. The project is called Solid Power for Extreme Environment Adaptability and Resilience in Space (SPEARS), and it could provide NASA with an important tool to help power humanity’s sustained presence on the Moon through the Artemis campaign. 

“Batteries have become an important part of our lives here on Earth, which enable our laptops, cell phones, power tools, and even our vehicles,” said Donald Dornbusch, principal investigator for SPEARS at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, where the project is led. “We will need them on the Moon, too, and these batteries will be required to operate reliably and safely in this harsh environment. That’s why we’re working on this technology.” 

Splashy problem, solid solution

Traditional lithium-ion batteries like those in your cell phone and laptop have a critical weakness: they rely on liquid electrolytes. Cool a conventional battery to the Moon’s nighttime temperatures, and that liquid would freeze, potentially damaging the battery. Heat it up too much — say, to daytime lunar temperatures of 212 F (100 C) — and it won’t work until cooled. Expose the liquid to the vacuum of space, and it evaporates. 

SPEARS batteries solve these problems by replacing the liquid electrolyte with a solid ceramic- or polymer-based material. This change could unlock several advantages. First and foremost, they could operate in the heat and extreme cold. 

During recent thermal vacuum testing at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, small prototype battery cells operated well up to 176 F (80 C), down to minus 76 F (minus 60 C), and with slightly reduced performance down to minus 112 F (minus 80 C). 

“We proved for the first time that these cells can work down to minus 80 degrees Celsius,” said Yi Lin, SPEARS testing and research lead at NASA Langley.  

Lin also said he’s confident they can improve performance and maybe even expand that range in coming years. 

The batteries need to remain reliable through exposure to the Moon’s wild temperature swings between day and night. The thermal vacuum testing showed that after exposure to temperature extremes from 212 F (100 C) to minus 274 F (minus 170 C), SPEARS batteries don’t sustain damage.  

Not even solid-state batteries will function while they’re at a temperature as low as minus 274 F, but because solid electrolytes don’t freeze like a liquid, the batteries can survive the extreme low temperatures.  

In order to get the batteries working again after exposure to such cold, small heaters come into play. SPEARS batteries wouldn’t need to be kept warm all the time, just warmed up to operational temperature. That could reduce the need for heavy thermal management systems in spacecraft and lunar habitats, allowing for lighter designs, lower costs, and longer mission durations. 

Power for Moon, Earth

The applications for these solid-state batteries are nearly limitless, from small tools like drills that must operate in shadowed lunar craters, to rovers and emergency power packs for astronauts. They also could provide power solutions for long-duration scientific instruments. 

“We can tune the chemistry by using different electrode materials,” said Lin. “Just like the chemistry in your earbuds is different from the chemistry in your phone, which is different from the chemistry in your car, all these chemistries can still function with a solid electrolyte. We can tune for energy, tune for power, tune for durability, depending on the application.” 

While SPEARS is designed for space, the technology could be spun off into Earth-based applications. In fact, SPEARS evolved out of a previous battery project Lin and Dornbusch worked on that focused on aeronautic applications. 

“The potential market for solid-state batteries is very broad,” said Ji Su, a polymer materials scientist and the task lead at NASA Langley. “Automobiles, cell phones, communication devices, drones — anything that needs a portable power supply.” 

The SPEARS project began in 2026 with funding through the Advanced Research and Technology division within the agency’s Research and Technology Mission Directorate. The project is set to focus on technology development in its first stages before potentially shifting toward commercial collaboration. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley is working to develop flight hardware such as test boards and electronics to help prepare the SPEARS batteries for spaceflight and test them in space environments. 

A Saudi OpenAI engineer has been arrested for allegedly planting a hidden recording device in an executive conference room at the company's San Francisco offices to secretly record sensitive conversations. [...]

When SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket exploded over the Caribbean last year, the internet lit up with videos from airline passengers, island tourists and locals showing flaming debris shooting across the sky. Even some airline pilots recorded the fiery aftermath as planes scrambled to move out of its path.

Some of those videos of Starship’s seventh test flight — including ones taken from Disney and Royal Caribbean cruise ships and a Club Med resort — went on to play a role in the company’s efforts to count and track pieces of debris after the explosion, a report obtained by ProPublica says.

The report — obtained by ProPublica from the Federal Aviation Administration through a freedom of information request — shows video captured a fireball, then a shower of sparkling debris in the sky moments after the explosion. It includes maps pinpointing where the images were shot, which helped the company understand how debris tumbled to earth after the blast.

“At 1 minute 42 seconds, the debris cloud is observed transiting behind the cruise ship,” says the report, which SpaceX provided the FAA two weeks after the so-called mishap.

Such reports are required by federal rules in the days after a rocket failure and are supposed to describe what happened and where hazardous debris landed. The information is key for the FAA’s efforts to keep busy air traffic corridors safe at a time of rapid growth in the commercial space industry as companies like SpaceX develop and test rockets that they hope will eventually reach the moon and Mars.

During launches, the FAA preventively closes airspace. It has also been forced to clear areas quickly after test flights of massive spacecraft went wrong.

Starship flights 7 and 8 broke apart last year and scattered debris above airline traffic over the Caribbean. Before Flight 9, the FAA moved to greatly increase the size of the airspace it walled off pre-launch.

The agency defined its no-fly zones, which are closed to airplane traffic during a launch, and its so-called debris response areas, which are closed after a mishap, using information from SpaceX and modeling from Space Force, the branch of the military that deals with the nation’s space interests, to predict where debris might fall.

Nearly doubling those pre-launch no-fly zones “only makes sense if the prior margin was judged inadequate rather than just unlucky,” said Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

Earlier this year, the FAA issued a warning that rocket launches could “significantly reduce safety” for airplanes, after ProPublica reported that 21 planes appeared to make sudden turns to exit or avoid an FAA-designated emergency no-fly zone in the minutes after the Flight 7 explosion. Such disruptions are likely to become more frequent. SpaceX is seeking to launch Starship up to 76 times a year from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The FAA provided ProPublica the reports on Starship flights 7, 8 and 9 — all of which involved mishaps — after we requested them under the Freedom of Information Act. The FAA redacted the vast majority of all three reports, citing, among other things, exemptions in the law that protect confidential business information from disclosure. The blackouts were, in part, a reflection of SpaceX’s objections; FAA allowed the company to challenge the release of information it deemed proprietary.

The FAA refused to release information that would show SpaceX’s estimates of where debris fell during the three rocket failures. It’s unclear what the agency or the company knows about how close any airplanes came to falling debris.

“Withholding the underlying debris estimates makes it impossible for anyone outside SpaceX and FAA to check whether that pattern is improving or repeating,” Jah said. “Given a regulator already revised its own safety margins once, the public has a real interest in seeing the data behind both the old margin and the new one.”

The unredacted part of the report did not show whether the debris from the Flight 7 explosion fell where SpaceX and the FAA expected it to. But the references to Disney and Club Med guests’ video suggest SpaceX did not have a full picture of where the debris landed without them. “I would read it as evidence their own tracking did not carry cleanly through the debris cloud phase, so they used the public to fill the gap,” Jah said.

SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment. The company has said that it learns from its mistakes and that each test improves Starship’s reliability. Last December, it said on X that “SpaceX is committed to responsibly using airspace during launches and reentries, prioritizing public safety to protect people on the ground, at sea, and in the air.”

The FAA did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Disney, Royal Caribbean or Club Med.

Ron Madler, a professor of aerospace engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, said the videos could help SpaceX “either confirm their breakup models or possibly to improve them.”

The mishap report for Flight 8, which rained debris near the Bahamas, said before that flight’s explosive failure, SpaceX did not have the proper “test stand” that was capable of testing the rocket’s engines “for a full Starship mission.” The remainder of the page was blacked out, so it was unclear from the report whether the company had found another way to fully test the engines before launch. 

Flights 7 and 8 both involved the same model. Both ended in engine-related failures.

Text in the report around the statement about the test stand was redacted. But Jah said it “means some part of the engine’s actual flight behavior was being verified for the first time in flight rather than on the ground.”

John Crassidis, an aerospace engineering professor at the University at Buffalo, said launching before having a fully capable test stand was likely “a cost-saving decision.” In building rockets, he said, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has used both the old approach of launching and then fixing any issues that arise, and the newer approach of running simulations and ground tests first to head off problems.

“Doing too much of the old school can lead to too many mishaps and cost overruns,” he said. “Doing too much of the new school leads to long times to get things done and a reduction in flexibility.”

The post Club Med, a Disney Cruise and an Exploding Starship: SpaceX Used Bystander Videos to Track Falling Debris appeared first on ProPublica.

La guerra in Ucraina non si combatte solo sul terreno, nel mare o nello spazio aereo. Il cyberspazio è uno degli scenari più attivi, dove vengono perpetrati quotidianamente decine di attacchi mirati alle infrastrutture civili e militari. Il continuo bersagliamento di infrastrutture energetiche, reti di comunicazione e servizi pubblici ha praticamente trasformato l’intero Paese in […]

L'articolo La guerra ucraina cambia la sicurezza delle infrastrutture critiche proviene da Securityinfo.it.