Enlarge / Ed Dwight stands in front of an F-104 jet fighter in 1963. (credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

Welcome to Edition 6.38 of the Rocket Report! Ed Dwight was close to joining NASA's astronaut corps more than 60 years ago. With an aeronautical engineering degree and experience as an Air Force test pilot, Dwight met the qualifications to become an astronaut. He was one of 26 test pilots the Air Force recommended to NASA for the third class of astronauts in 1963, but he wasn't selected. Now, the man who would have become the first Black astronaut will finally get a chance to fly to space.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Ed Dwight named to Blue Origin's next human flight. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space company, announced Thursday that 90-year-old Ed Dwight, who almost became the first Black astronaut in 1963, will be one of six people to fly to suborbital space on the company's next New Shepard flight. Dwight, a retired Air Force captain, piloted military fighter jets and graduated test pilot school, following a familiar career track as many of the early astronauts. He was on a short list of astronaut candidates the Air Force provided NASA, but the space agency didn't include him. It took 20 more years for the first Black American to fly to space. Dwight's ticket with Blue Origin is sponsored by Space for Humanity, a nonprofit that seeks to expand access to space for all people. Five paying passengers will join Dwight for the roughly 10-minute up-and-down flight to the edge of space over West Texas. Kudos to Space for Humanity and Blue Origin for making this happen.

Enlarge / Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) and Roscosmos Space Corporation Chief Yuri Borisov peruse an exhibit while visiting the Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation Energia, October 26, 2023, in Korolev, Russia. (credit: Contributor/Getty Images)

It has been a terrible decade for the Russian launch industry, which once led the world. The country's long-running workhorse, the Proton rocket, ran into reliability issues and will soon be retired. Russia's next-generation rocket, Angara, is fully expendable and still flying dummy payloads on test flights a decade after its debut. And the ever-reliable Soyuz vehicle lost access to lucrative Western markets after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Yet there has been a more fundamental, underlying disease pushing the once-vaunted Russian launch industry toward irrelevance. The country has largely relied on decades-old technology in a time of serious innovation within the launch industry. So what worked at the turn of the century to attract the launches of commercial satellites no longer does against the rising tide of competition from SpaceX, as well as other players in India and China.

Through the first quarter of this year, Russia has launched a total of five rockets, all variants of the Soyuz vehicle. SpaceX alone has launched 32 rockets. China, too, has launched nearly three times as many boosters as Russia.

Enlarge / A Cold War-era arcade cabinet that serves as an example of what happened the last time Russia was forced to create a home-grown video game market. (credit: Arcade Blogger)

It's been over two years since major players in the international game industry united to largely cut off the Russian market in response to a request from a beleaguered Ukraine. The relative isolation has apparently forced Vladimir Putin's government to contemplate the kind of homegrown gaming hardware and software that characterized Cold War gaming behind the Iron Curtain.

PC Gamer brings word of a series of recently approved Russian economic orders from the Kremlin. Amid talk of airport and museum funding, ocean shipping, and road construction is the somewhat bewildering instruction for the government to (machine translation):

consider the issue of organizing the production of stationary and portable game consoles and game consoles, as well as the creation of an operating system and a cloud system for delivering games and programs to users

Oh, is that all?

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Researchers have unearthed never-before-seen wiper malware tied to the Kremlin and an operation two years ago that took out more than 10,000 satellite modems located mainly in Ukraine on the eve of Russia’s invasion of its neighboring country.

AcidPour, as researchers from security firm Sentinel One have named the new malware, has stark similarities to AcidRain, a wiper discovered in March 2022 that Viasat has confirmed was used in the attack on its modems earlier that month. Wipers are malicious applications designed to destroy stored data or render devices inoperable. Viasat said AcidRain was installed on more than 10,000 Eutelsat KA-SAT modems used by the broadband provider seven days prior to the March 2022 discovery of the wiper. AcidRain was installed on the devices after attackers gained access to the company’s private network.

Sentinel One, which also discovered AcidRain, said at the time that the earlier wiper had enough technical overlaps with malware the US government attributed to the Russian government in 2018 to make it likely that AcidRain and the 2018 malware, known as VPNFilter, were closely linked to the same team of developers. In turn, Sentinel One’s report Thursday noting the similarities between AcidRain and AcidPour provides evidence that AcidPour was also created by developers working on behalf of the Kremlin.

Enlarge / Apollo commander Tom Stafford (left) with Soyuz commander Alexei Leonov during the Apollo-Soyuz mission in July 1975. (credit: NASA)

Former NASA astronaut Thomas Stafford, a three-star Air Force general known for a historic handshake in space with a Soviet cosmonaut nearly 50 years ago, died Monday in Florida. He was 93.

Stafford was perhaps the most accomplished astronaut of his era who never walked on the Moon. He flew in space four times, helping pilot the first rendezvous with another crewed spacecraft in orbit in 1966 and taking NASA's Apollo lunar landing craft on a final test run before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon in 1969.

By his own account, one of the greatest moments in Stafford's career came in 1975, when he commanded the final Apollo mission—not to the Moon but to low-Earth orbit—and linked up with a Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying two Soviet cosmonauts. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) planted the seeds for a decades-long partnership in space between the United States and Russia, culminating in the International Space Station, where US and Russian crews still work together despite a collapse in relations back on Earth.

Enlarge / A Starlink terminal used by the Ukraine army for drone operations in May 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Pacific Press )

Democratic lawmakers are probing SpaceX over Russia's reported use of Starlink in Ukraine, saying that recent developments raise questions about SpaceX's "compliance with US sanctions and export controls."

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk last month denied what he called "false news reports [that] claim that SpaceX is selling Starlink terminals to Russia," saying that, "to the best of our knowledge, no Starlinks have been sold directly or indirectly to Russia." But Musk's statement didn't satisfy US Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), who sent a letter to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell yesterday.

"Starlink is an invaluable resource for Ukrainians in their fight against Russia's brutal and illegitimate invasion. It is alarming that Russia may be obtaining and using your technology to coordinate attacks against Ukrainian troops in illegally occupied regions in Eastern and Southern Ukraine, potentially in violation of US sanctions and export controls," Raskin and Garcia wrote.

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More than 1,000 Ubiquiti routers in homes and small businesses were infected with malware used by Russian-backed agents to coordinate them into a botnet for crime and spy operations, according to the Justice Department.

That malware, which worked as a botnet for the Russian hacking group Fancy Bear, was removed in January 2024 under a secret court order as part of "Operation Dying Ember," according to the FBI's director. It affected routers running Ubiquiti's EdgeOS, but only those that had not changed their default administrative password. Access to the routers allowed the hacking group to "conceal and otherwise enable a variety of crimes," the DOJ claims, including spearphishing and credential harvesting in the US and abroad.

Unlike previous attacks by Fancy Bear—that the DOJ ties to GRU Military Unit 26165, which is also known as APT 28, Sofacy Group, and Sednit, among other monikers—the Ubiquiti intrusion relied on a known malware, Moobot. Once infected by "Non-GRU cybercriminals," GRU agents installed "bespoke scripts and files" to connect and repurpose the devices, according to the DOJ.

Enlarge / The upper stage for the first Ariane 6 flight vehicle is seen inside its factory in Bremen, Germany. The upper stage's hydrogen-fueled Vinci engine is visible in this image. (credit: ESA – M. Pédoussaut)

Welcome to Edition 6.31 of the Rocket Report! Photographers at Cape Canaveral, Florida, noticed a change to the spaceport's skyline this week. Blue Origin has erected a full-size simulator of its New Glenn rocket vertically on its launch pad for a series of fit checks and tests. Late last year, we reported Blue Origin was serious about getting the oft-delayed New Glenn rocket off the ground by the end of 2024. This is a good sign of progress toward that goal, but there's a long, long way to go. It was fun to watch preparations for the inaugural flights of a few other heavy-lift rockets in the last couple of years (Starship, SLS, and Vulcan). This year, it's New Glenn.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Russia launches a classified satellite. On February 9, Russia launched its first orbital mission of the year with the liftoff of a Soyuz-2-1v rocket from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in the far north of the country. The two-stage rocket delivered a classified satellite into orbit for the Russian military, Anatoly Zak of RussianSpaceWeb.com reports. In keeping with the Russian military's naming convention, the satellite is known simply as Kosmos 2575, and there's little indication about what it will do in space, except for one key fact.

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A core developer of Nginx, currently the world's most popular web server, has quit the project, stating that he no longer sees it as "a free and open source project… for the public good." His fork, freenginx, is "going to be run by developers, and not corporate entities," writes Maxim Dounin, and will be "free from arbitrary corporate actions."

Dounin is one of the earliest and still most active coders on the open source Nginx project and one of the first employees of Nginx, Inc., a company created in 2011 to commercially support the steadily growing web server. Nginx is now used on roughly one-third of the world's web servers, ahead of Apache.

A tricky history of creation and ownership

Nginx Inc. was acquired by Seattle-based networking firm F5 in 2019. Later that year, two of Nginx's leaders, Maxim Konovalov and Igor Sysoev, were detained and interrogated in their homes by armed Russian state agents. Sysoev's former employer, Internet firm Rambler, claimed that it owned the rights to Nginx's source code, as it was developed during Sysoev's tenure at Rambler (where Dounin also worked). While the criminal charges and rights do not appear to have materialized, the implications of a Russian company's intrusion into a popular open source piece of the web's infrastructure caused some alarm.

Enlarge / President Vladimir Putin visiting the Rocket and Space Corporation (RSC) Energia in Korolyov, outside Moscow, on October 26, 2023. (credit: GRIGORY SYSOYEV/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

When you think about the prospect of Russia putting nukes in space, you can understand why some people might fill in the blanks and envision a surprise apocalyptic bombardment from orbit.

That is the nightmarish prophecy members of Congress tried to extinguish Wednesday after news leaked that US intelligence officials obtained information about Russian preparations for warfare on the high frontier.

It all began with a cryptic statement Wednesday morning from Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Turner referenced intelligence information that the committee would begin sharing with all members of Congress about a "serious national security threat."

Enlarge / Building of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (France). (credit: SilvanBachmann | iStock / Getty Images Plus)

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that weakening end-to-end encryption disproportionately risks undermining human rights. The international court's decision could potentially disrupt the European Commission's proposed plans to require email and messaging service providers to create backdoors that would allow law enforcement to easily decrypt users' messages.

This ruling came after Russia's intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service (FSS), began requiring Telegram to share users' encrypted messages to deter "terrorism-related activities" in 2017, ECHR's ruling said. A Russian Telegram user alleged that FSS's requirement violated his rights to a private life and private communications, as well as all Telegram users' rights.

The Telegram user was apparently disturbed, moving to block required disclosures after Telegram refused to comply with an FSS order to decrypt messages on six users suspected of terrorism. According to Telegram, "it was technically impossible to provide the authorities with encryption keys associated with specific users," and therefore, "any disclosure of encryption keys" would affect the "privacy of the correspondence of all Telegram users," the ECHR's ruling said.

Enlarge / Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence unit made its claim following multiple reports in recent days that Russian forces are using Starlink’s distinctive square-shaped terminals. (credit: Pierre Crom/Getty Images)

Russian forces are using Starlink terminals on the front line in Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian military, which said the adoption of Elon Musk’s satellite Internet service by Moscow’s troops was becoming “systemic.”

Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence unit said on Telegram on Sunday that radio intercepts confirmed the use of Starlink terminals by Russian units operating in the occupied Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.

“Yes, there have been recorded cases of the Russian occupiers using these devices,” Andriy Yusov, a GUR officer, told RBC-Ukraine. “This is starting to take on a systemic nature.”

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Russia-state hackers exploited a weak password to compromise Microsoft’s corporate network and accessed emails and documents that belonged to senior executives and employees working in security and legal teams, Microsoft said late Friday.

The attack, which Microsoft attributed to a Kremlin-backed hacking group it tracks as Midnight Blizzard, is at least the second time in as many years that failures to follow basic security hygiene have resulted in a breach that has the potential to harm customers. One paragraph in Friday’s disclosure, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, was gobsmacking:

Beginning in late November 2023, the threat actor used a password spray attack to compromise a legacy non-production test tenant account and gain a foothold, and then used the account’s permissions to access a very small percentage of Microsoft corporate email accounts, including members of our senior leadership team and employees in our cybersecurity, legal, and other functions, and exfiltrated some emails and attached documents. The investigation indicates they were initially targeting email accounts for information related to Midnight Blizzard itself. We are in the process of notifying employees whose email was accessed.

Microsoft didn’t detect the breach until January 12, exactly a week before Friday’s disclosure. Microsoft's description of the incident raises the prospect that the Russian hackers had uninterrupted access to the accounts for as long as two months.

Enlarge / A service center for "Kyivstar", a Ukrainian telecommunications company, that provides communication services and data transmission based on a broad range of fixed and mobile technologies. (credit: Getty Images)

Ukrainian civilians on Wednesday grappled for a second day of widespread cellular phone and Internet outages after a cyberattack, purportedly carried out by Kremlin-supported hackers, hit the country’s biggest mobile phone and Internet provider a day earlier.

Two separate hacking groups with ties to the Russian government took responsibility for Tuesday’s attack striking Kyivstar, which has said it serves 24.3 million mobile subscribers and more than 1.1 million home Internet users. One group, calling itself Killnet, said on Telegram that “an attack was carried out on Ukrainian mobile operators, as well as on some banks,” but didn’t elaborate or provide any evidence. A separate group known as Solntsepek said on the same site that it took “full responsibility for the cyberattack on Kyivstar” and had “destroyed 10,000 computers, more than 4,000 servers, and all cloud storage and backup systems.” The post was accompanied by screenshots purporting to show someone with control over the Kyivstar systems.

In the city of Lviv, street lights remained on after sunrise and had to be disconnected manually, because Internet-dependent automated power switches didn’t work, according to NBC News. Additionally, the outage prevented shops throughout the country from processing credit payments and many ATMs from functioning, the Kyiv Post said.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A group of Russian-state hackers known for almost exclusively targeting Ukrainian entities has branched out in recent months, either accidentally or purposely, by allowing USB-based espionage malware to infect a variety of organizations in other countries.

The group—known by many names, including Gamaredon, Primitive Bear, ACTINIUM, Armageddon, and Shuckworm—has been active since at least 2014 and has been attributed to Russia’s Federal Security Service by the Security Service of Ukraine. Most Kremlin-backed groups take pains to fly under the radar; Gamaredon doesn't care to. Its espionage-motivated campaigns targeting large numbers of Ukrainian organizations are easy to detect and tie back to the Russian government. The campaigns typically revolve around malware that aims to obtain as much information from targets as possible.

One of those tools is a computer worm designed to spread from computer to computer through USB drives. Tracked by researchers from Check Point Research as LitterDrifter, the malware is written in the Visual Basic Scripting language. LitterDrifter serves two purposes: to promiscuously spread from USB drive to USB drive and to permanently infect the devices that connect to such drives with malware that permanently communicates with Gamaredon-operated command-and-control servers.

Enlarge / Russia President Vladimir Putin and Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin shake hands during a meeting at the Konstantin Palace. (credit: Mikhail MetzelTASS via Getty Images)

It was always abundantly clear that the leader of the Russian space corporation Roscosmos from 2018 to 2022, Dmitry Rogozin, sought to kowtow to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now we have an anecdote from Putin himself that highlights how much.

The story concerns a satellite constellation now known as Sfera (or Sphere, in English), a modestly ambitious constellation of 264 satellites. The Sphere constellation is intended to provide broadband Internet service from middle-Earth orbit to Russia and high-resolution Earth observation satellites.

As is usual with Russian space projects, because they tend to be poorly funded, the timeline for Sphere's deployment has been delayed and its scope reduced. It also underwent an unscheduled name change. Before 2018, this satellite program was known as Ehfir (Ether), a reference to the invisible substance once thought to fill the universe and the medium through which light waves propagated.

Enlarge / A press photo of the Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPU. (credit: Nvidia)

On Tuesday, chip designer Nvidia announced in an SEC filing that new US export restrictions on its high-end AI GPU chips to China are now in effect sooner than expected, according to a report from Reuters. The curbs were initially scheduled to take effect 30 days after their announcement on October 17 and are designed to prevent China, Iran, and Russia from acquiring advanced AI chips.

The banned chips are advanced graphics processing units (GPUs) that are commonly used for training and running deep learning AI applications similar to ChatGPT and AI image generators, among other uses. GPUs are well-suited for neural networks because their massively parallel architecture performs the necessary matrix multiplications involved in running neural networks faster than conventional processors.

The Biden administration initially announced an advanced AI chip export ban in September 2022, and in reaction, Nvidia designed and released new chips, the A800 and H800, to comply with those export rules for the Chinese market. In November 2022, Nvidia told The Verge that the A800 "meets the US Government’s clear test for reduced export control and cannot be programmed to exceed it." However, the new curbs enacted Monday specifically halt the exports of these modified Nvidia AI chips. The Nvidia A100, H100, and L40S chips are also included in the export restrictions.

Enlarge / Russia's Nauka module is seen attached to the International Space Station. (credit: Roscosmos)

NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli looked out of the large windows on the International Space Station on Monday afternoon and saw that it was snowing in space.

Well, not really snowing. But there were flakes flying by that looked a lot like flurries. They emanated from one of two radiators that service the "Nauka" science module attached to the Russian segment of the space station. The flakes were frozen coolant, and as a protective measure, she and other crew members on the orbiting laboratory closed the shutters on the US segment windows.

Moghbeli and the other crew members were never in any real danger from the radiator leak, but the problem does raise serious concerns about the viability of Russian hardware in space. That is because this is the third such leak that has occurred with Russian equipment in less than a year.

Enlarge / Russia outlined a plan for future spaceflight activities this week. (credit: IAC/Roscosmos)

The leader of Russia's space corporation, Yuri Borisov, discussed his country's future ambitions in space on Tuesday at the International Astronautical Congress. He spoke expansively about Russia's plans to build a new space station in low-Earth orbit, the Russian Orbital Station, as well as other initiatives.

"We are expecting to design, manufacture, and launch several modules by 2027," Borisov said via a translator at the conference, which is being held in Baku, Azerbaijan, this year. The conference's plenary sessions are being livestreamed on YouTube.

This space station will reside in a polar orbit, Borisov added, allowing it to observe the entire planet's surface. Its purpose will be to test new materials, new technologies, and new medicines. “It will be like a permanently functioning laboratory,” he said.