Dawn Aerospace CEO Stefan Powell announced today that the company’s Mk-II Aurora spaceplane has received approval from the Civil Aviation Authority of New Zealand for rocket-powered flight. The company is now ready to test the vehicle’s rocket engines with flights beginning next month.
The Mk-II Aurora is a remotely piloted spaceplane that could eventually take two trips into space every day. During testing, the Mk-II will host research projects and collect scientific data with its onboard 3U payload capacity (i.e. 30 cubic centimeters in size) while serving as a proof of concept for a later model—the Mk-III—that could deliver 550-pound (250-kilogram) satellites into orbit with the help of a second stage rocket (the concept is somewhat similar to how Virgin Orbit uses piloted aircraft to deploy its LauncherOne rocket).
With approval from New Zealand’s Civil Aviation Authority, Dawn Aerospace is readying to begin rocket-powered flight tests of the Mk-II Aurora beginning in just a few weeks. The company has already fired the Aurora’s rocket engine—112 times according to Powell in a press release—but never has it conducted a flight test with the engine, opting to flight test 48 times with jet engines instead.
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tests of the Mk-II Aurora will follow a “build-up approach,” as previous testing has, in which the plane will reach “modest” altitudes and speeds to demonstrate that rocket-powered flight is just as viable as commercial aircraft.
The Mk-II Aurora.
Photo: Dawn Aerospace
The altitude the Aurora will reach in these upcoming tests isn’t necessarily modest, as company plans to reach the internationally recognized boundary of space, better known as the Karman line. As SatNews reported last September, Dawn Aerospace is gearing up for Phase 2 of testing the Aurora, which according to its company’s website, will see the company push Aurora to higher and higher altitudes over a series of tests until it crosses the Karman line, which is about 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the Earth’s surface.
GitHub has rotated its private SSH key for GitHub.com after the secret was was accidentally published in a public GitHub repository.
The software development and version control service says, the private RSA key was only “briefly” exposed, but that it took action out of “an abundance of caution.”
Unclear window of exposure
In a succinct blog post published today, GitHub acknowledged discovering this week that the RSA SSH private key for GitHub.com had been ephemerally exposed in a public GitHub repository.
“We immediately acted to contain the exposure and began investigating to understand the root cause and impact,” writes Mike Hanley, GitHub’s Chief Security Officer and SVP of Engineering.
“We have now completed the key replacement, and users will see the change propagate over the next thirty minutes. Some users may have noticed that the new key was briefly present beginning around 02:30 UTC during preparations for this change.”
GitHub.com’s latest public key fingerprints are shown below. These can be used to validate that your SSH connection to GitHub’s servers is indeed secure.
As some may notice, only GitHub.com’s RSA SSH key has been impacted and replaced. No change is required for ECDSA or Ed25519 users.
“Please note that this issue was not the result of a compromise of any GitHub systems or customer information,” says GitHub.
“Instead, the exposure was the result of what we believe to be an inadvertent publishing of private information.”
The blog post, however, does not answer when exactly was the key exposed, and for how long, making the timeline of exposure a bit murky. Such timestamps can typically be ascertained from security logs—should these be available, and Git commit history.
To better cope with threats emanating from Russia, the countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden have created a unified Nordic air defense alliance, pooling the resources of their air forces. They have upwards of 300 fighter jets between them as well as training, transport and surveillance fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters.
Those four nations on Friday announced they signed the first Nordic Air Commanders’ Intent last week during a meeting at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.
“The declaration of intent strengthens Nordic cooperation and paves the way for further strengthening of the Nordic air forces,” the four nations said Friday in a joint statement. “The ultimate goal is to be able to operate seamlessly together as one force by developing a Nordic concept for joint air operations based on already-known NATO methodology.”
integrated command and control, operational planning and execution
flexible and resilient deployment of our air forces
joint airspace surveillance
joint education, training and exercises.
The publicly released plan does not provide specific timelines for achieving any of the goals. However, a separate jointly released document gives an overview.
Finnish Air Force F-18 Hornet. (Finnish Air Force photo)
“In the medium term, efforts shall revolve around preparing for, conducting, and assessing Nordic Response 24 from an air perspective, putting emphasis on the Nordic digital and semi-distributed [Air Operations Center] AOC development steps,” according to that document. “On the horizon, long-term permanent solutions to fulfill this intent’s aim shall be determined and established.”
While none of the documents mention Russia, the move to integrate the air forces was triggered by Moscow’s full-on invasion of Ukraine, the commander of the Danish Air Force, Major General Jan Dam, told Reuters.
“Our combined fleet can be compared to a large European country,” Dam said.
Finland has more than 60 Hornets. (Finnish Air Force photo)
Finnish Defense Minister Antti Kaikkonen on Thursday expressed his opposition to a request by Ukraine for a portion of his country’s Hornet fleet.
“My view as Finland’s defense minister is that we need these Hornets to secure our own country,” Kaikkonen told a news conference in Helsinki, as reported by Reuters. “I view negatively the idea that they would be donated during the next few years. And if we look even further, my understanding is that they begin to be worn out and will have little use value left, he added.”
Denmark has 58 F-16s and 27 F-35s on order, according to Reuters.
Danish F-16 taxiing ready for a training mission alongside Allies in the Baltic Sea region, helping improve tactics and readiness. (Danish Air Force photo).
Sweden has around 70 JAS-39C/D Gripen jets and will be converting over to the enhanced Gipen-E in the coming years.
Swedish JAS-38 Gripen jets. (Swedish Air Force photo)
How soon this gets off the ground and exactly how it will works remains to be seen. And while all four nations have agreed to work within NATO frameworks, Finland and Sweden have yet to gain membership.
Computer scientists found the holy grail of tiles. They call it the “einstein,” one shape that alone can cover a plane without ever repeating a pattern.
And all it takes for this special shape is 13 sides.
In the world of mathematics, an “aperiodic monotile”—also known as an einstein based off a German phrase for one stone—is a shape that can tile a plane, but never repeat.
“In this paper we present the first true aperiodic monotile, a shape that forces aperiodicity through geometry alone, with no additional constrains applied via matching conditions,” writes Craig Kaplan, a computer science professor from the University of Waterloo and one of the four authors of the paper. “We prove that this shape, a polykite that we call ‘the hat,’ must assemble into tilings based on a substitution system.”
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The history of the aperiodic tile has never had a breakthrough like this one. The first aperiodic sets had over 20,000 tiles, Kaplan tweets. “Subsequent research lowered that number, to sets of size 92, then six, and then two in the form of the famous Penrose tiles.” But those Penrose tiles were from 1974.
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The team proved the nature of the shape through computer coding, and in a fascinating aside, the shape doesn’t lose its aperiodic nature even when the length of sides changes.
