On the heels of OpenAI announcing the latest iteration of its GPT large language model, its biggest rival in generative AI in the U.S. announced an expansion of its own. Anthropic said Monday that Claude, its AI assistant, is now live in Europe with support for “multiple languages,” including French, German, Italian and Spanish across […]
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NASA is kicking off a formal environmental assessment of its facilities on Wallops Island, Virginia, to increase the number of authorized rocket launches at the site by almost 200%, according to slides and recordings of an April 29 internal meeting viewed by TechCrunch.
The proposed changes could help ease congestion at the country’s other spaceports, which have felt the strain of a rapid increase in launch capacity due primarily to SpaceX. That strain is projected to only worsen as companies including Rocket Lab, Relativity, Blue Origin and others aim to bring new rockets online in the next few years.
Wallops expansion has likely been on the minds of NASA officials for some time. After Rocket Lab conducted its first Electron launch from there in 2022, agency officials told the media that interest from private companies looking to launch from the site was “high.” And while these plans would eventually be made public as part of the EA process, this is the first time the scale of the proposed changes has been published.
The Wallops Island Southern Expansion Environmental Assessment (WISE EA), as the agency calls the undertaking, will study the potential consequences of a massive increase in annual launches from 18 to 52. The study will also consider other critical changes to the site, like water barge landings of rockets’ first stages and on-site storage of liquid methane, a novel rocket fuel. To fully understand the affects of these changes, NASA will be working with contractors who will conduct acoustic analyses, and look at air emissions impacts and impacts to marine and local wildlife.
The analysis will also consider the construction of up to four new launch pads and the installation of a suborbital launcher conducting up to 30 firings per year.
The increase in launches and new fuel mixes allowed are particularly notable. Today, of the 18 annual launches authorized at WFF, only six can involve liquid-fueled rockets, with the other 12 being solid-propellant rockets. The engines that power Electron, Rocket Lab’s launcher that flies out of Wallops, use a combination of liquid oxygen and RP-1, a highly-refined kerosene.
The new analysis would authorize 52 launches per year and allow a fuel mix that also includes methalox, a rocket fuel composed of liquid oxygen and liquid methane. Methalox has become the propellant system of choice for next-gen rockets including SpaceX’s Starship, Rocket Lab’s Neutron, Relativity Space’s Terran R and Blue Origin’s New Glenn.
A slide showing proposed changes. Image Credits:
One driver of the proposed expansion is the increased launch cadence from these companies. (While Relativity has not publicly disclosed any plans to launch from Wallops, the company, along with Rocket Lab, were listed as the two “participating agencies”.)
The Wallops site has become particularly important to Rocket Lab’s plans to bring Neutron to market by the end of this year. In 2022, the company announced it had selected WFF as the future home for Neutron’s first launch pad and production facility, effectively staking a claim in the future of the island. Rocket Lab’s recovery plans for Neutron also include the booster landing on downrange, on a barge at sea.
One of the slides in Miller’s presentation shows a launch forecast for WFF through 2032. It is unclear whether the data on the slide was provided by private companies or whether it’s from NASA’s internal estimates, and NASA did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment, but it charts around five annual Neutron flights per year through 2030. It also charts about five launches of Firefly and Northrop’s MLV by that date.
Image Credits: TechCrunch
Environmental assessments are essential: they ensure NASA and its commercial partners are following environmental regulations related to air emissions, acoustic impacts, and affects on local wildlife. They also provide a critical venue for input from stakeholders, including the public. Having an environmental assessment in place is vital for companies like Rocket Lab, as well as Firefly Space and Northrop Grumman, which are together developing a medium launch vehicle.
NASA completed a programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS) for the Wallops site in 2019, but as agency official Shari Miller said during the call, the anticipated growth of activity on the island “exceeds the numbers that were analyzed” for that document. Some proposed actions weren’t discussed at all in the 2019 document, like a water barge landing of a rocket. Miller said NASA is simultaneously undertaking what’s known as a “written re-evaluation” of the 2019 assessment to understand if additional environmental assessments is needed to allow for the storage of liquid methane and to authorize static fire tests of methalox engines at WFF. That would authorize those actions for two years, and importantly, act as a sort of temporary measure to facilitate Rocket Lab’s rollout of Neutron. The full WISE EA would extend for a full ten years.
Because of the scope of the various environmental assessments, the full EA process is projected to take around eighteen months, per one slide, with the final document published in December 2025.
Pour one out for CodeWhisperer, Amazon’s AI-powered assistive coding tool. As of today, it’s kaput — sort of.
CodeWhisperer is now Q Developer, a part of Amazon’s Q family of business-oriented generative AI chatbots that also extends to the newly-announced Q Business. Available through AWS, Q Developer helps with some of the tasks developers do in the course of their daily work, like debugging and upgrading apps, troubleshooting, and performing security scans — much like CodeWhisperer did.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Doug Seven, GM and director of AI developer experiences at AWS, implied that CodeWhisperer was a bit of a branding fail. Third-party metrics reflect as much; even with a free tier, CodeWhisperer struggled to match the momentum of chief rival GitHub Copilot, which has over 1.8 million paying individual users and tens of thousands of corporate customers. (Poor early impressions surely didn’t help.)
“CodeWhisperer is where we got started [with code generation], but we really wanted to have a brand — and name — that fit a wider set of use cases,” Seven said. “You can think of Q Developer as the evolution of CodeWhisperer into something that’s much more broad.”
To that end, Q Developer can generate code including SQL, a programming language commonly used to create and manage databases, as well as test that code and assist with transforming and implementing new code ideated from developer queries.
Similar to Copilot, customers can fine-tune Q Developer on their internal codebases to improve the relevancy of the tool’s programming recommendations. (The now-deprecated CodeWhisperer offered this option, too.) And, thanks to a capability called Agents, Q Developer can autonomously perform things like implementing features and documenting and refactoring (i.e. restructuring) code.
Ask a request of Q Developer like “create an ‘add to favorites’ button in my app,” and Q Developer will analyze the app code, generate new code if necessary, create a step-by-step plan, and complete tests of the code before executing the proposed changes. Developers can review and iterate the plan before Q implements it, connecting steps together and applying updates across the necessary files, code blocks and test suites.
“What happens behind the scenes is, Q Developer actually spins up a development environment to work on the code,” Seven said. “So, in the case of feature development, Q Developer takes the entire code repository, creates a branch of that repository, analyzes the repository, does the work that it’s been asked to do and returns those code changes to the developer.”
Image Credits: Amazon
Agents can also automate and manage code upgrading processes, Amazon says, with Java conversions live today (specifically Java 8 and 11 built using Apache Maven to Java version 17) and .NET conversions coming soon. “Q Developer analyzes the code — looking for anything that needs to be upgraded — and makes all those changes before returning it to the developer to review and commit themselves,” Seven added.
To me, Agents sounds a lot like GitHub’s Copilot Workspace, which similarly generates and implements plans for bug fixes and new features in software. And — as with Workspace — I’m not entirely convinced that this more autonomous approach can solve the issues surrounding AI-powered coding assistants.
An analysis of over 150 million lines of code committed to project repos over the past several years by GitClear found that Copilot was resulting in more mistaken code being pushed to codebases. Elsewhere, security researchers have warned that Copilot and similar tools can amplify existing bugs and security issues in software projects.
This isn’t surprising. AI-powered coding assistants seem impressive. But they’re trained on existing code, and their suggestions reflect patterns in other programmers’ work — work that can be seriously flawed. Assistants’ guesses create bugs that are often difficult to spot, especially when developers — who are adopting AI coding assistants in great numbers — defer to the assistants’ judgement.
In less risky territory beyond coding, Q Developer can help manage a company’s cloud infrastructure on AWS — or at least get them the info they need to do the managing themselves.
Q Developer can fulfill requests like “List all of my Lambda functions” and “list my resources residing in other AWS regions.” Currently in preview, the bot can also generate (but not execute) AWS Command Line Interface commands and answer AWS cost-related questions such as “What were the top three highest-cost services in Q1?”
Image Credits: Amazon
So how much do these generative AI conveniences cost?
Q Developer is available for free in the AWS Console, Slack and IDEs such as Visual Studio Code, GitLab Duo and JetBrains — but with limitations. The free version doesn’t allow fine-tuning to custom libraries, packages and APIs, and opts users into a data collection scheme by default. It also imposes monthly caps, including a maximum of 5 Agents tasks (e.g. implementing a feature) per month and 25 queries about AWS account resources per month. (It’s baffling to me that Amazon would impose a cap on questions one can ask about its own services, but here we are.)
The premium version of Q Developer, Q Developer Pro, costs $19 per month per user and adds higher usage limits, tools to manage users and policies, single sign-on and — perhaps most importantly — IP indemnity.
Image Credits: Amazon
In many cases, the models underpinning code-generating services such as Q Developer are trained on code that’s copyrighted or under a restrictive license. Vendors claim that fair use protects them in the event that the models was knowingly or unknowingly developed on copyrighted code — but not everyone agrees. GitHub and OpenAI are being sued in a class action motion that accuses them of violating copyright by allowing Copilot to regurgitate licensed code snippets without providing credit.
Amazon says that it’ll defend Q Developer Pro customers against claims alleging that the service infringes on a third-party’s IP rights so long as they let AWS control their defense and settle “as AWS deems appropriate.”
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