It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during its I/O 2024 (by its own count). CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap up the presentation, cheekily stating that the company was doing the “hard work” of counting for us. No surprise, of course, that the topic took […]
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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.
OpenAI, maker of the viral AI chatbot ChatGPT, has netted another news licensing deal in Europe, adding London’s Financial Times to a growing list of publishers it’s paying for content access.
As with earlier OpenAI’s publisher licensing deals, financial terms of the arrangement are not being made public.
The latest deal looks a touch cozier than other recent OpenAI publisher tie-ups — such as with German giant Axel Springer or with the AP, Le Monde and Prisa Media in France and Spain respectively — as the pair are referring to the arrangement as a “strategic partnership and licensing agreement”. (Though Le Monde’s CEO also referred to the “partnership” it announced with OpenAI in March as a “strategic move”.)
However we understand it’s a non-exclusive licensing arrangement — and OpenAI is not taking any kind of stake in the FT Group.
On the content licensing front, the pair said the deal covers OpenAI use of the FT’s content for training AI models and, where appropriate, for displaying in generative AI responses produced by tools like ChatGPT, which looks much the same as its other publisher deals.
The strategic element appears to center on the FT boosting its understanding of generative AI, especially as a content discovery tool, and what’s being couched as a collaboration aimed at developing “new AI products and features for FT readers” — suggesting the news publisher is eager to expand its use of the AI technology more generally.
“Through the partnership, ChatGPT users will be able to see select attributed summaries, quotes and rich links to FT journalism in response to relevant queries,” the FT wrote in a press release.
The publisher also noted that it became a customer of OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise product earlier this year. It goes on to suggest it wants to explore ways to deepen its use of AI, while expressing caution over the reliability of automated outputs and potential risks to reader trust.
“This is an important agreement in a number of respects,” wrote FT Group CEO John Ridding in a statement. “It recognises the value of our award-winning journalism and will give us early insights into how content is surfaced through AI.”
He went on, “Apart from the benefits to the FT, there are broader implications for the industry. It’s right, of course, that AI platforms pay publishers for the use of their material. OpenAI understands the importance of transparency, attribution, and compensation — all essential for us. At the same time, it’s clearly in the interests of users that these products contain reliable sources.”
Large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s GPT, which powers the ChatGPT chatbot, are notorious for their capacity to fabricate information or “hallucinate.” This is the polar opposite of journalism, where reporters work to verify that the information they provide is as accurate as possible.
So it’s actually not surprising that OpenAI’s early moves toward licensing content for model training have centered on journalism. The AI giant may hope this will help it fix the “hallucination” problem. (A line in the PR suggests the partnership will “help improve [OpenAI’s] models’ usefulness by learning from FT journalism.”)
There’s another major motivating factor in play here too, though: Legal liability around copyright.
Last December the New York Times announced it’s suing OpenAI, alleging that its copyrighted content was used by the AI giant to train models without a license. OpenAI disputes that but one way to close down the risk of further lawsuits from news publishers, whose content was likely scraped off the public Internet (or otherwise harvested) to feed development of LLMs is to pay publishers for using their copyrighted content.
For their part, publishers stand to gain some cold hard cash from the content licensing. OpenAI told TechCrunch it has “around a dozen” publisher deals signed (or “imminent”), adding “many” more are in the works.
They could also, potentially, acquire some readers — such as if users of ChatGPT opt to click on citations that link to their content. However, generative AI could also cannibalize the use of search engines over time, diverting traffic away from news publishers’ sites. If that kind of disruption is coming down the pipe, some news publishers may feel a strategic advantage in developing closer relationships with the likes of OpenAI.
Getting involved with Big AI carries some reputational pitfalls for publishers, too.
Tech publisher CNET, which last year rushed to adopt generative AI as a content production tool — without making its use of the tech abundantly clear to readers — took further knocks to its reputation when journalists at Futurism found scores of errors in machine-written articles it had published.
The FT has a well-established reputation for producing quality journalism. So it will certainly be interesting to see how it further integrates generative AI into its products and/or newsroom processes.
Last month it also announced a GenAI tool for subscribers — which essentially shakes out to offering a natural language search option atop two decades of FT content (so, basically, it’s a value-add aimed at driving subscriptions for human-produced journalism). Additionally, in Europe legal uncertainty is clouding use of tools like ChatGPT over a raft of privacy law concerns.
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