Space Is Heating Up

On January 16, well before sunrise, a rocket lifted off in Florida, sending a payload to orbit and returning its booster for an attempted landing on a barge off the Florida coast. Nothing was too notable about any of this. There were over 130 similar launches in 2024. But where every one of those launches was operated by industry titan, SpaceX, this particular rocket, dubbed New Glenn, was designed by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin.

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New Glenn, first announced in 2016, stands a bit taller than the Statue of Liberty and can carry 45 tons to low Earth orbit (in between SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy). Like Falcon 9, New Glenn’s first stage is designed to land under power and be reused 25 times or more. And also like Falcon 9, New Glenn’s first landing attempt failed. But if it succeeds in the future, it’ll be the first large reusable rocket not made by SpaceX.?

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Reusability has allowed SpaceX to slash launch costs and take over the industry. “Elon Musk’s SpaceX has successfully converted its first-mover advantage into near total dominance of the market—accounting for 45 percent of global space launches in 2023,” Edd Gent wrote for SingularityHub this month. It had an even greater slice in 2024. If Blue Origin proves it can similarly reuse its boosters, it may begin to muscle in on SpaceX’s territory.

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Bezos isn’t the only one coming for SpaceX.?

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Rocket Lab, which launched its small Electron rocket 12 times last year, aims to launch a reusable Falcon 9 competitor this year. The European Space Agency is farming out contracts to develop a reusable fleet. Relativity Space, though reportedly battling setbacks, is working on its Terran R rocket with a reusable first stage. And investors are hungry for more. Startup Stoke Space recently announced a quarter-billion-dollar Series C round to develop a fully reusable launch vehicle. Others could join the race too.

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Of course, SpaceX owns a formidable lead and has perfected the art of going fast in an often plodding industry. The first time it tried to land its Falcon 9 rocket on a barge was a decade ago. It’s since made such operations routine—re-flying Falcon 9 boosters as many as 25 times—and is now moving on to bigger things with its Starship launch vehicle.

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Starship and its super-heavy booster have twice the thrust of the Saturn V moon rocket. They’ll be able to throw 150 tons of cargo into orbit—six times more than Falcon—and crucially, if fully reusable, the cost to orbit would shrink even more. Missions on NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket are expected to launch at most twice a year and cost $4.1 billion per launch. By comparison, a fully reusable Starship, if completed, might eventually launch daily with an estimated base cost of around $10 million apiece.

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The company is making progress. It landed Starship’s booster for the first time last year, catching the giant rocket with a pair of robotic arms built into the launch tower. In its most recent launch—which took place the same day as New Glenn’s maiden flight—Starship repeated the feat, though its upper stage was lost after separation.?

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SpaceX hopes to launch as many as 25 Starships this year, which is a packed manifest. Blue Origin is aiming for 6 to 8 New Glenn launches. Boxes still in need of ticking include landing Starship itself (making the whole vehicle reusable) and showing it can be refueled in orbit (a necessary step for moon, Mars, and deep space missions).?

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With Starship and at least one other large reusable rocket on the horizon, it’s worth imagining how this could take space exploration to the next level. Consider, for example, what SpaceX has accomplished with its Falcon 9 rocket. In just over five years, it deployed nearly 7,000 Starlink satellites to rain down internet across the planet. Beyond commercial value, the constellation has been influential geopolitically too.

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It’s possible the industry is on the verge of another shift in capability.

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“Starship won’t just give us the ability to send human explorers to Mars, the moon, and other destinations in the inner solar system,” Mars Society founder Bob Zubrin wrote in 2021, ”it offers us a two-order-of-magnitude increase in overall operational capability to do pretty much anything we want to do in space.” So, what might “anything” look like?

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We could build bigger, bolder telescopes in orbit or on the moon and send more capable (and just plain more) robotic explorers across the solar system. Companies could assemble private space stations and more comprehensive communications arrays. Startups could begin digging up resources on asteroids or the moon to fuel ships or seed infrastructure. Astronauts could once again venture beyond Earth orbit to the moon and Mars. The potential for clutter and space trash will increase, but so would the ability to clear it. All this could kickstart the flywheel of an off-Earth economy.?

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These ideas are obvious. Declining costs will also bring surprising applications.

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Still, space is hard, as the saying goes, and while notching wins, both new rockets have yet to fully prove themselves. The recent failure of Starship’s upper stage was a setback, and pending investigation, it’s unclear how that will change its aggressive schedule. Meanwhile, New Glenn still needs to consistently reach orbit and stick its landings.

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This year, we’ll find out how far they can go.

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More News From the Future

OpenAI’s o3 model aced a test for artificial general intelligence. What does that mean?

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AIQ test. In 2019, AI researcher Francois Chollet launched the ARC-AGI benchmark. The idea, according to Chollet, was to see if AI could acquire skills beyond its training data. The test, which consists of gridlike puzzles, was intended to present AI with problems it had never seen before. Models have passed a slew of exams, but none scored over 30% on ARC-AGI—which is relatively easy for most humans—until OpenAI’s o3 model reportedly achieved 87.5% on the test. Chollet noted this was partly due to brute force, as the attempt took a lot of computing power and time, and he said it didn’t make o3 the first example of artificial general intelligence. But he was impressed by the feat.

Moving target. Quick improvements in AI are making it harder to measure progress, and terms like “artificial general intelligence” are ill-defined. Generally, people understand it to mean AI that can do anything a human can. Researchers vary in terms of how long until AGI arrives, but over the last few years, some predictions have shortened. Creating benchmarks—that is, tests measuring capability—is becoming more difficult, and each time one is passed, the bar gets reset to a higher level with a more challenging test. That’ll be the case here too.

Let’s reset. Chollet said that o3 passing ARC-AGI was “a genuine breakthrough,” but that it also spoke to the benchmark’s age and weaknesses. His team will release a new version soon that could knock o3 back down under 30%. But even that test may not stand for long. The group is forming the ARC Prize Foundation to continue the work and may partner with OpenAI in the future. Ultimately, Chollet has his own way of defining AGI progress. “You’ll know artificial general intelligence is here when the exercise of creating tasks that are easy for regular humans but hard for AI becomes simply impossible,” Chollet wrote in December.

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Google’s quantum computer crunches through an impossible calculation.

According to Google, the machine ran a calculation in five minutes that would have taken a supercomputer 10 septillion years. The result shows progress in the hardware, but the calculation is a benchmark specially designed for quantum computers and of little practical value. More importantly, the team demonstrated error correction—qubits are infamously finicky—that improved exponentially with scale. The more physical qubits they grouped into logical qubits, the more stable the system got. For practical tasks, the chips need to be bigger, but qubit quality is now high enough that scaling is possible.

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AI could bring 78 million new jobs globally by 2030.

A World Economic Forum (WEF) survey found AI could replace 92 million jobs while generating 170 million new jobs globally by 2030, resulting in a net increase of 78 million new jobs. It also found that while many companies were planning to reduce headcount due to AI, most of today's jobs would be augmented by AI as opposed to outright replaced. The survey polls 1,000 companies with 14 million employees every two years. The field is moving fast, though, and the impact on work could prove unpredictable.

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Data suggests electric car batteries might last 20 years or more.

People worry electric car batteries won’t last long enough for their cars to remain useful or resalable—after all, smartphone batteries noticeably lose juice after just a few years. But consulting firm P3’s analysis of 7,000 fleet electric vehicles showed they retained 90% and 87% capacity at 100,000 and 300,000 miles, respectively. Another study by Geotab pinned the degradation rate at 1.8% per year. Extrapolated out, a 300-mile-range car would still have 192 miles of range after 20 years. We’ll have to wait and see if this pans out in practice, but early data hints electric cars may last longer than expected.

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Thanks for reading. We hope you enjoyed this month's updates and found something to inspire you on your exponential journey.

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See you next month!

The Singularity Team