Ready for Liftoff: Boeing’s Starliner Spacecraft Prepares to Soar
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft overcomes safety hurdles for May launch to the ISS, marking their first crewed trip. Exciting times ahead! 🚀✨ #SpaceExploration #StarlinerLaunch
After encountering numerous delays and setbacks, Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft is finally on the brink of liftoff, targeting a launch date in May. The journey to this point has been filled with challenges for Boeing’s crew vehicle, with the most recent obstacles relating to two major safety concerns. However, during a press briefing, representatives from the company expressed confidence in the resolved issues, particularly regarding the parachutes and protective tape. Let’s delve into the remarkable journey of the Starliner as it prepares to carry NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS).
Throughout its development, Boeing’s Starliner faced a series of unfortunate delays. Notably, the most recent delay was due to the discovery of two significant safety hazards on the spacecraft. The first concern involved the load capacity of the parachutes, which are crucial for the safe landing of the crew vehicle. Extensive investigation revealed that the failure load limit of the fabric sections on the parachutes was lower than expected, necessitating rectification to ensure redundancy and safety. The second concern centered around flammable protective tape used to cover wiring harnesses within the Starliner. To mitigate this risk, Boeing carefully removed the tape and implemented necessary barriers or found areas where the tape posed no threat.
Boeing’s priority has always been the safety and reliability of their crew vehicle. In response to the safety concerns, Boeing developed a new parachute system that meets NASA’s meticulous safety standards. The achievement of closing the necessary paperwork for these modifications reaffirms their dedication to providing a secure mode of transportation for astronauts. Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program, expressed readiness and confidence during the press briefing, highlighting the extensive efforts made to eliminate risks.
The upcoming launch of the Starliner spacecraft to the ISS will mark Boeing’s first crewed mission. This historic flight follows the anomaly encountered during an uncrewed test flight in May 2022 when a thruster used for orbital maneuvering unexpectedly failed. The Starliner’s inaugural uncrewed test in 2019 also faced challenges, resulting in further tests and troubleshooting to ensure the spacecraft’s reliability and performance.
The crew access arm is seen as it swings into position for Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at the launch pad at Space Launch Complex 41 ahead of the Orbital Flight Test-2 mission, Wednesday, May 18, 2022 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Boeing’s Orbital Flight Test-2 will be Starliner’s second uncrewed flight test and will dock to the International Space Station as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. The mission, currently targeted for launch on 6:54 p.m. ET on May 19, will serve as an end-to-end test of the system’s capabilities. Photo Credit: (NASA/Joel Kowsky)
Boeing’s successful Starliner mission to the ISS will establish them as NASA’s concurrent commercial partner, joining SpaceX in providing transportation to and from the International Space Station. NASA has been primarily relying on SpaceX for crewed trips, reducing dependence on Russia’s Soyuz crew ship. This diversification of transportation options increases redundancy, safety, and autonomy for NASA. While Russia’s recent launch abort highlighted the ongoing importance of multiple commercial partners, Boeing’s readiness and ability to fulfill its role in this context positions NASA to rely on both companies for future orbital trips.
As the Starliner’s launch date approaches, the anticipation around this long-awaited mission grows. Boeing’s dedication to safety and addressing the challenges they encountered paves the way for future advancements in crewed space missions. With the commercial space industry evolving rapidly, NASA’s collaboration with multiple partners ensures reliability, innovation, and continuous progress towards exploring the mysteries of space. The imminent liftoff of the Starliner spacecraft signifies a significant milestone for Boeing, NASA, and the future of human space exploration.
What is the Starliner spacecraft?
The first of two operational Boeing CST-100 Starliner spacecraft, known as Boeing Starliner Spacecraft 2, was developed and constructed as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. Initially planned for its inaugural flight during Boe-CFT, the first crewed test flight of the Starliner spacecraft, it was later rescheduled to perform the Boe-OFT-2 mission due to the partial failure of another CST-100 in Boe-OFT. Additionally, the spacecraft was reassigned to fly Starliner-1 after being originally assigned to the CFT mission.
Rod: A creative force, blending words, images, and flavors. Blogger, writer, filmmaker, and photographer. Cooking enthusiast with a sci-fi vision. Passionate about his upcoming series and dedicated to TNC Network. Partnered with Rebecca Washington for a shared journey of love and art.
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Rod: A creative force, blending words, images, and flavors. Blogger, writer, filmmaker, and photographer. Cooking enthusiast with a sci-fi vision. Passionate about his upcoming series and dedicated to TNC Network. Partnered with Rebecca Washington for a shared journey of love and art.
The once red-hot U.S. residential solar market is showing signs of cooling off—but don’t count it out just yet. A combination of rising interest rates, regulatory changes, and supply chain challenges have led to a notable dip in installations across the country. But while the short-term trend suggests a slowdown, industry experts remain optimistic about the long-term potential of rooftop solar.
📉 The Numbers Don’t Lie: Installations Are Down
According to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie, residential solar installations dropped by 13% year-over-year in Q1 2025, with 1,106 megawatts (MW) installed nationwide. That’s also a 4% decline from the previous quarter. This marks a continuation of the trend that began in 2024, which saw the residential sector contract in 22 states—including a five-year low in California [^1].
Analysts at BloombergNEF predict that total U.S. solar capacity will fall by 7% between 2025 and 2027, with a projected 1% annual decline through 2035 under current policy scenarios [^2].
🧾 What’s Behind the Drop?
1. Higher Interest Rates
The Federal Reserve’s continued efforts to tame inflation have made financing solar systems more expensive for homeowners. The result? Fewer consumers are willing to commit to the upfront investment, even with long-term savings in play [^3].
2. Policy Shifts in Key States
California, long considered the leader in solar adoption, rolled back its Net Energy Metering (NEM) 2.0 program in favor of NEM 3.0, which significantly reduces the value of solar exports back to the grid. Installations in the state fell sharply as a result [^1].
On the federal side, proposed cuts to the 30% Investment Tax Credit (ITC)—a major driver of residential adoption—have caused uncertainty in the market. According to Reuters, solar stocks plummeted following changes in a Senate tax bill that threatened to shrink or eliminate these credits [^4].
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3. Tariffs and Supply Constraints
Tariffs on Chinese and other foreign-made solar panels have led to price increases and reduced availability. Simultaneously, battery storage components are experiencing shortages, further delaying installations and complicating project timelines [^5].
🌤 The Long-Term Picture: A Resilient Future
Despite the headwinds, many in the industry see this as a short-term correction rather than a lasting decline. SEIA projects a return to 9% annual residential growth from 2025 to 2030, particularly if financing conditions improve and federal incentives remain intact [^1].
Additionally, solar panel prices remain historically low, hovering around $2.50–$2.60 per watt installed. That affordability, coupled with increasing demand for home electrification and EV charging solutions, makes rooftop solar an attractive long-term investment [^1].
In a recent industry survey, 78% of solar installers said they expect to sell as much or more in 2025 than they did in 2024 [^3]. And while the market is down in states like California, others—including Texas, Florida, and Arizona—are continuing to grow.
✅ Final Takeaway
Yes, residential solar is currently in a downturn. But it’s more of a recalibration than a collapse. Regulatory turbulence and financial pressures are squeezing the market, but the fundamentals—affordability, environmental benefits, and technological advancement—remain strong.
The future of residential solar will depend heavily on stable policy support, affordable financing, and continued innovation. If those stars align, the industry could see another boom in the latter half of the decade.
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📚 Sources
[^1]: SEIA/Wood Mackenzie. U.S. Solar Market Insight Q1 2025.
STM Daily News is a vibrant news blog dedicated to sharing the brighter side of human experiences. Emphasizing positive, uplifting stories, the site focuses on delivering inspiring, informative, and well-researched content. With a commitment to accurate, fair, and responsible journalism, STM Daily News aims to foster a community of readers passionate about positive change and engaged in meaningful conversations. Join the movement and explore stories that celebrate the positive impacts shaping our world.
This screenshot of an AI-generated video depicts Christopher Pelkey, who was killed in 2021.
Screenshot: Stacey Wales/YouTubeNir Eisikovits, UMass Boston and Daniel J. Feldman, UMass Boston
Christopher Pelkey was shot and killed in a road range incident in 2021. On May 8, 2025, at the sentencing hearing for his killer, an AI video reconstruction of Pelkey delivered a victim impact statement. The trial judge reported being deeply moved by this performance and issued the maximum sentence for manslaughter.
As part of the ceremonies to mark Israel’s 77th year of independence on April 30, 2025, officials had planned to host a concert featuring four iconic Israeli singers. All four had died years earlier. The plan was to conjure them using AI-generated sound and video. The dead performers were supposed to sing alongside Yardena Arazi, a famous and still very much alive artist. In the end Arazi pulled out, citing the political atmosphere, and the event didn’t happen.
In April, the BBC created a deep-fake version of the famous mystery writer Agatha Christie to teach a “maestro course on writing.” Fake Agatha would instruct aspiring murder mystery authors and “inspire” their “writing journey.”
The use of artificial intelligence to “reanimate” the dead for a variety of purposes is quickly gaining traction. Over the past few years, we’ve been studying the moral implications of AI at the Center for Applied Ethics at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and we find these AI reanimations to be morally problematic.
Before we address the moral challenges the technology raises, it’s important to distinguish AI reanimations, or deepfakes, from so-called griefbots. Griefbots are chatbots trained on large swaths of data the dead leave behind – social media posts, texts, emails, videos. These chatbots mimic how the departed used to communicate and are meant to make life easier for surviving relations. The deepfakes we are discussing here have other aims; they are meant to promote legal, political and educational causes.
Chris Pelkey was shot and killed in 2021. This AI ‘reanimation’ of him was presented in court as a victim impact statement.
Moral quandaries
The first moral quandary the technology raises has to do with consent: Would the deceased have agreed to do what their likeness is doing? Would the dead Israeli singers have wanted to sing at an Independence ceremony organized by the nation’s current government? Would Pelkey, the road-rage victim, be comfortable with the script his family wrote for his avatar to recite? What would Christie think about her AI double teaching that class?
The answers to these questions can only be deduced circumstantially – from examining the kinds of things the dead did and the views they expressed when alive. And one could ask if the answers even matter. If those in charge of the estates agree to the reanimations, isn’t the question settled? After all, such trustees are the legal representatives of the departed.
But putting aside the question of consent, a more fundamental question remains.
What do these reanimations do to the legacy and reputation of the dead? Doesn’t their reputation depend, to some extent, on the scarcity of appearance, on the fact that the dead can’t show up anymore? Dying can have a salutary effect on the reputation of prominent people; it was good for John F. Kennedy, and it was good for Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
The fifth-century B.C. Athenian leader Pericles understood this well. In his famous Funeral Oration, delivered at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War, he asserts that a noble death can elevate one’s reputation and wash away their petty misdeeds. That is because the dead are beyond reach and their mystique grows postmortem. “Even extreme virtue will scarcely win you a reputation equal to” that of the dead, he insists.
Do AI reanimations devalue the currency of the dead by forcing them to keep popping up? Do they cheapen and destabilize their reputation by having them comment on events that happened long after their demise?
In addition, these AI representations can be a powerful tool to influence audiences for political or legal purposes. Bringing back a popular dead singer to legitimize a political event and reanimating a dead victim to offer testimony are acts intended to sway an audience’s judgment.
It’s one thing to channel a Churchill or a Roosevelt during a political speech by quoting them or even trying to sound like them. It’s another thing to have “them” speak alongside you. The potential of harnessing nostalgia is supercharged by this technology. Imagine, for example, what the Soviets, who literally worshipped Lenin’s dead body, would have done with a deep fake of their old icon.
Good intentions
You could argue that because these reanimations are uniquely engaging, they can be used for virtuous purposes. Consider a reanimated Martin Luther King Jr., speaking to our currently polarized and divided nation, urging moderation and unity. Wouldn’t that be grand? Or what about a reanimated Mordechai Anielewicz, the commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, speaking at the trial of a Holocaust denier like David Irving?
But do we know what MLK would have thought about our current political divisions? Do we know what Anielewicz would have thought about restrictions on pernicious speech? Does bravely campaigning for civil rights mean we should call upon the digital ghost of King to comment on the impact of populism? Does fearlessly fighting the Nazis mean we should dredge up the AI shadow of an old hero to comment on free speech in the digital age?
No one can know with certainty what Martin Luther King Jr. would say about today’s society.AP Photo/Chick Harrity
Even if the political projects these AI avatars served were consistent with the deceased’s views, the problem of manipulation – of using the psychological power of deepfakes to appeal to emotions – remains.
But what about enlisting AI Agatha Christie to teach a writing class? Deep fakes may indeed have salutary uses in educational settings. The likeness of Christie could make students more enthusiastic about writing. Fake Aristotle could improve the chances that students engage with his austere Nicomachean Ethics. AI Einstein could help those who want to study physics get their heads around general relativity.
But producing these fakes comes with a great deal of responsibility. After all, given how engaging they can be, it’s possible that the interactions with these representations will be all that students pay attention to, rather than serving as a gateway to exploring the subject further.
Living on in the living
In a poem written in memory of W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden tells us that, after the poet’s death, Yeats “became his admirers.” His memory was now “scattered among a hundred cities,” and his work subject to endless interpretation: “the words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.”
The dead live on in the many ways we reinterpret their words and works. Auden did that to Yeats, and we’re doing it to Auden right here. That’s how people stay in touch with those who are gone. In the end, we believe that using technological prowess to concretely bring them back disrespects them and, perhaps more importantly, is an act of disrespect to ourselves – to our capacity to abstract, think and imagine.
Nir Eisikovits, Professor of Philosophy and Director, Applied Ethics Center, UMass Boston and Daniel J. Feldman, Senior Research Fellow, Applied Ethics Center, UMass Boston
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
STM Daily News is a vibrant news blog dedicated to sharing the brighter side of human experiences. Emphasizing positive, uplifting stories, the site focuses on delivering inspiring, informative, and well-researched content. With a commitment to accurate, fair, and responsible journalism, STM Daily News aims to foster a community of readers passionate about positive change and engaged in meaningful conversations. Join the movement and explore stories that celebrate the positive impacts shaping our world.
The culinary world is reeling from the sudden and tragic loss of beloved chef and television personality Anne Burrell, who was found dead in her Brooklyn, New York, home on the morning of Tuesday, June 17. She was 55 years old.
According to a statement from the New York City Police Department, officers from the 76th Precinct responded around 7:50 a.m. to a report of “an unconscious and unresponsive 55-year-old female.” Emergency medical services arrived shortly after and pronounced her dead at the scene. While police did not formally release her name pending family notification, public records and the address provided in the police statement confirm that the residence belongs to Burrell.
A cause of death has not yet been determined. The city’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner will conduct an autopsy to clarify the circumstances surrounding her passing.
Burrell’s representatives confirmed the heartbreaking news in a release obtained by People magazine, marking a devastating moment for fans, friends, and fellow chefs who admired her bold personality, bright red hair, and fierce culinary skills.
Best known for her work on Food Network shows like Secrets of a Restaurant Chef, Worst Cooks in America, and Iron Chef America, Burrell was a standout in the food television landscape. A classically trained chef and graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, she blended expertise with an infectious enthusiasm that made her a favorite among viewers and a mentor to many aspiring cooks.
Tributes from across the food and entertainment communities have begun pouring in as the industry mourns the loss of one of its brightest and most unique stars. More details are expected in the coming days as the investigation continues and the autopsy results are released.
Anne Burrell’s legacy will live on through the meals she inspired, the careers she helped shape, and the joy she brought to countless kitchens around the world.
STM Daily News is a vibrant news blog dedicated to sharing the brighter side of human experiences. Emphasizing positive, uplifting stories, the site focuses on delivering inspiring, informative, and well-researched content. With a commitment to accurate, fair, and responsible journalism, STM Daily News aims to foster a community of readers passionate about positive change and engaged in meaningful conversations. Join the movement and explore stories that celebrate the positive impacts shaping our world.
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