Footage obtained by TechCrunch shows the catastrophic ending that Astra’s Rocket 3.0 suffered during prelaunch testing in March 2020.
“I can confirm we had an anomaly on the launch pad,” Alaska Aerospace CEO Mark Lester told local reporters at the time.
At the time, Astra was taking such failures in stride.
The deal is expected to close sometime this quarter, at which time Astra will cease trading on the Nasdaq.
Astra did not return a request for comment on the 2020 launch failure.
Telegram Business will likely give Premium another bump as it offers tools and features that can be used by business customers without needing to know how to code.
Similar to features available on WhatsApp, Telegram Business will offer “quick replies,” which are shortcuts to preset messages that support formatting, links, media, stickers and files.
Business customers can also add Telegram bots, including those from other tools or AI assistants, to answer messages on their behalf.
The company said more features will roll out to Telegram Business in future updates.
(They can be found under Settings > Telegram Business in the app.)
Amazon announced Thursday the launch of its new app for Amazon One, its contactless palm recognition service that allows customers to hover their palm over a device in order to purchase from select places, including over 500 Whole Foods Market stores, Amazon stores, and more than 150 third-party locations.
Instead of signing up for Amazon One at a physical retail location, users can now download the Amazon One app (available for iOS or Android devices) and take a photo of their palm right at home.
The company explains that all palm images taken via the new app are encrypted and sent to a secure Amazon One domain in the AWS cloud.
Amazon says that Amazon One has been used over 8 million times.
The app launch follows Amazon’s expansion of the technology for enterprise identity purposes, which gives companies the ability to authenticate employees when entering.
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As a preliminary step, the company used that second pad to launch an uncrewed Dragon capsule to the International Space Station.
This is the fifth and final mission Rocket Lab has performed for NRO under a contract the company was awarded back in 2020.
This week in space historyOn March 30, 1982, the space shuttle Columbia touched down at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
The shuttle was carrying astronauts Jack R. Lousma and C. Gordon Fullerton, who were returning home after a successful eight-day mission.
Intuit is winding down budgeting app Mint this week and that’s become good news for competitor Copilot.
The New York-based CEO started the subscription-based personal finance tracker in January 2020 to offer an alternative to Mint.
Users also save an average of 5% after starting with the app, Copilot calculates.
Beyond MintLike millions of others, Ugarte tried some personal finance apps, including Mint, yet found them to be lacking.
Other personal finance apps show where you are spending, even in categories that might not be relevant, he said.
Rails, a decentralized crypto exchange, has raised $6.2 million in attempts to fill the void FTX left behind after crashing in 2022, the startup’s co-founder and CEO Satraj Bambra exclusively told TechCrunch.
The crypto community is watching Rails because it’s attempting to straddle the divide in crypto exchanges by building out both centralized and decentralized underlying technology.
The capital is earmarked for engineering team hiring and expanding its licensing and regulatory strategy to make the exchange “fully compliant,” Bambra said.
That centralized computing was something Rails saw with FTX as “being really, really good,” but when it came to decentralized exchanges like dYdX that exist today it wasn’t as solid, Bambra thinks.
But being a hybrid of decentralized and centralized is better than being fully one side or another, he added.
Sameer Brij Verma, a high-profile investor at the Indian venture firm Nexus, will be leaving the fund later this year, he confirmed to TechCrunch.
Verma plans to launch his own venture firm, with the inaugural fund expected to have a corpus of at least $150 million, a source familiar with the matter said.
The timing of his departure is also peculiar as Nexus raised a $700 million fund, its largest, just last year.
Verma has been working with his portfolio startups to hand over board seats to other partners at Nexus for several months, the source said, requesting anonymity.
Verma plans to launch his own fund by the end of the year where he plans to adopt a strategy that sets him apart from other investment firms in India.
SpaceX has performed 13 crewed missions, and all of them launched from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
But the company has long intended to upgrade a second pad — SLC-40 at the neighboring Cape Canaveral Space Force Station — to expand its crew launch capacity.
Teams test the new emergency chutes from the pad 40 crew tower in Florida pic.twitter.com/rWVj7zaHp0 — SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 19, 2024As a next step, SpaceX is going to launch the CRS-30 cargo resupply mission.
In a media teleconference in February, SpaceX’s VP of build and flight reliability, Bill Gerstenmaier, said the cargo flight is an incremental step to astronaut launches.
“We would like to do a cargo flight first if we can.
One path, which is particularly well trodden, is to start a venture fund.
Instead of launching a VC fund, they’re starting with an incubator called Montauk Climate, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
Montauk Climate is one of the latter.
Montauk Climate will remain shareholders in its spinout companies and have seats on their boards.
As the number of incubated companies expands, Montauk Climate expects to raise its own venture fund to help support them.
SpaceX will attempt to send the massive Starship rocket to orbit for the third time early Thursday morning after U.S. regulators gave the green light for launch.
The first took place last April, and ended with both the upper stage (which is also called Starship) and the Super Heavy booster exploding mid-air.
Anytime an anomaly occurs during a rocket launch, the Federal Aviation Administration steps in to oversee a company-run investigation.
The investigation into the second Starship launch closed last month, so the only thing left was for the regulator to issue a launch license for the test flight.
Due to the in-space engine burn, the company is also targeting a new flight trajectory, with the upper stage splashing down in the Indian Ocean.
