Aussie rocket carrying jar of Vegemite launches, hovers for 14 seconds before crashing
After waiting 18 months for the right launch window, the three-stage Eris rocket achieved about 14 seconds of flight before sputtering to Earth in a plume of smoke.
It was built by Gilmour Space Technologies, which is vying to send the first locally built rocket into orbit from Australian soil.
'I'm so relieved you couldn't believe,' chief executive Adam Gilmour told AFP.
'I was so nervous about it getting off the pad, that when it did I screamed in pure joy.'
Video showed the rocket barely cleared the top of the launch tower, briefly hovering above the ground before running out of steam.
The 23-metre vehicle—designed to launch small satellites into low-Earth orbit—was launched from Abbot Point, about 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) up from the Queensland capital Brisbane.
The payload for the test flight was a jar of Vegemite, a popular Australian toast topping, which was strapped inside the rocket's nose cone.
Gilmour said preparations for a second test flight were already under way, with a view to launching within the next 'six-to-eight months'.
'It's huge what you can prove with just 10 to 15 seconds of flight time,' he said.
He added: 'I'm sorry to say the Vegemite didn't make it.'
The company, which has 230 employees, hopes to start commercial launches in late 2026 or early 2027. — AFP
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Star
4 hours ago
- The Star
Australia regulator says YouTube, others 'turning a blind eye' to child abuse material
FILE PHOTO: Children playground miniatures are seen in front of displayed Youtube logo in this illustration taken April 4, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo SYDNEY (Reuters) -Australia's internet watchdog has said the world's biggest social media firms are still 'turning a blind eye' to online child sex abuse material on their platforms, and said YouTube in particular had been unresponsive to its enquiries. In a report released on Wednesday, the eSafety Commissioner said YouTube, along with Apple, failed to track the number of user reports it received of child sex abuse appearing on their platforms and also could not say how long it took them to respond to such reports. The Australian government decided last week to include YouTube in its world-first social media ban for teenagers, following eSafety's advice to overturn its planned exemption for the Alphabet-owned Google's video-sharing site. 'When left to their own devices, these companies aren't prioritising the protection of children and are seemingly turning a blind eye to crimes occurring on their services,' eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said in a statement. 'No other consumer-facing industry would be given the licence to operate by enabling such heinous crimes against children on their premises, or services.' Google has said previously that abuse material has no place on its platforms and that it uses a range of industry-standard techniques to identify and remove such material. Meta - owner of Facebook, Instagram and Threads, three of the biggest platforms with more than 3 billion users worldwide - says it prohibits graphic videos. The eSafety Commissioner, an office set up to protect internet users, has mandated Apple, Discord, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Skype, Snap and WhatsApp to report on the measures they take to address child exploitation and abuse material in Australia. The report on their responses so far found a 'range of safety deficiencies on their services which increases the risk that child sexual exploitation and abuse material and activity appear on the services'. Safety gaps included failures to detect and prevent livestreaming of the material or block links to known child abuse material, as well as inadequate reporting mechanisms. It said platforms were also not using 'hash-matching' technology on all parts of their services to identify images of child sexual abuse by checking them against a database. Google has said before that its anti-abuse measures include hash-matching technology and artificial intelligence. The Australian regulator said some providers had not made improvements to address these safety gaps on their services despite it putting them on notice in previous years. 'In the case of Apple services and Google's YouTube, they didn't even answer our questions about how many user reports they received about child sexual abuse on their services or details of how many trust and safety personnel Apple and Google have on-staff,' Inman Grant said. (Reporting by Christine Chen in Sydney; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
The Star
5 hours ago
- The Star
Cultural fallout: the impact of the atomic bombings on Japanese arts
From Godzilla's fiery atomic breath to post-apocalyptic anime and harrowing depictions of radiation sickness, the influence of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki runs deep in Japanese popular culture. In the 80 years since the World War II attacks, stories of destruction and mutation have been fused with fears around natural disasters and, more recently, the Fukushima crisis. Classic manga and anime series Astro Boy is called Mighty Atom in Japanese, while city-levelling explosions loom large in other titles such as Akira, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Attack On Titan . "Living through tremendous pain" and overcoming trauma is a recurrent theme in Japan's cultural output "that global audiences have found fascinating", said William Tsutsui, a history professor at Ottawa University. The US nuclear bombing of Hiroshima on Aug 6, 1945 left around 140,000 people dead. It was followed days later by the bombing of Nagasaki that killed around 74,000 people. Some poetry "portrays the sheer terror of the atomic bomb at the moment it was dropped", but many novels and artworks address the topic indirectly, said author Yoko Tawada. "It's very difficult for the experience of the atomic bomb, which had never existed in history before, to find a place in the human heart as a memory," she told AFP. Tawada's 2014 book The Emissary focuses on the aftermath of an unspecified terrible event. She was inspired by connections between the atomic bombs, the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster and "Minamata disease" - mass mercury poisoning caused by industrial pollution in southwest Japan from the 1950s. The story "is less of a warning, and more a message to say: things may get bad, but we'll find a way to survive", Tawada said. Godzilla's skin Narratives reflecting Japan's complex relationship with nuclear technologies abound, but the most famous example is Godzilla, a prehistoric creature awakened by US hydrogen bomb testing in the Pacific. "We need monsters to give a face and form to abstract fears," said professor Tsutsui, author of the book Godzilla On My Mind. "In the 1950s, Godzilla fulfilled that role for the Japanese - with atomic energy, with radiation, with memories of the A-bombs." Many people who watched Godzilla rampage through Tokyo in the original 1954 film left theatres in tears, he said. And "it's said that the special effects people working on Godzilla modelled the monster's heavily furrowed skin after the keloid scars on the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." In the nearly 40 Godzilla movies released since, nuclear themes are present but often given less prominence, partly to appease American audiences, Tsutsui said. Even so, the series remains hugely popular, with 2016 megahit Shin Godzilla seen as a critique of Japan's response to the tsunami-triggered Fukushima disaster. 'Black Rain' Black Rain , a 1965 novel by Masuji Ibuse about radiation sickness and discrimination, is one of Japan's best-known novels about the Hiroshima bombing. But the fact Ibuse was not an A-bomb survivor is part of a "big debate about who is permitted to write these stories", said Victoria Young of the University of Cambridge. "How we talk about or create literature out of real life is always going to be difficult," she said. "Are you allowed to write about it if you didn't directly experience it?" Nobel-winning author Kenzaburo Oe collected survivor accounts in Hiroshima Notes, essays written on visits to the city in the 1960s. "He's confronting reality, but tries to approach it from a personal angle" including his relationship with his disabled son, said Tawada, who has lived in Germany for four decades after growing up in Japan. "The anti-war education I received sometimes gave the impression that Japan was solely a victim" in World War II, she said. "When it comes to the bombings, Japan was a victim - no doubt" but "it's important to look at the bigger picture" including Japan's wartime atrocities, she said. As a child, illustrations of the nuclear bombings in contemporary picture books reminded her of depictions of hell in historical Japanese art. This "made me consider whether human civilisation itself harboured inherent dangers", making atomic weapons feel less like "developments in technology, and more like something latent within humanity". - AFP
Sinar Daily
5 hours ago
- Sinar Daily
BP makes largest oil, gas discovery in 25 years off Brazil
The company said it had located oil and gas at the Bumerangue prospect, 404 kilometres (251 miles) from Rio de Janeiro, in a water depth of 2,372 metres. 05 Aug 2025 08:53pm BP is ramping up its global exploration programme, with around 40 wells planned over the next three years, including as many as 15 to be drilled this year. - AFP file photo LONDON - Britain's BP announced Monday it made its biggest oil and gas discovery in 25 years off the coast of Brazil, as it shifts back to its fossil fuel business. The discovery comes as a boost to the struggling energy major as it undergoes a major overhaul to focus on its more profitable oil and gas business, shelving its once industry-leading renewable energy strategy. The company said it had located oil and gas at the Bumerangue prospect, 404 kilometres (251 miles) from Rio de Janeiro, in a water depth of 2,372 metres. "This is another success in what has been an exceptional year so far for our exploration team, underscoring our commitment to growing our upstream," said Gordon Birrell, BP's executive vice president for production and operations. It marks the 10th discovery by BP in 2025. Shares in the company rose more than one percent on London's top-tier FTSE 100 index following the announcement. BP is ramping up its global exploration programme, with around 40 wells planned over the next three years, including as many as 15 to be drilled this year. The group expects to grow its daily global output to between 2.3 million and 2.5 million barrels of oil equivalent in 2030. "BP will want to use its latest numbers to convince the market it has truly revamped its strategy and moved away from the green push which proved unpopular with a significant portion of its shareholder base," said AJ Bell investment director Russ Mould. BP publishes its latest earnings on Tuesday, after rival Shell last week reported a 23-percent slide in first-half net profit, hit by lower oil and gas prices. - AFP More Like This
