Enlarge / SpaceX's Ship 24 rolls to the launch site in South Texas this week. (credit: SpaceX)

Welcome to Edition 5.02 of the Rocket Report! Just as a heads up, I would like to note that it is now more than just theoretical that SpaceX's Starship and NASA's Space Launch System rocket could make their orbital launch attempts during the same month, August 2022. While I would not say it's likely, both rockets presently have notional launch targets within three weeks of one another next month.

As always, we welcome reader submissions , and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

A Minotaur rocket explodes after launch . A Minotaur II+ rocket exploded 11 seconds after launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Wednesday night, Noozhawk reports . (The rocket's impact with the ground made a rather spectacular fireball, per an eyewitness source). There were no injuries in the explosion and the debris was contained to the immediate vicinity of the launch pad, Vandenberg officials said early Thursday. An investigative review board has been established to determine the cause of the explosion, Vandenberg officials said.

Enlarge / Yes, those are gills on this Cambrian animal. (credit: Dinghua Yang )

Because we're a member of the group, it's easy to see vertebrates as the pinnacle of evolution, a group capable of producing bats, birds, and giant whales in addition to ourselves. But when they first evolved, vertebrates were anything but a sure thing. They branched off from a group that lived in the mud and didn't need to tell its top from its bottom or its left from its right, and so ended up losing an organized nerve cord. Our closest non-vertebrate relatives re-established a nerve cord (on the wrong side of the body, naturally) but couldn't be bothered with niceties like a skeleton.

How exactly vertebrates came out of this hasn't been clear, and the probable lack of a skeleton in our immediate ancestors has helped ensure that we don't have a lot of fossils to help clarify matters.

But in Thursday's issue of Science, researchers have re-evaluated some enigmatic fossils that date back to the Cambrian period and settled several arguments about exactly what features the yunnanozoans had. The answers include cartilaginous structures that supported gills and a possible ancestor to what became our lower jaw. In the process, they show that yunnanozoans are likely the earliest branch of the vertebrate tree.

Enlarge / Juul used a fashionable, "cool" marketing strategy before backlash. (credit: Mass.gov )

The US Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday paused a decision that would effectively force Juul off the US market. On Wednesday, the two sides agreed to put their court battle on hold as the regulator conducted an additional review of Juul's products.

For people who use Juul products, the new development doesn't change much for now: A panel of federal appeals court judges had already issued an administrative stay on June 24, which meant Juul products could remain on the market while the company fought the FDA's denial of its marketing authorization request in court. But, in the longer term, it represents an embarrassing backpedal by the FDA and signals that Juul may have a good chance of permanently reversing the denial.

On June 23, the FDA announced that it denied US marketing authorization for all Juul products , effectively forcing the company off the e-cigarette market it previously dominated. Though the FDA's decision had been leaked to the press the day before, it still jolted industry watchers, consumers, and Juul, which said in court documents it first got wind of the decision through the press leak.

Enlarge (credit: 5./15 WEST | iStock Unreleased )

After the first child died from self-strangulation while attempting a recommended "Blackout Challenge," there were many steps that TikTok could've taken to shield other kids from the same fate immediately. Instead, a new lawsuit filed in California says TikTok chose to continue profiting from promoting what's now being described as its deadliest challenge, directly causing the deaths of six more children in 2021.

The lawsuit was filed by the parents of two of those children—girls ages 8 and 9. They claim their kids became addicted to TikTok, were fed a constant stream of seemingly harmless challenge videos persuading them to participate, and then died after attempting the Blackout Challenge.

Rather than blame creators of harmful videos or come after TikTok for publishing videos, the lawsuit instead seeks damages from TikTok for its product design that directed kids to videos.

Enlarge / Eddie Munson plays guitar in Stranger Things season 4. (credit: Netflix)

Netflix has partnered with Sennheiser to bring spatial audio to the streaming service's original programming, including the recently released Stranger Things season 4 .

"Spatial audio will roll out across our catalog beginning today, and you can hear it for yourself by typing 'spatial audio' into the search bar and selecting a show or film that supports it in the search results," a Netflix blog post says. The feature uses Sennheiser's Ambeo technology.

Spatial audio involves arranging all sources of sound in a model 360-degree sound field around the listener's position (in some cases, it involves vertical spatial positioning, too). Spatial audio then uses that data to deliver sound on various devices, including TV speakers or headphones that typically offer only stereo sound instead of a traditional multi-channel surround setup.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

On the last day of May, one of my inboxes began receiving emails, purportedly from one of the owners of the yoga studio I visit. It concerned a message I sent in January through the studio's website that had been resolved the following day in an email sent by the co-owner. Now, here she was, four months later, emailing me again.

"Listed below the documents we chatted regarding last week," the email author wrote. "Contact me if you've got any queries about the attached files." There was a password-protected zip file attached. Below the body of the message was the response the co-owner sent me in January. These emails started coming once or twice daily for the next couple of weeks, each from a different address. The files and passwords were often changed, but the basic format, including the January email thread, remained consistent.

With the help of researchers at security firm Proofpoint, I now know that the emails are the work of a crime group they call TA578. TA578 is what's known in the security industry as an initial access broker. That means it compromises end-user devices en masse in an opportunistic fashion, spamming as many addresses as possible with malicious files. The gang then sells access to the machines it compromises to other threat actors, for use in ransomware, cryptojacking, and other types of campaigns.

Enlarge (credit: Starlink )

The Federal Communications Commission has received over 90,000 comments from Starlink users urging the agency to side with SpaceX in a spectrum battle against Dish Network. The comments were all submitted since last week when SpaceX asked Starlink customers to weigh in on an FCC proceeding that seeks public input on the "feasibility of allowing mobile services in the 12.2-12.7 GHz band while protecting incumbents from harmful interference."

Dish wants to use the 12 GHz band for mobile service and says that sharing the spectrum wouldn't significantly degrade satellite broadband. SpaceX says the plan would cause "harmful interference [to Starlink users] more than 77 percent of the time and total outage of service 74 percent of the time, rendering Starlink unusable for most Americans." The satellite downlink band used by Starlink extends from 10.7 GHz to 12.7 GHz. SpaceX says it uses most of that but not the 10.7-10.95 GHz portion because it's adjacent to radio astronomy systems.

The Starlink email was sent to users on June 28. There were a little over 200 comments in the 18-month-old proceeding's docket at that time , mostly from satellite or telecom companies and lobbyist or advocacy groups.

Enlarge (credit: Justin Sullivan / Staff | Getty Images North America )

After nearly five days of jury deliberations, a unanimous verdict has been reached in the trial of former Theranos president and chief operating officer Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani. Balwani was found guilty of all 12 charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

New York Times reporter Erin Griffith tweeted that the courtroom drew the case’s biggest crowd while the verdict was read. Balwani faces a maximum sentence of up to 20 years in prison and fines of $250,000 per wire fraud and conspiracy count, plus restitution.

In 2018, Balwani was indicted, along with Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, for allegedly defrauding investors, doctors, and patients who bought into $9 billion-startup Theranos’ simplified blood-testing technology that proved too good to be true.

Enlarge / Jane (Natalie Portman) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth) are back at it in Thor: Love and Thunder . (credit: Marvel Studios)

Thirty minutes into the heartfelt silliness of Thor: Love and Thunder , a comparison dawned on me that clarified why I enjoyed this week's new film so much: In 14 years of Marvel Studios films, the company has never as successfully made an homage to Jim Henson as this.

At its most madcap, Love and Thunder giddily honors the likes of Fraggle Rock and The Muppet Show in terms of a rogue's gallery of goofballs and kiddos chewing up the film's gilded, Technicolor scenery. And at its darkest, it feels like a direct descendant of Labyrinth , as its villainy combines no-holding-back ruthlessness with some impressively staged shadow realms.

Most importantly, co-stars Natalie Portman and Chris Hemsworth nail the film's titular L-word in remarkable fashion. This action film knows that it's smothering a slab of rom-com peanut butter with ridiculous superhero-stakes chocolate, and the film's leads dance around this fact mostly in joking fashion while still threading the needle of building a believable, finale-clinching connection. (Comparing the results to Kermit and Miss Piggy would short-shrift their incredible work to some extent, yet the comparison also kind of makes sense, once you see the movie.)