By early 2025, Starlink was available in over 100 countries across every inhabited continent. In the past year, Starlink launched in 42 new countries and territories and surpassed 6 million active customers worldwide. In the United States, the standard Starlink plan costs about $90 per month with a $599 equipment kit. SpaceX added about 2,300…
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On July 25 at 1:54 a.m. ET, a Soyuz-2.1b from Russia’s Vostochny Cosmodrome lofted 21 satellites into orbit, including two Ionosfera-M space weather satellites, Iran’s Nahid-2, and 18 rideshares. The four Ionosfera-M satellites will provide three-dimensional near-Earth space coverage to study solar wind effects on radio communications and satellites, with the first two launched in…
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Vanuatu is a Y-shaped archipelago of roughly 80 islands with a population of about 330,000, of which nearly 74% live in rural areas. A 7.3-magnitude earthquake in late 2024 severed Vanuatu’s sole international submarine cable, the Interchange Cable Network (ICN1), causing a nationwide internet outage. The ICN1 is a 1,280 Gbit/s submarine fiber cable connecting…
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India bans unlicensed satellite communication and navigation devices, including Thuraya and Iridium phones and Garmin InReach, under the Indian Telegraph Act (1885) and Wireless Telegraphy Act (1933), with penalties up to three years in prison or ₹5 million in fines, and limited DoT licensing for Inmarsat devices. The 2008 Mumbai attacks involved a Thuraya satellite…
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The United Nations’ International Court of Justice on July 23 issued an advisory opinion declaring climate change an urgent and existential threat and urged states to cooperate to achieve concrete emission reduction targets, warning of potential compensation claims for wealthy polluters under international law. On July 23, the Trump administration moved to dismantle the EPA’s…
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Storm-2603, a China-linked cyber-espionage group, exploited a zero-day in Microsoft SharePoint Server (Toolshell) and by July 23 had breached at least 400 organizations, including DHS, DOE’s NNSA, the Department of Education, and NIH, with some hacked servers later seeded with LockBit and Warlock ransomware. The FBI, CISA, HHS, and MS-ISAC issued a joint alert about…
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Under Law 216 of 2017, Egypt requires a Defense Ministry permit to own or operate a drone, effectively banning recreational use without authorization. Importing or bringing a drone into Egypt without prior approval is illegal, and customs routinely confiscate unapproved drones on entry. Only the smallest “toy” drones are exempt from permits, defined as ≤150…
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Google and OpenAI won gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad by solving 5 of 6 problems with new general-purpose reasoning based on natural language understanding. OpenAI disclosed its experimental model scaled up test-time compute to think longer and in parallel, a very expensive undertaking. Google DeepMind’s Gemini Deep Think, unveiled in May, solved IMO…
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In June 2025, F-22 Raptors from the 1st Fighter Wing deployed from Langley AFB to the Middle East as part of Operation Midnight Hammer, joining a strike package of 125 U.S. aircraft including B-2 bombers dropping 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on Iran’s Fordow and Natanz, marking the Raptor’s first direct strikes against a nation-state. On July…
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In 2025 the F-35 program began full Block 4 modernization, adding more than 75 enhancements, including the APG-85 AESA radar replacing the APG-81 and the TR-3 hardware/software upgrade that enables sensor fusion and open-system architecture. By May 1, 2025 Lockheed Martin had cleared the TR-3 backlog and delivered the last of 72 TR-3-era airframes, reaching…
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