First Australian Orbital Rocket Suffers Catastrophic Failure ⇢

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I had lost track of this launch, but Stephen Clark has the details:

Back-to-back engine failures doomed a privately developed Australian rocket moments after liftoff Tuesday, cutting short a long-shot attempt to reach orbit with the country’s first homegrown launch vehicle.

The 82-foot-tall (25-meter) Eris rocket ignited its four main engines and took off from its launch pad in northeastern Australia at 6:35 pm EDT (22:35 UTC) Tuesday. Liftoff occurred at 8:35 am local time Wednesday at Bowen Orbital Spaceport, the Eris rocket’s launch site in the Australian state of Queensland.

But the rocket quickly lost power from two of its engines and stalled just above the launch pad before coming down in a nearby field. The crash sent a plume of smoke thousands of feet over the launch site, which sits on a remote stretch of coastline on Australia’s northeastern frontier.

Gilmour Space, the private company that developed the rocket, said in a statement that there were no injuries and “no adverse environmental impacts” in the aftermath of the accident. The launch pad also appeared to escape any significant damage.

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Memphis Light, Gas & Water Made $1 Million Error in xAI’s Billing ⇢

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For the second time, xAI has fallen behind on its bills to our local utility company. In February 2025, it was reported that the AI company was $400,000 behind and received several cutoff notices.

This time it seems that the error was on the side of MLG&W, per David Royer and April Thompson, reporting for WREG:

xAI’s Colossus data center in Memphis was issued a cutoff notice for a past-due bill by the local utility company in June, a month when it owed nearly $1 million for electricity, gas and water service.

But xAI says the company has paid its bills on time and in full, saying the notices were the result of internal accounting errors on the part of the utility.

Memphis Light Gas & Water confirmed that statement, saying, “xAI is current on its bill. MLGW continues to work with xAI on any billing concerns. There was a routing issue on MLGW’s side that has been corrected.”

The Highs and Lows of macOS Tahoe ⇢

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Today, the OS Class of 26 graduated to Public Beta, and Jason Snell and I are in lockstep in how we think about Tahoe:

After a month using early builds of macOS Tahoe full time, I can confidently report that this is an upgrade that feels like an upgrade. The additional power of Spotlight and Shortcuts is going to delight a lot of longtime Mac users, and I’m really liking the direction Apple is taking Control Center in the menu bar.

That said, it’s also clear that the Mac is the lowest priority platform when it comes to Apple’s new design language. The beta interface feels messy and unfinished, and worse, it feels like an iOS design that’s been imported without enough consideration for how it should manifest on the Mac. I understand that the iPhone is the top priority, but the Mac deserves a version of this design that fits how the Mac is used. So far, it doesn’t feel like that.