Mahri Stainnak got the call the day after President Donald Trump took office: the Office of Personnel Management’s human resources office was putting them on administrative leave “effective immediately,” while the agency “investigates your radical and wasteful DEI activity.”

Stainnak was surprised by the news. Before the Trump administration, they served as OPM’s deputy director of the governmentwide Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility. But now they worked as the director of OPM’s talent innovation group, a human resources job focused on recruiting and retaining talent across the federal government.

“I said, ‘Wait a minute, I’m not in diversity, equity and inclusion.’ I started a new role in a job that has nothing to do with diversity, equity and inclusion.’ So I felt incredibly shocked and confused,” Stainnak said.

The second call came 48 hours later: Stainnak, a nonbinary person who had worked in the federal government for more than 16 years, received a reduction in force notice, as part of the Trump administration’s plan to root out DEI programs across the federal government.

Stainnak is now part of a class-action lawsuit filed this week in the D.C. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The lawsuit, led by the American Civil Liberties Union of D.C., claims the Trump administration unlawfully targeted and fired federal employees perceived to be associated with DEI work — even if their current jobs had nothing to do with it.

Mary Kuntz, an attorney at the law firm Kalijarvi, Chuzi, Newman & Fitch, P.C. who is representing the former employees, said the administration’s actions “clearly” violate the Civil Service Reform Act, because employees like Stainnak were fired for previous work in DEI positions.

“You can’t RIF somebody from a position they’re not in,” Kuntz said. “They sought to punish Mahri [Stainnak] for previous DEI work. That’s a violation of the First Amendment.”

Kuntz said the lawsuit claims that the administration’s push to “eviscerate” DEI programs also had a disproportionate impact on people of color, women, non-binary individuals, and violates Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

“The DEI folks were working on behalf of people with disabilities, people who are non-native speakers of English. They were advocating for protected groups,” she said.

On the campaign trail last year, President Donald Trump pledged to “eliminate all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the entire federal government,” and characterized these programs as promoting “un-American” ideology.

On his first days in office, Trump signed executive orders that directed agencies to create lists of employees associated with DEI going back to Nov. 5, 2024 — the date of the presidential election.  The complaint says agencies were directed to remove those employees, “regardless of their current roles or duties.”

“President Trump’s directives did not merely represent a change in presidential priorities — a normal occurrence when presidential administrations change. Rather, they were targeted actions intended to punish perceived political enemies, as well as to eliminate from the federal workforce women, people of color, and those, like plaintiffs, who advocated for or were perceived as advocating for protected racial or gender groups,” the complaint states.

The complaint says agencies set competitive levels for the RIFs so narrowly that federal employees were unable to compete for retention, and that those impacted by RIFs were not considered for reassignment to other jobs.

“I absolutely feel targeted on the basis of what the Trump administration believes my beliefs are, because I was not working in a diversity, equity and inclusion role in any way at the time when the new administration came in, or at the time I was placed on administrative leave,” Stainnak said.

For all the Trump administration’s actions to strip DEI out of the federal workforce, Kuntz said the president’s executive orders don’t go into any detail to define DEI.

“He characterizes them as illegal and discriminatory and various other things … but does doesn’t define them,” Kuntz said. “You can’t decide that somebody is a different party than the party in the White House and decide to fire them on that basis.”

The lawsuit states that the total number of federal employees impacted by the DEI rollback fis unknown, but says news reports suggest it could be “potentially in the thousands.”

The complaint states that at least 40 women or non-binary individuals, and more than 40 people of color received layoffs in connection with the Trump administration’s directives.

Stainnak and their colleagues filed an appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board in March, but Kuntz said that appeal and similar cases brought before the Office of Special Counsel and agencies’ Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) offices, have stalled.

In their last role, Stainnak helped agencies recruit top talent into the federal workforce. But they said the Trump administration’s purge of DEI workers has pushed out individuals who worked on bipartisan projects.

Former federal employees leading the lawsuit include a former operations manager at the Department of Veterans Affairs who “helped ensure that veterans were not inhibited from accessing earned benefits due to cultural or socioeconomic barriers,” a Department of Homeland Security Employee who led language competency efforts at the border to advance intelligence gathering and the safety of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

“By illegally targeting people based on the Trump administration’s assumptions about our political beliefs, or by targeting us based on who we are, this administration actually is hurting the people who work and live in this country, because now these dedicated, hardworking federal servants are not in their jobs providing the critical services that they do, whether it’s responding to emergencies like hurricanes and making sure folks have drinking water and shelter, or making sure our transportation systems are safe and timely. This action is really hurting the people who live in this country,” Stainnak said.

The post Federal employees who left ‘DEI’ roles still fired under Trump administration purge, lawsuit claims first appeared on Federal News Network.

© The Associated Press

Apple’s rumored iPhone 18 delay could shrink the 2026 lineup and push the base model to 2027, as IDC forecasts shifts in Apple’s strategy.

The post iPhone 18 Release: Here’s What We Know So Far appeared first on TechRepublic.

Apple’s rumored iPhone 18 delay could shrink the 2026 lineup and push the base model to 2027, as IDC forecasts shifts in Apple’s strategy.

The post iPhone 18 Release: Here’s What We Know So Far appeared first on TechRepublic.

Bitcoin is holding firmly above the $92,000 level after several days of relief and a stronger-than-expected rebound across the market. Yet despite the positive price action, analysts remain deeply divided. Some interpret this move as a classic relief rally within a broader downtrend, warning that the macro structure still favors a deeper correction.

Others see the recent recovery as the first sign that Bitcoin may be stabilizing and preparing for another bullish phase. The uncertainty reflects the conflicting signals coming from both derivatives and spot markets.

Adding fuel to the discussion, new on-chain data from Arkham shows that Matrixport withdrew 3,805 BTC—worth approximately $352.5 million—from Binance within the last 24 hours. This is a significant development, as Matrixport is one of Asia’s largest crypto financial service platforms, founded by Jihan Wu, the co-founder of Bitmain. The firm provides institutional-grade investment products, lending, trading, and asset management solutions to high-net-worth clients and funds across the region.

Large withdrawals from exchanges by institutions like Matrixport often signal accumulation, reduced selling pressure, or repositioning for custody and long-term holding. Combined with Bitcoin’s stabilization above $92K, this data adds an important layer of complexity to the current market outlook.

Institutional Positioning and a Changing Macro Landscape

Matrixport’s withdrawal of 3,805 BTC from Binance signals a potentially meaningful shift in institutional positioning. Large entities rarely move this size of capital without intention. Such withdrawals typically imply reduced selling pressure and a preference for custody over exchange liquidity, often interpreted as quiet accumulation.

For a firm managing billions in client assets, reallocating Bitcoin off exchanges suggests growing confidence in medium-term price stability or an expectation of improving market conditions.

This move arrives at a pivotal moment in the global macro environment. The Federal Reserve has ended Quantitative Tightening (QT), marking a major transition from liquidity withdrawal to a more accommodative stance. Historically, the end of QT has preceded periods of asset reflation, as systemic liquidity begins to stabilize.

At the same time, Japanese bond yields have surged, signaling stress in one of the world’s most influential funding markets. A spike in Japanese yields often triggers global liquidity adjustments, particularly through the carry trade, which can ultimately redirect capital toward risk assets—including Bitcoin.

Additionally, markets expect the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates soon, further easing financial conditions. Lower rates weaken the dollar, reduce funding costs, and typically stimulate inflows into alternative and high-beta assets.

In this environment of softening monetary policy and rising liquidity, Matrixport’s aggressive Bitcoin accumulation could reflect growing institutional conviction that the worst of the downturn is behind us—and that Bitcoin may be entering a more favorable macro phase.

BTC Price Analysis: Testing Recovery Momentum

Bitcoin’s daily chart shows the market attempting to stabilize after the sharp decline that pushed price toward the mid-$80,000s. The rebound into the $91K–$93K zone marks the first meaningful recovery attempt, but the structure still reflects caution.

BTC remains below the 50-day and 100-day SMAs, which have both started to slope downward, signaling that the broader trend has not yet shifted back in favor of the bulls. Until Bitcoin reclaims these moving averages with strong volume, the market will likely see this move as a relief rally rather than a confirmed reversal.

Price is currently consolidating above the 200-day SMA, a level that often acts as a long-term trend gauge. Holding this region is essential; losing it would risk a deeper drop toward earlier support zones near $82K–$84K. Volume activity during the bounce shows some improvement, yet it remains far below the levels seen during the late-October peak, suggesting that buyers are cautious and large players are not fully engaged.

The chart also shows a clear lower-high structure forming since September, confirming the bearish pressure that has dominated the last several weeks. For sentiment to shift decisively, BTC must break above $95K and rebuild momentum toward the psychological $100K mark. Until then, volatility and hesitation remain the defining features of this recovery.

Featured image from ChatGPT, chart from TradingView.com

Madison, United States, 5th December 2025, CyberNewsWire

Welcome to Edition 8.21 of the Rocket Report! We’re back after the Thanksgiving holiday with more launch news. Most of the big stories over the last couple of weeks came from abroad. Russian rockets and launch pads didn’t fare so well. China’s launch industry celebrated several key missions. SpaceX was busy, too, with seven launches over the last two weeks, six of them carrying more Starlink Internet satellites into orbit. We expect between 15 and 20 more orbital launch attempts worldwide before the end of the year.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. 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.

Another Sarmat failure. A Russian intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) fired from an underground silo on the country’s southern steppe on November 28 on a scheduled test to deliver a dummy warhead to a remote impact zone nearly 4,000 miles away. The missile didn’t even make it 4,000 feet, Ars reports. Russia’s military has been silent on the accident, but the missile’s crash was seen and heard for miles around the Dombarovsky air base in Orenburg Oblast near the Russian-Kazakh border. A video posted by the Russian blog site MilitaryRussia.ru on Telegram and widely shared on other social media platforms showed the missile veering off course immediately after launch before cartwheeling upside down, losing power, and then crashing a short distance from the launch site.

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© Korea Aerospace Research Institute

Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation are raising the alarm over the deadly impacts of international funding cuts in global health. Slashed budgets are projected to reverse decades of progress, causing the number of children dying before their fifth birthday to rise for the first time this century. An estimated 4.8 million children are expected to die this year, an increase of 200,000 deaths compared to last year.

“That is something that we hope never to report on, but it is a sad fact. And there are many causes, but clearly one of the key causes has been significant cuts in international development assistance from a number of high-income countries,” said Mark Suzman, CEO of the Gates Foundation, in a briefing with media this week.

Suzman specifically called out the U.S., the United Kingdom, France and Germany for “making significant cuts” to their support. Internationally, funding plunged 26.9% below last year’s levels, according to the philanthropy.

The Gates Foundation today released its annual Goalkeepers Report, which tracks progress on measures including poverty, hunger, access to clean water and energy, environmental benchmarks and other metrics.

The Seattle-based foundation worked with the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to model the effects of reduced assistance. The researchers found that if the cuts to aid persist or worsen, an additional 12 million to 16 million children could die over the next 20 years.

While offering dire projections, the document aims to be a call to action for governments and philanthropists large and small.

“This report is a roadmap to progress,” Gates writes, “where smart spending meets innovation at scale.”

The billionaire Microsoft co-founder calls out some specific areas that could yield the most benefit, including primary healthcare, routine immunizations, the development of improved vaccines and new uses of data.

Modeling in the report predicts that by 2045, better vaccines for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and pneumonia could save 3.4 million children, while new malaria tools could save an additional 5.7 million kids. Shots of lenacapavir could successfully prevent and treat HIV.

The foundation calls attention to the life-saving benefits of vaccinations as the U.S. Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to undercut public support of vaccines.

With the backdrop of reduced federal funding for global humanitarian causes and backpedaling on vaccinations, Gates earlier this year announced plans to give away $200 billion — including nearly all of his wealth — over the next two decades through the Gates Foundation.

The Seattle-based organization, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, will sunset its operations on Dec. 31, 2045. The philanthropy is the world’s largest and has already disbursed $100 billion since its founding.

“If we do more with less now — and get back to a world where there’s more resources to devote to children’s health — then in 20 years, we’ll be able to tell a different kind of story,” Gates writes in the report. “The story of how we helped more kids survive childbirth, and childhood.”

A cryptocurrency analyst has pointed out how the next XRP support may be $1.2 if the lower level of the asset’s Parallel Channel breaks down.

XRP Is Currently Above A Parallel Channel’s Support Level

In a new post on X, analyst Ali Martinez has shared a pattern that has been forming in the 3-day price of XRP. The pattern in question is a Parallel Channel, a type of consolidation channel in technical analysis (TA).

A Parallel Channel appears whenever an asset’s price consolidates between two parallel trendlines. The upper level of the pattern tends to be a source of resistance, while the lower one that of support. Together, the two lines keep the asset locked in the range between them.

Either of the levels not holding up can imply a continuation of the trend in that direction. This breakout is bullish when the price breaks the upper level, while bearish in the case of the lower one.

Based on how the channel is aligned relative to the graph axes, Parallel Channels can be divided into a few types. The Ascending Channel corresponds to the case when the channel has a positive slope. Similarly, the Descending Channel is the type where consolidation occurs to a net downside.

The channel that XRP has been following over the past year falls in neither category, however, as it belongs to the third and simplest case: a Parallel Channel that’s also parallel to the time-axis. This pattern naturally signifies a phase of true sideways movement in the price.

Now, here is the chart shared by Martinez that shows the Parallel Channel that the 3-day price of XRP is trading inside:

As displayed in the above graph, the 3-day XRP price recently retested the Parallel Channel’s lower level situated at $2. The coin has since rebounded, indicating that support is holding for now.

In the scenario that the coin returns to the level and a retest fails, the analyst has noted that the next level that stands out is the $1.2 level. This level and the support line are separated by the same distance as the height of the Parallel Channel. It now remains to be seen how XRP will develop in the near future and whether the rebound will continue to hold.

XRP isn’t the only cryptocurrency that has been following a Parallel Channel recently. As Martinez has pointed out in another X post, Ethereum‘s daily price has seemingly been trading inside such a pattern for a few years now.

XRP Price

XRP has shot up alongside the rest of the cryptocurrency sector as its price has recovered to $2.17.

New York, New York, 1st December 2025, CyberNewsWire

Automatically convert values using the latest exchange rates, track gains or losses, and produce automated reports across markets.

The post How does multi-currency support help businesses manage global transactions? appeared first on Digital Trends.

FC Barcelona has drawn sharp criticism after signing a three-year sponsorship agreement with Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP), a “little-known” blockchain startup registered in Samoa that had only dozens of social media followers when the deal was announced.

As first reported by the FT, the partnership has sparked accusations that the club is desperately chasing revenue while potentially exposing fans to financial risks through a company that offers minimal transparency into its operations or leadership.

The Catalan giant announced the agreement on November 15, making ZKP its official blockchain technology partner, despite the company’s thin digital footprint and offshore registration in a jurisdiction the European Union lists as a tax haven.

Official: FC Barcelona have announced a new global sponsor: Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP), a Samoa-based AI and blockchain company.

The agreement runs until 2028 and includes digital advertising assets and fan experiences, though the company’s tiny social-media presence has… pic.twitter.com/mYejuVSQGb

— Barça Universal (@BarcaUniversal) November 15, 2025

Critics have pointed to troubling connections, including controversial influencer Andrew Tate promoting zero-knowledge proof systems hours after the deal went public, with a version of his video featuring ZKP’s logo later distributed through the company’s Telegram channel.

Red Flags and Missing Details

ZKP introduced itself with its first post on X, which had only 33 followers, following only FC Barcelona, Bitcoin, and Andrew Tate.

The company held its first auction of 200 million coins on November 21. While ZKP’s website claims commitment to transparency, it provides scant detail about who runs the operation or who provided the $100 million financing it claims to have secured.

“Everyone asks, ‘Who’s behind this?’ As if knowing the names would make the code stronger. It won’t. We’re real — engineers, cryptographers, ex-founders, system killers. But we’re not playing the PR game,” the company states on its website.

Martin Calladine, author of No Questions Asked: How football joined the crypto con, described the information deficit as “deeply concerning” and warned that Barcelona fans could be lured into purchasing coins “that could easily end up being worthless.“

Former Barcelona board director Xavier Vilajoana questioned what due diligence the club conducted before finalizing the agreement.

Sembla un mal acudit, però malauradament és real.

El FC Barcelona ha anunciat un acord de patrocini amb ZKP, una empresa de blockchain poc coneguda registrada a Samoa, una jurisdicció que la UE inclou a la llista de paradisos fiscals. En el moment d’anunciar-se l’acord, el…

— Xavier Vilajoana (@XaviVilajoana) November 18, 2025

“It is incredibly concerning that Barca’s leadership would choose to associate the club with a company whose background raises so many red flags,” he said, warning that partnering with a secretive crypto startup signals “desperation” at the financially stricken organization.

On November 26, Barcelona issued a statement distancing itself from ZKP’s newly announced FCB token, clarifying that the club has “no connection whatsoever” to it.

Official: Barça distanced itself from ZKP’s newly announced FCB token, saying the club has zero involvement in its creation, management or tech.

The token wasn’t part of their sponsorship deal and Barça says it’ll share updates only when there’s clear, confirmed info. pic.twitter.com/N050GjOuLJ

— Barça Universal (@BarcaUniversal) November 26, 2025

Financial Pressure Mounts

The ZKP partnership arrives as Barcelona grapples with severe financial pressure following an ill-judged player-buying spree between 2017 and 2019.

The club has been punished repeatedly for breaching Spanish football’s spending limit, with its latest accounts showing net debt of €469 million plus more than €900 million in stadium-related borrowing.

Barcelona has attempted to improve its finances through asset sales, including portions of its long-term television income. Still, costly delays to its stadium renovation have made revenue generation more urgent.

Barcelona’s other Web3 ventures have also faltered. The club booked a €141 million writedown last year after a deal to sell a stake in Barça Vision collapsed when investors failed to make payments.

Despite setbacks, Barcelona has maintained its digital asset initiatives, including selling its first NFT for $693,000 at Sotheby’s in July 2022 and launching FC Barcelona Fan Tokens through Chiliz and Socios in June 2020, which sold out for $1.3 million in less than 2 hours.

Sold out. @socios The $BAR @FCBarcelona token flash sale sold more than $1.3m in less than 2 hours, with $777k in less than 2 minutes on our crypto exchange @chiliz. Fans & crypto enthusiasts bought from 106 countries!!! There was 5x more demand ($6m++) on our platforms. pic.twitter.com/OKxmsbVAte

— Alexandre Dreyfus (@alex_dreyfus) June 22, 2020

Growing Industry Trend

Crypto firms have rushed to sponsor football clubs in recent years. However, many deals have ended in acrimony, with Inter Milan, Roma, Chelsea, and Atlético Madrid among clubs that entered agreements that were terminated early.

Despite cautionary tales, the trend continues to accelerate. Paris Saint-Germain revealed in May 2025 that it had become the first sports entity to adopt a Bitcoin treasury strategy.

A Sport Quake study found that football accounted for 43% of all crypto and digital asset sponsorships in the 2024/25 season, representing a 64% year-over-year increase.

Recent partnerships include Kadena’s four-year agreement with the Croatian Football Federation in February and Tether’s acquisition of a minority stake in Juventus FC.

Barcelona’s partnership with ZKP nevertheless stands apart for the opacity surrounding the company and the speed at which red flags emerged.

The post FC Barcelona Faces Backlash Over Sponsorship with Obscure Crypto Firm appeared first on Cryptonews.

Cybercriminals impersonating financial institutions have targeted individuals, businesses, and organizations of different sizes.

The post Account Takeover Fraud Caused $262 Million in Losses in 2025: FBI appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Apple was all-in on WiFi from the beginning, launching the AirPort line of products to much fanfare in 1999. In 2004, along came the AirPort Express—a fully-functional router the size of a laptop charger, that offered audio streaming to boot. As [schvabek] found out that while a lot of older Apple gear has long ago been deprecated, the AirPort Express is still very much supported and functional to this day!

Generally, you wouldn’t expect to plug in a 20-year-old Apple accessory and have it work with the company’s modern hardware. However, upon slotting the AirPort Express into a wall socket and starting the initialization process, [schvabek] noted that it was detected perfectly well by his post-2020 Macs. Only, there was a small problem—the configuration process would always stall out before completion.

Thankfully, there was a simple remedy. [schvabek] found that he could connect to the AirPort Express with his classic white plastic MacBook and complete the process. From there, he was astonished that Apple’s servers let him pull down a firmware update for a device from 2004. After that upgrade, the AirPort Express was fully functional with all his modern Apple gear. He could readily stream audio from his iPhone and MacBooks with no compatibility issues whatsoever.

It’s nice to see Apple still supporting this ancient hardware to this day. It’s a nice contrast when companies like Sonos are more than happy to brick thousands of old devices just for the sake of progress.

Last week’s conclusion of the record-breaking government shutdown was great news for federal employees in general. But for a few thousand specific feds, it was even better news. They’d been told they were about to lose their jobs completely, and as of Friday, almost all of them have now had those notices formally rescinded.

Filings the Justice Department submitted to a federal court in San Francisco on Friday indicate that each of the more than 3,000 federal workers who had received reduction in force (RIF) notices after the shutdown began have now been formally notified that those RIFs have been cancelled.

That action came as a result of several provisions in the continuing resolution Congress passed last week to reopen the government. The legislation provided that not only any RIF notice an agency issued on Oct. 1 or later “shall have no force or effect,” but it also barred federal agencies from using any funding to conduct any further RIFs for as long as the current CR is in effect.

Those same RIFs were the subject of a union lawsuit that had already resulted in a preliminary injunction putting the layoffs on hold. But the Trump administration argues the continuing resolution means there’s no longer a need to litigate over whether the RIFs were legal in the first place.

“In light of these developments, defendants believe this case is moot,” attorneys wrote in a filing Friday.

In all, agency-by-agency filings show the administration attempted to fire a total of 3,605 employees during the shutdown — with RIF notices ranging from more than 1,300 at the Internal Revenue Service to 54 at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

(Story continues below table)

Agencies updated their filings on Friday to indicate that they had complied with the directive Congress included in the CR to notify each employee that their RIF notices have been withdrawn.

However, there is some doubt as to the fate of 299 positions in the Department of Education’s civil rights division. Although the department notified those workers on Oct. 14 — a time period during which Congress undid all other RIF notices — the government argues that those specific notices were first issued in March, and consequently weren’t covered by the continuing resolution.

“Although the March 2025 RIF group of OCR employees is an entirely separate group from the 137 OCR employees to whom October 10 RIF notices were issued, and finalizing the March 2025 RIF does not involve issuing or implementing a RIF during and because of the shutdown, ED has paused separating the March RIF OCR employees pursuant to this court’s preliminary injunction pending clarification from the court that the current preliminary injunction does not encompass ED’s March 2025 RIF,” Jacqueline Clay, the department’s chief human capital officer wrote in a declaration.

 

The post More than 3,600 feds get notice their shutdown RIFs are rescinded first appeared on Federal News Network.

© The Associated Press

A man in Ireland earned the unpleasant distinction of developing an exceedingly rare infection on his penis—one that has a puzzling origin, but may be connected to his work with dead animals.

According to an article published in ASM Case Reports on Thursday, the 57-year-old man went to a hospital in Dublin after his penis became red, swollen, and painful over the course of a week. He also had a fever. Doctors promptly admitted him to the hospital and noted that he had received a kidney transplant 15 years prior. As such, he was on immunosuppressive drugs, which keep his body from rejecting the organ, but could also allow infections to run amok.

Initial blood work found hints of an infection, and the doctors initially suspected a bacterial skin infection (cellulitis) had taken hold in his nether region. So, they put him on some standard antibiotics for that. But his penis only got worse, redder, and more swollen. This prompted consultation with infectious disease doctors.

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© Getty | NIH/NIAID

Welcome to Edition 8.20 of the Rocket Report! For the second week in a row, Blue Origin dominated the headlines with news about its New Glenn rocket. After a stunning success November 13 with the launch and landing of the second New Glenn rocket, Jeff Bezos’ space company revealed a roadmap this week showing how engineers will supercharge the vehicle with more engines. Meanwhile, in South Texas, SpaceX took a step toward the first flight of the next-generation Starship rocket. There will be no Rocket Report next week due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. We look forward to resuming delivery of all the news in space lift the first week of December.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. 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.

Northrop’s Pegasus rocket wins a rare contract. A startup named Katalyst Space Technologies won a $30 million contract from NASA in August to build a robotic rescue mission for the agency’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory in low-Earth orbit. Swift, in space since 2004, is a unique instrument designed to study gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the Universe. The spacecraft lacks a propulsion system and its orbit is subject to atmospheric drag, and NASA says it is “racing against the clock” to boost Swift’s orbit and extend its lifetime before it falls back to Earth. On Wednesday, Katalyst announced it selected Northrop Grumman’s air-launched Pegasus XL rocket to send the rescue craft into orbit next year.

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© Manuel Mazzanti/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Palo Alto, California, 19th November 2025, CyberNewsWire

Austin, TX/USA, 18th November 2025, CyberNewsWire

Russia’s defense industry is facing its deepest crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union, according to internal assessments and correspondence circulating among defense‑sector managers. Despite large military orders driven by the ongoing war in Ukraine, Russian defense plants are now under heavy strain, lacking the workforce, financial stability, and supply chains required to sustain […]

Welcome to Edition 8.19 of the Rocket Report! Thursday was a monumental day in launch history with Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket not just taking off successfully, but with the first stage masterfully returning to the surface of the ocean, hovering near the Jacklyn drone ship, and then making a landing in the center of the barge. It was fantastic to watch and cements our new reality of reusable rockets. The future of space access is very bright indeed.

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.

Private Chinese rocket fails. Galactic Energy’s solid-fuel Ceres-1 rocket lifted off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China on Sunday, carrying three satellites toward low-Earth orbit. The rocket’s first three stages performed well, according to media reports, but its fourth and final stage shut down too early, leading to the loss of all three payloads, Space.com reports.

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© Blue Origin