NetBSD/i386 is the port of NetBSD to generic machines ("PC clones") with 32-bit x86-family processors. It runs on PCI-Express, PCI, and CardBus systems, as well as older hardware with PCMCIA, VL-bus, EISA, MCA, and ISA (AT-bus) interfaces, with x87 math coprocessors.

Any i486 or better CPU should work - genuine Intel or a compatible such as Cyrix, AMD, or NexGen.

NetBSD/i386 was the original port of NetBSD, and was initially released as NetBSD 0.8 in 1993.

More than 36 years after the release of the 486 and 18 years after Intel stopped making them, leaders of the Linux kernel believe the project can improve itself by leaving i486 support behind. Ingo Molnar, quoting Linus Torvalds regarding "zero real reason for anybody to waste one second" on 486 support, submitted a patch series to the 6.15 kernel that updates its minimum support features. Those requirements now include TSC (Time Stamp Counter) and CX8 (i.e., "fixed" CMPXCH8B, its own whole thing), features that the 486 lacks (as do some early non-Pentium 586 processors).

It's not the first time Torvalds has suggested dropping support for 32-bit processors and relieving kernel developers from implementing archaic emulation and work-around solutions. "We got rid of i386 support back in 2012. Maybe it's time to get rid of i486 support in 2022," Torvalds wrote in October 2022. Failing major changes to the 6.15 kernel, which will likely arrive late this month, i486 support will be dropped.

Where does that leave people running a 486 system for whatever reason? They can run older versions of the Linux kernel and Linux distributions. They might find recommendations for teensy distros like MenuetOS, KolibriOS, and Visopsys, but all three of those require at least a Pentium. They can run FreeDOS. They might get away with the OS/2 descendant ArcaOS. There are some who have modified Windows XP to run on 486 processors, and hopefully, they will not connect those devices to the Internet.

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates ratcheted up his feud with Elon Musk, accusing the world’s richest man of “killing the world’s poorest children” through what he said were misguided cuts to US development assistance.

Gates, who is announcing a plan to accelerate his philanthropic giving over the next 20 years and close down the Gates Foundation altogether in 2045, said in an interview that the Tesla chief had acted through ignorance.

In February, Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) in effect shut down the US Agency for International Development, the main conduit for US aid, saying it was “time for it to die.”

The co-founder of Microsoft, and once the world’s richest man himself, said the abruptness of the cuts had left life-saving food and medicines expiring in warehouses and could cause the resurgence of diseases such as measles, HIV, and polio.

“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” he told the Financial Times.

So we have a person who has been flouting American immigration laws for two decades, apparently never even attempting to rectify the situation. She then flouted motor vehicle laws by operating a car without a license, putting others in danger. That, too, had likely been taking place for decades with no attempt to rectify the situation. For context, California lets illegal immigrants obtain driver's licenses, and what do you think the chances are that she bothered to have insurance?

This "undocumented grandmother" then drove onto a military base, one of the few places in the country where federal authorities have the legal right to demand identification at any time. When she couldn't provide any, because again, she had been flouting the law for two decades, she was detained and turned over to ICE.

Now, that sounds just a little bit different than "undocumented grandma facing deportation for wrong turn," doesn't it?

Look, I understand the argument that illegal immigrants without expanded criminal records (past crossing the border illegally) probably shouldn't be prioritized for deportation. In this case, this grandmother appears to have had a job as a dishwasher, so as illegal immigrants go, she was at least productive, which is more than I can say for a lot of those who were released during the Biden administration. But, we also have to consider that flouting the law in such an in-your-face way, specifically regarding driving without any identification, needs to carry consequences.

Ask yourself, what aspects of the law are citizens made immune to if they continue to break various parts of it for decades on end? //

sb2
26 minutes ago
No, the media did not make any mistakes about the "Maryland dad", just as they didn't make any mistakes here. They are "reporting" precisely as they want to report - misleading (lying both blatantly and by omission) to sway public opinion before the facts are known by the general public so they already have the idea in their head. Make no mistake, if the media has this much of the story to tell in the first place, they know the details. //

BJW,lagos
17 minutes ago
Wrong turn? Remember several years ago the Military (?) guy heading toward Mexico who made a wrong turn to NOT GO INTO MEXICO? HOW much time was he held in a Mexico jail until he was finally freed? Asking for a friend.

J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling
·
This woman will go down in sporting history as a heroine and USA Fencing will be remembered for their profound misogyny for forcing her, and other women, into this situation.
Off The Press @OffThePress1
🚨Stephanie Turner, the fencer who went viral after refusing to compete against a biological male, tells @DOGECommittee it is "unbelievably demeaning" to chalk female athletes losing to transgender opponents up to "skill" issues.
"Within the USA Fencing authoritative body, there is a culture of intimidation towards women ... A culture that includes public humiliation, doxxing, social ostracization, dismissal and even threats,” she added.

Embedded video
9:35 PM · May 7, 2025

This isn't about acceptance, starting conversations, or expressions of diversity. None of these in-your-face "art projects" ever are, particularly when they come in statue form.

This isn't a conversation piece, it's a declaration of power. This isn't a celebration of inclusivity; it's a conqueror's flag planted in a place where they know it will get attention. If this statue had popped up in the middle of a museum or some small park somewhere, the attention it got would be minimal. Putting it in the middle of Times Square is a statement.

But this isn't a statement about how fat black women are taking over. That identity is just a mask.

The statue is representational of leftism through the thing it considers more important than anything else, and that's identity. The statue is female, obese, and black, representing three identity markers that leftists consider "protected." Fat black women are generally considered at the top of the identity food chain according to leftists, and putting a statue of one in such a prominent place isn't some passing statement. It's a declaration of ideological superiority.

Think of it this way. If the city weren't so entrenched in leftism, do you think Thomas Jefferson would have been removed? Do you think this statue would have gone up? I don't see them appearing in any official capacity in right-leaning areas. This is a reminder and overt statement that this area — this city — is occupied. //

Retired Professor
7 hours ago edited
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The guardian of the gate:
"To every man upon this earth,
Death cometh, soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?"

A new "temple" has just gone up. On the ashes of our fathers.

Jerimiah's Johnson Retired Professor
5 hours ago edited
Thomas Babington Macaulay. Horatius. //

Jokey401
6 hours ago
I look at this Statue I’ve seen that stance before. It’s right before she starts throwing anything she can find at the fast food restaurant she is in at the worker across the counter because they ran out of bbq or ranch dressing.

According to NCRI sources, the primary function of the Rainbow Site is the extraction of tritium – a radioactive isotope used to enhance nuclear weapons. Unlike uranium enrichment, tritium has virtually no peaceful or commercial applications, casting further doubt on Iran’s longstanding claims that its nuclear ambitions are solely for energy or civilian use. //

Tritium is used to boost fission bombs for a substantial increase in yield, and it is used as a primary fuel source in thermonuclear weapons, or hydrogen bombs. //

Allowing Iran to maintain plants for nuclear enrichment isn't a good idea. Iran is the very definition of a rogue state. If they make a promise, they will break it. If they sign an agreement, they will violate it. If they say they will cease nuclear weapons development, they will be lying. And if they develop a nuclear weapon, they are very likely to use it.

Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. //

anon-wwfm Cleophus
an hour ago
“tritium has virtually no peaceful or commercial applications”
It’s used to make exit signs and rifle and pistol sights and other things that need to light up without battery power. //

The Real John from Jersey anon-d2hb
6 hours ago
The only US production site for tritium is the DOE Savannah River Site in Aiken SC, just outside of Augusta GA.

I actually interviewed for a job there 35 years ago. I had to get a classified security clearance, and the FBI came to interview my parents and grandparents.
When I got there, there were multiple layers of security to go through, each guarded by serious looking gentlemen with machine guns.

My point is, plutonium is easy to get, compared to tritium. And if the mullahs are trying to make it, there is no civilian use.

The Urban Institute, a centrist think tank focused on societal data, has noted that when inclusion of outside factors such as economic strata transpires, the state boasting of the highest test scores in 2024 for fourth graders in both math and reading is ... drum roll, please ...

... Mississippi. //

The Mississippi Department of Education seeks to create a world-class educational system that gives students the knowledge and skills to be successful in college and in the workforce, and to flourish as parents and citizens. To make this vision a reality, all students must be given multiple pathways to success, and teachers and administrators must continue to meet the challenges of this ever-changing landscape of public education. //

This demands self-discipline and the ability to understand that there are absolute, automatic answers to many life situations, which leads to math. The math-trained mind has the capacity to approach the complex, multi-layered factors inherent in functions required for successful adulthood, such as logically running a business. Balancing the need to control expenses while taking on the calculated risks needed for a company to expand requires a firm grasp of the absolutes learned through no other method than applying time-honored and time-tested mathematical principles. As the truism says, if your outgo exceeds your income, your upkeep will be your downfall.

Additionally (no pun intended), the math-trained mind understands that the colorblind, genderless world of numbers and calculations demonstrates true equality in a manner no puffed-up imagined realm of pseudo-intellectual superiority can evoke. The “progressive” mentality secretly abhors equality, as it shows that when provided equal resources and instruction in life’s mechanics, the artificial barriers of race and gender melt away. It also demonstrates the logical next step of uncovering the soft bigotry of low expectations combined with laying bare the thin veneer of deep racism held by those who, in their self-righteousness and desire to play God, act as though they are the living embodiment of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation by behaving as the betters of those they claim to uplift.

In 1949, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who had served as co-counsel at Nuremberg, wrote the following as it pertained to a free speech case he was involved in.

“[t]his Court has gone far toward accepting the doctrine that civil liberty means . . . that all local attempts to maintain order are impairments of the liberty of the citizen. The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrine logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”

I could expand on what this means, but I think Thomas Jefferson does a better job than I ever could when he wrote to John Colvin in 1810:

Whether circumstances do not sometimes occur which make it a duty in officers of high trust to assume authorities beyond the law, is easy of solution in principle, but sometimes embarrassing in practice. A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen: but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property & all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.

This is basically the "don't cut your nose off to spite your face" argument. If following the letter of the law is going to send the country over the cliff, apply some common sense and don't follow the letter. Lincoln said as much in 1861 when he suspended habeas corpus by executive order, telling Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney that he had empowered Gen. Winfield Scott to arrest, and detain, without resort to ordinary processes and forms of law, such individuals as he might deem dangerous to public safety because it served the public interest.

And later during a special session of Congress, he said, "In nearly one-third of the States had subverted the whole of the laws ... Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?" It's kind of a unique and odd argument that the left puts out there today. It wants strict adherence to constitutional law, and at the same time, it wants to violate current immigration law (which was, by the way, legally and constitutionally affirmed). And the fact that we have to grapple with this at all is due to the Democratic Party's practice of busting the law as they soar high above it like a drone. It might make them look like children stealing out of the cookie jar when one of their judges gets caught sneaking illegal aliens out the back door, and it's enjoyable to watch them beclown themselves, but all of this is really quite dangerous. //

One final thing I ran across while studying this matter was a couple of obscure passages in the SCOTUS ruling for the Shaughnessy v. United States case noted above.

a) The alien's right to enter the United States depends on the congressional will, and the courts cannot substitute their judgment for the legislative mandate....In the exercise of these powers, Congress expressly authorized the President to impose additional restrictions on aliens entering or leaving the United States during periods of international tension and strife. That authorization, originally enacted in the Passport Act of 1918, continues in effect during the present emergency. Under it, the Attorney General, acting for the President, may shut out aliens whose "entry would be prejudicial to the interest of the United States."

b) Courts have long recognized the power to expel or exclude aliens as a fundamental sovereign attribute exercised by the Government's political departments largely immune from judicial control.

And as we mentioned and have mentioned in the past, some of them who have a much more reliable history—such as the Rasmussen poll, the Insider Advantage poll, the Trafalgar poll—they all had Donald Trump, at the end of 100 days, with either roughly 50-50 approval ratings or even slightly above that, 48-46, 50-49.

But my point is, in one of the daily Rasmussen polls, they had an astonishing figure, that they broke down Donald Trump’s support by ethnic category.

And there were 39% of black Americans that expressed support for Donald Trump. That’s an astonishing number. Given that 95% of the news coverage, according to the Media Research Center, has been negative. And yet here is a traditional Democratic constituency where 4 out of 10 people like what’s been going on.

But even more astonishing is the ethnic constituency that expressed the highest approval of Donald Trump’s first 100 days was the Hispanic community. In fact, far above the so-called white community.

How can that be possible? The Democratic Party had told us that closing the border and stopping the illegal entry of 10 to 12 million illegal aliens during the Biden administration—that was deeply unpopular to the Hispanic community. //

What I’m getting at is that a group of elites in the Biden administration, for particular political purposes—and I’ll be frank here—I think they did want people to come in, both to serve as future constituents under the lax rules and protocols of early and mail-in voting, and also to grow the government and have more constituencies on welfare. //

And why would so-called white people poll much more negatively against Trump’s first 100 days than Hispanics? It’s because the white elite had created an agenda under the Biden and Obama administration that was elitist.

By that I mean—let’s face it—Sen. Bernie Sanders had to take out the word “millionaires” from his usual castigation of millionaires and billionaires. And it wasn’t just because he’s a millionaire now. That is the trademark of the professional bicoastal classes. And they’re interested in issues that are not existential—at least not everyday existential. By that I mean global warming, the Green New Deal, transgendered men in women’s sports, international organizations—the U.N.

But they’re not interested in what the Hispanic working classes are interested in. And that’s affordable gasoline, affordable power bills, good-paying jobs, schools that allow their children to be competitively educated, safety in their neighborhoods.

And the idea that they should have some natural antipathy for illegal aliens just because they share the same language and maybe ethnic background—they don’t. They’re just like anybody else that’s trying to make a living and has been ignored and shunned by the grandees of the Democratic Party.

This latest revelation revolves around something that happened in Tennessee, though. As Redstate reported, Abrego-Garcia was pulled over in the state on suspicion of human trafficking in 2022. Highway patrol officers found eight other people in the car, which was registered to a convicted human smuggler. They also found $1400 in cash, which was suspected to be payment for the run. The then-Biden-led ICE never showed up to detain Abrego-Garcia on what would have presumably been federal charges, and he was released.

Now, the convicted human smuggler has not only been revealed, but he's cooperating with the Trump administration's Department of Justice. As part of a "limited immunity" deal, Jose Ramon Hernandez Reyes has confirmed that he did hire Abrego-Garcia to traffic illegal immigrants.

A Chinese company has developed an AI-piloted submersible that can reach speeds “similar to a destroyer or a US Navy torpedo,” dive “up to 60 metres underwater,” and “remain static for more than a month, like the stealth capabilities of a nuclear submarine.” In case you’re worried about the military applications of this, you can relax because the company says that the submersible is “designated for civilian use” and can “launch research rockets.”

“Research rockets.” Sure.

Ever since the pandemic forced schools to go virtual, the number of online classes offered by community colleges has exploded. That has been a welcome development for many students who value the flexibility online classes offer. But it has also given rise to the incredibly invasive and uniquely modern phenomenon of bot students now besieging community college professors like Smith.

The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generated work. And because community colleges accept all applicants, they’ve been almost exclusively impacted by the fraud.

That has put teachers on the front lines of an ever-evolving war on fraud, muddied the teaching experience and thrown up significant barriers to students’ ability to access courses. What has made the situation at Southwestern all the more difficult, some teachers say, is the feeling that administrators haven’t done enough to curb the crisis.

‘We Didn’t Used to Have to Decide if our Students were Human’

You can't serve two masters, and while I'd like to say the transgender activists in the military are trying to serve two... they ultimately aren't. Their central focus is themselves, and you could say it's also their cause if you want to be generous, but really, this is just a me-centric kind of activism.

The military suffered from their inclusion. They were a clear sign that the U.S. armed forces weren't taking themselves seriously and were giving themselves over to vanity and mental illness. With Pete Hegseth now in the driver's seat, recruitment has skyrocketed. That's not an accident. The military has returned to a mentality of service, and strength is now back as a priority.

Weakness in a business that deals in death can get you killed, and selfishness is weakness at its core.

Plans were well underway to launch the Space Shuttle at Vandenberg in the early 1980s. The shuttle was what a rocket could never be: A flying aircraft with a human pilot. //

After the Challenger disaster, the entire program underwent an audit, and it was discovered that the SLC-6 launch pad — recycled from previous canceled Air Force projects like the never-launched Manned Orbital Laboratory — would be destroyed by the force of the first shuttle launch. The effect would have been similar to the April 2023 SpaceX Starship launch in Texas that hurled concrete powder miles from the launch site and damaged the launch vehicle. //

That was all in the future as a Boeing 747 jet carried a Space Shuttle to Vandenberg (then an Air Force base) for a promotional look at what was hoped would be a West Coast base of operations for the shuttle. If my recollection is correct, there has never been a manned flight launched from Vandenberg. In a full circle moment, SLC-6 launch pad is now leased for an expansion of the SpaceX Falcon program. The Falcon is a smaller rocket, carrying about 25% of the shuttle’s maximum. //

Reporters and photographers line up to watch and photograph the space shuttle and 747. The plane and cargo circled over Santa Maria and Lompoc before landing on time at the base. The brand new space shuttle Discovery visited Vandenberg Air Force Base on Nov. 6, 1983. Tony Hertz Telegram-Tribune file //

The newest orbiter will leave Vandenberg on Tuesday for Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where it will fly at least three missions before returning for the first Vandenberg launch. Between five and 10 annual missions may be launched from Vandenberg. The craft weighs 148,000 pounds empty and will weigh about 210,00 pounds in flight. It is 122 feet long and 78 feet wide; about the size of a DC-9 commercial airliner. It is removed or placed aboard the 747 with a bridge-like crane called a mating facility. The Air Force has spent $2.5 billion to build the space shuttle launch complex. Construction included the pouring of 250,000 cubic yards of concrete — enough to build a 25-mile four lane freeway — the use of 9,000 tons of steel reinforcing bar and 15,000 tons of structural steel. The latter would build a 120-story office building. Shuttles launched from Vandenberg will be put on polar, or south to north, orbits; Florida launches are put on equatorial orbits.

Read more at: https://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/photos-from-the-vault/article297956698.html#storylink=cpy

Stratolaunch has finally found a use for the world's largest airplane.

Twice in the last five months, the company launched a hypersonic vehicle over the Pacific Ocean, accelerated it to more than five times the speed of sound, and autonomously landed at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Stratolaunch used the same vehicle for both flights.

This is the first time anyone in the United States has flown a reusable hypersonic rocket plane since the last flight of the X-15, the iconic rocket-powered aircraft that pushed the envelope of high-altitude, high-speed flight 60 years ago. //

Zachary Krevor, president and CEO of Stratolaunch, spoke with Ars on Monday afternoon. He said the Talon test vehicle advances the capability lost with the retirement of the X-15 by flying autonomously. Like the Talon-A, the X-15 released from a carrier jet and ignited a rocket engine to soar into the uppermost layers of the atmosphere. But the X-15 had a pilot in command, while the Talon-A flies on autopilot.

"Why the autonomous flight matters is because hypersonic systems are now pushing the envelope in terms of maneuvering capability, maneuvering beyond what can be done by the human body," Krevor said. "Therefore, being able to perform flights with an autonomous, reusable, hypersonic testbed ensures that these flights are exploring the full envelope of capability that represents what's occurring in hypersonic system development today."

Stratolaunch's Talon-A is a little smaller than a school bus, or about half the size of the X-15. //

Engineers know less about the conditions of the hypersonic flight regime (in excess of Mach 5) than they do about lower-speed supersonic flight or spaceflight. The only vehicles that regularly fly at hypersonic speeds are missiles, rockets, and spacecraft reentering the atmosphere. They spend just a short time flying in the hypersonic environment as they transition to and from space.

There are two things you should know about hypersonic missiles. First, rockets have flown at hypersonic speeds since 1949, so when officials talk about hypersonic missiles, they are referring to vehicles that operate in the hypersonic flight environment, instead of just transiting through it.

Second, hypersonic vehicles come in a couple of variations. One is a glide vehicle, which is accelerated by a conventional rocket to hypersonic speed, then steers itself toward its destination or target using aerodynamic forces. The other is a cruiser that can sustain itself in hypersonic flight using exotic propulsion, such as scramjet engines. //

The Pentagon's emphasis on hypersonic weapons is relatively new. After the X-15's final flight in 1968, the government lacked any major hypersonic flight test programs for several decades. NASA flew the autonomous X-43 test vehicle to hypersonic speed two times in 2004, and the Air Force demonstrated an air-breathing scramjet engine at Mach 5.1 with the X-51 Waverider aircraft in 2013. While some of the X-43 and X-51 test flights failed, they provided early-stage data on hypersonic propulsion systems that could power high-speed aircraft and missiles.

But these were expensive government-led programs. Together, they cost nearly $1 billion in 2025 dollars, with only a handful of flight tests to show for it. The military now wants to lean heavier on commercial industry.

Since its founding 14 years ago, Stratolaunch has pivoted its mission from the airborne launch of satellites to hypersonic testing. //

Stratolaunch's founder, Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, died in 2018, putting the company's future in doubt. Stratolaunch flew its huge carrier aircraft, named Roc, for the first time in April 2019 but ceased operations the following month. Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm, purchased Stratolaunch from Allen's heirs later that year and redirected the company's mission from space launch to hypersonic flight testing.

Through it all, Stratolaunch continued flying Roc, a twin-fuselage airplane with a wingspan of 385 feet (117 meters). For a time, it appeared Roc might share a fate with Howard Hughes' "Spruce Goose" flying boat, which held the record as the airplane with the widest wingspan, until Roc (officially designated the Scaled Composites Model 351) took off for the first time in 2019. The Spruce Goose flew just once after its business prospects faded in the aftermath of World War II.

Now, the Pentagon's hunger for hypersonic weapons seems likely to feed Stratolaunch's coffers for some time to come. //

David Mayer Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
5m
1,241
I'm uncertain how big a "game changer" endoatmospheric, maneuverable, hypersonic weapons will be. They should be relatively easy to detect, track, and target using existing systems, even if they have an incredibly low radar cross section, simply because they will be hot as all hell, appearing clearly to any infrared sensors.

Interception is another story, it all depends on how maneuverable the weapon is and if it can reliably detect interceptors. Available reaction time is going to be substantially lower than many other systems, just because of how fast the weapon is moving. Your interceptor doesn't need to match the speed, but it does need to deal with the maneuverability of the weapon. A 15° change in trajectory is a 7 kilometer difference in actual position vs expected position after 15 seconds. Lots of existing interceptors are going to have trouble coping with that.

If the weapon is regularly changing direction then the effective range of your interceptors is significantly reduced, meaning that any interception will have to be launched from closer to the defended area and will have to be launched later in the weapons flight. Launch too soon and the weapons maneuvering will exhaust the interceptors fuel.

If the weapon can detect the interceptor then it may chose an alternate target, heck, they might be maneuverable enough to come in for a second or even third approach.

You see, SpaceX’s plans for Starship are demonstrably stupid. In fact, it is so stupid in so many different ways a lot of us, myself included, struggle to get a big-picture view and articulate why this moronic giant phallus will never work. I want to correct that with this article. So, come with me as I will lay out in glorious detail the 7 Deadly Sins of Starship and why this project is destined for the scrap heap. ///

Starts off with demonstrably false statements...

If SpaceX can clean up Starship's reliability issues, the company is free to fly. //

Among the impacts considered were increased trucking operations to deliver water and various propellants needed to support Starship launches. An earlier analysis by the FAA found that, to support a cadence of 25 launches a year, the vehicle presence on State Highway 4 to Boca Chica Beach will grow from an estimated 6,000 trucks a year to 23,771 trucks annually.

Because of this, the FAA is requiring SpaceX to undertake dozens of mitigating actions. For example, for trucks, it has sought to reduce employee miles driven on the primary artery leading to the Starbase launch site.

Media smeared the findings as ‘junk science,’ but tens of thousands of data exclusions show researchers were careful not to overstate risk.

HINSON: Can you define for the committee today what an improper payment is, and some examples of what you're seeing — and why these procedures were not already in place before, Mr. Secretary?

BESSENT: Well...it's a bit mystifying why they weren't in place. And what we are seeing is that there was a very complacent upper level of management in many departments...across the entire government. What I can say at Treasury is that of the 1.5 billion payments...we send out every year, they are required to have something called a TAS — the Treasury Account Symbol. We discovered that more than one-third — one-third — of those payments did not have a TAS number. So, as the Appropriations Committee, you should be shocked by that because: How can a payment be tracked back to an appropriation? Only through the TAS number. So there was no accountability. So that is why the 450 organizations that sit above Treasury, where Treasury acts as the paymaster, are unable to pass an audit. So, we have cracked down on that. Every payment now requires a TAS number — very simple.