On Friday, during Day 12 of its "12 days of OpenAI," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced its latest AI "reasoning" models, o3 and o3-mini, which build upon the o1 models launched earlier this year. The company is not releasing them yet but will make these models available for public safety testing and research access today.

The models use what OpenAI calls "private chain of thought," where the model pauses to examine its internal dialog and plan ahead before responding, which you might call "simulated reasoning" (SR)—a form of AI that goes beyond basic large language models (LLMs).

The company named the model family "o3" instead of "o2" to avoid potential trademark conflicts with British telecom provider O2, according to The Information. During Friday's livestream, Altman acknowledged his company's naming foibles, saying, "In the grand tradition of OpenAI being really, truly bad at names, it'll be called o3."

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Within hours of NASA announcing its decision to fly the Artemis II mission aboard an Orion spacecraft with an unmodified heat shield, critics assailed the space agency, saying it had made the wrong decision.

"Expediency won over safety and good materials science and engineering. Sad day for NASA," Ed Pope, an expert in advanced materials and heat shields, wrote on LinkedIn.

There is a lot riding on NASA's decision, as the Artemis II mission involves four astronauts and the space agency's first crewed mission into deep space in more than 50 years.

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Two years ago next week, NASA's Orion spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean to wrap up what, at first glance, seemed to be a highly successful unpiloted test flight that made a return to the Moon feel within reach.

The Orion capsule descended under parachutes, right on target near a US Navy recovery ship on December 11, 2022. In 25-and-a-half days, the Orion spacecraft entered the Moon's sphere of influence, flew within about 60 miles (100 kilometers) of the lunar surface, and, for the most part, worked as designed in deep space. On top of that, the rocket's launch vehicle, NASA's heavy-lift Space Launch System, also performed near-flawlessly on its first flight, known as Artemis I.

However, once NASA engineers got a closer look at the Orion spacecraft, their optimism faded. They saw cracks in the craft's heat shield and divots in the ablative thermal protection layer resembling potholes on a neglected street. This isn't what engineers expected, and they spent the next two years investigating the cause of the problem and determining whether it posed a safety risk for NASA's next Artemis mission, Artemis II. If the results weren't favorable, NASA might have to disassemble the Orion spacecraft, pushing back the flight a year or more beyond the Artemis II mission's already-delayed launch date.

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The Space Launch System rocket that will dispatch four astronauts on the first Moon mission in more than 50 years passed a major milestone Wednesday.

NASA said ground teams inside the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at Kennedy Space Center in Florida lifted the aft assembly of the rocket's left booster onto the mobile launch platform. Using an overhead crane, teams hoisted the left aft booster assembly—already filled with pre-packed solid propellant—from the VAB transfer aisle, over a catwalk dozens of stories high and then down onto mounting posts on the mobile launcher.

This marks the start of stacking for the second SLS rocket earmarked to launch NASA's Artemis II mission and slated to send NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen on a 10-day flight around the far side of the Moon. Artemis II will be the first crewed flight of NASA's Artemis program and the first time people fly on the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft.

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