If SpaceX is going to fly Starships as often as it wants to, it's going to take more than rockets and launch pads.

First, there's the sprawling factory that SpaceX has constructed at its Starbase location along the Gulf Coast in South Texas. The building, known as Starfactory, is designed to produce one Starship per day. A couple of miles to the east, SpaceX has built one Starship launch pad and is preparing to activate a second one.

With Starship, SpaceX seeks to buck the old way of doing things. Tanker trucks have traditionally delivered rocket propellant to launch pads at America's busiest spaceports in Florida and California. SpaceX has used the same method of bringing propellant for the first several years of operations at Starbase.

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Marvel Studios has (mercifully) slowed the pace of new releases of late, but this month we're getting the miniseries Marvel Zombies —and the studio just dropped the official trailer. It's adapted from the Marvel Comics series and a spinoff of the 2021 What If...? episode featuring several Avengers in zombified form. It's part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phase Six.

(Spoilers for the 2021 What If...? episode below.)

In the What If...? episode—which retconned the events of Ant-Man and the Wasp and Avengers: Infinity War —the trouble started when Hank Pym entered the quantum realm to rescue his wife, Janet. Alas, Janet was now a zombie due to a mysterious quantum virus. Hank was infected in turn right before the pair returned to the lab; Scott Lang/Ant-Man was attacked, but Hank and Janet's daughter, Hope Pym, escaped. Within 24 hours, much of the northwestern US was infected, including many members of the Avengers who showed up to thwart the zombie apocalypse.

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All of the original US senators who created and sustained NASA's Space Launch System rocket over the last 15 years—Bill Nelson, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Richard Shelby—have either retired or failed to win reelection. However, a new champion has emerged to continue the fight: Texas Republican Ted Cruz.

He seems an unlikely hero for NASA's large rocket, which costs the federal government more than $2 billion to launch. Cruz, after all, is a self-described pro-capitalist, fiscal conservative. SpaceX and Blue Origin, which are building large and significantly lower-cost alternatives to the SLS rocket, have large operations in Texas. In previous legislative sessions, Cruz has often carried legislation important to the commercial space industry, such as the American Space Commerce Act and the Space Frontier Act .

But now that he chairs the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, Cruz has made a significant shift toward supporting the SLS rocket and its chief contractor, Boeing.

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Despite its lack of upgradeable system memory, Framework has tried to make its Framework Desktop a welcoming platform for upgraders and modders, releasing 3D-printable versions of a few case parts and generally sticking to standard-sized parts and standard connectors.

Often, it's independent creators who are making the weirdest and most interesting mods for Framework's devices, but PC cooling company Noctua has just announced what amounts to a fairly major cooling upgrade for the Framework Desktop, at least for anyone with access to a 3D printer . By printing a new fan duct and a custom side panel, Noctua managed to lower the noise levels of the Framework Desktop's default cooling fan by between five and seven decibels, without replacing or modifying any other components.

The key is apparently the design of the fan grill, which Noctua also used to reduce noise levels in the Noctua edition of this 1,600 W Seasonic power supply . The grill has a distinctive spiral pattern that allows the fan to move similar amounts of air at lower rotation speeds, which is where the noise reduction comes from.

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If Tesla was hoping that decent sales in China might boost the company's fast-diminishing profits, it was a forlorn hope. For the second month in a row, the automaker has experienced a year-over-year decrease in sales in China.

According to Reuters , Tesla's sales dropped by 4 percent in August compared to the same month in 2024. That's not quite as dire as July, when Tesla saw Chinese sales decrease by 8.4 percent. Much of Tesla's Shanghai factory's slack was taken up by exporting EVs to other markets.

Some of Tesla's stiffest competition in China has come from BYD , but the Chinese automaker has started to experience its own struggles at home, too. Yesterday, BYD reported a 30 percent drop in quarterly profits, in part due to the Chinese government telling automakers at the start of the summer that their price war was over.

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On Tuesday, OpenAI announced plans to roll out parental controls for ChatGPT and route sensitive mental health conversations to its simulated reasoning models, following what the company has called "heartbreaking cases" of users experiencing crises while using the AI assistant. The moves come after multiple reported incidents where ChatGPT allegedly failed to intervene appropriately when users expressed suicidal thoughts or experienced mental health episodes.

"This work has already been underway, but we want to proactively preview our plans for the next 120 days, so you won’t need to wait for launches to see where we’re headed," OpenAI wrote in a blog post published Tuesday. "The work will continue well beyond this period of time, but we’re making a focused effort to launch as many of these improvements as possible this year."

The planned parental controls represent OpenAI's most concrete response to concerns about teen safety on the platform so far. Within the next month, OpenAI says, parents will be able to link their accounts with their teens' ChatGPT accounts (minimum age 13) through email invitations, control how the AI model responds with age-appropriate behavior rules that are on by default, manage which features to disable (including memory and chat history), and receive notifications when the system detects their teen experiencing acute distress.

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We're roughly six months into Donald Trump's trade war, and tech firms remain in a fog, unsure what tariffs or retaliations could be coming next.

To shed light on this struggle, we invite you to join us for an Ars Live talk at 3 pm ET on Tuesday, September 2, with Consumer Technology Association (CTA) Vice President of International Trade Edward Brzytwa. We'll be discussing how tech firms are responding to tariffs so far and how looming chip tariffs could pose the biggest hurdle yet in sourcing alternative supply chains. And anyone joining will have an opportunity to ask their biggest questions about how tariffs could impact consumer tech.

Before Trump even took office, experts had warned that his global trade war—imposing tariffs on imports of various goods from various countries in a bid to strike more favorable trade deals for the US— risked spiking prices of popular tech products like laptops, game consoles, and smartphones.

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Slate Auto provided flights from San Francisco to Fort Wayne, Indiana, and accommodation so Ars could visit the Slate factory. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

WARSAW, INDIANA—The Blank Slate pickup scratches a particular itch for some, fulfilling the desire for an EV powertrain without all the bells and whistles associated with a modern vehicle. Gone is the infotainment screen, the lane-keeping assistance, and, for those concerned about surveillance, a modem. Instead, it's an unpainted modular pickup and can be configured post-production into nearly anything the owner wants. Oh, and it's cheap.

This Old Factory

For decades, the RR Donnelley & Sons printing plant in Warsaw, Indiana, pumped out catalogs. Glossy shopping books from JCPenney, Sears, and—my personal favorite—Radio Shack left the plant and were shipped all over the country to eager shoppers looking for their next mail-order delight. Then the Internet broke all of that.

The last employees clocked out in 2023.

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Porsche provided flights from Albany to Barcelona and accommodation so Ars could drive a prototype Cayenne Electric. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

Curved displays in cars are increasingly common, adding a bit of shape to the increasing pixel overload we face behind the steering wheel. The designers of Porsche's upcoming Cayenne Electric, though, decided to do something more dramatic with the touchscreen that commands the center of the forthcoming SUV's dashboard.

Its shape flows between dashboard and center console in a smooth, organic way, with a pronounced bend in the middle. The first time I dragged my finger from top to bottom, traversing that kink, I decided I was going to hate this layout. But a day behind the wheel of a prototype version of Porsche's electric SUV changed my mind. I was left wondering why nobody has used this shape.

That was just one feature out of dozens that impressed in this SUV that promises somewhere north of 1,000 horsepower (745 kW) and something in excess of 300 miles (482 km) of range on a charge. It won't hit dealerships until sometime next year, but early impressions are that it will be worth the wait.

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