Webb launched with 344 single points of failure, most tied to a deployment that could not be repaired at L2. It cleared them all. Today it runs on about one kilowatt, less than many kettles, kept cold passively by its sunshield, a million miles from Earth.
Relativity Space has reached orbit exactly zero times. Its only rocket flew once, in March 2023, climbed cleanly through the hardest part of the atmosphere, and then a second-stage engine quit and the vehicle fell into the Atlantic a few minutes after liftoff.
The Murchison meteorite, which fell in Victoria in 1969, holds presolar silicon carbide grains. A 2020 study dated them by cosmic-ray exposure: most formed shortly before the Sun, the oldest about 7 billion years ago. How the dating works, and why 7 billion is the extreme, not the average.
