“This is just not the right pathway forward,” Isaacman said.

A senior NASA official, speaking on background to Ars, noted that the space agency has experienced hydrogen and helium leaks during both the Artemis I and Artemis II prelaunch preparations, and these problems have led to monthslong delays in launch.

“If I recall, the timing between Apollo 7 and 8 was nine weeks,” the official said. “Launching SLS every three and a half years or so is not a recipe for success. Certainly, making each one of them a work of art with some major configuration change is also not helpful in the process, and we’re clearly seeing the results of it, right?”

The goal therefore is to standardize the SLS rocket into a single configuration in order to make the rocket as reliable as possible, and launching as frequently as every 10 months. NASA will fly the SLS vehicle until there are commercial alternatives to launch crews to the moon, perhaps through Artemis V as Congress has mandated, or perhaps even a little longer.

Is Everyone on Board?

The NASA official said all of the agency’s key contractors are on board with the change, and senior leaders in Congress have been briefed on the proposed changes.

The biggest opposition to these proposals would seemingly come from Boeing, which is the prime contractor for the Exploration Upper Stage, a contract worth billions of dollars to develop a more powerful rocket that was due to launch for the first time later this decade. However, in a NASA news release, Boeing appeared to offer at least some support for the revised plans.

“Boeing is a proud partner to the Artemis mission and our team is honored to contribute to NASA’s vision for American space leadership,” said Steve Parker, Boeing Defense, Space & Security president and CEO, in the news release. “The SLS core stage remains the world’s most powerful rocket stage, and the only one that can carry American astronauts directly to the moon and beyond in a single launch. As NASA lays out an accelerated launch schedule, our workforce and supply chain are prepared to meet the increased production needs.”

Solid Reasons for Changing Artemis III

NASA’s new approach to Artemis reflects a return to the philosophy of the Apollo program. During the late 1960s, the space agency flew a series of preparatory crewed missions before the Apollo 11 lunar landing. These included Apollo 7 (a low-Earth-orbit test of the Apollo spacecraft), Apollo 8 (a lunar orbiting mission), Apollo 9 (a low-Earth-orbit rendezvous with the lunar lander), and Apollo 10 (a test of the lunar lander descending to the moon, without touching down).

With its previous Artemis template, NASA skipped the steps taken by Apollo 7, 9, and 10. In the view of many industry officials, this leap from Artemis II—a crewed lunar flyby of the moon testing only the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft—to Artemis III and a full-on lunar landing was enormous and risky.

The idea of using a laptop cooling pad feels antiquated. These days, laptop chips have become extremely efficient. The fans on MacBooks (if they even have them) are barely used, and both Intel and Qualcomm are pushing efficiency on the Windows front.

But people keep buying laptop cooling pads, so surely there is a use case in 2026 that actually makes sense, right? I tried out a couple cooling pads paired with a couple of different gaming laptops, and walked away surprised at how effective they could be.

Do Cooling Pads Actually Work?

Laptop cooling pads have been around for decades, and the idea has always been simple: provide extra air to blow through a laptop that’s otherwise restricted by its own cooling system. In theory, more air means lower temperatures—and, ultimately, better performance. This is the whole idea of the power modes that exist in Windows, which ramp up the RPMs (rotations per minute) of the fans to add more air to both improve performance. More than that, less heat also means a longer-lasting laptop that doesn’t degrade as quickly over time. It’s by that same logic that laptop cooling pads offer help.

The problem, however, is that a cooling pad is a rather inefficient way of transferring air into your device. Most laptop cooling pads, including the two that I tested, use one large fan or two smaller fans to blast cold air across the bottom of the laptop. This is the first reason why the vast majority of modern laptops won’t benefit much from a cooling pad, as these laptops tend to only have vents along the hinge. Without vents or open holes, blowing air across a sheet of metal or plastic isn’t going to do anything to cool the components on the other side. It’ll only generate a bunch of fan noise.

Gaming laptops are the main exception, though, which is why they are the primary use case for such an accessory. Most gaming laptops have a few open vents, usually above the fans, like the Razer Blade 16, which is one of the laptops I used to test these cooling pads. Laptops like the Blade 16 are designed for intensive tasks like gaming, video editing, or local AI processing—and use a high-wattage GPU and CPU to get the kind of performance you need. My model has two of the most powerful laptop components on the market: the RTX 5090 and Ryzen 9 HX 370. As you might guess, they generate a lot of heat when cranked up. Modern chips tend to max out at 100 degrees Celsius, before throttling back performance to bring down temperatures.

Most laptops use fans to cool these components, but the thickness of the laptop chassis is also a determining factor in how much the system will need to throttle back performance to keep temperatures down. In the end, it’s geometry and physics, and every millimeter of space in the laptop chassis has an effect on how cool it can keep its internal components. And unlike in a large desktop PC, you have very restricted space. That’s especially true in the modern era, where even gaming laptops have become increasingly thin.

United States Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth directed the Pentagon to designate Anthropic as a “supply-chain risk” on Friday, sending shockwaves through Silicon Valley and leaving many companies scrambling to understand whether they can keep using one of the industry’s most popular AI models.

“Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic,” Hegseth wrote in a social media post.

The designation comes after weeks of tense negotiations between the Pentagon and Anthropic over how the US military could use the startup’s AI models. In a blog post this week, Anthropic argued its contracts with the Pentagon should not allow for its technology to be used for mass domestic surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon asked that Anthropic agree to let the US military apply its AI to “all lawful uses” with no specific exceptions.

A supply chain risk designation allows the Pentagon to restrict or exclude certain vendors from defense contracts if they are deemed to pose security vulnerabilities, such as risks related to foreign ownership, control, or influence. It is intended to protect sensitive military systems and data from potential compromise.

Anthropic responded in another blog post on Friday evening, saying it would “challenge any supply chain risk designation in court,” and that such a designation would “set a dangerous precedent for any American company that negotiates with the government.”

Anthropic added that it hadn’t received any direct communication from the Department of Defense or the White House regarding negotiations over the use of its AI models.

“Secretary Hegseth has implied this designation would restrict anyone who does business with the military from doing business with Anthropic. The Secretary does not have the statutory authority to back up this statement,” the company wrote.

The Pentagon declined to comment.

“This is the most shocking, damaging, and over-reaching thing I have ever seen the United States government do,” says Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and the former senior policy advisor for AI at the White House. “We have essentially just sanctioned an American company. If you are an American, you should be thinking about whether or not you should live here 10 years from now.”

People across Silicon Valley chimed in on social media expressing similar shock and dismay. “The people running this administration are impulsive and vindictive. I believe this is sufficient to explain their behavior,” Paul Graham, founder of the startup accelerator Y Combinator said.

Boaz Barak, an OpenAI researcher, said in a post that “kneecapping one of our leading AI companies is right about the worst own goal we can do. I hope very much that cooler heads prevail and this announcement is reversed.”

Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on Friday night that the company reached an agreement with the Department of Defense to deploy its AI models in classified environments, seemingly with carveouts. “Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems,” said Altman. “The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.”

Confused Customers

In its Friday blog post, Anthropic said a supply chain risk designation, under the authority 10 USC 3252, only applies to Department of Defense contracts directly with suppliers, and doesn’t cover how contractors use its Claude AI software to serve other customers.

Three experts in federal contracts say it’s impossible at this point to determine which Anthropic customers, if any, must now cut ties with the company. Hegseth’s announcement “is not mired in any law we can divine right now,” says Alex Major, a partner at the law firm McCarter & English, which works with tech companies.