Yesterday, Isar Aerospace secured its place in the history books when the upper stage of their Spectrum rocket put a payload of CubeSats into low Earth orbit (LEO). Not only does this make them the first European company to achieve such a feat, but it also marks the first time a booster departing from continental Europe has reached orbit. Not bad for a second attempt.

Standing 28 meters (92 feet) tall, the two-stage Spectrum rocket is just shy of half the size of the SpaceX Falcon 9 and designed to put a maximum of 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds) into LEO and 700 kg (1,500 lb) into the Sun-synchronous orbits used by Earth observation satellites. That puts its performance considerably ahead of other commercial launchers such as Rocket Lab’s Electron. Although the booster is not reusable, Isar Aerospace has stated they’re targeting a respectable launch cost of €10,000 ($11,700) per kilogram. The German company notes there are several more Spectrum vehicles currently in production, and when their new factory is operational, they’ll have the capacity to produce up to 40 of them each year.

In other European space news, BepiColombo has now entered what the European Space Agency (ESA) is calling the “arrival phase” of its nearly decade-long journey to Mercury. On Thursday, the spacecraft jettisoned its ion propulsion module as it had achieved the necessary trajectory and velocity to be captured by the planet’s gravitational field when it swoops by in November.

Launched in 2018, the BepiColombo mission is actually carrying two separate craft: the ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter from Japan. After the two separate from each other in December, they will operate independently to study their respective aspects of the solar system’s innermost planet for the next year, although, as is often the case for missions like this, an extension is always possible if things are still going well at that point.

On the subject of hardware outliving its original design lifetime, an active community of hackers has done a fantastic job of keeping the Spotify Car Thing up and running after the company officially pulled the plug on it just two years after its 2022 release. They’ve got a full Linux distribution running on it featuring a slick UI that can launch apps, check the weather, tap into Home Assistant, and of course, play music. The community is currently running a contest with cash prizes to spur on development of new open source software for the liberated Car Thing, and we’re eager to see what comes of it.

Speaking of keeping things open, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has joined Bluesky — but they aren’t exactly thrilled with it. Being federated and largely comprised of free and open-source software, the FSF admits that Bluesky is the lesser evil when compared to something like X or Facebook. But they still can’t recommend others join the service, as the actual signup process requires your browser to run non-free JavaScript code.

One may wonder why the FSF would join Bluesky if they can’t recommend the service to others, and the answer is simply because they want to get the word out to a wider audience. While the FSF already operates an account on Mastodon, there’s a good chance that anyone who’s willingly regularly using said platform doesn’t need any additional convincing when it comes to the evils of proprietary software.

This is as good a time as any to point out that Hackaday is on Bluesky and Mastodon as well, and unlike the FSF, we’re also on Facebook, although the automatic sharing of new posts hasn’t worked for quite some time and honestly we can’t be bothered to figure out why. For our readers with a particular aversion to grass, we’ve even got an official IRC channel on libera.chat where you and nearly 50 others can feel superior to the thousands of immoral heathens that have joined our Discord server.

Finally, it’s been 50 years since the introduction of the ColorChecker — that little card with 24 blocks of colors that’s placed in the frame of a picture or video to provide a visual reference point. In honor of the milestone, Calibrite has put together a timeline that walks you through its history, starting with its inception in the 1976 paper “A Color-Rendition Chart” by C.S. McCamy, H. Marcus, and J.G. Davidson and running up to how the handy tool evolved for the digital age.

There are plenty of facts and trivia about the ColorChecker that you can bring up the next time you want to impress a photographer, and we especially appreciated the breakdown of what each of the original 24 colors was meant to represent.

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Portland-based social media startup Graze is joining Flipboard in a strategic acquisition aimed at expanding open social protocols and giving users control over their own content algorithms.

Founded by Devin Gaffney, Peat Bakke and Andrew Lisowski — starting from a blog concept and officially forming 21 months ago — Graze has grown into an engine for the open social web.

The Graze platform has delivered over 41 billion posts to 12 million users. It enables creators, publishers and everyday users to build, tune, and monetize custom social algorithms, particularly across platforms like Bluesky, without writing a single line of code.

In announcement announcing the deal, Gaffney said that Graze marks the most important work of his career, creating a new “playbook for how to re-orient the attention economy, and start pulling us back out of the widening gyre.”

Under the direction of Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company has heavily invested in open social protocols like AT Protocol, ActivityPub and RSS through initiatives like its Surf browser and “Social Websites” product.

The acquisition combines Flipboard’s front-end discovery tools with Graze’s back-end algorithmic engine.

“Combined, we become two halves of one machine,” wrote Gaffney. “Surf will be the browser for the open social web — where people go to read and discover feeds across Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, RSS, and more. Graze will be the engine under those feeds — how a curator builds, tunes, and monetizes one without writing a line of code.”

As a lean team, Graze faced a number of operational slowdowns with Gaffney writing that they ended up “wearing a half dozen hats we didn’t know we needed at the start.” Joining Flipboard allows the team to accelerate development by tapping into Flipboard’s established infrastructure rather than rebuilding existing systems from scratch.

“Mike (McCue) and I share a vision of creating an attention economy that works for everyone, and as the onslaught of generative AI starts to clog the pipes of legacy platforms, we both deeply believe that a curatorial role in shaping “the algorithm” is the only sustainable way to run that attention economy into the future,” Gaffney wrote.

For Graze’s existing user base, the team confirmed that the core product and service will remain online. The combined entities aim to offer a creator-first alternative to closed, legacy platforms like Facebook or Instagram, providing users with ownership over what they see and how they earn.

In April 2025, Graze raised $1 million in a pre-seed round led by Betaworks, Salesforce Ventures Factorial, Apertu Capital, Skyseed, and angel investors from Mozilla and Protocol Labs. Graze employed just two people — Gaffney and software engineer Nick Gerakines — and both will be transitioning to Flipboard. Bakke and Lisowski left the company last year.

In an email to GeekWire, Flipboard’s McCue said that the Graze team has built a special tool that has benefited many curators, community builders, creators and developers.

“I’m inspired by their vision and can’t wait to work closely with them to continue building out the open social web,” McCue said. “Devin and Nick will continue to advance Graze as the ultimate feed building and hosting platform while Surf and Flipboard will enable millions of additional users to discover and experience feeds in new ways we’re going to design together.” 

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, though Gaffney tells GeekWire that they are “confident that this is a great outcome for the team, the company, and the investors.”