(credit: Luis Quintana Barney)

And lo, that which was rumored last night has come to fruition this morning. On Tuesday morning, Volkswagen Group has proposed a number of companion settlements with the Department of Justice (DOJ) representing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), more than 40 state attorneys general, and a class-action complaint from people who bought 2.0L diesel cars from Volkswagen and Audi.

The amount of the settlements will tally more than $15 billion, with $10.033 billion going to compensating consumers. In a conference call on Tuesday morning, Elizabeth Cabraser, the court-appointed lead counsel for Volkswagen consumer plaintiffs, detailed exactly how the German automaker would compensate its customers after the company was discovered last September to have included illegal software on many of its recent diesel models. The software helped the diesel vehicles pass federally required emissions tests in a lab but turned off the cars’ emissions control systems while under normal driving conditions, causing significantly increased levels of nitrogen oxide (NO_x) to spew on open roads.

Cabraser noted that owners of certain diesel VW Golfs, Passats, Jettas, Beetles, and Audi A3s would be eligible for a buyback equal to the amount the car was worth in September 2015—a range from a low of around $12,000 to a high of about $44,000. The buybacks would be accepted “regardless of condition,” Cabraser said, “as long as it’s drivable.”

NASA/Bill Ingalls

On Tuesday, NASA and its contractor, Orbital ATK, conducted the second and final qualification motor test for the Space Launch System’s booster.

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Say what you will about the Space Launch System. It’s expensive, costing so much that NASA can’t really afford to build payloads to fly on it. The Senate specified the rocket to fly with components derived from the Space Shuttle expressly to preserve jobs that otherwise would have been lost following the shuttle’s retirement. And the entirely expendable launcher uses 1970s technology while private companies are focusing on smaller, modern, and reusable rockets.

All of that, more or less, is true. But it is also undeniable that the Space Launch System, whenever it does fly, will be one hell of a firecracker. On Tuesday, the space agency offered a taste of that when it demonstrated the firing of one of the solid rocket boosters that will help blast the SLS rocket off of the launch pad.

These boosters will provide about 75 percent of the thrust needed to lift the rocket and its payload into low-Earth orbit. As implied by their name, the boosters burn a solid composite made largely of aluminum. During Tuesday’s test, a single booster produced about 3.2 million pounds of thrust. By way of comparison, a Falcon 9 rocket with its nine engines produces about 1.7 million pounds of thrust.