Month: March 2021

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX’s futuristic Starship looked like it aced a touchdown Wednesday, but then exploded on the landing pad with so much force that it was hurled into the air.

The failure occurred just minutes after SpaceX declared success. Two previous test flights crash-landed in fireballs.

The full-scale prototype of Elon Musk’s envisioned Mars ship soared more than 6 miles (10 kilometers) after lifting off from the southern tip of Texas on Wednesday. It descended horizontally over the Gulf of Mexico and then flipped upright just in time to land.

The shiny bullet-shaped rocketship remained intact this time at touchdown, prompting SpaceX commentator John Insprucker to declare, “third time’s a charm as the saying goes” before SpaceX ended its webcast of the test.

But then the Starship exploded and was tossed in the air, before slamming down into the ground in flames.

There was no immediate comment from SpaceX on what went wrong. But Musk looked on the bright side in a tweet: “Starship 10 landed in one piece! RIP SN10, honorable discharge.”

He added: “SpaceX team is doing great work! One day, the true measure of success will be that Starship flights are commonplace.”

Musk plans to use Starships to send people to the moon and Mars.

The last two prototypes reached a similarly high altitude in December and February, but slammed into the ground at Boca Chica, Texas, and exploded.

Each of these last three test flights lasted 6½ minutes.

TOKYO — Honda on Thursday unveiled a partially self-driving Legend sedan in Japan, becoming the world’s first carmaker to sell a vehicle equipped with new, certified level 3 automation technology.

The launch gives Japan’s No.2 automaker bragging rights for being the first to market, but lease sales of the level 3 flagship Legend would be limited to a batch of 100 in Japan, at a retail price of 11 million yen ($102,000).

Still, the new automation technology is a big step towards eliminating human error-induced accidents, chief engineer Yoichi Sugimoto told reporters.

The Legend’s “Traffic Jam Pilot” system can control acceleration, braking and steering under certain conditions.

Once the system is activated, a driver can also watch movies or use the navigation on the screen, helping to mitigate fatigue and stress when driving in a traffic jam, Honda said in a statement.

It can alert the driver to respond when handing over the control, such as vibration on the driver’s seatbelt, the carmaker said. And if the driver continues to be unresponsive, the system will assist with an emergency stop by decelerating and stopping the vehicle while alerting surrounding cars with hazard lights and the horn, it added.

The announcement comes after the Japanese government awarded a safety certification to Honda’s “Traffic Jam Pilot” in November.

Global automakers and tech companies, including Google parent Alphabet Inc’s Waymo and Tesla Inc, have been investing heavily in autonomous driving.

Yet even as the technology advances, regulations on autonomous driving differ from country to country. Audi unveiled an A8 sedan with level 3 technology in 2017, but regulatory hurdles have prevented it from being widely introduced.

Honda has no plans to increase production or sales of a level 3-equipped Legend for now, its operating officer said on Thursday.

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Looking every bit like a winged tube of toothpaste, NASA’s X-57 Maxwell experimental plane sits in a hanger at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The is NASA’s first crewed experimental plane in 20 years; it runs solely on electric power, an agency first, and it’s about to undergo high-voltage functional testing in advance of its first flight, scheduled for later this year.

“Currently, we have a battery emulator that we’re using to provide power to the aircraft,” said Nick Borer, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center, in a video call. “But this is the first time we’ve had the low-voltage and high-voltage systems operating together.”

NASA’s compendium of experimental aircraft, or X-planes, speaks to the agency’s long history of sussing out the future of flight. They range from kite-shaped, Bush-era combat drones to the Eisenhower administration’s autogyro, which sounds like a Greek dish that eats itself but looks more like a tricked-out tricycle combined with a helicopter. The new electric craft certainly looks more like a plane than any of them, and it has 14 propellers.

The X-57’s hallmark features include its exclusively electric fuel system and 14 motors—six smaller ones along either wing and two larger motors at the tips, which would have been difficult to manage with hefty, gas-powered engines in their place. (The idea of wingtip motors was floated as early as the 1980s, but technological limitations of the time relegated such ideas to the realm of futurism). The fuselage is a recycled husk from a Tecnam P2006T, a high-winged Italian twin-engine plane. The project’s primary contractor is California-based company Empirical Systems Aerospace.

Borer is an aerospace engineer who works on aircraft conceptual design for NASA, focusing on how plane design changes with respect to technological advancements. Since humans learned how to fly, Borer said, just one propulsion revolution had occurred: the shift from piston engines to jet engines for powering flight. The X-57 flips the script for the 21st century, running on two lithium battery packs in the plane’s cabin.

“One of the really cool things about X-57 is that it’s like two and a half, maybe even three X-planes in one,” Borer said, adding that the craft’s final phase—“Mod IV”—would introduce a “fundamentally different way to how you integrate propulsion to an airplane. It’s not just putting a motor or battery on a plane; it changes how you design the plane.”

The upcoming ground voltage tests will check the motors’ capacity to run in tandem. The tests will occur without the plane moving and come in advance of taxi tests and, later in 2021, crewed flight. Besides takeoff, which will undoubtedly be cool, Borer is really excited to see the plane land for the first time and get feedback on how the X-57 team handles differently from other planes.

“The way we’ve set it up is that the aircraft modulates and really helps control that critical region in the back side of the power curve,” Borer said, referring to a tricky situation in which propeller aircraft find themselves needing significantly more power as they slow for landing. “My feeling is that it’ll feel like it’s gone, and that’d be a huge advance and an interesting thing to get the test pilots’ opinion on.”

Borer said that an entirely electric plane could be a watershed moment for human flight. The X-57 Maxwell could be “a tide that raises all the boats,” he said. “Or all the airplanes.”