Month: September 2021

Virgin Galactic has pushed its next mission back a bit to investigate a possible manufacturing defect that might affect its VSS Unity space plane.

The upcoming flight, known as Unity 23, will carry members of the Italian Air Force to and from suborbital space. Virgin Galactic had been targeting late September or early October for Unity 23, but that window has now closed.

“During preparation for the Unity 23 test flight, a third-party supplier recently flagged a potential manufacturing defect in a component of the flight control actuation system that they supply to Virgin Galactic,” Virgin Galactic representatives said in a statement on Friday (Sept. 10).

“At this point, it is not yet known whether the defect is present in the company’s vehicles and what, if any, repair work may be needed,” the statement reads. “Out of an abundance of caution, and in line with Virgin Galactic’s established safety procedures, the company is in the process of conducting inspections in partnership with the vendor.”

In photos: Virgin Galactic’s 1st fully crewed spaceflight with Richard Branson

The earliest conceivable liftoff for Unity 23 is mid-October at this point, Virgin Galactic representatives said. They did not name the vendor that supplies the component in question.

The defect issue isn’t the only hurdle Virgin Galactic needs to clear before it launches again. During its most recent space mission, a landmark July test flight whose passengers included Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, VSS Unity flew outside its designated airspace for 101 seconds, as Nicholas Schmidle reported earlier this month in The New Yorker. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is investigating what happened on the flight and has effectively grounded VSS Unity until that inquiry wraps up, as Schmidle has noted.

The current defect issue is unrelated to the events of the July test flight, Virgin Galactic representatives said.

The six-passenger, two-pilot VSS Unity takes off beneath the wings of a carrier plane known as VMS Eve. At an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15,000 meters), Eve drops Unity, and the rocket plane then makes its own way to suborbital space.

Passengers experience three to four minutes of weightlessness and see the curve of Earth against the blackness of space, an experience that Virgin Galactic is currently selling for $450,000 per seat. 

VSS Unity has reached space four times to date, all on test flights. Unity 23 will be its final flight for a while. After that mission is over, Virgin Galactic plans to perform extensive maintenance and upgrade work on Eve, which is expected to sideline the carrier plane until the middle of next year. 

Mike Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

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Is a standard Rolls-Royce not big and imposing enough for you? Perhaps the company’s latest concept can get you to pass the Grey Poupon. Behold, the Rolls-Royce MTU hybrid haul truck.

The Cullinan might come with 22-inch rims, but when equipped with its R63 Michelin XDRs, each wheel and tire combo of the ultimate Roller will stand over 13 feet tall. With a driver’s seat a full story off the ground, it’s so lofty you won’t even see the plebes that you crush in their feeble Coachbuild Dawns as indifferently as Loxodonta africana steamrolls a line of ants. Serve as your own life-size Spirit of Ecstasy as you look down at the puny Parthenon radiators of run-of-the-mill Phantoms from atop your soaring grille, located a full flight of stairs above the lowly earth.

All jokes aside, the Rolls-Royce truck mainly serves to promote its new MTU V12 2000-series industrial 12-cylinder engines. Rolls-Royce doesn’t even produce the haul trucks; typically, they provide the engines for installation into rigid dumpers built by Liebherr, Hitachi, or Selex.

The new hybrid mill produces 1,560 horsepower, meant to replace the V16 4000-series 16-cylinder engines making 2,500 horsepower. However, Rolls-Royce says performance will be the same while dropping carbon dioxide emissions by 30 percent in new installations, or 22 percent with retrofits.

Like a Prius, the engine uses a battery pack to store regenerative energy captured as the trucks descend into quarries, then expends that juice to climb back up. It also requires no additional space for an exhaust gas treatment system or diesel urea additives, which are apparently concerns in a mining truck.

In addition, Rolls-Royce is in the process of engineering its industrial engines to run on sustainable fuels such as hydrogen brewed from renewable energy (not the way we do it in the U.S.). The company hopes to have hydrogen fuel engines ready by 2023 in stationary applications. It’s all part of the company’s goals for a — say it with us — carbon-neutral future.

The concept truck was conceived for MINExpo 2021, a mining convention taking place September 26-29 in Las Vegas. Hopefully they’ll put it into production and offer a constellation headliner in the cab.

There is a new Guinness World Record for the longest distance traveled by an electric truck on a single charge. Swiss-based firm Futuricum built a Volvo-based delivery truck that drove for 683 miles on a closed test track.

Although the prototype used to set the record has reportedly been in regular service on Swiss roads since early 2021, the record was set on a 1.7-mile high-speed oval operated by Continental near Hanover, Germany. The truck set off with a full charge and coasted to a stop 392 laps later; two drivers split their schedule in 4.5-hour shifts. Reaching the 683-mile threshold took about 23 hours, so the truck traveled at an average speed of 31 mph.

Futuricum calls this a realistic average value for the truck’s intended use — it’s certainly not designed for long hauls. Whether it was empty or loaded with cargo wasn’t specified, and we’ve reached out to the company for more details. What we do know is that the drivetrain was not modified, meaning the 680-horsepower truck is equipped with a 680-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack. That’s over six times bigger than the battery in a Porsche Taycan.

Driving at a constant speed on a closed track is very different than delivering parcels in real-world conditions, which is what the Futuricum truck normally spends its days doing. In more normal use cases, the model (whose speed is electronically limited to about 55 mph) has a driving range of around 250 miles, according to the manufacturer.

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Porsche and its international partners have started building the factory that will produce a new synthetic fuel starting in 2022. Located in southern Chile, the plant will make fuel for race cars, sports cars like the 911, and classic cars.

Producing synthetic fuel is an extremely complex and highly innovative process. In the company’s words, electrolysers split water into oxygen and hydrogen using wind power, hence why the plant is in Chile; it’s located in one of the most reliably windy parts of the world. CO2 is then filtered from the air and combined with the hydrogen to produce synthetic methanol, which in turn is converted into fuel that can be burned in a piston engine.

Porsche sees synthetic fuel as a non-electrified alternative to gasoline in markets where so-called Green Deal regulations are trying to make the internal combustion engine illegal in the coming years. “Our icon, the 911, is particularly suited to the use of eFuels. But so are our much-loved historic vehicles,” said Porsche’s R&D boss Michael Steiner. He added that approximately 70% of the cars Porsche has made are still on the road.

In theory, running a car on Porsche’s synthetic fuel won’t require mechanical modifications. “Our fuel specifications meet exactly the existing ones, so you could burn such fuel in a 993 without damaging the engine, and without making mechanical adjustments,” Steiner told Hagerty. There’s a catch: it won’t be cheap. When it arrives in Europe, where it will be distributed by ExxonMobil, it could cost about €2 per liter depending on taxes. That’s about $9 per gallon at the current conversion rate, which is more than even most Norwegians pay for gas in 2021.

Porsche will begin making synthetic fuel in 2022; it notably plans to fill up the cars that race in its Mobil 1 Supercup series with it. The plant will produce about 34,000 gallons of the fuel in 2022. If everything goes according to plan, its annual output will increase to about 14.5 million gallons by 2024 and around 145 million gallons by 2026.

Hold off on purchasing that iPhone mount for your motorbike. In a new Apple Support post first seen by MacRumors, the tech giant has warned that high amplitude vibrations, “specifically those generated by high-power motorcycle engines” transmitted through handlebars, can damage its phones’ cameras. As the publication notes, that damage can be permanent. A simple Google search will surface posts over the past few years by users whose cameras were ruined after they mounted their iPhone on their bike, mostly so they can use it for navigation. 

While Apple didn’t say why it’s issuing a warning now, it did explain the reason why attaching the iPhone to a motorcycle can destroy its camera. The company said that the camera’s optical image stabilization (OIS) and closed-loop autofocus (AF) features can be damaged by long-term exposure to high-amplitude vibrations. A camera’s OIS makes it possible for a device’s gyroscope to sense movement. In turn, the gyroscope changes its angle and the lens moves accordingly to prevent blur when you accidentally move while taking a photo. 

Meanwhile with closed-loop AF, a phone’s onboard magnetic sensors measure vibrations to compensate for the movement, so the lens can be positioned accurately. As MacRumor notes, all models since the iPhone 7 come with both features.

Thus, Apple says it’s not recommended to attach iPhones to motorcycles with high-power or high-volume engines. For mopeds and scooters, you may want to buy a vibration-dampening mount to lessen the risk of damage — or simply just use another GPS device to make sure you don’t ruin a device that costs hundreds to over a thousand dollars.

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Today DJI revealed the fifth iteration of its affordable smartphone stabilizers that help turn the device in your pocket into a surprisingly capable filmmaking tool. Although the DJI OM 5 now includes a telescoping arm that makes capturing group shot selfies and low-angle shots easier, the improvements come with a significant cost to battery life.

Like the DJI OM 4 that made its debut just over a year ago, the new OM 5 features the same easy-to-use magnetic clamp system but with increased adjustability so that larger phones, including those wearing a bulky protective case, can be easily attached and removed from the gimbal. The OM 5 also features a smaller and lighter design, even with the addition of a built-in “extension rod” that can position a smartphone an additional 215-millimeters (about eight-and-a-half-inches) farther away from the user. DJI has essentially turned the gimbal into a stabilized selfie stick for capturing larger group shots, but the extra length will also make it easier to capture more creative shots from higher or lower angles.

The extension rod doesn’t automatically extend and retract so you can’t use it as a short-range camera dolly, but you probably wouldn’t want it to anyways because while last year’s OM 4 model boasted 15 hours of battery life, the new OM 5 tops out at around six hours and 20 minutes. That’s still pretty decent—you’d probably fill up your phone’s storage capturing video before the OM 5 needed a recharge—but it’s a significant drop in battery life given the OM 5 doesn’t look much smaller than the OM 4. The storage space needed for that telescoping arm apparently left a lot less room for the battery.

Other upgrades on the DJI OM 5 include stronger motors in the gimbal to hold larger and heavier smartphones steady, improved image recognition and tracking for automatically locking onto specific subjects in the frame, and a new ShotGuides feature in the app which will scan a scene, automatically recommend a series of shots to capture, and then automatically edit them together into a video.

The OM 5 is available now on DJI’s website in two color options: Athens Gray and Sunset White, for $139. Optional upgrades include a $39 carrying case (the device does come with a fabric storage pouch), as well as a $79 alternate magnetic smartphone clamp that adds battery-powered LED lights to improve low-light selfie shots.