Scientists and opposition politicians say Australia is lagging behind in the space industry. The country has been involved in the field for decades and was one of the first to launch a satellite.
(Image credit: Japan Meteorological Agency/Getty Images)
from NPR Topics: News http://ift.tt/2hyfzh9
via IFTTT
Dyson has made a name for itself by inventing all sorts of new approaches to vacuuming your house, and it seems that the company is now looking to innovate in a whole new “clean†industry. On Tuesday, founder James Dyson announced that his company is making a major play in the electric car business.
Blue Origin, which is Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, just announced a milestone at the 68th Annual International Astronautical Congress. It has partnered with the connnectivity company mu Space, based in Thailand, to launch a satellite with the New Glenn rocket. This is the first partnership between the Blue Origin and an Asia-Pacific client, and the third company to sign up for a New Glenn launch.
mu Space is a very new company, established just last month, and their aim is to provide reliable satellite broadband and mobile for Thailand’s businesses. It has their own interest in space travel, though. Its "Everyone Project" is a plan to make space tourism a reality in Asia, though there’s scant information about it on the company’s website.
Compared to rival SpaceX, Blue Origin’s progress might appear slow, but there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. Blue Origin hasn’t had a NASA contract to help speed their development, after all. Additionally, its sights had previously been set squarely on crewed launches; it plans to fly astronauts on their New Shepard launch vehicle by early 2018. It has also been manufacturing rocket parts for other companies.
Last year, Bezos announced that Blue Origin would be developing another rocket of its own. New Glenn is its launch vehicle that’s currently under development, and it dwarfs SpaceX’s delayed Falcon Heavy in both its two-stage and three-stage models. The company plans to launch before 2020, and mu Space wants to place its satellite into geostationary orbit in 2021.
It’s 2017, and as the refrain goes, where are the flying cars? Boeing is more interested in "personal flying devices" — aka, jetpacks — and is partnering with new organization GoFly to post a $2 million bounty for working designs. Kind of like an X Prize competition, the partners are giving teams two years to develop their tech before whomever impresses the judges at a "final fly-off" takes home money from the GoFly Prize pool.
Boeing and other big names in aviation (along with DARPA) will lend their mentorship and technical expertise to the teams over the course of the contest. Winning is simple: The jetpack must carry a person 20 miles without refueling or recharging with vertical (or nearly vertical) take-off and landing. Teams will get technical guidelines — the competition is seeking a solution anyone can use that is ultra-compact, quiet and "urban-compatible" — but how they design or engineer their "personal flying device" is up to them.
Competition prize money will be doled out in three phases: Ten teams with interesting written concepts will be given $20,000 prizes, then four $50,000 will be handed out for the best prototypes and revised technical specifications, before a winner at the "final fly-off" takes home $1 million. Even if they don’t win, teams may qualify for supplementary prizes at the last event, including $100,000 for "disruptive advancement" of state-of-the-art aviation tech, $250,000 for quietest entry and $250,000 for the smallest.
Teams can register for the first phase of competition now on the GoFly Prize site until April 4th, 2018. After that, teams must register for Phase II by December 8th, 2018.
Unless you’re shelling out big bucks for business or first-class tickets, your in-flight entertainment system probably looks like something from the last decade. The monitors airlines put in the back of headrests are typically cheap, low-resolution, and have a pretty pathetic selection of content. That means you’re usually better off pulling out your phone or tablet, and if the airplane’s on-board wi-fi sucks too (which it probably does), you’ll be limited to whatever you managed to download before you sat down.
But at an airline trade expo this week, Netflix announced a new initiative that could make flying the friendly skies a little friendlier by bringing faster wi-fi to multiple airlines. The company will be launching a new service called “Netflix Inflight 2.0″ which will provide better tools and info to airlines offering in-flight streaming media. Netflix says the new service should improve buffering times and help reduce bandwidth, so that carriers “can now support and promote certain in-flight services as a core part of [the airline’s] offering rather than sticking it on some kind of premium tier.â€
From there, the idea is that airlines would be able to offer free or low-cost wi-fi so that existing Netflix users could sign into their accounts and stream shows and movies as usual, while others could sign up for free trials and access a much larger in-flight video library than offered by any traditional airline entertainment system.
Don’t expect full 1080p quality, however, as bandwidth will be limited to around 250 kbps, which is closer to a standard-definition DVD. But, hey, that’s still better than what you’d normally get.
Netflix pioneered this model by partnering with Virgin America to offer free in-flight wi-fi in 2015, before expanding the program to other airlines including Qantas and Aeromexico. While Netflix hasn’t mentioned specifically what airlines it wants to partner with, it probably won’t include carriers such as United or JetBlue, which have already teamed up with DirectTV for their in-flight entertainment.
Back at the end of August at IFA, Google announced that the Google Assistant was weeks away from showing up inside almost all of the electronics you own or will soon own. From new speakers and headphones to appliances, Google Assistant wants to be the technology that can control your life. LG signed-up out of the gate and announced this morning that they are bringing Assistant support to 87 of their WiFi connected smart home appliances.
We initially thought that only a couple of LG vacuums and washing machines would gain Google Assistant support to start, but that’s not at all the case. LG said that their smart home washing machines and dryers, refrigerators, ovens, dishwashers, vacuums, air purifiers, etc. are all ready for control via the Assistant.
With this support, you’ll be able to ask the Assistant to check on time remaining in wash cycles, tell refrigerators to make more ice, turn off ovens or ranges, adjust air conditioners, and check air quality levels from purifiers. All of the initial setup is apparently done through the LG SmartThinQ app.
If you own a bunch of LG smart appliances, this is a pretty huge jump in Assistant support.
I’ve been a Star Trek fan my entire life. It goes without saying, then, that I was eagerly anticipating the premiere of Star Trek: Discovery. Even through the myriad production delays and the departure of key behind-the-scenes staff, I remained optimistic. The casting was good. The promo images were good. The trailer was good.
Now the first two episodes have arrived, and the question remains: Just how good is Star Trek: Discovery?
This show is solid. It could even be great, given the chance.
In fact, it seems just as good as anything CBS has on the air. So the question is: Why the requirement of a subscription just for US viewers? After all, it’s airing on Netflix in the rest of the world, except Canada, where it can be seen on the Space channel.
It’s becoming increasingly clear we’re past the point where you could subscribe to just one or two streaming services and watch most of what you wanted. More and more companies are creating their own exclusive services, but you have to have the content to justify that. CBS All Access, at least as it exists right now, does not. Because the other offerings on the streaming service are so poor (it doesn’t even have full back catalogs of many of its own shows), CBS is basically asking people to pay $7 a month (with commercials) to $10 a month (without commercials) for the privilege of watching one show, maybe two. That being said, the strategy appears to be working: CBS claims it had a record number of sign-ups in a single day for the debut.
CBS also has been on the defensive when it comes to its fall television lineup. The network didn’t pick up a single show with a female lead (even though it has a high percentage of women viewers), which makes it all the more baffling that Discovery is confined to All Access. Here is a show with a black female lead. Why wouldn’t you want that on your network, easily accessible for all to enjoy? It’s doubly frustrating that All Access’s other exclusive property, The Good Fight (a spinoff of The Good Wife, starring Christine Baranski), is also female-led.
Additionally, at a time when it seems as though every headline contains dire news, we need Star Trek. It’s always been a groundbreaking show, focusing on values of diversity. What we watch influences how we think about the world, and Star Trek shaped so many young minds. The idea that children from less affluent homes, who can’t afford to subscribe, will be denied the chance to see a new installment of the show is upsetting.
But it also makes the show difficult to talk about. I’ve been tweeting about Discovery quite a bit since it was announced, and at every turn, I’m faced with people complaining at me about the fee to watch it. I sympathize, even if I’m willing to pay for it. This discussion essentially derails any and every conversation around it. What’s more, in the future, it will mean less conversations around problematic aspects of Discovery; those kinds of discussions can shape how shows grows and adapt. Fans of a franchise are often going to be less critical of it than those who are trying it out for the first time.
Ultimately, CBS is shortchanging Discovery, a show with potential that is so much greater than what it’s currently allowing. It’s a visually stunning show. And it should be — it costs about $8 million to produce a single episode. But Star Trek isn’t about cinematics. The real fear among existing Star Trek fans was that, in trying to make the show speak to a post-9/11 world, and the desire to attract new fans, it would be too grim. It would erase the very core of hope and optimism that defines Star Trek.
The show is dark, to be sure. It’s also action-packed. It has the slick aesthetics of the movies. What this show does very well is marry the Abrams-verse look with the essence of a Star Trek television show. It’s not the Trek we’re used to, but expecting it to be the same show it was three decades ago is not realistic. They threaded a very difficult needle — making this show relevant to our current times (which the franchise has always done) while also giving it the feel of Star Trek. And it excels at that.
Is it perfect? Definitely not — but no Star Trek is, and trying to hold this show to those expectations is unfair, to say the least. Plotting and dialogue are uneven. Additionally, the decision to treat the first two episodes separately, rather than making it a two-hour pilot, is baffling. It’s one complete story that sets up the rest of the show, and the second half is the stronger of the two. Presumably, CBS wanted to give non-subscribers access to only half of it. But they shouldn’t just be milking an existing fan base for cash; this has the potential to bring in new viewers as well.
Star Trek: Discovery is too good to be hidden behind that kind of paywall. This is a show that deserves to unfold over years and be widely seen. It’s got some growing up to do, and I’m eager to see it happen. I just hope it gets the chance.