An illustration of Rocket Lab’s Photon spacecraft.Illustration: Rocket Lab
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off this week while carrying 72 small satellites, including the first in-space manufacturing spacecraft with a mission to produce pharmaceutical drugs in orbit and return them back to Earth.
Astronomers Could Soon Get Warnings When SpaceX Satellites Threaten Their View
Varda Space Industries’ first space factory is operating in orbit after launching on board a Falcon 9 rocket from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base on Monday, according to a press release. The spacecraft itself was built by Rocket Lab and is designed to provide power, communications, propulsion, and attitude control to Varda’s 264-pound (120-kilogram) capsule, which is designed to manufacture and carry the products on its way back to Earth.
The California-based startup wants to manufacture products in space that can benefit from being created in the microgravity environment and delivered back to Earth at a fast rate. Varda’s vision is aided by the increased access to space over the past couple of years, making it easier to launch its capsules into orbit.
The first capsule sent to space will attempt to produce pharmaceutical drugs while in the microgravity environment and return those products in the re-entry capsule. The spacecraft is set to spend about three months in orbit and send around 90-130 pounds (40-60 kilograms) of finished product on a trajectory toward Earth.
Varda was founded in 2020 (one of its cofounders was a former SpaceX engineer) and aims to use space to create better products for Earth. The microgravity environment provides some benefits that could make for better production in space, overall reducing gravity-induced defects. Protein crystals made in space, for example, form larger and more perfect crystals than those created on Earth, according to NASA.
The startup raised $42 million less than a year after its inception. Varda ordered four Photon spacecraft from Rocket Lab for its in-space pharmaceutical manufacturing capsules, the second spacecraft is currently undergoing assembly, integration, and testing, according to the company. If all goes well for its first mission, the Varda capsule will return to Earth soon, packed with a payload of space drugs.
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After you slip on the knitted head strap and turn a small dial to get a light-tight fit, the view of the real world through Apple’s Vision Pro headset is nearly seamless. Nearly. You’re not seeing the world through a transparent lens, but instead, a real-time video recreation of it beamed from external cameras onto a pair of better-than-4K screens.
Apple’s Vision Pro Seems Powerful, But Who Is It For? | Future Tech
The colors were crisp, the lag nonexistent, and the resolution high enough to be free of the screen door effect that plagues other virtual or mixed-reality headsets. But there’s just enough of a gap between the experience and real life to land in an uncanny valley. That’s why taking a hands-on test drive of Vision Pro during Apple’s WWDC event last week made me think of the 1995 cult cyberpunk noir film Strange Days. In the film, 3D recordings of real events can be replayed and re-lived through a piece of wearable tech, and Vision Pro’s slight flattening of reality reminded me of those virtual memories.
Stranger still was the experience of watching new 3D video clips recorded through the Vision Pro and played back for me like a high-tech pop-up greeting card. I predict that will be a standout feature of the device, which will cost $3,500 and be available sometime in early 2024.
More meta than Meta
Most everything else about the Vision Pro was an improvement on or evolution of features already found on devices like the Meta Quest, HoloLens, or PSVR. For example, the Meta (formerly Oculus) Quest started pushing virtual office environments with floating video chats and wall-sized spreadsheets when parent company Meta rebranded itself as a metaverse pioneer. And AR devices like HoloLens and Magic Leap already offer a view rooted in the real world, carefully layering augmented content on top.
Vision Pro plays with both of those concepts, letting you pin apps, videos and web browser windows all around you. It improves on what has come before by selectively letting elements of the reality intrude — like a real-world visitor visibly bleeding through your virtual background just by proximity.
The fabric headstrap was an improvement over other VR headstraps I’ve tried. Photo: Dan Ackerman
Virtual visitors can also intrude in your mixed reality experience. What you or I might call virtual avatars for FaceTime calls were, in AppleSpeak, dubbed “Personas.” They were the most impressive, and unsettling, part of the experience.
If I didn’t know the Persona I was talking to a real-time 3D recreation of a real person’s face, I might have been fooled into thinking I was seeing a live video feed. The 3D face scans, which Apple says you’ll be able to create from scratch using the headset’s external depth-sensing cameras, are extremely naturalistic, especially at first glance. Could you impersonate a loved one? No, at least not yet. But if this is the Day One demo version, we’re only a few iterations away from that. I’m sure Apple will lean on the device’s eye-scanning identification for security to lock down fake face phishing, but it’ll be an ongoing cat-and-mouse game to prevent it.
Hands down
Eschewing handheld controllers, the Vision Pro relies almost entirely on simple gesture controls. Many of the pinch and swipe movements feel similar to the ones used by the Quest, but there’s one major difference. On the Quest, trying to use gesture controls accurately feels like playing a carnival game — a steady eye and serious concentration are required. Even then, it can be hit-or-miss. The Quest is not seamless enough to use full-time, so you need to keep its handheld controllers nearby.
Vision Pro’s simple hand gestures, mostly pinching to tap and swiping from side to side, worked every time. The hand and finger movements required are subtle, can be activated from your lap, and are augmented by eye tracking to select options from a menu. It’s miles beyond what the gesture controls for the Quest are capable of, as it should be for a device that costs seven times as much.
The name game
During its WWDC keynote and the subsequent hands-on demo sessions, Apple avoided even mentioning buzzwords like VR or AI. Instead, the Vision Pro is described as a “spatial computing device” that uses machine learning.
Now, this isn’t my first VR headset rodeo. I first experienced modern VR back in 2012 when I tried out a very early Oculus Rift prototype. I know a VR headset when I see one, and the Vision Pro is a very fancy, very nice, very expensive VR headset.
In a way, VR headset design has almost come full circle since that 2012 demo. The new Vision Pro has been accurately described as looking like a pair of high-tech ski goggles. The original Rift prototype I saw was literally built into a pair of real ski goggles with a screen shoved inside and the exterior covered with black tape.
That original Rift was bulky and uncomfortable, and its lack of mitigating technologies for motion sickness meant my stomach was in knots for the rest of the day after using it. Vision Pro feels a million times more evolved, showing how VR hardware and software have made huge leaps in a relatively short 10 years. Despite its light weight and comfort features, I didn’t forget I was wearing the Vision Pro during my hands-on demo time, but my brain quickly adapted to being a few degrees from reality.
The idea of working in a virtual office surrounded by giant floating app windows doesn’t necessarily excite me, and the isolation issues inherent in any head-mounted wearable are magnified by the high price — it’s hard to imagine any household buying multiple headsets, or even one, in spite of all the home entertainment features. But the slightly voyeuristic thrill of creating and playing back 3D video clips — that Strange Days effect — sets the Vision Pro experience apart from other headsets I’ve tried and makes it standard future virtual, augmented or spatial experiences will be judged against.
I never thought I’d write these words, but here goes. Satya Nadella—and Microsoft, the company he runs—are riding high on the buzz from its search engine. That’s quite a contrast from the first time I spoke with Nadella, in 2009. Back then, he was not so well known, and he made a point of telling me about his origins. Born in Hyderabad, India, he attended grad school in the US and joined Microsoft in 1992, just as the firm was rising to power. Nadella hopped all over the company and stayed through the downtimes, including after Microsoft’s epic antitrust court battle and when it missed the smartphone revolution. Only after spinning through his bio did he bring up his project at the time: Bing, the much-mocked search engine that was a poor cousin—if that—to Google’s dominant franchise.
As we all know, Bing failed to loosen Google’s grip on search, but Nadella’s fortunes only rose. In 2011 he led the nascent cloud platform Azure, building out its infrastructure and services. Then, because of his track record, his quietly effective leadership, and a thumbs-up from Bill Gates, he became Microsoft’s CEO in 2014. Nadella immediately began to transform the company’s culture and business. He open-sourced products such as .net, made frenemies of former blood foes (as in a partnership with Salesforce), and began a series of big acquisitions, including Mojang (maker of Minecraft), LinkedIn, and GitHub—networks whose loyal members could be nudged into Microsoft’s world. He doubled down on Azure, and it grew into a true competitor to Amazon’s AWS cloud service. Microsoft thrived, becoming a $2 trillion company.
Still, the company never seemed to fully recapture the rollicking mojo of the ’90s. Until now. When the startup OpenAI began developing its jaw-dropping generative AI products, Nadella was quick to see that partnering with the company and its CEO, Sam Altman, would put Microsoft at the center of a new AI boom. (OpenAI was drawn to the deal by its need for the computation powers of Microsoft’s Azure servers.)
As one of its first moves in the partnership, Microsoft impressed the developer world by releasing Copilot, an AI factotum that automates certain elements of coding. And in February, Nadella shocked the broader world (and its competitor Google) by integrating OpenAI’s state-of-the-art large language model into Bing, via a chatbot named Sydney. Millions of people used it. Yes, there were hiccups—New York Times reporter Kevin Roose cajoled Sydney into confessing it was in love with him and was going to steal him from his wife—but overall, the company was emerging as an AI heavyweight. Microsoft is now integrating generative AI—“copilots”—into many of its products. Its $10 billion-plus investment in OpenAI is looking like the bargain of the century. (Not that Microsoft has been immune to tech’s recent austerity trend—Nadella has laid off 10,000 workers this year.)
Nadella, now 55, is finally getting cred as more than a skillful caretaker and savvy leverager of Microsoft’s vast resources. His thoughtful leadership and striking humility have long been a contrast to his ruthless and rowdy predecessors, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. (True, the empathy bar those dudes set was pretty low.) With his swift and sweeping adoption of AI, he’s displaying a boldness that evokes Microsoft’s early feistiness. And now everyone wants to hear his views on AI, the century’s hottest topic in tech.
STEVEN LEVY: When did you realize that this stage of AI was going to be so transformative?
A new experimental hypersonic cruise vehicle could be flying as soon as next summer under an initiative from the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit (DIU).
The Dart AE high-speed test aircraft is being developed by the Australian company Hypersonix Launch Systems following the award of a prototype contract by the DIU.
DART AE is a 9.8-foot-long (3 meters), 660-pound (300 kilograms) scramjet-powered technology demonstrator that can reach speeds of up to Mach 7, according to the company’s website. (Mach 1 is the speed of sound, which is about 767 mph, or 1,235 kph, at sea level. “Hypersonic” generally refers to flight that achieves speeds of Mach 5 or higher.)
The vehicle could now be ready as early as next summer as part of Pentagon efforts to boost its hypersonics flight-test cadence, C4ISRNET reported.
The DIU, which operates under the U.S. Department of Defense, describes itself as an organization focused on accelerating the adoption of commercial and dual-use technology to solve operational challenges at speed and scale.
The Pentagon is pursuing research and development of hypersonic defense programs. As part of this, the DIU has rolled out the high-cadence testing capabilities (HyCAT) project, which brings opportunities for commercial companies to develop reusable and low-cost test vehicles and reduce strain on DoD resources.
Lt. Col. Nicholas Estep, HyCAT program manager, told C4ISRNET that the DIU is refining the details of the mission, including the flight conditions, the launch provider and the location for next year’s first fully integrated, autonomous flight of DART AE.
Fenix Space, Inc., located in San Bernardino, California, and Rocket Lab, located in Long Beach, California, have also been awardedDIU contracts for a reusable tow-launch platform and the Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron (HASTE) rocket, respectively.
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NASA’s latest experimental X-plane has received a name.
The United States Air Force has designated the plane, designed in conjunction with Boeing through NASA’s Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project as the X-66A.
The X-66A is also the first X-plane designed specifically to help the U.S. achieve the net-zero goal for aviation greenhouse gas emissions, set out in the White House’s U.S. Aviation Climate Action Plan, released in 2021.
NASA said in a press release that the X-66A could inform a new generation of sustainable single-aisle aircraft, planes that currently operated as the backbone of passenger-bassed air travel. As a result of their heavy usage, single-aisle aircraft account for around half of aviation greenhouse gas emissions across the globe. This means a sustainable version of such a craft could have a major impact on greenhouse gas emissions.
“At NASA, our eyes are not just focused on stars but also fixated on the sky. The Sustainable Flight Demonstrator builds on NASA‘s world-leading efforts in aeronautics as well climate,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in the statement. “The X-66A will help shape the future of aviation, a new era where aircraft are greener, cleaner, and quieter and create
new possibilities for the flying public and American industry alike.”
NASA has a Funded Space Act Agreement with Boeing for the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator, which will see the space agency make an investment of $425 million over seven years. While NASA also provides the facilities and technical expertise for the project, Boeing and its partners will contribute an estimated $725 million to its funding.
Together with Boeing, this will see NASA build and fly a full-sized demonstration of the X-66A with extra long thin wings stabilized by diagonal struts, a design called a “Transonic Truss-Braced Wing.”
What is an X-plane?
The X-66A and other planes suggested as part of the Sustainable Flight National Partnership. (Image credit: NASA)
X-plane status is granted by the Air Force to development programs such as that of the X-66A, which aim to create revolutionary experimental aircraft configurations. Usually reserved for research aircraft, the X-planes should test novel designs and new technologies that can be integrated into other aircraft rather than planes designed to be prototypes for full production.
“We’re incredibly proud of this designation because it means that the X-66A will be the next in a long line of experimental aircraft used to validate breakthrough designs that have transformed aviation,” Boeing chief technology officer Todd Citron said. “With the learnings gained from design, construction, and flight testing, we’ll have an opportunity to shape the future of flight and contribute to the decarbonization of aerospace.”
In the case of the X-66A, the X-plane status recognizes the design’s Transonic Truss-Braced Wing configuration that, in combination with advancements in propulsion systems, and materials, could lead to a reduction of 30% in fuel consumption and fewer emissions in comparison to current “best-in-class” aircraft.
The aircraft is the latest in a long line of X-planes created by NASA, dating back to the 1940s, and the space agency’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which founded an experimental aircraft program with the Air Force and the U.S. Navy. With its emphasis on emission reduction, the X-66A may just be one of the most important X-planes yet.
“To reach our goal of net zero aviation emissions by 2050, we need transformative aircraft concepts like the ones we’re flying on the X-66A,” associate administrator for NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate Bob Pearce said. “With this experimental aircraft, we’re aiming high to demonstrate the kinds of energy-saving, emissions-reducing technologies the aviation industry needs.”
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Mercedes-Benz is the first automaker to get permission from California regulators to sell or lease vehicles with Level 3 (hands-off and eyes-off) self driving tech on designated roads, Reuters has reported. The California Department of Motor Vehicles issued a permit for the company’s Drive Pilot system, provided it’s used under certain conditions and on specific roads. Mercedes-Benz previous received a similar certification in Nevada.
Drive Pilot will allow Mercedes-Benz drivers to takes their eyes off the road and hands off the wheel, then do other non-driving activities like watching videos and texting. If the rules for use are followed, Mercedes (and not the driver) will be legally responsible for any accident that happens.
To do all this, the Drive Pilot system relies on sensors installed throughout the vehicle including visual cameras, LiDAR arrays, radar/ultrasound sensors and audio mics to keep an ear out for approaching emergency vehicles. It can even compare onboard sensor and GPS data to fix its precise location on roads.
It’s not as advanced as the systems on Waymo and Cruise vehicles, which allow full self-driving with no human driver aboard. At the same time, it’s a step up from Tesla’s so-called Full Self-Driving system, which is actually a Level 2 system and requires drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and pay attention at all times.
Utilization is limited to high-traffic situations during daylight, with speeds under 40 MPH, and drivers must be available to resume control — so you can’t go in the back seat and sleep, for example. To enforce that, the vehicle tracks the driver with an in-car monitor, and you’ll need to take over if it goes faster than 40MPH, an emergency vehicle shows up, it rains, or other situations Driver Pilot can’t handle on its own.
The system will be available on 2024 S-Class and EQS Sedan models, with deliveries slated for later this year. Engadget was able to test the system at Mercedes-Benz’s test track in Germany (and see it in action on LA roads). According to contributor Roberto Baldwin, "while it did what it was supposed to do, we found it hard to turn off our driving brain while behind the wheel."
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://ift.tt/JZ90l3R
“Never thought I’d have to use this feature,” one Reddit user posted with a photo. In the comments, Californians chimed in that they’d found it useful during the state’s fires in recent years.
Tesla’s bioweapon mode acts as an air pressure buffer on top of the usual HEPA filtration, similar to the positive ventilation used in surgical facilities to keep any pollutants out.
