Dominique Luchart's Blog, page 554

On This Day in Space! July 29, 1982: Salyut 6 space station falls to Earth, ,

On July 29, 1982, the Salyut 6 space station fell out of space and safely burned up in Earth’s atmosphere along the way.

Salyut 6 was the eighth space station the Soviet Union had built for its Salyut program. It spent almost five years in orbit and supported five different crewed cosmonaut missions. While aboard Salyut 6, those cosmonauts made astronomical observations and studied the effects of spaceflight on the human body.

Though the aging space station was still considered fully functional in 1982, a mold problem in the crew quarters led the Soviets to abandon the orbiting lab. They intentionally sent it plunging toward Earth, where it would burn up in the atmosphere before hitting the ground.

Catch up on our entire “On This Day In Space” series on YouTube with this playlist.

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Boeing’s Starliner OFT-2 mission to the International Space Station: When to watch and what to know, ,

Boeing’s Starliner astronaut taxi is about to do a key test of its systems ahead of carrying humans. On Friday (July 30), the spacecraft will launch on an uncrewed mission and attempt to reach the International Space Station.

The mission, called Orbital Flight Test 2 (OFT-2), will be a crucial milestone for Boeing, which was unable to reach that destination with Starliner’s first test flight in December 2019. After completing a thorough investigation in July 2020, Boeing and NASA implemented 80 “corrective actions” to prepare Starliner for a do-over of the OFT mission. If all goes well, NASA astronauts will soon begin flying astronauts to the space station for NASA.

Here’s a complete guide to everything you need to know about the OFT-2 mission — including how to see the launch and all related live events online and in-person — and what this historic mission will mean for NASA and the commercial spaceflight industry.

Live updates: Follow Boeing’s Starliner OFT-2 mission here
Related: How to watch Boeing launch its 2nd Starliner test flight for NASA

When, where and how to watch online

The Starliner mission, also known as Orbital Flight Test 2 (OFT-2), is scheduled to lift off at 2:53 p.m. EDT (1853 GMT) on Friday (July 30).

The timing of the launch may change due to technical, weather or other factors. Currently, the weather is predicted to be only 40% favorable for Starliner’s instantaneous launch window on Saturday, according to a forecast issued Thursday (July 28) by the U.S. Space Force’s 45th Weather Squadron.

If Saturday’s launch attempt ends up being delayed, the next launch opportunity isn’t until Tuesday (Aug. 3) at 1:20 p.m. EDT (1720 GMT), with a second backup window on Wednesday (Aug. 4) at 1:40 p.m. EDT (1740 GMT). Saturday, Sunday and Monday (July 31-Aug. 2) are off the table because of a scheduling conflict with a “classified operation” on the Eastern Range, Gary Wentz, vice president of government and commercial programs at ULA, said in a prelaunch news conference on Tuesday (July 27).

You can watch live coverage of the mission here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA Television, beginning at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT). NASA’s launch broadcast will begin with prelaunch activities and end after Starliner’s orbital insertion; live coverage will resume when Starliner approaches the space station for docking about 24 hours after liftoff.

Starliner should reach its preliminary orbit about 31 minutes after liftoff. After the orbit insertion maneuver, the spacecraft will begin a 24-hour orbital chase to catch up with the International Space Station for rendezvous and docking on Saturday (July 31). Docking is scheduled for 3:06 p.m. EDT (1906 GMT) on Saturday.

About 18 hours after Starliner docks, the Expedition 65 astronauts onboard the space station will open the hatch and enter the Starliner vehicle for an inspection. The hatch opening is scheduled for approximately 9:35 a.m. EDT (1335 GMT) on Sunday (Aug. 1) — that, too, will stream live on NASA’s channels and on Space.com.

Starliner will spend less than a week docked at the space station before returning to Earth for a parachute-assisted landing at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico as early as Aug. 5, if the mission launches on time this Friday.

Where will Starliner lift off?

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A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket stands ready to receive its precious cargo — Boeing’s Starliner for the OFT-2 mission — at the Vertical Integration Facility (VIF) at Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, on July 17, 2021. (Image credit: ULA)

Boeing will launch Starliner from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, a busy launch port situated near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The launch area is about an hour east of Orlando adjacent to the Atlantic coast, providing for a safe region for rocket stage drops and overall launch activities.

Cape Canaveral Space Force Station is one of the United States’ and had its name officially changed from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in late 2020.

This is the same facility from which the first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, launched in 1958 and where some of the first American astronauts launched for space and Earth orbit. Numerous uncrewed planetary probes have also departed Cape Canaveral over the decades, with some reaching into interstellar space.

How to see the launch in person

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The launch of Boeing’s Starliner Orbital Flight Test 2 (OFT-2) mission may be visible to spectators along the eastern seaboard of the United States. This visibility map shows where the rocket will be visible for about five minutes after liftoff. (Image credit: ULA)

Planning to watch the launch in person? Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, NASA is limiting facility access to the public and only some media will be there in person. Spectators wishing to view the launch from the nearby NASA Kennedy Space Center must purchase tickets online in advance.

Viewers along the eastern seaboard of the United States may be able to catch a glimpse of the rocket soaring through the sky, weather and daylight permitting. However, because the launch is several hours before sunset, it may be difficult to observe.

What’s on board?

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An anthropomorphic test device or flight dummy nicknamed Rosie the Rocketeer appears strapped into a seat in Boeing’s Starliner capsule before the vehicle’s second uncrewed flight test, scheduled to launch on July 30, 2021. Full story: ‘Rosie the Rocketeer’ dummy buckles up for Boeing’s 2nd Starliner launch (Image credit: Boeing)

While Starliner will be uncrewed for the OFT-2 mission, the commander’s seat will have a passenger: Rosie the Rocketeer, Boeing’s anthropometric test device. Rosie also flew to space briefly during the first Starliner mission in December 2019 and was equipped with 15 sensors to evaluate the stresses of spaceflight on the human body. But for OFT-2, the “dummy” won’t be collecting any more data.

“Rosie’s there, but she is essentially a ballast,” John Vollmer, vice president and program manager of Boeing’s commercial crew program, said in Tuesday’s prelaunch briefing. “We are taking measurements — we’ve put sensors in the seats and other locations in the vehicle, as we found that we thought that would be more valuable since we’d gotten the data from Rosie on the first flight.”

Much of Starliner’s cargo will be simple supplies and equipment for the Expedition 65 crew aboard the International Space Station. Starliner will bring more than 400 pounds (180 kilograms) to the orbiting laboratory, and upon departure the spacecraft will return to Earth with more than 550 lbs. (250 kg) of cargo, according to NASA.

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Boeing technicians load a package of mementos aboard the Orbital Flight Test-2 Starliner capsule in preparation for its launch. (Image credit: Boeing)Image 2 of 4

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A Boeing technician holds a package of CST-100 Starliner Orbital Flight Test-2 patches to be flown on board the mission. (Image credit: Boeing)Image 3 of 4

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Flags and banners for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) await being packed for the second orbital flight test of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft, slated for July 30. (Image credit: Boeing)Image 4 of 4

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Rosie the Riveter commemorative coins are prepared for their flight on the second orbital flight test of Boeing’s Starliner. (Image credit: Boeing)

Starliner will also fly commemorative things. OFT-2 will include 14 banners from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), Silver Snoopy pins (traditionally given to NASA astronauts who directly contribute to human spaceflight success) and Rosie the Riveter commemorative coins to honor the nearly 19 million American women who contributed to the aerospace industry during the Second World War.

Other items aboard the spacecraft include American flags and an ID card signed and used by Boeing’s founder, Bill Boeing, to travel the U.S. by air. The same card also flew onboard OFT-1.

Read more: HBCU flags and ‘Rosie’ coins among Boeing Starliner OFT-2 cargo

What is Starliner’s mission?

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The fully assembled Starliner spacecraft for OFT-2 is lifted inside the Starliner production factory at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, on Jan. 13, 2021. (Image credit: John Grant/Boeing)

The overall goal of Starliner’s OFT-2 mission is to rocket a spacecraft to the International Space Station, dock with it to exchange supplies and equipment, and execute a safe splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean. This is an uncrewed test mission to ensure that the key milestones of an astronaut flight are possible so that Starliner can be certified to carry astronaut crews.

In 2014, both Boeing and SpaceX received commercial crew development contracts from NASA, together valued at $6.8 billion, to bring astronauts to space as a replacement for the space shuttle vehicle that retired in 2011. In the interim, Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft brought all NASA astronauts to the ISS.

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon began operational flights with astronauts in 2020, reducing NASA’s need to use Soyuz spacecraft. However, Boeing encountered technical problems that have delayed Starliner human flights. During Starliner’s last test attempt in December 2019, the spacecraft experienced a series of glitches that stranded the vehicle in the wrong orbit to reach the International Space Station.

The spacecraft splashed down safely after its failed attempt to reach the ISS, and since then NASA and Boeing have been working together to fix dozens of issues identified during the 2019 flight.

Media reports suggest that if Boeing’s OFT-2 passes its flight certification, the company may fly astronauts on a crewed test flight in late 2021. (NASA and Boeing officials declined to give a more specific timeframe for the first crewed mission during an OFT-2 prelaunch news briefing on July 27.)

OFT-2 mission timeline & flight profile

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The flight profile for Boeing’s Starliner Orbital Flight Test 2 mission to the International Space Station. (Image credit: ULA)

Should the schedule hold, Starliner will blast off aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at 2:53 p.m. EDT (1853 GMT) on Friday (July 30) from Space Launch Complex-41 on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

The spacecraft will reach its preliminary orbit roughly 31 minutes later, and then get ready to dock with the International Space Station. So far, the docking is scheduled for 3:06 p.m. EDT (1706 GMT) on Saturday (July 31), which is roughly 24 hours after its launch.

NASA says the spacecraft will remain docked to the ISS for about five to 10 days before coming back to Earth. Starliner will attempt to land at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico on the same day that it undocks from the space station. Through the whole process, Boeing and NASA will be assessing and testing the spacecraft’s performance to try to certify the spacecraft to ferry astronauts.

Some of the things NASA wants to see are the successful in-orbit operation of all major spacecraft systems, good performance of guidance, navigation and control systems through launch, orbit and re-entry, and safe acoustic and vibration levels for astronauts. Starliner will also have to meet all its basic mission requirements of launching, docking and landing to a degree that is operational and safe for astronauts.

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This graphic details ascent operations for OFT-2. (Image credit: Boeing)Image 2 of 4

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This graphic details docking operations for OFT-2. (Image credit: Boeing)Image 3 of 4

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This graphic details undocking operations for OFT-2. (Image credit: Boeing)Image 4 of 4

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This graphic details landing operations for OFT-2. (Image credit: Boeing)What’s next?

NASA pledges to put astronauts on board Starliner for a crewed test flight in 2021, as long as OFT-2 meets its objectives. “NASA and Boeing will look for opportunities toward the end of this year to fly Starliner’s first crewed mission to the space station,” the agency said in a recent statement.

That mission, called Crew Flight Test, will go to space with veteran NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore, Nicole Mann and Mike Fincke. The agency says that the crew will remain in space for “several months,” but didn’t specify if that would be a normal six-month rotation. Sometimes the schedule is adjusted for operational reasons, and as a comparison point, SpaceX’s first crewed test flight in 2020, Demo-2, was about two months long.

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NASA astronauts Nicole Mann (left) and Mike Fincke (center) and Boeing astronaut Chris Ferguson (right) pose for a photo on Sept. 11, 2019, as they rehearse landing and crew extraction from Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner. (Image credit: Boeing)

Crew Flight Test will need to pass its major milestones to allow Starliner to get full certification to haul astronaut crews to space regularly. Once that happens, NASA will have two commercial crew vehicles to use (Starliner and Crew Dragon) for all its astronaut flights.

Even when the two commercial crew vehicles are operational, NASA still may use Russian Soyuz seats on occasion. The agency has pledged to put Russian cosmonauts aboard American commercial crew vehicles in exchange for Soyuz seats for NASA astronauts, but that arrangement may be delayed until 2022.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Space telescopes spot light ‘echoing’ from behind black hole for the first time, ,

For the first time ever, scientists have seen the light from behind a black hole.

Black holes are regions in space-time where gravity’s pull is so powerful that not even light can escape its grasp. However, while light cannot escape a black hole, its extreme gravity warps space around it, which allows light to “echo,” bending around the back of the object. Thanks to this strange phenomenon, astronomers have, for the first time, observed the light from behind a black hole.

In a new study, researchers, led by Dan Wilkins, an astrophysicist at Stanford University in California, used the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s NuSTAR space telescopes to observe the light from behind a black hole that’s 10 million times more massive than our sun and lies 800 million light-years away in the spiral galaxy I Zwicky 1, according to a statement from ESA.

Video: Milky Way’s core overflows with colorful threads in new X-ray panorama

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An infographic depicting the light from behind a black hole. (Image credit: ESA)

This study began with the researchers’ desire to expand our understanding of black hole coronas, which are the source of the X-ray light that often radiates from the vicinity of these objects. . Bright flares of X-ray light are emitted by gas that falls into black holes from their accretion disks, the disks of dust and gas that surround and “feed” these objects.

The team spotted an X-ray flare in I Zwicky 1 that was so bright that some of the light reflected on the gas falling back into the black hole. When that reflected light was bent around the back of the black hole by the object’s extreme gravity, the team was able to spot it using the ESA and NASA space telescopes.

The team didn’t just observe this light, which is the first time it has been directly observed like this; they also took note of how the X-ray light changed color as it bent and moved around the back of the black hole. By observing the light’s journey around the back of the black hole, the researchers hope to understand more about what really goes on that close to these gravitational vortexes.

Following this groundbreaking study, the team aims to create a 3D map of the black hole’s surroundings, according to the statement. They also hope to better understand black hole coronas and explore how the corona of a black hole is capable of producing these bright X-ray flares.

This work was described in a study published July 28 in the journal Nature.

Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

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Stakes are high for Boeing Starliner’s 2nd space station try this week, ,

Boeing’s astronaut taxi is stepping into the limelight again, and the stakes are even higher this time.

The CST-100 Starliner capsule is scheduled to launch Friday (July 30) at 2:53 p.m. EDT (1853 GMT) on a crucial uncrewed demonstration mission to the International Space Station. You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the space agency.

The mission is called Orbital Flight Test 2 (OFT-2). As the name suggests, it will be Starliner’s second crack at an uncrewed meetup with the space station. On the first try, in December 2019, the spacecraft suffered a problem with its mission timer, got stranded in the wrong orbit and came home after circling Earth solo for two days.

It was not the first setback for Boeing or NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which has been encouraging the development of private astronaut taxis for more than a decade.

Related: Boeing’s OFT-2 mission: Live updates
Photo tour: Inside Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spaceship hangar

Filling the space shuttle’s shoes

NASA awarded its first commercial crew contracts in 2010. The goal was to get private American crewed vehicles up and running as soon as possible after the agency’s space shuttle fleet retired, which occurred the next year.

Boeing got one of those initial deals, as did SpaceX. The two companies were also among the awardees in 2011, and, in September 2014, NASA selected both of them to be official commercial crew providers. Boeing got $4.2 billion to finish developing Starliner and fly up to six contracted crewed missions to the space station, and SpaceX received a similar deal worth about $2.6 billion for its transportation system, which consists of the Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket.

When they announced those climactic awards, NASA officials said they hoped one or both private spacecraft would be operational by 2017. That was a hard target, especially considering that Congress has routinely allocated less money to commercial crew than NASA has requested over the years.

And both Boeing and SpaceX experienced some issues during development, which is hardly unexpected with brand-new spacecraft. For example, a Crew Dragon capsule aced its uncrewed test flight to the space station, known as Demo-1, in March 2019 but exploded on the test stand a month later during engine trials.

At one point, Boeing was targeting August 2018 for its version of Demo-1, called Orbital Flight Test (OFT). But a propellant leak was detected during tests of Starliner’s launch-abort engines in June 2018, pushing the capsule’s development back.

OFT didn’t get off the ground until Dec. 20, 2019, and things still did not go according to plan. The timing glitch wasn’t the only issue; post-flight analyses by Boeing and NASA revealed 80 “corrective actions” for the company to take.

“The review team’s recommendations included items relating to integrated testing and simulation, processes and operations, software, the crew module communication system and organization,” NASA officials wrote in an OFT-2 explainer this week.

Boeing has made all of those changes, as well as some others that weren’t mandatory, the officials added. So now, 19 months after the original OFT, Starliner is ready to fly again. (Not the same capsule, though; OFT-2 will use a different spacecraft.)

Starliner will carry 400 lbs. (181 kilograms) of cargo, as well as a test dummy named Rosie the Rocketeer, to the space station on OFT-2 and return to Earth with 550 lbs. (250 kg) of supplies, NASA officials have said. That touchdown is scheduled to take place in the western United States on Aug. 5.

Related: Boeing’s 1st Starliner flight test in photos

Keeping up with SpaceX

SpaceX has gotten out of the commercial crew gate faster than Boeing. Crew Dragon is now fully operational; the capsule aced a crewed test flight to the space station last summer and is in the middle of its second contracted mission to the orbiting lab for NASA.

OFT-2 is designed to show that Starliner, too, is ready to carry astronauts, a milestone that Boeing could achieve later this year if all goes well.

“As long as Starliner’s second uncrewed mission meets all necessary objectives, NASA and Boeing will look for opportunities toward the end of this year to fly Starliner’s first crewed mission to the space station, the Crew Flight Test (CFT), with NASA astronauts Barry ‘Butch’ Wilmore, Nicole Mann and Mike Fincke on board,” NASA officials wrote in the explainer.

Serious problems on OFT-2, however, would cause yet more delays, pushing further into the future the crewed-spaceflight redundancy that NASA prizes. (Agency officials have repeatedly stressed that they want more than one operational astronaut taxi, to maintain orbital access in case issues crop up with one craft.)

Such a scenario could even impel NASA to secure additional seats on Russian Soyuz spacecraft, something it did earlier this year as a sort of hedge against possible commercial crew delays. So, for both Boeing and NASA, there’s a lot more riding on Starliner this week than 400 lbs. of cargo.

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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The summer Intel fell behind, Chaim Gartenberg

In the summer of 2020 Intel seemed poised for triumph. Then it all went wrong. “To put it briefly: Intel blew it,” explains Glenn O’Donnell, a research director at Forrester Research. Intel was forced to announce to the world that it’d be delaying its next major manufacturing milestone for its chips for another few years, an admission that, once again, Intel was falling behind the competition.

After years of misplaced bets, manufacturing delays, and changing leadership, the previously undisputed chip-making king has found itself faced by competition the likes of which it hasn’t faced in decades — while simultaneously finding itself at what could be the company’s nadir.

In 2020, Intel was forced to admit that it would be severely delaying its 7nm node, recently rebranded as Intel 4. This precipitated an exodus of leadership and the admission that Intel might have to face the unthinkable and outsource its own manufacturing.

Intel managed to survive its last summer hell, at the cost of being forced to dramatically rethink its business from the top down. Now it has a new CEO, a new plan, and a market hungry for more chips. It’s set ambitious goals, revealing its most detailed process roadmap and a bold promise to jump ahead and reclaim processor leadership by 2025, if it can avoid the familiar pitfalls of the past decade. The coming years will be a make-or-break moment of redemption that will either right the course — or send Intel into what might be its final tailspin.

“It wasn’t something that just happened suddenly. These things build, they build and build over time until something happens that causes the whole thing to kind of crumble,” says O’Donnell. Things have been headed in a downward trajectory for Intel for years, yet it was last summer — and the delay on 7nm — when the cracks in Intel’s facade started to look a lot more like canyons.

“For all of its history, until recently, manufacturing was one of the magic things that was going on at Intel — part of the secret sauce of Intel was the manufacturing innovations, and that’s why 7nm was such a big embarrassment,” O’Donnell says. “It was a huge hit, psychologically, across the company, but also across the market because that meant Intel no longer had that secret sauce.”

The fact that Intel still makes its own chips today is a rarity in the industry. The vast majority of tech companies are fabless, meaning that they outsource the fabrication of their chips — even if they design them themselves — to other companies. AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Apple, MediaTek, and Broadcom are some of the leading examples of fabless companies today.

Intel is one of the few computer chip firms that still designs and manufactures its own hardware — it can design every part of the process to its own specifications and purposes, and it has an unmatched control over the actual manufacturing of its products. It actually owns its own fabs, and it’s the only major company still making chips in the US right now. Manufacturing has been one of Intel’s biggest strengths for decades. But the fact that the company missed its projections for 7nm, coming after years of 10nm delays that it was only just recovering from, was a huge blow.

Processor Processes

When we’re talking about semiconductor processes — be it 10nm, 7nm, or 5nm — in the tech industry, we’re largely discussing marketing terms. Today’s chips don’t actually have transistors that are 10nm or 7nm in size. Instead, the nodes are used as approximate generational terms to indicate when large advances in manufacturing technology have arrived.

The main thing that each node provides is greater transistor density, or the number of transistors that can fit into a space. The smaller the node, the more transistors you can fit, although exact numbers tend to vary a lot across different manufacturers — for example, Intel’s 10nm node features technology and transistor density roughly on par with that of TSMC and Samsung’s 7nm chips, precipitating Intel’s recent rebranding.

Last year started well for Intel. The company announced its Tiger Lake chips (technically the company’s third-generation 10nm designs) which also saw the debut of the company’s long-gestating Xe GPU architecture, giving it an exciting new wave of processors with prowess in an area (graphics) that had long been one of Intel’s weaknesses. The chips offered great performance, even though — much like their own long-delayed Ice Lake predecessors — they were limited to only lower-powered laptops. The wait for 10nm and Intel’s new graphics turned out to have been worth it: the new chips outpaced AMD’s in single-core performance when they were released, and they actually lived up to the hype.

There was still more to do: Intel had only released 10nm chips for its weakest laptop products; if you were buying a thin-and-light computer, it’d be better than ever, with all the performance and power efficiency improvements that the new architecture node brought with it. But it took the company almost a full year before it released more powerful H-series Tiger Lake chips for beefier laptops designed for gaming and video editing, which are only just starting to see those benefits. And it still has yet to move its desktop chips to 10nm (to the potential detriment of this year’s chips, which tried to fuse 10nm designs on 14nm architectures to mixed results).

After years of manufacturing delays, Intel almost seemed to maybe, possibly, be heading back on track.

But when June rolled around, Intel’s troubles started back up again. Seasoned engineer Jim Keller announced that he was leaving the company for “personal reasons.” Keller is the Mr. Fixit of the chip design world: he helped Apple with its in-house A-series chips, AMD with its Zen architecture, and Tesla with its Self-Driving Computer chip. Intel brought Keller on board in 2018, and while the company didn’t publicly define his role beyond leading Intel’s silicon engineering team for “system-on-chip (SoC) development and integration,” his job was clear: as the leader of Intel’s 10,000-person semiconductor engineering team, he was to get Intel back on track.

Keller is known for short stints at companies — he often comes in, sets things in motion, and leaves before the fireworks start. But his less than two years at Intel and his abrupt departure marked one of his shortest tenures yet, and an inauspicious start to Intel’s summer.

But there was more bad news waiting for Intel just a few days later, when Apple announced at WWDC 2020 that it would be making the switch to its own Arm-based chips, away from the Intel processors it had been using for over a decade. The reasoning was similar to when Apple first switched from PowerPC to Intel in 2005: Bloomberg reported that the Mac maker weighed and measured Intel’s roadmaps, already riddled with recent delays, and found it wanting.

Apple’s Q2 2019 earnings report goes even further, straight up blaming a dip in Mac sales that quarter on processor supply issues with Intel. “We believe that our Mac revenue would have been up compared to last year without those constraints,” CEO Tim Cook noted.

At least one former Intel engineer corroborates those frustrations: outspoken principal engineer Francois Piednoel told PC Gamer that the switch was at least partially due to poor quality assurance with the company’s Skylake chips.

But the switch to Arm chips wasn’t just an announcement that Apple was fed up with Intel’s delays — it was a declaration to the world from one of tech’s most influential companies that Intel’s chips just weren’t up to snuff anymore. “When we make bold changes, it’s for one simple yet powerful reason: so we can make much better products,” Cook said at the announcement — to Apple, leaving Intel behind was a necessary choice to let the Mac leap forward. And sure enough, Apple’s first M1 chips exceeded expectations on every front, upending our concept of laptop performance when they arrived later last year.

But all that was still a prelude to Intel’s biggest looming disaster: an announcement on its Q2 2020 earnings call that the company had identified a “defect mode” in its 7nm process, derailing progress by at least a year. The next-generation chip, originally set for a late 2021 release and a crucial part of Intel’s strategy to get its production back on track and to catch up to other silicon producers like TSMC, were now delayed until early 2023.

And that’s a big problem for Intel. As Natalie Enright Jerger, a professor in computer engineering and leading researcher in computer architectures explains, there are two main ways that chipmakers can improve performance: new designs, like putting more cores or new AI accelerators onto chips; and adding more transistors, which primarily come from new and smaller architectures. “Without being able to shrink the node they’re losing out on one of the two key drivers of performance. They’re still able to innovate … but they’re not able to get that additional win of more transistors that AMD has.”

AMD is also a beneficiary of TSMC’s more advanced production: its Ryzen chips have been on 7nm since 2019, and it could be poised to leapfrog Intel again when its 5nm Zen 4 chips ship in 2022.

Intel is effectively competing with one hand tied behind its back. The fact that it’s keeping up at all is a testament to the advantages its in-house production offers, and the innovations in things like its unique Foveros packaging technologies — all of which is the aforementioned “secret sauce”– but the continued delays to new architectures show it’s the kind of trick that Intel can only keep up for so long.

The fallout from the summer’s events came quickly. Shortly after the 7nm news hit, Venkata “Murthy” Renduchintala, the company’s former hardware chief, left his position. And Intel’s former CEO Bob Swan — previously Intel’s chief financial officer before taking the top spot — was replaced by Pat Gelsinger, a former Intel engineer best known for helping pioneer some of Intel’s earliest innovations in the 1980s and serving as the company’s first chief technology officer. Gelsinger was a hire meant to help right the ship, a sign to both employees and the world that Intel wanted to get serious about chips and play to its strengths again.

Gelsinger has wasted no time, already announcing a new “IDM 2.0” strategy for Intel that will see the company outsource some of its production to other players like TSMC and Samsung, work to establish Intel as a chipmaker for other companies through a new Intel Foundry Service business, and create an ambitious goal to return Intel to the forefront of cutting-edge chip designs by 2025.

The newly announced roadmap — the most detailed look at its future products that Intel has shared in some time — and the renaming of its technology nodes to better contextualize them with competitors is part of that strategy; a major declaration from the company that it has a plan to make its way back.

In a comment to The Verge, Intel executive vice president Michelle Johnston Holthaus said that “We have a solid foundation in place, and an exciting, strategic vision ahead of us,” highlighting the company’s new investments and roadmap.

But it’ll be a challenge to get there. Intel — the company once known for being the untouchable leader of CPU making — is undeniably behind. While some of its new announcements, like the $20 billion it is investing into new factories in Arizona, sound impressive, they’re bets that will take years to pay off. They also pale in comparison to competitors like Samsung, which announced a decade-long $116 billion investment in semiconductor production in 2019, or TSMC, which has announced plans to invest over $100 billion in expanding capacity over the next three years.

Even Intel’s new roadmap is not guaranteed for the future. There are a lot of ambitious goals there, including launching its long-delayed 7nm Intel 4 chips in 2023, and next-generation transistor architecture with Intel 20A in 2024. But Intel is coming off its recent 10nm and 7nm struggles and will need to make sure that its aggressive annual pace it’s setting here doesn’t hit similar snags that could cascade through the PC industry. And competitors like Samsung and TSMC are already gearing up their next generation of chips with higher transistor density and more advanced technologies, meaning that newly reinvigorated competitors like AMD and Qualcomm will be waiting to pick up any of Intel’s slack. As O’Donnell explains, “‘They’ve got to leapfrog now — simply catching up is insufficient.”

Last summer was a wake-up call for Intel, a clear sign that the years of delays and missed opportunities were a buck that it could no longer continue to pass. The changes that Intel’s made in the year since are the right ones: bringing back experienced leaders, hardware designers, and focusing on getting its semiconductor business back on track. Intel will have to regain trust and rebuild its reputation as a leader that OEMs and customers can rely on and show that it can still compete on the bleeding edge of chips. The last year was a good first step, and the ball’s in Intel’s court. But now, it needs to deliver.

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Sony’s first PS5 software beta arrives with M.2 SSD support, Tom Warren

Sony’s PS5 system software beta program is starting to roll out today, and it include access to the long-awaited M.2 SSD slot. The first PS5 beta is available for select users in the US, Canada, Japan, UK, Germany, and France. The beta includes some new UX enhancements and customizations, but the biggest addition is M.2 SSD expansion support.

Sony notes you’ll need an M.2 SSD that’s PCIe Gen4 and has read speeds of 5,500MB/s or faster. That’s largely what we were expecting, and it means a variety of Gen4 drives will be supported — including Samsung’s 980 Pro, Western Digital’s SN850s, and many other modern M.2 SSDs.

You may need to consider the cooling requirements for using an M.2 SSD in a PS5, though. “Using an M.2 SSD with your PS5 console requires effective heat dissipation with a cooling structure, such as a heatsink,” explains Sony. “You can attach one to your M.2 SSD yourself, either in a single-sided format, or double-sided format.”

You’ll need the latest Gen4 M.2 SSDs.Image: Samsung

While Sony notes that read speeds on Gen4 drives of 5,500MB/s or faster are recommended, it “cannot guarantee that all M.2 SSD devices meeting the described specifications will work with your console.” Playing games from this expandable storage may not have the “exact same performance” provided by the PS5’s internal drive, even if read speeds exceed 5,500MB/s.

Aside from M.2 SSD support, this latest PS5 beta software also includes 3D audio support for built-in TV speakers. This will be available in the sound menu in the PS5’s console system settings, and the feature uses the DualSense controller to measure the acoustics of a room to apply a 3D audio setting.

Sony is using the DualSense to intelligently enable 3D audio for TV speakers.Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Sony is also improving other areas of its PS5 software. The Control Center interface will now include more personalization options for rearranging or choosing controls, and PS5 users will be able to view and write messages to friends and parties from the Game Base in the Control Center.

The Friends tab in Game Base is also being updated with better management options, and the ability to see how many friends are online. Sony is also addressing some of the confusing aspects of PS4 or PS5 versions of games. Different versions will now appear separately in the home screen and game library, and each game’s title will also now include whether it’s PS4 or PS5.

This new PS5 beta will also include a trophy tracker that lets players quickly access up to five trophies per game through the Control Center. Sony is also adding options to pick between 720p and 1080p for its PlayStation Now service, and enabling a new automatic video clip for PS5 players that compete in challenges for high scores in games.

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Google is kicking ‘sugar dating’ apps out of the Play Store, Jon Porter

“Sugar dating” apps will not be allowed on the Android Play Store from September 1st, Google has announced as part of a series of policy changes for the platform. The change, which was first reported by Android Police, specifically prohibits apps relating to “compensated sexual relationships.” Other changes coming to the platform include a new crackdown on inactive developer accounts, Google says.

Traditionally, sugar dating relationships involve older, wealthier individuals dating and showering younger partners with gifts. As Android Police notes, there’s no shortage of apps on the Play Store designed around setting up “sugar daddy” relationships. None of them explicitly say that older men are expected to compensate younger women for their affection, but many emphasize the wealth of the men on their services.

Google’s Play Store policies already prohibit apps that promote “services that may be interpreted as providing sexual acts in exchange for compensation.” But the updated wording expands this definition to explicitly include “compensated dating or sexual arrangements where one participant is expected or implied to provide money, gifts or financial support to another participant (‘sugar dating’).”

Google’s announcement doesn’t explicitly say why the apps are being banned now. But it comes amidst a crackdown on online sex work by platforms following the introduction of the FOSTA-SESTA legislation in the US in 2018, which removes Section 230 protections for content that “promotes or facilitates prostitution.” A representative from Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Beyond the dating app rule changes, the search giant is also introducing a new policy which will see it delete developer accounts if they’ve remained inactive for a year. Google says it will make exceptions for accounts behind apps with over a thousand installs or with recent in-app purchases, but if a developer hasn’t uploaded an app or signed into the Google Play Console over the course of 12 months, their account is at risk of deletion. In a video outlining the change, Google says it will notify developers of an impending deletion 60, 30, and 7 days before it takes place.

The policy updates also offer more information on Google’s previously announced changes regarding Play Store spam and opting-out of the use of advertising IDs. It’s updating its store listings and promotion policy on September 29 to ban “spam text and graphics in app titles, icons and developer names” and its ads policy is being updated to reflect the advertising ID changes on October 4th.

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Bang & Olufsen launches its first pair of noise-canceling true wireless earbuds, Jon Porter

Bang & Olufsen’s Beoplay EQ are the Danish audio brand’s first pair of noise-canceling true wireless headphones. Two microphones on each earbud handle noise cancellation duties alongside an extra mic for making calls, for a total of six across the two earbuds. They’re releasing globally on August 19th in black and gold.

At $399 (GBP359 / EUR399), the Beoplay EQ are around $50 more expensive than B&O’s non-noise-canceling Beoplay E8 earbuds were at launch. They don’t feature the third-generation E8’s formidable battery life, which tops out at 35 hours of total charge from the earbuds and case combined. Instead, the Beoplay EQ can run for around 20 hours when used with the charging case. Battery life from the earbuds themselves is about the same, however, at around six and a half hours with ANC on, or seven and a half with it off. Charging is handled over USB-C or Qi wireless charging.

Their case provides two extra charges for a total playtime of 20 hours.Image: Bang & Olufsen

Rounding out the specs, the Beoplay EQ support Qualcomm’s AptX adaptive standard, which is able to make various adjustments to optimize your wireless audio depending on your environment or the content you’re listening to. The earbuds also support the AAC and SBC codecs, and there’s an IP54 rating for dust and water resistance.

Like all of Bang & Olufsen’s devices, the Beoplay EQ aren’t exactly cheap. They’re $150 more expensive than Apple’s AirPods Pro and around $120 more than Sony’s WF-1000XM4 — our current pick for the best noise-canceling earbuds available. But what else did you expect from a company whose Xbox headset costs about as much as the console with which it’s designed to be used.

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Watch live @ 9:24 am ET: Russian ‘Nauka’ module docks at space station, ,

Editor’s note: Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket successfully launched the Monolith satellite for the U.S. Space Force today (July 29) at 2 a.m. EDT (0600 GMT). Read the full story here.

A new Russian module will dock with the International Space Station on Thursday (July 29), and you can watch it live here.

The Multipurpose Laboratory Module (MLM), also known as Nauka, is expected to arrive at the orbiting laboratory at approximately 9:24 a.m. EDT (1324 GMT).

Nauka launched to orbit last Wednesday (July 21), lifting off on a Russian Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Hitching a ride with Nauka is the new European Robotic Arm, or ERA, a 16-foot-long (5 meters) two-handed robot that will be able to move freely outside of the orbiting lab.

A live broadcast of the docking will begin at 8:30 a.m. EDT (1230 GMT), and you can watch it live in the window above, courtesy of NASA TV.

Related: Skywatcher spots Russia’s Nauka headed to space station (photo)

NASA will provide live coverage of the automated docking of the uncrewed Russian Multipurpose Laboratory Module (MLM) to the International Space Station Thursday, July 29, beginning at 8:30 a.m.

Named Nauka, the Russian word for science, the 43-foot long, 23-ton module launched on July 21 and will serve as a new science facility, docking port, and spacewalk airlock for future operations.

To follow along live, tune into NASA Television, as well as the NASA app, and the agency’s website.

Boeing’s Starliner astronaut taxi is scheduled to attempt its second uncrewed test flight to the International Space Station on July 30.

The mission, called Orbital Flight Test 2 (OFT-2), will lift off on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, on Friday (July 30) at 2:53 p.m. EDT (1853 GMT).

A news conference with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson is scheduled for Thursday (July 29) at 10:30 a.m. EDT (1430 GMT), and you can watch it live in the window above, courtesy of NASA TV. (Until the live stream begins, you can watch a video of the Starliner capsule being mated to the Atlas V rocket during launch preparations at Cape Canaveral.)

Boeing Starliner Orbital Flight Test 2: Live updates

NASA will provide coverage of the upcoming prelaunch, launch, and docking activities for the agency’s Boeing Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) mission to the International Space Station. Scheduled to launch at 2:53 p.m. EDT Friday, July 30, OFT-2 is the second uncrewed flight for Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program.

Starliner will launch on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. About 31 minutes after launch, Starliner will reach its preliminary orbit. It is scheduled to dock to the space station at 3:06 p.m. Saturday, July 31. Prelaunch activities, launch, and docking will air live on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website.

The spacecraft will carry more than 400 pounds of NASA cargo and crew supplies to the space station and return to Earth with more than 550 pounds of cargo, including reusable Nitrogen Oxygen Recharge System (NORS) tanks that provide breathable air to station crew members.

OFT-2 will demonstrate the end-to-end capabilities of the Starliner spacecraft and Atlas V rocket from launch to docking to a return to Earth in the desert of the western United States. The uncrewed mission will provide valuable data toward NASA certifying Boeing’s crew transportation system for regular flights with astronauts to and from the space station.

The deadline has passed for media accreditation for in-person coverage of this launch. More information about media accreditation is available by emailing: ksc-media-accreditat@mail.nasa.gov.

NASA has updated its coronavirus (COVID-19) policies to remain consistent with new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance. Credentialed media will receive additional details from the media operations team at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

NASA’s Boeing OFT-2 mission coverage is as follows (all times Eastern):

Thursday, July 29

10:30 a.m. – NASA Administrator Media and Social Briefing on NASA TV, with the following participants:

NASA Administrator Bill NelsonNASA Deputy Administrator Pam MelroyNASA Associate Administrator Bob CabanaJanet Petro, director, NASA’s Kennedy Space Center

11 a.m. – Crew and Science Briefing on NASA TV, with the following participants:

Barry “Butch” Wilmore, NASA astronaut, Crew Flight TestE. Michael “Mike” Fincke, NASA astronaut, Crew Flight TestNicole Mann, NASA astronaut, Crew Flight TestChris Ferguson, director, Starliner Mission Operations and Integration/Crew SystemsJennifer Buchli, deputy chief scientist, NASA’s International Space Station Program

Friday, July 30

2 p.m. – NASA TV launch coverage begins. NASA TV will have continuous coverage through Starliner orbital insertion.

4 p.m. (approximately) – Postlaunch news conference on NASA TV:

NASA Administrator Bill NelsonNASA Deputy Administrator Pam MelroyKathryn Lueders, associate administrator, Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate at NASAJim Chilton, senior vice president, Boeing Space and LaunchTory Bruno, president and CEO, United Launch AllianceReid Wiseman, chief, Astronaut Office

Saturday, July 31

12 p.m. – NASA TV rendezvous and docking coverage begins

3:06 p.m. (approximately) – Docking

Sunday, Aug. 1

9:15 a.m. – NASA TV hatch opening and welcoming remarks coverage begins

9:35 a.m. (approximately) – Hatch opening and welcoming remarks about 10:35 a.m.

NASA TV Launch Coverage

NASA TV live coverage will begin at 2 p.m. For NASA TV downlink information, schedules, and links to streaming video, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv

Find out what the astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station are up to by tuning in to the “ISS Live” broadcast. Hear conversations between the crew and mission controllers on Earth and watch them work inside the U.S. segment of the orbiting laboratory. When the crew is off duty, you can enjoy live views of Earth from Space. You can watch and listen in the window below, courtesy of NASA.

“Live video from the International Space Station includes internal views when the crew is on-duty and Earth views at other times. The video is accompanied by audio of conversations between the crew and Mission Control. This video is only available when the space station is in contact with the ground. During ‘loss of signal’ periods, viewers will see a blue screen.

“Since the station orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes, it experiences a sunrise or a sunset about every 45 minutes. When the station is in darkness, external camera video may appear black, but can sometimes provide spectacular views of lightning or city lights below.”

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Astronomers propose ‘SatHub’ to address growing threat of satellite megaconstellations, ,

Some astronomers suggest setting up a “SatHub” to address the growing threat that satellite megaconstellations pose to the night sky — but funding and support are necessary to make it happen.

The primary goal of the international SatHub project would be implementing and adapting plans for observations as new satellites go up, team members said. A secondary goal would be training, outreach and analysis concerning low Earth orbit satellites for the greater community.

SatHub was one of the key recommendations emerging from a recent workshop, called Satellite Constellations 2 (SATCON2), to figure out how astronomers can best perform observations in the face of swiftly growing satellite numbers. (Some satellite companies also participated in workshop discussions.)

Related: Astronomers ask UN committee to protect night skies from megaconstellations

“That may include a proposal to the International Astronomical Union,” SATCON2 co-chair Connie Walker said during a preliminary press conference on July 16, referring to the SatHub idea. The IAU is one of the largest organizations representing astronomers and astronomy interests around the world.

“They have a call that just went out recently on such a center, so stay tuned for more on that,” added Walker, a scientist at the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab.

Proposals are due to the IAU on Sept. 10, and deliberations will likely continue until at least the end of 2021, representatives added in the workshop. They did not give a timeline for when SatHub could be available, but this would likely depend in large part on funding.

Ideally, companies that send satellites to space should put money toward the center, said Meredith Rawls, a research scientist at the University of Washington who was also the observations working group chair for SATCON2.

“The idea here is to have a one-stop shop for all of your different needs pertaining to low Earth orbit satellite constellation observations,” Rawls said during the press conference. “We really would like to get out ahead of this and avoid reinventing the wheel by having lots of individual siloed groups addressing the problem, and instead have a single landing place for all of these different observations and related analyses to land.”

SATCON2 had three objectives, according to a press release from NOIRLab and the American Astronomical Society (AAS), which jointly organized the workshop: to figure out what is required to implement the previous recommendations from 2020’s SATCON1; to have astronomers and satellite operators work together for policy frameworks and strategies; and to increase the diversity of all stakeholders.

SATCON1 participants produced a report last year warning that the impacts on astronomy of satellite megaconstellations in low Earth orbit “are estimated to range from negligible to extreme.” All-sky survey telescopes that depend on lengthy light exposures free from interference will feel the biggest effects, the report concluded.

Report: Satellite megaconstellations could have ‘extreme’ impact on astronomy

Key recommendations from 2020 included limiting satellite altitudes in low Earth orbit to 370 miles (600 kilometers); reducing satellite brightness; developing image-processing software to minimize satellite trails; and making orbital information about satellites widely available so astronomers can point away from them.

This year, SATCON2 astronomers pointed to challenges in keeping up with the growing pace of satellite launches. Among the conclusions was that substantial development will be needed in software solutions, said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who was co-chair of the SATCON2 algorithms working group.

“We’ve tried to identify what existing software is relevant to the software problems, but we find that a lot of it is specialized to particular instruments or particular observatories, and it’s going to need some work to be generalized,” he warned during the press conference. “Also, there are big gaps where the software just doesn’t exist. We do need a significant software development effort, and that’s going to require substantial resources and funding.”

Since satellites are always launching and software takes time to be developed, “we’re going to need these resources as soon as possible,” McDowell added. And the money will not only be needed for software, he added: Spectroscopic observations in particular are likely to be highly affected, so some observatories will likely need to spend money on hardware such as auxiliary spotting cameras.

The problem also goes beyond technical issues. Other commonly cited problems of constellations include space junk and crowding in terms of radio interference between satellites. These issues were not addressed in the workshop, but there were discussions concerning the impact on Indigenous peoples, as lack of access to the sky is seen as a cultural loss, said James Lowenthal, an astronomy professor at Smith College at Northampton, Massachusetts, who was the co-chair of the SATCON2 community engagement working group. (That said, he warned, not all Indigenous groups want the same thing.)

“The sky belongs to everyone,” Lowenthal said. “People are impacted by changes in the sky. Megaconstellations are a global issue because space is a global commons. The sky is part of the environment … and ecosystems depend on the night sky, and on each other, echoing the intersectional, interdependent nature of the many strands of this complex issue.”

Lowenthal suggested that, when coming with policy solutions, stakeholders should look to lessons learned from past global commons agreements such as the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, which led to some restrictions on CFCs. But not all such agreements were that successful, he said.

“Telephones, trains, planes, cars, fossil fuels, the internet itself — all of these technologies burst upon the scene, were disruptive, produced profound change in society, to be followed by some modicum of regulation and lawmaking. Some were more successful than others at protecting public interests,” Lowenthal said.

One way of mitigating the megaconstellation issue might be for those involved in satellite constellations to anticipate impacts long before satellites launch, said Richard Green of the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, director of the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory and chair of the SATCON2 policy working group.

Related: Air pollution from reentering megaconstellation satellites could cause ozone hole 2.0

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A fleet of SpaceX Starlink internet satellites is seen poised for deployment in orbit in this image from a May 24, 2019 launch. (Image credit: SpaceX)

The policy working group “wanted to encourage operators to consider effects on astronomy, early in their development of their constellations,” Green said. Acknowledging that SpaceX creates satellites in-house, most other companies contract for construction, he added. “They can adjust designs early, but it’s very hard to change once they’re in production.”

Among other measures, the policy working group urged individual countries — who are responsible for their launching entities, under the United Nations’ 1967 Outer Space Treaty recognized in international space law frameworks — to grant licenses to satellite operators only after the environmental impact of satellites has been assessed and minimized.

Despite the Outer Space Treaty’s age, Green noted, it remains a useful tool for policy discussions. “It is a very flexible backbone that provides the principles under which nations can operate together, to define how some new phenomenon like satellite constellations fits under the expectations of a spacefaring nation,” he said.

Constellations are not a new concept in space exploration, but they have been proliferating in recent years due to the ability to launch fleets of small but capable satellites on a single rocket. The most cited concern is the SpaceX Starlink constellation, which has an estimated 1,630 operational satellites as of July 2021, according to calculations from McDowell, and is growing fast.

“We started the SATCOM workshops after the launch in May 2019 of the first tranche of Starlink satellites,” SATCOM2 co-chair Jeff Hall, an astronomer at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, said during the press conference.

“That led to the idea we should all get together, in a community sense, and see what might be done about some of the impacts on astronomy. We know these satellites are perhaps up to a billion times brighter than the faintest objects astronomers study and have a significant impact on ground-based observatories, which require pristine dark skies to perform their research.”

SpaceX eventually hopes to have as many as 42,000 Starlink satellites providing broadband service, and more companies are looking to grow their own fleets, including Amazon’s Project Kuiper (which has yet to launch any craft) and OneWeb, which has already lofted 254 operational satellites.

Lowenthal praised some satellite companies for being “significantly and substantially involved in the planning of this workshop,” along with promising to “commit resources” to reduce the effects of satellite constellations.

That said, he pointed to challenges. There are no firm regulations yet forcing companies to adjust their satellites to help astronomy observations, he said. Further, the competition has already been tough and resulted in bankruptcies. While Lowenthal did not name any particulars, one commonly cited example is OneWeb’s recent Chapter 11 proceedings and subsequent ownership change.

“Even the business model is on shaky ground,” he said. “We’ve already seen bankruptcies, and having a completely unregulated atmosphere is not necessarily the best for them, either. I think there’s broad agreement that regulation is going to happen. Of course it’s a slow process, but that’s what we’re launching with this workshop.”

More than 350 astronomers, satellite operators, space policy specialists and advocates for dark skies — skies with a minimum of light pollution and satellite interference — attended SATCON2 from 40 countries, representatives said. A final report will be available around the end of September.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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