Dominique Luchart's Blog, page 574

OnePlus admits to throttling popular apps to save battery life, Sam Byford

OnePlus has confirmed that it deliberately reduces performance in “many of the most popular apps” in order to improve battery life on its latest OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro phones. The issue arose following testing by Anandtech’s Andrei Frumusanu, who called the situation “rather baffling” after discovering slowdown in a wide range of prominent apps from Google’s Play Store.

Anandtech‘s conclusion is that OnePlus is “blacklisting popular applications away from its fastest cores, causing slowdown in typical workloads such as web browsing.” The site tested Chrome and Twitter performance extensively, but concluded that the slowdown “applies to pretty much everything that has any level of popularity in the Play Store.” That’s said to cover all Google apps, all Microsoft Office apps, and all notable social media apps and web browsers, though some complex games like Genshin Impact are reportedly unaffected.

Some phone manufacturers have been caught in the past artificially boosting performance so that their devices run unreasonably fast in benchmarks. That isn’t quite what’s happening here; while benchmark apps seem to be running within expectations, it’s the performance of “regular” apps that’s been reduced. Nevertheless, popular testing tool GeekBench describes OnePlus’ approach as “benchmark manipulation” and has removed the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro from its Android benchmark chart.

OnePlus confirmed to XDA Developers that this is intended behavior designed to improve battery life. Here’s the full statement:

“Our top priority is always delivering a great user experience with our products, based in part on acting quickly on important user feedback. Following the launch of the OnePlus 9 and 9 Pro in March, some users told us about some areas where we could improve the devices’ battery life and heat management. As a result of this feedback, our R&D team has been working over the past few months to optimize the devices’ performance when using many of the most popular apps, including Chrome, by matching the app’s processor requirements with the most appropriate power. This has helped to provide a smooth experience while reducing power consumption. While this may impact the devices’ performance in some benchmarking apps, our focus as always is to do what we can to improve the performance of the device for our users.”

OnePlus’ statement implies that the performance is only affected in benchmark results, which is essentially the opposite of what Anandtech has found. Unless, of course, the intended user experience is for most popular apps to be slowed down, and the “impact” is on benchmark results that are higher than they ought to be.

It is worth noting that the performance tweaks may well not make much difference to the user’s overall experience. “I wouldn’t blame anybody if they hadn’t necessarily noticed the performance discrepancy — I hadn’t immediately noticed it myself beyond the device’s extremely slow momentum scrolling speed setting,” Frumusanu writes. “However, having it side-by-side to a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, or a Xiaomi Mi 11 (Ultra) and paying attention, I do very much notice that the OnePlus 9 Pro is less responsive.”

What’s clear is that OnePlus is taking an unusual approach to power management on the 9 Pro — Frumusanu says it “certainly represents the first case of a vendor implementing application and benchmark detection in this manner” — and that’s something you might want to be aware of before dropping the cash on the company’s latest flagship.

The post OnePlus admits to throttling popular apps to save battery life, Sam Byford appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.

This inexpensive backlight makes your big TV even more immersive, Thomas Ricker

Govee Lyra (left) and Immersion LED backlight (right).

I’ve been intrigued by Philips’ Ambilight televisions for almost two decades. Watching those displays bleed onto the wall in radiant synchronicity is something to behold. I just couldn’t justify the price premium, despite the promise of a more immersive viewing experience. Then Philips Hue introduced an external Hue Play Box that adds Ambilight to any TV. But at $229 and requiring you to buy lights to use with it, it was still too expensive for my cheap ass.

A few months ago, I discovered the Immersion TV backlight while checking out Govee’s new Lyra free-standing lamp. The Lyra is cool, but Govee’s Immersion backlight kit seemed like the stuff of my budget-priced dreams. Together, they can transform a bland living room into a hyper-chromatic party. At $80 (and sometimes less if you find it on sale), including all of the components you need to make it work, short of a TV itself, the Govee Immersion kit offers a much better value proposition than Philips.

Installing the Govee Immersion light kit on the back of my TV took about an hour, mostly because caution is advised when gluing over 12 feet of LED lights to a thin and expensive LG OLED TV. The Immersion light strip is a single strand of RGBIC LEDs that sit atop a layer of strong 3M adhesive. I used masking tape to stage my installation before removing the back of the 3M tape to permanently attach the LEDs around the entire perimeter of the TV.

Even then, I still had to move the left and right LED sections. It was only after turning on the lights that I realized the strips were too close to the left- and right-hand edges making them visible from the front. Fortunately, the strips peeled away easily enough, allowing me to reattach them closer to the center without needing to reheat the 3M tape with a hairdryer.

Govee says the Immersion kit is suitable for TVs between 55 and 65 inches, with the single LED light strip divided into sections measuring 70cm for the sides and 120cm along the top and bottom. For my 55-inch TV, I had to do plenty of twisting and cajoling of the LED strip to make sure the slack looped at the corners wasn’t visible from the front. It was all a bit of trial and error while making liberal use of the adhesive cable clamps included in the kit. Installation should be easier on larger TVs.

The Govee Immersion TV Backlight relies upon an external camera to synchronize the LEDs with any colors it detects on the display. Conversely, the Hue Play Box only works with content fed to it via HDMI. That’s given Govee the advantage for anyone who relies heavily on content sourced directly from apps installed on their smart TV.

Placement of the camera is crucial to the operation as it watches the edges of the display and then maps the colors back to each LED on the strip. All Govee marketing materials suggest that the camera has to sit on top of the TV. It’s only when you open the companion phone app that you learn it can also be placed at the bottom, which looks much better in my setup. My TV is sitting on a cabinet with a soundbar in front that completely hides the camera mounted below. Unfortunately, the soundbar also blocks most of the bottom strip of LEDs so I don’t get the full 360-degree Ambilight experience.

The downside of mounting the camera at the bottom is an increase in light interference, affecting the accuracy of the Immersion backlight colors. In my setup, I have light spilling in from a nearby garden door creating some minor interference. In the image slider below, you can see how the light output of the Govee Lyra affects the Immersion backlight when turned on. Mounting the camera on top of the TV would have mostly avoided this. But for me, I’d rather turn off the light than stare at the camera all day long.

The camera when positioned at the bottom of the TV can pick up light interference as demonstrated by the Lyra shifting colors along the left edge of the TV.","image_left":{"ratio":"*","original_url":"https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/choru...

The camera when positioned at the bottom of the TV can pick up light interference as demonstrated by the Lyra shifting colors along the left edge of the TV.

Calibrating the camera is not for the faint of heart as it requires adhering seven orange blocks to the TV display. I affixed mine as if handling live explosives, and the blocks came off without leaving any residue. But boy, did those steps feel icky. Calibrating the fish-eye camera is then a matter of using the Govee Home app to align a camera guide with the blocks. Don’t rush this step. Your diligence will be rewarded with an accurate color map that can be enjoyed long into the future.

A look at the most useful settings for Video mode, including Part or All, Game or Movie, and Brightness and Saturation.

Govee Immersion can be controlled with the Govee Home app over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. There’s also a dedicated control module that sits in line with the LED strip on the back of the TV (using more 3M tape). The lights support Google Assistant and Alexa out of the box. I plugged mine into a smart plug (the TV’s USB port isn’t an option) that automatically turns the LEDs on and off along with the TV. It works well since the Immersion remembers the last mode it was in before powering off.

The Govee Home app is where you’re introduced to an overwhelming set of options. There are interactive modes that make the strips respond to music and video, and static modes built around your preferred color patterns and scenes. It was within the Video mode that I fulfilled my Ambilight ambitions.

Video mode can be set to Part or All. Part makes each RGBIC LED respond locally to what’s happening on the display next to it, whereas All creates a uniform backlight of color based upon some average of what the camera sees on the display. Video mode can be further refined with a Game or Movie selection. Game mode causes the colors to change more abruptly, while Movie results in smoother but slower color transitions.

After a few weeks of testing, I ultimately settled on Part / Movie video modes with brightness set to 75 percent and saturation set to about 15 percent. These settings provide the best balance of immersion versus distraction for the content I watched the most: films, television series, some animation, and lots of soccer during the UEFA Champions League competition.

Soccer looks great in Part / Movie modes, especially when England scores.

Soccer looked amazing in these settings, where long single-camera shots show great swaths of green grass and uniformly clad spectators. The adaptive backlighting added substantially to the immersive feel, especially in the evening hours when the Govee Immersion wasn’t competing with the sun.

Govee Immersion in Part / Movie mode can fall behind on content with quick cut edits. All / Movie or Part / Game modes can improve performance.

The Part / Movie settings were less than perfect for watching films with quick-cut action shots. The split-second delay between a display change and the bias lighting detecting it proved distracting in some scenes, pulling the viewer out of the action, especially when the colors were wrong. Switching things to Game (faster response) or All (uniform backlight) settings helped improve the experience. Otherwise, I could just dim the LED brightness to make the backlight less prominent. It was never distracting enough to compel me to turn the backlight off completely, though.

Immersion backlight set to All / Movie mode makes The Handmaid’s Tale even more dire.Fast-moving animation looks great with the brightness and saturation cranked up (Part / Movie mode).Anime, too (Part / Movie mode).Soccer looks amazing in Part / Movie mode, thanks to wide shots with few camera changes.

For television shows like The Handmaid’s Tale, I preferred things in All / Movie mode and let Govee choose the uniform backlight colors. More often than not, it chose a deep angry red. How apropos.

I’ve been generally pleased with the accuracy of the color mapping though it does occasionally get confused. Nevertheless, I never want to watch TV without an immersive dynamic backlight again.

Ideally, the standing Lyra lamp would sync colors with the Immersion camera for dynamic scenes like these.

Ideally, the Govee Lyra would sync with the Govee Immersion to further enhance the Ambilight-like experience. While you can create Smart links within the Govee app to sync some features of the Lyra and Immersion lights, it’s limited to on / off or color syncing. They cannot sync information collected by the Immersion’s camera. That’s a shame because I’d love to transform the TV area into a makeshift Microsoft IllumiRoom.

On its own, the Govee Lyra is neat but gimmicky. It lacks a Video mode, but otherwise includes all of the same light modes as the Immersion backlight. But none of those are very compelling unless your job is to DJ dance parties for kids. It’s hard to justify a free-standing vertical LED lightstrip that costs $149.99, when the $79.99 Immersion is such a compelling product for so much less.

Every smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it — contracts that no one actually reads. It’s impossible for us to read and analyze every single one of these agreements. But we started counting exactly how many times you have to hit “agree” to use devices when we review them since these are agreements most people don’t read and definitely can’t negotiate.

To actually use the Govee Lyra floor lamp and Govee Immersion backlight, you must agree to the following in the Govee Home app (iOS and Android):

Final tally: two mandatory agreements.

Photography by Thomas Ricker / The Verge

The post This inexpensive backlight makes your big TV even more immersive, Thomas Ricker appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.

Polestar made a more powerful version of its electric sedan for the Goodwood Festival, Andrew J. Hawkins

Swedish electric performance automaker Polestar made a more powerful version of its electric fastback sedan for the Goodwood Festival of Speed in the UK, which kicks off today, July 8th.

Polestar, which is jointly owned by Volvo and Volvo’s Chinese parent company Geely, has tuned the dual motor configuration to pump out 476 horsepower, compared to 408 horsepower in the production version. By doing this, it hopes that the modified Polestar 2 will be able to finish Goodwood’s hill-climbing race in record time.

The company has also widened the vehicle’s stance by 10 millimeters on both sides and lowered the ride height by 25 mm to improve its handling on the track. And it’s carried over a few features from its first vehicle, the plug-in hybrid Polestar 1, including 9×21-inch wheels, 6-piston Akebono front brakes, and 275/30R21 Pirelli PZero Rosso performance tires.

There have been other modifications as well, including stiffer front and rear springs, upgraded dampers, and a carbon-fiber front suspension strut bar from a Volvo S60. “This car is what happens when we are given freedom to go beyond our limits,” Joakim Rydholm, Polestar’s chief chassis engineer, said in a statement.

Polestar cites the company’s CEO, Thomas Ingenlath, as the impetus behind the experimental EV. Ingenlath, who for several months has been driving another experimental version of the Polestar 2 nicknamed “Beast,” said he directed the engineering team to “play with Polestar 2 and come up with something that makes a strong statement for Goodwood.”

Polestar isn’t the first EV company to aspire to win the Goodwood Festival. The current record holder is Romain Dumas, who broke a 20-year-record in 2019 while driving a Volkswagen ID R electric racecar. (The festival was canceled last year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.) Dumas also holds the electric vehicle record at Germany’s famous Nurburgring, as well as the fastest run up Pikes Peak in Colorado.

But if Polestar wants to take the crown from the ID R, which was built explicitly to tackle these hill-climbing contests, Polestar will certainly have its work cut out for it.

There will be plenty of electric competitors this year as well. The Hyundai Ioniq 5 will be represented, and Ford CEO Jim Farley plans on driving the race himself from behind the wheel of a Mustang Mach-E GT Performance.

The post Polestar made a more powerful version of its electric sedan for the Goodwood Festival, Andrew J. Hawkins appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.

On This Day in Space! July 7, 1961: Discoverer 26 satellite launches on secret mission, ,

On July 7, 1961, the U.S. Air Force launched a satellite called Discoverer 26 into orbit with a classified payload.

Discoverer 26 was part of a series of reconnaissance or spy satellites whose missions were kept top-secret by the American government until 1992. While other Discoverer satellites were spying on Russia, China and the Middle East, Discoverer 26 was used to conduct experiments and new test spacecraft engineering techniques in orbit.

The mission also evaluated the Agena-B second-stage rocket booster. This part of the launch vehicle contained instruments that could measure how ions and micrometeoroids in low-Earth orbit affected the spacecraft.

After 32 trips around the planet, the satellite’s reentry capsule plunged into Earth’s atmosphere before it was successfully recovered.

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

[image error]

History of NASA: $22.99 at Magazines Direct

Discover the story of how and why NASA was created, its greatest triumphs, darkest days, and of the times it exceeded all possible hopes. A tale of adventure, heroism and resourcefulness, learn of the space agency’s greatest achievements and how — over six decades — the organization has consistently and tirelessly devoted itself to its founding principle: that “activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all humankind”. View Deal

Still not enough space? Don’t forget to check out our Space Image of the Day, and on the weekends our Best Space Photos and Top Space News Stories of the week.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @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.

The post On This Day in Space! July 7, 1961: Discoverer 26 satellite launches on secret mission, , appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.

Small-launch startup Astra aiming for 300 missions per year by 2025, ,

Astra plans to get to Earth orbit for the first time this summer — and to return many times in the ensuing weeks, months and years.

The Bay Area small-launch startup reached space for the first time last December, on a test flight with its 38-foot-tall (12 meters) Rocket 3.2 vehicle from the Pacific Spaceport Complex on Alaska’s Kodiak Island.

Rocket 3.2 didn’t quite reach orbit, running out of fuel just seconds before achieving the required velocity. But Astra made some tweaks to its next booster, Rocket 3.3, and plans to launch the new vehicle on a fully operational, satellite-carrying orbital mission sometime this summer.

And that launch will kick off a sustained and accelerating march to the final frontier for Astra, if all goes according to plan.

“In the fall, we’ll start this monthly cadence, and then we’re going to continue that cadence as we start to ramp towards weekly [orbital launches] late next year, ” Astra CEO Chris Kemp, who co-founded the company in 2016, told Space.com.

“Then we’ll cross through weekly,” Kemp said, and target “daily space delivery, or roughly 300 launches, in 2025.”

Video: Watch Astra’s Rocket 3.2 launch on its 1st successful flight

Small rockets, big plans

The small-satellite launch market is growing fast, and Astra intends to grab a sizable chunk of it. The startup’s strategy centers on providing cheap, flexible and dedicated rides to orbit with simplified, mass-produced rockets small enough to be transported to the launch site in a standard shipping container.

Astra’s two-stage launchers will also be ever-evolving, with a new and improved versiondebuting roughly every year, Kemp said. Some of the envisioned improvements are substantial, and will require far more than the mere tweaks the company performed to upgrade Rocket 3.3’s fuel-management software.

For example, the current Rocket 3 line features five “Delphin” first-stage engines and one “Aether” engine in its upper stage, all of which were developed and built in-house. But Rocket 4, the vehicle that Astra intends to use when it begins weekly launches in 2022, will be powered by just a single first-stage engine — a brand-new engine much more powerful than the Delphin.

That change alone will allow Astra to launch several hundred kilograms to low Earth orbit, Kemp said — a significant boost from Rocket 3’s payload capacity, which is about 110 lbs. (50 kilograms). And upgrades to the upper-stage engine, along with some mass-optimization work, should enable Astra to launch satellites that weigh up to 1,100 lbs. (500 kg) in the near future, Kemp added.

That higher payload capacity will allow Astra to compete for many more launch contracts — for example, from companies building huge broadband constellations, such as OneWeb and Amazon. (SpaceX is assembling such a constellation, too, but is launching its Starlink internet satellites on its own Falcon 9 rockets.)

“As we build the next couple versions of the rocket, we’re targeting 500 kilograms so that we can address the entire megaconstellation market,” Kemp said.

Astra already holds contracts for more than 50 launches, which represent more than $150 million in revenue, Kemp said. Some of the company’s customers are pretty high-profile. For example, in May of this year, Astra announced that it had signed a deal with San Francisco-based Planet, which operates the world’s largest constellation of Earth-observing satellites. Astra will launch Planet spacecraft next year; the number of missions and the financial details were not disclosed in that announcement.

And this past February, Astra won a $7.95 million contract to launch NASA’s Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation Structure and Storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) mission. TROPICS will study the formation and evolution of hurricanes using six cubesats, which Astra will launch over three missions between January and July 2022, NASA officials have said.

Related: The history of rockets

New launch sites — and building spacecraft, too

Astra has conducted four launches to date: suborbital test flights in July 2018 and November 2018, and orbital attempts in September 2020 and December 2020. (The September 2020 try, with the Rocket 3.1 vehicle, failed to reach space after suffering an issue with its guidance system.)

All four have originated from the Pacific Spaceport Complex — but that should change soon.

“There will be another launch from a different launch site this year,” Kemp said. “And what I’m excited about is, from deciding to launch the launch site to announcing it to doing the launch will be Astra-fast.”

TROPICS will bring some geographic diversity as well. Those three missions will launch from the Marshall Islands’ Kwajalein Atoll, in the central Pacific. Kwajalein has hosted a lot of spaceflight action over the decades, from U.S. military missile tests to SpaceX’s first orbital launch attempts to flights with Northop Grumman’s air-launched Pegasus rocket.

And Astra isn’t content with just building and launching rockets. Like one of its chief competitors in the small-launch market, Rocket Lab, Astra is also developing its own satellite bus, to give customers the option to integrate their payloads into a spacecraft they don’t have to build themselves.

Astra’s spacecraft will be powered by electric-propulsion engines built by Apollo Fusion, which the company recently acquired. These super-efficient engines will allow Astra to deliver payloads to a variety of destinations beyond low Earth orbit, including the moon and Mars, Kemp said, though he stressed that the company’s focus will likely remain on Earth orbit for a while.

[image error]

Astra’s Rocket 3.1 rises into the sky above Alaska’s Pacific Spaceport Complex during the company’s first orbital launch attempt on Sept. 11, 2020. The flight ended during the first-stage engine burn. (Image credit: Astra/John Kraus)Going public

Achieving such ambitious goals will take a fair amount of cash, and Astra has just come into some. Last week, the company completed a merger with Holicity, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that’s backed by such deep-pocketed folks as Bill Gates and billionaire telecom pioneer Craig McCaw.

The transaction took Astra public, and on Thursday (July 1) it became the first launch company ever to trade on the Nasdaq Global Select Market. Kemp rang the Nasdaq opening bell that morning to mark the occasion. (Rocket Lab plans to go public soon as well, via its own SPAC merger.)

The merger, which valued Astra at $2.1 billion and is expected to provide the company with about $500 million in cash proceeds, “gives us a fully funded path to daily space delivery,” Kemp said. “We didn’t have that before.”

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.

The post Small-launch startup Astra aiming for 300 missions per year by 2025, , appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.

Space tourism, 20 years in the making, is finally ready for launch, ,

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights .

For most people, getting to the stars is nothing more than a dream. On April 28, 2001, Dennis Tito achieved that lifelong goal — but he wasn’t a typical astronaut. Tito, a wealthy businessman, paid US$20 million for a seat on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to be the first tourist to visit the International Space Station. Only seven people have followed suit in the 20 years since, but that number is poised to double in the next 12 months alone.

NASA has long been hesitant to play host to space tourists, so Russia — looking for sources of money post-Cold War in the 1990s and 2000s — has been the only option available for those looking for this kind of extreme adventure. However, it seems the rise of private space companies is going to make it easier for regular people to experience space.

From my perspective as a space policy analyst, I see the beginning of an era in which more people can experience space. With companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin hoping to build a future for humanity in space, space tourism is a way to demonstrate both the safety and reliability of space travel to the general public.

Related: Virgin Galactic says it will launch Richard Branson to space on July 11

[image error]

Dennis Tito became the first space tourist when he launched toward the International Space Station in April 2001. Here, he shares his experiences at a space conference in 2003. (Image credit: NASA Kennedy Space Center)

Flights to space like Dennis Tito’s are expensive for a reason. A rocket must burn a lot of costly fuel to travel high and fast enough to enter Earth’s orbit.

Another cheaper possibility is a suborbital launch, with the rocket going high enough to reach the edge of space and coming right back down. While passengers on a suborbital trip experience weightlessness and incredible views, these launches are more accessible.

The difficulty and expense of either option has meant that, traditionally, only nation-states have been able to explore space. This began to change in the 1990s as a series of entrepreneurs entered the space arena. Three companies led by billionaire CEOs have emerged as the major players: Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and SpaceX. Though none have taken paying, private customers to space, all anticipate doing so in the very near future.

British billionaire Richard Branson has built his brand on not just business but also his love of adventure. In pursuing space tourism, Branson has brought both of those to bear. He established Virgin Galactic after buying SpaceShipOne – a company that won the Ansari X-Prize by building the first reusable spaceship. Since then, Virgin Galactic has sought to design, build and fly a larger SpaceShipTwo that can carry up to six passengers in a suborbital flight.

[image error]

The VSS Unity spacecraft is one of the ships that Virgin Galactic plans to use for space tours. (Image credit: Virgin Galactic)

The going has been harder than anticipated. While Branson predicted opening the business to tourists in 2009, Virgin Galactic has encountered some significant hurdles — including the death of a pilot in a crash in 2014. After the crash, engineers found significant problems with the design of the vehicle, which required modifications.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, respective leaders of SpaceX and Blue Origin, began their own ventures in the early 2000s.

Musk, fearing that a catastrophe of some sort could leave Earth uninhabitable, was frustrated at the lack of progress in making humanity a multiplanetary species. He founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of first developing reusable launch technology to decrease the cost of getting to space. Since then, SpaceX has found success with its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft. SpaceX’s ultimate goal is human settlement of Mars — sending paying customers to space is an intermediate step. Musk says he hopes to show that space travel can be done easily and that tourism might provide a revenue stream to support development of the larger, Mars-focused Starship system.

Bezos, inspired by the vision of physicist Gerard O’Neill, wants to expand humanity and industry not to Mars, but to space itself. Blue Origin, established in 2004, has proceeded slowly and quietly in also developing reusable rockets. Its New Shepard rocket, first successfully flown in 2015, will eventually offer tourists a suborbital trip to the edge of space, similar to Virgin Galactic’s. For Bezos, these launches represent an effort at making space travel routine, reliable and accessible to people as a first step to enabling further space exploration.

[image error]

SpaceX has already started selling tickets to the public and has future plans to use its Starship rocket, a prototype of which is seen here, to send people to Mars. (Image credit: Spadre.com via YouTube)

Now, SpaceX is the only option for someone looking to go into space and orbit the Earth. It currently has two tourist launches planned. The first is scheduled for as early as September 2021, funded by billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman. The other trip, planned for 2022, is being organized by Axiom Space. These trips will be costly, at $55 million for the flight and a stay on the International Space Station. The high cost has led some to warn that space tourism — and private access to space more broadly — might reinforce inequality between rich and poor.

Blue Origin’s and Virgin Galactic’s suborbital trips are far more reasonable in cost, with both priced between $200,000 and $250,000. Blue Origin appears to be the nearest to allowing paying customers on board, saying after a recent launch that crewed missions would be happening “soon.” Virgin Galactic continues to test SpaceShipTwo, but no specific timetable has been announced for tourist flights.

Though these prices are high, it is worth considering that Dennis Tito’s $20 million ticket in 2001 could pay for 100 flights on Blue Origin soon. The experience of viewing the Earth from space, though, may prove to be priceless for a whole new generation of space explorers.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.

The post Space tourism, 20 years in the making, is finally ready for launch, , appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope passes key review ahead of fall launch, ,

NASA’s next big space telescope just took a big step forward toward its planned launch this fall.

The $9.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope mission has passed a key launch review, keeping it on track to lift off atop an Ariane 5 rocket before the end of the year, European Space Agency (ESA) officials announced last week.

“This major milestone, carried out with Arianespace, the Webb launch service provider, confirms that Ariane 5, the Webb spacecraft and the flight plan are set for launch,” ESA officials wrote in a July 1 update. “It also specifically provides the final confirmation that all aspects of the launch vehicle and spacecraft are fully compatible.”

Related: Building the James Webb Space Telescope (photos)

While Webb is primarily a NASA mission, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) are important partners. The CSA is providing the telescope’s guidance sensor and one of its scientific instruments. ESA is contributing some science gear to the mission as well and is also providing launch services, procuring the Ariane 5 heavy lifter to get Webb off the ground.

The launch will take place from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. Mission teams are working toward a launch readiness date of Oct. 31, but liftoff is not expected to actually take place on Halloween.

“The precise launch date following 31 October depends on the spaceport’s launch schedule and will be finalized closer to the launch readiness date,” ESA officials wrote in the same statement.

After launch, Webb will head to the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2, a gravitationally stable point in space about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from our planet. The observatory, which features a 21.3-foot-wide (6.5 meters) primary mirror and a deployable sunshade the size of a tennis court, will then begin observing the cosmos in infrared light. It will study the universe’s oldest stars and galaxies and hunt for signs of life in the atmospheres of alien planets, among many other tasks.

On two recent missions, the Ariane 5 rocket experienced issues with the system that enables separation of the payload fairing, the protective nose cone that encapsulates satellites during launch. Those missions were still successful, but the rocket was more or less grounded while teams worked to troubleshoot the issue, as Space News reported.

As a result, the Ariane 5 has not flown since August 2020. But its hiatus will end soon: The rocket is scheduled to launch two communications satellites on July 27. And there’s another Ariane 5 mission on the docket before the Webb launch — another communications-satellite mission, which is targeted for late September, according to Spaceflight Now.

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.

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.

The post NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope passes key review ahead of fall launch, , appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.

July new moon 2021: Catch Mercury with the ‘invisible’ moon this week (Venus and Mars, too!), ,

[image error]

On July 8, the nearly-new moon will swing by the planet Mercury in the predawn sky. The new moon arrives July 9 at 9:16 p.m. EDT (0116 July 10 GMT). (Image credit: SkySafari app)

The new moon arrives Friday (July 9), a day after the planet Mercury reaches its highest elevation in the morning sky.

The moon is officially new at 9:16 p.m. EDT (0116 July 10 GMT), when the moon is directly between the sun and Earth. Technically, both objects are in conjunction, meaning that they are on the same north-south line that passes through the celestial pole, near the star Polaris. (The term conjunction is also applied to other celestial bodies, such as planets). The timing of the lunar phase depends on where the moon is relative to the Earth, so the new moon occurs at the same time all over the world — the only differences being due to what time zone you are in — in Melbourne, Australia, for example, the new moon occurs at 11:16 a.m. on July 10.

Since the new moon is between Earth and the sun, it isn’t visible unless there is a solar eclipse (when the new moon passes in front of the sun), and the moon and sun rise and set at nearly the same time. Solar eclipses don’t happen with every new moon because the orbit of the moon is slightly tilted, by about 5 degrees, relative to the plane of the Earth’s orbit, which means that it doesn’t always pass exactly between the sun and Earth — the moon’s shadow “misses” our planet. (The next solar eclipse isn’t until Dec. 4, 2021).

Related: The brightest planets in July’s night sky: How to see them (and when)

Visible planets

In the predawn hours of Thursday (July 8), the planet Mercury will be at its highest altitude above the horizon for this appearance, and it will also be in conjunction with the 28-day-old moon. The moment of conjunction happens at 12:39 a.m. EDT (0439 GMT), so the moon will be past its closest approach by the time the pair is visible in New York City, when they rise at 4:08 a.m. local time, according to sky-watching site In-The-Sky.org.

By sunrise Mercury will be at an altitude of about 14 degrees in the constellation Taurus, the bull, to the right of a very thin crescent waning moon. Mercury is about as bright as the star Vega; at magnitude 0. The best time to catch it will likely be about a half-hour after it rises when it is about 5.5 degrees above the horizon and will appear to the right of the moon. Take care when observing planets so close to the sun; even at sunrise accidentally focusing on the sun with a pair of binoculars can cause permanent retinal burns and possibly blindness.

Observers closer to the equator will have an easier time seeing Mercury. As one moves to low latitudes (either from the north or south pole) the ecliptic — the plane of the Earth’s orbit projected on the sky — makes a steeper angle with the horizon. That means the planets, which all wander within a few degrees of the ecliptic, tend to reach higher altitudes. From Quito, Ecuador, for example, the conjunction occurs Wednesday (July 7) at 11:39 p.m. local time, and Mercury and the moon will rise at 4:50 a.m. Sunrise is at 6:16 a.m., and by 6 a.m. the two bodies will be about 16 degrees in altitude.

[image error]

On Monday (July 12), the waxing crescent moon will pass about 3 degrees to the north of Venus. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Venus, meanwhile, appears as an evening star for the next few months, and on July 9 will be visible after sunset from New York City until it sets at 10:01 p.m. local time. At sunset (8:28 p.m. local time in New York) the planet will be about 17 degrees above the west-northwestern horizon. An interesting exercise is to see how soon after sunset you can spot it. Mars will also grace the evening sky — on the night of the new moon the planet will be just to the left of Venus, though harder to spot as the Red Planet is fainter than Venus and won’t be visible until at least 15 to 20 minutes after sunset; by that time the planet will only be 14 degrees above the horizon. The two planets will be about a degree apart, or two lunar diameters.

On Monday (July 12) the moon will make a close pass to both Venus and Mars. The new crescent moon will be in conjunction with Venus on July 12 at 5:09 a.m. EDT (0909 GMT) and passes about 3 degrees to the north of the planet. About an hour later, at 6:10 a.m. EDT (1010 GMT), the moon will pass just under 4 degrees (3 degrees 46 arcminutes) to the north of Mars. From North America the conjunctions won’t be visible, but by sunset the two will be a little further apart but Venus will be to the right and below the moon.

If you live in Asia or the Western Pacific the moment of conjunction will be visible while Venus and Mars are above the horizon. In Tokyo, for example, the conjunction with Venus occurs July 12 at 6:09 p.m. local time, about 50 minutes before sunset, which happens at 7 p.m. local time. The conjunction with Mars is at 7:10 p.m.

In Melbourne, Australia, the Venus conjunction happens at 7:09 p.m. local time and the sun sets at 5:17 p.m., so by 5:30 p.m. the two will be about 18 degrees high in the northwest as the sky darkens. The Mars conjunction is at 8:10 p.m. local time.

Constellations

On the night of the new moon (July 9) Saturn rises at 9:45 p.m. in New York and is in the constellation Capricornus, the sea goat; it reaches the meridian (its highest point in the sky) at 2:39 a.m. local time on July 10. Capricornus is a relatively faint constellation, so in areas with a lot of light pollution Saturn stands out in the southern sky.

Jupiter, meanwhile, rises about 55 minutes later at 10:40 p.m. local time in New York; it is also located in a fainter constellation, Aquarius, the water bearer. From mid-northern latitudes Jupiter and Saturn will reach altitudes of about 35 and 31 degrees, respectively, and Jupiter will be to the left (east) of Saturn.

Antipodean skywatchers will get a much better view since the winter months mean that the ecliptic is at a much steeper angle relative to the horizon from places like Australia or New Zealand. From Melbourne, Jupiter will get as high as 64 degrees above the northern horizon in the wee hours of July 10, and Saturn will also be as much as 70 degrees high — nearly straight up by the time it crosses the meridian at 2:06 a.m. local time.

July is the time for summer constellations in the Northern Hemisphere, and that means that by 10 p.m. the Summer Triangle has cleared the horizon and is high in the eastern sky. The Summer Triangle consists of the stars Deneb, Altair, and Vega, which make a rough right triangle with Altair at the southern end. By 10 p.m. local time Vega is 63 degrees in altitude, and it is the highest of the three stars.

Looking north, one will see the Big Dipper to the left (west) of Polaris, the pole star. Following the “pointers” to Polaris and continuing straight across you encounter Cepheus, the king, and just below Cepheus the “W” shape of Cassiopeia.

In the other direction, follow the handle of the Big Dipper and “arc to Arcturus” (the brightest star in the constellation Bootes, the herdsman), and continuing downward you hit Spica, the brightest star in Virgo. Turning south, one sees the bright red star Antares, the heart of the constellation Scorpius, the scorpion, and in darker sky locations looking up (north) from Scorpius one sees the constellation Ophiuchus, the snake bearer.

In the southern latitudes, the sun sets earlier (it being austral winter) and by 7 p.m. the sky is dark and the Southern Cross constellation is high in the south. To the left of the Cross (east) is Alpha Centauri, our nearest stellar neighbor, and east of that is Scorpius, though upside-down (from the point of view of a Northern Hemisphere observer). In the southwest, the “ship’s keel” Puppis, is setting and marked by Canopus, the second-brightest star in the night sky after Sirius. In the same region of sky are the Large Magellanic Cloud and Small Magellanic Cloud, two satellite galaxies of the Milky Way.

Editor’s Note: If you snap an amazing night sky picture and would like to share it with Space.com’s readers, send your photos, comments, and your name and location to spacephotos@space.com.

You can follow Space.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook .

The post July new moon 2021: Catch Mercury with the ‘invisible’ moon this week (Venus and Mars, too!), , appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.

Richard Branson says he isn’t racing Jeff Bezos into space with Virgin Galactic launch, ,

Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson denied on NBC’s “Today Show” that he is in a space race with fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin and Amazon — despite a recent announcement that may put Branson in space first by just nine days.

Branson is slated to go into orbit as soon as July 11 aboard Virgin Galactic’s space plane VSS Unity for the company’s next suborbital flight, the most high-profile launch since its founding in 2004.

That launch date gives plenty of time to squeak ahead of Blue Origin’s first crewed launch of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle, carrying Bezos — who recently resigned as Amazon’s CEO to focus on Blue Origin, the space venture he founded in 2000.

The situation sounds like a spaceborne version of the fictional CEO conflict that dominated the first season of the hit HBO television show “Silicon Valley,” but Branson denied as such in the interview.

Related: Virgin Galactic unveils pilot spacesuits for space tourist flights (photos)

“I know nobody will believe me when I say it, but honestly, there isn’t [competition],” Branson said on the Today Show episode, which aired Tuesday (July 6). The 70-year-old admitted he couldn’t wait for the opportunity, given he had dreamed of spaceflight since the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. (Blue Origin’s flight with Bezos is scheduled to launch on the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.)

Branson said there is plenty of room for multiple space companies to fly tourists into space. That said, seat prices remain sky-high for participation and it remains largely open to the super-rich. The forthcoming Inspiration4 flight aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon sought other types of passengers for its mission led by billionaire Jared Isaacman, including two contest winners and the first astronaut set to fly with a prosthetic device, but it remains an exception in the history of space tourism.

An estimated 750 people have signed on for Virgin Galactic flights, some paying $250,000 apiece for the opportunity. Blue Origin has not released normal seat prices for its flight, but the high bid for a lucky contestant to gain a seat with Bezos ended up running at $28 million.

[image error]

Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson (third from right) will launch on the company’s first fully crewed flight on July 11, 2021 as part of a six-person crew. They are (from left): Pilot Dave Mackay; Coplin Bennet, lead operations engineer; Beth Moses, chief astronaut instructor; Branson; Sirisha Bandla, vice president of government affairs and research operations; and pilot Michael Masucci. (Image credit: Virgin Galactic)

The Bezos and Branson flights will each have other crew members aboard. Branson’s fellow passengers will include Beth Moses, Virgin Galactic’s chief astronaut instructor, Colin Bennett, Virgin Galactic lead operations engineer and Sirisha Bandla, the vice president of government affairs and research operations at the company. VSS Unity will be piloted by Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci, with C.J. Sturckow and Kelly Latimer piloting the carrier aircraft VMS Eve.

Bezos invited 82-year-old female aviator Wally Funk, one of the “Mercury 13” who unsuccessfully sought female astronaut qualification with NASA in the 1960s, on the first crewed launch — which she gleefully accepted on camera. Should Funk succeed, she’ll be the oldest person ever to reach space, after John Glenn did so at age 77. The other passengers will be Bezos’ brother Mark, and the as-yet-unnamed auction winner.

Regardless of who goes first, Bezos is slated to fly higher than Branson. Historically, Virgin Galactic spacecraft tend to fall a few miles short of the height many people use to demarcate space, at 62 miles (100 kilometers). Meanwhile, a definition from the Federal Aviation Administration says anything above 50 miles (80 km) is space, and Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo is slated to go at least that high with Branson on board.

While Bezos has remained silent so far about Branson’s attempt to go to space first, years ago Bezos touted New Shepard as better than Virgin Galactic due to his company’s ability to go over the 62-mile mark, also known as the Karman Line.

“We’ve always had as our mission that we wanted to fly above the Karman Line, because we didn’t want there to be any asterisks next to your name about whether you’re an astronaut or not,” Bezos said in 2019. “That’s something they’re going to have to address, in my opinion.”

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

The post Richard Branson says he isn’t racing Jeff Bezos into space with Virgin Galactic launch, , appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.

A bigger, better Switch screen is exactly what I wanted, Sam Byford

At least in many of the corners of the internet I’ve been reading all day, the response to the OLED Nintendo Switch has not been all that positive. It’s no surprise, really — credible reporting had suggested a more powerful model with 4K output, but the final product features the same internals as the current Switch. If you prefer to play Nintendo games on your TV, the new version’s bigger OLED screen isn’t going to do anything for you.

I’m still buying one, though. A proper screen upgrade has been my most-wanted Switch feature ever since the console came out, and now more so than ever.

I swapped my launch-model Switch for a Switch Lite when it came out in 2019. Most of the Switch’s appeal is in its portable nature, I figured, so why not go all-in on a sleeker, more compact version with an actual D-pad? Well, turns out there are lots of reasons not to do that.

The Switch Lite is perfect for a lot of games, but damn near unusable for a bunch of others. The screen is just too dang small to read all the text in Fire Emblem: Three Houses, or to make any sense of the action in Astral Chain. Cross-save functionality would make it a great portable Hades machine for when I’m away from my PC, except that I can barely see what’s happening on-screen. And for obvious reasons, you can forget about Ring Fit Adventure.

It’s not like the regular Switch’s 6.2-inch display is vastly bigger, but it does make a difference, and at least there you have the recourse of playing the worst offenders on your TV if need be. The Switch’s biggest strength is the way it runs the same games in TV and handheld modes, but inevitably some titles are going to be better suited to one than the other, and the Switch Lite only gives you one option.

The new OLED Switch should solve the issue altogether. It has a TV dock, of course, but even in handheld mode I’d expect the bigger screen to make the aforementioned games a lot more playable, without causing a noticeable increase in the size of the console itself thanks to slimmed-down bezels. And the OLED panel technology should, in theory, also make them look much better, with deeper blacks and more vibrant colors. The LCD panels in the current Switch models are adequate at best.

The OLED Switch’s kickstand looks to be much-improved.

This is mostly just about me regretting the move to the Switch Lite, but I think the OLED Switch could be a solid upgrade from the launch model too. The kickstand looks much improved, and the bigger screen should make it more practical to play local multiplayer games in tabletop mode. And according to Nintendo, you’ll get the same boost to battery life that was introduced with 2019’s refresh to the original Switch.

I do have some reservations about the OLED Switch. At $350, it feels like a price hike considering the regular Switch has sat at $299 since its 2017 launch. I really hope the screen doesn’t use a PenTile-style sub-pixel matrix commonly found in OLED panels, for example, because that would probably look pretty rough at 720p and 7 inches. (My guess/hope is that it will use a full RGB layout, like the PS Vita did almost ten years ago.)

Mostly, though, I’m just glad I’ll be able to play more Switch games again. The Lite caused my Switch playtime to fall off a cliff over the last couple of years, and although it is very cute, I’ll be happy to see the back of it.

The post A bigger, better Switch screen is exactly what I wanted, Sam Byford appeared first on NEWDAWN Blog.