Month: March 2017

Enlarge / Jeff Bezos, chief executive officer of Amazon (far left), listens during a technology summit with then President-elect Trump in December, 2016. (credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Until the last year, Jeff Bezos has kept the plans for his rocket company, Blue Origin, largely under wraps. Since then, he has talked about doing suborbital space tourism flights, building an orbital rocket, and now he has begun to open up about ambitions beyond low Earth orbit. And unlike SpaceX and its Mars ambitions, Blue Origin has its focus on the Moon.

The Washington Post first reported on the "Blue Moon" concept Thursday evening, which Bezos has articulated in a seven-page white paper sent to NASA leadership and President Trump's transition officials over the last two months. The proposal outlines a plan to build a lunar spacecraft and lander to deliver supplies to the South Pole of the Moon, where scientists believe there are abundant ice resources and almost continuous solar energy.

Later Thursday night, during an awards event hosted by Aviation Week, Bezos explained the philosophy behind this idea. "We are hoping to partner with NASA on a program called Blue Moon where we would provide a cargo-delivery service to the surface of the Moon, with the intent over time of building a permanently inhabited human settlement on the Moon," he said. "It’s time for America to go back to the Moon and this time to stay. We can do it. It’s a difficult but worthy objective."

Andrew Williams

BARCELONA, Spain—It’s not easy for a phone to stand out when once-impressive features such as multiple cameras and sub-8mm thickness are now normal. Alcatel manages it, however, with the A5 LED by using a completely different tactic: it has a bunch of RGB LEDs that perform a light show whenever you get a notification or play music, or pretty much whenever else it has even the slightest excuse to fire them up.

Enlarge / The Wii U's great games will live on long after its death. (credit: Farley Santos on Flickr)

I haven't taken a poll or anything, but I suspect I'm the only person on the Ars staff who happily and without reservation plunked down for the Wii U version of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild instead of springing for a copy of the game and a brand-new Nintendo Switch.

Though the game was originally developed as a Wii U game, it's clear that this version is being released almost as an afterthought. The Wii U version comes with the same content as the Switch version and the DLC will be available for both platforms, but the pricey Special and Master Editions are Switch-exclusive. Breath of the Wild will be a quiet coda for Nintendo's least successful home console since the company helped birth the modern game industry back in the 80s. This is a system that Nintendo pretty much gave up on before concrete details on its successor had even been announced.

But somehow, I think history will vindicate the Wii U; at the very least, it should go down as a "good" failure like the Dreamcast rather than a "bad" one like the Virtual Boy. It was and is a system that's worthy of attention, it was just done in by poor timing and messaging and a central gimmick that nobody (Nintendo included) ever really managed to figure out.