Month: April 2017

Enlarge / Maybe reusing rockets isn't a crazy American capitalist idea after all? (credit: SpaceX)

As recently as last year, Russian rocket scientists were dubious about the potential of reusable rockets, such as those being developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin. Among the doubters was the Central Research Institute of Machine Building, which develops basic rocket strategy for Roscosmos, the Russian space agency.

"The economic feasibility of reusable launch systems is not obvious," an official with the research institute said in February 2016. "First and foremost it will depend on how often launches will be made. At the moment it is hard to forecast which way the market of launch services will go when reusable space rockets become available. The designers are still to demonstrate the real costs of production and of making reusable stages for re-launching,"

At the time of that statement, both SpaceX and Blue Origin had begun flying their purportedly reusable boosters, but SpaceX had not yet landed at sea nor had it reused a flown booster. Blue Origin, too, had only begun a series of ultimately impressive tests to stress its New Shepard booster. Accordingly, Roscosmos CEO Igor Komarov was confident that a reduction in launch costs of the country's workhorse Proton-M rocket from $90 million-100 million to $70 million would keep Roscosmos competitive.

Jim Resnick

When Jaguar launched the F-Type a few years ago, it awoke something long-dormant in the British carmaker. Jaguar used to make legitimate sports cars which won the 24 Hours of Le Mans five times in the 1950s. But focus groups and corporate mismanagement diluted away that spirit by the end of the century, a lackluster product line being the leftovers. The F-Type was a proper 21^st century sports car—no rehash of the decades-old XJ-S here.

Think Hamlet, but a car

The SVR is the ultimate expression of the F-Type, the most focused performance car in Jaguar's range. And it delivers a beautiful shape, be it in coupe or convertible form, but the character of the SVR takes some figuring. Be timid with the throttle and it's timid with you. Press that pedal more than halfway and it summons up noise and intensity.

Enlarge (credit: Christoffer Rudquist)

For over 60 years, Formula 1 teams have developed, tested, and built the fastest and most technologically impressive cars the world has ever seen. An almost unending list of superlatives can be ladled onto F1 cars: they can accelerate from 0 to 190mph in about 10 seconds, fling around a corner at such speeds that the driver experiences g-force close to that of an Apollo astronaut during Earth re-entry, and then decelerate by 60mph in just 0.7 seconds thanks to strong brakes and massive downforce—the same downforce that stopped the car from spinning out around that corner.

But the bit that's really impressive is that these machines are designed and built from scratch every year. That's what makes F1 so competitive, and why the rate of improvement is so rapid. These teams—there's only about 10 of them, and most are based in England—have been challenging each other to make a new best-car-in-the-world every year for 60 years. The only way to pole position is to try and find an edge that no one else has thought of yet, and then to keep finding new edges when everyone inevitably catches up.

As you've probably guessed, materials science, engineering, bleeding-edge software, and recently the cloud are a major part of F1 innovation—and indeed, those fair topics are where we lay our scene.

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

Whether you like it or not, you probably spend more time on your work computer than your personal machine. If those devices happen to be one and the same, then you probably want something thin, light, and attractive, not one of the bulky business laptops of yore.

HP's newest release, the Elitebook x360, may be geared toward working professionals, but like other HP business laptops we've seen in the last year or two, it's also slim and handsome. The x360 combines the convertible design of the company's Spectre series with the business-friendly features of the Elitebook line.