Month: December 2018

Enlarge / NASA Associate Administrator for Science Thomas Zurbuchen, left, and President and CEO for United Launch Alliance Tory Bruno shake hands after viewing the ULA Delta IV Heavy rocket with NASA's Parker Solar Probe in August. (credit: NASA)

After a long career in the development of space and missile programs, Salvatore T. "Tory" Bruno was named chief executive of United Launch Alliance in August 2014. In this new position, Bruno has faced enormous challenges.

Over the last half-decade, SpaceX has emerged as a viable competitor, begun to fly its Falcon 9 rocket more frequently, and competed successfully for lucrative military launch contracts. Meanwhile, ULA faced a mandate from the US government to end its reliance on the Russian-made RD-180 engine for its workhorse rocket, the Atlas V booster.

In response to these challenges, Bruno has sought to cut costs (through layoffs and other restructuring) and increase the commercial competitiveness of ULA, while also developing the brand-new Vulcan rocket with US-made components at the same time. Bruno also must answer to two demanding parents, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, each of which own 50 percent of his company and have competing aerospace interests. A little more than four years on the job, Bruno appears to be making progress. Most notably, the company recently won a $967 million contract from the US Air Force to complete development of the Vulcan rocket, which ULA says will be ready to fly by 2021.

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Samsung had a product launch in China earlier this week, where it seemingly announced a partnership in China with the skateboard fashion brand Supreme. Branding partnerships are usually pretty boring, but this one has some spice to it. Supreme's CEO came up on stage at Samsung's event, and he talked about a nebulous partnership with Samsung and an expansion into the Chinese market with a flagship store in Beijing. He then announced a runway show at the Mercedes-Benz Cultural Center in Shanghai. Then Supreme put out this statement after the event:

"Supreme is not working with Samsung, opening a flagship location in Beijing or participating in a Mercedes-Benz runway show. These claims are blatantly false and propagated by a counterfeit organization."

Wait, what?

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | TwilightEye)

A small Massachusetts town has rejected an offer from Comcast and instead plans to build a municipal fiber broadband network.

Comcast offered to bring cable Internet to up to 96 percent of households in Charlemont in exchange for the town paying $462,123 plus interest toward infrastructure costs over 15 years. But Charlemont residents rejected the Comcast offer in a vote at a special town meeting Thursday.

"The Comcast proposal would have saved the town about $1 million, but it would not be a town-owned broadband network," the Greenfield Recorder reported Friday. "The defeated measure means that Charlemont will likely go forward with a $1.4 million municipal town network, as was approved by annual town meeting voters in 2015."

Enlarge / The Plasma Science Experiment, and the change in the solar wind it detected as Voyager 2 reached interstellar space. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MIT)

On Monday, NASA announced that one of its longest-running experiments has started a new phase. Five years after Voyager 1 reached interstellar space, its sibling, Voyager 2, has joined it there. While the Oort Cloud of icy bodies extends well beyond the probes' current locations, they've gone past the point where the charged particles of the solar wind dominate space. Instead, their current environment is dominated by cosmic rays ejected by other stars.

Voyager 2 was actually the first of the two probes launched back in 1977, but its trajectory had it reaching its first destination, Jupiter, after Voyager 1. Its trailing position had a large impact on its future; after Voyager 1 obtained sufficient data at Saturn, Voyager 2 was switched from a route that optimized data gathering to one that sent it past the ringed planet on a trajectory that boosted it toward Uranus and Neptune. That difference meant that Voyager 1 reached interstellar space much earlier.

To a large extent, this made it much easier to figure out that Voyager 2 made the transition. Prior to Voyager 1's arrival, it was expected that two transitions would happen at roughly the same time: the Sun's magnetic field would fall off and the galactic magnetic field would dominate, and the particles of the solar wind would drop while cosmic rays would pick up. Voyager 1 experienced the latter transition but not the former. Put differently, there was a change in charged particles without an accompanying change in the magnetic field.

Enlarge / NTSB officials inspecting the vehicle that killed Elaine Herzberg in a March crash in Arizona. (credit: NTSB)

On March 19, the world learned that Uber had a serious safety problem when a prototype self-driving car struck and killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona. But signs of Uber's safety problems were evident to company insiders even before the crash. And at least one Uber manager tried to raise the alarm on March 13—just days before Herzberg's death.

Robbie Miller worked for Google's self-driving car program until 2016, when he left for the self-driving truck startup Otto. Otto was snapped up by Uber later that year, and Miller became an operations manager in Uber's self-driving truck program.

Miller quit his job at Uber in March 2018 and went on to lidar startup Luminar. Before he left the company he sent an email to Eric Meyhofer, the leader of Uber's self-driving car project, about safety problems at the company. The email, which was obtained by The Information's Amir Efrati, is absolutely scathing.