Month: January 2019

Captions available here. (video link)

It has been 36 years since President Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), an effort to develop technologies to counter intercontinental ballistic missiles, including orbital systems that could detect and take out ICBMs with lasers or kinetic weapons. That program, dismissively called "Star Wars" by Senator Ted Kennedy, was seen as massively destabilizing from a strategic perspective—until the Soviets stopped objecting in 1987 because they realized it would never work. SDI was officially terminated in 1993, as the US focused instead on the threat of shorter-range ballistic missiles by "rogue states" in the wake of the Gulf War.

In 2019, "Star Wars" is back. While President George W. Bush got the ball rolling in 2002 with the formation of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) and an exit from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, President Donald Trump's new missile defense strategy seeks to expand the MDA's efforts by returning to a quest for a space-based missile shield and other weapons that could, as Trump put it in a January 17 speech, "detect and destroy any missile launched against the US from anywhere at any time."

Enlarge / This scene fro, Detroit probably does not represent how the negotiations for a minority share in Quantic Dream went...

Since 2010, players who have wanted to experience Quantic Dream's unique brand of branching interactive storytelling have had to do so through PlayStation hardware. But now that the company has accepted investment from Chinese gaming giant NetEase, it says it is looking to develop for other platforms.

"We will continue to work on PlayStation, which is a platform we love and that we know very well," Quantic Dream co-founder and CEO Guillaume de Fondaumière said in an interview with Venturebeat. "But we will also consider other platforms as we want to make our creations accessible to as many gamers as possible worldwide, regardless of the platform."

While de Fondaumière didn't commit to any specific outside platforms, he did note that the company previously developed PC, Dreamcast, and Xbox versions of 2005's Fahrenheit (known as Indigo Prophecy in North America) before focusing exclusively on PlayStation for Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, and Detroit: Become Human. Quantic Dream co-founder David Cage noted in the interview that the company's next engine will be "will be cross-platform and even more impressive than anything we have done before."

Enlarge / The two Falcon Heavy booster landings in 2018 were something to behold. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann for Ars Technica)

The reopening of the federal government means that launch companies can once again file for launch licenses with various agencies, and it seems that SpaceX took full advantage of this fact on Monday. The company sought three permits from the Federal Communications Commission (which can be searched here).

One of the permits concerns the next International Space Station cargo supply mission for the Dragon spacecraft, CRS-17, which had been scheduled for March. This permit for "Dragon capsule telemetry, tracking, and command" indicates that the mission will now fly no earlier than April 12.

Of potentially more interest are applications for two permits related to the launch of the next Falcon Heavy mission, Arabsat 6A, and the landing of two side boosters and the central core. These applications indicate that the launch of the Arabsat 6A mission will occur no earlier than March 7 from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39A. This is consistent with existing estimates for the current launch date.