Month: May 2019

Enlarge / It is not clear when we will see crewed flights of SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft. (credit: SpaceX)

During a news conference Thursday in advance of a SpaceX supply mission to the International Space Station, the company's vice president of mission assurance, Hans Koenigsmann, provided some additional details about a failure with the company's Crew Dragon spacecraft 12 days ago.

In the company's most expansive comments to date, Koenigsmann said the "anomaly" occurred during a series of tests with the spacecraft, approximately one-half second before the firing of the SuperDraco thrusters. At that point, he said, "There was an anomaly and the vehicle was destroyed."

During the activation phase, the SuperDraco thruster system is pressurized, and valves are opened and closed. Since the accident there has been speculation that there may have been some issue with the composite overwrap pressure vessels, or COPVs, which store rocket fuels at extremely high pressures. The COPVs on Crew Dragon are different from those on the Falcon 9, and they would not have been overly stressed at that moment, Koenigsmann said. "I'm fairly confident that the COPVs are going to be fine," he said.

Enlarge / Our gravitational wave detectors really are a series of tubes. (credit: Caltech/MIT/LIGO Lab)

On April 1, the teams behind the three gravitational wave detectors started them up for a new observational run, the first with all three operating in parallel for the full run. With the benefit of three detectors and some upgrades that were done during the downtime, we're seeing a flood of new data. In just one month, LIGO/VIRGO has seen five gravitational wave events. Three of those are from merging black holes, one was the second neutron star merger, and another may have been the first instance of a neutron star-black hole merger.

A new season

The two LIGO detectors have been a work in progress for years, starting with an early version that everyone acknowledged was unlikely to pick up gravitational waves. But each iteration has allowed scientists to understand the sources of error in their detectors, and they've been taken down for regular upgrades. The international collaboration also benefits from the fact that two additional detectors, Europe's VIRGO and Japan's KAGRA, have similar designs, and all the teams share what they're learning about the hardware.

VIRGO joined LIGO for roughly a month in 2017 before its second observational run came to a close. According to Caltech's Jess McIver, a LIGO team member, work in the intervening time went into "pushing down the quantum noise limits in the detectors." As a result of the lowered noise, McIver said that the detectors can pick up gravitational wave events farther out into space than was ever possible before. Having three detectors helps provide better spatial information as to where the event actually originated, necessary for doing follow-up observations with traditional observatories. And, as one of the events described today makes clear, three detectors let us continue to take data even if one detector is down temporarily.

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  A mockup of the Antstream game selection screen.

For decades now, the only practical way for most people to access vast swathes of digital gaming history has been through illegal ROM downloads. Unlike music and movies—where thousands of catalog works are available through multiple different streaming and download services—the game industry restricts its commercial history to aging cartridges and arcade cabinets, extremely sporadic re-releases on modern hardware, and limited services like Nintendo Switch Online (which replaced Nintendo's more-robust Virtual Console).

A newly announced service called AntStream just reached its £50,000 Kickstarter goal to help change that state of affairs. The planned service has spent years tracking down the licenses to over 2,000 classic titles from the arcade, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, Commodore 64, and Sega Genesis. Subscribers to an all-you-can-play plan, starting at $50/year for early backers, will soon be able to play those emulated games via remote streaming on their PC, Mac, Xbox One, iOS, or Android device (Switch and PS4 versions are reportedly "on the roadmap")

"When you talk to the IP holders, they're not happy that all their games are being downloaded and shared illegally," AntStream CEO Steve Cottam told Ars in a recent interview. "I was quite frustrated by the fact that I could go online and pretty much get any movie, and I have Spotify for all my music, but for games it was just a really, really tough experience. [AntStream] is really about trying to put games on equal footing with movies and music in terms of accessibility."

Normally, we devote our "War Stories" videos to established and classic games of old. So what is a 2019 video game doing here?

Anyone who asks this question about Slay the Spire, made by a three-person studio in Seattle, hasn't played this wonderful title. It's arguably the most addictive, accessible, and strategy-filled digital card game we've seen in years. So we wanted to talk to its dealers about the game's irresistible properties.

The result is the above interview, which is peppered with developer Mega Crit's insights (and at least one Easter egg). We're glad we sought out this younger team, because their answers revolved largely around the Steam Early Access system, which is still a pretty small drop in the bucket of game design history. Designers Anthony Giovannetti and Casey Yano sought a passionate community's help to solve the game's early design problems, and the community's use of Discord and Steam forums were critical not just for fixing Slay's early issues but also identifying them in the first place.

Enlarge / Under some designs plans, the lunar Gateway more resembles the International Space Station than a small outpost. (credit: NASA)

On Wednesday, as NASA continued to press lawmakers to support an accelerated plan to return humans to the Moon, the space agency began distributing a document titled Why Gateway? in defense of a return. The document summarizes why NASA thinks a space station near the Moon is critical to human exploration, and it was first shared internally by the Gateway program office at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The document can be read here.

The five-page paper is not signed by any NASA official, nor is a point of contact listed. Additionally, because there are several grammatical errors and typos, it appears the document was rushed into production. Since it is not marked "for internal use only" and is written at a fairly general technical level, it seems meant for public consumption, including members of Congress amid criticism of the concept.

"I do not know whether it is intended as a formal statement of policy, but the fact that it was released anonymously means someone expected blowback," said a NASA source who had read the document and is familiar with the agency's plans to bring a human landing forward from 2028 to 2024. This source said the document accurately reflects what NASA's chief of human spaceflight, Bill Gerstenmaier, thinks about the Gateway and its role in human exploration. "It is certainly the most succinct summary of the thinking that goes into Gateway, and what the NASA HQ party line is, that I have read."

Enlarge / A cruise ship in Castries Port, Saint Lucia on February 6, 2019. (credit: Getty | Daniel Slim)

Officials of the Caribbean nation St. Lucia have quarantined a cruise ship reportedly owned by the Church of Scientology after doctors confirmed a case of measles onboard.

A female crew member has a confirmed case of measles and the ship has been quarantined since Monday, according to NBC News. There are reportedly more than 300 passengers on board.

Though health officials in St. Lucia did not identify the ship or its owner, St. Lucia Coast Guard Sgt. Victor Theodore told NBC News that the vessel’s name is “Freewinds,” which is the name of a cruise ship owned by the Church of Scientology and based in the Caribbean. According to the Church’s website, the 440-foot vessel hosts religious retreats “ministering the most advanced level of spiritual counseling in the Scientology religion.”