Month: May 2019

Enlarge / The mighty Delta IV Heavy rocket takes to the skies. (credit: Aurich Lawson/United Launch Alliance)

Welcome to Edition 2.02 of the Rocket Report! We've got lots of heavy-lift news this week, including reports on potential problems with a test of the Omega rocket's large first stage and a messy political decision surrounding NASA's choice of rockets for the high-profile Europa Clipper mission.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Senate bill calls for use of commercial spaceports. The Senate Armed Services Committee approved three amendments in its version of the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2020 related to the burgeoning small-launch industry, SpaceNews reports. According to the report, the Department of Defense must devise a plan to make greater use of commercial spaceports to launch small satellites, develop a strategy to integrate commercial capabilities into space operations, and investigate China's investments in its small satellite and small launch industries.

Enlarge / The way this film turned out, that blast of radiation should be coming out of the other end. (credit: Warner Bros. / Legendary Pictures)

The Ars Technica braintrust of movie fans has no shortage of good, funny, silly, or enjoyably bad kaiju film recommendations. We love our share of stompy monster movies, whether they come in the form of surprisingly fun thrillers, quirky existential ruminations, or even awesome scenes inside of otherwise underwhelming popcorn flicks.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters will not be on our list of recommended ultra-monster films anytime soon, if ever.

Instead, I'm holding out hope that this week's sloppy, plodding, and logically bankrupt film eventually becomes the subject of a "how did this happen?" documentary, the kind that might explain why the film's scriptwriters, director, and editors all seemed to abruptly quit working simultaneously.

Enlarge / Neon emoji and animoji images accompanied the invites to press. (credit: Apple)

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) starts this Monday, June 3, with a stage presentation by Apple executives at 10am Pacific Time. WWDC is usually one of the two biggest Apple events of the year (the other is the now-recurring iPhone/Apple Watch event in the fall), and it generally focuses on software.

It has become tradition for Apple to introduce new versions of its operating systems to developers at WWDC. Those systems include iOS for iPhone, iPad, and iPod; macOS for Mac; watchOS for Apple Watch; and tvOS for Apple TV and Apple TV 4K. In fact, these are some of the primary purposes of the event. So you can expect to see detailed presentations during Apple's keynote on each of those, plus deeper dives for developers in the various sessions at the convention center, which will also be made available as videos on Apple's developer portal.

To prepare for the event, we're recording what we deem to be the likeliest-to-be-true rumors, reports, and predictions ahead of the show—not just for software, but for hardware too.