Month: July 2019

Enlarge / Artist's concept of a lunar lander. (credit: NASA)

On Tuesday morning, NASA conducted what appears to have been a highly successful test of the launch escape system for its Orion capsule—a piece of the hardware needed to safely fly humans to the Moon. This test, in concert with the looming 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing mission, is likely to raise public interest in NASA's new lunar landing program over the next month.

A little more than three months have passed since Vice President Mike Pence directed NASA to move up its plans to land humans on the Moon from 2028 to 2024, and a lot has happened. Here, then, is a reality check on the state of the 2024 Moon landing program—now named "Artemis," after the twin sister of Apollo. This report is based on interviews with multiple sources inside and outside NASA.

Sense of urgency

Pence's announcement has succeeded in shaking up NASA and injecting a sense of urgency into the agency. Consider the Orion vehicle tested Tuesday; NASA originally sought bids for the development of the deep-space capsule that would become Orion all the way back in March 2005. The agency awarded the contract to Lockheed Martin in 2006. NASA's administrator at the time, Mike Griffin, said Orion could carry humans into space as early as 2010.

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  Lee Iacocca poses next to a computer in 1974 while president of the Ford Motor Company. [credit: John Olson/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images ]

On Tuesday, former US auto executive Lee Iacocca died at the age of 94 from Parkinson's disease. He was an iconic figure in the business world, at separate times running the Ford Motor Company and later the Chrysler Corporation. His autobiography was required reading for men in suits in the 1980s, and he was even mooted for President. And along the way, he was responsible for some legendary cars, including the Ford Mustang and Chrysler Minivan.

Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1924, Iacocca was the son of working class immigrants from Italy. He graduated high school during World War II, earned a degree in industrial engineering at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, then found time to study politics and plastics at Princeton before joining Ford as an engineer in 1946. However, he quickly shifted into sales and marketing, where his true skills lay. In 1960, he was promoted to general manager of the Ford Division. By 1970, he was named president of the entire company.

During his time at Ford, Iacocca was instrumental in bringing a number of vehicles to market, including the Mustang. Clever use of the corporate parts bin meant this sporty looking car was actually highly affordable in 1964, costing $2,400 at the time. It was an outrageous sales success, prompting rivals General Motors and Chrysler to create "pony cars" of their own.

Enlarge / Android Development: It can be a messy process. (credit: Google)

As has become tradition for Ars at Google I/O, we recently sat down with some of the people who make Android to learn about the OS directly. For 2019, the talk was all about Android Q and this year's big engineering effort, Project Mainline. Mainline's goal is to enable Google (and sometimes OEMs!) to directly update core parts of the OS without pushing out a whole system update. If that sounds technical and challenging, well, it is.

This year running the Ars Android Interview Gauntlet we have veteran interviewee Dave Burke, VP of engineering for Android. As the head of Team Android, Burke is an encyclopedia of Android knowledge and always manages to come up with insightful answers to my grab bag of esoteric questions. And returning for the second year in a row is Iliyan Malchev, principal engineer at Android, the lead of Project Treble, and all-around Linux integration guru.

But to help up the ante for this latest deep dive, Ars was also joined by Anwar Ghuloum, Android's senior director of engineering and the lead of Project Mainline. Ghuloum's insight was especially welcomed given this year's I/O headliner: as "The Next Great Android Update Project," Mainline was easily the biggest news to come out of the conference.