Month: August 2019

Enlarge / Want to strap into VR? It's optional. Want to play with friends or strangers? It's optional. Want to, er, milk the game's bizarre creatures? That's optional, too. But it's all here, along with tons of other updated features, entirely for free, starting August 14. (credit: Hello Games)

When I caught wind of a new No Man's Sky update launching on August 14, free for all owners, I went through the usual routine of emailing its makers at Hello Games to request some form of access. Anything from a beta branch to a list of patch notes might support whatever I'd end up writing, I said. In response, Hello Games offered a high-class upgrade: a phone conversation with the game's director.

That's Sean Murray himself, the man whose name kept getting attached to stories about disappointed fans—and who thus went into media-blackout mode for some time. Since launch, NMS has benefited from a series of patches, and I looked forward to hearing about even more new content coming to the game, like a VR update (which I'd briefly tested at a Valve Index reveal event in April) and an emphasis on online play.

Of course, hours before my phone rang, my game-news feed lit up with the No Man's Sky community losing its danged mind.

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  A comparison between ICEYE's SAR image, left, and visible image data from the European Space Agency's Copernicus network, showing crude oil tank filling in Brisbane, Australia. [credit: ICEYE ]

A Finnish company named ICEYE that is building a constellation of satellites to create synthetic images of the Earth's surface says it has taken the first sub-1 meter resolution photos of the planet with a small satellite. The images show significant detail of crude oil being loaded onto and off of tankers.

According to ICEYE co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Pekka Laurila, since its founding in 2015 ICEYE has raised about $65 million, expanded to 120 employees, and most recently has launched three of its mini-refrigerator-sized satellites into low-Earth orbit.

For the first three years ICEYE focused on technology development, and its first payload launch occurred in January 2018 on board India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. Since then ICEYE has launched two more satellites and plans to add another two by the end of this year. "It is fair to say that we are moving into commercial operations, and the scope of those commercial services are rapidly increasing," Laurila said in an interview with Ars.

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

Welcome to Edition 2.10 of the Rocket Report! We are stuffed with news this week, running over 2,000 words with lots of things coming out of the Small Satellite Conference in Utah this week. But there was also plenty happening with bigger rockets, including launches of the Atlas V, Falcon 9, and Ariane 5 rockets, as well as developments with Starship and the Space Launch System vehicles.

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.

Rocket Lab seeks to reuse its Electron rocket. On Tuesday, the US-based company Rocket Lab announced that it had begun to explore the possibility of reusing its smallsat launch vehicle, Electron. This represented a change of heart for the company, whose chief executive, Peter Beck, had previously dismissed the possibility of re-using the Electron booster. In a lengthy interview with Ars, Beck explained the company's decision by saying customer demand exceeds its capability to build Electrons.

A ragtag gang of vigilantes takes on a powerful group of corrupt and venal superheroes in The Boys, Amazon's adaptation of the comic books series of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson.

Ennis is also the creative mind behind Preacher, and he once said he intended The Boys to "out-Preacher, Preacher" in terms of the extreme violence and sexual content. It just so happens that the TV adaptation of Preacher started airing its fourth and final season on AMC. The two definitely share the Ennis sensibility, but much as I love Preacher, this adaptation of The Boys is even better. It's ideal late-summer therapy for anyone who's grown a bit weary of the constant onslaught of superhero movies.

(Mild spoilers below.)