Month: October 2019

Enlarge / Elon Musk. (credit: Robyn Beck-Pool/Getty Images)

Last year, Vernon Unsworth, a cave explorer who advised on the rescue of kids trapped in a Thailand cave, got in a spat with Elon Musk. Musk labeled Unsworth a "pedo guy" in a tweet—and later called him a "child rapist" who married a 12-year-old girl in an ill-considered email to a reporter.

Unsworth sued Musk for defamation. Musk's legal response was that, while the accusations might not have been true, Musk believed they were true at the time he made them. The claim about marrying a 12-year-old (the woman in question says she was actually 33 when she met Unsworth) came from a private investigator Musk paid $50,000 to dig into Unsworth's private life. Musk argued the high price tag was a sign that he was taking the issue seriously.

But now BuzzFeed is reporting that the private investigator Musk hired is a convicted felon and scammer.

Enlarge / The Electron launch vehicle is ready to soar. (credit: Rocket Lab)

Welcome to Edition 2.17 of the Rocket Report! The big news of this week came when SpaceX founder Elon Musk revealed his Starship in South Texas on Saturday night. The vehicle remains a long way from orbit, to be sure. Yet SpaceX sure seems a lot closer to realizing its dream of a flight-worthy Starship and Super Heavy than it did three years ago.

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.

Relativity Space is terran up the venture capital markets. Relativity Space announced Tuesday that it has closed a $140 million Series C funding round led by Bond Capital and Tribe Capital. (The puns come at no additional cost). With this funding, Relativity Chief Executive Tim Ellis told Ars that the company is fully funded to complete development of its Terran 1 rocket and reach orbit. However, instead of that happening in 2020, the first launch has now slipped into early 2021.

Enlarge / Simulated temperature changes 2 years after a hypothetical nuclear war between India and Pakistan. (credit: Toon et al./Science Advances)

There are few things humans have committed to as whole-heartedly as the art of killing. The culmination of this effort (so far) are nuclear bombs. Not only do these weapons have an almost impossible ability to take lives around the targeted location, but scientists have also warned that nuclear wars would have drastic climate impacts around the world.

While that general idea is pretty well known, shifting tensions and growing nuclear arsenals have provided a number of different scenarios to analyze over the years. The latest study, led by Owen Toon (a student of Carl Sagan), simulates a plausible war between India and Pakistan in which the combatants use the nuclear weapons they're likely to possess by 2025.

Escalation

While small wars have broken out between these countries periodically, each has stockpiled nuclear weapons in the hope of creating a threat too terrible to risk further conflict. India has a stated no-first-use policy (unless it's attacked by chemical or biological weapons), while Pakistan's policy is that it won't strike first... unless it sees nukes as the only way to halt an invasion. Details on the precise number of weapons each country has, as well as the yield of those weapons, are hard to come by. But there's certainly a lot of firepower.

Enlarge / Even the most renowned video games don't teach their players as well as we all assume, according to a surprisingly comprehensive video cited in this article. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

For years, we at Ars Technica have discussed how the video game industry might benefit from tearing down its oldest traditions. This November's Death Stranding will ship with a "very easy" mode, and that inspired us to wonder whether other video games should do the same thing. And we loved how the Halo: Master Chief Collection launched in 2014 with an option to hop to any moment within its multi-game library. That prompted us to suggest that more games should let their owners flip to any "page" in a game as they please instead of forcing players to earn their way via challenge.

This week, a gaming and pop-culture critique channel on YouTube looked at the existential question of "video game access" from a wholly different perspective: a year-long analysis of an adult trying video games for the first time in her life. The results, as posted by the channel Razbuten, have been embedded below, and the 20-minute analysis is fascinating on both a macro and micro level.

Even Mario could learn a thing or two

Instead of calling the video "I made my wife suffer through video games for her first time ever," Razbuten opted for a title that speaks to the inherent learning curve for anyone new to the hobby. "What Games Are Like For Someone Who Doesn't Play Games" came as a result of a full year of the host's wife testing nine video games she'd never played before: Super Mario Bros., Celeste, Shovel Knight, Portal, Doom (2016), The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Last of Us, Uncharted 2, and Dark Souls.