Month: October 2019

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

Welcome to Edition 2.18 of the Rocket Report! This week has produced a lot of news about medium-lift rockets, particularly around the issue of commercial crew—is the hardware finally ready?—as well as rideshare missions. There's also some nifty news about the Falcon 9 brute-forcing its way into a polar orbit from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

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.

Virgin Orbit to launch Mars smallsat mission. In what would be a landmark for small-satellite launch vehicles, Virgin Orbit announced this week that it plans to become the first private company to send cubesats to Mars. The company said it is partnering with nearly a dozen Polish universities and a Polish satellite maker called SatRevolution to design up to three robotic missions to the Red Planet over the next decade, The Verge reports.

Enlarge / Thermal images show how stretching twisted rubber causes its temperature to change. (credit: Wang et al./Science)

Although some manufacturers have attempted to spice up refrigerators with an Internet-of-Things capacity, few of us have found automatic egg-inventory-tracking notifications a compelling upgrade. So are any real technological revolutions possible for this humble home appliance?

A team of researchers led by Nankai University’s Run Wang and the University of Texas at Dallas' Shaoli Fang certainly thinks so. They’re not thinking about the front of the fridge, though—for them, the party is in the back. They're looking to replaced compressed gas coolants with a twisted solid.

It’s solid

Refrigerators have long run on a vapor-compressor design that uses circulating coolant to pump heat energy out of the fridge and into your kitchen. At this point, we've pretty much maxed out the potential energy efficiency of that design, which isn't ideal. Also not ideal is the fact that the coolants used are not without problems if they leak—problems range from health hazards to a history of ozone depletion to their behavior as greenhouse gases.

Enlarge / What's to become of the WoW Classic guild "GAY BOYS"? (credit: Aurich Lawson / Blizzard)

Public scrutiny of game developer Blizzard's relationship with free speech was already high this week. It intensified on Thursday, but the latest Blizzard story has nothing to do with punishing players for statements about Hong Kong. Instead, it's about the names of guilds in World of WarCraft.

We’ve heard lots of acronyms, but never "ZFXPK"

Ars Technica received word on Thursday that the "GAY BOYS" guild within the recent World of WarCraft Classic fork had its name changed late Wednesday to the machine-generated gibberish "Guild ZFXPK." An email, apparently sent by Blizzard Customer Service, indicated that the guild's name-change process began because "your fellow players reported your in-game name as inappropriate multiple times." From there, the email cites "a thorough investigation" that also led to the guild's creator receiving a temporary account suspension. The suspension was later overturned, but the guild's name remains "Guild ZFXPK."

A cursory scan of existing WoW guilds shows another one named "GAY BOYS," which had a temporary name change in 2016, followed by a Blizzard forum thread asking why it had been changed. After acknowledging that general user forums weren't the place to properly dispute customer service issues, a WoW forum moderator offered some advice for choosing a new name: "Picking a name that you can identify with without also using words that would illicit [sic] a reaction from other players would be far more beneficial."