Month: March 2020

Enlarge / Illustration of a OneWeb satellite. (credit: OneWeb)

OneWeb has filed for bankruptcy and intends to sell its business, bringing an abrupt end to the company's plan to offer high-speed satellite Internet service around the world.

OneWeb announced Friday that it "voluntarily filed for relief under Chapter 11 of the [US] Bankruptcy Code," and "intends to use these proceedings to pursue a sale of its business in order to maximize the value of the company." OneWeb made the decision "after failing to secure new funding from investors including its biggest backer SoftBank," largely because of the coronavirus pandemic, the Financial Times wrote. OneWeb also "axed most of its staff on Friday," the FT article said.

OneWeb previously raised $3 billion over multiple rounds of financing and was seeking more money to fund its deployment and commercial launch. "Our current situation is a consequence of the economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis," OneWeb CEO Adrián Steckel said in the bankruptcy announcement. "We remain convinced of the social and economic value of our mission to connect everyone everywhere."

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

I don't often get to write for the Ars Technica front page anymore—I'm usually off pulling levers behind the scenes—but I count it a privilege every day to work with the team we've assembled here at Ars for the express purposes of serving you, the reader! As such, I hope that you will consider supporting Ars Technica by buying a subscription.

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For the next week, we are going to mount a subscription drive with the goal of convincing 5,000 more of you to join one of our membership tiers. The reason is simple: we need your financial support to weather the next several months, as advertising dollars are all drying up thanks to the current state of the economy. Each and every subscription dollar goes against our direct editorial costs. So please consider joining us!

Enlarge / Artist's concept of initial configuration of the Lunar Gateway. (credit: NASA)

The concept of NASA's Lunar Gateway—a small outpost to be built in a halo orbit around the Moon—is about five years old.

Although a lunar space station might serve many useful purposes, the concept came about for one basic reason. Due to limitations in the upper stage of NASA's Space Launch System rocket and an under-powered propulsion system in the Orion spacecraft, these vehicles do not have enough performance to get astronauts into low-lunar orbit, and then back out of it again for a return to Earth. Thus, NASA came up with a waypoint farther from the Moon and not so deep within its gravity well.

For more than a year, as NASA has developed its Artemis plan to return humans to the Moon by 2024, the space agency has positioned Gateway as the "Command Module" where it would aggregate components of a Human Landing System and from where astronauts would descend down to the surface of the Moon.

Enlarge (credit: Jamie Grill / Getty)

A federal court in Washington, DC, has ruled that violating a website's terms of service isn't a crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, America's primary anti-hacking law. The lawsuit was initiated by a group of academics and journalists with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The plaintiffs wanted to investigate possible racial discrimination in online job markets by creating accounts for fake employers and job seekers. Leading job sites have terms of service prohibiting users from supplying fake information, and the researchers worried that their research could expose them to criminal liability under the CFAA, which makes it a crime to "access a computer without authorization or exceed authorized access."

So in 2016 they sued the federal government, seeking a declaration that this part of the CFAA violated the First Amendment.