Month: April 2020

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  The Stratolaunch vehicle, the world's largest aircraft, took flight for the first and only time in April, 2019. [credit: Stratolaunch ]

Nearly a decade ago, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen founded Stratolaunch to build an aircraft capable of launching orbital rockets. At the time, the company's leadership included a host of luminous spaceflight officials, including former NASA chief Mike Griffin, who said the Stratolaunch aircraft “would make a very effective launcher."

Initially, the company planned to launch rockets built by SpaceX. But over time, the company's plans changed to fly Pegasus rockets built by Orbital ATK. Eventually, Stratolaunch dropped this idea and announced that it was developing its own line of rockets.

Alas, the aircraft never did prove to be an effective launcher. In fact, what became the world's largest airplane took flight just one time, in April, 2019. The Stratolaunch plane reached speeds above 300km/h and heights of 5km during its 150-minute test flight before landing safely at the Mojave Air and Space Port.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

If you're reading this, you're probably interested in space. I sure am. It's why I took a job writing for Ars nearly five years ago—the editors promised me I could cover the space industry full time, however I wanted.

And so I have. Few of my peers possess this kind of limitless freedom. For example, when I worked for the Houston Chronicle, I always had to be at least slightly deferential to the local NASA facility, Johnson Space Center. No longer. Great people. I have a lot of friends there. But if NASA is taking 11 years to develop a parachute, y'all are doing it wrong.

I have two goals with my space coverage. One is to get as close to the truth as possible. The second is to kick this industry in the ass so humans actually get out there into the cosmos and begin exploring the worlds around us. I was born a few months after Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt climbed aboard the ascent stage of the Lunar Module, blasted off the Moon, and came home. And I'm rather disappointed that humans have yet to dip their toes into deep space in the nearly half-century since.

Enlarge / Edge's "Inspirational" page layout—which basically just means "slap a pretty wallpaper on it"—isn't our favorite for day-to-day use. Makes for a nice screenshot, though. (credit: Jim Salter)

It's no secret that we've been enthusiastic about Microsoft's new, Chromium-based Edge browser for a while now. But that enthusiasm has mostly been limited to "a default Windows browser that doesn't suck," rather than being for any particularly compelling set of features the new Edge brings to the browser ecosystem.

In a folksy announcement this week, Microsoft politely declared its determination to step up our expectations from "doesn't suck" to somewhere on the level of "oh, wow." Microsoft Corporate VP Liat Ben-Zur spent plenty of time enthusing about the way the new features are, apparently, already changing her life.

Unfortunately, despite her use of the present tense, most of them aren't yet available—even on the Canary build on the Edge Insider channel.