Month: May 2020

Enlarge / Zach Dunn with the Merlin engine that powered the successful fourth flight of the Falcon 1 rocket. (credit: SpaceX)

Relativity Space, a California-based company pushing hard toward the inaugural flight of its Terran 1 rocket by the end of 2021, has hired a senior launch official from SpaceX. Zach Dunn, formerly Senior Vice President of Production and Launch at SpaceX, will become Vice President of Factory Development at Relativity.

In joining Relativity, Dunn will work for a company that seeks to build a rocket made almost entirely of 3D-printed parts. And if that goal were not fantastical enough, Relativity also plans to automate as much of the rocket assembly and test process as possible. That is what Dunn was hired for.

The well-capitalized startup recently announced plans to build a large 3D-printing factory in Long Beach, California. Relativity intends to start with rockets, but it also has plans to additively manufacture large objects for other industries. Dunn's first job will be to oversee the development of this facility, said Tim Ellis, co-founder of Relativity. "We really are looking to develop the factory of the future, as its own product," Ellis said.

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  The Onn.8 Tablet Pro. [credit: Walmart ]

When you think of cheap Android tablets, you probably think of the Amazon Fire series, but Walmart is also in the game with its in-house "Onn" tablets. As spotted by 9to5Google, recently Walmart started selling two new models of its Onn tablet: the 8-inch "Onn.8 Tablet Pro" for $99, and the 10-inch "Onn.10.1 Tablet Pro" for $129. Surprisingly, we are not here to mock the $99 Walmart tablet, because it actually looks pretty good! You get Google Play, which is a major upgrade over the Google-less Amazon Fire tablets, plus Android 10, a shockingly-modern USB-C port, and an "HD" display.

Walmart is not great at this whole "selling electronics" thing and doesn't list the usual official detailed stats. The 8-inch model's "HD Display" could mean a resolution as low as 720p. Last year's version of this device (this is the second generation) had a 1280×800 LCD, which would qualify for the "HD" tag and would be comparable to the closest Amazon device, the Fire HD 8 Plus.

The SoC is unhelpfully listed as a "2.0 GHz Octa-core processor" but an earlier leak pegged both tablets with a 2.0 GHz MediaTek "MT8768WA" SoC. The MT8768 features eight Cortex-A53 cores and a 650Mz PowerVR GE8320 GPU. The CPU cores are one of the first 64-bit cores ARM ever produced and were originally introduced in 2012. I can't find detailed specs on this exact model, but other MT87xx SoCs, which also use Cortex A53 cores, are built on a 28nm process. So yeah, it's cheap.