Month: June 2020

Enlarge / An artist's concept of a Terran 1 rocket launching from Vandenberg Air Force Base. (credit: Relativity Space)

Relativity Space says it has reached an agreement with Iridium to launch six of the company's next-generation communications satellites.

Each of the Iridium NEXT satellites, which weigh 850kg, will be launched individually on Relativity's Terran 1 rocket. This means the new Launch Services Agreement will lead to as many as six Terran 1 missions, beginning no earlier than 2023.

This is the fifth launch-service agreement for Relativity, said Tim Ellis, co-founder of the California-based company. "This agreement represents yet another blue chip company to sign up with Relativity," Ellis said. It demonstrates that the Terran 1, with a potential lift capacity of 1.25 tons to low Earth orbit, fills a "unique" need in the launch market, he said.

Enlarge / The newer SMR-equipped small drives remain “Red”—while the CMR models will all become “Red Plus.” (credit: Western Digital)

Update 5:08pm ET: Pricing
Ars asked a senior Western Digital executive about pricing on the new Red and Red Plus lines. The initial answer given was "in general, we expect WD Red drives will be priced below WD Red Plus drives." When asked to comment on how prices of the existing EFRX and EFAX models will shift in order to make Red less expensive than Red Plus, the only response was "I can only comment on the [preceding] at this time," followed by "WD Red Plus will be available in August time period."

Original story 7:34am ET
Last night, a Western Digital executive reached out to Ars to let us know of a blog post concerning their controversial Red drives.

The company is taking a new branding initiative to clarify the technology used in its NAS drives—in the near future, "WD Red" will exclusively mean disks using Shingled Magnetic Recording technology, and "WD Red Plus" will mean disks using Conventional Magnetic Recording.

• 

  No, your eyes don't deceive you, the Model 3's interior really is that minimalist outside of its prominent screen. The seats are comfortable but lack side support. Quality is improved on the Model S and X, but I can't get over how cheap and aftermarket the steering wheel feels. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

Have you ever gotten lost while driving? Probably not recently thanks to GPS navigation.

The touchscreen navigation/infotainment system in every new car or truck that some colloquially refer to as “the GPS” is technology that we take for granted today. In fact, it’s so ubiquitous, it’s hard to imagine new vehicles without them (though such vehicles did exist—people used maps and turntables). But the road to today’s navigation touchscreens is a winding one marked by a trio of evolving technologies that developed over decades. It took a while before these innovations came together to ultimately doom the humble—not to mention difficult to read and refold—road map.

The next time you don’t know how to get somewhere and have to rely on maps embedded on your car’s display, you can thank the atomic clock, the satellite constellations powering actual global positioning systems, and the humble touchscreen.