Month: June 2020

Enlarge / The Electron mission lifts off Saturday for the "Don't Stop Me Now" mission. (credit: Rocket Lab)

Welcome to Edition 3.04 of the Rocket Report! This week we're looking ahead to an exciting Vega launch on Friday evening (or early Saturday, if you're in Europe) that will be worth watching if you're near a computer. This is Vega's return-to-flight mission, and it's always fun to watch the small, solid-fueled rocket, well, rocket off the launch pad.

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.

Rocket Lab launches, signs two more customers. On Saturday, an Electron rocket successfully launched a set of payloads for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and two universities on a mission delayed 2.5 months by the coronavirus pandemic. All five payloads on the rocket for the Don't Stop Me Now mission were successfully deployed in a "perfect orbit," SpaceNews reported.

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  As budget-priced retro hardware goes, you could do much worse than the Evercade. [credit: Evercade ]

Gamers of a certain age will always have a special place in their hearts for the humble video game cartridge. There's something about sliding a thick piece of plastic into a slot before playing that evokes the simple joy of gaming as it was when we were kids. Optical discs, flash-based cards, and game downloads may have won the technological battle in the end, but the nostalgic appeal of cartridges has never faded for some.

That appeal seems to be central to the idea of the Evercade, a portable system from the UK's Blaze Entertainment. Besides the portable form factor—and the ability to emulate multiple classic consoles out of the box—the $80 Evercade differentiates itself from other recent plug-and-play retro devices in its expandability through various $20 cartridges. Each proprietary cartridge carries anywhere from six to 20 games, grouped by developer and licensed from companies like Namco, Atari, Interplay, Technos, and Data East, with more to come.

I've spent the last few weeks tinkering with the Evercade, swapping through dozens of well-known and obscure games on its initial selection of 10 cartridges. In that time, though, I've found my annoyance at the inconvenience of swapping those cartridges has overwhelmed my nostalgia. At this point, I think I'm finally ready to leave my nostalgia behind and keep cartridges in the dustbin of gaming history.