Month: August 2020

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  The Hargreeves siblings find themselves trapped in 1963 in S2 of The Umbrella Academy. [credit: Netflix ]

Ars staffers were divided on the merits of The Umbrella Academy's first season. The pacing dragged a bit in the earlier episodes, and the deviations from the source material—the Dark Horse Comics  series created by Gerard Way and illustrated by Gabriel Bá—were not to everyone's taste. But I appreciated the time taken to flesh out the main characters, and I thought S1 ended strong, with a promising setup for a second season. I'm happy to report that S2 is even better: faster paced and well-acted, with some intriguing plot twists and developmental arcs for the Hargreeves siblings as they find themselves scattered in Dallas, Texas, in the early 1960s.

(Spoilers for S1; some spoilers for S2, but no major reveals with regard to the final episodes.)

For those unfamiliar with the series, billionaire industrialist Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore, House of Cards) adopts seven children out of 43 mysteriously born in 1989 to random women who had not been pregnant the day before. The children are raised at Hargreeves' Umbrella Academy, with the help of a robot "mother" named Grace (Jordan Claire Robbins, iZombie) and become a family of superheroes with special powers. But it's a dysfunctional arrangement, and the family members ultimately disband, only reuniting as adults when Hargreeves dies.

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  SpaceX's SN5 prototype very nearly lifted off on Monday. [credit: Trevor Mahlmann ]

8:45am ET Tuesday Update: It appears as though SpaceX engineers were able to address the turbopump issues that occurred on Monday evening, as the company seems to be pressing ahead with a Starship prototype launch attempt on Tuesday morning. Even before the launch window opened at 8am CT local time (13:00 UTC), the road leading to the launch pad was closed. This typically is the first step before clearing the launch pad of SpaceX employees, and beginning fueling operations.

The company has until 8pm CT Tuesday (01:00 Wednesday UTC) to complete the 150 meter hop. A live stream of the test can be watched below.

9:11pm ET Monday Update: SpaceX very nearly made it to T-0 on Monday evening in South Texas as it sought to launch its Starship prototype for the first time. However, a technical issue cropped up seconds before the 30-meter-tall vehicle was due to liftoff. The company's founder, Elon Musk, summarized the situation thusly:

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  The Pixel 4a. It's finally here! [credit: Google ]

Remember the Pixel 4a? After months of delays, Google's midrange smartphone is finally coming to market. Google made the phone official with only a quiet blog post, instead of the hyped-up online launch most other phones have been getting in the COVID-19 era.

The main thing we didn't know from the seven months of leaks was the price, which Google confirmed today is $350. It really seems like Google is doing the bare minimum for a launch here—there is no XL model, and the phone only comes in one color. The Pixel 4a is up for pre-order right now, with a ship date of August 20.

For your $350, you get a 5.81-inch, 2340×1080 60Hz OLED display, a Snapdragon 730G SoC, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of UFS 2.1 storage, a 3140mAh battery, a single 12MP camera on the back and an 8MP camera on the front. There's a USB-C port and, surprisingly, a headphone jack.

Enlarge / A SpaceX Starlink user terminal/satellite dish. (credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX has asked the US for permission to deploy up to 5 million user terminals for its Starlink satellite-broadband network in the US after nearly 700,000 people in the country registered interest in the service.

SpaceX in March received a Federal Communications Commission license for up to 1 million user terminals (i.e. satellite dishes) in the United States. That would allow for 1 million homes to receive the service, but SpaceX now wants to quintuple that number.

"SpaceX Services requests this increase in authorized units due to the extraordinary demand for access to the Starlink non-geostationary orbit satellite system," the company told the FCC in a license-change request on Friday. "Despite the fact that SpaceX has yet to formally advertise this system's services, nearly 700,000 individuals represented in all 50 states signed up over a matter of just days to register their interest in said services at www.starlink.com. To ensure that SpaceX is able to accommodate the apparent demand for its broadband Internet access service, SpaceX Services requests a substantial increase in the number of authorized units."