Month: October 2020

Enlarge / A BE-4 rocket engine undergoes tests in West Texas. (credit: Blue Origin)

Blue Origin appears to have solved some development issues related to the turbopumps in its powerful BE-4 rocket engine.

United Launch Alliance chief executive Tory Bruno said Friday that the problem was "sorted out," and that the full-scale, flight-configured BE-4 engine is now accumulating a lot of time on the test stand. Bruno made his comments about one hour into The Space Show with David Livingston.

Bruno's company, ULA, is buying the BE-4 engine to provide thrust for the first stage of its upcoming Vulcan-Centaur rocket. This booster may make its debut next year, although ULA is still awaiting delivery of BE-4s for the first flight. Two of these large engine—each providing about 25 percent more thrust than the RS-25s used on the Space Shuttle—will power each Vulcan rocket.

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  Facebook's game streaming is focused on mobile games, But the titles can also be run in a browser on a desktop or laptop.

Facebook is the latest tech giant to follow the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Amazon into the game streaming space. But Facebook's effort differs from the competition by focusing exclusively on the kind of free-to-play games that are "typically played on mobile devices."

Facebook VP of Play Jason Rubin lays out the thinking behind this move in a blog post this morning. The company's new game streaming service won't be a separate platform, a la Microsoft xCloud, Google Stadia, or Amazon Luna. Instead, streamed titles will be integrated into Facebook's existing Instant Games platform, which hundreds of millions of players already use to run simple HTML5 games in the News Feed or a separate Gaming tab.

"People will play cloud-streamed games right alongside those playing instant games in HTML5," Rubin writes. "And if we do our jobs right, you won’t notice how the games are delivered."