Month: November 2020

Enlarge / Artist's view of the configuration of Ariane 6 using four boosters. (credit: ESA - D. Ducros)

European space officials announced late last week that the debut of the Ariane 6 rocket will be delayed again—this time until the second quarter of 2022.

This large rocket, which roughly has a comparable lift capacity to SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster, was originally due to launch before the end of 2020. In May of this year, citing the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Space Agency acknowledged the debut launch would slip into 2021.

Now, during a teleconference with reporters, European officials said they're targeting the period of April through June 2022 for the first Ariane 6 flight. Again, they cited the global pandemic that has affected both activities at development facilities in Europe, and the rocket's launch site in French Guiana. "We can say today that COVID-19 has led to an extension of activities on the critical path," said Daniel Neuenschwander, the director of space transportation at the European Space Agency

Enlarge / We all work from home now. We are the cloud. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

We are now a solid two quarters into our new work-from-home bizarro world. Many companies found themselves in a bit of a pickle as workforces went from occasional or limited to everyone all-the-time, throwing up whatever they could provision to allow for remote access and continued productivity (or at least some semblance of it).

We're well past the emergency stage, folks. For many of us, this will be ongoing and potentially permanent. And the way we do business will have to change—including how we structure our IT operations.

Who is your daddy, and what does his computer do?

This became extremely clear to me after a conversation with a friend, a line-of-business lead who has been working from home for the past few months. His company was semi-ready for remote work, having moved many employees over to Windows Terminal for desktops a while back. But he personally hadn't transitioned, because much of his work involved a database running on his corporate desktop—on Microsoft Access.