Month: April 2021

Enlarge / NASA and Boeing work to remove the SLS rocket core stage from its test stand in Mississippi. (credit: NASA)

Welcome to Edition 3.42 of the Rocket Report! This week we've got an update on Virgin Orbit, which has signed a multilaunch deal for its LauncherOne vehicle. Additionally, NASA has provided a couple of news items on the Space Launch System rocket, suggesting progress on not just the first core stage, but for those of cores for future Artemis launches.

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.

Virgin Orbit to launch six satellites for QinetiQ. The California-based satellite-launch company said on Wednesday it has been selected by defense and security company QinetiQ and geospatial analytics company HyperSat to launch a series of six hyperspectral satellites to low Earth Orbit. The first satellite will launch no earlier than 2023 on Virgin's LauncherOne rocket.

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  Assuming you've already got your system running Insider, Dev channel, and build 21364, all you need to do is wsl --install (or wsl --update, if you've already installed it). [credit: Jim Salter ]

This week, Microsoft launched support for graphical and audio Linux apps under the Windows Subsystem for Linux—although the new feature is only available in the Dev channel of Insider builds, for now. The new feature is nicknamed WSLg, and it includes both X and PulseAudio servers. We gave WSLg some limited testing today, and it performed rather well.

After running apt install firefox in the WSL2/Ubuntu terminal, we ran an Ubuntu-flavored web browser and played several videos on YouTube. We don't necessarily recommend you base your next HTPC on WSLg—but the videos were watchable, with decent frame rate and non-skipping audio. (We tested WSLg with a Ryzen 5 Pro 2500U-powered Minisforum UM250 Mini-PC.)

More importantly, virt-manager worked very well on the little Minisforum—in very short order, we set up a "virt-ception" by using virt-manager beneath WSL2/Ubuntu running on Windows 10 to access a Windows VM running under Ubuntu on a machine across the office. (You can also see a Hackintosh VM in the background.)