Month: April 2021

Enlarge / Chris Urmson speaks onstage during the 2019 SXSW Conference on March 9, 2019 in Austin. (credit: Samantha Burkardt/Getty Images for SXSW)

Few people have been working on self-driving cars longer than Chris Urmson. Urmson played a key role on Carnegie Mellon's team in all three of DARPA's famous Grand Challenges between 2004 and 2007. He then led Google's self-driving project for several years. Urmson left Google after being passed over to become the CEO of the spin-off company that became Waymo.

“I’d been leading and building that team and, for all intents and purposes, general managing it for years,” Urmson told Bloomberg in a Thursday interview. “Of course I wanted to run the program.”

Bloomberg asked Urmson about Tesla's Autopilot technology—and particularly Elon Musk's claim that Tesla vehicles will soon be capable of operating as driverless taxis.

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  The G15 is reasonably unassuming as gaming laptops go—it doesn't feel huge or bulky, and there's a thankful minimum of SuPeR 31337 bling. [credit: Jim Salter ]

Recently, we managed to get our hands on an Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 laptop. We had to do it just like anybody else does, by finding one and buying it retail. That's notable because this laptop combines AMD's Ryzen 9 5900HS processor with an Nvidia RTX 3070 Mobile GPU, a combination that means this device sells out extremely quickly.

Make no mistake, the RTX 3070 in this year's AMD-powered Zephyrus is a distinct step up. Last year, if you wanted an RTX 3000 series GPU in a laptop, you had to settle for an Intel CPU to go with it.

Overview

This year's Ryzen-powered Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 is almost everything we'd want in a gaming laptop. Beastly CPU? Check. Beastly GPU? Check. Full-size wired LAN port? Check. Loud speakers? Absolutely. 1440p display with high refresh? Yes. Even the storage on this laptop—a model of SK Hynix NVMe SSD we'd never seen before—is blistering fast.

Enlarge / New Shepard crew capsule is seen landing in West Texas. (credit: Blue Origin)

Welcome to Edition 3.41 of the Rocket Report! As always there is plenty of news in the world of launch, and this week we have several stories about heavy lift vehicles. Perhaps most interesting, SpaceX has received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to press ahead with construction of a large tower for its Starship launch System.

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.

Blue Origin completes final step before crew mission. On Wednesday morning, in West Texas, Blue Origin flew its New Shepard-15 mission on a suborbital flight to test its vehicle for passengers. Two people even climbed into the vehicle before the launch to test the ingress procedures, but they exited before the launch took place. The mission was another success, with both the booster and capsule making a feathery landing.