Month: August 2022

Enlarge / The SLS rocket did not leave the planet on Monday morning.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—Despite all of the hard work by its engineers and technicians, NASA did not really get close to firing up the massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on Monday.

The rocket experienced several issues during the countdown early on Monday before running into a technical problem the launch team could not solve: an RS-25 rocket engine that did not properly chill down prior to ignition. Even if the engine problem had been resolved, weather along the Florida coast on Monday morning proved dicier than anticipated.

Space is hard, certainly. But Monday's attempt—which NASA had promoted heavily by inviting celebrities to the launch and which included a visit by Vice President Kamala Harris—was perhaps a bit rushed. Why? Because NASA rolled a rocket out to launch without accounting for all of the things that could go wrong.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The Federal Trade Commission on Monday sued a data broker for allegedly selling location data culled from hundreds of millions of phones that can be used to track the movements of people visiting abortion clinics, domestic abuse shelters, places of worship, and other sensitive places.

In a complaint, the agency said that Idaho-based Kochava has promoted its marketplace as providing "rich geo data spanning billions of devices globally." The data broker has also said it "delivers raw latitude/longitude data with volumes around 94B+ geo transactions per month, 125 million monthly active users, and 35 million daily active users, on average observing more than 90 daily transactions per device."

The FTC said Kochava amassed the data by tracking the Mobile Advertising ID, or MAID, from phones and selling the data through Amazon Web Services or other outlets without first anonymizing the data. Anyone who purchases the data can then use it to track the comings and goings of many phone owners. Many of the allegations are based on the agency's analysis of a data sample the company made available for free to promote sales of its data, which was available online with no restrictions on usage.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Bet_Noire)

Dish Network and Viasat lost their attempt to block one of the key approvals Starlink received from the Federal Communications Commission. On Friday, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected the Viasat and Dish protests in a ruling that upheld the FCC decision.

Dish and Viasat sued the FCC after the commission's April 2021 decision to let SpaceX fly 2,824 of its Starlink satellites at a lower altitude than originally planned, in the 540-570 km range instead of 1,110-1,325 km. The FCC rejected protests from satellite competitors while agreeing with SpaceX that the altitude change would improve broadband speed and latency while making it easier to minimize orbital debris.

A panel of three DC Circuit judges heard the appeal and unanimously sided with the FCC and SpaceX, which was an intervenor in the case on the FCC's behalf. "Dish argued that the proposed changes would interfere with its GSO [geostationary orbit] satellite television service," the judges wrote. "Another competitor, Viasat, Inc., jointly objected with an environmental organization calling itself The Balance Group. They argued that NEPA [the National Environmental Policy Act] required the FCC to prepare an environmental assessment before granting the modification."

Enlarge / The Chinese already have a number of dams in the generally arid Tibetan Plateau. (credit: Holger Kleine)

A study recently published by a team of researchers at Beijing’s Tsinghua University has revealed plans to construct a 594-foot-tall dam using robots, 3D printing, and artificial intelligence. The researchers claim that no human labor needs to be directly employed in building this massive structure—if the plan moves forward, the dam would produce 5 billion kWh of electricity annually. This much energy will be enough to meet the power demands of 50 million homes in China.

The Yangqu dam is on the second largest river in China, the Yellow River, where it flows through Qinghai Province on the Tibetan plateau. There is already a dam on the river, so the proposal involves enlarging the existing structure and increasing its power generation capacity, making it one of the world’s largest dams. If everything goes as planned, the Yangqua dam will become the biggest ever AI-made 3D-printed structure on the planet.

3D printing without a printer

Construction-scale 3D-printing technology involves the use of giant 3D printers to produce concrete layers that form the structure. In contrast, the researchers at Tsinghua University have developed a method that allows them to 3D-print concrete without a printer. They plan on using an additive manufacturing approach that employs a computerized scheduling system that takes the 3D structure into account. It will use AI-controlled robots instead of a large 3D printer to construct the upgrade to the Yangqu dam.