Month: March 2023

Bethesda's highly anticipated space exploration game Starfield is now due to release on September 6, the publisher announced in a new trailer video Wednesday morning.

The newest release date target for the game comes after the previous promise of a November 11, 2022, release was eventually pushed back to an amorphous "first half of 2023" window. Starfield's development was first announced way back in 2018, but we had to wait until last June before we finally saw our first slice of "No Man's Skyrim"-style gameplay.

Oh my god... it's full of stars! (credit: Bethesda)

The new launch date announcement trailer intercuts shots of space stations and massive castle-like spires on barren planets. An unseen narrator talks of "another one of those big anomalies" and encourages the player to "uncover the source of it all."

Enlarge / The Terran 1 rocket as seen on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. (credit: Relativity Space/Trevor Mahlmann)

Today's the day—probably—for Relativity Space to attempt its first launch of the small-lift Terran 1 vehicle.

The three-hour launch window opens at 1 pm ET (18:00 UTC), and weather conditions at the company's Cape Canaveral, Florida, launch site appear to be ideal. The biggest threat to a liftoff today, almost certainly, is some issue during the countdown with the vehicle or ground systems, as commonly occurs with new rockets.

If the rocket does lift off, then nominally, the Terran 1 will reach a 365 km by 373 km orbit at precisely eight minutes. But it's very far from clear that the launch of the Terran 1 rocket, the majority of which was additively manufactured by large 3D printers, will go as planned. In recognition that this is purely a test flight, Relativity has put no customer payloads on the flight. And the mission has a lighthearted name, "Good Luck, Have Fun," that acknowledges there is a bit of a hold-my-beer aspect to this test flight.

Enlarge / The Terran 1 rocket as seen on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. (credit: Relativity Space/Trevor Mahlmann)

Today's the day—probably—for Relativity Space to attempt its first launch of the small-lift Terran 1 vehicle.

The three-hour launch window opens at 1 pm ET (18:00 UTC), and weather conditions at the company's Cape Canaveral, Florida, launch site appear to be ideal. The biggest threat to a liftoff today, almost certainly, is some issue during the countdown with the vehicle or ground systems, as commonly occurs with new rockets.

If the rocket does lift off, then nominally, the Terran 1 will reach a 365 km by 373 km orbit at precisely eight minutes. But it's very far from clear that the launch of the Terran 1 rocket, the majority of which was additively manufactured by large 3D printers, will go as planned. In recognition that this is purely a test flight, Relativity has put no customer payloads on the flight. And the mission has a lighthearted name, "Good Luck, Have Fun," that acknowledges there is a bit of a hold-my-beer aspect to this test flight.

Enlarge / Even Tesla says you should keep your hands on the steering wheel, but it helps if that wheel is actually connected to the steering column. (credit: Tesla)

Tesla has yet another federal headache to contend with. On March 4, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Office of Defects Investigation opened a preliminary investigation after two reports of Tesla Model Y steering wheels detaching in drivers' hands while driving.

NHTSA's ODI says that in both cases, the model year 2023 Model Ys each required repairs on the production line that involved removing their steering wheels. The wheels were refitted but were only held in place by friction—Tesla workers never replaced the retaining bolt that fixes the steering wheel to the steering column. In 2018, Ford had to recall more than 1.3 million vehicles after an incorrectly sized bolt resulted in a similar problem.

The ODI document states that "sudden separation occurred when the force exerted on the steering wheel overcame the resistance of the friction fit while the vehicles were in motion" and that both incidents occurred while the electric vehicles still had low mileage.

Enlarge / AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X3D. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Toward the end of Ryzen 5000's run, AMD released the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, a special version of the eight-core 5800X with 64MB of extra L3 cache stacked on top of it.

The result was an interesting but niche experiment. The extra "3D V-Cache" helped the CPU perform particularly well in games, but lower clock speeds (plus higher power use and heat generation) hurt its all-around app performance. The extra cost was (and remains) way out of proportion to the speed gains over the 5700X or 5800X. And the 5800X3D was the end of the line for the old socket AM4 platform, making it an interesting upgrade option if you already had an older Ryzen PC but an awkward choice to build an all-new PC around.

Now AMD is back with an expanded range of Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000X3D processors. The $599 12-core Ryzen 9 7900X3D and $699 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X3D are available now, while the 8-core Ryzen 7 7800X3D will arrive on April 6.

Enlarge (credit: Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Elon Musk and the EU are in a dispute over the Twitter owner’s plan to use more volunteers and artificial intelligence to help moderate the social media platform, as the company responds to strict new rules designed to police online content.

According to four people familiar with talks between Musk, Twitter executives, and regulators in Brussels, the billionaire has been told to hire more human moderators and fact-checkers to review posts.

The demand complicates Musk’s efforts to reorganize the lossmaking business he acquired for $44 billion in October. The new owner has slashed more than half of Twitter’s 7,500 staff, including the entire trust and safety teams in some offices, while seeking cheaper methods to monitor tweets.

Enlarge / NASA's Orion spacecraft descends toward the Pacific Ocean after a successful mission in December. (credit: NASA)

About three months have passed since NASA's Orion spacecraft splashed down into the Pacific Ocean after a flight beyond the Moon and back. At the time, the space agency said the Artemis I mission had successfully met its goals and paved the way for humans to follow suit.

This week, after carefully reviewing data from that Artemis I mission since splashdown, space agency officials reiterated that although there were a few minor issues with the flight, overall it bolstered confidence. As a result NASA's chief of human exploration for deep space, Jim Free, said the agency is targeting "late November" of 2024 for the Artemis II mission.

During this flight, four astronauts—likely including a Canadian—will spend a little more than a week in deep space. After checking out the performance of Orion in low-Earth orbit, the spacecraft will fly into what is known as a "free return trajectory" around the Moon, which will bring them as close as 7,500 km to the surface of the Moon before swinging back.