Month: September 2024

Enlarge / The second stage of the New Glenn rocket rolls to the launch pad on Tuesday. (credit: Blue Origin)

Welcome to Edition 7.10 of the Rocket Report! It has been a big week for seeing new hardware from Blue Origin. We've observed the second stage of New Glenn rolling out to its launch pad in Florida, and the rocket's first stage recovery ship, Jacklyn, arriving at a nearby port. It looks like the pieces are finally coming into place for the debut launch of the massive new rocket.

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.

Vega rocket makes its final flight. The final flight of Europe's Vega rocket lifted off Wednesday night from French Guiana, carrying an important environmental monitoring satellite for the European Union's flagship Copernicus program, Ars reports. About an hour after liftoff, the Vega rocket's upper stage released Sentinel-2C into an on-target orbit. Then, Sentinel-2C radioed its status to ground controllers, confirming the satellite was healthy in space. The Vega rocket will be replaced by the larger Vega-C rocket, with a more powerful booster stage and a wider payload fairing. One of the primary purposes of the Vega-C will be to launch future Copernicus satellites for Europe.

Enlarge / AMD's Ryzen 7700X makes enough sense to feature in our higher-end gaming build. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

It's been a while since our last system guide, and a few new products—most notably AMD's Ryzen 9000 series CPUs—have been released since then. But there haven't been many notable graphics card launches, and new ones are still rumored to be a few months off as both Nvidia and AMD prioritize their money-printing AI accelerators.

But that doesn't make it a bad time to buy a PC, especially if you're looking for some cost-efficient builds. Prices of CPUs and GPUs have both fallen a fair bit since we did our last build guide a year or so ago, which means all of our builds are either cheaper than they were before or we can squeeze out a little more performance than before at similar prices.

We have six builds across four broad tiers—a budget office desktop, a budget 1080p gaming PC, a mainstream 1440p-to-4K gaming PC, and a price-conscious workstation build with a powerful CPU and lots of room for future expandability.