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An artist's concept of the Space Launch System rocket ascending through the clouds. (credit: NASA)

Almost from the inception of NASA’s large and costly rocket program, the Space Launch System, aerospace engineers have questioned the viability of a rocket that will fly infrequently, perhaps as little as once every two to four years. The most influential body to review the rocket, the National Research Council, concluded in 2014 that such low flight rates “will not be sustainable over the course of an exploration pathway that spans decades.”

NASA has steadfastly maintained that it will be able to fly the SLS rocket on an annual basis. However, on Tuesday, the website NASA Spaceflight.com reported on an “all hands” meeting at Kennedy Space Center in Florida where Robert Lightfoot, the agency’s top civil servant, addressed employees. According to the report, NASA officials explained during the meeting that the SLS lacks “booked missions at this time due to tight funding.”

Essentially this appeared to be an acknowledgement by NASA that it lacks funding to build payloads for its flagship rocket, largely because it is spending so much time and money building that rocket. This has been a main contention of SLS critics, who have said it gobbles up so much of the agency’s budget that NASA cannot afford to use it. For this reason the SLS has been derided as a “rocket to nowhere.”

(credit: Flickr user Noticias UFM)

We reported yesterday on the workplace difficulties that many female scientists face as they advance through their careers. But all of those problems happen after the women have been through years of education, a process that can also be a source of challenges. A variety of surveys have found indications that stereotypes about women's capabilities in science and math influence expectations throughout their education.

Connecting these biases to actual educational problems can be challenging, but a Swiss researcher named Sarah Hofer has found a way to test these issues. Hofer provided a large panel of physics teachers with a single answer that was attached to either male or female biographical information and asked them to grade it. She found that tests with a female bio got significantly lower grades, at least from teachers who were early in their careers.

Hofer's approach was simple. She told physics teachers in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany that she was doing a survey on their grading practices. They'd be given a physics question with an answer that required detailed reasoning in Newtonian mechanics, along with some information about a student and the student's answer.

Icons now get forced to a standard size.

An update to the Google Now Launcher has brought some nifty new features to Android's home screen. Google is reining in unruly app icons to make everything a consistent size and adding auto rotate support to the launcher.

Google's icon design guidelines give developers the tools to create a consistently sized icon in many different shapes. Many developers totally ignore the guidelines in favor of just creating the biggest icon possible, which often leaves Android's app drawer and home screen an inconsistent mess. The recent launcher update fixes this problem by ignoring the app developer's wishes and normalizing all the icon sizes—big icons get shrunken down.

Google doesn't police its app store the way Apple does, and since asking nicely via the guidelines doesn't work, Google has turned to automatically reducing the size of icons via software. This idea was actually pioneered last year in the third-party app "Nova Launcher," which similarly made fat icons smaller with a software enforcer.

Google has quietly been building up its virtual reality offerings with Cardboard and its Spotlight Stories app for watching 360 video. And now it appears that the company will have a dedicated VR division headed by VP Clay Bavor, who previously worked on Cardboard and headed up the Gmail and Drive apps. What could this mean for Google's immersive media future?

In the short term, not much. The Wall Street Journal reports that Bavor's main task will be to lead a team that's producing a version of Android for VR. Bavor's previous experience is with running apps, and right now Cardboard and Spotlight Stories will probably continue to be the main consumer apps available. Cardboard is currently the VR system Google is best known for, especially since its cheap, DIY hardware provides a nice rejoinder to Oculus' headset, whose price tag took many by surprise last week. That said, Spotlight Stories was a revelation at Google I/O last year, especially because Justin Lin's short film Help—about an alien monster loose in the subway—looked explosively awesome in the app.

What's going to be more interesting is Google's take on augmented reality. Though Glass has become an object lesson in how not to launch products, the idea behind the technology is still promising. We want a virtual overlay on reality, whether as a map guide or game, and so far only Microsoft's HoloLens has come close to delivering on that. But Google is the lead investor in mystery company Magic Leap, which is supposed to give us the ultimate augmented reality experience any year (or decade) now.

David Bowie. (credit: davidbowie.com)

When David Bowie became an Internet service provider in 1998, a man named Ron Roy helped him start the business. Now, three days after the legendary musician's death at age 69, we've interviewed Roy about how "BowieNet" came to life and why it was so important to the artist.

"David was tremendously involved from day one," Roy told Ars via e-mail. Roy appeared in some of the first press releases that followed BowieNet's US and UK launches; we tracked him down at his current business, Wines That Rock.

It was a lot easier to become an Internet service provider in 1998 than it is today. Instead of the enormous expense of deploying fiber or cable throughout a city, ISPs could spring to life by selling dial-up connections to anyone with a telephone line. BowieNet's dial-up service sold full access to the Internet for $19.95 a month (or £10.00 in the UK), but it was also a fan club that provided exclusive access to David Bowie content such as live video feeds from his studio. Customers who already had a dial-up Internet provider and didn't want to switch could buy access to BowieNet content separately for $5.95 a month. BowieNet had about 100,000 customers at its peak, Roy said.