Facebook and Google are Out of the Space Race

As reported by Quartz: Who wasn’t excited to see Facebook and Google battle for dominance of low-earth orbit?  Alas, it wasn’t meant to be: both companies are shelving their ambitious plans for satellite internet.

The tech-news site 'The Information' reports that Facebook is dropping its plans for a geo-stationary satellite over concerns that it will not recoup costs. Google, which hired satellite entrepreneur Greg Wyler to prepare an satellite constellation in 2014, backed out of that plan earlier this year.

Titan Aerospace is a Google supported project that uses solar powered
drones to provide network communications systems.

To which satellite experts might say: We told you so. Ambitious satellite-internet projects have a history of failure. Satellite-internet services today are fairly expensive, and offer slow data speeds.  

While Facebook’s cancelled project comes from the more traditional approach to satellite internet, the current hope of Wyler and other satellite entrepreneurs is that constellations made up of many small satellites could solve those two problems. They would offer faster service, since they are closer to earth than the typical communication satellites, which fly at high altitudes to maximize coverage; and they would cost less, since tiny satellites are typically less expensive than their larger siblings.

But even this plan may over-promise—one of the pioneers of the satellite business, Martin Sweeting, chairman of Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd., compared interest in small satellites to the froth on top of a cappuccino. The technical challenges to flying and operating a full-fledged constellation of them may still prove too difficult to surmount.

Similar to the Titan Aerospace system, project 'Loon' funded by
Google provides network communications systems using high altitude
balloons.

And that explains why mainstream, public tech companies like Google and Facebook have tabled their satellite plans—they are apparently riskier than self-driving cars and virtual reality, to name two experimental areas where these companies are still staking aggressive claims. Google also still owns Skybox, a satellite imaging start-up.

But fear not, internet fans, there are still some businesses that dream of creating real satellite internet, since the potential rewards for success could be quite high. Wyler, the entrepreneur who left Google, founded a new satellite-internet concern, with backing from Qualcomm and Virgin Galactic. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has said it is developing a constellation of small communications satellites of its own. And even Google remains an investor in O3b, the firm using satellites to boost internet access in emerging markets.

Of course, the logic for Google and Facebook remains clear: Increased connectivity around the world means more customers for their products. If another company solves the mystery of satellite internet first—through some combination of cheaper rocket launches and more powerful mini-satellites—expect Facebook and Google to look to the heavens once again.

Officials Push for Standard Collision Tech in Cars

As reported by PCMag: The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) strongly recommends that collision avoidance systems become standard on all new vehicles.

The technology, NTSB said, can prevent, or at least lessen the severity of, rear-end crashes—saving lives and reducing injuries.

Rear-end impacts kill about 1,700 people and injure half a million more each year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)reported. A vast majority of those accidents involved a distracted driving who was not paying attention to the traffic ahead.

But the agency said 80 percent of those instances could have been diverted, if vehicles were equipped with a collision avoidance system (CAS).

"You don't pay extra for your seat belt," NTSB Chairman Christopher Hart said in a statement. "And you shouldn't have to pay extra for technology that can prevent a collision altogether."

Continuing a two-decade-long fight for life-saving technology, the Safety Board recommends manufacturers start with collision warning systems. They can later add autonomous emergency braking, once NHTSA decides on the necessary standards.

In the past two decades, the NTSB has submitted 12 proposals in favor of CAS technologies. Progress, however, has been limited, which it blames on a lack of incentives and limited public awareness.

"The promise of a next generation of safety improvements has been used too often to justify inaction," Hart said. "Because there will always be better technologies over the horizon, we must be careful to avoid letting perfection become the enemy of the good."

Only four of last year's 684 passenger vehicle models included a complete forward collision avoidance system as a standard feature. When offered as an add-on, NTSB said, they are often bundled with non-safety features and boost the overall package price.

Still, the transportation agency is issuing a companion Safety Alert for consumers and commercial fleet owners, urging folks to consider vehicles with collision warning and autonomous emergency braking functions.

In January, the NHTSA said it will add two emergency-braking technologies to its New Car Assessment Program (NCAP), which rates vehicles on a five-point scale of safety: crash imminent braking (CIB) and dynamic brake support (DBS).

G-7 Leaders Set Goal to End Fossil-Fuel Use in 85 Years

As reported by MarketWatch: The Group of Seven leaders agreed Monday that the world should end its use of fossil fuels by the end of the century.  

“Deep cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions are required with a decarbonisation of the global economy over the course of this century,” the G-7 leaders from the United States, Germany, Canada, Japan, France, Italy and the United Kingdom said ina declaration from the meeting in Germany.

But the end of the century is a long way off.

In the meantime, “oil companies will predict that fossil fuels will remain dominant into the 22nd- and perhaps even the 23rd-century, but I sense more traction for the anti-carbon foes,” said Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at the Oil Price Information Service.

‘If 90%-95% of vehicles in [California] are still running on fossil fuel by, say, 2025, then it’s clear that it would take an unprecedented [oil] price spike or a global event on the order of sustained rising oceans to spur action.’

Tom Kloza, Oil Price Information Service

“The laboratory for this in the United States is still California,” he said. “If 90%-95% of vehicles in that state are still running on fossil fuel by, say, 2025, then it’s clear that it would take an unprecedented [oil] price spike or a global event on the order of sustained rising oceans to spur action.”

Read: World Bank forecasts $90 trillion new low-carbon stock opportunity

The G-7 agreed that global emissions should be cut at the upper end of a 40%-to-70% range by 2050 from 2010 levels.

The leaders recognize that the challenge can only be met by a “global response” and said the G-7 will do its part “to achieve a low-carbon global economy in the long term, including developing and deploying innovative technologies striving for a transformation of the energy sectors by 2050.”

It will certainly be a challenge in the United States.

Kloza said “fossil fuels have clearly become a more prominent choice because of the sharp drop in price that began in earnest about 10 months ago.” He also pointed out that “driving a car that uses gasoline or diesel is a better choice when viewed from the simplest economic perspective.”

Still, Kloza said that “instinct” tells him the technology to end the use of fossil fuels as our main transportation fuel will exist by the year 2100.

He also admits he doesn’t have any “special technical insight.”

“Back in the 1970s, I would have thought that we could travel cross-country at supersonic levels and make the NY to LA trip in, say, two hours,” he said. “Instead, it takes longer than ever in a seat that is smaller than ever.”

27% of Americans Already Support Limits on Humans Driving Cars, Prefer Self-Driving

As reported by Breitbard:

In a national poll, more than 1 in 4 Americans said they would support limits on humans driving cars in the near future, given the fact that robotic self-driving cars could be safer.

Google says that self-driving cars will likely be commercialized in about 5 years, and their wide-spread use could overtake human-driven cars soon after. From the available evidence, they are much much safer: self-driving cars have been involved in only a few minor accidents, which is why they are estimated to save the lives of around 21,700 people a year and save the country billions of dollars.

Hence, this is why the world’s happiest mad scientist and Tesla founder Elon Musk thinks that the government may eventually outlaw humans driving cars altogether or, at least, place severe restrictions on them.

At this stage, 27 percent is a much higher poll number than I was expecting. It was only 17 years ago that 27 percent of Americans favored legalizing marijuana — and now a majority do (roughly the exact same trend for gay marriage).

Typically, Americans are averse to any sort of restrictions, which is why phrasing a survey question as something that the government “forbids” normally ends up in biasing the results towards heavy opposition.

At the moment, as expected, most respondents still support the right of Americans to drive their own car. One survey respondent wrote:

[I] support the movement toward self driving vehicles however i personally enjoy the freedom …based on this view i feel that autonomy should be optional when driving and not mandated.

Still, these numbers are quite high. I expect they could reach a majority in favor of restricting human drivers in less than a generation after self-driving cars are widely available.

You can read the full results and methods of the Ferenstein Wire poll, conducted with the help of Google Surveys, here.

Bill Nye’s LightSail has Finally Deployed After Multiple Setbacks

As reported by the Washington Post: Since launching on May 20, the Planetary Society's solar sail prototype -- called LightSail and inspired by an idea Carl Sagan championed decades ago -- hasn't exactly had smooth seas.

A glitch made the tiny satellite holding the folded sail unreachable from Earth for a time. Even after communications were reestablished, it took days to get the spacecraft to do the one thing it was sent up to do -- deploy its sail, proving that a propulsion system thinner than human hair could be packed away and unfurled safely in space.

On June 7, the Planetary Society reports, the sail finally unfurled.

Motor is running! Sail is Deploying!!! 39 Years after Prof. Sagan spoke of it!

— Bill Nye (@BillNye) June 7, 2015

Mission control expected another opportunity to communicate with LightSail early on June 8, during which time engineers on the ground hoped to confirm that the deployment procedure had been completed. Once we get those updates, we may have pictures of the great unfurling as well.

We were actually meant to wait a full 28 days for this deployment. The original plan for LightSail's first test was to let it spend a month orbiting Earth, allowing teams on the ground to monitor how it fared. Unfortunately, it didn't fare all that well: After recovering from the glitch that made it incommunicado, the LightSail spacecraft had to recover from a battery malfunction. With things looking less than certain, the team chose to deploy the sail at the earliest opportunity.

Sometime during the next year or so, Nye and his colleagues will send another satellite into orbit. This one won't just unfurl a delicate mylar sail: It will use that sail to propel itself through space. Solar sails work by using the physical force of particles emitted by the sun, catching their momentum the way a ship's sail catches the wind. It's not very forceful, but it's continuous. Nye hopes the technology will allow small research vessels -- and one day perhaps larger spacecraft -- to operate more efficiently.

The Planetary Society already has more than quadrupled its $200,000 goal for the project on Kickstarter. Now that this first test's deployment has been confirmed, it seems all systems are go for LightSail's next round.

Google Maps Now Offers Dragon, Loch Ness Monster As Public Transportation Options in the UK

As reported by Huffington Post: Google Maps now provides people in Great Britain with real-time information about the best and quickest ways to get places -- regardless of whether commuters choose to travel by train, tube, bus, boat, dragon or Loch Ness Monster.

Take the journey from Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales, to the Welsh mountain range, Brecon Beacons. According to Google, it would either take you about 3 and a half hours to drive. Or 32 minutes by dragon. Just hop onto one of the mythical creatures at Snowdonia Dragon Station, and enjoy the ride.

Another noteworthy route is the journey between Fort Augustus and Urquhart Castlein the Scottish Highlands. You can either take a bus, which will take you around 33 minutes, or the Loch Ness Monster -- a 22 minute ride.

Google Maps has been known to hide cheeky easter eggs in its app. Previously, it’s told travelers to swim across the Atlantic Ocean or jet-ski across the Pacific.

As Buzzfeed notes, Google Maps' new easter eggs include traveling by “royal carriage” from Buckingham Palace to Windsor Castle, and by “punt” in Oxford and Cambridge. A punt is a flat-bottomed boat that’s commonly used for leisurely rides in both cities.

Google Maps has had real-time public transportation information for bigger British cities like London for a while now, but according to Google, that information is now available across Britain.

“You can now check the best time and route for millions of departures for trains, tubes, trams, buses and ferries every day. In total, 17,000 different routes across the UK are featured,” the company wrote in a blog post.

We’re thinking even Daenerys Targaryen will be pleased with the update.

Power Sector Finds a New Set of Customers: Cars

As reported by MIT Technology Review: Lawmakers in Washington state this month passed a bill that opens up the electric-vehicle charging sector to a group of players who have thus far been mostly absent: power utilities.

The goal is to help the EV market get beyond its chicken-and-egg problem: EV charging stations are expensive to install, and there’s not yet enough of a critical mass of EVs on the road to make deploying them widely profitable; with few publicly accessible charging stations, meanwhile, many potential EV purchasers are still hesitant to trade in their gas guzzlers.

Sponsored by Republican state representative Chad Magendanz, the bill enables investor-owned utilities in the state to invest in EV charging infrastructure and pass along those costs to ratepayers, subject to the approval of the state Utility and Transportation Commission.

“We want people to be able to buy electric vehicles without regard to whether they can install a charging station at their home or afford the cost,” says Magendanz. “This is particularly directed at urban dwellers who live in condos or apartments, and need to be able to charge their vehicles at home or at work. If we can unlock that market, this could be a model for the rest of the country.”

Others have tried to address the so-called “range anxiety” that’s holding back potential buyers of electric vehicles. Several startups appeared in the 2000s to build privately owned charging networks, but viable business models have not emerged, and some, like Ecotality and 350Green, have flamed out in spectacular fashion. High-end EV maker Tesla has solved this dilemma by building its own proprietary network of free stations known as Superchargers.

“You don’t have seamless, available charging facilities, unless you own a Tesla,” says Mark Duvall, the director of energy utilization at the Electric Power Research Institute, an independent research organization for the power utility industry. “What’s lacking is consistent, adequate access to reliable charging infrastructure that’s not dependent on the kind of car you drive.”

Utilities, which already operate ubiquitous electrical grids and have the capital to invest in major infrastructure projects without an immediate return on the investment, would seem to be ideal candidates to build out charging networks. But in many states, regulators either have not ruled or have explicitly prohibited investor-owned utilities from selling electricity at retail charging stations. In Indiana, for instance, an EV car-sharing service called Blue Indy has been stalled by utility commissioners’ refusal to allow charging investments by the local utility.  

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, which has invested more than $130 million to help establish a network of privately owned charging stations, there are now nearly 23,000 public charging outlets in the United States. That is not enough to keep up with accelerating demand—or, at least, to alleviate motorists’ range anxiety.

In states where such participation is allowed, utilities have been surprisingly nimble in leaping into the market: Kansas City Power & Light, for instance, plans to install 1,000 public EV charging stations in Kansas City by the end of summer 2015—in a state where total EVs number fewer than 3,000.

In California, meanwhile, the world’s largest market for EVs will soon be served by an extensive network of charging stations owned or supported by utilities. In late 2014 the state reversed its earlier stance banning utility participation in the market, and the state’s three largest utilities—Southern Cal Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric, and San Diego Gas & Electric—have proposed programs that would deploy a combined total of nearly 60,000 stations, at a cost of nearly $1 billion. If approved by regulators, those facilities would outnumber gas stations by a wide margin.

“The utilities excel at planning big infrastructure projects, at building systems that are reliable and durable,” says Duvall. “If they’re able and choose to get involved, they can provide a regional framework with uniform access, consistent pricing, and most importantly, reliability and longevity.”

Duvall and utility executives also acknowledge that EV charging could offer an important element of the business model for electricity providers. That model is changing rapidly as demand for power flattens and more consumers generate their own electricity via solar panels or other distributed resources. While regulated utilities in California are “decoupled”—meaning that their revenues are not dependent on selling more electrons—moving into the transportation market would spread their fixed costs over a broader customer base, while helping to mitigate the impact of thousands of new EVs on the power grid.

The next phase for utilities would be the growth of the vehicle-to-grid market, known as V2G: vehicles could essentially serve as mobile electricity storage devices, charging during off-peak hours and transmitting power back onto the grid when it’s needed. Once that happens, the rollout of utility-owned charging infrastructure will have benefits for all ratepayers—not just those looking to top off their EV batteries.