SpaceX Will Try to Land its Next Falcon 9 Rocket on Solid Ground, NASA Says

As reported by The Verge: When SpaceX launches its Falcon 9 rocket again, the company will attempt to land the vehicle back on solid ground, Florida Today reported. So far, the company has only attempted landing their rockets on ships out at sea, but SpaceX's ultimate goal is to eventually touch down its rockets on land-based spaceports. If the company's landing is successful, it will be the first step toward making the Falcon 9 a reusable rocket.

The "very exciting news" came from a NASA representative, who made the announcement today to members of the press at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. "Their plan is to try to land [the next booster] out here on the Cape-side," said Carol Scott of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, referring to Cape Canaveral, where SpaceX typically launches from. Scott said she had recently talked about the landing plan with a SpaceX executive. SpaceX declined to confirm the news.

SPACEX'S ULTIMATE GOAL IS TO TOUCH DOWN ITS ROCKETS ON LAND-BASED SPACEPORTS

This past year, SpaceX has tried to land the Falcon 9 rocket's first stage — the long 14-story rocket body that contains the main engines and most of the fuel — after launching the vehicle into space. Typically, rocket bodies are lost or destroyed post-launch. It makes the cost of commercial space travel particularly expensive, since a new rocket must be built for each subsequent mission. Landing a big portion of the rocket would allow SpaceX to then reuse the vehicle, saving the company from building an entirely new spacecraft.

The two times SpaceX has tried to land the Falcon 9, the rocket's target was an autonomous drone spaceport floating out in the ocean. Unfortunately, the company wasn't able to stick those landings — though the rockets did get pretty close. Landing attempts — and launches, for that matter — were then halted in June, after a Falcon 9 rocket exploded en route to the International Space Station. SpaceX said it plans to return to flight sometime this month, by launching small satellites for a communications company called Orbcomm, but no exact date has been confirmed yet.

It's during this tentatively scheduled Orbcomm mission that SpaceX will attempt a ground landing, Scott said. A solid touch down would pave the way for SpaceX's big-picture plan of landing rockets mostly on land going forward. In February 2015, SpaceX leased an old launch pad at Cape Canaveral from the Air Force, known as Launch Complex 13. Since renamed Landing Complex 1, the site will be where SpaceX hopes to touch down its rockets post-launch.

A Falcon 9 landing on land would be a huge technological first, though it won't be the first time a rocket has landing vertically after going to space. Last week, Blue Origin made big waves when it announced it had landed its New Shepard booster after sending it to sub-orbital space. While, Blue Origin's achievement was a historical moment, what SpaceX is trying to do is a bit more complex than the New Shepard landing, as the Falcon 9 is going much faster and is at a much higher altitude when it begins its return trip to Earth.

Amazon Reveals New Delivery Drone Design with Range of 15 Miles (Video)

As reported by GeekWire: Amazon today released new photos and a video showing off a redesigned version of its delivery drone.

It’s been almost exactly two years since Amazon first announced the “Amazon Prime Air” project and the company today showed off a new prototype drone that will deliver packages through the air directly to customers’ doorsteps in as little as 30 minutes.

Here’s the new drone:

Here’s the original design:

The new design is a bit larger, has an updated propeller system, and features sense-and-avoid technology to detect nearby obstacles both on the ground and in the air.

This new video featuring Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson, who recently inked a lucrative contract with Amazon to create a new car show, shows how the drone scans a landing area at a customer’s home and is able to spot what looks like an Amazon logo where the package is dropped.

This particular drone can fly for 15 miles. Clarkson calls it “amazing innovation.”

“It looks like science fiction, but it’s real,” Amazon notes in a FAQ page. “One day, seeing Prime Air vehicles will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road.”

Amazon said its drones fly under 400 feet and weigh less than 55 pounds.

“Prime Air vehicles will take advantage of sophisticated ‘sense and avoid’ technology, as well as a high degree of automation, to safely operate beyond the line of sight to distances of 10 miles or more,” Amazon noted in the FAQ.

The company said it has developed more than a dozen prototypes in the past few years at R&D centers in the U.S., United Kingdom, and Israel, and that the “look and characteristics of the vehicles will evolve over time.”

Amazon adds that it “will not launch Prime Air until we are able to demonstrate safe operations.”

“Prime Air has great potential to enhance the services we already provide to millions of customers by providing rapid parcel delivery that will also increase the overall safety and efficiency of the transportation system,” the company wrote. “Putting Prime Air into service will take some time, but we will deploy when we have the regulatory support needed to realize our vision.”

The Federal Aviation Administration is currently developing regulations for both recreational drones and commercial delivery drones, which companies like Amazon,Walmart, and Google are all working on. It recently convened a task force charged with drawing up recommendations for registering recreational drones that includes representatives from Amazon, Google, Walmart, and other companies.

Amazon today also posted two new documents related to airspace proposals: Revising the Airspace Model for the Safe Integration of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems and Determining Safe Access with a Best-Equipped, Best-Served Model for Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems.

Here’s the original Prime Air video Amazon released two years ago:

Roborace Championship Will Pit Driverless Electric Cars Against Each Other

As reported by GizMag: A new racing championship will do away with drivers. Roborace will pit driverless electric cars against each other in a round-the-world series. It will provide a competitive platform for the autonomous driving technology that is being developed by automotive and tech firms, as well as universities.

Roborace has been developed in a partnership between the electric racing series Formula E, which is currently in its second season, and investment firm Kinetik. It will form part of the support package for the Formula E Championship, with races taking place at the same circuits prior to each Formula E race.

Ten teams will compete in the Roborace championship, each with two driverless cars. The running of one team will be crowdsourced by a community of software and technology enthusiasts, and experts from around the world. All the teams will use the same car , but will be able to alter its software to gain a competitive advantage over the course of one-hour races.

Formula E says the aim of Roborace is to demonstrate the capabilities of autonomous driving technology, even in extreme conditions, while Kinetik's Denis Sverdlov says it will help to show that we can co-exist with such technologies. CEO of Formula E Alejandro Agag describes the new series as "an open challenge to the most innovative scientific and technology-focused companies in the world."

The Roborace series is scheduled to debut in the 2016-17 season, with further details about its teams and technologies to be announced early next year.

This App Helps You to Visualize the Cell Towers, Wifi Signals, and Satellites Around You

As reported by Gizmodo: You’re aware that your cell service comes from cell towers. And that your mapping app is made possible by GPS satellites. And that wifi signals deliver your fail videos. But the sight of that invisible world is breathtaking.

This summer, a Dutch artist named Richard Vijgen released a video of a project he was working on called the Architecture of Radio. It was an augmented reality app that revealed the waves and signals in a given room, pulling information from publicly available databases on cell tower locations and satellites. It revealed an unearthly, web-like network of invisible infrastructure that powers our world—and unsurprisingly, a lot of people wanted to try it for themselves.

Sadly, the app itself wasn’t ready for public consumption... until today. You can now download the $3 iOS app for iPhone or iPad. When you fire it up, you see a cobalt-blue screen where the app takes your GPS location and loads a series of datasets drawn from a global database that includes the cell towers around you and the satellites overhead (like this one). All in all, the database includes “7 million cell towers, 19 million Wi-Fi routers and hundreds of satellites.”

As you pan around your house, the app identifies signals and waves as you move: There’s a cell tower 589 meters to my left. If it was night, I could look out for a Russian satellite from 1964 passing to the south. It’s a bit like having x-ray glasses on.

The app warns that it is “not a measurement tool.” For example, the atmospheric waves and dots that texture the screen are an interpretation of waves, not a scientific reality. But the actual datapoints are real, based on your GPS coordinates and scraped from a database, which is pretty cool. Or terrifying, if you’re more of a tin-foil hat person.

“Most people seem to be amazed by the density of signals, some think it’s a bit scary, others just think it’s beautiful,” Vijgen told Gizmodo over email. In the end, it’s a lovely reminder of the vast network all around us, hidden in plain sight. You can get it here.

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin May Just Have Beaten Elon Musk's SpaceX in the Reusable Rocket Race

As reported by Engadget: Blue Origin, the private space firm owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, has just dropped a huge, unexpected gauntlet in the race to develop a reusable rocket. It just launched itsNew Shepard space vehicle (video, below) consisting of a BE-3 rocket and crew capsule to a suborbital height of around 100.5 kilometers (62 miles). The capsule then separated and touched down beneath a parachute, but more importantly, the BE-3 rocket also started its own descent. After the rockets fired at nearly 5,000 feet, it made a a controlled vertical landing at a gentle 4.4 mph.

So far, SpaceX has managed to get its own reusable booster close to its barge platform, but hasn't nailed the landing yet. Elon Musk's company does have a more daunting task, however -- its Falcon 9 reusable first stage is propelling the rocket to an orbital, not suborbital altitude. While SpaceX's rocket separates at a similar height of around 50 miles, its speed at that point is much faster than that of New Shepard -- around Mach 10 compared to Mach 3.7. As a result, it continues to an apogee height of nearly 90 miles, so it has a lot further to fall. During its last attempt, the rocket unfortunately exploded early in the flight, setting the program back significantly.

Bezos boasted that the BE-3 is "now safely tucked away at our launch site in West Texas, [and] is the rarest of beasts—a used rocket." He added that "it flew a flawless mission -- soaring to 329,839 feet and then returning through 199-mph high-altitude crosswinds to make a gentle, controlled landing just four-and-a-half feet from the center of the pad." In the video below, you can see the rocket approaching the ground at dramatically high speeds, then slowing rapidly with a final rocket thrust as the landing gear deploys. Meanwhile, the drogue parachutes on the capsule unfurled at 20,045 feet, helping the crew craft make a (fairly) gentle desert "splashdown."

The New Shepard and BE-3 are intended to be used in Blue Origin's suborbital space program, mainly for a commercial space tourism. Blue Origin hasn't set a date for flights yet, but the program is intended to carry six astronauts to the boundary of space at around 100 km in altitude. Also in that race is Virgin Galactic, which itself was badly set back by its SpaceShip 2 crash that resulted in the death of a pilot. Blue Origin's BE-3 rocket may also be used by United Launch Alliance to power the second stage of its Vulcan orbital rocket.

NASA Orders First Crewed Mission From SpaceX to the International Space Station

As reported by The Verge: NASA has officially ordered its first commercial crew mission from private spaceflight company SpaceX. That means SpaceX has NASA's authority to proceed with the first crewed launch of the company's Crew Dragon capsule, which can carry up to seven people in lower Earth orbit. The mission is slated for sometime in late 2017, but the exact date has not yet been determined.

SpaceX and Boeing hold contracts with NASA through the space agency's Commercial Crew Program. The initiative tasks the two companies with creating and operating spacecraft that can ferry NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Currently, NASA is without a primary space vehicle and must rely on the Russian Soyuz rocket, which costs $80 million to get just one US astronaut into lower Earth orbit. Commercial Crew will allow American astronauts to get to the ISS on American-made vehicles once again, and for much lower costs.

THE MISSION IS SLATED FOR SOMETIME IN LATE 2017

According to the contracts, NASA guarantees it will make at least four orders from SpaceX and Boeing for crewed missions to the ISS. Boeing received its first official order in May of this year, beating out SpaceX by six months. However, the race is still on to see who will launch their mission. NASA says it will figure out later when the launches will take place.

Mission orders are made two to three years prior to launch date, according to NASA, so that the companies have time to assemble their launch vehicles and their spacecraft. Neither SpaceX nor Boeing have actually built their respective crew vehicles yet. Boeing is getting started on manufacturing its CST-100 Starliner spacecraft, and SpaceX is working on its Crew Dragon, which is an enhanced version of its Dragon cargo capsule.

The order also comes at an odd time for SpaceX. The company's fleet of rockets have been grounded since June, after a Falcon 9 carrying supplies to the ISS exploded post-launch. SpaceX figured that a faulty strut in the rocket's upper fuel tank was to blame, but its flights have been on hold as the company conducted a complete investigation into the incident. SpaceX is expected to return to launch sometime in December, but no official date has been set.

Additionally, it's possible that SpaceX's crewed mission for NASA won't happen in 2017 as planned. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has admonished Congress several times, claiming the Commercial Crew Program has been consistently underfunded. IfNASA doesn't get adequate funds in time, the first launch under the program — whether it be from SpaceX or Boeing — will likely be pushed back to 2018.

Tesla Disables Some Autopilot Features in Hong Kong

As reported by Fortune:Tesla reportedly said Tuesday it would be temporarily disabling automatic steering and lane-changing on all Model S vehicles in Hong Kong.

The company had enabled the feature for all Model S owners without first retrieving approval by the city’s Transport Department. The Wall Street Journal reports that the agency is now saying the new software might not meet regulations and has requested that Tesla stop releasing it to more vehicles and disable the function on ones that already have it.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has previously referred to the electric car’s autopilot as a “public beta.” The company continues to refine the function as drivers use it. Hong Kong’s Transport Department has issued a warning to Tesla Model S owners stating the following:

“Although vehicles may be equipped with advanced driver assistance systems, the roads in Hong Kong are extremely busy, and motorists should stay alert [and] maintain control of the vehicle.”

The South China Morning Post writes that the agency has approved Tesla’s autoparking function, but not automatic steering or lane-changing. Tesla is currently working with the department to get the necessary approval.