Elon Musk's Companies Team Up: Tesla Offers to Buy SolarCity

As reported by Engadget: Tesla Motors and SolarCity have always had a close link (Elon Musk is the chairman of both companies, and SolarCity was founded by two of his cousins) but now they may come under one roof. They already pair up on charging stations and power for off-grid homes, but Tesla is offering to acquire the energy company, saying it wants to provide its customers with access to the "most sustainable energy source available: the sun." Soon, you might be able to shop for solar panels, home batteries and an electric call all in one place.

The way Tesla sees it, linking up a solar panel, Powerwall battery and Model S/3/X electric vehicle means offering a more efficient way for customers to consumer energy that's vertically integrated. On a call with reporters, Elon Musk said the all-stock deal would end up with a price between $2.5 and $3 billion. He also said that it shouldn't impact plans for the Model 3 or Gigafactory going forward. According to Musk, "we're not an automotive company," pointing at the bigger issues it hopes to address around providing and using sustainable energy sources.

DOT and FAA Finalize Rules for Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems

From the FAA: Today, the Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation Administration has finalized the first operational rules (PDF) for routine commercial use of small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS or “drones”), opening pathways towards fully integrating UAS into the nation’s airspace. These new regulations work to harness new innovations safely, to spur job growth, advance critical scientific research and save lives.

“We are part of a new era in aviation, and the potential for unmanned aircraft will make it safer and easier to do certain jobs, gather information, and deploy disaster relief,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. “We look forward to working with the aviation community to support innovation, while maintaining our standards as the safest and most complex airspace in the world.”

According to industry estimates, the rule could generate more than $82 billion for the U.S. economy and create more than 100,000 new jobs over the next 10 years.

The new rule, which takes effect in late August, offers safety regulations for unmanned aircraft drones weighing less than 55 pounds that are conducting non-hobbyist operations.

The rule’s provisions are designed to minimize risks to other aircraft and people and property on the ground. The regulations require pilots to keep an unmanned aircraft within visual line of sight. Operations are allowed during daylight and during twilight if the drone has anti-collision lights. The new regulations also address height and speed restrictions and other operational limits, such as prohibiting flights over unprotected people on the ground who aren’t directly participating in the UAS operation.

The FAA is offering a process to waive some restrictions if an operator proves the proposed flight will be conducted safely under a waiver. The FAA will make an online portal available to apply for these waivers in the months ahead.

“With this new rule, we are taking a careful and deliberate approach that balances the need to deploy this new technology with the FAA’s mission to protect public safety,” said FAA Administrator Michael Huerta. “But this is just our first step. We’re already working on additional rules that will expand the range of operations.”

Under the final rule, the person actually flying a drone must be at least 16 years old and have a remote pilot certificate with a small UAS rating, or be directly supervised by someone with such a certificate. To qualify for a remote pilot certificate, an individual must either pass an initial aeronautical knowledge test at an FAA-approved knowledge testing center or have an existing non-student Part 61 pilot certificate. If qualifying under the latter provision, a pilot must have completed a flight review in the previous 24 months and must take a UAS online training course provided by the FAA. The TSA will conduct a security background check of all remote pilot applications prior to issuance of a certificate.

Operators are responsible for ensuring a drone is safe before flying, but the FAA is not requiring small UAS to comply with current agency airworthiness standards or aircraft certification. Instead, the remote pilot will simply have to perform a preflight visual and operational check of the small UAS to ensure that safety-pertinent systems are functioning property.  This includes checking the communications link between the control station and the UAS.

Although the new rule does not specifically deal with privacy issues in the use of drones, and the FAA does not regulate how UAS gather data on people or property, the FAA is acting to address privacy considerations in this area. The FAA strongly encourages all UAS pilots to check local and state laws before gathering information through remote sensing technology or photography.

As part of a privacy education campaign, the agency will provide all drone users with recommended privacy guidelines as part of the UAS registration process and through the FAA’s B4UFly mobile app. The FAA also will educate all commercial drone pilots on privacy during their pilot certification process; and will issue new guidance to local and state governments on drone privacy issues. The FAA’s effort builds on the privacy “best practices” (PDF) the National Telecommunications and Information Administration published last month as the result of a year-long outreach initiative with privacy advocates and industry.

Part 107 will not apply to model aircraft.  Model aircraft operators must continue to satisfy all the criteria specified in Section 336 of Public Law 112-95 (PDF) (which will now be codified in Part 101), including the stipulation they be operated only for hobby or recreational purposes.

Firefly Rocket Engine Looks Luminous During Test

As reported by Space.com: A white, hot column of flame firing out of a rocket engine, backdropped by white clouds and a blue sky, looks like a work of art in this photo from the private company Firefly Space Systems.

This luminous image was posted to the company's Twitter account on June 10, and shows a single engine — one of 12 that will be included on the completed Firefly Alpha 'aerospike' rocket. The aerospike design uses engine nozzles with a slightly different shape compared to the bell-shaped nozzles seen on many other rocket engines.



Firefly is a company aiming to build "low-cost, high-performance space launch capability for the underserved small satellite market," according to the company's website. The company's first launch with its Firefly Alpha vehicle is scheduled for March 2018. That will be the first of four launches contracted by NASA.

In the picture, the engine is attached to the "life ring," which will hold all 12 engines when the rocket is fully constructed. (Many rocket designs have multiple engines, such as SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, which has nine engines.)

The aerospike engine design has been around since the 1960s, a representative for Firefly told Space.com via email, but the company believes it "will have the first aerospike engine in production when Firefly Alpha becomes operational in early 2018," he said.

Hyperloop One Team Dreams of Connecting Europe and China

As reported by Engadget: Hyperloop One has teamed up with the city of Moscow and a local company to explore bringing the Hyperloop to Russia. The trio will investigate how and where such high-speed transportation can be integrated into the country's existing transport network. Since Moscow itself has a population of 16 million people, cheap, quick and reliable mass transit is always worthy of further study. But the wider picture is that Hyperloop One views this as the first step on building a new high-speed freight link between Europe and China.

As co-founder Shervin Pishevar explains, Hyperloop could form the backbone of a "transformative new Silk Road: a cargo Hyperloop that whisks freight containers from China to Europe in a day." That would reduce shipping times from weeks (as it currently stands) and lighten the load on container ships. It helps, too, that the local company Hyperloop has partnered with is, essentially, the ideal company to actually build the system out.

Hyperloop cargo carriers have been proposed
as an alternative to train, trucking, air and ship
based transportation of cargo.

Summa Group is an investment and construction conglomerate that can probably knock out a passable Hyperloop without any outside help. For instance, it already owns Russia's largest sea port, three different construction companies and a logistics company. Then there's the fact that it's already got its own oil-and-gas plant and experience of building oil pipelines -- sealed metal tubes that travel large distances across the country. Given that Hyperloop will also rely upon the same technology, such expertise will come in very handily indeed.

NASA Will Test an Experimental Hybrid X-Plane with 14 Electric Motors

As reported by The Verge: NASA is still testing wild new wing technologies to improve energy efficiency in flight. The agency announced yesterday that it is conducting research on a unique wing design that uses 14 electric motors. The experimental aircraft it's designing is called X-57, otherwise known as "Maxwell."

The X-57 is NASA's first X-plane in a decade, and the plan is to develop technologies that improve fuel use and emissions and reduce noise, while also potentially paving the way to faster and more efficient small aircraft. "With the return of piloted X-planes to NASA’s research capabilities – which is a key part of our 10-year-long New Aviation Horizons initiative – the general aviation-sized X-57 will take the first step in opening a new era of aviation," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.

PAVING THE WAY TO FASTER AND MORE EFFICIENT SMALL AIRCRAFT

The Maxwell, which is named after 19th century Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, will be built by the Scalable Convergent Electric Propulsion Technology Operations Research (Sceptor) project. The aircraft itself will be a modified Tecnam P2006T, outfitted with 14 motors for propulsion. Researchers hope to prove that using that many motors can reduce the amount of energy required to reach a cruising speed of 175 mph.

NASA has been doing this research for X-planes for some time, and it'll be awhile before these experimental planes are ready. NASA also awarded Lockheed Martin $20 million for the company to develop its own supersonic X-plane designs. NASA hopes that these efforts represent the future of flight. Here's hoping they're right.

1,000-Core “Kilo-Core” Processor Built at UC Davis

As reported by SlashGear: When MediaTek announced its deca-core moble processor, it almost seemed insane in a world that's very much settled on octa-cores. The chip maker, however, has nothing on the silicon produced by researchers at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Davis. Although it definitely won't fit inside a smartphone, tablet, or even a laptop for that matter, the chip boasts of being the world's first kilo-core processor. That's 1,000 processing cores at your service, making even the beefiest gaming rig cry in shame.

Of course, you probably won't be using it for that gaming, or any other consumer purpose. It's still something that exists inside controlled conditions of a laboratory, but it is nonetheless an achievement worth bragging about. According to electrical and computer engineering professor Bevan Baas, the highest number of cores ever achieved in a multi-core chip has been 300. This UC Davies chip is easily more than thrice that many.

That's not its only bragging right either. Each processor is like an island of its own and can run a tiny program independently of others. This would be akin to a "Multiple Instruction, Multiple Data" architecture that is more flexible than current Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) used by most modern commercial processors these days.

And there's more to it than that. Almost like the "True Octa Core" feature MediaTek flaunted a few years ago, each processor can power itself down when not in use, so you aren't exactly going to be using 1,000 times the power. In fact, the chip can be powered by a AA battery.

In terms of specs, the cores operate at 1.78 GHz and has been clocked to process 1.78 trillion instructions per second. A special feature of the chip is that the cores can send and receive data directly to each other instead of having a common memory pool, like an L-level cache, which would have been a bottleneck instead of a speed increase in this situation. The chip itself was fabricated by IBM using a much older 32nm process. As for what the chip can be used for, it could, if it ever becomes mass produced and stable, be a favorite among media processing, scientific, and encryption circles. Basically anything that requires processing tons of data in parallel and in break neck speeds.

Can you imagine combining this technology with Google's Tensor processors, or with deeply trained neural network systems?

A Rocket Launch Brings China One Step Closer to Its Own GPS

As reported by Wired: ON SUNDAY MORNING, the Chinese government launched the 23rd satellite in its BeiDou Navigation Satellite System—the Chinese equivalent of GPS—into orbit aboard a Long March-3C rocket. BeiDou has worked for a while on a regional level, but China has been racking up the launches recently. Each one is another step toward BeiDou having fully operational global coverage, something that only the United States and (kinda, sometimes, maybe) Russia have today. If it works, it could mean a new golden age of navigation. Unless it leads to global war.

BeiDou is already a a Regional Navigational Satellite System; India and Japan are working on their own regional systems, too. Completing the Chinese constellation would turn it into a Global Navigational Satellite System, joining the US (the familiar GPS), Russia (GLONASS), and the European Union (Galileo). Though each places satellites in slightly different orbits and at different altitudes, they all work on the same idea, providing global coverage with enough signal to allow devices on Earth to triangulate a precise location. GPS is accurate to within a meter.

The more satellites you have, the more precise and accurate the system. And you need a reliable satellite constellation because so much modern technology is location-enabled and dependent. GPS and its siblings are how airplanes and freighters navigate, how maps stay accurate on the move, how cell phones work. The modern global economy only works if it knows where it is in all three spatial dimensions.

A more philosophical dimension matters even more. “If you want acceptance, a system has to have more than precision and accuracy, it has to have integrity,” says Brad Parkinson, a Stanford engineer and one of the inventors of GPS. “It has to operate within spec, and have some system of monitoring and publishing when it isn’t.” If a GPS satellite goes berserk, the FAA’s Wide Area Augmentation System sends out an alarm within six seconds. WAAS, or something like it, could just as easily monitor Galileo, GLONASS, and even BeiDou, and then, technically, anyone could use any and all of the various networks. “If it’s there, and it’s working, why not use it?” says Parkinson. “Almost all modern smartphone receivers support GPS and GLONASS already.”

Actually, the US and China have been working towards GPS-BeiDou interoperability for years in fields like aviation. “If you can land a plane in pea soup fog conditions, that’s a pretty great thing,” says Tom Langenstein, Executive Director of the Stanford Center for Position, Navigation and Time. “China would like to be able to do that too. It’s kind of a nice area of cooperation between our countries.”

Granted, BeiDou hasn’t been totally cooperative and transparent. China launched several satellites before telling the engineering community what their signal structure was—somewhat pointlessly, considering Stanford researchers were able to figure it out in about day. But as Langenstein points out, if they fail to provide evidence of their accuracy and integrity, then their satellites simply won’t be used. GLONASS has had a lot of trouble keeping their satellites in working order, and is notably cagey about system failures, which to Parkinson’s mind keeps them in a vicious cycle of limited viability. So it’s likely that, if BeiDou is to succeed, it’s by being welcomed into the international GNSS club.

Ultimately, international use of BeiDou satellites is in China’s own interest. “GPS has been a major boon for the US economy for the last twenty years,” Langenstein says. “China wants some of that. If you want to fear that, you can. But China is the second largest economy in the world and getting larger. It would be far better to cooperate and work with them than try to find some way to fight them.”

It’s that fighting part that could make BeiDou more scary than useful. “For the last several decades, satellites have been one of the signature elements of the US projecting as the sole remaining superpower. We can blow up anyone who looks at us cross-eyed,” says John Pike, a prominent military analyst and director of GlobalSecurity.org. “This suggests that China has global ambitions. They’ve got superpower-style space systems, but they don’t have the military to go with it.” The US and China are already frenemies at best; a significant military advantage for the Chinese could jeopardize the relationship further.

On the other hand, an optimist might point out the opportunities here. “BeiDou would change the asymmetry of military power,” Parkinson says. “But I’ve been saying for years that our ground soldiers should have sets that pick up US, Russian, Chinese, and European signals, and a very rapid technique of letting that ground soldier know when not to use it—a military analogue of WAAS. You wouldn’t be relying on foreign systems, but they’d enhance your mission when you know that they’re working properly.” BeiDou’s ultimate direction might not be clear yet, but it’s definitely headed there—fast.