SpaceX is Planning to Reuse the Rocket it Just Landed on a Barge in the Ocean — Here’s Why That’s a Huge Deal

As reported by Business Insider:On April 8, SpaceX made history, landing its Falcon 9 rocket on a lonely barge in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

After three failed attempts, the landing marks SpaceX’s first successful attempt at guiding a 229-foot-tall rocket to a vertical landing on a floating target.

Rockets like the Falcon 9 play an integral role in launching satellites into space and sending supplies to the International Space Station. But the rockets we use today cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. And as of right now, these rockets have a very short shelf-life. After their brief moment in the sun, they're essentially sent to a great junkyard, never again to be seen.

Now, private spaceflight companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are racing to design and build rockets that could be reused anywhere from 10 to 100 times.

Last November, Blue Origin became the first company to successfully land a reusable rocket. But this rocket was much less powerful than SpaceX' Falcon 9, traveling slower and less high.

While Blue Origin only plans to use suborbital rockets to carry tourists for very short periods of times, SpaceX uses its rockets to transport supplies to the International Space Station into low Earth orbit. The company celebrated its first safe return of a rocket to a site on land last December. 

One small step for a Falcon 9 and one giant leap for the future of reusable rockets

Tech Insider

Unlike the first Falcon 9 that SpaceX succesfully landed, the oceanfaring Falcon 9 is already being prepared for its second trip. CEO Elon Musk has announced that they expect to reuse the Falcon 9 from the barge landing within two months, making it the first orbital rocket to make a second venture into space.

The plan to reuse rockets is far from perfect. And the news that SpaceX is planning on reusing this rocket — the first one it's successfully landed at sea — comes as a bit of a surprise. 

In practice, withstanding the drastic temperature changes and the intense pressure and winds of the atmosphere would leave the rockets with a few scrapes and bruises. NASA’s Space Shuttle, which was also designed to be reusable, ended up being more trouble than it was worth, costing up to over a billion dollars per launch. The rocket would probably need to be refurbished before its next launch.

But the Falcon 9 is much less complex than the Space Shuttle. Even with the cost of refurbishment, reusable rockets like the Falcon 9 would slash the toll of spaceflight significantly. And they could cut the time between launches from a few months to a few weeks. CEO Elon Musk has announced that they expect to reuse the Falcon 9 from the barge landing within two months.

The landing of the Falcon 9 was an important milestone in rocket technology, signifying one small step for a Falcon 9 and one giant leap for the future of reusable rockets.

Waze Will Warn You When You're Speeding

As reported by Engadget: If you drive in unfamiliar areas often enough, you've probably run into situations where you couldn't spot a speed limit sign or were too busy finding your way to notice. However, Waze has some relief in sight: it just started rolling out an alert feature that makes it clear when you're breaking the speed limit on a given street. You can tell it whether or not to sound an alert, and even force the alert to show only when you run over the limit by a set percentage -- helpful for those fast-paced roads where obeying the limit actually makes you a hazard.

The catch? If you're reading this, you probably can't use the alerts... yet. Waze is launching the feature in just 16 countries, most of which are in mainland Europe and Latin America. The rest of the world is getting it "soon," though, so don't despair if you tend to keep a heavy foot on the accelerator.

Elon Musk Reportedly Visited Mobileye to Test Tech for Next Gen Tesla Autopilot

As reported by electrek: A new report published today by Israel’s Globes suggests that Elon Musk visited Israel-based tech firm Mobileye to test a new system for the next generation Tesla Autopilot.

According to Globes, Musk visited Mobileye’s Israel operations earlier this month for a “demonstration of several breakthrough developments by Mobileye in [automated driving technology] installed on a trial Tesla Model S vehicle.”

The report suggests that Mobileye is testing its automated driving technology in two Tesla Model S test vehicles. Independently, a Model S being tested with a fully-autonomous hardware suite was recently spotted in California.

Mobileye is already a supplier in Tesla’s Autopilot program and last year the automaker committed to keep using the firm’s technologyin future iterations of its self-driving and assisted-driving programs.

The Globes described the tech in the demo Musk reportedly witnessed:

“Among the technologies are a system called DNN (digital neural network), which enables the vehicle to “learn” by gathering data on the move, and even to identify different kinds of road surface; free-space, which enables the automatic vehicle’s systems to identify areas without defined objects such as hard shoulders of roads, sidewalks, and so on, and avoid collisions and deviations from the road; a “holistic path prediction”, which enables a vehicle to select the correct path – on an open road, for example – even when there are no visual hints in the environment; and a sign identification system that can identify over 1,000 signs and road markings in use around the world.”

The current version of Tesla’s Autopilot is believed to already have self-learning capacity, similar to the “DNN” described above, built on top of Mobileye’s system. Tesla also recently hired a few machine learning experts to improve its system.

Tesla is expected to release more features through over-the-air updates utilizing the same hardware, but the system, which consists of a forward-looking camera, a radar, and 360 degree sonar sensors, is limited and not expected to achieve fully autonomous driving.

Last year, Mobileye’s CEO Ziv Aviram confirmed that his company is working a new system which he described as a  “more sophisticated” and that could allow fully autonomous driving. He also confirmed that one OEM is already implementing it in a vehicle:

“Today we are already preparing with one of the OEM, a first vehicle based on 8 cameras, one radar and ultrasonic around the vehicle. So this is much wider implementation of the first introduction of semi-autonomous driving and the trifocal is going to be here as we planned, but additional 4 cameras around the vehicle and one camera looking back. The system will run on 5 EyeQ3 chips and all of them will be connected.”

Aviram didn’t disclose which automaker is testing the system, but he said during a recent conference that Tesla is willing to push the envelope “faster and more aggressively than any other OEM”. He also hinted that the new system could find its way into a commercial product within a year and we know that Tesla has been testing a similar hardware suite with more cameras.

Both Musk and Aviram agree that a fully autonomous system could be developed using only camera sensors and radar, without the need for LiDAR technology.

SpaceX Is Ferrying a Prototype Space Hotel Up to the ISS

As reported by Popular Mechanics: Bigelow's inflatable space habitat has been under development for a few years, but now it seems that the prototype for the someday space hotel is ready to fly. On April 8, SpaceX will launch a resupply mission to the International Space Station, taking the inflatable habitat aboard for a round of testing in orbit.

Bigelow has sent up a few uncrewed prototypes before, and has made no secret of its ambitions to get larger and larger space stations in orbit. The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, is a good step toward this. The 565 cubic-foot habitat will stay on the ISS for two years to further test if it has the right stuff to make viable for a longterm stay in space.

While inflatable habitats may seem like a strange idea, the idea is nearly as old as the space race, albeit never fully implemented. The first such idea, the TransHab, would have gone up early in the 21st century had it not been cancelled by Congress. However, Bigelow picked up that patent and developed it into their line of habitats. 

At just eight feet in diameter, inflatable modules like this are much easier to get into space than other components of the ISS that have to be launched one by one and constructed in orbit. If the BEAM module is successful, there could be a whole lot more in like it in orbit this coming decade.

Requiring Driving Students to Text While Driving Makes a Big Impression

As reported by Little Things: According to the CDC, each day in the United States, more than 9 people are killed and more than 1,153 people are injured in crashes that are reported to involve a distracted driver. In order to reduce the 1.2 million traffic victims worldwide each year, we have to act. So, how to convince eager drivers not to text while driving? Prove it to them in an unexpected way. See how these student drivers react when they’re told they can only pass on one condition…

…The only way they’ll earn their license? “You must prove you’re able to use your mobile phone while driving.”

A Belgian organization called Responsible Young Drivers enlisted a driving school and driving instructor to be in on this brilliant social experiment that quickly went viral. Hidden cameras film the students as they try their best to text and drive. The results are incredibly powerful. While attempting to send text messages at the request of the instructor, the drivers must also avoid a course of traffic cones and obstacles in their way. The drivers brake, swerve, and panic.

“Imagine that’s a child,” the instructor says, as one student nearly breaks down in tears.

As Vehicles Learn to Communicate with Each Other - A Future With No Traffic Lights Could Be Terrifying

As reported by Jalopnik: MIT’s researches have been fiddling with virtual models programmed to eliminate traffic lights at intersections with the introduction of fully-autonomous cars, and for the first time I can easily picture how terrifying flying through an intersection with no control just might be.

Up until now I have personally been very comfortable with the prospect of having an autonomous car chauffeur me to my destinations. I still feel comfortable with what is ultimately inevitable at this point. Yet this video preview of what the MIT SENSEable City Lab and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have been working, which depicts autonomous cars zipping through intersections without stopping for each other, paints a rather unsettling scenario in my head.

I’ll let Digital Trends explain how it works:

Using mathematical modeling, the researchers show how sensor-laden cars and traffic light-free intersections could reduce traffic congestion. In the scenario reviewed by the team, self-driving vehicles would travel autonomously on roads without traffic lights to control the flow of traffic. Instead of stop lights, cars would communicate wirelessly with other vehicles on the road, allowing them to travel at a safe distance without having to slow down for a traffic light.

This car-to-car communication would control the traffic flow so that cars can only enter an intersection when a slot is open for them to travel through safely. Cars would move slowly in small groups towards the intersection. As they reach the crossing, they then would slide through the intersection quickly. “You want the car to use the intersection for the shortest possible time,” says Paolo Santi, a member of the Italian National Research Council and researcher in the SENSEable City Lab.

One of the main attributes of an autonomous road network of the future is the increased productivity of traffic congestion, particularly in grid-like cities full of time-killing and traffic-clogging intersections. I am extremely confident in the technology of the car being more than capable of handling the navigation for me while I double fist two Quarter Pounders with Big Mac sauce.But this MIT video has me unsettled. With all of the computing technology of a fully-autonomous car, the simulation in the video depicts the autonomous traffic of the future having the capability to time the cars in a free-flowing network, rather than the current system of timed or sensor-activated stop light intersections.

In these slot-based intersections (SIs) Cars will move slower, but more efficiently since they don’t have to stop. This “slower is faster” form of traffic management is a well-known principle that already is being used to move crowds of people through building entrances, passageways, and other narrow areas. In the model published by SENSEable City Lab, the traffic-based system is so efficient that it could support twice as many cars without any impact on the rate of travel, claims the researchers.

Speeding up my commute is nice and all, but imagining myself sitting in a car I am not controlling, seeing other vehicles zipping through the intersection ahead of me and my intelligent steel coffin showing no signs of stopping for what would traditionally be a red light is terrifying.

Of course I’m sure the car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure communication systems will prevent a collision, and I’m sure the vehicles and networks will be programmed with mandatory speeds and distances between intersecting vehicles, but it’s still an interestingly risky-feeling prospect.

I’m still excited to give it a try. What better way to wake yourself up on your morning commute than a little game of autonomous car chicken?

Tesla Details the Process for Reserving a Model 3

As reported by The Verge: Tesla just published a blog post with some more details on reserving a Model 3, which is scheduled to debut at an event at the company's Hawthorne, California facility late next week. But "debut" is a lot different from "launch" — the car won't actually be on the road until late 2017, a time frame that Tesla reaffirms in this latest post.

If you want to put your name down for the car, you'll need to either visit a Tesla store on March 31st, which is the date of the unveil, or wait until reservations go live on Tesla's site around the time of the announcement, 8:30PM PT. You'll need to put down $1,000 upfront to get your name on the list. That sounds like a big chunk of change — and it is — but the waiting list is likely to fill up quickly: Tesla is still working through reservations of Model X, which first went into production late last year. Existing Tesla customers will get priority, and Tesla says that the best way to get an early reservation slot will be to go into a store when it opens on the 31st — if you wait until reservations go live on the website that evening, you'll be pretty far behind the curve.

The Model 3 won't launch everywhere simultaneously. The car — Tesla's first mass-market vehicle, and an absolutely critical launch for the company — will first be available on the American west coast before moving east, eventually crossing the pond to "Europe, APAC, and right-hand drive markets."

"We recognize that everyone wants to get their Model 3 as quickly as possible. Our overarching goal is to maximize total customer happiness within the bounds of what is physically possible," Tesla says. And even if you're in the first batch — late 2017 delivery — that's going to be a pretty painful wait.

We expect to know much more next Thursday.