As reported by Seeker: Investigators probing why a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket burst into flames on its launch pad two months ago have found the smoking gun. They discovered that the rocket's liquid oxygen accidentally got so cold it became solid. That transformation, in turn, triggered a chemical reaction with a carbon composite container holding liquid helium that is located inside the oxygen tank.
The helium vessel's failure set off a series of explosions that destroyed the rocket and its payload, a $200 million communications satellite that it was due to carry into orbit two days later. The accident occurred as the rocket was being fueled for a routine, pre-launch engine test on Sept. 1.
SpaceX chief Elon Musk called the problem surprising and said it had never been encountered in the history of rocketry.
But it's not completely unexpected. A panel of highly respected aerospace experts told NASA eight months before the accident that the lack of a re-circulation pump aboard the Falcon rocket could be a safety problem.
"We are concerned that there may be insufficient pre-cooling of the tank and plumbing with (SpaceX's) current planned oxidizer fill scenario," former astronaut Thomas Stafford and members of the International Space Station Advisory Committee wrote in a December 2015 letter to NASA.
The letter was released on Friday.
"Without re-circulation there may be stratification of oxidizer temperature that will cause a variation in the input conditions to the oxidizer pump," the letter said.
NASA's space shuttles, for example, used a re-circulation system and pressure lines to help keep liquid oxygen temperatures consistent, Mike Leinbach, former shuttle launch director, told Seeker.
"That's key," said Leinbach.
NASA also has a bit of history with liquid oxygen behaving badly with a composite fuel tank, which was developed as part of the experimental X-33 spaceship in the 1990s.
"The composite tank experienced cracks when fueled in development tests. Composite was used to save weight. Never could overcome it technically, and contributed a lot to the program demise," Leinbach wrote in an email.
Camera view of the inside of the second stage's LOX tank with Helium COPVs.
The Stafford letter raised the lack of a re-circulation pump as part of a broader safety concern about SpaceX's plan to fuel its rockets with astronauts aboard. All previous rockets used to launch humans have been fueled before a crew arrived at the launch pad.
SpaceX is one of two companies NASA has hired to fly astronauts to the space station beginning in 2018.
During a committee meeting last week, Stafford also questioned SpaceX's unorthodox practice of putting helium canisters inside the oxygen tank. The helium, which is part of pressurization system, typically is located outside of the oxygen tank.
SpaceX has not yet said what it will do to fix the fueling system issue, but Musk said Friday said he is aiming to return the Falcon 9 to flight in mid-December.
As reported by Engadget: Researchers can now probe connected devices, computers and cars for security vulnerabilities without risking a lawsuit. Last Friday, the FTC authorized changes to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that will allow Americans to do hack their own electronic devices. Researchers can lawfully reverse engineer products and consumers can repair their vehicle's electronics, but the FTC is only allowing the exemptions for a two-year trial run. The FTC and US Library of Congress enacted similar legislation in 2014 that allows you to unlock your own smartphone. Until today, however, it was illegal to mess with the programs in your car, thermostat or tractor, thanks to strict provisions in the DMCA's Section 1201. That applied even to researchers probing the device security for flaws, a service that helps both the public and manufacturers. For example, researchers commandeered a Jeep on the road to show it could be done, an act that was technically illegal. You could have also been sued just for trying to repair your own electronics. In a well-publicized example, John Deere told farmers that they have no right to root around in the software that runs their tractor even when they're just trying to fix the damned thing. That issue alone prompted over 40,000 public comments to the US Copyright Office demanding stronger ownership rights.
DMCA 1201, and the rulemaking process, create unconstitutional restraints on speech, and need to be struck down by a court or fixed by Congress.
The exemptions have certain restrictions -- consumers are only allowed to do "good-faith" hacking on "lawfully-acquired" devices. That means, for instance, that you can still get in trouble if you gain unauthorized access to a device you don't own. Also, researchers can't probe internet services or public services like airlines either, meaning that the jet hack done last year would still be illegal now.
Groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, iFixit and Repair.org fought to have research and repair activities exempted from the DMCA, since they actually have nothing to do with copyright law. "You could be sued or even jailed for trying to understand the software in your devices, or for helping others do the same," the EFF wrote.
The new exemptions are nice, but critics are still fuming over the fact that they took a year to kick in and are only good for two years. Repair and research advocates say that the process for changing copyright law is unnecessarily expensive and onerous, too. "The one year delay ... was not only a violation of law, not only pointless, but actively counterproductive," the EFF wrote. "DMCA 1201, and the rulemaking process, create unconstitutional restraints on speech and need to be struck down by a court or fixed by Congress."
As reported by Bloomberg: On Friday evening as the sun descended over the old Hollywood set of “Desperate Housewives,” Elon Musk took to a stage and fired up his presentation about climate change. It was a strange scene, with hundreds of people crowded into the middle of a subtly artificial suburban neighborhood.
It wasn’t until about a minute into the speech that Musk casually let the crowd in on Tesla’s big secret. “The interesting thing is that the houses you see around you are all solar houses,” Musk said. “Did you notice?”
The answer, in short, was no. Like everyone else, I knew we were there to see Musk’s new “solar roof,” whatever that was supposed to mean. But try as I could as we walked in, I didn’t see anything that looked like it could carry an electric current. If anything, the slate and Spanish clay roofs looked a bit too nice for a television set. This is the future of solar, Musk proclaimed. “You’ll want to call your neighbors over and say ‘check out the sweet roof.’ It’s not a phrase you hear often.”
The roof tiles are actually made of textured glass. From most viewing angles, they look just like ordinary shingles, but they allow light to pass through from above onto a standard flat solar cell. The plan is for Panasonic to produce the solar cells and for Tesla to put together the glass tiles and everything that goes along with them. That’s all predicated on shareholders approving the $2.2 billion acquisition of SolarCity, the biggest U.S. rooftop installer, on Nov. 17.
Tesla says the tempered glass is “tough as steel,” and can weather a lifetime of abuse from the elements. It can also be fitted with heating elements to melt snow in colder climates. “It’s never going to wear out,” Musk said, “It’s made of quartz. It has a quasi-infinite lifetime.”
In a Q&A with reporters after the presentation, Musk said the tiles are comparable to competing high-efficiency solar panels. The current prototypes that Tesla engineers are working with reduce the efficiency of the underlying solar cell by just 2 percent. With further refinement, Musk said he hopes the microscopic louvers responsible for making the tiles appear opaque can be used to actually boost the efficiency of standard photovoltaic cells.
Putting the pieces together
The vision presented at Universal Studios in Los Angeles is the grand unification of Musk’s clean-energy ambitions. The audience was able to step into a future powered entirely by Tesla: a house topped with sculpted Tuscan solar tiles, where night-time electricity is stored in two sleek wall-hung Powerwall batteries, and where a Model 3 prototype electric car sits parked out front within reach of the home’s car charger.
Attracting less attention on Wisteria Lane was Tesla’s Powerwall 2, a major upgrade of its home battery for electricity storage. When the original Powerwall was released last year, I was skeptical. Mostly, it was just too pricey for the amount of power it provided, especially in the U.S. where electricity is cheap and most people can sell their excess solar power back to the grid. Version 2 is a much different product. It packs more than twice the capacity—14 kilowatt hours versus 6.4 kilowatt hours—for less than half the price after installation. 1 It includes a built-in Tesla-brand inverter and comes with a ten year, infinite-cycle warranty.
Electricity storage is crucial for future uptake of solar power. Already in some solar-heavy regions, more electricity is being produced during the middle of the day than people can consume, and utility prices spike in the evening hours when the sun goes down. In the U.S., some states are abandoning payments for daytime rooftop solar, undermining huge investments that families have made in their solar systems. The only recourse is for customers to use that electricity themselves, at night.
Like previous attempts at solar shingles, the solar-plus-battery package hasn’t really caught on yet. SolarCity’s total bundled sales thus far number in just the hundreds. But an argument can be made that the products just weren't compelling enough yet and the prices were still too high.
The Powerwall 2 may be the cheapest lithium ion battery for the home ever made when deliveries start in January. Tesla is selling the batteries at retail prices that are cheaper than the average manufacturing cost at most companies, according to data compiled by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. We "certainly expect it will move the market prices downwards as we saw last year with the first Powerwall," said Yayoi Sekine, a BNEF analyst who covers battery technology.
“The future is going to overwhelmingly be solar plus battery,” Musk said. "They go together like peanut butter and jelly."
Let’s wait and see
Powerwall 2 looks ready for primetime. The new solar shingles? Let’s wait until more details emerge. Tesla says we should expect a slow initial rollout beginning in about nine months. Within two years of production, the shingles could account for five percent of the five million roofs installed in the U.S. every year, said Peter Rive, SolarCity’s co-founder and chief technology officer. SolarCity, under the Tesla brand, would also continue to sell surface-mounted solar panels for homeowners who have no plans for replacing their existing roofs.
The pricing on the new solar roof is a bit—squishy. Musk said that someone who buys a Tesla roof will save money compared with someone who buys a comparable traditional roof plus electricity from the grid. But make no mistake: This will be a premium product, at least when it first rolls out. The terra cotta and slate roofs Tesla mimicked are among the most expensive roofing materials on the market. SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive noted that the price of a conventional roof can vary widely, from $7,000 to $70,000—based on materials, size, complexity, location—so giving out firm prices of a solar roof at this point would be difficult.
Telsa will release more financial information about the SolarCity deal this week before it goes to shareholders for a vote. If all of Musk's plans come true, by the end of next year you'll be able to walk into a Tesla store, buy a Model 3 electric car, a slate-glass solar roof, and a Powerwall 2 to manage the flow of all those electrons in your life. There are a lot of details to be hammered out until we know for certain whether Musk’s vision for a grand unification will become more than just a great television backdrop. But these tiles, viewed up close, are definitely worth tuning in for.
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As reported by Wired: IN LESS THAN 12 hours, three different people offered to pay me if I’d spend an hour talking to a stranger on the phone.
All three said they’d enjoyed reading an article I’d written about Google building a new computer chip for artificial intelligence, and all three urged me to discuss the story with one of their clients. Each described this client as the manager of a major hedge fund, but wouldn’t say who it was.
The requests came from what are called expert networks—research firms that connect investors with people who can help them understand particular markets and provide a competitive edge (sometimes, it seems, through insider information). These expert networks wanted me to explain how Google’s AI processor would affect the chip market. But first, they wanted me to sign a non-disclosure agreement. I declined.
These unsolicited, extremely specific, high-pressure requests—which arrived about three week ago—underscore the radical changes underway in the enormously lucrative computer chip market, changes driven by the rise of artificial intelligence. Those hedge fund managers see these changes coming, but aren’t quite sure how they’ll play out.
Of course, no one is quite sure how they’ll play out.
Today, Internet giants like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and China’s Baidu are exploring a wide range of chip technologies that can drive AI forward, and the choices they make will shift the fortunes of chipmakers like Intel and nVidia. But at this point, even the computer scientists within those online giants don’t know what the future holds.
Going Deep
These companies run their online services from data centers packed with thousands of servers, each driven by a chip called a central processing unit, or CPU. But as they embrace a form of AI called deep neural networks, these companies are supplementing CPUs with other processors. Neural networks can learn tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data, including everything from identifing faces and objects in photos to translating between languages, and they require more than just CPU power.
And so Google built the Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU. Microsoft is using a processor called a field programmable gate array, or FPGA. Myriad companies employ machines equipped with vast numbers of graphics processing units, or GPUs. And they’re all looking at a new breed of chip that could accelerate AI from inside smartphones and other devices.
Any choice these companies make matters, because their online operations are so vast. They buy and operate far more computer hardware than anyone else on Earth, a gap that will only widen with the continued importance of cloud computing. If Google chooses one processor over another, it can fundamentally shift the chip industry.
The TPU poses a threat to companies like Intel and nVidia because Google makes this chip itself. But GPUs also play an enormous role within Google and its ilk, and nVidia is the primary manufacturer of these specialized chips. Meanwhile, Intel has inserted itself into the mix by acquiring Altera, the company that sells all those FPGAs to Microsoft. At $16.7 billion, it was Intel’s largest acquisition ever, which underscores just how much the chip market is changing.
First, Training. Then, Execution
But sorting all this out is difficult—in part because neutral networks operate in two stages. The first is the training stage, where a company like Google trains the neural network to perform a given task, like recognizing faces in photos or translating from one language to another. The second is the execution stage, where people like you and me actually use the neural net—where we, say, post a photo of our high school reunion to Facebook and it automatically tags everyone in it. These two stages are quite different, and each requires a different style of processing.
Today, GPUs are the best option for training. Chipmakers designed GPUs to render images for games and other highly graphical applications, but in recent years, companies like Google discovered these chips can also provide an energy-efficient means of juggling the mind-boggling array of calculations required to train a neural network. This means they can train more neural nets with less hardware. Microsoft AI researcher XD Huang calls GPUs “the real weapon.” Recently, his team completed a system that can recognize certain conversational speech as well as humans, and it took them about a year. Without GPUs, he says, it would have taken five. After Microsoft published a research paper on this system, he opened a bottle of champagne at the home of Jen-Hsun Huang, the CEO of nVidia.
But companies also need chips that can rapidly execute neural networks, a process called inference. Google built the TPU specifically for this. Microsoft uses FPGAs. And Baidu is using GPUs, which aren’t as well suited to inference as they are to training, but can do the job with the right software in place.
To the Smartphone
At the same time, others are building chips to help execute neural networks on smartphones and other devices. IBM is building such a chip, though some wonder how effective it might be. And Intel has agreed to acquire Movidius, a company that is already pushing chips into devices.
Intel understands that the market is changing. Four years ago, the chip maker told us it sells more server processors to Google than it sells to all but four other companies—so it sees firsthand how Google and its ilk can shift the chip market. As a result, it’s now placing bets everywhere. Beyond snapping up Altera and Movidius, it has agreed to buy a third AI chip company called Nervana.
That makes sense, because the market is only starting to develop. “We’re now at the precipice of the next big wave of growth,” Intel vice president Jason Waxman recently told me, “and that’s going to be driven by artificial intelligence.” The question is where the wave will take us.
An AI feedback loop annotates 'noise' with ghostly images it's been trained to see.
As reported by Engadget: If you're in Colorado and grab a can of Budweiser, it's possible that you might be sipping beer delivered by Uber's autonomous truck company. Today, Otto confirmed that on October 20th, it "completed the world's first shipment by a self-driving truck," a delivery that involved transporting 2,000 cases (or 51,744 cans) of Bud from Fort Collins, Colorado to Colorado Springs along Interstate 25.
Although impressive, this "world first" is mostly promotional. The Verge reports that a human driver first navigated the truck from a Anheuser-Busch depot to a weigh station in Fort Collins. From there, Otto's self-driving technology was deployed and the Volvo big rig drove the remaining 100 miles to Colorado Springs without any outside assistance. Once it entered the city, the driver -- who monitored the journey from the sleeper berth in the back -- resumed control and completed the final maneuvers.
With Uber's self-driving cars taking to US streets and Otto now starting to make its first shipments, the company is finally starting to realize its vision as a logistics company. Right now, deliveries are marketed as a step towards a "safe and productive future" across US highways, allowing drivers to rest while their vehicle does the hard miles. However, with Uber's rapid expansion into cities worldwide, it likely won't be long until it's self-driving trucks can negotiate confusing inter-city streets too.
To mark the Budweiser milestone, Uber is now inviting potential partners to inquire about its haulage offering, which it's now calling Uber Freight. "Our partnership with Anheuser-Busch is just beginning," says the company in a blog post. "Our companies are excited to transform commercial transportation together."
But, before Teslas can start driving autonomously, the company needs to collect a lot of data to prove to customers (and regulators) that the technology is safe and reliable. So, the car will run Autopilot in “shadow mode” in order for Tesla to gather statistical data to show false positives and false negatives of the software. In shadow mode, the car isn’t taking any action, but it registers when it would have taken action. Then, if the Tesla is in an accident, the company can see if the autonomous mode would have avoided the accident (or the other way around, with the self-driving system potentially causing an accident).
It will record how the car would have acted if the computer was in control, including information about how the car might have avoided an accident (or caused one). That data would then be used to show “a material improvement in the accident rate over manually driven cars,” said Tesla CEO Elon Musk on a call with reporters today. “I think at that point regulators would be comfortable approving it.”
Musk said that he hopes the US will not end up with a patchwork of autonomous regulations across states, noting that the EU appears like it will have a unified standard. He hopes that Tesla’s collection of statistical data regarding potential autonomous vehicle actions — millions of miles across thousands of cars driving in the real world — will help regulators be comfortable enough to sign off on his self-driving vision.
“We look carefully at the regulations and make sure that what we do is in line with those,” Musk said. “We can’t do anything other than that because it would be against the law.”
Tesla also announced it is giving all its new cars the hardware for “full self-driving capabilities,” including 8 cameras with 360-degree viewing at up to 820 feet of distance, as well as 12 ultrasonic sensors that can detect both hard and soft objects. A new forward-facing radar helps see through rain, fog, and dust.
“The full autonomy update will be standard on all Tesla vehicles from here on out,” Musk says.
The updates are included in all new Tesla vehicles built from today forward — however, don’t expect your new Model X to be fully autonomous when you pick it up. Tesla says it needs to “further calibrate the system using millions of miles of real-world driving” before it hands your car fully over to a computer.
On the call about the new hardware, Musk said the hardware is fully capable of “Level 5 autonomy,” a big step forward.
Most significantly, new Teslas won’t have access to some safety features that older Teslas have, including automatic emergency braking, collision warning, lane holding, and active cruise control. The company says that these features will be activated after they are “robustly validated.”
“As always, our over-the-air software updates will keep customers at the forefront of technology and continue to make every Tesla, including those equipped with first-generation Autopilot and earlier cars, more capable over time,” said the Tesla statement.
In essence, it reads as though Tesla has put together a better, more powerful hardware system for these safety and autonomous driving features, but this new system isn’t going to be ready for real use right away. That’s a disappointing dip in the road, but apparently a necessary one.
Musk started off the call with a testy answer - defending Tesla Autopilot and laying into media outlets that don’t put the accidents that have happened from it into the proper context. Autonomous driving is so much safer, Musk argues, that outlets that put too much emphasis on the crash are “killing people.” He then added: “next question.” Musk says that the “Tesla Neural Net” doesn’t require any third party hardware sensors, and that it’s based on the Nvidia Titan GPU (although it could run on other processors). He says that it’s 40 times more powerful than the last Tesla computer, “it’s basically a supercomputer in a car,” he said. “We go from one camera to eight cameras,” Musk said. Three of them are forward cameras, for redundancy, and the rest provide “360 coverage” for the rest of the car. The new Teslas will also have 360-ultrasonic sonar. “I think is is very hard to turn into a kit,” Musk said, so it won’t be sold to other car makers. All the cameras and sensors he is talking about won’t cause “weird protuberances” or make the cars look funny. Musk also promised a demonstration of a fully autonomous drive from Los Angeles to New York by the end of 2017. Musk largely begged off talking about what the regulation would or should be but he did note that the computer will “always be running in ‘shadow mode,’” so that he can build the case that his self-driving software would have been safer than human drivers.
Fully-autonomous Teslas are getting closer to reality. Yesterday, the electric carmaker announced that all new vehicles will come with extra hardware to support "full self-driving capabilities,” and this morning, the company posted a video showing exactly what that hardware can do. The self-driving software is not finished and has yet to be approved by regulators, but the four-minute clip is nonetheless impressive, showing a Tesla leaving a garage, driving across town, and finding its own parking spot — all autonomously. There is someone sat in the driver's seat, as per current legal requirements, but they never touch the wheel. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who posted the clip to Twitter, notes that the car is even smart enough to driver past a disabled parking spot, knowing it's not allowed to park there. He also highlighted the car's summon function:
All of this technology is a long way from being implemented, but it does raise some interesting questions. Like, what happens if you summon a Tesla on your phone while you are moving (say on a train, or in another form of transportation like a taxi) — will the car follow you round indefinitely, or will it only drive to the initial summon location? It's all to come.