Retired astronaut Bruce McCandless II, the first astronaut to fly untethered from his spacecraft, has died at the age of 80. NASA said McCandless passed away on Thursday in California, but gave no cause of death. The former naval aviator flew in space twice. During a spacewalk in 1984, McCandless tested a hand-controlled maneuvering unit that took him more than 300 feet away from the shuttle Challenger. He jokingly referred to Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk: “That may have been one small step for Neil, but it’s a heck of a big leap for me.”
Elon Musk’s red Tesla Roadster is nestled within the payload shroud for a Falcon Heavy rocket. (Elon Musk via Instagram)
After a flurry of speculation, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is showing off his midnight cherry-red Tesla Roadster sports car as it’s being prepared for its ride atop a Falcon Heavy rocket.
Liftoff from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida is currently set for next month, and if all goes as planned, the car will be put into a long, looping trajectory bridging the orbits of Earth and Mars.
More than 70 observatories analyzed the data from the Aug. 17 event, which came in the form of gravitational waves as well as electromagnetic emissions going all the way from radio waves to gamma rays.
“The amount of information we have been able to extract with one event blows my mind,” Georgia Tech physicist Laura Cadonati, deputy spokesperson for the LIGO team, told Science.
A dermatologist uses a dermatoscope, a type of handheld microscope, to look at skin. Computer scientists at Stanford have created an artificially intelligent diagnosis algorithm for skin cancer that matched the performance of board-certified dermatologists. (Stanford Photo / Matt Young)
Computer scientists have created artificial-intelligence algorithms that are at least as good as trained humans at recognizing the signs of skin cancer or malaria, but does that mean your future physician will be a bot?
Two experts on AI explain in the journal Science why the rapid rise of machine learning could be good for well-paid professionals like dermatologists and epidemiologists, no big deal for workers on the low end of the wage spectrum, but big trouble for employees in the middle.
That’s because those middle-spectrum jobs are particularly vulnerable to the machine-learning treatment, MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Carnegie Mellon University’s Tom Mitchell say.
Embraer’s E195-E2 jet competes with Bombardier’s CS100. (Embraer Photo)
Boeing and Embraer, a Brazilian regional-jet manufacturer, today confirmed that they’re discussing a “potential combination” in the wake of a Wall Street Journal report suggesting that Boeing was looking into acquiring the company,
Tanks for liquid oxygen and liquefied natural gas, the propellants to be used by Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, are lined up at Launch Complex 36 in Florida. (Blue Origin Photo via Twitter)
Blue Origin hasn’t put up the “Grand Opening” sign yet, but there’s clearly business going on at the Florida rocket facilities built by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space venture.
The latest sign came today, when Blue Origin tweeted out a picture of propellant tanks being delivered to Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, which is destined to host Blue Origin’s orbital-class New Glenn rocket.
“Starting to look more and more like a launch pad!” the tweet read.
An artist’s conception shows the sequence leading to the landing of the Dragonfly probe and the deployment of its rotorcraft on Titan. (NASA Illustration)
A rotorcraft that could flit around the Saturnian moon Titan and a probe that could bring a sample back from an already-famous comet have emerged as top prospects for a future NASA mission.
Those two mission concepts were selected for further study from a list of 12 proposals that were submitted for NASA’s New Frontiers portfolio, aimed at space missions with a development cost cap of about $850 million.
Examples of existing New Frontiers projects include the Juno orbiter circling Jupiter, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft that’s on its way to sample a near-Earth asteroid, and the New Horizons probe that flew past Pluto and is now heading toward another icy object on the edge of the solar system.
A showdown is expected to result in one of the two new mission concepts moving onward to its development phase in 2019, NASA said today.
Both concepts call for robotic probes to be launched in the 2020s and yield results in the 2030s.
House Speaker Paul Ryan and Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg share the stage at a town hall meeting at Boeing’s Everett plant in August. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
The Boeing Co. is moving ahead on $300 million in charitable contributions and workplace investments as a response to the tax bill approved by Congress today.
The commitments were laid out in an announcement from Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing’s chairman, president and CEO. They’re well-timed to demonstrate how the bill’s cut in the corporate tax rate could encourage businesses to open their wallets wider.
“On behalf of all our stakeholders, we applaud and thank Congress and the administration for their leadership in seizing this opportunity to unleash economic energy in the United States,” Muilenburg said. “It’s the single most important thing we can do to drive innovation, support quality jobs and accelerate capital investment in our country.”
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket makes use of 27 Merlin engines arranged on three cores. (SpaceX via Elon Musk / Twitter)
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket just got more real, now that billionaire founder Elon Musk has tweeted out pictures of the triple-barreled launch vehicle.
The late-night tweet was accompanied by three views of the rocket cores being processed at SpaceX’s Florida facility in preparation for the rocket’s first test liftoff. That’s scheduled to take place next month from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
There was nary a sign of what’ll go on top of the rocket — a payload shroud that’s due to contain Musk’s cherry-red Tesla Roadster sports car, set up to play David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on the sound system.
But Twitter fans were enchanted nevertheless by the sight of the triple-cored rocket, bristling with 27 Merlin engines at its bottom. “OMG” was a commonreaction.
