Cosmic Log
China took less than 24 hours to respond to proposed U.S. tariffs with a 106-item list of its own that could affect $50 billion worth of U.S. imports, potentially including some of Boeing’s 737 airplanes.
The impact on Boeing isn’t yet clear, and the tit-for-tat trade sanctions on aerospace goods have not yet been implemented. Hours after China announced its move, Boeing issued a statement voicing hope that Washington and Beijing will be able to avoid a trade war.
Two days after its launch, SpaceX’s uncrewed Dragon cargo capsule was pulled in for its hookup to the International Space Station today.
A research team led by an University of Washington oceanographer has published the largest known set of songs from bowhead whales, the jazz singers of the cetacean tribe.
An analysis of 184 different songs, recorded between 2010 and 2014, finds that bowhead whales swimming in the Arctic Ocean east of Greenland have a surprisingly diverse repertoire of vocalizations.
“If humpback whale song is like classical music, bowheads are jazz,” study lead author Kate Stafford of UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory said in a news release. “The sound is more free form. And when we looked through four winters of acoustic data, not only were there never any song types repeated between years, but each season had a new set of songs.”
Stafford and her colleagues published their findings in today’s issue of Biology Letters.
A California-based aerial delivery venture called Zipline has unveiled what it calls “the fastest commercial delivery drone on Earth,” capable of flying as fast as 80 mph (128 km/h).
Sustained cruising speed for the latest version of Zipline’s fixed-wing drone is almost 63 mph (101 km/h), which is about 13 mph faster than the previous version. It has a round-trip range of 100 miles, and can carry a maximum load of nearly 4 pounds.
The drone isn’t the only thing that’s been upgraded: Changes in the company’s logistics system have reduced the time from receipt of an order to the launch of a fulfillment flight from 10 minutes to one minute.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative today rolled out a list of $50 billion worth of Chinese-made goods that could be hit by import tariffs, marking the latest volley in what some fear could turn into a trade war.
The items range from components for spacecraft and aircraft, to robots and other industrial tools, to pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, to television sets, dishwashers and even sewing machine needles.
The 45-page, 1,300-item list was developed as a response to what the Trump administration says are China’s efforts to take unfair advantage of technologies and intellectual property developed in the U.S. Listed items could be subject to an added import duty of 25 percent.
California-based Deep Space Industries says it has signed a contract to provide water-spraying thrusters for the BlackSky Earth observation satellites that are due to be built in Seattle.
The contract covers an initial block of 20 Comet water-based satellite propulsion systems. The systems expel superheated water vapor as propellant to adjust the attitude of small spacecraft in orbit.
Twenty satellites are scheduled to go into orbit by 2020 in the first phase of an Earth observation effort managed by BlackSky, a subsidiary of Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries. The first satellite, dubbed Global-1, is due for launch this year.
NASA says Lockheed Martin will be its partner in building a supersonic test plane that’s designed to muffle sonic booms and clear the way for a new boom in faster-than-sound passenger flights.
California-based Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co. won the $247.5 million contract to build the Low-Boom Flight Demonstrator, or LBFD, after putting in the sole bid for the project, NASA officials said today.
NASA’s acting administrator, Robert Lightfoot, said boom-reducing aerodynamics will be a “game-changer” for civilian flight — a view that was voiced by other officials as well.
SpaceX sent nearly three tons of supplies, hardware and experiments to the International Space Station today, using a Falcon 9 rocket booster and a Dragon capsule that have both been flown before.
The rocket rose from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 4:30 p.m. ET (1:30 p.m. PT).
“We had a perfectly nominal mission, as we like around here,” SpaceX launch commentator John Federspiel said during a webcast from the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. “Falcon 9 performed its job splendidly.”
It’s the second “refurbish-and-reuse” mission of its kind. The first flight of a refurbished Falcon 9 first-stage booster with a reused Dragon took place last December.
A working paper written for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that about 14 percent of the jobs in 32 OECD countries, including the U.S., are at high risk of being automated.
That raw figure may not sound as dire as some of the previous numbers cited for the effect of automation and artificial intelligence on employment, and that’s what’s been grabbing the headlines over the past couple of days. But a close reading of the report, published last month, shouldn’t lead anyone to brush off the issue — as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin did last year.
The authors of the study, Ljubica Nedelkoska and Glenda Quintini, say the level of automation risk varies widely from country to country. Slovakia comes in on the high side (33 percent), while the projected risk is only 6 percent in Norway.
The high-risk percentage for the U.S. is 10 percent, which is significantly lower than the 47 percent that was cited in a provocative 2013 study by Oxford researchers. But even 10 percent translates to about 15 million U.S. jobs.
China’s Tiangong-1 space lab is no more.
The 8.5-ton spacecraft re-entered the atmosphere at about 5:15 p.m. PT today (00:15 GMT on April 2) over the Pacific Ocean, and any pieces that survived the fiery plunge should have fallen into the central area of the South Pacific, Chinese space officials said.
The U.S. military’s Joint Force Space Component Command issued a similar report, setting the time of re-entry at about 5:16 p.m.