NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has confirmed in a tweet that the space agency is working with movie star Tom Cruise on a project that involves shooting a film on the International Space Station.
Month: May 2020
A Boeing-led team has presented the Royal Australian Air Force with its first “Loyal Wingman” aircraft, an AI-equipped drone that’s designed to fly in coordination with crewed military airplanes.
The latest projection from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Modeling and Evaluation says the coronavirus pandemic will claim nearly 135,000 lives in the U.S. by August, in part because many states are easing their social distancing restrictions.
Other projections also foresee a deadlier spring: A presentation purportedly prepared for the Trump administration and leaked to The New York Times and The Washington Post projects that there’ll be as many as 3,000 deaths per day in the U.S. by June 1, with a sharp increase coming around May 14. That’s significantly higher than the current pace of roughly 1,500 daily deaths, and close to the previous peak rate reported in mid-April.
The White House and the Centers for Disease Control disavowed the slide presentation, which carried the CDC’s logo. The Post quoted one of the researchers providing the data for the presentation, Justin Lasser of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, as saying that the modeling work was not complete and that the projection was only one of a range of forecasts.
The Institute for Health Modeling and Evaluation’s projections have been closely watched by the White House and other policymakers — in part because they’ve provided specific albeit variable estimates of total deaths. But the IHME’s projections also have come in for significant criticism from other quarters — in part because the models are based on tracking the course of the pandemic in various regions of the world, rather than the epidemiological characteristics of the virus.
Considering the fact that Blue Origin was founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, you’d think that the Seattle-area space venture would be one of the pioneers in online merchandise sales.
But the company has just now opened its online store to the general public, offering Blue-branded apparel, caps and accessories such as water bottles, coffee mugs and luggage tags. And yes, you can use Amazon Pay to handle the order (or not, if that’s your preference).
This comes years after Elon Musk’s SpaceX began selling merchandise online. Blue Origin could still learn a few lessons from SpaceX when it comes to the merch department: SpaceX’s inventory includes lots more stuff, from the low end (sticker assortments) to the midrange (model rockets, posters and branded tumblers) to the premium selections (soft-shell jackets).
London’s Telegraph newspaper reports that Amazon is understood to be among the entities sifting through the assets of OneWeb, a venture that began building a constellation of broadband internet satellites but filed for bankruptcy in March.
Amazon’s interest has to do with its plans to create its own broadband constellation, known as Project Kuiper. The most attractive assets that OneWeb has to offer would arguably be its rights to radio frequency spectrum and its access to the U.S. market — advantages that Amazon currently lacks.
Among the other entities looking at OneWeb’s assets, according to the Space Intel Report, are SpaceX, Eutelsat and the British government.
Everything is in readiness for the first mission to send humans into orbit from U.S. soil since NASA retired the space shuttle fleet in 2011 – from the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule that will take two astronauts to the International Space Station, to the parachutes that will bring them back down gently to an Atlantic Ocean splashdown, to the masks that NASA’s ground team will wear in Mission Control.
The fact that the launch is coming in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic has added a weird and somewhat wistful twist to the history-making event.
“That certainly is disappointing,” NASA astronaut Doug Hurley, who’ll be spacecraft commander for the Crew Dragon demonstration mission, told reporters today during a mission preview. “An aspect of this pandemic is the fact that we won’t have the luxury of our family and friends being there at Kennedy to watch the launch. But it’s obviously the right thing to do.”
NASA is asking people not to show up in person to watch the liftoff, currently scheduled for 4:32 p.m. ET (1:32 p.m. PT) May 27 at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
For the first time, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo rocket plane flew free in the skies over New Mexico’s Spaceport America, its new base of operations.
The SpaceShipTwo plane, known as VSS Unity, has made rocket-powered flights beyond the 50-mile space milestone during tests at California’s Mojave Air and Space Port, but today’s unpowered test flight was the first to be flown from Spaceport America.
The Food and Drug Administration today authorized emergency use of the experimental antiviral drug remdesivir for treating COVID-19 in the wake of encouraging results from a federally backed clinical trial.
It’s been a year and a half since the assets of Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining venture headquartered in Redmond, Wash., were acquired by a blockchain venture called ConsenSys. Now we’re finding out what ConsenSys is doing with those assets.