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🔋 Hello everyone! Battery charged, and thanks to Nick for covering up. With the Labor Day holidays on Monday, I’m sending a shorter and sweeter version to start the week.
Virgin Galactic’s core spaceship, SpaceShipTwo, is now grounded pending investigation (Reuters).
Why? Well, it seems from “The red warning light on Richard Branson’s space flight“According to a detailed New Yorker Report released this week on the famous / infamous Virgin Galactic flight earlier this year that took billionaire Richard Branson to the edge of space and defeated Jeff Bezos.
It’s a damning report because it … seems uncertain at best? In short, it is reported that the flight did not go according to plan, which is not entirely unexpected given the various premieres.
- But the VSS Unity went off course during its ascent and issued warnings.
- It was flying in unauthorized airspace and the spacecraft was unable to reach its intended trajectory.
- That risked a dangerous descent and a dangerous landing with a red warning light: Virgin Galactic pilots Dave Mackay and Mike Masucci were aware of the problem.
Details:
- First a yellow light: a “warning to the pilots that their flight path was too flat and that the nose of the ship was not sufficiently vertical,” writes the author of the article, Nicholas Schmidle. “If they didn’t fix it, they risked a dangerous emergency landing in the desert on the descent.”
- Then the red light: an “entry slip cone warning”, which is described as a “big deal”.
- During a meeting in 2015, the report said that Mike Masucci himself said that this red warning light “should scare you to death.”
- “According to multiple sources in the company, the surest way to respond to the warning would have been to abort. (A Virgin Galactic spokesman denied this claim.)
- “An abort at this moment would have dashed Branson’s hopes of defeating his rival Bezos, whose flight was planned for the end of the month, into space. Mackay and Masucci didn’t cancel. Whether or not her decision was motivated by programmatic pressure and the hopes of her billionaire bankroll in the background remains unclear.
- “An FAA spokesman confirmed that Virgin Galactic had “deviated from its air traffic control clearance” and that an “investigation was ongoing”.
the New Yorker Report further challenges the company’s safety culture, which Virgin Galatic has denied in various statements.
- Anyway, tickets are $ 450,000!
📸 In the future, Samsung could include OIS, a flagship camera function, in its mid-range and value smartphones of the Galaxy A series (Android authority).
📺 Amazon could very soon launch its own Alexa-powered TV from TCL in the US, but Amazon makes one of its own … (Android authority).
🎧 Why You Should (and Why Not) Care About Bluetooth Lossless Audio (Android authority).
👉 Microsoft may have just announced Android app support for Xbox, which would be interesting (Android authority).
💸 WhatsApp cops pay a whopping $ 267 million fine for violating privacy laws in Ireland, but Facebook will appeal (Android authority).
🍎 New details on Apple’s AR headset and SoC suggest it leaves much of the processing to a connected iPhone, but has a unique focus on “compressing and decompressing video” and “transferring wireless data between the headset and the host. ”Which makes a lot of sense (Ars-Technica).
🍏 Huge leak reveals tons of Apple Watch Series 7 secrets, including details about the new larger sizes and even new watch faces (Android authority).
🤔 After the iPhone 13, the future of Apple’s iPhone Mini hangs in the balance (CNET).
📉 GM stops production at North American plants due to ongoing chip shortages (Engadget).
👉 A brief overview of IBM’s new 7 nm Telum mainframe CPU with 256 cores (Ars-Technica).
🔴 The second time is the charm: NASA’s Perseverance is drilling Martian rocks again, and it seems to have worked (Wired).
💰 Have fun with r / ReallyShittyCopper, a subreddit dedicated to Ea-Nasir, “an Iraqi merchant around 1750 BC(Wikipedia).
🤔 “Is it possible that the microphone in your phone is listening to targeted ads?” (Lots of interesting discussions, although the answer is no) (r / nostupidquestions). BTW, could Reddit go public? (Reuters).
Moonfall has been announced and a film will be released early next year. Moonfall is a disaster film about the falling moon(The edge).
- No really: “A mysterious force is pushing the moon out of its orbit around the earth and sending it on a collision course with life as we know it.” It seems loosely based on a book of the same name?
- It was made by Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, 2012, etc.) which tells you that it’s overdone and funny and probably a little bit silly.
- Aside from the general craze for funny disaster movies, this has also resulted in people asking for a movie or TV series based on Seveneves, the science fiction book about the exploding moon.
- You can read the first 26 pages of this book by Neal Stephenson here.
All the best here on earth,
Tristan Rayner, Managing Editor.
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