Tomorrow’s major NASA/SpaceX launch to the ISS, and more tech news today

Your Tech News Digest via the DGiT Daily Tech Newsletter for Friday, November 13th, 2020. Don’t be scared!

1. Start tomorrow!

SpaceX and NASA Crew 1’s astronaut mission to the International Space Station will start tomorrow, Saturday, November 14th at 7:49 p.m. EST, except in case of bad weather or final hiccups. The rocket is on the launch pad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

• NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi, the most experienced of the four, will launch.
• They will join three other astronauts who are now circling overhead to reach seven in the ISS, their maximum capacity
• This week static fire tests were completed and a full dress rehearsal with the unknown SpaceX spacesuits was completed.
• It was foreseeable for a long time. The launch was originally scheduled for August 30th, but numerous delays on both sides resulted in the November mission.
• After the Crew Dragon Demonstration Mission 2 (the Bob & Doug Mission), NASA postponed the mission to the end of September for the first time.
• Then corrections to the Falcon-9 Merlin 1D rocket engines delayed the missions until October 23, then until October 31 and finally until this launch in mid-November.
• The spaceship Crew Dragon is called Resilience Astronauts naming the vehicle (Twitter).
• The US Air Force’s 45th Weather Squadron now predicts a 70% chance of favorable weather conditions – find L-1 updates (NASA) here.
• And you can follow the expected start during prime time via NASA Live TV on YouTube.

While we’re here, there’s another scheduled launch today: a ULA Atlas V scheduled for approximately 5:13 PM EST from Cape Canaveral (ulalaunch.com).

2. It’s time: Google should need updates to every Android (Android Authority) phone for two years.

3. PS5 is here: Everything you need to know about Sony’s PlayStation 5 (Android Authority) to get started.

4. Apple HomePod Mini Reviews Out: The latest smart speaker is way cheaper, but still haunts Amazon and Google on assistant smarts, overly strict Apple ties, and overall sound quality that is behind Nest Audio and the latest Amazon Echo (The Verge) is stuck. .

5. 3-D music to your ears: New device brings music to your head – no headphones required. Starts today (AP).

6. Apple swears up and down that touchscreen Macs don’t work (Gizmodo). And good: “Why is there a human hand in the Mac App Store that touches MacOS interface elements?”(Twitter). This was later removed!

7. Mac users were unable to launch apps after Apple Verification Server (The Verge) issue.

8. The judge rejects Apple’s “theft” claims in the Epic Games lawsuit: “You really have to have facts” (Ars Technica).

9. The US government says it will not enforce the shutdown of TikTok after a court ruling (The Verge).

10. With PayPal, all US users can now buy, sell and hold cryptocurrency (Engadget).

11. The Pfizer / BioNTech announcement shows the promise of gene-based vaccines (The Verge).

12. In the laboratory’s first meat restaurant, you can eat a cultured chicken sandwich grown from cells in a bioreactor visible through a glass window in its dining room (FastCompany).

13. SpaceX Starlink has some issues as expected, but users are impressed (Ars Technica).

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