As with El Viento, I hadn’t heard of Sol-Deace before Retro-Bit’s reproduction of it was announced. However, it’s a good partner since, like El Viento, it was developed by Wolf Team.
05.01.2024 - 02:38 / tech.hindustantimes.com / Elon Musk / Jeff Bezos / Space
When the Vulcan rocket lifts off for the first time as soon as next week, multiple billionaires are sure to be watching. Built through a joint venture of Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., the new vehicle is poised to take on Elon Musk's SpaceX and ferry satellites and cargo for the likes of the Pentagon, NASA, and even Amazon.com Inc.
Vulcan is also helping fuel takeover offers for the company building it, the United Launch Alliance. Among them is a multibillion-dollar bid from Blue Origin LLC, the ambitious space venture run by billionaire Jeff Bezos, according to people familiar with the matter.
It's a pivotal moment for ULA, a once-dominant launch provider for the US government whose star has faded in recent years. With SpaceX now leading the commercial market and making inroads with the government on the strength of its reusable Falcon 9 rocket, ULA finds itself needing to adapt to avoid being left behind.
“SpaceX likes to say they have a monopoly” in the launch market, Tory Bruno, ULA's chief executive officer, said in an October interview. “They don't.”
Vulcan, set to debut early Monday after almost a decade in development, enters a market starved for more capacity. The rocket is meant to be a cheaper, all-American alternative to ULA's legacy Atlas and Delta vehicles to carry the government's highest profile satellites.
If Vulcan proves it can fly — and then fly again and again — the vehicle is the company's best hope to gain ground on Musk's launch behemoth. ULA, which also aims to build out the commercial side of its business, has already signed contracts worth billions for roughly 70 Vulcan missions.
“It's important to demonstrate success as soon as they can,” said Cristina Chaplain, an independent space analyst and former director at the Government Accountability Office overseeing space and defense programs. “They really want to be able to stay in the game.”
ULA was formed by Boeing and Lockheed in 2006. The pioneering venture had “a virtual monopoly on US government launches” in those early years, said George Sowers, the company's former chief scientist. Those contracts were sweetened with extra money to ensure the Defense Dept. could maintain access to space at a time when there were few viable launch providers.
But the ownership structure — with two publicly traded companies that compete for defense contracts — also muddied its strategy. Sowers, who's now a professor at the Colorado School of Mines, likened it to “being owned by the Hatfields and McCoys.”
“Trying to get them to agree on anything at the level of the board of directors was nearly impossible,” he said.
Unlike newer launch rivals that have tapped the public and private markets for capital in pursuit of ambitious new technologies,
As with El Viento, I hadn’t heard of Sol-Deace before Retro-Bit’s reproduction of it was announced. However, it’s a good partner since, like El Viento, it was developed by Wolf Team.
Ever since he took over X (formerly Twitter), billionaire Elon Musk has implemented a myriad of changes on the microblogging platform. It started with mass layoffs which saw the reduction in over 80 percent of X's workforce. Then, Musk stopped legacy verification and brought out Twitter Blue, following which Larry the Bird was phased out and Twitter was officially rebranded to X. All these changes have been introduced in a bid to make it a super app that can compete with China's WeChat, offering services such as audio, video, messaging, and potentially payments and banking. However, that isn't attracting advertisers on the platform, even though X's latest move involves becoming a “video-first platform”. Know all about it.
This is not investment advice. The author has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Wccftech.com has a disclosure and ethics policy.
When the first US-made moon lander launched in more than 50 years experienced a critical failure shortly after reaching space on Monday, the news was initially a shock. But NASA was prepared. The Peregrine lander, built by a Pittsburgh-based startup called Astrobotic, had barely been deployed into orbit before it suffered an apparent propulsion error, causing it to leak propellant into space. After a day, the company said there was no chance the spacecraft would reach the moon.
Two years after Twitter introduced hexagonal NFT avatars, they're gone: As reported by TechCrunch and confirmed by numerous users, the social media platform has quietly dropped the feature, and reverted all existing NFT avatars to standard ones.
X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, announced a slate of new video shows, including a partnership with former CNN anchor Don Lemon. Lemon will host a 30-minute show on X called “The Don Lemon Show,” airing three times a week “exclusively first” on the platform.
Amazon.com Inc. introduced a new feature that mimics Apple Inc.'s AirPlay while working across different platforms, setting the stage for iPhone and Android users to wirelessly stream video to its TV hardware. The feature, called Matter Casting, is part of a push by Amazon to create interoperable services — an alternative to the propriety technology developed by Apple and Google. It will make it easier for iOS and Android phones to send video to Amazon devices, such as its Fire TV boxes and sticks, as well as the Echo Show 15 smart display.
While X continues to spiral in relevancy, its owner Elon Musk spent the holidays grinding Diablo 4's hardest dungeon and even teamed up with its most popular streamers for some help.
Artificial intelligence technology (AI) has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few months, but so has the number of miscreants using it to defraud people. One of the most prominent dangers emerged recently has been deepfake videos. For the unaware, deepfakes are AI-generated videos, images, and audio that are edited or manipulated to make anyone say or do anything that they did not do in real life. Deepfake videos are mostly being used by cybercriminals for illegal purposes. While nations are drafting and amending IT regulations to deal with this threat, malicious threat actors are all out to carry out these illicit activities, and deepfakes have now entered the crypto world too! Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko recently became the latest victim of deepfakes in the crypto world. Know all about it.
NASA, with the help of its advanced space and ground-based telescopes, has recently tracked an asteroid that is set to pass Earth at very close quarters today, January 6, and the US space agency has shed light on details such as its speed, distance of approach, and more. Apart from posing a threat to Earth, asteroids can also provide valuable resources such as water, metals, and other minerals. In fact, it is surmised that water was brought to Earth by asteroids and comets over a period in excess of millions of years. Research on asteroids is critical since it can provide valuable information on the early stages of the solar system and planetary development. Know all about the asteroid that is set to pass Earth in the coming days.
SpaceX was accused by the US labor board of illegally firing eight employees over an internal letter sharply critical of Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk.
Elon Musk had removed the headlines from article links from X (formerly Twitter) last year to make the post look more appealing. However, later in November, Musk promised that the headlines would be back on the platform in the upcoming updates. Now, X has finally introduced an update in which users can see headlines on the article links on the post. But, as per reports, the headlines do not appear to look similar to the previous version as long headlines may not show the full text. And yes, you may not like it much.