Max Q: NASA signs up new Moon delivery companies

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There were lot of highlights in the space industry this past week (even though a rocket launch that was supposed to happened is now pushed to Monday). The biggest news for commercial space might just be that NASA signed on five new companies to its list of approved vendors for lunar payload delivery services, bringing the total group to 14.

SpaceX is among them, and Musk’s company had its own fair share of news this week, too – some good, some bad. One things’ for sure: Even going in to the last week in November, there’s still plenty of news to come in this industry before the year’s out.

1. NASA selects five new vendors for commercial lunar payloads

Artist’s rendering of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander.

The five include Blue Origin, SpaceX, Ceres Robotics, Sierra Nevada Corporation and Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems. This doesn’t necessarily mean all or any of these companies will actually fly anything to the Moon on behalf of NASA, but it does mean they can officially bid for the chance. Alongside 9 other companies selected previously by NASA, their bids will be considered by the NASA based on cost, viability and other factors.

1. SpaceX Starship prototype blows its lid

This is the bad news I referred to earlier: SpaceX’s Starship Mk1 prototype in Texas blew up just a little bit during cryo testing. This test is designed to simulate extreme cold conditions that the spacecraft could endure during flight, and it clearly didn’t. But Elon Musk was optimistic, saying just after the incident that they’ll move on to a more advanced design right away.

1. Sierra Nevada Corporation details an expendable cargo container for its Dream Chaser spaceship

SNC’s Shooting Star module. Credit: SNC.

One of the companies that is now included in NASA’s lunar payload service provider list is Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC). They’re currently developing and building their Dream Chaser spacecraft, which is reusable and lands like the Space Shuttle. At an event at Cape Canaveral in Florida, they unveiled what they call the ‘Shooting Star’ – an ejectable single use cargo container for the Dream Chaser that can really add to its versatility.

1. Nanoracks will launch a test craft that can convert old spaceships into orbital habitats

This demonstration mission is just a start, but the tech that Nanoracks is launching aboard a future SpaceX launch will be able to cut metal in space, marking the first time a robotic piece of equipment has done that. The ultimate goal is to use this tech to take spent spacecraft upper stages and give them new life – as research platforms, satellites or even habitats in orbit.

1. NASA’s JPL is using the Antarctic to test a rover for a trip to Enceladus

That’s one of Saturn’s moons, and it’s made up of icy oceans. Normally, that’s not an optimal place for a rover to get around, but the agency’s laboratory has been testing a design in the Earth’s coldest oceans to see how viable it will be, and now they’re going to use the Antarctic, which is where it’ll test it for months at a time.

1. Tesla’s Cybertruck is made of Starship steel

Elon Musk revealed Tesla’s crazy, beautiful, ugly, strange Cybertruck pickup last week, and he noted that the stainless steel alloy that makes up its skin is the same material that SpaceX is developing and using on its new Starship spacecraft. Sometimes, being CEO of both a car company and a space company at the same time really pays off.

1. Space is inspiring new kinds of startups

A lot of large companies outsource at least part of their innovation management and design, and with the space boom on, there’s a new opportunity for companies to emerge that specialize in helping those same large companies find out where they fit in this new frontier. Luna is one such co, putting the puzzle pieces together for health tech companies.

ColdQuanta, which uses ultracold atom tech, where atoms are cooled using lasers to manufacture components for quantum computing, raises $16.75M in seed funding (FinSMEs)

FinSMEs:
ColdQuanta, which uses ultracold atom tech, where atoms are cooled using lasers to manufacture components for quantum computing, raises $16.75M in seed funding  —  ColdQuanta, Inc., a Boulder, CO-based quantum atomics company, closed a $10M additional seed round equity financing.

How Bhiwandi has rebuilt itself to become a logistics hub for online retailers

A city known for its century-old power looms is the nerve centre of India's e-commerce operations. https://ift.tt/34gl2R3 https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Review: Knives Out is a delightfully twisty homage to classic whodunnits

Enlarge / Daniel Craig sports a southern accent and plenty of panache as Det. Benoit Blanc in Knives Out. (credit: YouTube/Lionsgate)

A wealthy family patriarch dies under mysterious circumstances and a brilliant detective suspects foul play in Knives Out, Director Rian Johnson's terrific postmodern take on the classic whodunnit. Frankly, I can't tell you much without spoiling the fun—there are twists upon twists upon twists throughout—but the film should be on everybody's must-see list.

(We are very mindful of spoilers below, apart from brief descriptions of the premise and main characters, and well-known tropes of classic mystery novels.)

It's not as much of a radical departure for Johnson as it might seem. His debut feature film, Brick (2005), was a crime drama with film noir overtones, largely inspired by the works of Dashiell Hammett and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. (The actor would go on to star in Johnson's third film, 2012's Looper.) For Brick, Johnson had his actors read Hammett and watch classic screwball comedies like His Girl Friday to bring a lighter touch to the traditional noir genre.

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Hulu is down, and nobody’s sure why

Hulu is currently down.

We’re not sure why, and neither does Hulu. A stream of tweets complaining about the outage surfaced Sunday morning on the U.S. east coast, but it seems like a global outage. In response, Hulu’s Twitter support didn’t seem to know either, instead telling frustrated users that it’s looking into it.

Fantastic. We’ve reached out for comment. Stay tuned for more. (Or switch to another streaming service instead.)

Single people in their 50s open up to the idea of using dating apps

A lot of single folk in the 50 and above age group are taking to dating apps to ward off their loneliness. https://ift.tt/2Ddr6h6 https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Original Content podcast: Netflix’s ‘Rhythm + Flow’ tweaks the music competition formula

“Rhythm + Flow” is Netflix’s take on a reality TV staple — the music competition show. With Cardi B, Chance the Rapper and Tip “T.I.” Harris on-board as judges, the series searches for the next big hip-hop star.

In some ways, “Rhythm + Flow” sticks to the formula popularized by “American Idol,” “The Voice” and similar shows, with several episodes devoted to auditions in Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta and Chicago, followed by a gauntlet of challenges in which contestants hone their skills and prove their worth, culminating in a final showdown with one big winner.

But as fellow TechCrunch writer Megan Rose Dickey helps us explain on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, the series stands out in a few key ways. For one thing, it’s the first music competition to focus on hip hop. And rather than asking the audience to watch live/week-to-week, the show is now fully binge-able (it was initially released in batches of episodes over a two-week period).

We appreciated the fact that “Rhythm + Flow” didn’t linger on the spectacularly bad performers (and there were some) — it reserved most of its screen time for the genuine talents.

We also enjoyed the judges, who seemed to be enjoying themselves while also offering thoughtful commentary. Cardi B, in particular, was always entertaining, whether she was being enthusiastic, supportive or dismissive.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

A quick warning: While we felt that you can’t really “spoil” a reality show that’s been out for a month, we do reveal who won.

And if you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Intro
1:30 Disney+ follow-up
8:28 “Rhythm + Flow” review

Reasons to be climate cheerful (ish)

The International Energy Agency published its annual World Energy Outlook ten days ago. In this era of climate crisis, that outlook includes, as you would expect, stern warnings of catastrophic warming. But it also includes interesting nuggets of hope and optimism — and they aren’t alone. Global warming is a slow-motion in-progress planetary train-wreck, true; but you don’t have to look too hard to find evidence that new technology might yet, eventually, after enormous expense and had work, get us halfway back on non-catastrophic rails.

Consider the dreaded coal mine. Coal mines are really, really bad. How bad? New research suggests that methane leakage from coal mines, alone — without even considering burning the coal after it’s mined! — has “a greater warming impact than aviation and shipping combined.” (Italics mine.) Fly less and drink from paper straws if it makes you feel better, but if you really want to fight global warming, help close coal mines and/or prevent new ones from opening.

Alarming new @IEA research in #WEO19 shows..
Coal mine methane leaks are worse for climate than shipping+aviation emissions combined

It adds 10% to coal's lifecycle emissions on average.

We wrote a blog to expand on the IEA's analysis…https://t.co/besT4Ja5EM pic.twitter.com/9eKWinMYvc

— Sandbag (@sandbagorg) November 13, 2019

The WEO projects a long plateau in our collective reliance on coal over the next decades. That may seem surprising, but: “rising demand in India is one of the key factors holding global coal use steady, despite rapid falls in developed economies.” However, in India, “510GW of new coal has been cancelled since 2010 due to competition from cheaper renewables, financial distress at utility firms and public opposition” while Indian “coal power generation shows a declining trend since August 2019.” (Again, italics mine.) This is because of a decrease in demand, but it’s one that’s especially well-timed …

…because at the same time, renewables are on a tear in India, and around the world. They just keep getting cheaper. The IEA is infamous for drastically, comically underestimating how fast solar power capacity will grow around the world. (Here’s a paper which tries to explain why.) Bewilderingly, they are sticking to this, despite having been proven spectacularly wrong every year for the last decade:

It’s very easy to envision a scenario in which solar continues to skyrocket, coal diminishes faster than the IEA currently projects, and we emit significantly less methane and carbon dioxide than expected. (Oh, and reap massive public health benefits, too.) Yes, renewables will eventually run into significant unsolved, intermittency problems, but as Ramez Naam puts it, “these problems are distant.”

In the shorter term, even if the IEA’s impressively pessimistic projections are correct, they are still actually reason for relative optimism. The famous IPCC Fifth Assessment report on climate change gave us four scenarios. The worst case is known as RPC8.5 (RPC for Representative Concentration Pathway, a name only a bureaucrat could love, and 8.5 for the watts per meter squared of radiative forcing, i.e. the difference between energy received from the sun and that radiated back out to space.) The second-worse is RPC6.0. And the IEA’s World Energy Outlook seems to indicate that we’re currently tracking better than either of those cases;

Conclusion: IEA scenarios are a more realistic projection of the global energy system’s current ‘baseline’ trajectory; showing we are far from RCP8.5 & RCP6.0. World currently tracking between RCP4.5 & lower climate change scenarios – consistent with 1.5˚ to 2.5˚C. Thread: 11/11

— Justin Ritchie (@jritch) November 18, 2019

Again, this is relative optimism: it’s by no means “everything is going to be fine,” but it is “thanks to the spectacular growth of renewable energy, we do not seem to be on course for the IPCC’s worst or even second-worst projection.” Of course this is all estimation. Models are complex and comparisons are hard. For instance, the IEA projections do not include cement:

A technical interlude: The IEA does not include cement, but very few scenarios submitted to the IPCC SR15 separated cement from energy. This makes comparisons hard. Either do an inconsistent comparison (previous tweet) or a comparison with fewer scenarios (this tweet)

2/ pic.twitter.com/Z8rKW4Vizi

— Glen Peters (@Peters_Glen) November 19, 2019

But speaking of cement, there’s a recent potential breakthrough there, too. Cement is responsible for some 8% of global carbon emissions, and 40% of those come from simply heating limestone to over 1,000 degrees. Heliogen’s new solar thermal plant can do that with sunlight — using machine learning.

Of course what we ultimately want is carbon capture. But wait! There’s a recent potential breakthrough there, as well. A few years ago the cost of capturing carbon from the air was estimated at hundreds of dollars per ton. But that is on a steep decline, with estimates for new technologies now as low as $50/ton. (A typical car releases about 5 tons per year.)

Hockey-sticking renewable energies. Solar thermal cement. Cheaper carbon capture. In what may often seem like the forthcoming wasteland of the climate crisis, there are a surprising number of green shoots. Of course not all of them may grow. There’s many a slip ‘twixt breakthrough proof-of-concept and actual production at scale. And there’s always the chance that better data and models may undercut apparent (relatively) good news.

But at the same time, in addition to the apocalypticists who seem to take a grim glee in oncoming catastrophe, and the hairshirt moralizers who seem to believe that suggesting anything other than “we’re all doomed, unless we go back to living in carbon-neutral caves!” is dangerous, there is another narrative. One which says “we, as a species, have a huge amount of incredibly expensive work to do, yes, but despair is not the only thing on the menu.” It’s true that politicians seem unlikely to save us from a climate disaster. Technology, however, still might.

What do the concept cars of the LA Auto Show tell us about the future?

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  The Vision Mercedes Simplex re-imagines the 1901 Mercedes 35PS. [credit: Brian Won ]

The prophets of doom are right; the auto show is fast becoming a spent force. I’ve been resistant to that idea, but this year’s LA Auto Show was as lackluster an event as I can remember. There was big car news these past days, all of which took place in LA: the Ford Mustang Mach-E, Volkswagen ID Space Vizzion, and of course the Tesla Cybertruck all made waves. But each met the public at an off-site event, and the Ford and VW were old news by the time the doors to the convention center opened for the first press day on Wednesday.

But we’re not going to focus on negativity today. Instead, we’re going to celebrate some of the four-wheeled eye candy at the show. The OEMs might not have brought much new to LA, but many of them did wheel out their takes on the future. Some are next year’s model with some added greebles, others are a view of decade or more from now, and require enabling technologies that aren’t quite there yet. Two are just race cars, built for SEMA and brought along to LA to make up the numbers.

No mind—I asked photographer Brian Won to walk the halls and, like the video game said, try to catch them all. And he did, with a couple of exceptions; BMW had put away its MNEXT and Kia's Futuron was also hiding somewhere. Most of the captions are his, and I urge you to check out the massive gallery at the top of this article—the pictures are where it's at.

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ProPublica claims to have found 57 unlabeled state-sponsored channels on YouTube; after presented with a list, YouTube labeled only 35 of them as such (Ava Kofman/ProPublica)

Ava Kofman / ProPublica:
ProPublica claims to have found 57 unlabeled state-sponsored channels on YouTube; after presented with a list, YouTube labeled only 35 of them as such  —  ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.  Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they're published.

Dealmaster: A big batch of early Black Friday deals is available now

Enlarge (credit: Mark Walton)

Greetings, Arsians! Black Friday is nearly here, but many retailers and device makers have set some of their most notable holiday discounts live over the last couple of days. To help you see if you can get some holiday shopping done ahead of the rush later this week, the Dealmaster has rounded up some favorites from this latest batch of early Black Friday tech deals.

Of particular note today are savings on both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One hardware. Sony has the PS4 Pro down to $300 and a PS4 Slim bundle that includes God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition, and The Last of Us: Remastered available for $200. Microsoft, meanwhile, now has Xbox One X bundles for $350, Xbox One S bundles for $200, and Xbox One S All-Digital Edition bundles for $150. It's worth remembering that both companies will have new consoles by this time next year, but this is as low as we typically see any of these consoles. There are also tons more deals on both consoles' respective games, controllers, and subscription services if you don't need a whole new system. (The Nintendo Switch, on the other hand, doesn't have any major sales live just yet.)

Elsewhere, Amazon has kicked off Black Friday discounts for a number of its own Fire tablets and Fire TV media streamers, most of which are down to the same prices they had on Prime Day. These deals include the Fire TV Stick 4K for $25, the 1080p Fire TV Stick for $20, the Fire HD 8 tablet for $50, and the latest Kindle Paperwhite for $85, among others.

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A look at the team behind VLC, which started as a student-run project in 1996 that is now part of a nonprofit with a for-profit consultancy managed by ~10 staff (Chris Stokel-Walker/Increment)

Chris Stokel-Walker / Increment:
A look at the team behind VLC, which started as a student-run project in 1996 that is now part of a nonprofit with a for-profit consultancy managed by ~10 staff  —  How a group of university students transformed a school project into a media-player mainstay.  —  Teams