iPhone SE 2 Rumors

With the iPhone SE positioned as a new device in Apple's iPhone lineup, its upgrade schedule is not yet known. Apple could decide to update the 4-inch iPhone on a regular basis like its flagship devices, but its internals are also powerful enough that it could remain a capable phone for multiple years without an upgrade. On March 21, 2017, Apple bumped up storage tiers, but did not introduce a new model.

Rumors about a second-generation iPhone SE have been circulating for multiple months now, but concrete details have been hard to come by. We've heard plenty of rumors and speculation, but a lot of the information has been conflicting and impossible to confirm.

Most recently, Japanese site Mac Otakara said Apple had not nailed down the final design of the iPhone SE and was exploring multiple prototypes ahead of a third quarter launch, an unlikely scenario as design elements would be established by now if Apple is planning to release the device in the fall. Mac Otakara also previously said

 the iPhone SE will come in May, so the site, which is sometimes accurate, is sharing several conflicting and confusing rumors at this time.

Case makers that spoke to Mac Otakara have said that the second-generation iPhone SE will be the same physical size as the current iPhone SE, and that it will continue to offer a Touch ID Home button. Apple may, however, eliminate the headphone jack, perhaps for improving water resistance, and a glass back could be added for wireless charging support. Other rumors sourced from case makers have, however, pointed to a range of different, more dramatic designs, including one that's similar to the iPhone X.

Case makers are often able to obtain information about iPhones from the Asian supply chain ahead of a device's launch to be the first to build cases for the new smartphones, and while this information can be quite accurate, it's not always reliable, so these details should be taken with a grain of salt.

It's also possible that case makers are confusing iPhone SE rumors and part leaks with 6.1-inch iPhone information, as Apple is said to be working on a lower-cost LCD iPhone that's coming in 2018 and set to be sold alongside a next-generation 5.8-inch OLED iPhone and a new 6.5-inch OLED iPhone. More information about these devices can be found in our 2018 iPhones roundup.

Building Sails for Tiny Interstellar Probes Will Be Tough - But Not Impossible

Giant lasers may indeed launch fleets of spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, given breakthroughs in the science behind extraordinarily thin, incredibly reflective sails that can catch this laser light, a new study finds.

The $100 million Breakthrough Starshot initiative, which was announced in 2016, plans to use powerful lasers to launch swarms of tiny spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to our own. While using laser cannons for spacecraft propulsion might sound like science fiction, previous research has suggested that "light sailing" might be one of the only technically feasible ways to get a probe to another star within a human lifetime.

Although Alpha Centauri is the nearest star system to Earth, it still lies roughly 4.37 light-years away. That is equal to more than 25.6 trillion miles (41.2 trillion kilometers), or more than 276,000 times the distance from Earth to the sun. [Breakthrough Starshot's Interstellar Mission in Pictures]

Conventional rockets are nowhere near efficient enough to cover the enormous distance to Alpha Centauri within a human lifetime. For instance, it would take NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft

 — which launched in 1977 and reached interstellar space in 2012 — about 75,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri (if the probe were headed in the right direction, and it's not).

The problem with all thrusters that current spacecraft use for propulsion is that the propellant they carry with them has mass. Long trips need a lot of propellant, which makes the thrusters heavy, which, in turn, requires more propellant, making them heavier, and so on. And that problem gets exponentially worse the bigger a spacecraft gets. Starshot proposes that, instead of carrying propellant for propulsion, spacecraft be equipped with mirror-like sails and rely on lasers to push these probes outward. 

How to See Mars with NASA's InSight Lander Launch on Saturday

Mars will shine like a celestial lighthouse in the night sky as NASA launches its next robotic lander to the Red Planet tomorrow (May 5), but only if you know when and where to look.

Mars is the destination for NASA's InSight lander, which is scheduled to launch early Saturday from California's Vandenberg

Air Force Base. Liftoff is scheduled for 7:05 a.m. EDT (4:05 a.m. PDT/1105 GMT).

Skygazers in central and southern California, as well as those watching from Mexico's northern Pacific Coast, may be able to see InSight launch toward Mars, weather permitting, NASA officials have said. And depending on your time zone, you may be able to see Mars before or just after the liftoff. [Where to Watch NASA's InSight Mars Lander Launch from California]

To see Mars, look south before dawn on Saturday. The Red Planet will shine to the lower left of the moon at about 6 a.m. in your local time zone (which is after InSight's launch in California, but before the liftoff in Eastern Daylight Time).

If you have a star chart, use it to locate Mars and the moon, which can be found near the constellation Sagittarius, according to this video guide from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Saturn will also be visible to the right of the moon, with the constellation Scorpius shining off to the right.

Mars shines brighter this month than it did in April, and according to NASA officials, the Red Planet will become increasingly vivid in the southern morning skies until July 27. On that day, it will reach opposition, when Mars and the sun are on opposite sides of Earth. This causes each to appear in Earth's sky as the other one goes into hiding: When the sun sets in the West, Mars rises in the East, and vice versa. And Mars appears brighter in the night sky because its distance to Earth shortens in the process.

This will be Mars' closest approach to Earth since 2003, according to NASA.

The rocket malfunctioned in mid-air (May 3 1986)

May 3 1986 NASA attempted to launch a new weather satellite called GOES-G for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but the rocket malfunctioned in mid-air. About a minute after it lifted off, lightning struck the Delta rocket!

How to Reason With Flat Earthers

Thinking that the earth might be flat appears to have grown in popularity in recent years. Indeed, flat earthers are gathering for their annual conference this year in Birmingham, just two miles from my own university.

But the earth isn't flat. Unsurprisingly, this isn't hard to prove. But as scads of YouTube videos demonstrate, these proofs fail to convince everyone. A glance at the comments show there's still vitriolic disagreement in some quarters.

Philosophy can explain why. Consider one, standard, flat earth line: "Can youprove the world is round?" Maybe you point to the (often artificially assembled) photos of Earth from space. Or possibly you rely on the testimony of astronauts. The flat earther knocks it all back. The standard of proof is higher, they say. You haven't been to space. You haven't seen the round earth.

Perhaps you then start to appeal to science. But unless you're unusual, you probably don't know all of the details of the scientific proofs – is it something to do with ships and horizons? Or eclipses? And even if you know the details, unless you've indulged existing flat earth literature you are unlikely – right here, right now – to be able to cogently, concisely and comprehensively respond to the lengthy rebuttals flat earthers will give to each and every scientific proof.

You could double down. Getting knee deep in the vloggersphere, you might learn the details of the scientific proofs as well as painstakingly spelling out each error in every flat earther's rebuttal.

I recommend against doing that. I recommend letting philosophy do the work. I recommend "epistemic contextualism." To understand what this is, we first must understand a familiar idea: context shift. Consider the sentence "I'm tall." Surrounded by five year olds at a rollercoaster park, the sentence is true – after all, I can get on all the rides and they can't. But at the try-outs for the Harlem Globetrotters, my measly 5'11" won't cut it. So in that context, the sentence is false. Tallness is contextually sensitive. And it makes no sense to further ask whether I'm really tall or not. It only makes sense given a particular context.

Epistemic contextualists say that knowledge is the same. Imagine you're transferring £10 to your daughter. You know her bank details. You tap them in. You send the money. But now imagine you're transferring £50,000. Doubt sets in. Do you really know her bank details? Are you sure? Sensibly, you phone her to double check. The contextualist says that in the first case, you know her bank details. In the second case, even though nothing about you has changed, the context has. And in that case, you don't know the details.

That said, I claim the flat earther is doing a "Phoebe." In one episode from Friends, Phoebe and Ross argue about evolution. Ross piles on the evidence thick and fast. Finally, Phoebe loses her temper. Can he be so unbelievably arrogant, she asks, that he can't admit the slightest chance that he might be wrong? Sheepishly, Ross agrees that there might be a chance. Suddenly, Phoebe has him – Ross's admission destroys his worldview. He's a palaeontologist and, having admitted he can't be sure about evolution, how can he "face the other science guys?"

Phoebe has (humorously) shifted context. Ross's proof starts off relying on fossils in museums, books and articles on evolutionary biology, and so on. But Phoebe moves him to a "sceptical context" in which if there's a hint of doubt about something – any possibility that you might be wrong – then you don't know it at all.

Where flat earthers go wrong

Flat earthers are pulling the same trick. They're right that you don't know the earth is round. But they're only right in a context where testimonies of hundreds are disregarded, where widely accepted facts among the scientific community don't count, where photographic evidence is inadmissible, and so on.

The flat earther's argument is framed in a context where you can't set aside the possibility that there's a pervading global conspiracy – albeit one which somehow intermittently leaves glaring errors which give them away. In that context, you don't know the earth is round. But in that context, nobody knows much at all and so this conclusion is simply unsurprising.

In the more everyday contexts that we care about, we can rely on testimony. We can rely on the fact that every educated physicist, cartographer and geographer never pauses to think the earth might be flat. And we are correctto rely on these things. If it was incorrect, we'd never get treated at hospitals – for in a context where we can't trust the established laws of physics, how could we trust the judgements of medical science?

So do you know whether the earth is round? It turns out it depends on context. But in most regular contexts then, yes, you do. And that's even though I doubt most people could prove it, right here and now.

Blue Origin Launches New Shepard Space Capsule on Highest Test Flight Yet

Blue Origin, the private space company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, launched its passenger spaceship New Shepard on a test flight Sunday (April 29), carrying a dummy astronaut and experiments on their highest spaceflight yet.

The New Shepard 2.0 rocket and capsule, which have both flown in space before, lifted off from Blue Origin's West Texas l

aunch site at 1:06 p.m. EDT (1706 GMT). Despite several hours of delays (thunderstor
ms thwarted a 9:45 a.m. EDT launch target) and countdown holds for last-minute checks, the flight appeared to go flawlessly.

Blue Origin launched New Shepard to a target altitude of 347,485 feet (105,913 meters), Cornell said after the launch. That's almost 66 miles (106 km), slightly higher than the company's typical target of 62 miles (100 km) — the altitude widely accepted as the boundary line for space, Cornell said.

"Today, we're going to push the system a little bit harder," Cornell said during the launch webcast.

Sunday's launch marked the second flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard 2.0 vehicle (after a successful December 2017 test launch) and eighth test flight overall for the company's New Shepard program. An earlier version of New Shepard launched a series of missions in 2015 and 2016 before it was retired.

From liftoff to landing, Sunday's test flight lasted about 10 minutes, 19 seconds. After launching the New Shepard capsule, the booster separated and returned to its launch site, ,where it made smooth vertical landing. The capsule fell back to Earth a few minutes later, descending on parachutes and cushioning its own landing with retrorockets.

Blue Origin's New Shepard 2.0 space capsule is designed to fly 6 passengers on suborbital space tourism flights — trips that reach space but don't orbit the Earth — and can also carry commercial payloads and experiments. It has 6 large windows to give paying passengers wide views of Earth from space. However, Blue Origin has not yet announced how much a ticket to fly on New Shepard will cost.

For Sunday's mission, Blue Origin's dummy astronaut — affectionately nicknamed "Mannequin Skywalker" — rode in a passenger seat alongside a series of customer science and technology experiments. Those payloads include an experiment for NASA's Johnson Space Center; several others from European universities funded by the German Aerospace Center (DLR); and a "Schmitt Space Communicator" for the company Solstar, which named the experiment after Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt (a Solstar advisor).

More New Shepard test flights are expected in the coming months. If all goes well, Blue Origin could potentially begin launching people into on New Shepard this year, company representatives have said.

Meanwhile, Blue Origin is busy developing a larger rocket called New Glennthat will launch missions all the way to orbit from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in the 2020s. Like New Shepard, the heavy-lift New Glenn rocket will be reusable and fly people into space.

During Sunday's launch webcast, Cornell said Blue Origin's first New Shepard customers will get first dibs on those orbital New Glenn spaceflights, but will have to wait until the 2020s for a chance to fly.

NASA Kills Lunar-Resources Mission Despite Push to Return to the Moon

NASA has cancelled a mission to assay the resources that may be available to humans on the moon, despite President Donald Trump's administration making it a priority to send humans back there, according to media reports. 

The Resource Prospector mission would have sent a rover to the moon's polar regions to learn about water and other deposits on and just beneath the lunar surface. Scientists have sent an open letter to new NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, urging him not to shut down the agency's only current moon mission, which has already been in development for four years, according to a report by The Verge.

The Resource Prospector mission consisted of a lander and a solar-powered rover equipped with a drill. The rover would have scouted the lunar surface, digging up soil for analysis. Scientists know that water ice exists on the moon, but the Resource Prospector would have provided scientists with a more complete understanding of these deposits. 

Such knowledge is crucial in expanding a human presence on the moon. Lunar ice can potentially be melted and split into oxygen and hydrogen, providing a local source of water, oxygen and rocket propellant, The Verge reported. Not only would this help make human activities more self-sustaining, but it would also dramatically reduce launch costs, because much of these vital resources could be produced on site. 

"If we can demonstrate that we can access the water on the moon, then we can start to design the equipment that will mine it and deliver it to the outpost," Phil Metzger, a planetary physicist at University of Central Florida who is part of the science team for Resource Prospector, told The Verge.

Although it was not yet fully funded, the Resource Prospector mission had gotten well past the drawing board. Engineers had been working on the project for four years, and prototypes were tested on Earth in 2015 and 2016, according to The Verge. Plans had the mission launching in 2022. "It's far enough along that it's a real mission," Clive Neal, an engineering professor at the University of Notre Dame and Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) emeritus chair, told The Verge.

NASA Pushes for Moon, Deep Space with Crucial Tests

With the moon as its immediate goal, NASA is pushing hard on deep space exploration.

In a press conference from Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston today (April 26), NASA officials talked through the status of their deep space exploration program and the upcoming launches of the agency's Orion spacecraft around the moon.

A NASA report last year suggested the launch date could slip to June 2020. However, JSC Director Ellen Ochoa confirmed that NASA is still pushing to use the massive Space Launch System to send Orion around the moon for the first time, on the uncrewed Exploration Mission-1, by the end of 2019.

"Launch [is] hopefully at the end of 2019. That is the goal we're keeping toward," Ochoa said at the press conference. "We've done an in-depth assessment of that, and likely it will be in early 2020, but we are keeping pressure on our agency and our folks to try and launch in December of 2019, to make sure that we put our best foot forward and do our best to meet those deadlines."

Space agencies aim to deliver rocks from Mars to Earth

Nasa and Esa have signed a letter of intent that could lead to the first "round trip" to another planet.

The move was announced as a meeting in Berlin, Germany, discussed the science goals and feasibility of a Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission.

The venture would allow scientists to answer key questions about Martian history.

Those questions include whether the Red Planet once hosted life.

Scientists at the Mars meeting said that there was only so much they could learn from Martian meteorites and from the various rovers and static landers sent to the Red Planet.

The next step had to be a mission that would retrieve samples from the Martian surface, blast them into space in a capsule and land them safely on Earth.

Billion-star map of Milky Way set to transform astronomy

After a feverish wait, astronomers around the world have an ocean of new information to throw themselves into. This afternoon in Europe, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia mission published its first fully 3D map of the Milky Way.

The data haul includes the positions of nearly 1.7 billion stars, and the distance, colours, velocities and directions of motion of about 1.3 billion of them. Together they form an unprecedented live movie of the sky, covering a volume of space 1,000 larger than previous surveys have (see ‘Gaia’s gold’). “In my professional opinion, this is crazy awesome,” says Megan Bedell of the Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York, one of the many astronomers who will conduct studies based on the data set. “I think the whole community is eager to dive in.”

Within hours of the catalogue going online, 3,000 users from around the world had already started downloading the data, ESA said in a tweet.

“We’re very curious to see what the community will do with it,” says Anthony Brown, an astronomer at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands who chairs Gaia’s data-processing collaboration.

At an event to present the Gaia catalogue at the Royal Astronomical Society in London, astronomer Gerry Gilmore of the University of Cambridge, UK, presented a striking video that extrapolated on the Gaia data to simulate the future motion of millions of stars. “Everything moves,” he said.

SpaceX moving up

Govini: ULA is the big winner based on how much its market share has increased over the past six years.

WASHINGTON — Attracting new players to compete for national security and civil space contracts has been a longtime goal of the Congress, the Pentagon and NASA. But as the numbers show, only a handful of contractors command the bulk of federal dollars spent on space programs.

The U.S. government invested $83 billion in space platforms and hypersonic technologies between fiscal years 2011 and 2017, according to Govini’s new report, Space Platforms & Hypersonic Technologies Taxonomy. Lockheed Martin, United Launch Alliance — a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing — and Boeing captured more than half of all contract obligations, Govini estimated. SpaceX took the fourth spot in 2017, leading the trend of “new space” companies that are moving to compete for government contracts.

ULA is the big winner based on how much its market share has increased over the six years. Govini calculated ULA’s average obligation value per contract went from $10.1 million in 2011 to $23.6 million in 2017 and grabbed 49 percent of the total launch market. “ULA leveraged its presence in the medium-lift market subsegment to capture $14.6 billion in federal unclassified contracts from FY-11 through FY-17,” the study noted. “This growth in market share made it the top vendor in our analysis.”

Looking at the top 15 space contractors, little fluctuation occurred over the past six years. Three companies dropped out: Iridium, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and General Dynamics. Newcomers to the top 15 include Raytheon, Harris and United Technologies. UT became a top-15 vendor 2017 selling booster technology for NASA’s Space Launch System. Raytheon moved into the top 15 by winning hypersonic vehicle development contracts.

Within the top five, from 2011 to 2017, ULA surpassed Boeing and became the top overall vendor. Lockheed Martin diversified its space science and national security satellite-focused portfolio with NASA contracts for the Orion spacecraft program. SpaceX rose to the top five by successfully developing technologies for International Space Station resupply mission and the commercial crew program.

Govini analyst Robert Meteer told SpaceNews that ISS resupply and commercial crew transportation are “areas with immense growth potential and applicability to other space markets.” Overall government  spending on space and hypersonic technologies went up by 6 percent a year over the six-year period and projections of continued growth are attracting new vendors. Despite the overwhelming dominance of a few large contractors, there is a “proliferation of private companies in space which is a sign that barriers to entry are starting to decline,” he said. ‘We’re starting to see new entrants in launch and small satellites.”

Meteer said Govini decided to combine spending on space and hypersonics as hypersonic vehicles are an area of increasing importance both for  the military and for space research. The technology enables both extremely fast missiles and future space exploration. Despite its high profile, hypersonic technology has a relatively small footprint in unclassified contract obligations — with $1.5 billion from 2011 to 2017, or 1.8 percent of the total federal spending in these areas. DoD keeps much of its investments in hypersonic in its classified budget.

Former NASA astronaut and Air Force fighter pilot Terry Virts said the data shows “there may be creative and non-traditional opportunities for partnerships between the Department of Defense and the private sector.” In the introduction to the Govini report, Virts noted that Blue Origin’s New Shepherd hypersonic vehicle will fly a suborbital trajectory with only a few minutes of weightlessness, which makes this vehicle a potential candidate to be a “testing platform for the DoD.”

NASA’s commercial crew program to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station may end up with excess capacity. Virts said this could give the DoD a “potentially innovative capability for space-based missions that would not exist had the military had to develop it on its own.”

In an interview with SpaceNews, Virts said the space sector is undergoing enormous change and it’s still unclear how the unprecedented level of private investments will reshape the industry. Govini’s study of federal spending is an interesting backward look, and only one piece of the puzzle, he said. Privately funded companies like Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are becoming important players but there is scant information about its finances. “It would be useful to get the full picture,” said Virts. He predicts SpaceX gradually will make inroads into ULA’s market share, and this analysis seven years from now might look completely different.

Some bits and pieces of what is happening with private funding for space companies: Bryce Space & Technology estimated start-up space ventures have attracted investments of over $18.4 billion since 2000. “More start-up space companies reported investment in 2017 than in any other year,” said a Bryce report. The total number of start-up space companies reporting new funding in 2017 (73) broke the 2015 record (65) and increased by one-third over the 2016 total (55).

The venture capital firm Space Angels reported that the space industry is on pace for over $4 billion in investment for the second year in a row. The United States continues to lead in private space industry investment, with over $7 billion since 2009.

Swoop Down On Comet

Swoop Down On Comet: The ESA - European Space Agency Rosetta Mission

spacecraft is expected to come within four miles (six kilometers) of the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko in February of next year. The flyby will be the closest the comet explorer will come during its prime mission.

Aboard the International Space Station

Aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Terry Virts posted this image and wrote, "One of the most amazing sites on Earth #AmazonRiver delta."

The station crew has been working on a variety of robotics activities this week. On Wednesday, they tested a humanoid robot and explored how bowling ball-sized satellites, known as SPHERES, can navigate around objects. Crew members trained earlier in the week for the planned Sunday capture of the Dragon spacecraft using the 57.7 foot Canadarm2.