Toggle light / dark theme

Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin is challenging a U.S. government contract with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to develop technology to land people on the moon again.

In a complaint filed Friday in the Court of Federal Claims in Washington, Blue Origin said the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s evaluation process was “unlawful and improper.” The complaint was filed under seal but tandem documents seeking a protective order gave an indication of its contents.

NASA selected SpaceX’s human lander bid on April 16 leading Blue Origin and a bidding partner, Dynetics Inc., to file protests with the Government Accountability Office less than two weeks later alleging that the award process was flawed. The GAO denied that protest on July 30 saying that NASA’s SpaceX selection had been made properly. Blue Origin, which has offered to contribute more than $2 billion of work on the project at no cost to the government, had vowed to continue pursuing the matter.

Elon Musk has mentioned that the Tesla Cybertruck’s production version would be extremely similar to the all-electric pickup truck’s controversial prototype from 2019. While this may largely be the case, Musk has hinted at some new features that would be included in the production Cybertruck. Apart from updated door handles and rear-wheel steering capabilities, for example, Musk also hinted at “other great things” coming for the vehicle.

A recently published patent application from Tesla has now hinted at a couple more updates that may be coming to the Cybertruck, at least on the design front. The patent, titled “Automotive Glass Structure Having Feature Lines and Related Method of Manufacture,” describes a way to form extremely durable glass structures with aggressive curves and folds. Using such a technique, Tesla stated that it could create components like windshields with very aggressive feature lines that would otherwise not be possible with conventional glass-forming methods.

The patent application’s illustrations showcased how the system would be used in a vehicle such as the Cybertruck. One of the images in the patent featured the far left and right side of the Cybertruck’s windshield having aggressive feature lines that make the all-electric pickup truck even more futuristic and CGI-esque. This is quite different from the windshield used on the prototype Cybertruck, which seemed completely flat.

Join me as I take a tour of SpaceX’s Starbase facility with Elon Musk as our tour guide! This is part 2 of 3 so stay tuned, there’s another one coming!

If you need some notes on this video with key points, check out our article — https://everydayastronaut.com/starbase-tour-and-interview-with-elon-musk/

Need a rundown on Starship? I’ve got you covered with our “Complete Guide to Starship“
https://youtu.be/-8p2JDTd13k.

00:00 — Intro.

After a much-anticipated GAO denial of Blue Origin and Dynetics protests over NASA’s decision to solely award SpaceX a contract to turn Starship into a crewed Moon lander, an in-depth (but heavily redacted) document explaining that decision was released on August 10th.

Aside from ruthlessly tearing both companies’ protests limb from limb, the US Government Accountability Office’s decision also offered a surprising amount of insight into SpaceX’s HLS Starship proposal. One of those details in particular seemed to strike an irrational nerve in the online spaceflight community. Specifically, in its decision, GAO happened to reveal that SpaceX had proposed a mission profile that would require as many as 16 launches to fully fuel a Starship Lander and stage the spacecraft in an unusual lunar orbit.

After around 24 hours of chaos, confusion, and misplaced panic, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk finally weighed in on the GAO document’s moderately surprising indication that each Starship Moon landing would require sixteen SpaceX launches.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX stacked a Starship prototype rocket on top of a Super Heavy rocket booster for the first time Friday morning, giving a look at the scale of the combined nearly 400-foot-tall vehicle.

Musk, asked by CNBC what he thought of witnessing the milestone at the company’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas, responded simply.

“Dream come true,” Musk replied in a tweet.

✅ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pro_robots.

You’re on PRO Robotics, and in this video we present the July 2,021 news digest. New robots, drones and drones, artificial intelligence and military robots, news from Elon Musk and Boston Dynamics. All the most interesting high-tech news for July in this Issue. Be sure to watch the video to the end and write in the comments, which news you are most interested in?

0:00 Announcement of the first part of the issue.
0:23 Home robot assistants and other.
10:50 Boston Dynamics news, Tesla Model S Plaid spontaneous combustion, Elon Musk’s new rocket, Richard Brandson.
20:25 WAIC 2,021 Robotics Exhibition. New robots, drones, cities of the future.
33:10 Artificial intelligence to program robots.

#prorobots #robots #robot #future technologies #robotics.