Catch! SpaceX catches Starship booster on its fifth attempt
It didn’t take long for Elon Musk’s SpaceX to get Starship working the way it was hoping to. After the FAA finally gave the company clearance to try and launch its building-sized rocket into space again, the fifth attempt at Starship went without a hitch.
That means, of course, that Starship itself launched, travelled for a while, and then splashed down in the Indian Ocean. That was the point, after all, and the scientists are after data more than anything else. But something else also went horribly right.
Starship’s Super Heavy booster, a 71-metre tall collection of 33 Raptor engines, returned to Earth. This has happened before, but it has always blown up. This time Mechazilla, the launch platform for the rocket, was able to catch the booster and bring it back in one piece.
It’s one thing to see this happen with the 41-metre Falcon boosters but a rocket twice this size is too heavy to land on the ground. Specifically, adding legs capable of supporting the rocket would throw off the launch too much. The answer, obviously, is to catch the rocket with a pair of ‘chopsticks’, something Elon has been bragging about for some time. Turns out, he – and SpaceX – no longer has to brag.
It’s been 202 days since load shedding… so far
If you woke up today and wondered where load shedding went, we have questions. Like, don’t you have anything better to think about? If you’re only wondering about load shedding now, we’re sorry for bringing it up.
But in this case, it isn’t to announce that it’s back but rather that it’s been a whole 202 days since state-owned energy utility Eskom shed anyone’s load. We’re not counting ‘load reduction’ because neither did Eskom in its announcement yesterday to commemorate the occasion.
“Eskom has today successfully delivered 200 consecutive days of uninterrupted power supply since 26 March 2024,” reads the statement. The utility said the milestone was a result of its ‘Generation Operational Recovery Plan’ which has reduced unplanned outages by about 8.6% and improved energy availability by about 7.7%.
With his eyes on the future, Eskom Group Chief Executive Dan Marokane said: “We are days away from a further milestone that demonstrates the stability of our fleet, on Saturday 18 October 2024 we are on track to reach 206 days without load shedding, a result we last delivered five years ago on 15 October 2019.”
Here’s to the next 200 days, Eskom.
Lara Croft is back. Again
Because remasters are all we as a society know how to make and consume these days, we’re not at all surprised to see Crystal Dynamics is back with the other half of the original Tomb Raider series, now featuring updated visuals that might not poke your eye out whenever Lara Croft runs past.
Crystal Dynamics has hooked up with Aspyr again to handle the second remastered trilogy – containing the original Tomb Raider IV up to the sixth and the then-final entry of the mainline series before Tomb Raider was rebooted into the Legends timeline which we’re crossing our fingers also gets the HD treatment eventually.
With Aspyr at the helm, it’ll mark the return of those features in the recent Tomb Raider I-III reboot, which allowed players to flick a switch and experience the graphics for what they were back then, or take on the puzzle action adventure with a couple more polygons in the mix. Boss health bars are a thing now too, as is the photo mode that proved to be quite a hit in the last trilogy.
Quell those tears, trophy hunters. Aspyr hasn’t forgotten about you, adding more than 150 trophies to track down and conquer (with the help of a guide of course) and quench that desperate need for fulfilment. All those features arrive on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, and PC on 14 February 2025.
The Internet Archive recovers, but only a little
The Internet Archive is alive. Kinda. The Internet’s Wayback Machine recently suffered a massive cyberattack in the form of a data breach and DDoS attack, ultimately knocking the site offline for the entirety of the weekend, and giving us all a bit more paranoid than was strictly necessary. If you’re wondering if you were affected, here’s how you can find out.
But now, the site is back online – but only in a “provisional, read-only manner,” according to the site’s co-founder Brewster Kahle in a post on X. “Safe to resume but might need further maintenance, in which case it will be suspended again,” he concluded.
That means the Wayback Machine’s 916 billion saved pages are still accessible to everyone, with the caveat that new pages cannot be captured and added to the catalogue until Archive.org gets its life together again. And the bad actors off its back, we guess. When the capture ability will be re-added hasn’t yet been stated.