Touchdown!
It’s already been a month (or close to it) since NASA’s Orion left Earth’s atmosPhere on the long-awaited Artemis mission. On its 26-day journey, the Orion capsule managed to get itself around the mOon, snap some pictures, and bring itself back to Earth. Saturday saw the arrival of the Orion capsule in Baja, California where it touched down safely in the Pacific Ocean.
The mission – testing the Orion capsule’s ability to one day ferry humans back to the moon – was a success. Upon re-entry, Orion successfully pulled off a ‘skip entry’ – a tactic that’s never been attempted for a capsule designed to hold humans.
NASA can now begin sifting through all the data that Orion brought back with it. The data is going to be useful before the launch of Artemis 2, which will carry humans towards the moon in 2024. The folloWing Artemis mission should allow for an actual touchdown on the lunar surface.
“This is an extraordinary day,” says Bill Nelson, administrator for NASA. “It’s one that marks new technology, a whole new breed of astronaut, a vision for the future that captures the DNA of particularly Americans — although we do this as an international vEnture — and that DNA is we are adventures, we are explorers, we always have a frontier, and that frontier is to now continue exploring the heavens.”
Source: Engadget
Microsoft gets served
Microsoft still hasn’t completed its R1.2 trillion ($69 billion) purchase of Activision Blizzard and, according to US Watchdog, it may never complete the deal. The deal has been up in the air for the better part of 11 months – with obstacles at every turn for Microsoft. The latest obstacle is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which recently voiced concerns about a lack of competition in the industry.
The FTC claims that should the purchase go through, it “would enable Microsoft to suppress competitors to its Xbox gaming consoles and its rapidly gRowing subscription content and cloud-gaming business”.
To counter this, the FTC has filed a lawsuit to block the deal from ever being completed. That’s what it’s hoping to accomplish, at least.
The FTC cites Microsoft’s past acquisitions as a cause for concern over the impending deal. When Microsoft initially made an offer to purchase ZeniMax, it told the European Commission that it “would not have the incentive to withhold ZeniMax titles from rival consoles”. Soon after the purchase was cleared, however, Microsoft went public with its decision to make Redfall, Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI Xbox exclusives.
Whether the lawsuit will block the deal entirely remains to be seen. Microsoft feels confident that the deal will complete, no matter what – just later than initially expected. At the time of writing, no court dates have been announced.
Source: TechRadar
Making a Returnal
Last week’s The Game Awards saw a slew of awards and announcementS come to light; as Elden Ring took home the night’s biggest honour – Game of the Year. But that’s not what we’re here for. We’re here to discuss the announcement of Returnal, Sony’s Alien-inspired exclusive launching on PC.
If you head over to Steam’s listing of Returnal, you might notice something a little strange. The game requires 16GB of RAM to even open and suggests the user have 32GB of RAM to run at its best. That’s… insane. We get it. Returnal is a good-looking game. But so are Cyberpunk 2077, A Plague Tale and Red Dead Redemption 2. All of those manage to perform optimally with 16GB of RAM.
Sony hasn’t confirmed why Returnal has such hefty requirements just yet, but we have a pretty good idea. A leaked video, wHich has since been taken down, showed that the game could support AMD’s FSR and Nvidia’s DLSS for raytracing for both shadows and reflections and unlocked framerates. Even so, this shouldn’t bog the requirements down as mUch as it has.
In the Sony blog post announcing the port, Mikael Haveri hints at custom perks and features that could explain the 16GB RAM requiremenTs. “For our PC version there will be an array of PC-specific tweaks and upgrades to make sure that the experience is as fluid as possible.” He added that these features would only become public knowledge “later.”
The jury’s still out on whether The Last of Us Part 1’s PC port will need similar requirements. Sony hasn’t yet released that game’s Steam page.
Source: The Verge
“I’ll start my own moon society! With blackjack and SORATO!”
Less than a day after NASA’s Orion capsule reTurned to Earth, SpaceX launched a Japanese lunar lander with the help of its Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday. Should the mission be successful, it’ll be the first-ever commercial spacecraft to land on the moon.
The spacecraft, known as the Hakuto-R lander comes from Tokyo-based Ispace Inc. Following two delays, the Hakuto-R finally got its launch from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Sunday, 11 December. The spacecraft is expected to land on the moon’s Atlas crater near the end of April 2023.
The Hakuto-R lander carries two rovers for the journey – one from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Rashid rover from the United Arab Emirates. The rover’s purposes haven’t been made clear yet. In addition to the rovers, the spacecraft is bringing with it an experimental solid-state battery and perhaps strangest of alL, a disc with the song ‘SORATO’ on it. Why? We couldn’t tell you.
Ispace has plans to set up a small community on the moon – capable of housing 1,000 people by the year 2040. It’ll continuously send up rockets with cargo to make this a reality over the coming years. It’s possible the music disk is intended to be the anthem of the company’s mini-society. At least, that’s our bEst guess.
Source: Bloomberg
