Monthly Archives: October 2022

Watch the Crew-5 mission blast off on a SpaceX rocket

The four members of the SpaceX Crew-5 mission. From left are, Mission Specialist Anna Kikina from Roscosmos; Pilot Josh Cassada and Commander Nicole Aunapu Mann, both from NASA; and Mission Specialist Koichi Wakata from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). | SpaceX The history-making Crew-5 mission is about to take off today from NASA’s Kennedy…

Darth Vader’s voice will be AI-generated from now on

Enlarge / As James Earl Jones retires, Darth Vader’s voice will come courtesy of voice-cloning software called Respeecher. (credit: Lucasfilm / Benj Edwards) During the creation of the Obi-Wan Kenobi TV series, James Earl Jones signed off on allowing Disney to replicate his vocal performance as Darth Vader in future projects using an AI voice-modeling…

Who is ready for a fleet of cubesats flying over cities, displaying ads?

Artist’s impression of a space ad seen from the Skoltech campus. (credit: Shamil Biktimirov/Skoltech) On Wednesday the public relations department of the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Moscow issued a news release with a provocative title: “Ad-block this: Space advertisers ready to display commercials in the sky.” How about no. The basis for the…

Engineers made synthetic alien lava to understand uninhabitable worlds

In this illustration, exoplanet CoRoT-7b, which is likely five times the mass of Earth, may well be full of lava landscapes and boiling oceans. European Southern Observatory/L. Calçada Scorching heat, pillars of darkened ash, gushing lava fountains. Volcanic eruptions on Earth are paradoxes of life and death, though they are nothing compared to entire planets…