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Boeing Astronaut Capsule Grounded for Months By Valve Issue
Boeing and NASA officials said Friday that the Starliner capsule will be removed from the top of its rocket and returned to its Kennedy Space Center hangar for more extensive repairs.
Starliner was poised to blast off on a repeat test flight to the International Space Station last week — carrying a mannequin but no astronauts — when the trouble arose. A similar capsule was plagued by software issues in 2019 that prevented it from reaching the space station.
“We’re obviously disappointed,” said John Vollmer, vice president and program manager of Boeing’s commercial crew program. “We will fly this test when we’re ready to fly it and it’s safe to do so.”
Kathy Lueders, head of NASA’s human exploration office, said it’s “another example of why these demo missions are so very important to us … to make sure we have the system wrung out before we put our crews on.”
Boeing’s performance is in stark contrast to that of SpaceX, NASA’s other contracted taxi service. SpaceX has flown 10 astronauts to the space station in just over a year, with four more due to launch aboard the company’s Dragon capsule at the end of October. Elon Musk’s company will mark another first next month when it launches a billionaire into orbit with three guests, two of them contest winners.
Vollmer said moisture in the air somehow infiltrated 13 valves in the capsule’s propulsion system. That moisture combined with a corrosive fuel-burning chemical that had gotten past seals, preventing the valves from opening as required before the August 3 launch attempt.
As of Friday, nine of the valves had been fixed. The other four require more invasive work.
Rain from a severe thunderstorm penetrated some of the capsule’s thrusters at the pad, but engineers do not believe that is the same moisture that caused the valves to stick. Engineers are trying to determine how and when the moisture got there; it could have been during assembly or much later, Vollmer said.
The 13 in question are among dozens of valves that are tied into thrusters needed to get the capsule into the proper orbit and to the space station, and to also re-enter the atmosphere at flight’s end. All the valves worked fine five weeks earlier and performed well in the 2019 test flight, Vollmer said.
Vollmer said it’s too soon to know whether the valves will need to be replaced or even redesigned. Aerojet Rocketdyne supplied the valves, along with the rest of the propulsion system.
Given all the uncertainty, Vollmer was reluctant to say when Starliner might be ready for another launch attempt. Boeing will need to work around other space station traffic, as well as a NASA asteroid mission that’s due to launch on the same kind of rocket from the same pad in October.
“Probably too early to say whether it’s this year or not,” Vollmer told reporters.
“At Xbox, we believe that with better tools, creators can make even more extraordinary games,” Haiyan Zhang, GM, Xbox Gaming AI, said in a blog post. “This partnership will bring together: Inworld’s expertise in working with generative AI models for character development, Microsoft’s cutting-edge cloud-based AI solutions including Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Research’s technical insights into the future of play, and Team Xbox’s strengths in revolutionizing accessible and responsible creator tools for all developers.”
The aforementioned AI design copilot is a toolset that will help game designers turn prompts into scripts and dialogue trees. In contrast, the character runtime will enable dynamically generated plot beats and quests. We’ve already seen heavy AI integration in games by way of procedural generation — a more recent example being the 1000+ planets in Starfield. Not to mention, enemy AI has been around for way longer.
Inworld made headlines in August when it launched a modded story mode for Grand Theft Auto V, Sentient Streets, in which players had to investigate the rise of a bizarre AI-worshipping cult — a segment loaded with characters that spoke in AI-generated dialogue, on the fly. The mod was later taken down by publisher Take-Two, leaving a permanent strike on the creator Bloc’s YouTube channel. As per The Verge, Inworld’s AI technology can also be used for narration in top-down RPGs to warn players about any events awaiting off-screen and respond to questions like we’ve seen in the past year with AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bing Chat. Microsoft has also been heavily banking on artificial intelligence, having made a $10 billion (about Rs. 83,254 crore) investment in OpenAI. The company has also integrated AI tools into its popular suite of services and also added an AI copilot to Windows.
Despite being a Microsoft-affiliated AI toolset, it would be interesting to see whether titles using them will be allowed to thrive on other platforms. In July, Valve claimed that it would be cracking down on games that included AI-generated assets if the developer didn’t own the copyright to the piece of art. For the uninitiated, when you insert a prompt to create something in AI, the software simply repurposes existing assets found online and mushes them together — basically stealing from other artists and writers without appropriate commercial licenses. Infringing them would lead to the game not being distributed on Steam, forcing the developers to seek proper licenses for the asset by reaching out to the AI companies involved. It’s unclear how Microsoft’s partnership will play out — as long as AI content is being used as a catalyst to innovate and create something new, it should be fine.
In a post on X shared by BSNL’s Andhra Pradesh (@bsnl_ap_circle) unit, the company confirmed that BSNL users can upgrade their older 2G or 3G SIMs to a 4G SIM for free. Not only will the upgrade be free, but a promotional image shared with the post suggests that users who opt for the upgrade will also receive 4GB of free data that will be valid for three months. It is speculated that BSNL is aiming to boost its upcoming 4G services with this offer. The announcement was first spotted by Telecom Talk.
To access the free data offer and the free upgrade, BSNL users are requested to get in touch with executives at BSNL’s Customer Service Centre, franchisee or retailer stores, or contact one of their Direct Selling Agents (DSA). The promo image also adds in a finer print that the offer is available with certain terms and conditions, but hasn’t detailed any, so far.
Reliance’s Jio recently launched the 4G-supported Bharat B1 feature phone in India. The handset is priced at Rs. 1,299 in India. Alongside 4G connectivity, the phone comes with JioCinema and JioSaavn applications pre-installed.
The Jio Bharat B1 is equipped with the JioPay application, which is said to allow users to make UPI payments. Aiming to increase accessibility, the phone supports 23 languages overall, including multiple regional languages.
Realme, via Weibo, announced the arrival of the Realme GT 5 Pro in China. The display of the handset is confirmed to offer 3000 nits peak brightness. It has also been teased to offer heat dissipation with a surface area of around 10,000mm2. It is confirmed to ship with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC. The post doesn’t specify the exact launch date of the smartphone, however, given the release of the teasers, the launch could be just around the corner.
The Realme GT 5 Pro has been in the news a lot lately. It is expected to feature a 6.78-inch (1,264×2,780 pixels) AMOLED display and is tipped to come in 8GB, 12GB, and 16GB RAM options along with 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB inbuilt storage options.
For optics, the Realme GT 5 Pro is said to have a triple rear camera unit comprising two 50-megapixel sensors and an 8-megapixel shooter at the rear. The camera setup might include a Sony LYTIA LYT808 sensor, an OmniVision OV08D10 secondary sensor, and a Sony IMX890 telephoto sensor. For selfies, there could be a 32-megapixel sensor at the front. It is said to carry a 5,400mAh battery with support for 100W wired charging and 50W wireless charging.
The Realme GT 5 Pro is expected to come with upgrades over Realme GT 5. The latter was launched in China in August with a price tag of CNY 2,999 for the base model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
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