#newglenn — Public Fediverse posts

Blue Origin continues work on lunar landers during recovery from New Glenn explosion

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://spacenews.com/blue-origin-continues-work-on-lunar-landers-during-recovery-from-new-glenn-explosion/

Weekly output: not-so-independent agencies, location privacy, Virginia’s data-center tax, Blue Origin’s return-to-flight plans, civil supersonic flight, astronomy in VR, Backblaze

The list below would be a lot of published work for a five-workday week, and yet I didn’t write any of those things or deal with edits to them on Friday. The Supreme Court bears much of the responsibility for this pace, the aerospace-industry news cycle did its own part, and then I had two pieces that I’d started weeks before finally get published on the one day that I gave this keyboard a decent rest.

But wait, there was more: I wrote an extra post for Patreon readers Tuesday about the business calculations I’m working through as I decide if going to Berlin for the IFA tech trade show can pencil out for me.

6/29/2026: Supreme Court Gives Trump the Green Light to Fire Heads of FTC, Other Agencies, PCMag

Since I’ve been following President Trump’s attempts to expel the Democratic minority on the Federal Trade Commission, commissioners Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, since first writing about this story last March, I felt obliged to cover the Court’s conclusion of this case.

6/30/2026: Supreme Court: Fourth Amendment Protects Your Phone’s Location History, PCMag

I felt just as obliged to cover the Court ruling that Google’s Location History tool incurs Fourth Amendment protections–and to note that the majority opinion describes this as if Google hadn’t since turned Location History into an on-device, end-to-end-encrypted feature that Google can no longer access if presented with a “geofence warrant.”

6/30/2026: The State With the Most Data Centers Will Now Tax Their Energy Use, PCMag

I had been meaning to write about how Virginia has begun to change its approach to the data centers that now sprawl across Loudoun and Prince William counties. But until the General Assembly reached a belated budget compromise in the closing days of June, I didn’t know what sort of change we’d get.

7/1/2026: Blue Origin: Here’s How We’ll Return New Glenn to Flight Faster Than Expected, PCMag

Blue Origin posted an update Tuesday about its plans to resume launches of its New Glenn rocket. But in addition to having my hands full Tuesday, I needed part of Wednesday to take notes from videos of recent discussions–a panel with Blue founder Jeff Bezos and CEO Dave Limp, another panel led by Ars Technica space reporter Eric Berger, and a NASA press conference featuring administrator Jared Isaacman–that yielded some insight into the company’s situation.

7/2/2026: FAA Moves to Allow Civil Supersonic Flights Over Land, If They’re Quiet Enough, PCMag

This was my longest story published this week, because it had to cover not only the Federal Aviation Administration’s opening of a rulemaking process to legalize commercial supersonic flights over land but also the current state of affairs at Boom Supersonic and NASA’s debut of flight tests of its “low-boom” X-59 aircraft. That was a lot of detail to pack in, and I missed one error in my copy until a few hours after the story posted–I had described Boom’s XB-1 testbed aircraft as a single-engine plane when I meant single-seat.

7/3/2026: Visiting the stars (and planets, and telescopes) in VR, Ars Technica

Earlier in June, I spent a fascinating 40 minutes with a computer strapped to my face in a windowless room in downtown D.C., enjoying a VR tour of some of the universe’s more interesting places. I thought that would be a good fit for a site that routinely covers both technology and astronomy, and that’s how I’ve now had two pieces run at Ars this year after going three years since my previous contribution to one of my daily tech-news reads.

7/3/2026: Backblaze: Backup May Be a ‘Declining’ Business, But We’re Not Backing Away

This post was originally going to start with my talking to an exec with this computer-backup and cloud-storage firm at the TechEx North America conference in the middle of May, but my having the appointment on my calendar did not prevent me from completely spacing about it. We then punted to having the conversation over video but next had to reschedule the call multiple times. And now that the piece is finally published, we need to correct a few small items in it.

#NASA #ARTEMIS3 #NEWGLENN #SPACEX

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0oTKtKg5SU

New Glenn forced an explosive rewrite for NASA’s plans to build a moon base

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://spacenews.com/new-glenn-forced-an-explosive-rewrite-for-nasas-plans-to-build-a-moon-base/

Weekly output: Internet Archive, Roblox parental controls, Google travel-search tools, T-Mobile yanks free WiFi from United flights, Mark Vena podcast, talking to local user groups, AST SpaceMobile

LAS VEGAS–I’m typing this from a press room in the Las Vegas Convention Center barely three months after I spent too much time in that facility for CES. Credit or blame for this trip goes to a different Washington-area trade group, the National Association of Broadcasters. Tuesday, I will be moderating an NAB Show panel about the state of content creation that features two people who are better at Instagram than me: Juliana Broste and my fellow former USA Today columnist Jefferson Graham.

4/13/2026: Journalists Applaud the Internet Archive’s Role In Preserving the Public Record, Fight for the Future

A staffer with Public Knowledge e-mailed me a few weeks ago to ask if I would be willing to sign a letter supporting the Internet Archive’s efforts to preserve the history of the Web and possibly provide a quote about how I’d used the Archive. Having repeatedly relied on the Archive’s Wayback Machine to link back to my own past published work, I said I would be happy to do that–having already donated $100 to that San Francisco non-profit in January.

4/13/2026: Roblox Adds Account Restrictions for Younger Users, Expands Age Verification, PCMag

I attended a press roundtable Monday morning featuring some Roblox trust-and-safety executives, allowing me to enrich this writeup of the platform’s changes with quotes from that conversation.

4/15/2026: T-Mobile Grounds Free In-Flight Wi-Fi Benefit for United Airlines Passengers, PCMag

I had the dumb luck to see this change firsthand on a flight from Denver to San Jose Tuesday, then needed the rest of that day to get some responses from T-Mobile and United. The airline’s switch to free Starlink connectivity will fix this problem, but we are months away from that rollout reaching a significant fraction of United’s mainline fleet.

4/17/2026: Like It or Not, Google Wants to Be Your AI Travel Buddy This Summer, PCMag

I wrote up this post off an embargoed copy of Google’s announcement that we had to correct the next day because I had missed two of the finer points of this bundle of news. In my halfhearted defense, it is more work than you might realize keeping track of Google’s ongoing efforts to infuse AI into its existing services.

4/17/2026: How NTT Research’s Upgrade 2026 Helps Silicon Valley Get Ready for The Future, Mark Vena

My industry-analyst pal had do a quick video from NTT Research’s Upgrade conference in San Jose, Calif.–with that firm covering my travel costs–about some of its initiatives.

4/18/2026: 2026 Consumer Electronics Show and Lots More!, Potomac Area Technology and Computer Society/Osher Lifelong Learning Institute Personal Computer User Group/Washington Apple Pi

Despite that title–picked by the organizers at PATACS, pronounced “Pat-Aces”–I spent more time talking about other topics. Among them: my switch from Evernote to Obsidian just in time for CES, the sad state of tech policy in Washington, and my takes on self-driving cars and what’s befallen the Washington Post. As I have in previous appearances before these folks, I showed up with a bag of trade-show swag and gave away all of it.

4/19/2026: Blue Origin Rocket Launches, Then Loses AST SpaceMobile BlueBird Satellite, PCMag

I watched the third launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket on my phone as I was walking up to the security checkpoint at Dulles early Sunday morning, started writing up what I thought was a successful launch, then learned–via painfully slow inflight WiFi–that New Glenn’s second stage had failed to deliver AST’s mobile-broadband BlueBird satellite to the intended orbit. This is a real black eye for Blue that should outweigh its achievement in reflying a New Glenn booster and then landing it on a barge in the Atlantic.

Weekly output: USPS NGDV, spectrum policy, Pixel Drop, Uber’s robotaxi hopes, AI + cybersecurity, Tesla Files, Cerebras, New Glenn launch and landing, Cory Doctorow

Friday afternoon’s landing at Dulles and subsequent Metro ride home put this year’s business travel in the books–unless somebody else is prepared to pay for an additional work trip in 2025, and not even I want that to happen.

11/10/2025: I Took America’s Goofiest-Looking EV for a Spin. It Might Swing by Your Mailbox Soon, PCMag

My mid-October trip to Wisconsin (with Oshkosh Corp. paying for the airfare and lodging) yielded this report about the U.S. Postal Service’s NextGen Delivery Vehicle that I have yet to see in operation near me.

11/11/2025: It’s easy to reassign spectrum if you’re not the one using it, Light Reading

I rounded out this recap of a spectrum-policy conference I’d attended at the end of October with some quotes from a broadband expert whose insight I’ve been borrowing for the last 15 years or so.

11/11/2025: Google’s Latest Pixel Drop Adds Messaging Tricks And Tweaks, PCMag

The time-zone spread between the 2 p.m. Eastern embargo time for this item and my Western European local time for most of last week made this easy to file between other Web Summit schedule commitments.

11/12/2025: Cybersecurity at the pace of AI, Web Summit

The first of three panels I moderated at this conference in Lisbon had me quizzing Rob Daly, CTO of the security-training firm SoSafe, about how AI has complicated the work of people like him. As in previous years, Web Summit’s organizers paid for my lodging and are reimbursing me for my airfare.

11/12/2025: The Tesla Files: Leaks, power, and control, Web Summit

Later that Wednesday, I interviewed Sönke Iwersen, head of investigative research at Handelsblatt, about that German newspaper’s groundbreaking reporting on Tesla’s secretive and often careless approach to safety. Iwersen brought up a part of this story that hadn’t emerged in my pre-conference banter over e-mail with him: the steep personal price the paper’s informant has paid.

11/13/2025: The startups taking on Nvidia, Web Summit

Where my onstage interview of Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman at Web Summit Qatar in February had me running out of questions in my hand-written outline, this chat Thursday afternoon with that AI-processor startup’s chief strategy officer Andy Hock required me to cross out some queries in my notes because he answered the others at such length.

11/13/2025: Uber COO on Robotaxis: The Economics Don’t Work…Yet, PCMag

This panel happened late Tuesday afternoon, right before a crowded evening schedule; having to moderate two panels of my own on Wednesday pushed my filing time to Wednesday afternoon.

11/14/2025: Blue Origin Lands Its Giant Rocket’s Booster for the First Time, PCMag

A hold late in the countdown pushed the second launch of New Glenn to around dinnertime in Lisbon. So I didn’t get to watch any part of this mission on a screen larger than my phone’s until after I got back to my hotel–with fewer hours left than I would have liked before I had to head to Lisbon’s airport to fly back to the States.

11/14/2025: Cory Doctorow’s Plan for a Better Internet: Legalize Jailbreaking, Modding, and Tinkering, PCMag

I did not plan on my Web Summit coverage giving me a chance to put the neologism “enshittogenic” into the opening paragraphs of a story, but sometimes life comes at you fast.

#AIProcessors #AndroidUpdate #antiCircumventionLaws #BlueOrigin #Cerebras #CoryDoctor #Handelsblatt #jailbreaking #NewGlenn #newspace #NGDV #Nvidia #Oshkosh #PixelDrop #SoSafe #SpectrumAmericas #spectrumAuction #sprectrumReallocation #TeslaFiles #UberRobotaxi #UberWaymo #USPSElectricTruck #whistleblowing

https://www.europesays.com/uk/573129/ Blue Origin planning next New Glenn flight for early next year #Artemis #BlueMoon #BlueOrigin #HLS #HumanLandingSystem #NewGlenn #Science #SN #UK #UnitedKingdom

Blue Origin planning next New Glenn flight for early next year

WASHINGTON — After a successful second flight of New Glenn, including the first landing of the booster, Blue…
#NewsBeep #News #Science #Artemis #BlueMoon #BlueOrigin #GB #HLS #HumanLandingSystem #NewGlenn #SN #UK #UnitedKingdom
https://www.newsbeep.com/uk/265011/

Blue Origin planning next New Glenn flight for early next year

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://spacenews.com/blue-origin-planning-next-new-glenn-flight-for-early-next-year/

Weekly output: Arc Boats, data brokers, Mark Vena podcast, New Glenn, Starship, TikTok

Ideally, the week after CES would be a relaxing time with at least one day spent entirely disconnected from work. Because we don’t live in an ideal world, my week instead featured the Supreme Court blowing up TikTok and SpaceX blowing up the second stage of its giant Starship rocket.

And on top of that, I wrote a post Wednesday for Patreon readers sharing further observations from CES.

1/13/2025: This Speedy Electric Sport Boat Leaves Internal Combustion in Its Wake, PCMag

My CES coverage almost wrapped up with this report of a fun outing on Lake Mead on a battery-electric boat–“almost” as in I have a couple of other stories that began with notes and quotes from that trade show, but which can’t be finished without additional reporting.

1/13/2025: Even the Experts Have Trouble Getting Data Brokers to Stop Tracking Them, PCMag

After covering ShmooCon Saturday, I spent part of Sunday watching that hacker conference’s closing panels remotely and part of it writing a recap of Yael Grauer’s talk about the futility of trying to opt out of data brokers without any help from the federal privacy law that Congress keeps failing to pass.

1/15/2026: Ep 106 SmartTechCheck Podcast — CES recap, TikTok, Zoox, TSMC, Apple, Mark Vena

I joined my industry analyst friend Mark and my fellow tech journalists Stewart Wolpin and John Quain for this CES recap.

1/16/2025: Blue Origin’s Giant New Glenn Rocket Reaches Orbit on Its First Try, PCMag

The 1 to 4 a.m. launch window that Blue Origin apparently picked to minimize interference with air traffic maximized interference with my sleep–especially when the first attempt on Monday morning saw five resets of the countdown clock before finally getting scrubbed a little after 3 a.m. The second one resulted in a successful launch at 2:03 a.m., but then writing the post (and eyeing my bleary-eyed copy carefully before pasting it into the CMS) had me up until after 3 a.m. anyway.

1/16/2025: SpaceX Catches a Booster But Loses an Upper Stage on Starship’s Seventh Flight, PCMag

About 17 hours after watching one rocket launch Thursday, I watched a second one that was not so successful–and not in the way that I’d thought Starship’s seventh test might go awry, a failed booster catch.

1/17/2025: Supreme Court Upholds TikTok Ban, Finds No First Amendment Violations, PCMag

I wrote more than 500 words of background material in advance, plus ledes and closing sentences that would go with a court opinion against TikTok or for it. That let me get a completed story filed within half an hour of the court’s mercifully brief opinion getting posted at 10 a.m. Friday. That afternoon, I added another section with reactions from various parties, including two of my favorite tech-policy experts who also happen to be among two of the fastest sources I know to answer an e-mail request for comment.

#ArcBoats #BlueOrigin #ces #dataBrokers #electricBoat #FirstAmendment #LasVegas #MarkVena #NewGlenn #Shmoocon #SpaceX #Starship #SupremeCourt #TikTok #YaelGrauer