SpaceX wins $82.7 million contract from the US Air Force; Google's "driverless car" is about to graduate | Lei Feng Morning News

SpaceX wins $82.7 million contract from U.S. Air Force

According to the Los Angeles Times, SpaceX won the US Air Force's $82.7 million contract to launch GPS (Global Positioning System) satellites, breaking ULA's monopoly in the US national security launch market. The Hawthorne-based company plans to launch a third-generation GPS satellite in May 2018 using a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

The U.S. Air Force said the satellite will have stronger anti-interference capabilities and provide more accurate navigation and timing services for military and civilian fields. SpaceX was certified in May last year to launch satellites for national security and military purposes. This launch market has long been dominated by the United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

The United Launch Alliance did not bid for the Air Force launch contract, saying they "did not have an accounting system ready to bid in compliance." This is also the first time SpaceX has won a contract from the U.S. military. Lieutenant General Samuel Greaves, the U.S. Air Force's space program executive, said: "The award of the GPS 3 launch contract is a balance between mission success, meeting operational needs, reducing launch costs and introducing competition in the national security space launch market."

Netizen comments: Space X has been very popular recently!

Google executive says self-driving cars will soon graduate from X

Astro Teller, head of Google's X division, reportedly said that Google's self-driving car "will soon graduate from X." Although the semantics of this statement are a bit complicated, it basically means that Google's parent company Alphabet believes that self-driving cars are no longer a crazy moonshot project. Because it can now be operated as an independent business, the son has grown up and can be sent out to make money!

Bloomberg reported in December last year that Google may spin off its self-driving car business to focus on deploying self-driving cars in designated areas (such as college campuses) to provide ride-hailing services. Google may also try to make self-driving cars legally available on public roads and highways across the United States. However, this process, even in the most optimistic scenario, will take several years.

As everyone starts paying attention to self-driving cars, Alphabet is naturally starting to take it seriously, and the company wants to make it more independent and formal. The job of the X department is to prove that this technology is reliable and profitable. Although we have not seen self-driving cars actually driving on public roads, Google and various companies in the automotive industry have actually proved that it is reliable.

Netizens commented: "If there are any traffic problems in the future, you guys who are working on driverless cars will be held responsible."

AMD to build affordable Polaris VR graphics card

AMD's Roy Taylor revealed in an interview that the company is preparing to build an affordable Polaris VR graphics card. According to him, AMD is committed to increasing its share in the VR market through more affordable graphics cards. Currently, high-end VR helmets, such as HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, require a powerful gaming system. The minimum recommended VR graphics card is NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 970 and AMD's Radeon R9 390. The average price of these graphics cards is $330, which is an extra burden for VR players.

Judging from Taylor's comments, AMD's new generation Polaris architecture will bring the cost-effectiveness of VR graphics cards to a new level and launch lower-priced VR graphics cards. These more affordable graphics cards will not adopt the method of renaming old products. They will be new products based entirely on the Polaris architecture.

According to its latest financial report, AMD will launch Polaris 11 products for the laptop market and Polaris 10 products for mainstream desktops and high-end gaming laptops. Some other reports suggest that the high-end Polaris 10 graphics card will perform similarly to NVIDIA's flagship GTX 980 Ti, but will cost only half of its $650 price, around $300.

NVIDIA, on the other hand, is likely to focus on building the most powerful single-GPU graphics card yet using the Pascal architecture, but that may not happen until 2017, when we will also see AMD's new high-priced flagship, the Vega products with HBM2 memory.

Netizen comments: It will take some time for the VR industry to mature

Liqun Automation receives USD 10 million in Series B financing

Industrial robot company Liqun Automation recently announced the completion of a multi-million dollar Series B financing round. This round of financing was led by SAIF Partners, and China Renaissance Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor for this financing.

Regarding this round of financing, Shi Jinbo, CEO of Liqun Automation, said: "After this round of financing, we will further increase investment in the development of underlying technologies, new products and related software, and increase the introduction of talents. The company is currently developing new robot control technologies, while constantly enriching product lines and integrated application scenarios to meet more diversified customer needs in the future."

Ge Xiaojing, partner of SAIF (Fuxing) Fund, said: "In line with the urgent need to upgrade the domestic manufacturing industry in recent years, the company takes light industrial robot manufacturing as its entry point and application services as its competitiveness, and has the ability to grow into a leading enterprise in China's emerging industrial robot market."

Founded in 2011, LiQun Automation has successfully launched a number of products including the Apollo series parallel robots, Artemis series and Athena series SCARA robots.

Liu Jing from NetEase Media: VR makes first-person news reporting possible

At the VR Summit held at GMIC yesterday, Liu Jing, deputy editor-in-chief of NetEase Media, said: News itself is report-based, and reporters enter the news from the perspective of an observer or a third party. It is difficult to enter the first-person perspective. The emergence of virtual reality has made first-person perspective reporting possible.

Liu Jing said: "VR hardware technology has developed to this stage. After many explorations by peers in the film and television industry and the gaming industry, we as news producers can now try to produce first-person news content. NetEase Media reporters went to Ukraine to report on the Chernobyl nuclear accident and filmed the scene. The difference is that we operate virtual reality equipment, which presents a new news viewing experience to the audience.

He believes that in the VR news reporting scenario, in addition to obstacles such as data transmission and battery life, the most important thing is the popularity of viewing devices. At present, although there are many relatively cheap devices that can provide users with this VR content viewing and browsing experience, it also brings some corresponding problems. For example, relatively low-priced viewing devices may affect the effect of the entire VR browsing process, which means that you only experience freshness but not a very pleasant state. This is a problem currently facing the entire industry.

Netizen comments: Will the news broadcast also use VR technology in the future?

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