Chicago reporters

Welcome to Edition 3.34 of the Rocket Report! I apologize for the unplanned hiatus last week. The Rocket Report's Houston-based author lacked power until Wednesday night amidst a massive winter storm and had no reliable Internet until Friday afternoon. We still had no hot water at our house, but at least we're no longer freezing. We're back just in time to spew all manner of spicy launch news this week. As always, Ars welcomes reader submissions , and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar. KSLV-2 rocket on track for 2022 launch . As part of its budget for 2021 space activities, South Korea will spend $553 million for satellites, rockets, and other equipment. SpaceNews reports this funding will keep the country's development of … [Read more...] about Rocket Report: Cornwall says “LOL, no” to space tourism, Korean rocket on track

Bloomberg cites unnamed "people briefed on the matter" in reporting that PS5 owners will finally be able to expand the system's built-in storage by this coming summer. The planned firmware update that will unlock this feature will also allow for higher cooling-fan speeds on the system to prevent overheating, Bloomberg reports. For games designed for the PS5, owners are currently limited to 667GB of usable space on the system's 825GB high-speed NVMe drive. That's a pretty strict limit when individual PS5 games can be 50 to 100GB or more at the high end. PS5 owners can plug in a standard USB hard drive to store backward compatible PlayStation 4 games running on the system, though. Further Reading Sony details PS5’s fast SSD, variable clock rates, 3D audio tech [Updated] Almost a year ago, Sony announced that the PS5's storage space would be expandable with certain standard M.2 solid state drives , which are shaped a bit like a stick of gum. Sony said it would be … [Read more...] about Report: PS5 storage expansion will be available by summer

Sony will allow the PlayStation 5 to make use of expanded SSD storage from this summer, according to a report in Bloomberg . The functionality is said to be coming in a firmware update that will activate the PS5’s M.2 expansion slot, which is currently disabled. Sony told The Verge ahead of the PS5 launch that the feature was “reserved for a future update.” Bloomberg’s sources say that the firmware update will allow for an increase in the speed of the PS5’s cooling fans. The PS5 has an extremely fast built-in SSD, and any compatible third-party drive will need to be equally fast in order to store and run PS5 games; that’s going to generate some extra heat. The PS5 comes with an 825GB SSD right now, leaving users with only 667GB of usable space when formatted. With game sizes ever increasing — you can’t fit all the content from the latest Call of Duty on a 500GB PS4 , for example — PS5 owners will welcome the possibility of storage upgrades. As long as the fan noise isn’t … [Read more...] about Sony will reportedly enable PS5 SSD expansion this summer

In the wake of Google shutting down its Stadia Games & Entertainment (SG&E) group , leaks about the underwhelming game-streaming service have started to emerge . A Friday Bloomberg report , citing unnamed Stadia sources, attaches a new number to the failures: "hundreds of thousands" fewer controllers sold and "monthly active users" (MAU) logging in than Google had anticipated. The controller sales figure is central to the story told Friday by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier: that internally, Google was of two minds about how Stadia should launch. One idea looked back at some of the company's biggest successes, particularly Gmail, which launched softly in a public, momentum-building beta while watching how it was received over time. The other, championed by Stadia lead Phil Harrison, was to treat Stadia like a console, complete with some form of hardware that could be hyped and pre-sold. In Stadia's case, the latter won out, with Harrison bullishly selling a Stadia Founder's … [Read more...] about Report: Stadia undershot to the tune of “hundreds of thousands” of users

New Delhi: As the stage is almost set for selective rollout of 5G (fifth generation) mobile network technology in India by 2021-end, the Telecom Ministry is facing insufficiency of spectrum with the defence and space sectors seeking nearly half of the spectrum. Of the 300 megahertz which are available, 25 megahertz are required for certain satellite uses by Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and 100 megahertz is wanted by the defence sector. If these 125 megahertz are deducted from the available spectrum , only 175 megahertz will be available with the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), under the Telecom Ministry, to divide it among three present operators. However, DoT has been addressing the issue of "lack of spectrum" and deliberating with Department of Space (DoS) and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) for making sufficient spectrum available for 5G IMT (International Mobile Telecommunications) services. "In so far as the spectrum availability is … [Read more...] about ‘Lack’ of spectrum major issue before 5G rollout: Report