Solo flight for Virgin spaceship

10 October 2010 Last updated at 19:19 ET By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News <!-- Embedding the video player --> <!-- This is the embedded player component -->

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Virgin has released footage of the VSS Enterprise taking its first flight

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Virgin Galactic's suborbital spaceship, Enterprise, has made its first solo test flight, in California.

Continue reading the main story

"Start Quote

We are focused on safety and making sure we know everything about this vehicle before we put it into commercial operations"

End Quote Stephen Attenborough Virgin Galactic

The spaceship was carried to an altitude of 45,000ft (13,700m) by an aeroplane and then dropped to glide back to the Mojave Air and Space Port.

Enterprise will soon be taking people prepared to pay $200,000 (�126,000) on short hops above the atmosphere.

The British billionaire behind the project, Sir Richard Branson, was on hand to witness the drop test.

"This was one of the most exciting days in the whole history of Virgin," the entrepreneur said.

"For the first time since we seriously began the project in 2004, I watched the world's first manned commercial spaceship landing on the runway at Mojave Air and Space Port and it was a great moment."

Virgin Galactic is aiming to become the world's first commercial space line, and has already taken deposits from 370 customers who want to experience a few minutes of weightlessness on a suborbital flight.

"We're not far off booking out our first year of operations," said Stephen Attenborough, head of astronaut relations at Galactic.

"We'll see exactly how many we decide to fly in year one, but the intention has always been around 500. We're well on our way to that," he told BBC News.

The Enterprise ship is based on the X-Prize-winning SpaceShipOne vehicle, which made history in 2004 by successfully flying to 100km (60 miles) in altitude twice in a two-week period.

The new ship, built by Mojave's Scaled Composites company, is bigger and will be capable of carrying eight people - two crew and six passengers.

When it eventually enters service, Enterprise will be carried to its launch altitude by the "Eve" carrier plane before being released in mid-air. Enterprise will then ignite its single hybrid rocket engine to make the ascent to space.

Although Eve and Enterprise have made several test flights together, Sunday was the first time the spaceplane had been released at altitude.

Two pilots were at the controls, Pete Siebold and Mike Alsbury. They guided the ship back to the Mojave runway.

The entire flight took about 25 minutes. On later test flights, Enterprise will fire its rocket engine.

Only when engineers are satisfied all systems are functioning properly will passengers be allowed to climb aboard.

"We are focused on safety and making sure we know everything about this vehicle before we put it into commercial operations. There is a timetable in terms of what we're going to do, but as we've said many times before, 'it takes as long as it takes', Mr Attenborough said.

"The next big milestone will be when we start the rocket motor propulsion tests."

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

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Call to change PC security tools

11 October 2010 Last updated at 05:56 ET By Mark Ward Technology correspondent, BBC News

An initiative has been kicked off that hopes to improve the way PC users are protected from viruses.

It will create and distribute a small program that will gather statistics on how quickly security companies find and remove malicious code.

The figures will reveal if users are being left vulnerable and for how long as well as rank response times.

But some experts say such simple tools could give a false impression and may prove hard to develop.

"In the last two to three years we have seen more individual pieces of malware than in the entire 30 years before that time," said Mr Chris Bolin, a former chief technology officer at McAfee who is now head of UK security firm Prevx, which is trying to start the initiative.

Response time

The typical way that anti-virus companies work, said Mr Bolin, was by analysing novel threats, creating a signature file for it and then distributing that to customers to spot when the novel threat turns up.

But, said Mr Bolin, the sheer amount of viruses was threatening to overwhelm this system.

Estimates suggest that hi-tech criminals are pumping out about 60,000 individual pieces of malware every day. The number of daily variants was only going to grow, said Mr Bolin, and current methods were rapidly going to be overwhelmed.

As the gap between the variants and fixes grew, users were increasingly going to be at risk.

"No other industry would tolerate that level of failure," he said.

In the face of the tidal wave of malware, said Mr Bolin, PC users need a better way to find out how well they are being protected and how long they have been at risk.

Continue reading the main story

"Start Quote

There's always room for improvement"

End Quote Graham Cluley Sophos

Mr Bolin believes the way to get a better sense of the performance of security companies is via a small program that sits on a PC and logs when files are installed.

The program would lie dormant most of the time but would alert a user if it noticed that a fix had been created for a particular virus or trojan it had spotted on a PC.

It would tell a PC owner how long a virus had been known about and when it was first fixed. Mr Bolin said the small program would be ready by November.

"Innovation needs to occur on the anti-malware side because it's growing exponentially on the malware side," he said. "We need to bring about change in an industry that is not changing."

Statistics generated by the tool being used across thousands of PCs would help consumers and corporates get a better sense of which firms react and fix viruses fastest.

This would be preferable to the current situation, he suggested, in which firms are measured on how well they perform against a fixed list of malicious programs.

"We need a fundamental sea level change," he said. "Using the old yardstick does not work."

Signature test

Rik Ferguson, senior security advisor at Trend Micro, said logging response times was too crude a measure of what anti-virus companies did.

"If you concentrate on just looking for malicious files then you are only looking at part of the story," he said.

Most contemporary infections, he said, began with a victim visiting a booby-trapped website or clicking a link in an e-mail that takes them to a poisoned site. From there a victim could be re-directed and only then vulnerabilities in code might be exploited to place a malicious file on a PC.

"Any good security system should block that process from ever getting started," said Mr Ferguson.

Logging only when a virus was fixed would ignore all that other useful work, he said.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said privacy might limit the numbers of people who download and install the tool as they may have fears about what was being done with the data being gathered.

He added that the ways that security companies seek out malware on PCs was changing to cope with the growth of malicious programs.

Mr Cluley said the testing of anti-virus products was developing and improving thanks to initiatives such as the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organisation.

"There's always room for improvement," he said. "But most security companies these days are pretty good at being pro-active. They do not just rely on signatures to spot malware."

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Google tests &#39;intelligent&#39; cars

10 October 2010 Last updated at 05:53 ET

Engineers at Google have tested a self-driving car on the streets of California, the company has announced.

The cars use video cameras mounted on the roof, radar sensors and a laser range finder to "see" other traffic, software engineer Sebastian Thrun said.

They remain manned at all times by a trained driver ready to take control as well as by a software expert.

Google hopes the cars can eventually help reduce road traffic and cut the number of accidents.

In a posting on the company's official blog, Mr Thrun said the self-driven cars had so far covered 140,000 miles on the road.

They have crossed San Francisco's iconic Golden Gate bridge, negotiated the city's famous sloping streets, driven between Google offices, and made it around Lake Tahoe in one piece.

'Exciting future'

Engineers told the New York Times that the forays onto the highways have been largely incident-free, apart from one bump when the car was reportedly hit from behind at a traffic light.

In his Google blog post, Mr Thrun - professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University - insisted that safety was the "first priority" in the project.

Routes are pre-planned, mapped first by real drivers, and local police are briefed in advance, he says.

But he pointed to figures from the World Health Organization which show that more than 1.2 million people are killed each year on the roads, and said that number could and should be reduced.

"We believe our technology has the potential to cut that number, perhaps by as much as half.

"While this project is very much in the experimental stage, it provides a glimpse of what transportation might look like in the future thanks to advanced computer science. And that future is very exciting," he added.

Google has rapidly branched out from its previous core business of search in recent years.

The company already has significant interests in location services through its Google Maps and Google Street View offerings.

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