three, two, one, zero. getting into space is an expensive, dangerous, highly complicated business, where hundreds of thousands of precision—made parts all have to work together perfectly. if they don't. .. but as the race back to space hots up, commercial ventures are looking for simpler, cheaper, quicker alternatives to building spacecraft. and here in la, ifound a startup trying to solve all of those problems in the unlikeliest of ways — by sd printing rockets. this is relativity space.

existing rocket bits are not sd printed. what is the advantage of sd printing? a lot of it, from our perspective, is flexibility. traditionally, factories are made of tonnes of fixed tooling. it's then very expensive, very hard to change, then where you have to retooling factory in order to make a new product or even change a product slightly. for us, we can change all of that in software. so it's digitising the manufacturing process and providing flexibility, where, if you push new code to the printers and the hardware on the factory floor, you can actually make an entirely different product without changing anything in hardware. after a stint at spacex, jordan formed relativity space with his friend and ex—blue origin engineer tim ellis. the two twentysomethings realised that sd printing could help in several ways. because it builds up objects layer by layer, it can produce complicated structures out ofjust one part. also, much of the manufacturing can

be done autonomously, which leads to a rather remarkable aim. the team wants to send robots to mars which can then build rockets on the surface. and that means that the astronauts who eventually land there will have a way of getting home. it's both better, cheaper, faster. it's going to actually evolve more quickly than other technologies and we'll launch factories to mars, actually build things like housing, spare parts and infrastructure, and eventually leading up to printing the first rockets. why has no—one done this before? no—one‘s had a printer big enough to print something that big. and a lot of the challenge we had as a company was making printers big enough to make entire rockets within them. this is what the printing process looks like close up. a robot arm weaves backwards and forwards to lay down a thick layer of special

high—strength aluminium alloy. so this is it, the world's largest metal sd printer. it's currently printing the top of the first stage of the rocket, so the first bit that burns its fuel and is then jettisoned. this is the top of that. and if you look really closely, you can see that it's very slowly rotating. it takes about an hour to go all the way around at the moment, and that means that the robot arm — with all the hot stuff and liquid metal stuff — can stay relatively still as it weaves each layer. and that means you get a lot more precision. the whole thing will take about ten to 12 days to print. i can wait. i don't know about you. and why have one giant sd printer when you can have several running in parallel? they're basically off the shelf robot arms, all arc—welding different rocket stages that, when put together,

can stand s0 metres high. in its first five years, relativity space has already secured contracts with nasa and others. and next year, it hopes to make its first launch from cape canaveral in florida after becoming only the fourth commercial company to secure a launch there alongside the united launch alliance, blue origin and its la compatriots spacex. and, sometime after that, mars beckons — and the promise that anyone who journeys to the red planet is not making a one—way trip after all. hello, and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week saudi arabia was accused of hacking the phone of amazon's billionaire founderjeff bezos. crown prince mohammad bin salman is alleged to have sent an encrypted video file via whatsapp, which saudi arabia denies. it was revealed that the introduction of gdpr in 2018,

the eu has imposed 114 million euros in fines, with regulators in france, germany and austria handing out the biggest fines so far. is it a bird? is it a plane? yes and no. it's a pigeon bot. researchers at stanford university have built a robot bird using real pigeon feathers. the team believe their findings could inspire future aircraft wing design. quite the coup! how would you feel about sharing a ride in a driverless car without a steering wheel? the origin, made by general motors‘ own crews, is also missing pedals and a rear—view mirror. its developers, which also include honda, hope that multiple—occupancy electric vehicles will reduce emissions, accidents and congestion. and finally, spending too much time on your smartphone? google suggests popping it in an envelope. google envelope is an app used in conjunction with a paper cover

you can print out at home. the combo can dumb down your device so it can only make and receive calls or transform it into a photo and video camera with no screen, although it only currently works on the pixel sa. will it work? answers on a postcard. now, much earlier than normal, we find ourselves in oscars season. it's the academy awards in a few weeks‘ time. and between now and then, we are going to be meeting the people behind the most innovative developments in the movies that are up for the awards. and we start with this monster hit. whatever it takes. this show had so many challenges, i think, because it's such a pinnacle of the marvel universe. excuse me, mr hulk? yes. can we get a photo? smart hulk in particular was a real challenge because we were taking our facial

animation to places we hadn't been. and to get that level of performance was definitely a real challenge. so, when they were shooting, they shot with mark ruffalo in place as smart hulk. he would wear a motion capture suit and also some head—mounted cameras to capture his facial performance. so that meant, once we got the shots turned over to us, we had a good amount of reference to get started with. although we had this amazing performance for mark, if you put 100% mark onto smart hulk, it wouldn't look like smart hulk. it would look like mark ruffalo pretending to be smart hulk. so there's some amount of refinement we had to do to find that performance, to find the character. we used some machine learning techniques to enable us to capture his performance very quickly off of that footage and put it onto our initial model. we tried to get that really finessed human performance, which is probably one of the hardest things to do in cg. something else we took from our machine learning information was some of the really small micro movements. although we did most of it had animation, it was very important we could take

these tiny little micro movements, like just very small bits of eyebrow movement, cheek movements, just really subtle so you can feed it back over the top of the hand animation to really capture the performance. the biggest problem, i think, we faced was actually the quantum suits that the avengers wear because, when they shot it — way back before infinity war — there was no design for the suits. so nobody was wearing a suit and no suit was ever built. so we had to work out several things. one is how we were going to place everybody‘s costumes? because they were being shot in whatever costume the avenger happen to usually wear. in some cases, that created quite a few problems. some of the costumes that they were wearing have very high collars, so the newer suits that they would've been wearing wouldn't be covering all of that costume. so there'd be bits of their next would be visible, which we have to recreate either in cg or in painting it back. and in some shots... the establishing shot when they first walked

into the hangar altogether was actually shot with stand—ins. they've done the lines... we ended up replacing their heads as well. sometimes using a double, sometimes using pieces of plate from our shots. we could find a nice side view and stick that in because it was quite wide. but the other thing to bear in mind is in these shots, because we had to integrate the lighting on the suits into the plate as well, we built a full cg hangar — which we needed anyway... there was a green screen behind them, where the windows are. and even though the green screen was outside the windows, we had to replace all the windows simply because we needed the reflections of what we are putting into the building anyway. so by the end of the day, the only thing that's actually left in those shots from what was filmed, is their heads and part of the ceiling. so we replaced the hangar as well. so, actually there was one shot in particularfor ant—man right at the beginning of the time travel testing. ant—man introduces the quantum van. that shot was originally in a different sequence,

shot in a different part of the hangar, so the background was all wrong. so we had to take that and completely change it and change the environment, change the van. and then it was like, "oh, he's also in the wrong costume." so we ended up replacing his costume as well to put him into the ant—man quantum suit that he was wearing for the rest of the sequence. so that was another sort of last—minute, single—shot design of a costume to match what it was exactly like in the rest of the shots. people like to see the big flashy effects. but the satisfaction comes a lot of the time from doing work, good work, that nobody realises is there. and we'll look at the secrets behind another oscar nominee next week. now, this is the end of the short version of click for this week. the full—length version is available to watch on iplayer right now. and we‘ll be back in la in a few weeks‘ time for the academy awards. in the meantime, follow us on social media. we live on youtube, facebook, instagram and twitter at... thanks for watching

and we‘ll see you soon. halow. much of the past week, we have had a fairly quiet spell of largely dry, settled but fairly cloudy weather. it has been all change, though. on sunday, we saw this system which you consume the satellite and in quite a bit of cloud and other bits of rain moving eastwards a cross cloud and other bits of rain moving eastwards across the uk. and following from the west behind that weather front, much following from the west behind that weatherfront, much colder air, and you can see the cloud on the satellite image. we ended the day with a bit of brightness, this is cou nty with a bit of brightness, this is county londonderry, but cloudy conditions in staffordshire during sunday afternoon. through the rest

of this evening and overnight, the cloud and rain will push away from eastern parts of the uk, followed by a rash of heavy showers leading on from the west. some of these could bring some hail and some thunder, across parts of england and wales, for scotland, northern ireland and the north of england, some sleet, ice and snow falling overnight, so could be quite a difficult rush—hour. monday morning, we are likely to see some ice and snow commuting over most of the higher ground, but even to some relatively low levels of the central belt, could be quite an icy start to your monday morning. northern ireland and parts of northern england over parts of the higher ground in particular seems icy stretches, too. further southin seems icy stretches, too. further south in england and wales, some showers rattling in. some heavy around the south coast, and parts of wales as well. could be some hail and thunder mixed in. further east across england, and for eastern scotland, looking dry during the day for the most part, but plenty of showers blown across southern and western parts on that brisk breeze. it will feel colder than it has recently come impetus around five to

nine celsius. —— colder than it has felt recently. monday evening, the breeze will pick up, particularly blustery through the english channel, the bristol channel as well. towards tuesday, things will stay fairly unsettled, a westerly influence to our weather. this weather system is set to bring more in the way of rain, sleet and snow over some of the higher ground, parts of northern england, southern scotla nd parts of northern england, southern scotland noticing some wintriness and those showers on tuesday. elsewhere, sunny spells, a scattering of showers, could be some hailand scattering of showers, could be some hail and thunder in them as well, and quitea hail and thunder in them as well, and quite a chilly day on tuesday. through the weekend, for after that chilly start with snow and ice, looking dry in midweek. and once again, things turn mild and u nsettled again, things turn mild and unsettled later in the week. goodbye for now.

this is bbc news. the headlines at 8pm: the death toll from the coronavirus in china rises to 56 — officials warn the spread of the virus is accelerating and the country faces a "grave situation". today, the chinese government has said there is evidence that it is actually getting stronger in its transmission. and because of that, many specialists are seeing it is already too late. the foreign office is urging britons to leave the province where the outbreak began — and is advising against further travel there. a member of the grenfell tower inquiry panel resigns over links with the firm that supplied the tower block‘s deadly cladding. a child is pulled from the rubble as emergency teams search for survivors in the aftermath of the powerful earthquake that struck turkey on friday.