Lifeboat Foundation

– TechCrunch

Elon Musk has shared some details about future testing of Starship, the SpaceX launch vehicle currently being developed by the company at its Boca Chica, Texas facility. Recently, SpaceX has completed short, 150 meter (just under 500 feet) test flights of two earlier Starship prototypes, SN5 and SN6 – and SN8, which is currently set to be done construction “in about a week” according to Musk will have “flaps & nosecone” and ultimately is intended for a much higher altitude test launch.

The prototypes that SpaceX has flown and landed for its so-called ‘short-hop’ tests over the past few weeks have been full-sized, but with a simulated weight installed on the top in place of the actual domed nosecone that will perch atop the final production Starship and protect any cargo on board. SN5 and SN6, which are often compared to grain silos, are also lacking the large control flaps on either side of the nosecone that will help control its flight. SN8 will have both, according to Musk.

Continue reading “Elon Musk says Starship SN8 prototype will have a nosecone and attempt a 60,000-foot return flight” »

An advanced artificial intelligence created by OpenAI, a company founded by genius billionaire Elon Musk, recently penned an op-ed for The Guardian that was so convincingly human many readers were astounded and frightened. And, ew. Just writing that sentence made me feel like a terrible journalist.

That’s a really crappy way to start an article about artificial intelligence. The statement contains only trace amounts of truth and is intended to shock you into thinking that what follows will be filled with amazing revelations about a new era of technological wonder.

Here’s what the lede sentence of an article about the GPT-3 op-ed should look like, as Neural writer Thomas Macaulay handled it earlier this week:

SpaceX just launched more satellites in a month than history has ever seen. But that’s bad news for astronomers.

SpaceX’s newest satellites sport sun visors — an effort to reduce their brightness in the night sky and their impact on astronomers’ telescopes.

Featured image: @tobilindh/Twitter

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is now in Germany on a visit. During the trip, he met with several politicians, discussed a number of important issues, and visited Giga Berlin.

On September 3, Musk made his first visit to the construction site of Tesla’s plant in Grünheide, near Berlin. He arrived at 12:30 pm in a black Model X, where the media and film crews were already waiting for him. Apparently, he is very pleased with the progress of the construction, which was expressed in an enthusiastic greeting: “Deutschland roks! Yeah!”

Fellow rocket man Elon Musk reacted with sympathy. “Sorry to hear that. Orbit is hard,” he tweeted, adding that it took his firm, SpaceX, four attempts before reaching orbit in September 2008. Branson himself “waited an hour” before getting on the phone to CEO Dan Hart. “His brain, as it does, just immediately turns to – ‘well how quickly can you try again’?” Pomerantz recalls, describing the mood in the room as the sun set in California as “a big step forward that nevertheless was nowhere near as big as we wanted it to be – we are a way better company than we were the day we did that launch, but we didn’t get to orbit.”

Back Of A Napkin

But for Pomerantz, Branson, Virgin and the watching entrepreneurial world, including competitors like SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, a larger question was answered: Could Richard Branson drop a rocket off the wing of a Virgin aircraft and call it a business?

Featured Image Source: SpaceX

Chief Engineer Elon Musk founded SpaceX with the goal to enable humans to live on Mars. The aerospace company is developing its next-generation launch vehicle in South Texas at Boca Chica Beach. According to SpaceX, Starship will be the most powerful rocket in the world; It will be a 120-meter-tall, two-stage launch vehicle consisting of a spacecraft capable of carrying one hundred passengers, and a Super Heavy booster used to propel the craft out of Earth’s atmosphere.

During the Humans To Mars teleconference that took place on Tuesday, Musk said Starship’s Super Heavy “booster prototype one” will initiate construction “this week.” SpaceX Boca Chica teams are building multiple Starship prototypes at the assembly facility, where gigantic vehicle assembly buildings are taking shape to accommodate the massive stainless-steel rocket booster. – “Making a prototype of something is, I think, relatively easy,” he said, “But building the production system so that you can build ultimately hundreds or thousands of Starships, that’s the hard part.”

With a pig-filled demonstration, Neuralink revealed its latest advancements in brain implants this week. But what do scientists think of Elon Musk’s company’s grand claims?

SpaceX gave an update on early tests of its Starlink satellite internet network, which showed speeds capable of playing online video games and streaming movies.

Starlink is the ambitious plan by Elon Musk’s company to build an interconnected network of about 12,000 small satellites in low Earth orbit. To date, SpaceX has launched about 650 of its version 1.0 satellites and is currently building a system of ground stations and user terminals to connect consumers directly to its network.

The company confirmed during the webcast of its latest launch on Monday that employees have been testing Starlink’s latency and download speeds, key measures for an internet service provider. SpaceX senior certification engineer Kate Tice said that the initial results of those tests “have been good.”

Earlier this week, Elon Musk said there’s a “good chance” settlers in the first Mars missions will die. And while that’s easy to imagine, he and others are working hard to plan and minimize the risk of death by hardship or accident. In fact, the goal is to have people comfortably die on Mars after a long life of work and play that, we hope, looks at least a little like life on Earth.

🌌 You love our badass universe. So do we. Let’s explore it together.