COLORADO SPRINGS — A shortage of Ukrainian Antonov aircraft raises the prospect of more delays for satellite projects already bogged down by supply chain issues.
Satellite manufacturers make heavy use of large cargo space on Antonovs to transport GEO spacecraft from factory to launch site.
But some Antonovs have been destroyed amid Russia’s war in Ukraine, noted Mark Quinn, head of Willis Towers Watson’s satellite insurance business, and those that are in service tend to be owned by Russian air cargo companies subject to Western sanctions or are being used to support the war effort.
It’s a reference to the evil form in the ‘Lord of the Rings’ books. For those unfamiliar with the ‘Lord of the Rings” books and movies, the Eye of Sauron is the chief antagonist in the series, exemplified as a flaming eye and that is a metaphor for pure evil. It’s not something anyone would want to be compared to unless, of course, you are Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
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Mark Zuckerberg (FB/IG) is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Meta, which he originally founded as Facebook in 2004. Mark is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for the company. In October 2021, Facebook rebranded to Meta to reflect all of its products and services across its family of apps and a focus on developing social experiences for the metaverse—moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology.
He is also the co-founder and co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative with his wife Priscilla, which is leveraging technology to help solve some of the world’s toughest challenges—including supporting the science and technology that will make it possible to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the twenty-first century.
Mark studied computer science at Harvard University before moving to Palo Alto, California, in 2004.
With the web of undersea cables lacing the continents together now, it’s hard to imagine that it wasn’t until 1956 that the first transatlantic telephone cable was laid. Sure, there were telegraph cables under the Atlantic starting as early as the late 1800s, but getting your voice across the ocean on copper was a long time coming. So what was the discerning 1930s gentleman of business to do when only a voice call would do? He’d have used a radiotelephone, probably at an outrageous expense, which as this video on the receiving end of the New York to London radio connection shows, was probably entirely justified.
The video details the shortwave radiotelephone system that linked New York and London in the 1930s. It starts with a brief but thorough explanation of ionospheric refraction, and how that atmospheric phenomenon makes it possible to communicate over vast distances. It also offers a great explanation on the problems inherent with radio connections, like multipath interference and the dependency on the solar cycle for usable skip. To overcome these issues, the Cooling Radio Station was built, and its construction is the main thrust of the video.
Built on Cooling Marshes along the Thames well outside of London, the receive-only radio station was a gigantic undertaking. It consisted of a two-mile-long rhombic array antenna, pointed directly at the transmitting site in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. The pool-table-flat marshland made for a perfect place for the array; the fact that the ground was saturated with brackish tidal water had the added benefit of excellent electrical conduction, too. The amount of work it took to raise the antenna masts and booms is impressive — very little power equipment was used. And we loved the details about the hardline coaxial used to stitch the antennas together — it was made on-site from copper tube and insulating spacers.
A U.S. astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts safely landed in Kazakhstan after leaving the International Space Station aboard the same capsule despite heightened antagonism between Moscow and Washington over the conflict in Ukraine.
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WASHINGTON — SpiderOak Mission Systems announced March 29 it won a contract from Lockheed Martin Space for its cybersecurity software.
The contract allows Lockheed Martin to use SpiderOak’s OrbitSecure software. “This is commercial technology that was developed for terrestrial applications and has been repurposed for the space business, specifically for low Earth orbit,” SpiderOak chairman Charles Beames told SpaceNews.
Beames said he could not disclose the value of the contract with Lockheed Martin. “The goal is to make OrbitSecure available to Lockheed Martin customers as part of an offering to provide an extra level of cybersecurity,” he said.
Source’s hydropanels are installed in 52 countries in 450 separate projects. The company has raised $150 million from investors including Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, BlackRock, Duke Energy and the Lightsmith Group.
This type of technology is desperately needed in places like India, where an estimated 800,000 villages don’t have clean drinking water. Friesen cited World Health Organization, showing that by 2025 “half the world’s population will be in water stressed areas.”
There’s a domestic need as well. In the U.S, there are 1.5 million miles of lead pipes still in the ground, and about 750 water main breaks a day, according to Friesen. The business opportunity, he said, is enormous.
This point was made clear in a recent paper by David Silver, Satinder Singh, Doina Precup, and Richard Sutton from DeepMind titled “Reward is Enough.” The authors argue that “maximizing reward is enough to drive behavior that exhibits most if not all attributes of intelligence.” However, reward is not enough. The statement itself is simplistic, vague, circular, and explains little because the assertion is meaningless outside highly structured and controlled environments. Besides, humans do many things for no reward at all, like writing fatuous papers about rewards.
The point is that suppose you or your team talk about how intelligent or cognitively plausible your solution is? I see this kind of solution arguing quite a bit. If so, you are not thinking enough about a specific problem or the people impacted by that problem. Practitioners and business-minded leaders need to know about cognitive plausibility because it reflects the wrong culture. Real-world problem solving solves the problems the world presents to intelligence whose solutions are not ever cognitively plausible. While insiders want their goals to be understood and shared by their solutions, your solution does not need to understand that it is solving a problem, but you do.
If you have a problem to solve that aligns with a business goal and seek an optimal solution to accomplish that goal, then how “cognitively plausible” some solution is, is unimportant. How a problem is solved is always secondary to if a problem is solved, and if you don’t care how, you can solve just about anything. The goal itself and how optimal a solution is for a problem are more important than how the goal is accomplished, if the solution was self-referencing, or what a solution looked like after you didn’t solve the problem.
WASHINGTON — If you can’t beat them, join them. That is the thinking behind a new managed network service offered by satellite operator Intelsat that integrates geostationary satellites, SpaceX’s Starlink low Earth orbit constellation and cellular broadband.
“A lot of our customers would like to use Starlink and many have been using it,” Don Claussen, Intelsat’s vice president of business development, told SpaceNews at last week’s Satellite 2022 conference.
Satellite communications companies “spend so much time fighting each other over what orbits are better, what band is better,” he said. “If we’re really listening to our customers, what they are saying is ‘we kind of need all of you.’”.
American Robotics CEO Reese Mozer has no beef with drone deliveries, but he thinks all the hoopla surrounding aerial transport of burgers and burritos is drowning out news about farther-reaching UAV activities that are dramatically changing the way businesses operate. He tells DroneDJ about that transformative innovation, and how American Robotics’s (AR) leading role in the complete automation of critical drone services to industry is set to take wing.
Nevertheless, Mozer adds, that action manages to generate sufficient media and public excitement to divert attention from the more complex, vital, and – in total financial terms – valuable surveying and inspection services drone automation provides heavy industry, energy, railroad, and infrastructure operators. And that’s precisely the UAV sector activity he predicts will begin taking off and turning heads this year.
Starbucks is aiming to capitalize on the rising demand for electric vehicle infrastructure by installing fast chargers at up to 15 coffeehouses this summer, along a 1,350-mile route from Colorado to Washington.
The project, a pilot program with Volvo Cars, aims to build one DC charging station on each 100-mile segment of the western route.
Why install chargers at Starbucks? The coffeehouse chain is betting that it can score business from electric vehicle owners while they wait for their cars to charge — a process that can take a while, depending on the battery and strength of the charger.
