Lifeboat Foundation

Billionaire Rocket Scientist SpaceX CEO Elon Musk: “Give people back their goddamn freedom.”

Elon Musk called the shelter-in-place orders in the San Francisco Bay Area and throughout the US “fascist” actions that are stripping people of their freedom on a Tesla earnings call on Wednesday. Musk’s comments come after a torrent of criticism for remarks he made late Tuesday night on Twitter, in which the billionaire CEO echoed President Trump by writing in all caps, “Free America Now.”

Continue reading “Elon Musk says shelter-in-place orders during COVID-19 are ‘fascist’” »

A full payout for Musk, who is also the majority owner and CEO of the SpaceX rocket maker, would surpass anything previously granted to US executives.

When Tesla unveiled Musk’s package in 2018, it said he could theoretically reap as much as $US55.8 billion if no new shares were issued. However, Tesla has since issued shares to compensate employees, and last year it sold $US2.7 billion in shares and convertible bonds.

The potential payout for Musk comes after Tesla said this month it would furlough all non-essential workers and implement salary cuts during a shutdown of its US production facilities because of the coronavirus outbreak. The pandemic has slashed US demand for cars and forced several other automakers to also furlough US workers.

During a virtual conference briefing this week, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk provided more details about a new plan that his company has to mitigate the impact of their Starlink satellite constellation on night sky observation. Musk first revealed on Twitter the intent to build a “sun visor” to lower their visibility, but we didn’t know much about how it would work or how it compared to the test dark paint job that SpaceX tried previously.

As reported by Space News, SpaceX’s new “VisorSat” approach will essentially use sun visors to block inbound sunlight from hitting the reflective antennas on the spacecraft, stopping them from reflecting said light back to Earth, which is why they appear as bright lights in the night sky.

This new hardware addition to future Starlink satellites will supplement other measures, including making use of a new method for changing the orientation of the satellites as they raise into their target orbits after launch, which is a period during which they’re especially visible. The overall goal, according to Musk, is to “make the satellites invisible to the naked eye within a week, and to minimize the impact on astronomy,” with a specific focus on ensuring that whatever impact the constellation does have doesn’t impeded the ability of scientists and researchers to make new discoveries.

Musk also tries to assure scientists his Starlink satellites won’t ruin the sky as many fear, and says he’d like to help send more observatories into orbit.

WASHINGTON — SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said April 27 that he hopes to test a new way to reduce the brightness of the company’s Starlink satellites on the next launch for the broadband megaconstellation.

In a briefing to a committee working on the next astrophysics decadal survey, Musk said the experimental “VisorSat,” along with a new approach for orienting Starlink satellites as they raise their orbits, should address concerns raised by astronomers that the Starlink constellation could interfere with their observations.

“Our objectives, generally, are to make the satellites invisible to the naked eye within a week, and to minimize the impact on astronomy, especially so that we do not saturate observatory detectors and inhibit discoveries,” Musk said.

After testing on public roads, Tesla is rolling out a new feature of its partially automated driving system designed to spot stop signs and traffic signals.

The update of the electric car company’s cruise control and auto-steer systems is a step toward CEO Elon Musk’s pledge to convert cars to fully self-driving vehicles later this year.

But it also runs contrary to recommendations from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board that include limiting where Tesla’s Autopilot driving system can operate because it has failed to spot and react to hazards in at least three fatal crashes.

An exhibition at the Science Gallery Dublin explores how humans are preparing to live in the harsh conditions of outer space — and how microorganisms might help us do so.

Space traveling is closer than many of us think. NASA has plans to send humans to Mars in the 2030s, and Elon Musk seems to have taken on a personal challenge of establishing a city on the red planet. He says the Martian city should reach a million inhabitants within 40 to 100 years.

However, the human body is not adapted to life in space. In zero gravity, muscles lose force, bones lose density, vision becomes blurry, and the immune system grows weaker. A study that sent astronaut Scott Kelly to space for a year showed that the regulation of his DNA — but not its actual sequence — changed as compared to his twin brother, who stayed on Earth.

Elon Musk says SpaceX’s ambitious Starlink satellite internet setup has made great steps toward providing good internet to previously low-priority locations. Musk’s Starlink plan accounts for an eventual 40,000 satellites in orbit to blanket the globe in internet coverage, far surpassing any existing satellite internet service.

SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk has shared more details about when in 2020 we can expect the company’s Starlink low-latency, high-bandwidth satellite internet service to actually be available to customers. He said on Twitter that a private beta for Starlink would begin in around three months, with a public beta to kick off roughly three months after that.

The initial beta test will apply to those located in “high latitudes,” Musk added. To date, SpaceX has said that Starlink service will initially be made available to customers in Canada and in the northern United States in 2020, with additional service expansion to follow to other parts of the world throughout 2021. On Twitter in response to a question about whether Germany counts as “high latitude,” Musk said that it does, indicating beta service at least may be available in more markets than the U.S. and Canada ahead of next year.

Late last year, Musk tweeted saying he was using a Starlink satellite connection to do so, and since then the company has launched six batches of 60 satellites each to build out its network. The small satellites work by flying around the Earth in low orbit, passing off connection between one another to ensure consistent service is provided to ground stations. They orbit lower than geostationary communications satellites, which provides latency and speed benefits, but don’t remain in a fixed position so a large number of them are required to provide consistent connectivity.