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Category: Elon Musk – Page 186

Congress raises concerns about FAA’s handling of Starship launch license violation

WASHINGTON — As SpaceX gears up for another test flight of a Starship prototype, the Federal Aviation Administration is facing new scrutiny from Congress for how it handled SpaceX’s violation of its launch license on an earlier test flight.

SpaceX had planned to launch its SN11 Starship vehicle March 29 from its Boca Chica, Texas, test site. That flight will be similar to those of previous Starship prototypes, going to an altitude of 10 kilometers before landing on a nearby pad.

However, SpaceX called off the March 29 launch attempt because an FAA inspector could not arrive to observe the flight during a five-hour window. “FAA inspector unable to reach Starbase in time for launch today,” tweeted Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX, using the proposed new name for the Boca Chica site. “Postponed to no earlier than tomorrow.”

Elon Musk tweets Tesla could become ‘the biggest company’ surpassing Apple ‘probably in a few months’ then deletes it

Musk’s tweet offering guidance on timing for an anticipated increase in Tesla’s market cap has since been deleted, but screenshots were widely shared on Twitter.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has clashed with Musk and Tesla over the CEO’s unfettered use of Twitter before.

In the third quarter of 2018, Musk faced securities fraud charges from the SEC after he tweeted to his tens of millions of followers then that he was planning to take Tesla private at $420 a share, and had secured funding to do so. Tesla’s stock price jumped more than 6 percent that day.

Rural Iowans seeing benefits from SpaceX Starlink internet

For many Iowans, the first they heard of SpaceX Starlink Internet is when the strange lights started appearing in the night sky in Spring 2020. Long “trains” of dots, each dot being a Starlink satellite.

“There’s all these lights and what looked to me like they were jets,” said John Dunnegan a resident living in rural Des Moines County, Iowa northwest of Burlington. “I thought we were being attacked by Russia. I thought ‘what is that?’ They were all in perfect file. I got on the internet started checking around, and found out what it was. It was Elon Musk’s Starlink.

Thought-detection: AI has infiltrated our last bastion of privacy

“Ahsan Noor Khan, a PhD student and first author of the study, said: “We’re now looking to investigate how we could use low-cost existing systems, such as Wi-Fi routers, to detect emotions of a large number of people gathered, for instance in an office or work environment.” Among other things, this could be useful for HR departments to assess how new policies introduced in a meeting are being received, regardless of what the recipients might say. Outside of an office, police could use this technology to look for emotional changes in a crowd that might lead to violence.”

Research from the UK and an update from Elon Musk on human trials at his brain interface company show software is now eating the mind.

After Sunday’s launch, SpaceX is on the cusp of a historic reuse milestone

“For those that know rockets, this is a ridiculously hard thing.”

As this is the first Falcon 9 rocket to launch nine missions, it raises the prospect of a first stage making a tenth flight in the near future, probably within a month or two. Reaching ten flights would accomplish one of the main goals set by SpaceX with the Falcon 9 rocket, after optimizing the vehicle for reuse about three years ago.

The company debuted its “Block 5” version of the Falcon 9 rocket in May 2018, and since then this vehicle has flown 55 missions, all of which have successfully delivered their payloads to orbit. More importantly, the changes SpaceX engineers incorporated into this new rocket to ensure its robustness for reuse, such as strengthening its “Octaweb” engine bay, have largely been validated.

“For those that know rockets, this is a ridiculously hard thing,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk said during a teleconference with reporters in 2018 to discuss the Block 5 upgrades. “It has taken us since, man, since 2002. Sixteen years of extreme effort and many, many iterations, and thousands of small but important development changes to get to where we think this is even possible.” He paused for a second, and then added, “Crazy hard.”

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