Lifeboat Foundation

In the video, SpaceX’s Starlink satellites pass overhead like a string of pearls, a brilliant trail of moving lights in the night sky. SpaceX launched the satellites into an initial orbit 273 miles (440 kilometers) above Earth. They are making their way to a final orbit 342 miles (550 km) up.

SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk hinted on Twitter today that the satellites are doing well. “So far, so good,” he wrote.

Langbroek said he used the knowledge of SpaceX’s deployment altitude and target orbital inclination (the angle of the orbit with respect to the equator) to estimate where the satellites would appear in Friday night’s sky.

Continue reading “Wow! This Is What SpaceX’s Starlink Satellites Look Like in the Night Sky” »

SpaceX has successfully deployed sixty production versions of the Starlink Satellite. They are targeting six Starlink launches through the next six months. Those six launches will place 360 Starlink satellites into orbit. The pace of Starlink launches will increase with six more launches by the end of April 2020. This will enable SpaceX to generate a lot of revenue for service to North America, Europe and Asia. The revenue will be from reducing latency in financial trading communication.

SpaceX and Elon Musk will be made financially secure by 2023 and will have the $20 billion per year budget of NASA. If Elon has a 30X on his 54% share of SpaceX, then with Elon would have 30 times $10 billion in 2024 (50% of $20 billion in 2024). This means Elon would be worth over $300 billion without including any valuation for Tesla.

If Tesla still had any financial issues, Elon would be able to lend money from SpaceX to Tesla by late 2020 or 2021. Elon used Tesla to buyout Solarcity. In 2018, financial analysts speculated that Elon could his SpaceX stake as collateral in a buyout of Tesla. If SpaceX is worth $100 billion late in 2020 and then $200 billion in 2021, Elon would easily be able to fund a Tesla buyout with his $54 billion and then $108 billion of SpaceX (versus about $15 billion today).

Continue reading “SpaceX Starlink Will Equal Launch Revenue in 2020 and Will Make Elon the World’s Richest Person by 2023” »

I agree with Bezos on this one.

Elon Musk dismissed Jeff Bezos’ plan of housing a trillion people in orbiting ‘O’Neill colonies,’ which resemble gargantuan spinning cylinders.

SpaceX’s first 60 “production-design” Starlink satellites have been successfully placed in orbit, kicking off a constellation beta test at an unprecedented scale. According to CEO Elon Musk, all spacecraft also managed to successfully ‘phone home’ after separation.

The company’s Redmond satellite operators still need to verify that all spacecraft are functional and healthy after a Falcon 9 launch and chaotic deployment from the rocket’s upper stage, but the riskiest part of the mission is now arguably behind SpaceX. What remains is essentially a massive, hardware-rich test of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation, ranging from granular flight testing of individual components to an effective simulation of a full constellation’s operations.

Continue reading “SpaceX’s deploys 60-satellite Starlink blob, all spacecraft successfully phone home” »

Here is the latest Seeking Delphi™ podcast, with John C. Havens on IEEE’s newly minted guidelines on ethical design of autonomous systems.

“With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.”–Elon Musk.

Continue reading “Podcast #31: Ethically Aligned Design in Autonomous Systems with John C. Havens” »

And it doesn’t want the details of the case made public.

Elon Musk’s space company is taking the U.S. to court.

Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, wants to launch enough satellites to provide broadband web access anywhere in the world. The first 60 fly this week.

Starship is designed to be a fully reusable launch system, and is intended to transport as many as 100 people at a time to and from the moon or Mars.

On the call Wednesday, Musk clarified that SpaceX’s recent fundraising rounds “have been oversubscribed.” He said SpaceX has the funding needed to build and launch enough Starlink satellites to begin using the network.

“At this point it looks like we have sufficient capital to get to an operational level,” Musk said.

Continue reading “Elon Musk says SpaceX Starlink internet satellites are key to funding his Mars vision” »

When designing the Tesla Model S, Elon Musk wanted an electric motor that had the same horsepower as the most powerful internal combustion engine but with nearly-instantaneous torque. And he wanted it to be the size of a watermelon. Engine manufacturers told him this couldn’t be done. So the Tesla CEO decided to build his own motor. The earlier versions of this had a hand-wound stator which increased winding density to help eliminate resistance and increase peak torque. Later versions of the stators were built by robots.

Musk made the same decision with practically every other component of the Tesla — including the power electronics and other elements of the drivetrain. For him, there could be no compromises in design and functionality. That is why almost every component of the Tesla Model S is produced at its factory in Fremont, Calif.

When you drive a Model S, you can see the results. The car literally seems to fly. It picks up acceleration like a spaceship shifting into warp speed. The car is eerily quiet, comfortable, and elegant. It is a completely different driving experience than the cars we are used to. There is no engine to start, gears to shift, or oil to replace. The brakes don’t wear out because you hardly use them. The Tesla regenerative-braking system charges the car as it slows.

Continue reading “Tesla will have a $35K car that can go 1,000 miles on a single charge by 2020” »