Musk: “There will be a lot of jobs on Mars!”
According to Musk, you’ll need a crazy amount of cargo capacity to build a human colony on a faraway planet.
“Megatons per year to orbit are needed for life to become multiplanetary,” he tweeted.
Each Starship could deliver more than 100 tons per flight, meaning that every ten ships could “yield one megaton per year to orbit,” Musk calculated.
Elon Musk’s Boring Company has made plenty of progress with its Las Vegas Convention Center people mover. The underground tunnel is now about 50% complete and around six football fields in length, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.
The Boring Company officially started tunneling for the people mover after a ceremonial groundbreaking event on November 15. In just two months, the project is nearly halfway completed.
The company’s Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) has been 40 feet underground for months and is working to drill two, one-mile-long tunnels. Boring Company began shipping portions of the TBM to the site in Las Vegas in September. Since then, the project has really started to take shape.
How long should an EV battery last? Elon Musk seems to think that a million miles is just about right — last April he announced that Tesla had a “1 million-mile battery pack” in the pipeline. That’s an ambitious goal, to say the least — do we really need a battery that lasts three to four times as long as a typical car? We will.
Source: Charged
As a recent article posted on Forbes points out, while today’s typical Li-ion battery packs are more than adequate for individual EV owners, applications such as taxi services and long-distance trucking will require batteries optimized for longevity (according to writer Ariel Cohen, the average trucker logs some 100,000 to 150,000 miles per year). Thus, long-life batteries are likely to be critical to the success of the Tesla Network (a proposed fleet of robo-taxis) and the Tesla Semi.
Tesla vehicles are apparently going to talk to people not only inside the car but also outside. CEO Elon Musk even released a quick preview video.
It’s no secret that Tesla wants to use more artificial intelligence in its business.
Two years ago, Tesla hired Andrej Karpathy to lead its computer vision and AI team and they have been expanding their team since then.
SpaceX’s newly redesigned prototype of its Mars-colonizing Starship craft could get off the ground for the first time just two or three months from now, company founder and CEO Elon Musk said.
SpaceX’s New Starship Prototype Could Fly in Just 3 Months, Elon Musk Says :
Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX is kicking off the new year with an ultra busy month of tests and missions, including a major test for the company’s first crewed mission to fly NASA astronauts to and back from the International Space Station (ISS).
To drum up hype ahead of the big day, Musk posted a simulated video on Monday showing how the eventual manned launch will look.
SEE ALSO: Why Nobel Prize-Winning Scientists Universally Oppose Moving to Mars.
Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of populating outer space. But in the nearly 18 years since – and even as the rocket company continues to disrupt the global launch industry – the most complex life-form SpaceX has flown is a mouse.
That should all change in early 2020, though, as SpaceX prepares to launch its first crewed mission aboard its new capsule-like spaceship, called Crew Dragon.
The NASA astronauts and spaceflight veterans Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are set to board the Crew Dragon, rocket into orbit 250 miles above Earth, and dock with the football-field-size International Space Station.
The holidays might be a time of slowed activity for most companies in the tech sector, but for SpaceX, it was a time to ramp production efforts on the latest Starship prototype — “Starship SN1” as it’s called, according to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. This flight design prototype of Starship is under construction at SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas development facility, and Musk was in attendance over the weekend overseeing its build and assembly.
Musk shared video of the SpaceX team working on producing the curved dome that will sit atop the completed Starship SN1 (likely stands for “serial number 1,” a move to a more iterative naming system and away from the “Mark” nomenclature used for the original prototype), a part he called “the most difficult” in terms of the main components of the new spacecraft. He added that each new SN version of the rocket SpaceX builds will have minor improvements “at least” through the first 20 or so versions, so it’s clear they expect to iterate and test these quickly.
As for when it might actually fly, Musk said that he hopes this Starship will take off sometime around “2 to 3 months” from now, which is still within range of the projections for a first Starship high-altitude test flight given by the CEO earlier this year at the unveiling of the Starship Mk1 prototype. That prototype was originally positioned as the one that would fly for the high-altitude test, but it blew its top during testing in November and Musk said they’d be moving on to a new design rather than repair or rebuild the Mk1.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted a video showing construction progress on the dome tank for Starship, a spacecraft designed to eventually take Earth colonists to the moon and Mars.
Elon Musk shared an update that building a sustainable city on Mars will take at least two more decades, as the planets align only once every two years.
