Lifeboat Foundation

Even if you’re enjoying gloriously fast broadband at home wherever you live in the world, you’re still going to be a long, long way behind the new record for data transmission: an incredible 1.02 petabits per second.

That’s a million gigabits shifted down a line every single second. The record was set by a team at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan, transmitting the data over 51.7 kilometers (32 miles).

To put it another way, there’s enough bandwidth here to transmit not just one 8K video feed, or a hundred or a thousand 8K video feeds, but 10 million 8K video feeds simultaneously. That’s a lot of Netflix.

A computer capable of achieving quantum advantage – a demonstration of supremacy over conventional machines – is the first that anyone can use over the internet.

SpaceX could begin launching the fourth of five orbital ‘shells’ of its first Starlink constellation as early as July, according to a report from a reliable source of SpaceX information.

The initial report tweeted on May 20th by reporter Alejandro Alcantarilla claimed that SpaceX was preparing to start launching “Group 3” of its first 4408-satellite Starlink constellation as early as July 2022. Less than a week later, those claims were confirmed when SpaceX applied for communications permits known as “special temporary authority” licenses or STAs for a launch known as “Starlink Group 3−1” no earlier than late June.

“Group 3” refers to one of five orbital “shells” that make up SpaceX’s 4408-satellite first-generation Starlink constellation. Each shell can be thought of more or less as, well, a shell – a thin layer of satellites more or less evenly distributed around the entire sphere of the Earth. Shells mainly differ by two measures: orbital inclination (the angle between a given orbit and the Earth’s equator) and orbital altitude (the distance from the orbit to the ground).

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has revealed the first technical details about the company’s next-generation Starlink ‘Gen2’ satellite design, confirming that it will far outmatch the current generation of satellites by almost every measure.

Speaking in an onsite interview and Starbase tour with YouTuber Tim Dodd (The Everyday Astronaut), Musk – largely unprovoked – revealed that SpaceX has already built at least one functional Starlink Gen2/V2.0 satellite prototype and shipped it to the South Texas Starship factory, where it is currently being stored. More importantly, Musk also provided the first direct specifications for the next-generation spacecraft, stating that each Starlink V2.0 satellite will weigh about 1.25 tons (~2750 lb), measure about seven meters (~23 ft) long, and be almost an order of magnitude more capable than the “Starlink 1” satellites they’ll ultimately supersede.

Almost ten months after SpaceX first revealed its updated plans for a next-generation, 30,000-satellite constellation, those details have confirmed a few key points of speculation about the future of Starlink.

China has to have the capability to identify and destroy SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, according to Chinese military experts in a report released in April. The research, headed by Ren Yuanzhen of the Beijing Institute of Tracking and Telecommunications, was published in the Chinese peer-reviewed journal Modern Defence Technology. The publication inexplicably disappeared from the online version of The South China Morning Post after The South China Morning Post reported on its contents.

David Cowhig, a former US ambassador, was able to complete the translation of the document before it vanished, which allowed him to uncover a number of preventative steps that were suggested to be taken against Starlink. According to the study, China has to “use a mix of soft and hard kill measures to disrupt the operating system of the constellation and deactivate part of the Starlink satellites.”

SpaceX informed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) it surpassed 400,000 Starlink Internet subscribers across 36 countries. The company had a private conference presentation with FCC representatives on May 19 about using the 12GHz band “for providing next-generation satellite services to Americans,” including to use Starlink broadband satellite service on moving vehicles.

An outline of the presentation was submitted as a public filing to the Commission where it states the new subscriber count and a list of how Starlink has been useful; a screenshot of the document is shown below. SpaceX doubled the amount of Starlink subscribers in just a couple months. SpaceX announced its Starlink division had 250,000 subscribers in February.

SpaceX’s FCC presentation says the Starlink service is active in 48 U.S. states. Besides the United States, Starlink is now available in portions of: Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Denmark, Chile, Portugal, Switzerland, Poland, Italy, Czech Republic, Sweden, Mexico, Croatia, Lithuania, Spain, Slovakia, Slovenia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Luxembourg, Latvia, Tonga, Hungary, and Ukraine. SpaceX plans to expand service to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East in 2023. The company recently released an interactive Starlink Coverage Map which shows where the internet service is “available” and on a “waitlist” by simply typing an address.

Stuart Firestein Science is a fundamentally optimistic enterprise. More than a cheery disposition, it is the source of a philosophical outlook that we might call ‘optimistical’. It reliably produces fundamental and actionable knowledge about the world. We are able to take for granted, in a way even our recent ancestors never imagined, the idea of progress. The engines behind science, surprisingly, are ignorance, the unknown, failure, and, perhaps most vexingly, uncertainty. In recent decades, science has undergone a change in perspective and practice — from viewing the universe like a clockwork regimented by laws and formulas to recognizing it as irreducibly complex and uncertain. Perhaps counter intuitively this has freed science to exploit previously unimaginable possibilities and opportunities. It has led to a deeper understanding of the nature of things and to the production of technologies such as lasers, microchips, the internet, genetics, and many more. And yet socially and societally we remain mired in a 19th century view of deterministic science. We might instead learn to revel in the adventure of navigable uncertainty and take advantage of the creative opportunities of a world where we can confidently say ‘it could be otherwise’. Possibility of this sort is the rarest and purest form of optimism. Stuart Firestein is a neuroscientist and the former Chair of Columbia University’s Department of Biological Sciences, where he researches the vertebrate olfactory system. He is also a member of SFI’s Fractal Faculty.