Lifeboat Foundation

SpaceX drone ship Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) has departed Port Canaveral in anticipation of the company’s sixth consecutive Starlink launch.

Known as Starlink 4–12, the mission will be SpaceX’s sixth uninterrupted Starlink launch – just shy of the company’s record of seven Starlink launches between commercial payloads. Though SpaceX would probably prefer to avoid month-long streaks without commercial launches, the company’s ability to use its own launch capabilities to deploy its Starlink constellation means that it can maintain valuable economies of scale while simultaneously launching satellites that generate some revenue.

With approximately 200,000 active subscribers, Starlink should already be generating around ~$250 million in annual revenue – perhaps enough to pay for anywhere from five to ten Starlink launches. Viewed another way, $250M would also pay the average annual salaries of more than 2,300 employees. Even if it doesn’t come close to the $1–2 billion SpaceX is likely spending annually on Starlink development, deployment, and operations, it’s still better than the alternative that all other launch providers are left with: nothing.

SpaceX is counting on Starship rockets to carry more than 100 metric tons of cargo and crew per launch and help build out the company’s prized Starlink unit.

SEKO examines how 5G, the Internet of Things and a growing need for data on demand are influencing the development of pump technology in the water-treatment sector.

In the future, decarbonized societies that use internet of things (IoT) devices will become commonplace. But to achieve this, we need to first realize highly efficient and stable sources of renewable energy. Solar cells are considered a promising option, but their electrical contacts suffer from a “tradeoff” relationship between surface passivation and conductivity. Recently, researchers from Japan have developed a new type of electrical contact that can overcome this problem.

The most recent type of commercial photovoltaic cell (solar cell) uses stacked layers of crystalline silicon (c-Si) and an ultrathin layer of silicon oxide (SiO_x) to form an electrical contact. The SiO_x is used as a “passivating” film—an unreactive layer that improves the performance, reliability, and stability of the device. But that does not mean that simply increasing the thickness of this passivating layer will lead to improved solar cells. SiO_x is an electrical insulator and there is a trade-off relationship between passivation and the conductivity of the electrical contact in solar cells.

In a new study, published in ACS Applied Nano Materials, a research team led by Assistant Professor Kazuhiro Gotoh and Professor Noritaka Usami from Nagoya University has developed a novel SiO_x layer that simultaneously allows high passivation and improved conductivity. Named NAnocrystalling Transport path in Ultrathin dielectrics for REinforcing passivating contact (NATURE contact), the new electrical contact consists of three-layer structures made up of a layer of silicon nanoparticles sandwiched between two layers of oxygen-rich SiO_x. “You can think of a passivating film as a big wall with gates in it. In the NATURE contact, the big wall is the SiO_x layer and the gates are Si nanocrystals,” explains Dr. Gotoh.

SpaceX has reflown a converted Falcon Heavy side booster just 37 days after its first mission as a Falcon 9 rocket, successfully delivering a batch of Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO) in the process.

Booster B1052 first flew in April 2019 as part of Falcon Heavy Block 5’s launch debut. The same side core was reused two and a half months later in June 2019 but was then unceremoniously ushered into an unknown warehouse. Despite earlier statements from CEO Elon Musk indicating that new Block 5 Falcon Heavy side boosters could be quickly and easily converted into Falcon 9 boosters, B1052 remained mothballed in storage for the better part of two and a half years. Only in December 2021 – almost 30 months after its last launch – did the former Falcon Heavy side core finally reappear in the form of a Falcon 9 booster.

A month and a half later, on January 31st, Falcon 9 B1052 debuted with the flawless launch of Italy’s CSG-2 Earth observation satellite, subsequently becoming the first SpaceX booster of any kind to complete three back-to-back ‘return-to-launch-site’ landings.

Is Metaverse a boom or a bubble?

There is hardly a day that goes by without a mention of the metaverse. Since Facebook’s brand name changed to Meta, the word has really caught on and everybody wants to be a part of it.

Mark Zuckerberg may have drawn the world’s attention to the metaverse but the digital world has been on the rise for quite some time. Minecraft, an online game, has been around since 2011, where not only does one get to stay in a digital world but also has the tools to build it around themselves. With their versions of the metaverse, what Meta and the others now want to do, is build up these worlds rapidly, so that people can just come and spend their time in there. ## Time is Money.

Continue reading “The Metaverse is seeing a surge in real estate prices. Don’t panic” »

Welp, Starship is delayed yet again.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted on Friday that there would be “slight delays” ahead for the company’s experimental Mars-bound spacecraft. To blame, the billionaire said, was SpaceX having to dedicated more resources to fighting escalating cyber attacks on Starlink satellites by Russia after the space company sent Ukraine a shipment of its internet terminals.

Starship’s first launch has been delayed numerous times now, with much of it due to pending regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). However, this latest instance comes amidst a time of geopolitical turmoil caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3PzbGGaImo

Elon Musk has been doing his best to help Ukraine amid the Russian invasion.

Musk warned Starlink users in Ukraine to turn on the system “only when needed” because they could be targeted amid the invasion.

Continue reading “Elon Musk And NASA Mocks Russia Insane Decision” »

Hard drives and flash storage have gotten more reliable over the years, but only on a human timescale. What if we need data storage that lasts longer? Decades? Millennia? The key to that vision might be 5D optical storage, which has a data density 10,000 times that of a Blu-ray disc. But it’s always been far too slow to write data onto glass plates in this way—until now. A new technique developed at the University of Southampton speeds up the process dramatically, without impacting the reliability of the data.

This type of data storage uses three layers of nanoscale dots in a glass disc. The size, orientation, and position (in three dimensions) of the dots gives you the five “dimensions” used to encode data. Researchers say that a 5D disc could remain readable after 13.8 billion years, but it would be surprising if anyone was even around to read them at that point. In the shorter term, 5D optical media could also survive after being heated to 1,000 degrees Celsius. You can see an earlier, smaller version of the disc above.

This is not the first time 5G optical data storage has popped up. It was just impractically slow before. Data is added to the discs with lasers, but if the laser moves too fast, the disc’s structural integrity is compromised. The technique devised by doctoral researcher Yuhao Lei uses a femtosecond laser with a high repetition rate. The process starts with a seeding pulse that creates a nanovoid, but the fast pulse doesn’t need to actually write any data. The repeated weak pulses leverage a phenomenon known as near-field enhancement to sculpt the nanostructures in a more gentle way.