Lifeboat Foundation

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is preparing to further expand testing of its Starlink satellite internet in a test for the U.S. Air Force, an FCC request revealed.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is preparing to further test its Starlink satellite internet in a demonstration for the U.S. Air Force, the company revealed in a recent request to the Federal Communications Commission.

“SpaceX seeks to make minor modifications to its experimental authorization for additional test activities undertaken with the federal government,” the company wrote to the FCC in a filing on Thursday.

Continue reading “SpaceX prepares for Air Force test connecting an aircraft to its Starlink satellite internet” »

These shifting dynamics in India’s digital marketplace are yet another warning sign of what’s been dubbed the splinternet, foreshadowing a possible world where each country sticks to its own apps and abandons the open and global nature of the internet. For now, however, these homegrown apps may find it difficult to compete at the same level unless the government decides to ban Facebook and Twitter, too.

While Twitter finds itself in a prolonged standoff with the Indian government over the company’s refusal to take down certain accounts, a senior executive of a very similar Indian social network says the sudden attention on his app has been “overwhelming.”

“It feels like … you’ve just been put in the finals of the World Cup suddenly and everyone’s watching you and the team,” Mayank Bidawatka, co-founder of Koo, told CNN Business.

Continue reading “India is trying to build its own internet” »

SpaceX has launched 1265 Starlinks to date with another 60 awaiting launch this weekend. Thousands more are planned.

Researchers have developed a new data transfer system that is 20 times faster than USB 3.0.

This combines high-frequency silicon chips with a polymer cable as thin as a strand of hair. The system could boost energy efficiency in data centres and lighten the loads of electronics-rich spacecraft. Researchers presented their breakthrough at the recent IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, held virtually.

“There’s an explosion in the amount of information being shared between computer chips – cloud computing, the Internet, big data. And a lot of this happens over conventional copper wire,” says Jack Holloway, who led the research. Holloway completed his PhD in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science last year and currently works for Raytheon.

It was the 6th launch and landing for this Falcon 9 first stage.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched a new batch of 60 Starlink internet satellites to orbit early this morning (March 11) and nailed its landing on a floating platform at sea.

MIT scientists demonstrate a hair-like plastic polymer cable that can transmit data 10 times as fast as USB.

How fast does data flow? The answer: not fast enough.

The search for more efficient data-transfer solutions to meet the ever-increasing demand for computation never ends. Even today, most data transmission happens via traditional copper cables, which are power-hungry, leading to a compromise between data exchange and energy consumed. Fiber-optic cables are an alternative, but they don’t work well with the silicon chips in our computing systems. Overcoming these limitations, while theoretically possible, can turn out to be prohibitively expensive, especially for electronics-rich applications like data centers, spacecraft, electric vehicles and so on.

Continue reading “Plastic Polymer Cables That Rival Fiber Optics” »

SpaceX wants to begin connecting moving vehicles – from cars and trucks to jets and ships – to its Starlink satellite internet network, according to a request the company filed with the Federal Communications Commission.

“This application would serve the public interest by authorizing a new class of ground-based components for SpaceX’s satellite system that will expand the range of broadband capabilities available to moving vehicles throughout the United States and to moving vessels and aircraft worldwide,” SpaceX director of satellite policy David Goldman wrote in a letter to the FCC filed on Friday.

Starlink is the company’s capital-intensive project to build an interconnected internet network with thousands of satellites, known in the space industry as a constellation, designed to deliver high-speed internet to consumers anywhere on the planet.

SpaceX has launched another batch of its Starlink satellites — the usual complement of 60 of the low Earth orbit spacecraft, which will join the more than 1000 already making up the existing constellation. This is the fifth launch of Starlink satellites for SpaceX this year, and the twentieth overall.

Earlier this year, SpaceX opened up Starlink access to anyone in a current or planned service area via a pre-order reservation system with a refundable up-front deposit. The company aims to continue launches like this one apace throughout 2021 in order to get the constellation to the point where it can serve customers over a much larger portion of the globe. SpaceX COO and President Gwynne Shotwell has previously said that the company expects it should have coverage over much of the globe at a constellation size of around 1200 satellites, but the company has plans to launch more than 30000 to fully build out its network capacity and speed.

While SpaceX is making good progress on Starlink with its Falcon 9 launcher, it’s also looking ahead to Starship as a key driver of the constellation’s growth. Starship, SpaceX’s next-generation launch vehicle currently under development in South Texas, will be able to deliver to orbit 400 Starlink satellites at a time, and it’s also being designed with full reusability and fast turnaround in mind.

Laser generates quantum randomness at a rate of 250 trillion bits per second, and could lead to devices small enough to fit on a single chip.