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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.

Researchers in Delft have succeeded in teleporting quantum information across a rudimentary network. This first of its kind is an important step towards a future quantum internet. This breakthrough was made possible by a greatly improved quantum memory and enhanced quality of the quantum links between the three nodes of the network. The researchers, working at QuTech—a collaboration between Delft University of Technology and the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO)—are publishing their findings today in the scientific journal Nature.

The power of a future quantum internet is based on the ability to send quantum information (quantum bits) between the nodes of the network. This will enable all kinds of applications such as securely sharing confidential information, linking several quantum computers together to increase their computing capability, and the use of highly precise, linked quantum sensors.

In addition to being a simple power source built from readily available parts and materials, the system runs day and night (in contrast with solar power). The algae, the team thinks, overproduces food during the day, so it continues to happily munch away, and produce electricity, through the night. Although the paper addresses their findings from just that first six-month period, their algae-powered-computer has now been running continuously for a year (and counting).

It’s a pretty nifty trick, but some scaling is probably in order. The system produces a tiny amount of current. The chip, an Arm Cortex M0+ commonly used in Internet of Things applications, sips just 0.3 microwatts an hour to perform very basic calculations. As The Verge notes, if your average laptop uses around 100 watts an hour, you’d need millions of these algae energy harvesters just to check your email or zone out in a Zoom meeting.

But the researchers aren’t targeting laptops. Rather, they believe future iterations would find a niche application powering the billions or trillions of simple sensors and chips making up the Internet of Things. These might take measurements of local conditions in remote locations, for example, or they might be able to charge a small device.

The study was led by Ren Yuanzhen, a researcher with the Beijing Institute of Tracking and Telecommunications, under the PLA’s Strategic Support Force. Coauthors included several senior scientists in China’s defense industry.

Ren and his colleagues could not immediately be reached for comment and it is uncertain to what extent their view represents an official stance of the Chinese military or government.

“A combination of soft and hard kill methods should be adopted to make some Starlink satellites lose their functions and destroy the constellation’s operating system,” said the paper, published in the domestic, peer-reviewed journal Modern Defense Technology.

Scientists realize quantum teleportation between remote, non-neighboring nodes in a quantum network. The network employs three optically connected nodes based on solid-state spin qubits. The teleporter is prepared by establishing remote entanglement on the two links, followed by entanglement swapping on the middle node and storage in a memory qubit.

They demonstrate that once successful preparation of the teleporter is heralded, arbitrary qubit states can be teleported with fidelity above the classical bound, even with unit efficiency. These results are enabled by key innovations in the qubit readout procedure, active memory qubit protection during entanglement generation and tailored heralding that reduces remote entanglement infidelities.

Continue reading “Dutch researchers teleport quantum information across rudimentary quantum network” »

Starlink has launched a new product meant specifically for RV dwellers and those who can’t wait to get connected to the satellite internet service. While applying for a regular Starlink dish and service will put customers in a waitlist until 2023, Starlink for RVs is immediately available and will ship out to buyers right now. The downside? Network resources are always de-prioritized for it, and the service costs $135, which is $25 more than a regular Starlink connection.

In other words, the RV option costs just as much as a regular Starlink connection with the Portability feature introduced back in March that allows customers to use the service while they’re away from home. A regular connection requires one to have a home service first, though, and that may not be possible for some people. Another difference is that the product for RVs gives customers the ability to pause and un-pause service, so they can control when their billing starts and ends.

Since the network is de-prioritized for the RV service, though, users’ connection might be slow and intermittent in congested areas and during peak hours. “Stated speeds and uninterrupted use of the service are not guaranteed,” the company wrote in its Help page, clearly making sure interested customers understand that it’s prioritizing at-home users. One important thing to note for those looking into the RV option is that they can’t use Starlink while in motion at this time. SpaceX chief Elon Musk also added on Twitter that the dish is too big for cars, though that didn’t stop at least one user from bolting it onto their vehicle’s hood.