Category: space travel – Page 465
Will SpaceX become the world’s biggest telecoms provider? Probably
(This is a followup post to three earlier posts on forecasting. The first in May 2015 forecast both blimp-based and dedicated building-based drone deployments (later patented by Amazon); The second in October 2015 largely predicted Elon Musk’s Tesla Masterplan Part Deux by 9 months, the third in July 2016 among other things correctly hypothesised the use of Model X falcon wings for future possible Tesla bus designs. I try to get it right but I mainly enjoy the idle speculation).
I was recently in San Francisco and had a very random number of drinks with two very friendly employees of US telco AT&T. As is often the case I turned the conversation towards autonomous vehicles, and more specifically two of Elon Musk’s companies, Tesla and SpaceX.
I was curious about how cars, such as a Model S, have much greater data connectivity needs than ever before. Right now, Teslas connect to AT&T’s network and it seems clear that data needs will only increase for data hungry vehicles that drive themselves. Already Tesla cars consume quite a few gigabytes of data per month.
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NGA 2017 SUMMER MEETING — Introducing the New Chair’s Initiative “Ahead of the Curve”
Breaking : Elon Musk’s ideas on SpaceX DeepMind Tesla and The Dangers of #AI #Robots #Armageddon caused by AI & ideas for NASA — National Aeronautics and Space Administration (starts at 42mins in video).
Closing Plenary Introducing the New Chair’s Initiative “Ahead of the Curve”
Speaker: Elon Musk
Governor Terry McAuliffe, Virginia, Chair.
Governor Brian Sandoval, Nevada, Vice Chair.
Keynote speaker: • elon musk, CEO of tesla and spacex
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Mulder, it’s me: The InterPlanetary Project — By Casey Sanchez | Pasatiempo
“Should it ever occur, an encounter with interplanetary life will surely reorder our own society in ways that this new SFI initiative suggests that we ought to consider right now.”
RCA graduate proposal would see ordinary people driving NASA’s space exploration rovers
Royal College of Art graduate Brian Black has designed a concept rover and virtual-reality interface that would allow anyone on earth to contribute to space exploration missions.
Black’s vision would see participants driving the rovers over real planets and moons, and collecting samples for analysis, all via a virtual-reality (VR) headset.
Installed in galleries, universities or other public places, the VR experience would function as an engagement mechanism during future interplanetary missions by NASA and other space agencies.
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Air Enhanced Nuclear Thermal Rocket
John Bucknell was Senior Propulsion Engineer for the Raptor full-flow staged combustion methalox rocket at SpaceX and is currently the Senior Propulsion Scientist for Divergent3D in Torrance, CA developing additively manufactured vehicle technologies.
Specific impulse (usually abbreviated Isp) is a measure of the efficiency of rocket and jet engines. By definition, it is the total impulse (or change in momentum) delivered per unit of propellant consumed and is dimensionally equivalent to the generated thrust divided by the propellant mass or weight flow rate. You can think of it like miles per gallon for cars. Higher ISP is better.
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Poland is about to launch a fake Mars colony on a hilltop
- A group affiliated with the United Nations is launching a fake Mars and moon colony.
- Called M.A.R.S., the faux habitat is located in the remote countryside of southern Poland.
- Six volunteer astronauts will work and live inside M.A.R.S. for two weeks, starting on July 31.
- Organizers hope to use the data and lessons they learn to support real missions to the moon and Mars.
Atop a forested ridge in southern Poland, a mission on the surfaces of both Mars and the moon is about to launch.
The two-week mission is just a simulation, of course, since no entity on Earth is prepared to inhabit deep space. But the experiment — called the Poland Mars Analogue Simulation 2017 — will study a group of six volunteer “analogue” astronauts as they work through a realistic schedule of space exploration, then provide those findings to anyone who’s drawing up crewed missions beyond Earth.
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