Lifeboat Foundation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds9EcRBZzWE

One of the most critical aspects of SpaceX’s quest for the reusability of its space hardware is the recovery of its booster. To achieve this, SpaceX decided to land its boosters on the sea. However, the boosters land on large drone ships to prevent losing the booster and transport it back to land.
After many successful landings and recovery of the boosters, the large and dependable drone ships have become a vital link in SpaceX’s dream to make space travel affordable. SpaceX recently added another drone ship to the pair it had in service.
Join us as we explore SpaceX’s insane new drone ship!
To the armchair engineer, landing a rocket in the sea is suicide as many things can go wrong. To start with, when floating on the sea, the drone ship or barge is small compared to all the land available for the booster to land on.
Compounding the problem is that the drone ship itself can be rocked about on the sea, more than 300 km off the coast.
So, combining the size and instability of the drone ship, the booster can miss the drone ship and crash into the sea, making it harder or even impossible to recover.
However, many things have gone wrong as SpaceX tried to land a rocket on land, with several boosters crashing and bursting into flames.
Apart from that, SpaceX has very good reasons to prefer a sea landing for its boosters, and the reason has to do with fuel.
Fuel is a critical component on any mission because the engineers have to balance carrying enough quantity of it and keeping the rocket as light as possible. As you can imagine, the Falcon 9 rockets are heavy, at more than half a million kilograms which means fuel is a premium.
This is how it breaks down:
When you launch to space and the booster returns, you need to slow down the speed from more than 8,000 km/h down to zero. This is done by reigniting the engine, and it requires fuel.
The fuel has to come from the leftover after boosting the upper stage.
This is where it gets interesting.
If you blasted a payload to low orbit, for example, you would have more than enough fuel for the landing. However, if the mission was destined for beyond Earth’s orbit, you will need more fuel because you have to launch faster. This will leave you with no fuel for the landing.
This will be a big blow to SpaceX’s dream of reusing its boosters. Recall that the company wants to launch missions to Mars, which will require lots of fuel to attain the speed necessary for launch but not enough fuel for landing.
However, there is a way out of this problem with the aid of geography.
When SpaceX launches from Florida, the rocket heads East over the Atlantic Ocean. So making the rocket land at sea and not having to return to the launch site will reduce the fuel required because the distance is shorter.
This means for more ambitious launches, it makes sense for SpaceX to land on the sea.
As Musk put it at a conference, “For half our missions, we will need to land out to sea. Anything beyond Earth is likely to need to land on the ship.”
Now, what motivation does SpaceX have to land and reuse its boosters?
The motivation is money. SpaceX wants to save money on its launches, and refurbishing a rocket saves time and costs a fraction of building a new one.
Just how much money is SpaceX saving?
We might never get an actual figure because it is a trade secret, but it is a play on several factors.
For example, to save some fuel for landing, it means you have to reduce your payload. For the Falcon 9 that means a reduction of up to 40 percent in revenue, according to Musk’s tweet:

Payload reduction due to reusability of booster & fairing is <40% for F9 & recovery & refurb is <10%, so you’re roughly even with 2 flights, definitely ahead with 3

Continue reading “FINALLY! SpaceX Is Testing Their New Starship Droneship!” »

The valuation of Elon Musk’s SpaceX crossed $100 billion following a share sale by existing investors announced this week, CNBC has learned.

SpaceX has an agreement with new and existing investors to sell up to $755 million in stock from insiders at $560 a share, according to multiple people familiar with the deal — increasing the company’s valuation to $100.3 billion. The company did not raise new capital at this time, sources said, with the purchase offer representing a secondary sale of existing shares.

The new share price is an increase of 33% from SpaceX’s last valuation of $74 billion at $419.99 a share in February, when the company raised nearly $1.2 billion. The company had a similar secondary transaction in February, with a deal for insiders to sell up to $750 million at the time.

Despite high vaccine coverage and effectiveness, the incidence of symptomatic infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been increasing in Israel. Whether the increasing incidence of infection is due to waning immunity after the receipt of two doses of the BNT162b2 vaccine is unclear.

As the rollout of vaccines against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)^1,2 is expanding worldwide, data on the durability of protection are limited. A randomized, controlled trial and real-world studies have shown vaccine efficacy of 94 to 95% with the BNT162b2 vaccine (Pfizer–BioNTech) and vaccine effectiveness in preventing symptomatic coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) 7 days or more after receipt of the second dose of vaccine.^1,3–5 Real-world effectiveness and immunogenicity data describing the antibody kinetics over time after vaccination are beginning to appear, but a complete picture of the duration of immunity is not yet available. We recently reported that breakthrough infection in BNT162b2-vaccinated persons was correlated with neutralizing antibody titers.⁶ However, a threshold titer that can predict breakthrough infection has not been defined.

The BNT162b2 vaccine elicits high IgG and neutralizing antibody responses 7 to 14 days after receipt of the second dose. Lower antibody levels have been shown to develop in older persons, men, and persons with an immunosuppressed condition, which suggests that antibody titers in these populations may decrease earlier than in other populations.^7,8 A decrease in anti-spike (S) antibody levels by a factor of two was observed from the peak (at 21 to 40 days) to 84 days after receipt of the second dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine among 197 vaccinated persons.⁹ Here, we report the results of a large-scale, real-world, longitudinal study involving health care workers that was conducted to assess the kinetics of immune response among persons with different demographic characteristics and coexisting conditions throughout the 6-month period after receipt of the second dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine.

If you follow the latest trends in the tech industry, you probably know that there’s been a fair amount of debate about what the next big thing is going to be. Odds-on favorite for many has been augmented reality (AR) glasses, while others point to fully autonomous cars, and a few are clinging to the potential of 5G. With the surprise debut of Amazon’s Astro a few weeks back, personal robotic devices and digital companions have also thrown their hat into the ring.

However, while there has been little agreement on exactly what the next thing is, there seems to be little disagreement that whatever it turns out to be, it will be somehow powered, enabled, or enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI). Indeed, the fact that AI and machine learning (ML) are our future seems to be a foregone conclusion.

Yet, if we do an honest assessment of where some of these technologies actually stand on a functionality basis versus initial expectations, it’s fair to argue that the results have been disappointing on many levels. In fact, if we extend that thought process out to what AI/ML were supposed to do for us overall, then we start to come to a similarly disappointing conclusion.

Analytics has played a significant role in the fight against COVID-19. Would we be as far along in the battle without it?

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed many things in business, producing a new normal that all of us now operate in—and analytics is no exception.

“As companies adapt to the new normal created by COVID, one of the primary questions we’re asked in analytics is how to retrain artificial intelligence (AI) models with a more diverse data set,” said David Tareen, director of AI and analytics at SAS.

There are 40.3 million victims of human trafficking globally, according to the International Labor Organization. Marinus Analytics, a startup based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, hopes to make a dent in that number. The company’s mission is to “serve those working on the frontlines of public safety by developing technology for them to disrupt human trafficking, child abuse, and cyber fraud.” For its achievements, Marinus won $500,000 as part of its third-place ranking in the 2021 IBM Watson AI XPRIZE competition. The startup is the brainchild of three co-founders: Cara Jones, Emily Kennedy, and Artur Dubrawski, who launched it out of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in 2014.

Marinus implements its mission primarily through its set of AI-based tools called Traffic Jam, whose goal is “to find missing persons, stop human trafficking and fight organized crime.”

Traditionally, finding a missing person would involve taping a picture of the person on the computer and then manually combing through thousands, if not millions, of online ads on adult services websites to see if any of the posted pictures match. Such a process is time-consuming and tiring. A human detective’s attention can start flagging after long hours at the computer doing the same task endlessly.

But if you’re in an area already full of Starlink users, don’t expect availability until SpaceX launches more satellites.

SpaceX is doubling the size of its fleet of astronaut-carrying spacecraft — as well as doubling the number of cargo-carrying ones — according to officials who spoke during a briefing ahead of the space company’s next crewed mission later this month.

It’s a significant expansion that will widen SpaceX’s already sizeable head start over the competition.

Continue reading “SpaceX Is Doubling Its Number of Astronaut-Carrying Spacecraft” »