Lifeboat Foundation

The U.S. should invest in its allies, instead of chasing the mirage of onshore chip manufacturing.

On Monday, SpaceX was spotted loading some of the first Starlink V2 satellite prototypes into a custom mechanism designed to refill Starship’s magazine-like payload bay.

While it’s not the first time SpaceX has used the dispenser, the photos captured by photographer Kevin Randolph are the first to clearly show real prototypes of the next generation of Starlink satellites. According to CEO Elon Musk, those Starlink Gen2 or V2 satellites will be “at least 5 times better”, “an order of magnitude more capable,” and about four times heavier than current (V1.5) Starlink satellites.

The potential of the new satellite bus design paired with Starship’s massive fairing and lift capacity could dramatically improve the viability and cost-effectiveness of SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. First, though, the company needs to launch and qualify prototypes of the new satellite design and verify that all associated ground support equipment works as expected.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=5VygwTBgph4

The transport sector is transforming towards climate-friendly powertrains with significantly reduced CO₂ emissions. The electrification of powertrains remains a major challenge not only for trucks, buses, trains, and ships but also for aircraft. These applications cannot be realized in the future with batteries because of the energy requirements. The fuel cell is an extremely promising energy supplier for these applications, which supplies electrical energy from stored hydrogen and ambient air.

Fraunhofer Institutes LBF, IFAM, IISB, and SCAI joined their forces to develop advanced and highly efficient components for fuel cells. The project HABICHT aims to design and develop a high-speed motor for a fuel cell compressor to enable innovation in the utility vehicle and aviation domain. The electric machine should at least achieve apower density of 30 kW/kgby using innovative materials for direct cooling of the stator and maximizing the rotor’shigh-speed capability (150.000 rpm). The rotor design will use a new manufacturing process to glue and pot the magnets to be suitable for high circumferential speeds.

Prototype of a high-speed motor for a fuel cell compressor. (Image: Project HABICHT)

We all learn from early on that computers work with zeros and ones, also known as binary information. This approach has been so successful that computers now power everything from coffee machines to self-driving cars and it is hard to imagine a life without them.

Building on this success, today’s quantum computers are also designed with binary information processing in mind. “The building blocks of quantum computers, however, are more than just zeros and ones,” explains Martin Ringbauer, an experimental physicist from Innsbruck, Austria. “Restricting them to binary systems prevents these devices from living up to their true potential.”

The team led by Thomas Monz at the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck, now succeeded in developing a quantum computer that can perform arbitrary calculations with so-called quantum digits (qudits), thereby unlocking more computational power with fewer quantum particles. Their study is published in Nature Physics.