Musk and SpaceX sent Starlink terminals to Ukraine at the request of a government official after internet service was disrupted across the country by the Russian invasion. A shipment of Starlink ground terminals, which use an antenna and terminal to access the satellite broadband service, arrived in Ukraine by Monday Feb. 28). With the terminals in use, SpaceX is working to keep them online, Musk said.

“Some Starlink terminals near conflict areas were being jammed for several hours at a time,” Musk wrote in a Twitter statement Friday (March 1). “Our latest software update bypasses the jamming.”

I wonder how many of the satellites are damaged?

Starship and Starlink V2 progress will be delayed, Musk said.

Russia’s attacks on Ukraine continue to take lives and destroy infrastructure as the country invades. This infrastructure damage has disrupted internet access in Ukraine, leading a government official to publicly request Starlink satellite internet access for the country from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Musk obliged, activating Starlink service in Ukraine and sending additional hardware. But with continued attacks on infrastructure, how will Ukraine stay connected?

Fedorov brings up an important point: Even though Starlink operates without the need for traditional internet infrastructure, the Earth-bound hardware still needs power. And, as Russian attacks bombard the country, Ukraine’s internet access will continue to be threatened.

Fedorov’s statement publicly reached out for help acquiring generators to keep Starlink online for Ukrainians. But Musk responded with an alternative suggestion.

“Solar panels + battery pack better than generator, as no heat signature or smoke & doesn’t run out of fuel,” Musk wrote in response on Twitter.

Elon Musk has some ideas.

Ooooops!!

A rocket stage set to smash into the moon on March 4 is no longer believed to be a piece of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, but rather a booster from a Chinese rocket sent to the moon in 2014, experts say.

Bill Gray, an astronomer and the developer of the asteroid tracking software Project Pluto, initially identified the errant space junk (which had been given the temporary name WE0913A) as the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket, predicting that the debris would collide with the moon after hurtling through space for seven years.

Gray now believes his initial assessment was wrong, and he has updated his blog post with a correction. The doomed object isn’t the SpaceX upper stage — launched in February 2015 to send the Deep Space Climate Observatory satellite, or DSCOVR, 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth — but is actually a rocket booster from China’s 2014 Chang’e 5-T1 mission, which launched on October 2014, he said.

The object is set to hit the moon traveling at roughly 5,771 mph (9,288 km/h) on March 4.

Elon Musk’s company launched a Falcon 9 rocket bearing the 49 satellites from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday (Feb. 3), but a geomagnetic storm that struck a day later sent the satellites plummeting back toward Earth, where they will burn up in the atmosphere.

“Unfortunately, the satellites deployed on Thursday were significantly impacted by a geomagnetic storm on Friday,” SpaceX said in a statement. “Preliminary analysis show[s] the increased drag at the low altitudes prevented the satellites from leaving safe mode to begin orbit-raising maneuvers, and up to 40 of the satellites will reenter or already have reentered the Earth’s atmosphere.”

The satellites were hit by the storm just one day after launch.[/s].

The latest on some space debris…

The Falcon 9 DSCOVR’s booster: 7 Feb. 2022.

The animation above comes from 268, single, 4-second exposures, remotely taken with the “Elena” (PlaneWave 17″+Paramount ME+SBIG STL-6303E) robotic unit available at Virtual Telescope. The telescope tracked the apparent motion of the booster, so it looks like a sharp dot, with surrounding stars moving on the background. East is up, South on the left.

There was a VERY strong Moon interference, the booster was in the same spot of the sky as our natural satellite and grabbing it was quite hard. As we can see, the booster is blinking, as it is tumbling with a period of about 90 seconds.

A SpaceX rocket that launched nearly seven years ago is now on course to crash into the moon, astronomers have predicted.

The Falcon 9 booster was launched in February 2015 as part of a mission to send a climate observation satellite 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, but since running out of fuel, the 4.4-ton (4 metric tons) rocket has been hurtling around space in a chaotic orbit.

The rocket is now expected to hit the far side of the moon while traveling at a blistering speed of 5,771 mph (9,288 km/h) on March 4, 2022, according to Bill Gray, the developer of software that tracks near-Earth objects.

The rocket stage has been tumbling through space for seven years.

An artificial intelligence (AI) system that can identify diabetic retinopathy (DR) without physician assistance, including the most serious form that puts patients at risk of blindness, has outperformed expectations in a clinical trial. The commercial system successfully detected the presence and severity of the disease in 97% of eyes analysed. Deployment of such AI systems in primary care facilities for use by non-specialists could significantly increase access to eye exams that include DR evaluation, aiding in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease.

An artificial intelligence system that simplifies diabetes retinal screening could help save the vision of millions of people around the world.

SpaceX is embarking on a bold new adventure: making rocket fuel out of thin air.

“SpaceX is starting a program to take CO₂ out of atmosphere & turn it into rocket fuel,” CEO Elon Musk tweeted on Monday. “Please join if interested.”

The news comes after Musk announced a $100 million prize to come up with carbon removal technologies earlier this year. The goal is to pull 1,000 tons of CO₂ out of the atmosphere annually — and eventually scaling up the operation dramatically.

“I think this is one of those things that is going to take a while to figure out what the right solution is,” Musk explained back in April. “And especially to figure out what the best economics are for CO₂ removal.”

“Right now we’ve only got one planet,” Musk said at the time. “Even a 0.1 percent chance of disaster — why run that risk? That’s crazy!”

A stem cell researcher who founded his startup with the psychedelic-loving German billionaire Christian Angermayer, Peyer believes that aging is a disease that humans can fight with pharmaceuticals. He plans to prove it first by identifying disorders and diseases that mimic aging, such as those that cause loss of muscle mass, and then partner with researchers studying medicines for said diseases.

A bold proposal: that by 2050, a 70-year-old will look and feel like they’re 50.

That’s the gamble that 35-year-old James Peyer is taking with this Cambrian Biopharma “longevity startup,” the Times of London reports.

“Of our 100,000-year-plus history as a species, it’s been for only about 75 years that these diseases of ageing have been the primary predators of humankind,” he told the newspaper. “We are rapidly zeroing in on our biggest predators — diseases of [aging] — and figuring out how to beat them back.”

Elon Musk thinks SpaceX needs to ramp up production of its next-generation Raptor engine soon or face potentially dire consequences, according to media reports.

Raptors will power Starship, the huge, fully reusable vehicle that SpaceX is developing to take people and cargo to the moon, Mars and other distant destinations. Each Starship will need a lot of Raptors — 33 for the giant first-stage booster, called Super Heavy, and six for the upper-stage spacecraft, known as Starship.