Lifeboat Foundation

SpaceX is ready to offer Starlink internet in northern United States and southern Canada. The company currently operates approximately 888 internet-beaming satellites in low Earth orbit. SpaceX plans to deploy thousands of satellites to provide broadband coverage globally by 2021. To track the satellites in orbit SpaceX signed a deal with LeoLabs, the company announced the partnership today October 27. —“LeoLabs is pleased to announce a commercial agreement with SpaceX to support tracking of Starlink satellites during the initial on-orbit phase of missions,” LeoLabs representatives wrote in a press release. “Under this partnership, SpaceX utilizes LeoLabs Launch and Early Orbit service to track all Starlink satellites beginning immediately after deployment, providing SpaceX with rapid orbital location and identification support during the first few days of new missions.”

SpaceX and LeoLabs have been working together since March this year. Through LeoLabs’ advanced tracking system, SpaceX obtains detailed data rapidly about where each Starlink satellite is located in space. LeoLabs states it delivers data within 1-hour after a Starlink satellite passes over one of its radar stations on Earth.

“LeoLabs is excited to work with SpaceX as they launch the world’s largest constellation of satellites to provide global broadband internet access,” the Chief Executive Officer at LeoLabs Dan Ceperley wrote in a statement released by the company. “Our global radar network and software platform allow LeoLabs to acquire an entire batch of Starlink satellites faster than any other organization in the world and provides SpaceX with a level of certainty that was previously not available,” he added.

‚The innocuous microwave on a shelf in a laboratory at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Wash., is anything but ordinary.

“Weird,” is how Penny McKenzie, a cybersecurity engineer at the laboratory, describes the device.

The microwave arrived at PNNL with the capability to be controlled through a smart speaker connected to the internet, a connection McKenzie and her colleagues declined when they plugged it into the wall.

This is probably the only time, that I’ll be sharing a netflix trailer in this group. The documentary is worth watching, especially the outlook at the end.

In this unique feature documentary, titled David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet, the celebrated naturalist reflects upon both the defining moments of his lifetime and the devastating changes he has seen. Coming to Netflix October 4 2020, the film addresses some of the biggest challenges facing life on our planet, providing a snapshot of global nature loss in a single lifetime. With it comes a powerful message of hope for future generations as Attenborough reveals the solutions to help save our planet from disaster.

Continue reading “David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet | Official Trailer | Netflix” »

SpaceX is expanding the beta test of its Starlink satellite internet service, reaching out via email on Monday to people who expressed interest in signing up for the service.

Called the “Better Than Nothing Beta” test, according to multiple screenshots of the email seen by CNBC, initial Starlink service is priced at $99 a month – plus a $499 upfront cost to order the Starlink Kit. That kit includes a user terminal to connect to the satellites, a mounting tripod and a wifi router. There is also now a Starlink app listed by SpaceX on the Google Play and Apple iOS app stores.

“As you can tell from the title, we are trying to lower your initial expectations,” the emails said, signed Starlink Team. “Expect to see data speeds vary from 50Mb/s to 150Mb/s and latency from 20ms to 40ms over the next several months as we enhance the Starlink system. There will also be brief periods of no connectivity at all.”

We stored the light by putting it in a suitcase so to speak, only that in our case the suitcase was made of a cloud of cold atoms,” says physicist Patrick Windpassinger from Mainz University in Germany. “We moved this suitcase over a short distance and then took the light out again.

The storage and transfer of information is a fundamental part of any computing system, and quantum computing systems are no different – if we’re going to benefit from the speed and security of quantum computers and a quantum internet, then we need to figure out how to shift quantum data around.

One of the ways scientists are approaching this is through optical quantum memory, or using light to store data as maps of particle states, and a new study reports on what researchers are calling a milestone in the field: the successful storage and transfer of light using quantum memory.

Continue reading “In New Milestone, Physicists Store And Transport Light Using Quantum Memory” »

Optical computing, which uses photons instead of electrons, has been one of the great promises of this field for decades.

According to Moore’s law —actually more like a forecast, formulated in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore— the number of transistors in a microprocessor doubles about every two years, boosting the power of the chips without increasing their energy consumption. For half a century, Moore’s prescient vision has presided over the spectacular progress made in the world of computing. However, by 2015, the engineer himself predicted that we are reaching a saturation point in current technology. Today, quantum computing holds out hope for a new technological leap, but there is another option on which many are pinning their hopes: optical computing, which replaces electronics (electrons) with light (photons).

The end of Moore’s law is a natural consequence of physics: to pack more transistors into the same space they have to be shrunk down, which increases their speed while simultaneously reducing their energy consumption. The miniaturisation of silicon transistors has succeeded in breaking the 7-nanometre barrier, which used to be considered the limit, but this reduction cannot continue indefinitely. And although more powerful systems can always be obtained by increasing the number of transistors, in doing so the processing speed will decrease and the heat of the chips will rise.

Continue reading “Optical Computing: Solving Problems at the Speed of Light” »

Morgan Stanley, the New York-based investment bank, has nearly doubled its valuation of Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, from $52 billion in July to over $100 billion, it said in a research note issued Thursday. The bank’s so-called “bull case”–its absolute best-case scenario–puts SpaceX at a value above $200 billion.

The investment bank says that SpaceX’s Starlink internet-from-satellites service has driven a near $50 billion increase in the rocket company’s value since July. Forbes is sticking with investors’ more conservative valuation.

It’s all coming together.

SpaceX is deploying a megaconstellation of internet-beaming Starlink satellites to provide internet service to rural areas around Earth where service is unreliable and not available. The Starlink network could provide SpaceX with additional funding to develop a fleet of Starships to colonize Mars.

Continue reading “SpaceX plans to provide Starlink internet on Mars one day” »

WASHINGTON — SpaceX launched another set of Starlink satellites Oct. 24, marking the 100th time the company has placed payloads into orbit.

The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 11:31 a.m. Eastern. The rocket’s upper stage deployed the payload of 60 Starlink satellites into orbit 63 minutes after liftoff. The first stage, making its third flight, landed on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean.

This was the 100th successful launch in the company’s history. That total includes 95 Falcon 9, three Falcon Heavy and two Falcon 1 launches. The company also suffered three Falcon 1 launch failures and one Falcon 9 launch failure; another Falcon 9 was destroyed in 2016 during preparations for a static-fire test.