Lifeboat Foundation

Look up into the night sky towards the end of October and you may catch sight of a brand new ‘star’ twinkling in the cosmos.

The tiny speck of light is not the offspring of a seething nebula, but the world’s first space sculpture, which will orbit the Earth for three weeks this autumn.

The length of a football field, and the shape of an elongated diamond, the ‘Orbital Reflector’ artwork is the brainchild of US artist Trevor Paglen and will be launched on board on one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets.

Continue reading “Heavens to shine with new ‘star’ as first space sculpture prepares for launch” »

On September 29th, 2017, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk unveiled detailed plans of the Big Falcon Rocket at the 68th International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia. It was a follow-up speech to the prior year’s presentation when he first discussed the architecture of what was then called the Interplanetary Transport System. In his highly anticipated speech, Musk laid out the detailed plans for a two stage rocket to enable the colonization of Mars, a moon base, and hypersonic long-distance travel on Earth.

The design featured an enormous Booster that would be powered by 31 Raptor engines, planned to be the world’s most advanced and highest pressure chemical rocket engine. Following stage separation, the booster would return to Earth and land near or on the launch pad.

There were three variants of the rocket’s second stage planned: a Spaceship, Tanker and Cargo Lifter. The primary of which, the BFR Spaceship, was also the colonization vehicle and that could carry up to 100 passengers and a hundred tonnes of cargo. One possible use of the Spaceship was as the world’s first hypersonic passenger transport vehicle, which would enable travel between any two points on Earth in under an hour. Its primary envisioned mission, however, was to be a colonization vehicle for the Moon, Mars and beyond.

The production problems Tesla has faced with its Model 3 have been well documented. Now, sources say the company is facing similar issues with its solar roof tile initiative. According to Reuters, former and current employees have revealed that assembly line problems, plus CEO Elon Musk’s exacting aesthetic demands, has delayed production, causing tension with partner Panasonic, and rattling officials that are keen to see a return on significant state investment.

The “Solar Roof,” produced at Tesla’s factory in Buffalo, New York, is designed to look like and function as a regular roof while also generating energy. According to sources, technical challenges have delayed production, as has Musk’s design plans. Speaking to Reuters, one source said that “Aesthetic look is the key point that Elon is not always satisfied with. That’s the big issue.”

Neither Tesla nor Reuters’ sources have revealed current production figures for the roof tiles, but the delays are such that Panasonic — which the initiative depends on for solar components — has been forced to find other buyers for the parts it had built to sell to Tesla. According to a former Panasonic employee, the company has been shipping “large volumes” of its photovoltaic cells as samples to other prospective buyers, due to low demand from Tesla. Panasonic declined to comment on the issue, stating only that it “believes Tesla will use Panasonic cells when it mass-markets the Solar roof.”

Continue reading “Tesla’s production problems extend to its solar roof business, too” »

No one can deny that SpaceX founder Elon Musk has thought a lot about how to transport humans safely to Mars with his Big Falcon Rocket. But when it comes to Musk’s highly ambitious plans to settle Mars in the coming decades, some critics say Musk hasn’t paid enough attention to what people will do once they get there.

However, SpaceX may be getting more serious about preparing for human landings on Mars, both in terms of how to keep people alive as well as to provide them with something meaningful to do. According to private invitations seen by Ars, the company will host a “Mars Workshop” on Tuesday and Wednesday this week at the University of Colorado Boulder. Although the company would not comment directly, a SpaceX official confirmed the event and said the company regularly meets with a variety of experts concerning its missions to Mars.

This appears to be the first meeting of such magnitude, however, with nearly 60 key scientists and engineers from industry, academia, and government attending the workshop, including a handful of leaders from NASA’s Mars exploration program. The invitation for the inaugural Mars meeting encourages participants to contribute to “active discussions regarding what will be needed to make such missions happen.” Attendees are being asked to not publicize the workshop or their attendance.

Continue reading “SpaceX organizes inaugural conference to plan landings on Mars” »

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Space X and Tesla founder Elon Musk has a vision for colonising Mars, based on a big rocket, nuclear explosions and an infrastructure to transport millions of people there. This was seen as highly ambitious but technically challenging in several ways. Planetary protection rules and the difficulties of terraforming (making the planet hospitable by, for example, warming it up) and dealing with the harsh radiation were quoted as severe obstacles.

Undeterred, Musk took a first step towards his aim in February this year with the launch of a Tesla roadster car into an orbit travelling beyond Mars on the first Falcon Heavy rocket. This dramatically illustrated the increasing launch capability for future missions made available by partnerships between commercial and government agencies.

I think we have finally entered the rapid exponential runaway phase of the technological Singularity. As we’ve already seen in the last year year-and-a-half, we are in an era of unprecedented chaos and innovation. The invention of multifidus AI is, of course, the driver of the singularity and as we move forward people like Musk will become ever more importance to the future of our species.

Having a president like Donald Trump can I think, be taken as just another symptom of this period of time. It might not seem like Donald Trump has anything to do with the singularity. He, PERSONALLY, doesn’t, really. But the methods of his madness are the salient data point here. His use of Twitter VERY quickly changed the way millions of people communicate. It changed how they view the world, and their place within it. They have fallen to theiir knees in hypocritically and ENTIRELY UNFORGIVEABLE SUBMISSION to the SICKLY malevolent STUPIDITY that is embodied in the orange, spoiled meat named Donald J Trump. The Right has finally drunk the Kool-Aid that they’ve been serving everyone else for years and found it to be most unpleasantly bitter. They have been bitten by the hand that feeds them.

Tesla is cutting back on plastic with its new car delivery system. On Monday, CEO Elon Musk shared the story of how he personally delivered a Tesla Model 3 to Devin Scott in Los Angeles, using a new method where instead of arriving in plastic wrap, the car is delivered with an enclosed trailer directly from factory to home.

The new method is a marked change from the previous process, where several cars would ship out on a truck to a delivery hub and move out later. It means less packaging, and potentially fewer steps in getting some of the approximately 7,000 cars produced per week into the hands of buyers. Tesla produces around seven times more cars per week than it did when the Model 3 first started production a year ago, and this rapid expansion has led to big changes in the company’s processes to fulfill the 400,000 or so $1,000 reservations for the Model 3. In a March 2017 earnings call, Musk said his goal was to make deliveries “more streamlined, less paperwork, less bureaucracy.”

Elon Musk’s rocket company launched the final iteration of its workhorse rocket carrying the biggest communications satellite ever.

It was a hyperloop hat trick by a team of German engineering students at the third annual SpaceX pod competition on Sunday. WARR Hyperloop from the Technical University of Munich took home the top prize — and set a new record — with their self-propelled pod reaching a top speed of 284 mph (457 km/h).

WARR Hyperloop was one of three finalists to participate in the competition. The teams were tasked with developing a pod to travel down the 1.2-kilometer (0.75-mile) tube, as part of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s vision for a futuristic, high-speed transportation system. The pod that reached the maximum speed would be crowned the winner. The only other requirement was that all pods be self-propelled. In addition to WARR, the other qualifying teams were Delft University from the Netherlands and EPF Loop from Switzerland.