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RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 16 (Reuters) — Elon Musk and Brazilian Communications Minister Fabio Faria met in Austin on Tuesday to discuss a potential partnership that would leverage SpaceX technology to bring Internet to rural schools and cut back on illegal deforestation.

In a statement, the Brazilian government said the two talked about how SpaceX and Starlink, a satellite broadband service offered by the firm, could help monitor the Amazon rainforest for illegal cutting, while also providing Internet connections to remote schools and health centers.

“We’re working to seal this important partnership between the Brazilian government and SpaceX,” Faria said, according to the statement. “Our objective is to bring Internet to rural areas and remote places, in addition to helping control fires and illegal deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.”

Amazon is planning a satellite internet constellation that could rival SpaceX Starlink, touted by CEO Elon Musk as a means of getting more people online.

Brazilian Communications Minister Fabio Faria met with the billionaire tech mogul in Austin, Texas. SpaceX would send its satellite internet service, Starlink, to rural schools and health institutions.

When Elon Musk has any news to share, you’re likely to hear about it first on Twitter. You’d think the guy who runs SpaceX, Neuralink, Tesla, The Boring Company wouldn’t have much time on his hands.

But as his companies grow, so do his number of tweets. They’ve been increasing steadily – as the Wall Street Journal notes in this graphic. His tweets are so frequent that when he announced he was taking a break from Twitter that one time, it made the news.

Continue reading “The Clever Reason Elon Musk Tweets So Much” »

But it might not be a success, warns Elon Musk.

SpaceX’s launch vehicle scheduled to take humans back to the Moon is expected to make its first orbital flight as early as January 2022.

Speaking in a video call at the fall meeting of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, CEO Elon Musk said that SpaceX is scheduled to carry out some tests in December, ahead of Starship’s first orbital flight in January, Business Insider reported.

Continue reading “SpaceX’s Starship Will Fly Into Orbit For the First Time in January 2022” »

For the first time, SpaceX has teamed up with researchers from NASA and several other US institutions to publicly discuss how it plans to use Starship to build Mars Base Alpha.

Save for a handful of comments spread around the periphery of SpaceX and CEO Elon Musk’s main focus, Starship itself, the company and its executives have almost never specifically discussed how the next-generation fully-reusable rocket will be used to create a permanent human presence on Mars. For the most part, that clear focus on near-term hurdles is hard to fault. Half a century of mostly theoretical analysis has made it abundantly clear that a permanent and sustainable extraterrestrial human outpost is impossible without a radical reduction in the cost of access to space. For decades, NASA has studied and studied and studied slight variations of a plan that would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to send a few astronauts to Mars for a few months at a time.

Put simply, without a revolution in space transport, even a temporary presence on Mars where inhabitants are mostly dependent on imported goods is infeasible unless Mars exploration is made a national or international priority on the order of tens of billions of dollars per year. Over the 80–90 years that spaceflight has been seriously pondered, dozens of groups and papers and studies and space agencies have imagined what that revolution might look like and SpaceX is not unique for proposing a solution to that longstanding problem. However, SpaceX is the first of that long list of contenders to propose a solution and both invest significant resources and put hammer to metal in an attempt to make that vision real.

The first prize money has been awarded in the largest XPrize competition ever held, with 23 student teams getting financial injections to further their carbon removal technology.

Among the winners are a variety of forward-thinking initiatives addressing the issue of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, as well as those that seek to address more than one environmental issue at the same time.

The US$100 million Carbon Removal XPrize was launched in February with the goal of developing technology that can remove CO₂ from the seas and the atmosphere.

Musk gave a new date for Starship’s first orbital flight. He’d previously predicted it would launch in July, then November.

On Wednesday, CEO Elon Musk outlined how the company’s under-development rocket will deliver a “high fly rate” of a dozen launches in 2022. This will enable the ship to deliver actual payloads in 2023 before moving on to more ambitious goals like sending humans to the Moon and Mars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLydXZOo4eA

The comments, made at the joint meeting of the Space Studies Board and the Board on Physics and Astronomy, outline how the stainless steel rocket taking shape in Texas will move from prototype curiosity to working ship.

Continue reading “SpaceX Starship 2022: How next year will pave way for Mars City and Artemis” »