Lifeboat Foundation

The price skyrocketed after an Elon Musk tweet.

On Tuesday, SpaceX plans to launch the latest prototype of its Starship spacecraft — a system that could one day carry humans to Mars. The prototype, called.

The first time SpaceX attempted such an ambitious Starship flight, the 16-story vehicle blew up. Seven weeks later, Elon Musk’s company is trying again.

Continue reading “SpaceX may finally launch its newest Starship rocket prototype Tuesday afternoon. With any luck, it won’t explode” »

The latest Starlink satellites launched on Jan. 24 are equipped with laser links, and all Starlink satellites launched next year will be equipped with laser inter-satellite links, Elon Musk, SpaceX chief engineer confirmed on Twitter.

“All sats launched next year will have laser links. Only our polar sats have lasers this year and are v [version] 0.9,” Musk tweeted on Monday.

A Twitter user noticed a difference in a photo of the stack of 10 Starlink satellites deployed on Sunday’s Transporter-1 rideshare mission, and asked Musk if an object that looked like a black pipe was lasers, which he confirmed.

A new world record has been set for the number of satellites sent to space on a single rocket. The 143 payloads, of all shapes and sizes, rode to orbit on a SpaceX Falcon rocket that launched out of Florida.

Entrepreneur Elon Musk’s SpaceX company delivers 143 satellites to orbit on a single rocket flight.

Tesla recently shared some footage of its next-generation 4680 battery cells being produced. The video, which seems to be taken from the electric car maker’s pilot Roadrunner line, suggests that Tesla’s 4680 battery manufacturing system may very well be Elon Musk’s elusive “Alien Dreadnought” concept coming to life.

During the lead up to the Model 3’s initial ramp, Elon Musk envisioned a vehicle production system that was so automated, it would look extraterrestrial in nature. Dubbed as the “Alien Dreadnought,” this concept ultimately fell short of its targets, and Tesla eventually adopted a production system for the Model 3 that combined both human and automated machines. Since then, Tesla has taken steps towards increasing the automation of its vehicle production system, as evidenced by parts like the Model Y’s rigid wiring, which are optimized for installation by robots.

Tesla’s video of its 4680 battery production line suggests that the company’s level of automation has reached levels that have never been seen before. As noted by TSLA bull @truth_tesla on Twitter, the footage shared by Tesla in its recruitment video showed a battery production line that is incredibly automated. This could be seen immediately in Tesla’s main battery production line, which, unlike traditional battery manufacturing facilities, is largely absent of human workers.

Things we already know: The world is growing uncomfortably warm due to humanity’s insistence on burning fossil fuels. Elon Musk is currently the wealthiest human on the planet. Yet for being among the wealthiest people on the planet, Musk’s philanthropic track record over the years has been paltry compared to the likes of Jeff Bezos. So, yeah, it did come as a bit of a surprise on Thursday when the Tesla CEO took to Twitter to announce that he plans to donate $100 million as a prize towards a winning carbon capture system.

Am donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 212021

Details on Musk’s upcoming carbon capture competition have not been released but are expected to arrive “next week.” This is not the first time that a company has sought the public’s help with carbon capture technology, which seeks to pull this element from the atmosphere and squirrel it away to help slow the rate of human-induced climate change. In 2018, X-Prize held a similar competition and awarded five finalist teams a share of its $20 million grand prize. But with a $100 million purse on the line, Musk’s competition will not only offer five times the funding as X-Prize, it’ll also constitute his single-largest philanthropic investment to date (10 times the amount of his second-largest donations so far). Of course, this is far from the first effort to collect and convert atmospheric CO₂ into consumer products.

LONDON — Artificial intelligence researchers don’t like it when you ask them to name the top AI labs in the world, possibly because it’s so hard to answer.

There are some obvious contenders when it comes to commercial AI labs. U.S. Big Tech — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft — have all set up dedicated AI labs over the last decade. There’s also DeepMind, which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet, and OpenAI, which counts Elon Musk as a founding investor.

DeepMind, OpenAI, and Facebook AI Research are fighting it out to be the top AI research lab in the world.

Continue reading “Artificial intelligence researchers rank the top A.I. labs worldwide” »

Billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson all want to send private citizens to space. Their respective companies, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic are dedicated to making space travel and space tourism more accessible.

Narrator: SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic are in a modern space race. Similar to when the United States and the Soviet Union competed to get astronauts on the moon, these billionaire-run companies are racing to bring people like you and me to space. But how will they do it?

Let’s start with Blue Origin, the passion project of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Blue Origin’s focus is on commercial space flight, or space tourism. It plans to shoot a booster rocket with an attached passenger capsule to 60 miles above the surface into sub-orbital space. At the top of the rocket’s arch, the capsule will detach, and for about four minutes, passengers will experience weightlessness. They’ll be allowed to unbuckle their seat belts and float around the cabin, looking out the window at the curvature of the Earth. The capsule will then start to fall back into the atmosphere, and parachutes will deploy to bring it down slowly. The whole trip only lasts about 11 minutes. A ticket on Blue Origin’s New Shepard will likely cost more than $200000. That’s over $18000 a minute. Blue Origin has tested the New Shepard rocket nine times, and the company still hopes to send civilians into space in 2018.

The Space Race