Lifeboat Foundation

The Air Force had said there was about a 20% chance that the launch would be delayed because of bad weather. But the 23-story Falcon 9 rocket lifted off on time on Thursday.

After the booster’s landing, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted: “Highest reentry heating to date. Burning metal sparks from base heat shield visible in landing video.”

You can watch the mission and landing, narrated by SpaceX staff, here, though this clip shows the booster’s heat shield burning off.

Continue reading “SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket booster survived a ‘spicy’ landing at sea after launching the first private moon mission” »

RD: Is that because the focus right now is so much on getting there? EM: Yeah yeah, you need to get there. That’s a big deal. I think Starship will also be good for creating a base on the moon. We’ll probably have a base on the moon before going to Mars.

The SpaceX CEO on food, fuel, and the risk of vaporization.

In an interview newly published by Popular Mechanics, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shared his thoughts on colonizing Mars — from how the first settlers will grow food to the friendly vibe he envisions at the first base on the Red Planet.

“For having an outdoorsy, fun atmosphere, you’d probably want to have some faceted glass dome, with a park, so you can walk around without a suit,” Musk told the magazine. “Eventually if you terraform the planet, then you can walk around without a suit. But for say, the next 100-plus years, you’ll have to have a giant pressurized glass dome.”

NASA has given the green light for Elon Musk’s SpaceX to launch the first unmanned test of its seven-seat Crew Dragon capsule on March 2 after passing a full day of reviews, bringing the space agency one step closer to replacing the retired Space Shuttle program after years of delays and ending its dependency on contracted Russian Soyuz rockets.

The test flight was originally scheduled for January, but was later delayed to complete hardware testing and other reviews. Per Space.com, NASA and SpaceX officials have now completed an in-depth review of the Crew Dragon’s capabilities called a flight readiness review, with NASA Commercial Crew Program manager Kathy Leuders telling reporters they needed to verify the craft “can safely go rendezvous and dock with the space station, and undock safely, and not pose a hazard to the International Space Station.”

Bezos: “I don’t think we’ll live on planets…I think we’ll live in giant O’Neal-style space colonies.”

• Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, gave a talk to a members-only event at the Yale Club in New York on Tuesday.
• During the 30-minute lecture, Bezos said his private aerospace company, Blue Origin, would launch its first people into space aboard a New Shepard rocket in 2019.
• Bezos also questioned the capabilities of a space tourism competitor, Virgin Galactic, and criticized the goal of Elon Musk and SpaceX to settle Mars with humans.
• Ultimately, Bezos said he wants Blue Origin to enable a space-faring civilization where “a Mark Zuckerberg of space” and “1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins” can flourish.
• Bezos advised the crowd to hold a powerful, personal long-term vision, but to devote “the vast majority of your energy and attention” on shorter-term activities and those ranging up to 2- or 3-year timeframes.

Jeff Bezos may be the richest human on Earth, as the founder of Amazon, but his ultimate dreams reside within a relatively obscure company called Blue Origin.

In fact, as Bezos told the CEO of Business Insider’s parent company in April 2018, he liquidates $1 billion of stock a year to fund his private aerospace outfit.

Continue reading “Jeff Bezos just gave a private talk in New York. From utopian space colonies to dissing Elon Musk’s Martian dream, here are the most notable things he said” »

The CEO once said a self-sustaining Mars colony won’t work if it’s wildly expensive for each person to make the voyage.

Tesla will have the technology to pick up passengers and drive them to destinations by the end of the year, said CEO Elon Musk said on a podcast with an investor.

Circa 2018

The CEO is worried about unchecked machines.

A group of computer scientists once backed by Elon Musk has caused some alarm by developing an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) they say is too dangerous to release to the public.

OpenAI, a research non-profit based in San Francisco, says its “chameleon-like” language prediction system, called GPT–2, will only ever see a limited release in a scaled-down version, due to “concerns about malicious applications of the technology”.

That’s because the computer model, which generates original paragraphs of text based on what it is given to ‘read’, is a little too good at its job.

Continue reading “Scientists Developed an AI So Advanced They Say It’s Too Dangerous to Release” »