Lifeboat Foundation

SpaceX satellite internet service Starlink said it will comply with court orders to block social network X in Brazil.

WASHINGTON — SpaceX resumed launches of its Falcon 9 rocket early Aug. 31 after the Federal Aviation Administration ended a brief grounding of the vehicle.

One Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 at 3:43 a.m. Eastern, placing 21 Starlink satellites into orbit. It was followed at 4:48 a.m. Eastern by another Falcon 9 lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base’s Space Launch Complex 4E, also delivering 21 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit. The 65 minutes between launches is the shortest interval yet between Falcon 9 launches.

The launches were the first by SpaceX since the Aug. 28 launch of a Falcon 9 where the booster was lost during landing on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean. While the rocket successfully placed its payload of Starlink satellites into orbit, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered a halt in Falcon 9 launches later that day to investigate any public safety implications of the failed landing.

Elon Musk said Starlink’s direct-to-cellular service would provide free emergency services at SpaceX seeks FCC approval for the technology.

ICYMI: Elon Musk’s social media platform X was instructed by a Brazilian court to name a local representative, but failed to do so.

The justice said the platform will stay suspended until it complies with his orders, and also set a daily fine of 50,000 reais ($8,900) for people or companies using…

SAO PAULO — Brazil started blocking Elon Musk’s social media platform X early Saturday, making it largely inaccessible on both the web and through its mobile app after the company refused to comply with a judge’s order.

Continue reading “The Reason Brazil Is Blocking Elon Musk’s X/Twitter” »

Three days ago, an old Falcon 9 booster crashed and exploded while landing on a drone ship during its 23rd landing.

The FAA has cleared SpaceX to launch the Falcon 9 while the investigation into Wednesday’s mishap wraps up.

While the idea of a quantum internet has a huge amount of potential, getting it hooked up to the regular old internet has its challenges.

Now a new study hints at how existing and future networks could be combined.

An experiment conducted by researchers from Leibniz University Hannover in Germany show how quantum information and the classic 1s and 0s of conventional data could be beamed down the same optical fiber.

Optical fiber, as a physical medium for information transmission, is the “highway” of modern economic and social development. However, with the continuous emergence of high-speed and high-capacity communication scenarios such as virtual reality, 5G, intelligent driving, and the Internet of Things (IoT), there is an upper limit to the communication capacity (traffic flow) of the traditional single-mode fiber-optic communication system (highway).

Reports that each of NASA’s Artemis launches could cost as much as $4.1 billion…

“Costs going up faster than the tower,” self-described internet rocket scientist Scott Manley joked at the time.

NASA used its Mobile Launcher 1 for its inaugural — albeit uncrewed — Artemis mission in late 2022. According to a 2020 audit, the tower, which was originally built for NASA’s canceled Constellation program, cost $234 million to develop.

Picking up a box and placing it in a neat pile is not an impressive action in itself for a robot; understanding an enigmatic human command and correctly deciphering and explaining the decision-making process, are definitely innovations. Digit owes parts of its progress to the generative artificial intelligence revolution that also reached the field of robotics and turned expectations from it on its head. “I’ve been asked what’s the biggest thing in 2024 besides language modeling — it’s robotics. Period,” Nvidia’s senior AI scientist Jim Fan wrote in December. “We’re about three years away from a ChatGPT moment for physical AI agents,” he explained.

Ever since Fan made this statement, it seems that everyone is talking about the “ChatGPT moment of robotics”, or the hope of a technological breakthrough that will push the field forward and finally fill our homes with intelligent humanoid robots to help us with household chores, wash the floor, set the table or do the laundry (but not fold it). “What has been happening in recent months is dramatic,” explains Amir Bousani, CEO of R-Go Robotics, which recently entered into a partnership with Nvidia to equip the robot it is developing with its spatial perception capabilities. “The physical world is more difficult than the internet,” notes Dr. Oren Etzioni, founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, “but the field of robots that have the ability to behave in general is running much faster today.”

The huge interest in humanoid robots, or humanoids, which Fan is talking about, is evident in the constant announcements in the field: in February, the startup Figure raised $675 million from Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and OpenAI for the development of the humanoid. In March, Nvidia’s CEO stood on the stage of the company’s developer conference alongside nine humanoids from different companies and announced that building models for robots is “one of the most exciting problems to solve in artificial intelligence”; in April, Elon Musk promised that he would launch the humanoid robot he is developing — Optimus — next year and predicted that by 2040 there will be a billion humanoids among us. A short time later, the activities of Mentee Robotics, Amnon Shashua’s company that was founded two years ago and also develops the humanoid, went public.