Today we catch up on all the latest Starship and Super Heavy updates. Go over recent Dragon news. Talk Starlink and other upcoming missions, and finish with today’s Honorable Mention.
SUBSCRIBE: https://www.youtube.com/spacexcentric
BECOME AN XCENTRIC MEMBER: https://www.youtube.com/spacexcentric/join
SUPPORT ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/spaceXcentric
JOIN OUR DISCORD: https://discord.gg/UCv4yx4
WEBSITE: https://spacexcentric.com
SpaceX is developing a new satellite bus for the Space Development Agency based on the Starlink design.
WASHINGTON — The Space Development Agency awarded SpaceX a $149 million contract and L3Harris a $193.5 million contract to each build four satellites to detect and track ballistic and hypersonic missiles.
The contracts announced Oct. 5 are for the first eight satellites of a potentially much larger Space Development Agency constellation of sensor satellites known as Tracking Layer Tranche 0. This is SpaceX’s first military contract to produce satellites.
China is pushing ahead with developing a giant Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellation competing with SpaceX, Amazon and OneWeb, according to the Washington DC-based analyst Bhavya Lal and California State University’s Professor Larry Press.
Press, professor of information systems at the California State University, mentioned a recent Chinese spectrum filing in a blog of the CircleID website. China “has filed a spectrum application with the International Telecommunication Union for two constellations with the cryptic names GW-A59 and GW-2″ for a total of 12,992 satellites, Press said.
“We heard about an announcement of a constellation with nearly 13,000 satellites,” Bhavya Lal said in SpaceWatchGlobal’s Space Café webtalk last week. Lal is a senior space policy analyst at the IDA Science and Technology Policy Institute in Washington DC and was in the lead for IDA’s recently published report “Evaluation of China’s Commercial Space Sector”.
“Out of around 20 Chinese companies engaged in satellite communications, fewer than a half dozen have proposed constellations,” Lal summarized the report’s findings. “Many focus on narrowband communications, targeting markets such as the Internet of Things (IoT).” Companies considering satellite broadband at an early stage include LinkSure and Galaxy Space, Lal said, while state-owned enterprises such as CASIC and CASC “have the deeper pockets needed to more rapidly launch satellite constellations”.
Regarding the not state-owned enterprises (SOE’s) “we found that these broadband companies are all very early-stage, still in the R&D phase, and do not have much in the way of hardware to launch,” Lal said. “However, as in other areas, the Chinese are making fast progress. The best we can tell the current focus of most companies is domestic. But as the Chinese have done in other areas such as high-speed rail, it would be not a stretch of the imagination that once the bugs in the system are worked out domestically, the Chinese will begin to market services internationally.”
The next generation of the Internet will rely on revolutionary new tech. It will make unhackable networks real — and transmit information faster than the speed of light.
Microsoft’s Teams had a very busy September adding a host of new features. Now, the firm is looking to improve the performance of its Teams service as it continues in the battle to beat Zoom in the video conferencing space.
In an update detailing the features added in September, Microsoft explained how it was trying to improve Teams’ performance as a large proportion of the workforce continue to work from home.
Microsoft says it’s working to ensure businesses and schools “have a high-performance experience that scales across their devices and levels of internet connectivity.”
Starlink Render Created By: ErcX @ErcXspace
SpaceX is looking forward to providing Starlink satellite broadband internet service globally. The company aims to initially offer connection in rural areas of the northern United States and Canada before this year ends. A total of 4,409 internet-beaming satellites will initially make up the Starlink constellation; t here are around 708 satellites already in low Earth orbit. SpaceX is Private Beta Testing the network among employees. Starlink users receive broadband service from the satellites in space via a user dish terminal that is easy to install. “The instructions are super-easy. You plug it in, and you point it at the sky, and a few seconds later you have internet. It’s truly remarkable,” Jonathan Hofeller SpaceX Vice-President of Starlink and Commercial Sales said in July.
SpaceX’s Starlink network is also undergoing real world use with Washington state’s unit of first responders, who are helping rebuild after wildfires destroyed the small town of Malden early September. The emergency telecommunications leader of the Washington State Military Department’s IT division, Richard Hall, told reporters he set up Starlink user terminals in locations that are severely devastated by the fires, to provide families broadband access that enables them to perform wireless calls and connect online. In his job profession Hall has set up a variety of satellite services, he stated that “there’s really no comparison” between Starlink and other networks. “Starlink easily doubles the bandwidth” in comparison, “I’ve seen lower than 30 millisecond latency consistently,” he told CNBC news last week. — “Starlink will be a revolution in connectivity, especially for remote regions or for emergency services when landlines are damaged,” the founder of SpaceX Elon Musk said.
As our lives become increasingly intertwined with technology—whether supporting communication while working remotely or streaming our favorite show—so too does our reliance on the data these devices create. Data centers supporting these technology ecosystems produce a significant carbon footprint—and consume 200 terawatt hours of energy each year, greater than the annual energy consumption of Iran. To balance ecological concerns yet meet growing demand, advances in microelectronic processors—the backbone of many Internet of Things (IoT) devices and data hubs—must be efficient and environmentally friendly.
Northwestern University materials scientists have developed new design principles that could help spur development of future quantum materials used to advance (IoT) devices and other resource-intensive technologies while limiting ecological damage.
“New path-breaking materials and computing paradigms are required to make data centers more energy-lean in the future,” said James Rondinelli, professor of materials science and engineering and the Morris E. Fine Professor in Materials and Manufacturing at the McCormick School of Engineering, who led the research.
SpaceX’s Starlink has showed its utility in connecting far-flung locations to the internet quickly and relatively simply in Washington, where like much of the west coast wildfires have caused enormous damage to rural areas. A couple small towns in the state have received Starlink connections to help locals and emergency workers.
The town of Malden was almost completely destroyed, but restoration efforts are underway, and of course it helps to be able to access the internet for communicating with residents and authorities. With power and cellular service unreliable, satellite internet is a good temporary option, and Starlink stepped up.
As SpaceX founder Elon Musk said on Twitter, the company is prioritizing emergency responders and areas without internet:
SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet network has been used in the field by Washington state emergency responders in recent weeks.
Quantum computers, which harness the strange probabilities of quantum mechanics, may prove revolutionary. They have the potential to achieve an exponential speedup over their classical counterparts, at least when it comes to solving some problems. But for now, these computers are still in their infancy, useful for only a few applications, just as the first digital computers were in the 1940s. So isn’t a book about the communications network that will link quantum computers — the quantum internet — more than a little ahead of itself?
Surprisingly, no. As theoretical physicist Jonathan Dowling makes clear in Schrödinger’s Web, early versions of the quantum internet are here already — for example, quantum communication has been taking place between Beijing and Shanghai via fiber-optic cables since 2016 — and more are coming fast. So now is the perfect time to read up.
Dowling, who helped found the U.S. government’s quantum computing program in the 1990s, is the perfect guide. Armed with a seemingly endless supply of outrageous anecdotes, memorable analogies, puns and quips, he makes the thorny theoretical details of the quantum internet both entertaining and accessible.
Readers wanting to dive right in to details of the quantum internet will have to be patient. “Photons are the particles that will power the quantum internet, so we had better be sure we know what the heck they are,” Dowling writes. Accordingly, the first third of the book is a historical overview of light, from Newton’s 17th century idea of light as “corpuscles” to experiments probing the quantum reality of photons, or particles of light, in the late 20th century. There are some small historical inaccuracies — the section on the Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted repeats an apocryphal tale about his “serendipitous” discovery of the link between electricity and magnetism — and the footnotes rely too much on Wikipedia. But Dowling accomplishes what he sets out to do: Help readers develop an understanding of the quantum nature of light.
For an entertaining overview of the physics and technological advances paving the way for the quantum internet, read ‘Schrödinger’s Web.’
