Daily Archives: August 8, 2020

Earlier this week, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley returned to Earth from the International Space Station (ISS), capping off what will go down in history as a truly groundbreaking mission. After docking with the ISS two months earlier in late May, the astronauts have officially completed the first-ever crewed commercial flight of SpaceXs Dragon capsule.

Of course, astronauts have been flying to the ISS for decades, but the successful mission marks a critical moment in U.S. space exploration and travel a moment of domestic independence. After a long period of reliance on Russian Soyuz rockets for ISS docking, NASA is now working with SpaceX, a private American company instead.

NASAs shift to a private launch partner comes with more than a nationalistic benefit too. The cost of a seat on SpaceXs Dragon crew capsule comes in at $55 million. The cost for a seat on Roscosmos Soyuz rocket is nearly double at $90 million.

NASA already has its Crew-2 targeted to launch in spring 2021. This wasnt a one-off, in other words; its arguably the dawn of a new era in space travel.

As one might expect, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was ecstatic upon the missions completion. This is an enormous win for his company, and it puts him in an incredibly influential position as far as NASA missions are concerned. Heres what Musk had to say at the welcoming ceremony:

I do think what this heralds really is fundamentally a new era in spaceflight. We're going to go to the moon, we're going to have a base on the moon, we're going to send people to Mars and make life multiplanetary, and I think this day heralds a new age of space exploration. That's what it's all about.

Musks bold ambitions to colonize space have never been a secret, but after putting astronauts on a spaceship, sending them to orbit, and then returning them home safely, those ambitions have never been closer to reality. At least, that may be the way it seems.

Im a pretty big fan of science fiction, but Ill be the first to admit that colonizing the moon and going to Mars isnt quite as alluring as a man like Musk makes it out to be. We already know what its like on both of these celestial bodies: Its barren, cold, and utterly unlivable. Even if the most dire predictions of climate change were to wreak havoc on Earth, humanity would still be much better off sticking it out right here.

That isnt to say that humans wont eventually need to extend their reach or that space exploration isnt important, but we will have to find something more livable before we get there; neither Mars nor the moon are it.

Considering Elon Musks intellectual prowess, its difficult to believe he hasnt considered that the temperature on Mars averages out to negative 81 degrees Fahrenheit, that the atmosphere is almost entirely carbon dioxide, or that the planet is prone to violent dust storms that kick up toxic soil. Could Elon really be this clueless about the inhabitability of Mars? Probably not.

Love him or hate him, Musk is no dummy, if measured only by the simple fact of what he has accomplished. Musk is a one-of-a-kind businessman who knows how to leverage lofty promises for funding and media attention. He channels his inner Tony Stark, promising humanitarian advancements and convincing the government to subsidize his operations.

You see, Musks most newsworthy ambition may be advancing humanity into a multiplanetary species, but the real long-term business model of SpaceX isnt about NASA contracts: Thats just the starting point. The real moneymaker for SpaceX is its Starlink network: a constellation of thousands of low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites designed to cover the entire Earth.

Late last month, Morgan Stanley released a research report updating its long-term valuation estimate for SpaceX. The investment bank believes the companys value could soar to as much as $175 billion because of Starlink.

Of course, Starlink is still a private company, so as far as retail investors are concerned, its off the table until the company holds an IPO. But SpaceX isnt the only company building out this new kind of LEO constellation; Facebook (NASDAQ: FB), OneWeb, and Boeing (NYSE: BA) are just a few companies working on similar networks.

Those who have been with us long enough know that weve been talking about LEO constellations and the moneymaking opportunity surrounding them for the last half-decade. For instance, I was shouting from the rooftops for investors to buy Aerojet Rocketdyne (NYSE: AJRD), a critical satellite component supplier, as early as 2016. The stock shot up over 300% during that time frame.

Now, on the heels of SpaceXs successful Dragon crew launch, the institutions are finally catching up. RBC upgraded Aerojet to Outperform on Wednesday, with a $54 price target. The company is far less attractive today than when we first began covering it, but its a future-minded stock that investors can still feel comfortable holding long term.

That all said, investors looking to get in on private companies akin to SpaceX arent to be pigeonholed to the public stock market for these kinds of huge gains: There are new and emerging opportunities in private equity that have recently become accessible to Main Street investors.

Ive heard from countless investors recently who have been begging for easier entry into private companies. The demand isnt surprising at all because this is how billionaires like Elon Musk ultimately make their wealth: by securing ownership before everyone else.

In fact, the demand for private equity is so great, I personally know an analyst who left his desk at Morgan Stanley to teach Main Street investors how to get in on private equity deals without having to be an industry insider or an accredited investor.

He recently launched a new investment service called Main Street Ventures where he lays out a simple three-step system for pinning down the most compelling private deals. He sent me a video explaining the system in a private email last week, but Im sharing it with you right here, because the public needs to see it.

Until next time,

Jason Stutman

@JasonStutman on Twitter

Jason Stutman is Wealth Daily's senior technology analyst and editor of investment advisory newsletters Technology and Opportunity and Topline Trader. His strategy for building winning portfolios is simple: Buy the disruptor, sell the disrupted.

Covering the broad sector of technology and occasionally dabbling in the political sphere, Jason has written hundreds of articles spanning topics from consumer electronics and development stage biotechnology to political forecasting and social commentary.

Outside the office Jason is a lover of science fiction and the outdoors. He writes through the lens of a futurist, free market advocate, and fiscal conservative. Jason currently hails from Baltimore, Maryland, with roots in the great state of New York.

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Forget SpaceX: Invest in This Instead - Wealth Daily

Cybercrime , Cyberwarfare / Nation-State Attacks , Fraud Management & Cybercrime

One day when all of this pandemic craziness is over, maybe you'll drive your Tesla Cybertruck on Cyber Monday to your cybersecurity job. Of course, your business will be backed by a cyber insurance policy as a fallback in the event of a devastating cyberattack. Or if you're working for a government cybersecurity center, maybe you'll even be safeguarding cyberspace against cyber espionage agents - who do cybercrime in their spare time - and the looming threat of cyberwar, while binging over the weekend on your favorite episodes of "CSI: Cyber." Or cyber whatever.

See Also: How To Cut Through The Web Of Insurance Fraud

We seem to keep entering the era of ever more "cyber." Since we're truly through the looking glass on this one, it begs this "Alice in Wonderland" question: Do we say what we mean - or mean what we say - when we use the word cyber?

"What does 'cyber' even mean? And where does it come from?" writes Thomas Rid in "Rise of the Machines," his book-length quest to unravel cyber's origin story.

Everyone from military officers and spies, to bankers, hackers and scholars "all slapped the prefix 'cyber' in front of something else ... to make it sound more techy, more edgy, more timely, more compelling - and sometimes more ironic," writes Rid, who's a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University.

Cyber has cachet. Cyber inevitably seems to always be pointing to the future. But as Rid writes in his book, "the future of machines has a past," and cyber has long stood not just for a future, Utopian merging of humans and machines, but a potential dystopia as well.

On the good side exists the potential offered by cyborg-like technologies that might one day, for example, enable humans with spinal injuries to walk again. Such technology may even facilitate the human colonization of Mars.

For a view of the flip side, however, take the "Matrix's" rendering of a postapocalyptic hellhole in which humans have been made to unthinkingly serve machines.

The question stands: What is cyber? "We know it is a lazy sobriquet" beloved by marketing departments and business types seeking budget for a project, currently vying with "artificial intelligence and machine learning" as must-have buzzwords, says Colin Williams, who formerly served as a director of UK-based government contractor SBL - Software Box Limited.

Williams, who's currently researching the history of cybernetics at Oxford University, says that we continually remake our society with technology - and bar some potential efforts by neo-Luddites, there's no going back.

"Like it or loathe it, it's existential: We absolutely, fundamentally rely on technology for our existence," he tells me.

At the same time, there's been a dangerous disconnect between understanding how our current technological environment is a natural consequence of so many things that have come before, including not just technology but also social change and our moral, ethical, political and philosophical fabric, he says.

For example, "when we talk about driverless, autonomous vehicles and we start to talk about driverless carriages, we're in the realm of classic Benthamite 19th-century utilitarianism," he says.

In other words, we've been here before, just under a different name. Or in the case of "cyber," in fact, the same name, since it was first coined in 1948 as "cybernetics" by Norbert Wiener, who defined the word as "the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine."

Despite the current prevalence in society to flail about, seemingly uncontrollably, in the face of today's awesome technology, and for people to claim that no one, truly, could have predicted the internet of things or the all-electric Tesla Cybertruck - set to be built soon at a factory in Austin, Texas - in fact there's been a natural evolution, not just in science but popular culture, preceding where we are today.

And if there is one constant, it's simply that everything always changes. "We've inherited an idea from the 19th century about stability and permanence, and it's wrong," Williams says.

At the same time, the word cyber arguably points to what is inherently leading-edge and subject to change. Entering the world of cybersecurity today, for example, "you're leaving the reality of what you know, for a fantasy world you know nothing about," Amanda Rousseau, an offensive security engineer at Facebook, said in a keynote speech at last year's Black Hat Europe conference in London.

But in some cases, the "future is now" cachet afforded by the term appears to have already outstayed its welcome.

Rid, for example, recently tweeted that he finds "increasingly counterproductive" the term "cyberattack."

He's not the only one. In 2017, the Associated Press style guide used by numerous news organizations recommended retiring the "routinely overused" - and thus increasingly meaningless - word for all but the most egregious of onslaughts. What qualifies? Think "computer operations" that result in "physical damage or significant and wide-ranging disruption."

Despite such entreaties, the word still gets overused in news story headline after headline.

Another candidate for a "cyber" paring is cybercrime, says Raj Samani, chief scientist at security firm McAfee.

"We shouldn't use the word cybercrime anymore, because whether it's digitally enabled or digitally dependent crime - whatever it is - modern crime now uses computers. So get over it, right? It is just crime," he tells me. "Whether you use USB sticks or whether you use a gun, you're still robbing a bank."

When it comes to seeing cyber as not being a new concept, Rid and Williams are no outliers. Indeed, writing in The Economist's "1843 Magazine," Tom Standage recounts what was arguably the world's first cyberattack, which involved hiding messages sent via "the world's first national data network."

Sounds like a story that's been ripped from the headlines, right? But the network in question was a mechanical telegraph system built in France in the 1790s. In 1832, this so-called semaphore telegraph system was targeted by two brothers named Blanc, who bribed an official to communicate stock market movements to them. These communications got hidden in regular messages by using a prearranged character, followed by a backspace character, which instructed the telegraph operator to ignore it when transcribing a message.

Even so, "this extra character could be seen by another accomplice: a former telegraph operator who observed the telegraph tower outside Bordeaux with a telescope, and then passed on the news to the Blancs," Standage writes.

"The scam was only uncovered in 1836, when the crooked operator in Tours fell ill and revealed all to a friend, who he hoped would take his place," Standage reports. "The Blanc brothers were put on trial, though they could not be convicted because there was no law against misuse of data networks."

So not only did the Blanc brothers manage a clever subversion of the mechanical telegraph system, they also in effect hacked the legal system by doing something that had never been envisioned.

Hacking systems and data? Plus a change, plus c'est la mme chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Only now, of course, we have added cyber.

Read the original post:
Exploring the Forgotten Roots of 'Cyber' - BankInfoSecurity.com

Investments in long-term space programmes require change in strategic, far-reaching thinking, which unfortunately is clouded by politics

Why go to the stars? Because we are the descendants of those primates who chose to look over the next hill, because we wont survive here indefinitely, wrote science fiction authors James and Gregory Benford.

Take a moment off from the ongoing Covid-19 crisis to look up and wonder what lies beyond that beautiful cloud-filled August sky. And that is where the Indian space programme or space diplomacy should come in. While we were busy looking at the pandemics impact, not many noticed the three intra-planetary objects launched across the globe. The first was the Hope orbiter from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), followed by Tianwen 1 by China and finally the Perseverance by the US. All three are expected to reach destination Mars by February 2021,thereby opening up a whole new chapter of Star Wars. No matter who reaches there first, or what their stated objectives are, the world is again welcoming a highly-contested and thereby, surveillance-hungry and of course trillions of dollars worth of yet-to-be-explored space right above our heads. The battle for global dominance has just gone into space.

Leading the race for interstellar supremacy is China, which has openly stated its objective of joining the elitist space club with self-reliant rockets, satellites and telescopes by 2049. The Mars Mission is part of a larger plan which aims to set up a space station orbiting Earth in the next two years. China has already shot most rockets into space with shrouded ambitions in 2018 and its BeiDou-2 navigation system has an impressive array of satellites, mapping every corner of the globe, providing an alternative to the European and US navigation systems. Meanwhile,China has taken the Moon seriously and wants to establish a lunar research centre within the next decade.

So why does an edge in the cosmic sphere suddenly become so important, specially if it is led by terrestrial players, hungry perhaps, for new territories? First, it is about a strategy to occupy as much of the outer space as one can for global dominance. Remember the Cold War-era Moon rush between the then superpowers? Today a host of citizen services beginning with the internet, electricity, common city navigation via the GPS, high-tech military surveillance and missile and torpedo navigation can all be beamed from a satellite, with needle-edge precision, onto any tech-enabled receiver.

We are all aware of Chinas lust for territorial colonialism barely hidden under a veil of loans and infrastructure development projects targetted towards those willing to barter away their sovereignty. In fact, the BeiDou-2 navigation system is an excellent example of how China aims to keep an eye on its strategically-chosen welfare partner countries and the globe. China knows that future wars will not be fought on terra firma. The second reason for Chinas space rush is to lay claim to trillions of dollars worth of unmined minerals, precious metals and rare earths that can be found just a few kilometres above the Earth, floating around in space and in our galactic neighbourhood, the Moon. A mineral-rich asteroid or comet if somehow pushed back to Earth can cover and provide for billions of dollars worth of space missions.

Clearly it is a heady combination of new horizons with dominance in existing spheres and India has just begun to look at opening its space programme to private players. The desire is to have indigenous companies like Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and Space X all of which are funded by billionaires who made their fortunes elsewhere be a part of the race to space.

Investments in long-term space programmes require change in strategic, deep, far-reaching thinking, which unfortunately is mostly clouded by politics on the ground. In the land of great physicists and mathematicians like Bhaskaracharya, Aryabhata and CV Raman, there is a black hole of lost opportunities and scientific temper. Independent India was left plundered and poor by the colonisers. It has taken more than 50 years for India to be able to truly start telescoping between ancient knowledge with modern-day quantum theories to start rebuilding its starships.

It is here that the true human and monetary resources of the country need to be pooled together for an Indian Century. A deeper focus on marketing and glamourising space studies with ample doses of creative imagination, mixed with scientific knowledge, would be a good start for young minds at school. After all, the Indian interstellar traveller of the future is perhaps still at school. Similarly, billions of worth of long-term bets without any visible returns in the near future can only be achieved by a clever mix of private enterprise and the taxpayers money. Remember NASA can easily be dubbed as the most criticised and perhaps expensive space organisation in the world, yet it made communicating with anyone around the globe at the touch of a button possible. Mark Twain said, There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

(The writer is a policy analyst)

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Race to space is hotting up - Daily Pioneer

We all know Jeff Bezos is very rich but wouldnt you love to know how long it would take him to, for example, earn your entire years salary, tackle your entire student debt or pay off your mortgage?

A new website will you give you these exact numbers, as they apply to Bezos and 14 other tech moguls. The company a text messaging company says it uses data on salary, bonuses, earnings from equity and other forms of compensation from 2019 SEC filings to let you calculate just how quickly people like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Susan Wojcicki of YouTube and Reed Hastings of Netflix could pay off all of your expenses.

The data tells us the 15 best-paid CEOs in tech have a combined annual income of over $83bn which is greater than the entire gross domestic product of hundreds of countries.

Tech moguls are now so rich that its not unusual to see shocking comparisons that demonstrate exactly how egregious their salaries are. When Bezos was touted to soon become the worlds first trillionaire (he isnt yet but his net worth of $144bn puts him on track to become one by 2026), we learned he was richer than entire countries and later also found out he was richer than combined countries (to take an example: Jamaica, Iceland, Tunisia and Estonia).

Remember when Elizabeth Warren helped billionaires calculate how much they would pay under her ultra-millionaire tax proposals, and it was pointed out that under her plan, even after tax, Bill Gates would still be a billionaire 60 years from now? Oh, and that time we learned that Zuckerberg takes about two minutes to earn the average US yearly wage?

Now that I know Bezos earns my entire salary in under a minute, it does make the additional $2 an hour that Amazon employees briefly received for working during the pandemic seem even more paltry. (Bezos has now ended that entitlement, despite the virus still raging across the US.)

As for Elon Musk, he could pay my monthly rent after less than 30 minutes of work which makes you wonder why he violated Californias stay-at-home order to keep Teslas factory open, and why he sued local authorities after he was forced to shut it. We can all understand how eager he must be to continue his work (particularly his pressing mission to, er, colonize Mars) but a global pandemic feels like a good moment for pause.

Then again, when you have so much money, it may just not matter: Musks net-worth is almost 20 times the entire budget of the county he sued.

Read more:
To understand how rich billionaires really are, use this calculator - The Guardian