Monthly Archives: February 2021

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on February 1 revealed an ambitious plan to get humans on Mars by 2026, which is seven years before US space agency NASA aims to land astronauts on the Red planet. While speaking on the audio-only social media app Clubhouse, Musk said that his goal was to establish a self-sustaining Martian civilisation. For the first time, he mentioned a time-line and said that he will get humans on the Red Planet in five and a half years.

Musks deadline seems little ambitious as there is a long way to go. SpaceX is still working to finalise the prototypes, with a second high-altitude test flight due soon. Even NASA aims to get first humans on the Red Planet in 2033. It is also worth mentioning that it currently takes at least six months to get to Mars, however, Musk believes that could be down to as little as a month, with flights operating every two years.

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While speaking on Clubhouse, the SpaceX CEO went on to say that over time one can make Mars Earth-like by transforming the planet by warming it up. He said that the first colony will be a tiny, dangerous, frontier-like environment as they begin to establish propellant manufacturing, food production and power plants. He said that there are a number of technological advances that need to be made between now and 2026 before humans can travel to Mars on Starship.

Further, when asked if he would allow his children to go to the Red planet on a future rocket trip, Musk said, if were talking about the third or fourth set of landings on Mars Id be ok with that. He added that so far none of them are jumping to go to Mars.

READ:Elon Musk's 'Cyborg Monkey' Triggers Memes, Netizens Say 'Planets Of Apes Has Begun'

Meanwhile, the latest 'SN9' Starship prototype is due to undergo a high altitude test flight in the coming days - similar to the test in December that ended in an explosion. The scientists are going to check how this prototype performs. SpaceX is aiming to launch the SN9 at the speed of 15 km, which is much higher than the speed used by any rocketto date. The previousthree engine prototypes named Star hopper, SN5,SN6 attained a minimum altitude of 500 during the test flight. The test flights were conducted in the past year. Elon Musk wants to use his SpaceX mission to help humanity and also plans to create a "Colony of Humans" on Mars.

Back in November, the tech mogul had even said that he wants to make his own laws on the Red planet. Musk said that once SpaceX reachesMars,it will colonize the planet as there are no universal laws on the planet. All Martian settlement will be dealt with using "self-governing principles, Musk said in a document that lists Terms of Service of its Starlink internet project, declaring himself the governing entity in space. Further, the rocket company's satellite-based internet service, Starlink suggests that it will not recognize the land-based international law that governs Earth on the red planet.

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READ:Elon Musk Claims He Has 'a Monkey With Brain Implant To Play Video Games'

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Elon Musk reveals ambitious plans to get humans to Mars seven years ahead of NASA - Republic World

Next month, three new spacecraft arrive at Mars. Two represent firsts for their countries of origin, while the third opens a new era of Mars exploration. The first is the UAEs Emirates Mars Mission, also known as Hope, which enters orbit on 9 February. Shortly after, Chinas Tianwen-1 settles into the red planets gravitational grip and in April will deploy a lander carrying a rover to the surface.

Both of these missions are groundbreaking for their countries. If they are successful, their makers will join the US, Russia, Europe and India in having successfully sent spacecraft to Mars. However, it is the third mission that is destined to capture the most headlines.

On 18 February, around 8pm GMT, Nasa will attempt to land the car-size rover Perseverance in Jezero crater. Its got a long list of science objectives to work through. We want to get a fuller understanding of how Mars formed as a planet, says Sanjeev Gupta of Imperial College London, who is part of the Perseverance science team.

On Earth, the constant shifting of the crust has mostly destroyed the very first surface rocks to form, but on Mars the oldest rocks are preserved, so there is an unbroken record stretching back more than four billion years. As well as telling us about the history of the planets formation, those primeval rocks could also contain clues as to whether life ever began on the red planet.

Yet what makes Perseverance unique is that it is also the first part of an ambitious 10-year plan between Nasa and the European Space Agency (Esa) to bring Martian rocks to Earth in around 2031.

Scientists really want rocks from Mars back on Earth, says Gupta. Samples can be analysed much more thoroughly on Earth than using even the most sophisticated Mars rover. And because laboratory techniques improve constantly, they can continue to be inspected year after year for new discoveries.

The value of sample return was demonstrated in the 1970s when the analysis of moon rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts changed our understanding of the solar systems history and formation.

To replicate this success for Mars, Perseverance is equipped with more than 30 canisters, into which interesting-looking rocks will be loaded and then cached on the surface. If all goes well, a European rover built at Airbus Defence and Space in Stevenage will arrive on Mars in 2028 to collect the canisters. It will load them into a Nasa spacecraft known as the Mars Ascent Vehicle, which will blast them to a rendezvous with the European supplied Earth Return Orbiter that will bring the samples to Earth.

Whereas the lunar samples of the 1970s were from a barren world, Mars could once have been a habitable planet. So key investigations will involve looking for evidence of past or possibly present life and that is a whole new ballgame.

If you discover signs of life on Mars, you want to know thats Martian life, right? You dont want to accidentally discover E coli bacteria that hung on to your spacecraft, says Casey Dreier, chief advocate and senior space policy adviser for the Planetary Society, a non-profit organisation for space advocacy based in Pasadena, California.

To keep the scientific results as pure as possible, spacecraft and equipment are cleaned with chemical solvents or by heating.

When building a mission to Mars, you have to apply these biological controls that go beyond what we typically use for satellites that we build for, say, Earth observation, says Gerhard Kminek, a planetary protection officer for Esa. Hes been working since 2004 to make sure such precautions become standard practice at Esa for anything going to Mars including the Rosalind Franklin rover that will launch in 2022 and which carries life-detection equipment.

From working on Rosalind Franklin, European aerospace companies Airbus and Thales Alenia Space now have biologically controlled cleanrooms in which to build almost completely sterile spacecraft. Were in a very good position, says Kminek, so much so that Nasa sent a delegation late last year to visit the facilities and learn from them.

Kminek is also spearheading studies into the kind of containment facility needed to hold Mars samples on Earth. Working with organisations such as Public Health England, the Porton Down laboratory and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Controls, Thales UK and the University of Leicester have already built a prototype double wall isolation chamber under an Esa contract.

Such precautions are known as planetary protection, which is split into two components. Forward contamination is the introduction of Earth life on to other worlds; backwards contamination is concerned with the possibility, however remote, of extraterrestrial life brought back to Earth escaping into the biosphere.

It was initially discussed in the 1950s in the run-up to the launch of the first satellite, the Soviet Unions Sputnik 1, and the Committee on Space Research (Cospar) issued its first planetary protection guidelines in 1959. Back then, scientists thought the solar system was much more habitable. You read Arthur C Clarke novels written in the 50s that talk about native Martians and people dont see that as being an absurdity, says Thomas Cheney, lecturer in space governance at the Open University.

That all changed in 1971, when Mariner 9 became the first spacecraft to enter orbit around Mars. The pictures it sent back were sobering. There was no vegetation and no visible signs of life. Indeed, there was not even an indication of past life. People were surprised at just how dead Mars actually turned out to look, says Cheney.

Closer investigation in more recent decades, however, has swung opinions back again. It is now thought that Mars could have been habitable and that microbes may still be clinging on in areas of the planet where liquid water is present. Planetary protection concerns mean that spacecraft cannot go to these areas. So, life-detection experiments cannot investigate the areas most likely to support life and therefore most concentrate on looking for the evidence of past life on Mars.

Beyond these purely pragmatic scientific issues, however, a larger debate is brewing that brings in an ethical dimension. Its something that is, I think, even more important in a sense, says Dreier. Its applying the lessons of horrendous mistakes that humans have made in terms of exploration in the past.

Perhaps the most widely known of these mistakes is the European colonisation of Hawaii in the 18th century. Various diseases devastated the indigenous population because of the bacteria and viruses that were introduced. While there is no real chance of animal life on Mars, Dreier thinks the same consideration should be extended to bacteria. If theres life there, we dont want to inadvertently introduce a competing form of life that could undermine or destroy that, he says.

In truth, this concern has always underpinned the planetary protection guidelines, but its re-emergence as a discussion point is because Nasa and its partners are on the brink of returning humans to the moon. They also have ambitions for sending astronauts to Mars sometime in the 2030s and wherever humans go, contamination is sure to follow. We are for want of a better word leaky, even when enclosed in space suits. There is no such thing as a perfect seal, so viruses and bacteria will be constantly escaping into extraterrestrial environments.

The way we currently try to minimise the impact is to say that all areas with the potential for water are off limits, even to biologically decontaminated rovers such as Perseverance. Yet this will not work for human exploration, because water is going to be an essential resource for astronauts to drink and to make oxygen and rocket fuel with. Such in-situ resource utilisation is hard written into everyones plans for exploration.

On the face of it, planetary protection rules out a human exploration programme and all the scientific exploration that could bring. It would have scuppered the historic moon landings if anyone had thought about it too much. The Apollo missions would have been entirely impossible if someone had tried to enforce planetary protection, says Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society, which advocates for human missions to Mars.

Those early astronauts left several hundred pounds of metabolic waste on the moon. This includes 96 bags of poo, urine, vomit and food waste. Apart from making the most historic feat of human exploration sound more like the aftermath of a student party, the point is that those waste products will have contained more than 1,000 microbial species usually found in the human gut.

Zubrin, whose book The Case for Mars is celebrating its 25th year in print, thinks that planetary protection is overcautious. He points to the subset of naturally occurring meteorites on Earth that have been shown to come from Mars and that this must have been happening since the formation of the solar system 4.6bn years ago.

One Martian meteorite in particular, ALH84001, aroused great interest in 1996 when a group of scientists claimed to have found microscopic fossils of Martian bacteria inside. Although that conclusion is still hotly contested, part of the analysis showed that the meteorite had never been subjected to temperatures above 40C. If there had been microbes in it, they could have survived the trip, says Zubrin, and billions of tons of such material have transferred from Mars to Earth in the last four billion years.

In other words, if nature does not respect planetary protection protocols, why should we?

Nasa recently commissioned a report on planetary protection. Published in October 2019, the Planetary Protection Independent Review Board recommended that different areas of a celestial body should be classified in different ways. Previously, the Cospar planetary protection rules applied to a celestial body as a whole. Now, specific areas can be protected while leaving others to be explored.

Its a stopgap at best because the water-rich areas necessary for the establishment of permanent bases remain off limits. To make progress, Cheney would like to see planetary protection become part of a wider discussion about space as an environment, so that we can decide what our priorities are for space exploration.

Its not just a place where you can do anything you want. What you do has consequences, he says. He points to space debris as something that could be rolled into a wider discussion of protecting the environment of space.

And theres no time to lose. The Cospar planetary protection guidelines are not part of international law, so while its recommendations are written into the fabric of Nasa, Esa and other major space agencies, there is nothing to stop the burgeoning private space sector sending anything they want into space. And as the flotilla of missions arriving at Mars demonstrates, the red planet is no longer as remote as it once seemed.

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Is there life on Mars? Not if we destroy it with poor space hygiene - The Guardian

Story by David Condos

But for Bahr, the cable running beneath his feet is off-limits. Its owned by a neighboring internet service provider and is merely passing through on its way to a nearby town.

Its just maddening, Bahr said. Were at the end of the line basically.

Bahrs story illustrates just how out-of-reach broadband remains for tens of millions of people in rural America. Nearly 9% of Kansas households roughly 130,000 still dont have access to high-speed internet.

Yet the promise of a future with broadband for all Kansans, no matter how remote, might rest in the wide-open skies over the Bahrs home and a plan to send Wi-Fi to a future Mars colony.

Beaming the internet down from satellites might leapfrog the logistical and financial barriers that leave so many rural homes and those just outside the city limits on the wrong side of the digital divide. But to do that, the next generation of satellite internet service will need to be better than the space-based stuff thats been around for a while.

Existing satellite internet is better than nothing, said Daniel Andresen, a computer science professor at Kansas State University, but thats about all you can say about it.

He said customers often have to deal with web pages that load slowly due to bottlenecked bandwidth and video calls that appear choppy because of high latency, or lag times. They sometimes lose service completely if there is rain or snow.

Left behind

Andresen said Kansans who live in towns even very small towns can generally skip satellite internet and connect their homes with fiber, cable or DSL.

But if somebody wants to live ... two miles outside of town, Andresen said, good luck getting any of the above.

The basic problem is that its not usually worth it to internet providers to string broadband lines out to places where people dont live close to each other. Each mile of fiber costs more than $27,000 to install. That might pay off in Wichita, which has 2,300 potential users per square mile, but not so much in Great Bends Barton County, with only 31 people per square mile.

Andresen says that leaves rural Kansans behind, especially as the pandemic moves so much of Americans personal and professional lives online.

It used to be that, Internet access is kind of nice, but you go into town once a week and use the librarys and its fine, Andresen said. Now, its vital.

New 5G cellular technology might improve wireless internet speeds for some rural homes, but Andresen said its only likely to help someone who already has good 4G coverage. The high-frequency wavelengths that enable 5Gs fast speeds dont travel as far as 4G waves. And a tree or hill in the wrong place could block the signal.

5G could turn kind-of-haves into haves, but wont turn have-nots into haves, Andresen said. You end up with a situation where good connectivity tends to be pretty much no matter how much money youre willing to fling at it unavailable.

But the richest man on the planet, Elon Musk, has a plan to send humans to Mars. And almost accidentally, that plan might just open the door to getting a better YouTube feed to the ranches and farms of Kansas.

To the stars

For Elon Musks aerospace endeavor, SpaceX, the Starlink project is part fundraiser, part test run. The company needs money from internet customers to fund its ambitions in the heavens, like space tourism and colonizing the red planet. SpaceX also wants to deliver high-speed internet to those future Martians who, like the people of rural Kansas, will be spread across a sparsely populated landscape.

Unlike traditional satellites that sit roughly 22,000 miles out into space, Starlink satellites beam data from a mere 340 miles above the Earth. Theoretically, these low-Earth orbit satellites could provide even better speeds than wired internet because light travels 50% faster through the vacuum of space than it does through the glass of fiber-optic cables.

So far, SpaceX has launched about 1,000 satellites floating above a thin strip of the U.S.-Canadian border. Kansans should be able to try Starlink for themselves later this year when SpaceX activates another belt of satellites over the Midwest.

But travel three states to the north of here, and that internet future already exists.

The speeds and the latency theyre advertising appear to be holding true, said North Dakota Chief Technology Officer Duane Schell. So, yeah, theres a lot of excitement about it.

Schell is talking with SpaceX about testing Starlink in state parks and wildlife management areas in North Dakota, where Starlink satellites already cover most of the state. But he also sees it as a way to shore up the future of the states rural economy, from telecommuting to high-tech farming.

Without that broadband, Schell said, youre simply not going to be able to compete.

The space rush

Starlink isnt alone on the mission to bring satellite broadband to remote places like western Kansas. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos hired a former SpaceX executive to lead his companys satellite internet venture, Project Kuiper. HughesNet, already a major satellite internet provider in rural America, partnered with OneWeb to power a network of 650 satellites by the end of this year.

Derek Smashey, a financial analyst with Scout Investments in Kansas City, said satellite internet could eventually serve 15-20% of the population. So, Starlinks $99 monthly fees could cover the projects estimated $10 billion price tag.

It looks to us like that could be a $20 billion-plus dollar market just in the United States alone, Smashey said. I wouldnt want to bet against people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

Eventually, SpaceX plans to build a constellation of Starlink satellites that deliver broadband not only to rural America, but also to arctic research stations, tanker ships at sea and other remote locations around the globe. The company has federal approval to launch 12,000 satellites and has already filed paperwork for 30,000 more 10 times the number in the sky now.

But that worries some people who like the sky the way it is.

It will be everywhere

The thought of having to see the stars through a grid of crawling satellites, thats pretty horrifying to me, said Samantha Lawler, an astronomy professor at the University of Regina in Canada. This isnt like light pollution from a city where you can go camping in the mountains and see the stars perfectly. ... It will be everywhere.

Lawler lives on a farm in rural Saskatchewan, where shes teaching classes via video using a home hotspot similar to what Joey Bahr uses in Kansas. But shes afraid that advancing our connection to the internet could come at the expense of losing our connection to the stars.

Humans have looked up at the stars since the dawn of humanity, Lawler said. Thats just such a huge part of being human that we are very much in danger of losing.

In Barton County, Joey Bahr said living in a place where his three sons can gaze up at the night sky was one of the reasons he and his wife, Anita, moved out here seven years ago. But living here means they have to connect to the internet through a cell tower a few miles away and try to stay under their data cap of 15 gigabytes per month. It would take about six of those gigabytes to stream a single two-hour HD movie.

If they go over that limit, he said their internet speeds can slow down to 600 kilobytes per second roughly 2% of the minimum speed in the federal definition of broadband.

The family reached a breaking point when their son tested positive for COVID-19 in the fall. Bahr and his wife suddenly needed to work from home, and their son used an iPad from school to keep up with his lessons. They decided to spend $200 on a second mobile hotspot just to get through the four-week quarantine.

Its a beautiful place. I love it, Bahr said of their property. Unfortunately, we are in kind of an internet no-mans-land right now.

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David Condos covers western Kansas for High Plains Public Radio and the Kansas News Service. You can follow him on Twitter@davidcondos. The Kansas News Service is a collaboration of Kansas Public Radio, KCUR, KMUW and High Plains Public Radio - focused on health, the social determinants of health and their connection to public policy. Kansas News Service stories and photos may be republished by news media at no cost with proper attribution and a link toksnewsservice.org.

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How Elon Musk and a Mission to Mars Might Boost Internet Speeds in Rural Kansas - kansaspublicradio.org

Elon Musk has a meme dealer and we must find out who it is.

Musk has been in news for all the right reasons lately. Be it his comments on Bitcoin and Dogecoin, revelations about his kids' education, or his plans for colonizing Mars, the Tesla CEO's recent appearance on an audio-only chat show on the new social media app Clubhouse has led to a flurry of interest in the American millionaire and pop culture icon.

But one of the things that stood out in the now-viral QnA session was Musk's take on memes and his confession to having a "meme dealer".

"I think memes are a complex form of communication," Musk said in the interview.

"A picture says 1000 words, and maybe a meme says 10,000 words, the SpaceX CEO said, adding, "Its a complex picture with a whole bunch of meaning in it".

Elon Musk Says His Kids Were Educated by YouTube and Reddit. Now He's Ready to Send Them to Mars

Clearly a fan of the complex "artform", Musk further substantiates his love for memes by stating they have symbolic value for our times. "Memes aspire to be funny, I dont know, I love memes. I think they can be very insightful. Throughout history, I think the symbolism has positively affected people.

Musk, who is both a creator and subject of viral memes, also said that he had a "meme dealer".

"I dont really follow memes. I make some of them. Some of them are sent to me. I have some pretty kickass meme dealers...I am the lucky recipient of very interesting memes," Musk said.

He added that his friend "Mike" was a good "meme dealer".

While Musk's confession cracked the hosts of the QnA up, ardent Musk followers will note that this is not the first time Musk has used the term but often tweets the same from his official handle. Exhibit A - this tweet from 2018.

Since the Tesla chief's appearance on Clubhouse, stocks of Bitcoin have surged since he made a comment in support of the cryptocurrency. And this isn't the first time.

Elon Musk Wiring a Monkey's Brain Has Everyone is Predicting Same 'Planet of Apes' Scenario

Musk sent Bitcoin stocks flying earlier toward the end of January with an update in his Twitter bio that simply read "#bitcoin". On his Monday appearance on Clubhouse that has the internet janta across the world hooked, Musk said that he fully supported Bitcoin.

"I'm late to the party but I'm a supporter of Bitcoin," Musk said. The millionaire, however, said that he did not vouch for all cryptocurrencies. "Dogecoin was made a joke on cryptocurrency. But fate loves irony. The moth ironic outcome of this would be if Dogecoin becomes the currency of Earth in future," the Tesla CEO said.

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Elon Musk Thinks Memes are 'Complex' Form of Communication. He Even Has a 'Dealer' for Regular Supply - News18

Mumbai, Music label Saregama on Tuesday said it has inked a music licensing deal with homegrown short-video app Josh by VerSe Innovation.

With this deal, users of Josh can now access old and new songs from the Saregama library with over 1.3 lakh songs to create innovative content.

Saregama said it will license its entire catalogue to Josh allowing users to create content inspired from its music library in diverse Indian languages like Hindi, Bhojpuri, Bengali, Tamil, Marathi, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Punjabi and Gujarati, amongst many others.

"Saregama has music to offer to all generations and age groups across languages. It's great to associate with Josh and see such innovative content getting created."

Saregama holds the catalogue spanning genres like film/non-film songs, devotional music, ghazals and indipop in more than 25 languages.

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"This partnership is a great reminder of that focus - one that makes sure there's a song for every user, creator and moment on Josh, today."

Over 77 million monthly active users on Josh can now create content to songs by legends like Lata Mangeshkar, Kishore Kumar, Mohammed Rafi, Asha Bhosle, Gulzar, Jagjit Singh, R.D Burman, Kalyanji Anandji, Geeta Dutt and Laxmikant Pyarelal making their experience on the platform even more engaging and fun.

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Josh app expands its musical library with 1.3 lakh songs from Saregama in 25 different languages - Business Insider India