There are thousands of news articles and government reports proving that SPACEX is a scam, spy-tech, dangerous, domestic data abuse, stock-market rigged, horrific company… so why would T-MOBILE partner with such a dirty business unless T-MOBILE is a dirty business too?
Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship rocket explodes during disastrous test
SPACEX HAS HAD THE MOST FAILURES AND ROCKET EXPLOSIONS OF ANY CONTRACTOR FOR NASA
SpaceX’s failed test saw the top of the rocket blown off, sending plumes of gas into the air.
It was tipped to begin test flights by the end of 2019, but SpaceX ’s Starship rocket has suffered a huge setback following a disastrous test.
The monster spacecraft partially exploded during a ground test in Boca Chica, Texas – and the whole thing was caught on camera by local space enthusiasts.
The failed test saw the top of the rocket blown off, sending plumes of gas into the air.
Speaking to The Verge , a spokesperson for SpaceX said: “The purpose of today’s test was to pressurize systems to the max, so the outcome was not completely unexpected.
Starship is SpaceX’s enormous spacecraft that’s designed to carry cargo and people into deep space in the future.
Back in September, Elon Musk , CEO of SpaceX claimed that test flights in low altitude could begin within the next couple of months, while Starship could reach orbit within six months.
However, the failed test casts doubt on these ambitious timelines.
While Musk hasn’t specifically commented on the failed test, in a reply to tweet about it, he confirmed that SpaceX is now focusing its efforts on a new prototype for the Starship, called MK-3.
He said: “[Mk-1] had some value as a manufacturing pathfinder, but flight design is quite different.”
Once deployed, Starship will be the world’s most powerful launch vehicle, according to SpaceX.
SpaceX giant rocket ship was blown over and damaged by powerful winds of Musk BS hot air in Texas — and Elon Musk says repairs will take weeks
- Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, has built a prototype of a stainless-steel rocket ship in southern Texas.
- People who live near the site reported on Wednesday morning that the vehicle, known as the “test hopper,” was blown over by powerful gusts of wind.
- Musk and SpaceX confirmed those reports, saying the damage would take weeks to repair.
- The test hopper is a squat version of a full-scale Starship, a spaceship that’s being designed to send people to Mars.
The top section of SpaceX’s shiny prototype of its giant Starship rocket fell over on Wednesday morning because of powerful winds.
“I just heard,” Elon Musk, the company’s founder, tweeted, confirming on-the-ground reports that the vehicle was no longer vertical.
He added: “50 mph winds broke the mooring blocks late last night & fairing was blown over. Will take a few weeks to repair.”
A SpaceX representative independently confirmed to Business Insider that the top portion of the vehicle — called the fairing or nosecone — had fallen over because of high winds. The representative declined to comment further.
SpaceX’s facility is at the southern tip of Texas. A local resident, who asked not to be named, said winds were gusting at about 50 mph for much of Tuesday and picked up early Wednesday.
“From about 2 to 5, it was nothing but rattling and metal and trees breaking. It felt like a hurricane,” the resident said. “Everything SpaceX did to get ready for this storm worked against them. It looked like they blocked the wind coming from the southeast, but the winds shifted in the night and came from the northeast — and that sucker went flying.”
Below is an image Musk shared in January of the fully integrated rocket. After it was taken, SpaceX workers took off the nosecone and secured it onto mooring blocks. (A person wearing a spacesuit is standing in front of the assembled vehicle for scale.)
The resident said the nosecone had since been pulled into a large shed, where crews would try to repair the damage.
“The winds were so loud that what you heard sounded like a freight train coming through here,” the resident said. “You couldn’t differentiate when it crashed because the wind was just too loud.”
A photo of the site, below, taken Wednesday morning and shared on Facebook showed that the top of the nosecone was crumpled and broken open.
Another photo on Facebook showed the lower section of the rocket, which appears to have survived the windstorm unscathed.
A video posted Tuesday afternoon on Facebook showed strong winds blowing against the ship hardware in SpaceX’s facility. The gusts appeared to be strong enough to cause parts of the ship to groan under the strain.
Why SpaceX built a stainless-steel prototype of a rocket ship
SpaceX has worked feverishly to build the prototype vehicle at its Texas facility since late last year. Musk and Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, call the ship the “test hopper.”
The vehicle is not designed to launch to Mars or even into orbit around Earth. Instead, the somewhat crude and windowless ship will rocket on “hops” that go no more than about 16,400 feet in the air, according to Federal Communications Commission documents.
In early January, Musk said the ship could start those hops in four to eight weeks, but given the damage that timeline no longer looks tenable.
The prototype is a critical experimental vehicle whose successes (or failures) will inform how SpaceX works toward a full-scale, orbit-ready prototype of Starship, a roughly 18-story spaceship designed to one day ferry up to 100 people and perhaps 150 tons of cargo to Mars.
Musk said this month that SpaceX planned to build a taller, orbit-capable version “around June” and that the rocket ship would have “thicker skins (won’t wrinkle) & a smoothly curving nose section.”
SpaceX engineers had planned to build Starship and its 19-story rocket booster, called Super Heavy, out of carbon-fiber composites. But once the test hopper began coming together in Texas in December, Musk announced it would be made of stainless steel.
Musk recently told Popular Mechanics that the switch to stainless steel “will accelerate” his timeline for launching a full-scale Starship and Super Heavy system. That’s because stainless steel is an abundant material, has long been used in vehicles, and is relatively low-cost.
Musk has said he hopes to launch the first crews to Mars in the mid-2020s, perhaps as early as 2024. He has also already introduced the person who may be the rocket ship’s first crewed passenger: the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who plans to bring eight artists on a flight around the moon in 2023.
“I will do a full technical presentation of Starship after the test vehicle we’re building in Texas flies, so hopefully March/April,” Musk tweeted on December 22.
Wolf Richter: Oops, SpaceX to Lay Off 10% of its Employees after Funding Fiasco in November
By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive international work experience. Originally published at Wolf Street
What SpaceX is trying to do has “bankrupted other organizations,” it said.
SpaceX, the unicorn startup with a newly minted $30.5 billion “valuation” and dreams of sending humans to Mars shortly, will lay off about 10% of its employees, “a person familiar with the matter” told the Los Angeles Times on Friday.
The company says on its website that it has “6,000+” employees. TechCrunch reported that SpaceX “employed at least 7,000 people in late 2017 when COO Gwynne Shotwell last gave a number.” So somewhere between 600 and 700 employees will be out of a job. The Times reached out to SpaceX for comment, and this is how the company responded in perfect corporate-hype speak (bold added):
“To continue delivering for our customers and to succeed in developing interplanetary spacecraft and a global space-based Internet, SpaceX must become a leaner company. Either of these developments, even when attempted separately, have bankrupted other organizations. This means we must part ways with some talented and hardworking members of our team.”
And note the phrase, “…have bankrupted other organizations.” So how serious is this getting?
This reflects perhaps the money-raising fiasco SpaceX smacked into in November. SpaceX had tried to raise $750 million by issuing a leveraged loan. The leveraged loan market was red hot until October, and anything would go. But this era ended. By November, investors were getting jittery about leveraged loans. And in December, the leveraged loan market came unglued.
SpaceX will need many billions of dollars over the next few years not only to launch commercial and government satellites, but also to fulfill its dreams, including sending cargo to Mars by 2022 and humans by 2024, or whatever.
It marketed that $750 million leveraged loan only to a select group of investors, and they had no appetite for a risky loan of this magnitude. And here’s why, according to the Wall Street Journal at the time:
Some investors who were offered the loan expressed misgivings about the company’s record of burning through cash and its experience with high-profile accidents, which have previously led to dips in revenue. Other concerns include the company’s large investment plans and its connection to Mr. Musk, the founder and chief executive of SpaceX, whose volatile behavior has led to turmoil at the electric-car maker Tesla Inc., where he also is chief executive.
With that fiasco under the belt, and needing more cash to burn through, SpaceX tried in December to make up the difference by selling $500 million in equity, “to help get its internet-service business off the ground, according to people familiar with the fundraising,” the Wall Street Journal reported at the time.
SpaceX has not yet announced if it actually received the equity funding. In total, including the downsized leveraged loan and the December equity funding, if or when it goes through, SpaceX will have raised $2.7 billion.
To those of its employees who are now getting laid off, the company is offering a minimum of eight weeks’ severance pay along with other benefits and assistance, such as career coaching, according to an email sent Friday to employees by COO Shotwell, cited by the Times.
SpaceX launched 21 satellites in 2018 and 18 the year before. It has contracts with NASA to deliver cargo to the International Space Station and develop a capsule to send humans up there. The first unmanned test flight of the capsule is schedule for next month (NASA used to do that sort of thing itself in the 1960s).
The loan debacle SpaceX ran into in November is the beginning of a broader symptom: The rising difficulties for cash-burning companies to obtain new funds to burn through, after an era when just about anything went.
This is another piece of the puzzle of those “financial conditions” in the markets that the Fed has been discussing for a while. It was trying for three years via its monetary policy to tighten the ultra loosey-goosey financial conditions that resulted from years of QE and zero-interest-rate policy. And suddenly, starting in October the financial conditions in the markets tightened as investors became a tad more aware of risks.
When companies have trouble funding their cash-burn operations as financial conditions tighten, the next step is to be more prudent with their expenses and to try to reduce their cash burn so that they can hang on under these tighter financial conditions. And perhaps that’s what we’re seeing at work here.
China Threatens To Destroy Elon Musk’s Starlink
Space exploration in the 21st century offers the possibility to reach new frontiers, from developing a lunar gateway for deep space travel, returning American astronauts to the surface of the Moon and eventually putting humans on Mars.
With NASA preparing to return crewed astronaut launches to the U.S. for the first time since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011, and return astronauts to deep space for the first time since the end of the Apollo program in 1972, we are on the cusp of an exciting new era in human spaceflight and exploration.
As we prepare to launch new crewed spacecraft over the next several years, we need to honor the lessons learned from the tragedies of Apollo I, Challenger and Columbia. To successfully reach these next milestones in exploration, it is critical that core safety priorities continue to protect American astronauts and avoid unnecessary risks beyond those inherent to all launches and spaceflight.
I spent much of my career developing and supporting the Apollo program that landed NASA astronauts on the Moon. The experiences our engineers learned on the first Apollo launches shaped the steps in place today to ensure the safety of the entire team and success of the program.
Apollo 1 would have been the first manned flight, with astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chafee onboard. That 1967 mission was supposed to be simple — fly the vehicle, fire the Module Engine and return to Earth.
During the second attempt to run the “plugs out test” with 100 percent oxygen in the command module, we held the crew in their position for several hours, trying to improve static filled communications. I was monitoring the test sitting beside the command module when a crew member reported a fire in the vehicle. I took two steps toward the white room when I heard the crew members’ alarm before the space craft erupted. The fire was quickly contained, but not before losing three incredible astronauts.
I was the first launch crew member to enter the spacecraft after removing the crew to try and determine if there was an obvious cause for the fire. After months of investigations by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), one specific cause could not be identified.
Thankfully, we learned from the disaster that day in January. Over the years and subsequent missions, our procedures changed, methods got better and we improved the process to put man in space. NASA human spaceflight programs carefully incorporated these lessons throughout their safety requirements and the talented men and women throughout the agency work hard to make spaceflight as safe as possible for astronauts.
It’s concerning to learn that some of the newer private space ventures launching today don’t appreciate the same safety standards we learned to emphasize on Apollo. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, for example, announced he intends to save time and money by fueling their Falcon 9 rockets after the astronauts board.
This “load and go” process allows SpaceX to inject more fuel without the cost or expertise necessary to build a larger rocket, but it may come at a heavy price. Mr. Musk already lost one unmanned rocket to this risky technique.
I suppose for Mr. Musk, inexperience is replacing the abundant safety protocols drilled into us after witnessing the Apollo 1 disaster. Astronaut safety is NASA’s number one priority on any space mission. There is no reason it should not be for private space travel, but commercial space companies like SpaceX play by different rules.
Most Americans would be surprised to learn that special interests in Washington representing commercial space companies have forbidden the Department of Transportation, which licenses commercial launch and reentry, from developing any human spaceflight safety standards for passengers.
This shortsighted legislative restriction means that billionaires profit and can’t be held accountable for injury or death of their passengers — even though we have decades of lessons learned from NASA to prevent potential incidents.
We owe it to future astronauts to remain diligent with our innovations and not blindly rush while possibly revisiting the mistakes we made decades ago.
Congress and the administration should overturn these shortsighted restrictions on commercial spaceflight safety standards, and NASA must ensure that before they put an astronaut on a commercial spacecraft that it lives up to the strict standards we have learned over the last 60 years of spaceflight.
Richard Hagar worked on every Apollo mission for NASA at the Kennedy Space Center as a spacecraft operator on the launch team, including for the Apollo 11 mission that went to the Moon. He lives in Tennessee.
Emily or Alex is available to consult with T-Mobile about bribing Congress:
Introducing Our New Executive Director! – Progress Arizona
. Alex is a talented communications and digital strategist who comes to the … Emily Kirkland, our outgoing executive director, has been with …
On 8/13/22 10:17 AM, Investigation Team wrote:Hedge Funds and private Equity funds that covertly fund T-Mobile and T-Mobile partners are buying up Congress people right and left. The line from T-Mobile to public policy decisions is hard to see, like a spider web, but modern AI technology can track it all down nonetheless.The donations, which make Sinema one of the industry’s top beneficiaries in Congress, serve a reminder of the way that high-power lobbying campaigns can have dramatic implications for the way legislation is crafted, particularly in the evenly divided Senate where there are no Democratic votes to spare. They also highlight a degree of political risk for Sinema, whose unapologetic defense of the industry’s favorable tax treatment is viewed by many in her party as indefensible.
“From their vantage point, it’s a million dollars very well spent,” said Dean Baker, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal-leaning think tank. “It’s pretty rare you see this direct of a return on your investment. So I guess I would congratulate them.”
Sinema’s office declined to make her available for an interview. Hannah Hurley, a Sinema spokesperson, acknowledged the senator shares some of the industry’s views on taxation, but rebuffed any suggestion that the donations influenced her thinking.
“Senator Sinema makes every decision based on one criteria: what’s best for Arizona,” Hurley said in a statement. “She has been clear and consistent for over a year that she will only support tax reforms and revenue options that support Arizona’s economic growth and competitiveness.”
The American Investment Council, a trade group that lobbies on behalf of private equity, also defended their push to defeat the tax provisions.
“Our team worked to ensure that members of Congress from both sides of the aisle understand how private equity directly employs workers and supports small businesses throughout their communities,” Drew Maloney, the organization’s CEO and president, said in a statement.
Sinema’s defense of the tax provisions offer a jarring contrast to her background as a Green Party activist and self-styled “Prada socialist” who once likened accepting campaign cash to “bribery” and later called for “big corporations & the rich to pay their fair share” shortly before launching her first campaign for Congress in 2012.
She’s been far more magnanimous since, praising private equity in 2016 from the House floor for providing “billions of dollars each year to Main Street businesses” and later interning at a private equity mogul’s boutique winery in northern California during the 2020 congressional recess.
The soaring contributions from the industry to Sinema trace back to last summer. That’s when she first made clear that she wouldn’t support a carried interest tax increase, as well as other corporate and business tax hikes, included in an earlier iteration of Biden’s agenda.
During a two-week period in September alone, Sinema collected $47,100 in contributions from 16 high-ranking officials from the private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, records show. Employees and executives of KKR, another private equity behemoth, contributed $44,100 to Sinema during a two-month span in late 2021.
In some cases, the families of private equity managers joined in. David Belluck, a partner at the firm Riverside Partners, gave a $5,800 max-out contribution to Sinema one day in late June. So did three of his college-age kids, with the family collectively donating $23,200, records show.
“I generally support centrist Democrats and her seat is important to keep a Democratic Senate majority,” Belluck said, adding that his family has known Sinema since her election to Congress. “She and I have never discussed private equity taxation.”
The donations from the industry coincide with a $26 million lobbying effort spearheaded by the investment firm Blackstone that culminated on the Senate floor last weekend.
By the time the bill was up for debate during a marathon series of votes, Sinema had already forced Democrats to abandon their carried interest tax increase.
“Senator Sinema said she would not vote for the bill .. unless we took it out,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters last week. “We had no choice.”
But after private equity lobbyists discovered a provision in the bill that would have subjected many of them to a separate 15% corporate minimum tax, they urgently pressed Sinema and other centrist Democrats for changes, according to emails as well as four people with direct knowledge of the matter who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
“Given the breaking nature of this development we need as many offices as possible weighing in with concerns to Leader Schumer’s office,” Blackstone lobbyist Ryan McConaghy wrote in a Saturday afternoon email obtained by the AP, which included proposed language for modifying the bill. “Would you and your boss be willing to raise the alarm on this and express concerns with Schumer and team?”
McConaghy did not respond to a request for comment.
Sinema worked with Republicans on an amendment that stripped the corporate tax increase provisions from the bill, which a handful of vulnerable Democrats also voted for.
“Since she has been in Congress, Kyrsten has consistently supported pro-growth policies that encourage job creation across Arizona. Her tax policy positions and focus on growing Arizona’s economy and competitiveness are longstanding and well known,” Hurley, the Sinema spokesperson, said.
But many in her party disagree. They say the favorable treatment does little to boost the overall economy and argue there’s little compelling evidence to suggest the tax benefits are enjoyed beyond some of the wealthiest investors.
Some of Sinema’s donors make their case.
Blackstone, a significant source of campaign contributions, owns large tracts of real estate in Sinema’s home state, Arizona. The firm was condemned by United Nations experts in 2019 who said Blackstone’s financial model was responsible for a “financialization of housing” that has driven up rents and home costs, “pushing low-income, and increasingly middle-income people from their homes.”
Blackstone employees executives and their family members have given Sinema $44,000 since 2018, records show.
In a statement, Blackstone called the allegations by the U.N. experts “false and misleading” and said all employee contributions are “strictly personal.” The firm added that it was “incredibly proud of its investments in housing.”
Another major financial services donor is Centerbridge Partners, a New York-based firm that buys up the debt of distressed governments and companies and often uses hardball tactics to extract value. Since 2017, Sinema has collected at least $29,000 from donors associated with the firm, including co-founder Mark Gallogly and his wife, Elizabeth Strickler, records show.
In 2012, Centerbridge Partners purchased Arizona-based restaurant chain P.F. Chang’s for roughly $1 billion. After loading the struggling company up with $675 million of debt, they sold it to another private equity group in 2019, according to Bloomberg News. The company received a $10 million coronavirus aid loan to cover payroll, but shed jobs and closed locations as it struggled with the pandemic.
Centerbridge Partners was also part of a consortium of hedge funds that helped usher in an era of austerity in Puerto Rico after buying up billions of dollars of the island government’s $72 billion debt — and filing legal proceedings to collect. A subsidiary of Centerbridge Partners was among a group of creditors who repeatedly sued one of the U.S. territory’s pension funds. In one 2016 lawsuit, the group of creditors asked a judge to divert money from a Puerto Rican pension fund in order to collect.
A Centerbridge representative could not immediately provide comment Friday.
Liberal activists in Arizona say they plan to make Sinema’s reliance on donations from wealthy investors a campaign issue when she is up for reelection in 2024.
“There are many takes on how to win, but there is no universe in which it is politically smart to fight for favorable tax treatment of the wealthiest people in the country,” said Emily Kirkland, a political consultant who works for progressive candidates. “It’s absolutely going to be a potent issue.”
We call that felony bribery and a total violation of the American STOCK ACT!
Please be aware of a Service called: Project Veritas and the following device, which were/are in use INSIDE of POLSINELLI and those users are offering to sell those videos to the media. Not our monkey’s..not our circus …but 100% legal for 60 Minutes or New York Times to buy those videos.. and 100% legal for T-Mobile Plaintiffs to use those videos in their cases if they acquire them from the New York Times..
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On 8/13/22 9:50 AM, Investigation Team wrote:TTMP is a news reporting and broadcasting service. As such, they are protected by laws including: Public Domain. Non-Commercial. Fair Use. Freedom of The Press. No Tracking Of Public Allowed. First Amendment Protections, SLAPP, UN Protected. GDPR Compliancy as we are based in the EU. Section 203 protected. The Privacy Tools At: http://privacytools.io, ACLU, and report directly to ICIJ.org and Margrethe-Vestager-contact@ec.europa.eu
One Mr. Rubin, from Google, who helped put together the T-Mobile Android arrangement has an interesting situation. Wait till everyone sees how many other T-Mobile lawyers and executives are in the same boat:
Android Creator Andy Rubin Is Accused of Running a ‘Sex Ring’
… The Android creator Andy Rubin has been accused of running a “sex ring” with at least one woman and of cheating his ex-wife out of millions of …
This Former Google Executive Was Accused Of Running A “Sex Ring”
… A newly unsealed complaint shows how Google paid Android creator Andy Rubin $90 million in severance after he left the company amid …
The truth about Andy Rubin and Google’s existential crisis – British GQ
… The Rubin scandal has also drawn attention to the company’s long-standing opposition to new US sex trafficking laws – which it believes could …
Google Board Sued for Andy Rubin Sexual Harassment Coverup
… “While at Google, Rubin is also alleged to have engaged in human sex trafficking—paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to women to be, in …
Android Founder Andy Rubin Accused of Running ‘Sex Ring’
… Andy Rubin, the Android founder and former Google executive has been accused of running a “sex ring” by his ex-wife, according to court …
Andy Rubin, former Google executive, sexual misconduct allegations
… Andy Rubin is one of 262 celebrities and powerful people accused of sexual misconduct since 2017. See the full list:
How Google Protected Andy Rubin, the ‘Father of Android’
… What Google did not make public was that an employee had accused Mr. Rubin of sexual misconduct. The woman, with whom Mr. Rubin had been …
Android creator Andy Rubin allegedly concealed Google payments …
… Andy Rubin, a former Google executive and the inventor of the Android … Rubin is also alleged to have engaged in human sex trafficking …
Ex-Google Star Rubin Spars to Keep Divorce Fallout Secret
… Andy Rubin, the Android creator at the center of a sex harassment scandal … Rubin is also alleged to have engaged in human sex trafficking …
Alphabet Board Sued Over Claims It Covered Up Senior Execs …
… Alphabet’s Board Sued for Role in Allegedly Covering Up Sexual Misconduct by … How Google Protected Andy Rubin, the ‘Father of Android’.
I doubt very much if SpaceX could ever corner any market in space travel, its strategically too important to too many countries, so there will always be competitors from Russia, China, Europe, India and maybe other countries too in the next few years. Its possible of course that he could intend to corner the US government market, but even that would be difficult given the power of the existing industry.
Just consider the basic numbers. It costs about $10,000/lb to put things into Earth orbit. Mars is between 100 and 1000 times as far away as the Moon (depending on planetary alignment), so putting a gigantic payload on Mars is going to require a substantial craft with many tons of fuel that will itself need to be boosted into Earth orbit at a cost of $10,000/lb. Because of the way the planets rotate, there is only a favorable time to transit between Earth and Mars every 2 years, so the minimum length of a Mars mission is 2 years.
So. From Earth, we will need to orbit (a) a trans-planetary spacecraft, (b) fuel for that craft to power it both to and from Mars, (c ) a human crew, (d) 2 years of oxygen, food and water for that crew, and (e) sufficient structures and supplies for the crew to live for 2 years in a place that has absolutely no natural resources, not even air or water (recall in the US moon missions the astronauts were on-planet for a few days at most). Just from a cost perspective, this will take the combined GDP of many countries and need hundreds of launches from the surface of the Earth just to position things for the start of the trip.
There are also terrible technical issues with landing on Mars (which lacks enough atmosphere for a parachute to do much), and with assembling and fueling a gigantic interplanetary return-trip spacecraft in the surface of Mars. Mars has no infrastructure whatever, not even a tree to swing a rope over, so the idea of doing heavy vehicle assembly work on Mars, or any kind of assembly work, is facially absurd. The “industrial base” will consist of whatever humans can lift with their arms while wearing a spacesuit, breathing imported oxygen.
One can go on and on, but there is no need. The whole mission, even leaving aside the pointlessness of visiting a barren and utterly hostile world and the great likelihood of death for the participants, makes no sense whatsoever and is strictly a fantasy for people who haven’t spent 5 minutes thinking about it.
In other words, a perfect Musk proposal!
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct
First, Mars gravity well is ‘lighter’ than Earth’s. Returning from the Martian surface to orbit won’t be as hard as from here to Low Earth Orbit. (LEO, the base for all else in our vicinity.)
Second, Mars has lots of water! Water can be ‘cracked’ quite easily and cheaply to supply both oxygen, (your reactive part of a breathable atmosphere,) and hydrogen, (one half of the most basic fuel needed, and already technically feasible.)
Third, if you have to build political support by utilizing some of the Battlestar Mars methodology, the Moon also has water, though much more difficult to gain access to. Your basic fuel and atmosphere materials can be got there at much cheaper rates.
Fourth, all the radiation problems have work arounds. Cost is the biggest draw back. Radiation shielding adds weight and complexity to your spacecraft.
Fifth, on Mars, the ‘pioneers’ will have to spend much of their time in underground facilities anyway. A foot or more of good old Martian red dirt does wonders for stopping those pesky energetic particles.
Sixth, the return craft will not land on Mars. It will be left in orbit, say tethered to one of the two “moons” of Mars. In the second generation deep space craft, the engineering enters a different field. Light weight construction methods.
Seventh, humans need some frontier to aspire to, even if the individual doesn’t have a realistic chance of going there. The psychological value of aspiration, even though presently misused for socio-political ends, is positive.
Some of us have spent more than five minutes thinking about this and have come away with the conviction that it is necessary for the species continued health and well being.
elon musk (sept 2017)
See above for a Mars Direct link.
It is all technically feasible. What are needed are the necessary resources allocated. (Cost.)
Once a usable source of water is found, the rest falls into place.
There is no reason why the ‘pioneers’ won’t become literal pioneers and stay on Mars. (The Commentariat’s preferred outcome for Musk et. al.)
https://www.iflscience.com/space/mars-one-torn-shreds-mit-debate/
Anyway, the flip-side of that is that the Mars Trilogy has the first pioneers on a one way trip with certain death from rad exposure and a bunch of other fun side effects. They still went. The first fifty to a hundred years of humans on mars is life-dependent on regular cargo shipments from home (think 40ft containers dropped from space that cost megabucks to send from a disintegrating global economy drowning in climate failure and you’ll see some of the problems with that approach).
So https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy probably source material, remarkably prescient but that’s a bit chicken/egg I think.
Here we have a company that hasn’t been profitable doing the thing they were set up to to, and now they’re trying to justify that work by implementing space-based internet connectivity, which coincidentally requires another 10,000+ things to be launched into space. This would nearly triple the number of satellites in orbit (about 4900 as of Nov 2018), and add significantly to the space junk problem.
I’m all for continued space exploration, but at this point it seems like the company is simply flailing about trying to justify sucking money out of wealthy investors.
This retrenchment at Space-X is a sign that that entity has realized that it, suffering from the limitations imposed on it by the “private” sector, cannot be run as a Project, but must content itself with existing within the constraints of being a Business.
I lost track of why NASA had to give up these projects in the first place. Is it such revulsion for government that we can no longer feel proud of our flag unless it’s flown by private industry? Is it just one more avenue for funneling large amounts of cash into the hands of our most needy politicians to sustain their Dorian Grey pictures of what they really look like well locked up? Or is it to illustrate that in a meritocracy (ahem…), like ours, people that can hop in their own space ships really are worth 1000 times more than us beasts of burden?
The false equivalency inherent in the Neo-liberal myth of the “rugged individualist” is plain. All those ‘big business’ “successes” are built upon Government funded and run ‘pure science’ programs. The Internet itself, fecund source of fortunes large and small was the direct outgrowth of a network established among government and university departments to facilitate the communications of scientists. Who here remembers the Arpanet? All Bezos and his ilk did was to carry out a modern enclosure movement upon what had been a public trust. Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
In the proverbial “Just Society” criminals like the billionaire class would pay for their transgressions. We have the dishonour to be living in a corrupt and degenerate age. Thus, criminals are lauded. The rest of us, well…..
1) a banker (paypal/ebay)
2) A defense contractor (spaceX)
He uses these two entities to fund gifts of shitty cars to giant, insufferable assholes.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX Spy Satellites Watch You Everywhere On Earth! Can privacy survive?
In 2013, police in Grants Pass, Oregon, got a tip that a man named Curtis W. Croft had been illegally growing marijuana in his backyard. So they checked Google Earth. Indeed, the four-month-old satellite image showed neat rows of plants growing on Croft’s property. The cops raided his place and seized 94 plants.
HOW MUSK RUINED SPACEX WITH HIS LIES AND EGOMANIA
– SpaceX engineers call Musk a “liar’ in published reports
– NASA senior staff call Musk’s Mars Scheme: “PR Hype designed to cover up the fact that SpaceX makes it’s money from domestic spy satellites and pushing Google’s ideology and privacy tracking in space…”
– SpaceX is a spy contractor and nothing more. Those who believe otherwise are shills and “fools”, say experts
– SpaceX has blown up more spacecraft from shoddy engineering than any other space company in history
– SpaceX STARLINK system is just a Google/Silicon Valley scheme to push left-wing politics to the public and give Google another way to spy on users
– China, a solar storm or a COMCAST hunter/killer satellite can wipe out the entire Starlink network in 60 minutes
If This Is Your Inspiration From Space, You’re Doing It Wrong
Jenny List
So after a false start due to bad weather, the first crewed launch of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule with two astronauts on board has gone ahead. After playing catch-up with the ISS for around 27 hours they’re now safely aboard. At times it seems that space launches have become everyday occurrences, but they are still heroes who have risked their lives in the furtherment of mankind’s exploration of space. Their achievement, and that of all the scientists, engineers, and other staff who stand behind them, is immense.
I watched the drama unfold via the live video feed. Having heaved a huge sigh of relief once they were safely in orbit, the feed cut to the studio, and then moved on to interview the NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine. He was naturally elated at a successful launch, and enthused about the agency’s achievement. You can watch the full interview embedded below, but what caught my attention was his parting sentence:
I was slightly shocked and saddened to hear this from the NASA administrator, because to my mind the careers of Musk, Bezos, or Branson should not be the ones first brought to mind by a space launch. This isn’t a comment on those three in themselves; although they have many critics it is undeniable that they have each through their respective space companies brought much to the world of space flight. Instead it’s a comment on what a NASA administrator should be trying to inspire in kids.
Ask yourself how many billionaire masters-of-the-universe it takes for a successful space race compared to the number of scientists, engineers, mathematicians, technicians, physicists, et al. From the anecdote of the NASA administrator it takes about three, but if he is to make good on his goal of returning to the Moon in 2024 and then eventually taking humanity to Mars it will take a generation packed full of those other roles. To understand that we’ll have to take a trip back to the Apollo era, and how that generation of kids were inspired by the spacecraft on their screens.
Fifty years ago, we were very much on the brink of becoming a spacefaring planet. American astronauts were taking their first steps on the Moon, and Soviet cosmonauts were occupying real space stations that would soon be capable of housing them for months at a time. Planetary probes were returning colour TV pictures from other worlds, and it was certain that in the immediate aftermath of the Apollo programme we’d be sending astronauts and probably cosmonauts too further afield. A Mars base in the 1980s perhaps, and following our fictional Star Trek heroes further afield thereafter.
We now know it didn’t quite work out that way, but a whole generation of tech-inclined kids grew up wanting nothing more than to be involved in space flight. The vast majority of us never made it, but with that inspiration we took our soldering irons and 8-bit home computers and ran with them. Those NASA folks were the coolest of role-models, and no doubt their Soviet equivalents were too for kids on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
With the best will in the world, the chances of any kid becoming the next Jeff Bezos is about as high as that of their becoming the next Neil Armstrong. Compared to the number of kids in the world, the number of billionaires and the number of astronauts both pale into statistical insignificance. But the chances of a kid becoming an engineer or a scientist is much higher, and in those careers their chances of having some of their work be involved with the space effort becomes not entirely unlikely.
I understand what the NASA administrator was trying to say, but can’t shake the feeling that if those are the people he rolls out to inspire kids watching a space launch, he’s missed an opportunity. Those are the names we all recognize, but shouldn’t we also elevate the people making the scientific breakthroughs so their names are equally recognized? Like Margaret Hamilton, Gene Kranz, and Sergei Korolev and many others before them, we should be making names like Tom Mueller and Margarita Marinova prominent examples of where a career in the sciences can take you. But to be honest, the real problem is we just don’t hear much about all the people doing this fascinating engineering and that’s a sad state of affairs.
Looks like it’s time for Hackaday to pursue a biography series based on the many great minds who are the ones delivering on the promise and vision of today’s (and tomorrow’s) space race. Get us started by talking about your favorite behind the scenes science folks in the comments below.
It is indeed unfortunate to be “inspired” and have as role-models, tycoons with highly questionable motives (primarily profit) on all their ventures so far. Thank you for bringing this up!
I would suggest Hackaday focus on a series of great minds like the ones you mentioned and additionally: Cayley, Goddard, Kemurdzhian, Keldysh, Severin, Xiji and many others.
Yes, we need everything into the hands of 4 billionaires. I can’t wait until I don’t have to care about voting and budget allocations anymore, the 4 billionaires will do it for me! 🙂
here is a perfect example of the insanity we face, the “billionaire” has never created anything least of all solutions to problems. the slap their name on other peoples work and make people pay more money they they should ever to get it.
“not inclined to believe that the primary drivers behind creating SpaceX, Blue Origin and perhaps some others were profit,”
Everyone knows government contracts have no profit. That’s why Boring, Lockheed and Raytheon are so broke.
Musk is a welfare queen.
Musk main goal is to feed his own ego and nothing else.
musk is a narcissistic sociopath who’s trying to get his name remembers and be doesn’t care how many lies he has to tell or people have to die to have that happen. and when his plan fail as there is no other option for them but to fail they are that stupid.
he will have damage space exploration for years to come
I don’t know you have all day?
someone stopping to help fix a flat tire, returning a lost toy, return someones dropped money and so on.
they’re not typically the kind you see in history books tho, history writers do so love to writer about mythological figures rather then the harder dirty truth of incremental change and group dynamics. its one of the greater flaws of the human mind, we’re not very good at understanding the complexity of reality but the mind is very good at personal understanding so it likes personalize complex concepts by choosing “avatars” (think wearing the same underwear for good luck or thinking a god made that glass of water fall on their laps) which is easier to understand but completely wrong.
Musk an trash like him are desperately try to make themselves seem important when they’re not. because they are just sad pathetic people and i just feel sorry for the people that fall for it,
you post more then boards on straw man argument Msat
any good musk does for the world will be purely incidental, the people he hurts to get his ego fueled nightmare already out number those it could ever help. this isn’t a binary issue its simply the fact his actions haven proven he’s toxic in the purest sense.
One has to wonder.
The people behind SpaceX’s rockets were already working for NASA on the very same problem, when Musk bought and hired them to sell NASA the same technology by the same people. The only “thing” here is that NASA was having a hard time securing funding, so they made this whole “commercial space flight” switcheroo to make it look like they’re doing something different.
Even the re-usable rockets are just a rehash of the old McDonnell Douglas DC-X concept that was funded by NASA, and the technology was transferred to NASA in 1996 in order to develop into the DC-XA.
Everything that Musk is doing is projects that NASA was doing, handed over on a platter to privatize the profits.
The Mars business is just a red herring. It’s an implausible goal set for the point that it’s really difficult, perfectly useless, and you can waste a lot of public money trying to.
Where is Musk’s personal fortune on the line? He hasn’t got a dime in it – NASA is paying nearly all of it. If SpaceX goes bankrupt, Musk will actually be on the receiving end of the line because he funds his companies by lending them the money, not investing.
Should he be forced to liquidate the company, the money would go to pay all the debtors, including himself.
It didn’t start with a boatload of cash from NASA, but neither were they doing anything interesting before they got into contact with NASA and got access to all the cool tech that they had sitting on the shelf.
They started in 2001 with a bunch of other venture capitalists, then in 2002 bought Tom Mueller who was working for TRW under a sub-contract for NASA to develop exactly the kind of low-cost engines that SpaceX needed. Tom took the TR-106 and turned it into the Merlin engine, and NASA started throwing billions of dollars worth of contracts to them, which enabled Musk to pull in billions of dollars worth of public loans plus investments from companies like Google.
You mean buying companies that made products that could sell, then selling the companies to get richer?
Elon didn’t make PayPal happen. He bought in just as it got going.
NASA has totally turned over it’s responsibility to the private sector. At a budget of over 25 billion, what does it say that a private company given just a few of that can bring back the space program and put us back in low earth orbit on our own ships. I’m 52 and saw what it NASA could do “back in the day”. Now NASA is just a money dump supporting a failed bureaucracy that killed the crews of two shuttle missions and still can’t see past its own politics. It seems odd that the one guy that actually pulled this off wasn’t on screen. Although we got to see a lot of politicians that could no more work out the math behind three sides of a triangle try and steal credit for something that started over 10 years ago.
This is fantastic. I was also shocked that NASA Administrator Bridenstine called out Elon Musk or Richard Branson as the inspirational examples. I think I understand the top-of-mind idea, that this was a triumph of *commercial* space development. And I was absolutely thrilled by this success. And I think the era of cost-plus space contracting is on its way out. And…
Yes, all of that. But the idea that we need to emulate the billionaires seems at least tone-deaf to me. Not the greatest hot-take interview. If that’s what it was. It was all very strange.
SpaceX and the SSP: Elon Musk and the Biggest Lies of the …
Elon Musk is a total fraud – New York Post
The cult of Tesla’s Elon Musk lives on – Vox
Nobody On Earth Can Launder And Hide Illicit Cash, Or Bribe Politicians, Like Elon Musk
In one of a series of wild tweets posted last week, Elon Musk stated he would be “selling almost all physical possessions” and that he would “own no house.” He appears to be actually following through with that promise, as chronicled in a great story in The Wall Street Journal about Musk’s personal finances that you should go read.
According to the WSJ, despite being worth an estimated $39 billion on paper:
Musk also doesn’t take a salary at Tesla, but he apparently became eligible for stock options worth more than $1 billion this week. To get that money, he will need an eye-watering $592 million to exercise the option, according to the WSJ. It’s not clear if Musk has the money on hand to exercise that option or if the money raised from the house sales will be used to help pay for the sum. “Mr. Musk said he wasn’t selling his possessions because he needs the money,” the WSJ reported.
The article also lists a few times Musk has said he’s cash poor. Here’s one example:
Here’s another:
The whole article has a lot of history about Musk, interesting information about his finances backed up by regulatory filings, and numerous quotes from Musk himself, and I sincerely recommend taking 10 minutes to read it in full.
Musk has Goldman Sachs, Welles Fargo and Wilson Sonsini Mobster-Class executive bankers hide his money in a rabbit warren of HUNDREDS of trusts, shell corporations and fake charities from South Dakota, to Switzerland to the Cayman Islands to Russia.
A federal investigation to show the tentacular diagram of scams has been demanded!
FBI, SEC, FTC and citizen forensic investigators are hot on his trail, though!
These are the illicit things that sociopath narcissist Musk has engaged in with the taxpayer cash he mooched from government treasuries:
Rising”.
The Malignant Narcissism And Cartel Climate Of SpaceX’s Elon Musk And His Billionaire Frat Boy Club
At almost every juncture, Elon Musk has made egotistical decisions that lead to more failures. His behavior is that of a person who has no care or concern for the health, safety and welfare of the American people. Nothing could epitomize that more perfectly than his grotesque suggestions that we should shoot nuclear bombs off on Mars or that nobody will care that his Starlink Satellites are designed to spy on the public. This would seem comical, and entirely unbelievable, if it had not actually happened.
In 2006 the many scientists told Elon Musk and his advisers of the high likelihood that a pandemic of lithium ion battery explosions would strike the nation and advised the incoming administration to take appropriate steps to reduce its impact. Obama officials hid the dangers because they owned stock in lithium and cobalt mines for those batteries, particularly in Afghanistan.
In November of 2007, the experts warned Obama that the country was likely to be afflicted with a devastating pandemic of lithium ion originating from Asian and Russian oligarchs.
In January 2009, the Obama administration was told by its own experts, Bernard Tse and his team who knew Tesla bosses, Sandia and others that the lithium ion batteries in Tesla cars had degrading chemistry which become a global pandemic of auto danger. Again, Obama chose inaction.
Obama and Musk have deprived Democratic-led regions of the country from receiving needed safety reviews of Tesla cars.
Over the year’s since 2006, Americans working with the DOE, NHTSA, SEC and other groups accelerated warnings to Obama officials. These engineers and other science professionals were intentionally ignored in order to protect politicians stock market profits.
In these, and any other examples, Musk and his inner circle of White House and Senate insiders ignored or purged experts and other truth-tellers, and lied about, misrepresented, deflected or denied the dire threat to the American people posed by the lithium ion battery scam.
Considered in total, Musk and his regime have shown themselves to be incompetent, callous, malevolent and deeply cruel in their response to the Tesla safety issue crisis (as well as to a plethora of other issues).
But to merely document the Musk regime’s deadly failures in response to the dangers of his companies is to ignore the most important question: What are Musk’s and his advisers’ underlying motivations?
This forensic question must be answered if we are ever to have a full accounting of the Musk Corruption, and see justice done for the voters, the dead tesla victims and those who will die in the future as well as the damage done to the broader American community.
The coordinated ‘main-stream’ media’s preferred storyline that suggests Musk is simply incompetent doesn’t add up because Muskhas made the wrong decision every single time in terms of how crises like this are supposed to be dealt with. (i.e. Be consistent, transparent, factual, and credible.) It’s increasingly not believable for the left-wing press to suggest that Musk has been distracted or inept during this crisis, in part because of the level of his uselessness has become so staggering.
Maybe Musk is vengeful. Maybe he wants to wreck the economy to create investment opportunities? He’s under the thumb of a foreign entity? He wants to cause panic and cancel the November elections? He’s a fatalist? Who knows. And honestly, the specific “why” isn’t what matters now. What matters is asking the difficult questions and pondering what the Musk oligarchy is truly about, no matter what lurks in the shadows…
Now the press needs to shift some of its focus and ask the truly alarming questions about Musk and his motives. Because we still don’t know why he essentially ordered his companies to embark on such sinister ventures involving slicing up brains; over-priced deadly cars for rich douche-bags; digging holes for billionaire hide-outs, launching domestic spy satellites and manipulating elections along with his boyfriend: Larry Page, etc…
Psychologist and psychotherapists have an answer: Elon Musk is a “malignant narcissist”. Musk’s mental pathologies inexorably compel him to hurt and defraud large numbers of people — including his own supporters.
Exports have looked at Musk’s borderline personality disorders. They explais that sadism and violence are central to Musk’s malignant narcissism and his decision-making about his self-promotion. They warn that Musk is abuser locked into a deeply dysfunctional relationship with the American people and that, like other sadists, Musk enjoys causing harm and suffering to any that do not recognize his “tech Jesus” self-proclaimed superiority.
Ultimately, all psychologists generally concludes that Musk is engaging in “democidal behavior” in partnership with Obama and Pelosi and cautions that the many dead and injured (so far) from the Tesla fires and crashes are not simply collateral damage from the Musk madness, but rather the logical outcome of Musk’s apparent mental pathologies and the poor decisions that flow from them.
Musk is both denying responsibility by saying things such as, “I take no responsibility. We’ve done everything right.” But at the same time, Musk is also sabotaging the efforts to stop the corruption in his empire. This is a very important aspect of Musk’s behavior. Musk is not just deflecting blame onto others, he is actively interfering with the politicianss’ ability to do their job by controlled Senators with bribes. Musk is not just incompetent. He is actively engaging in sabotage against competitors and reporters who speak the truth about him.You might wonder: How does someone with his type of mind reconcile claims like “I have total power” with “I take no responsibility”? He has said both things within a few days of each other. Well; That is a function of how the psychology of a malignant narcissist is structured. When Musk says things such as, “I have total power,” that’s the grandiosity. “I’m in total control” is a function of Musk’s paranoia, where everything bad is projected outward. Therefore, anything negative or bad is someone else’s fault. Bad things are ‘other people’ in Musk ’s mind. The grandiosity and “greatness” are all him. Musk’s mind runs on a formula which bends and twists facts, ideas and memories to suit his malignant narcissism. This is why Musk contradicts himself so easily. He lies and makes things up. His fantasies all serve his malignant narcissism and the world he has created in his own mind about his greatness.
Another component of Musk’s malignant narcissism is sadism. That part of Musk’s mind is more hidden. People such as Musk are malignant-narcissist sadists because they, at some deep level, are driven to cause harm to other people. Musk’s life is proof of this. His pedo father and trophy wife narcissist mother demonstrate his roots. He enjoys ripping people off and humiliating people. He does this manically and gleefully. He has lied thousands of times. He threatens people online and elsewhere. Most psychologists believe that Elon Musk is also a sexual sadist, who on some basic level enjoys and is aroused by watching people be afraid of him. In his mind, Musk is creating chaos and instability so that he can feel powerful.
Professor of psychiatry and psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg called that phenomenon “omnipotent destructiveness.” The bullying, the violence, the destruction, frightening people, humiliating people, getting revenge and the like — such behavior is what Elon Musk has done his whole life. It is who Elon Musk really is. Unfortunately, too many people are still in denial of that fact.
Musk has to create and control a field of negative corrupting energy around himself. For example, he pressures the scientific experts to bend the truth to his dreamworld during his press conferences. The scientists are basically Musk’s hostages. The American people are hostages as well to Elon Musk’s lies. We are being abused by him. We know that Musk is lying. We know that he’s doing nothing to help us. We feel helpless to do anything to stop him. It is causing collective mental despair. It is not that all Americans are suckers or dupes, it is that Musk is a master at such cruel and manipulative behavior.
Elon Musk is a master at getting negative attention, and the more people he can shock and upset, the better.
Malignant narcissists like Elon Musk view other human beings as kindling wood to be burned for their own personal enrichment, media enlargement and hype expansion.
Follow the facts to the obvious and true conclusion. If all the facts show that Elon Musk (and his little boy buddies Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, John Doerr, Reid Hoffman, Steve Westly, etc.) is a malignant narcissist with these powerful sadistic tendencies, this omnipotent destructiveness, where he’s getting pleasure and a sense of power from dominating people and degrading people and destroying people and plundering people and laying waste to people, both psychologically and physically, then to deny such obvious facts is willful ignorance. When Musk is finally exposed, like Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos or ENRON, it will be glorious.
Rather than making a prediction as to Musk’s specific actions when the emperor has no clothes, it is more helpful to describe the type of actions he will take. Rather than trying to say, “This is the move he’ll make.” Like in a relationship, Elon Musk is the abuser. He is the husband or father who is abusing his partner or children or other relatives. The American people are like a woman who is leaving her abuser. She tells her abuser, “That’s it! I am done with you!” She has her keys in hand and is opening the door of the house or apartment to finally leave. What happens? The democidal maniac Elon Musk will attack us, badly. Make no mistake. Elon Musk is going to find a way to attack and cause great harm to the American people if he believes that he will be fully exposed. He will use his spy satellites, his media controls, his remote controlled cars, his stock market manipulation tools, his Goldman Sachs economic destruction team and more. Musk will strike back… unless the FBI finally arrests him first.
The Bottom Line: These people are crooks, using your tax money to conduct crimes and protect themselves from arrest at your expense!
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In 2018, Brazilian police in the state of Amapá used real-time satellite imagery to detect a spot where trees had been ripped out of the ground. When they showed up, they discovered that the site was being used to illegally produce charcoal, and arrested eight people in connection with the scheme.
Chinese government officials have denied or downplayed the existence of Uighur reeducation camps in Xinjiang province, portraying them as “vocational schools.” But human rights activists have used satellite imagery to show that many of the “schools” are surrounded by watchtowers and razor wire.
Every year, commercially available satellite images are becoming sharper and taken more frequently. In 2008, there were 150 Earth observation satellites in orbit; by now there are 768. Satellite companies don’t offer 24-hour real-time surveillance, but if the hype is to be believed, they’re getting close. Privacy advocates warn that innovation in satellite imagery is outpacing the US government’s (to say nothing of the rest of the world’s) ability to regulate the technology. Unless we impose stricter limits now, they say, one day everyone from ad companies to suspicious spouses to terrorist organizations will have access to tools previously reserved for government spy agencies. Which would mean that at any given moment, anyone could be watching anyone else.
The images keep getting clearer
Commercial satellite imagery is currently in a sweet spot: powerful enough to see a car, but not enough to tell the make and model; collected frequently enough for a farmer to keep tabs on crops’ health, but not so often that people could track the comings and goings of a neighbor. This anonymity is deliberate. US federal regulations limit images taken by commercial satellites to a resolution of 25 centimeters, or about the length of a man’s shoe. (Military spy satellites can capture images far more granular, although just how much more is classified.)
Ever since 2014, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) relaxed the limit from 50 to 25 cm, that resolution has been fine enough to satisfy most customers. Investors can predict oil supply from the shadows cast inside oil storage tanks. Farmers can monitor flooding to protect their crops. Human rights organizations have tracked the flows of refugees from Myanmar and Syria.
But satellite imagery is improving in a way that investors and businesses will inevitably want to exploit. The imaging company Planet Labs currently maintains 140 satellites, enough to pass over every place on Earth once a day. Maxar, formerly DigitalGlobe, which launched the first commercial Earth observation satellite in 1997, is building a constellation that will be able to revisit spots 15 times a day. BlackSky Global promises to revisit most major cities up to 70 times a day. That might not be enough to track an individual’s every move, but it would show what times of day someone’s car is typically in the driveway, for instance.
Some companies are even offering live video from space. As early as 2014, a Silicon Valley startup called SkyBox (later renamed Terra Bella and purchased by Google and then Planet) began touting HD video clips up to 90 seconds long. And a company called EarthNow says it will offer “continuous real-time” monitoring “with a delay as short as about one second,” though some think it is overstating its abilities. Everyone is trying to get closer to a “living map,” says Charlie Loyd of Mapbox, which creates custom maps for companies like Snapchat and the Weather Channel. But it won’t arrive tomorrow, or the next day: “We’re an extremely long way from high-res, full-time video of the Earth.”
Some of the most radical developments in Earth observation involve not traditional photography but rather radar sensing and hyperspectral images, which capture electromagnetic wavelengths outside the visible spectrum. Clouds can hide the ground in visible light, but satellites can penetrate them using synthetic aperture radar, which emits a signal that bounces off the sensed object and back to the satellite. It can determine the height of an object down to a millimeter. NASA has used synthetic aperture radar since the 1970s, but the fact that the US approved it for commercial use only last year is testament to its power—and political sensitivity. (In 1978, military officials supposedly blocked the release of radar satellite images that revealed the location of American nuclear submarines.)
Meanwhile, farmers can use hyperspectral sensing to tell where a crop is in its growth cycle, and geologists can use it to detect the texture of rock that might be favorable to excavation. But it could also be used, whether by military agencies or terrorists, to identify underground bunkers or nuclear materials.
The resolution of commercially available imagery, too, is likely to improve further. NOAA’s 25-centimeter cap will come under pressure as competition from international satellite companies increases. And even if it doesn’t, there’s nothing to stop, say, a Chinese company from capturing and selling 10 cm images to American customers. “Other companies internationally are going to start providing higher-resolution imagery than we legally allow,” says Therese Jones, senior director of policy for the Satellite Industry Association. “Our companies would want to push the limit down as far as they possibly could.”
What will make the imagery even more powerful is the ability to process it in large quantities. Analytics companies like Orbital Insight and SpaceKnow feed visual data into algorithms designed to let anyone with an internet connection understand the pictures en masse. Investors use this analysis to, for example, estimate the true GDP of China’s Guangdong province on the basis of the light it emits at night. But burglars could also scan a city to determine which families are out of town most often and for how long.
Satellite and analytics companies say they’re careful to anonymize their data, scrubbing it of identifying characteristics. But even if satellites aren’t recognizing faces, those images combined with other data streams—GPS, security cameras, social-media posts—could pose a threat to privacy. “People’s movements, what kinds of shops do you go to, where do your kids go to school, what kind of religious institutions do you visit, what are your social patterns,” says Peter Martinez, of the Secure World Foundation. “All of these kinds of questions could in principle be interrogated, should someone be interested.”
Like all tools, satellite imagery is subject to misuse. Its apparent objectivity can lead to false conclusions, as when the George W. Bush administration used it to make the case that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling chemical weapons in Iraq. Attempts to protect privacy can also backfire: in 2018, a Russian mapping firm blurred out the sites of sensitive military operations in Turkey and Israel—inadvertently revealing their existence, and prompting web users to locate the sites on other open-source maps.
Capturing satellite imagery with good intentions can have unintended consequences too. In 2012, as conflict raged on the border between Sudan and South Sudan, the Harvard-based Satellite Sentinel Project released an image that showed a construction crew building a tank-capable road leading toward an area occupied by the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. The idea was to warn citizens about the approaching tanks so they could evacuate. But the SPLA saw the images too, and within 36 hours it attacked the road crew (which turned out to consist of Chinese civilians hired by the Sudanese government), killed some of them, and kidnapped the rest. As an activist, one’s instinct is often to release more information, says Nathaniel Raymond, a human rights expert who led the Sentinel project. But he’s learned that you have to take into account who else might be watching.
It’s expensive to watch you all the time
One thing that might save us from celestial scrutiny is the price. Some satellite entrepreneurs argue that there isn’t enough demand to pay for a constellation of satellites capable of round-the-clock monitoring at resolutions below 25 cm. “It becomes a question of economics,” says Walter Scott, founder of DigitalGlobe, now Maxar. While some companies are launching relatively cheap “nanosatellites” the size of toasters—the 120 Dove satellites launched by Planet, for example, are “orders of magnitude” cheaper than traditional satellites, according to a spokesperson—there’s a limit to how small they can get and still capture hyper-detailed images. “It is a fundamental fact of physics that aperture size determines the limit on the resolution you can get,” says Scott. “At a given altitude, you need a certain size telescope.” That is, in Maxar’s case, an aperture of about a meter across, mounted on a satellite the size of a small school bus. (While there are ways around this limit—interferometry, for example, uses multiple mirrors to simulate a much larger mirror—they’re complex and pricey.) Bigger satellites mean costlier launches, so companies would need a financial incentive to collect such granular data.
That said, there’s already demand for imagery with sub–25 cm resolution—and a supply of it. For example, some insurance underwriters need that level of detail to spot trees overhanging a roof, or to distinguish a skylight from a solar panel, and they can get it from airplanes and drones. But if the cost of satellite images came down far enough, insurance companies would presumably switch over.
Of course, drones can already collect better images than satellites ever will. But drones are limited in where they can go. In the US, the Federal Aviation Administration forbids flying commercial drones over groups of people, and you have to register a drone that weighs more than half a pound (227 grams) or so. There are no such restrictions in space. The Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967 by the US, the Soviet Union, and dozens of UN member states, gives all states free access to space, and subsequent agreements on remote sensing have enshrined the principle of “open skies.” During the Cold War this made sense, as it allowed superpowers to monitor other countries to verify that they were sticking to arms agreements. But the treaty didn’t anticipate that it would one day be possible for anyone to get detailed images of almost any location.
And then there are the tracking devices we carry around in our pockets, a.k.a. smartphones. But while the GPS data from cell phones is a legitimate privacy threat, you can at least decide to leave your phone at home. It’s harder to hide from a satellite camera. “There’s some element of ground truth—no pun intended—that satellites have that maybe your cell phone or digital record or what happens on Twitter [doesn’t],” says Abraham Thomas, chief data officer at the analytics company Quandl. “The data itself tends to be innately more accurate.”
The future of human freedom
American privacy laws are vague when it comes to satellites. Courts have generally allowed aerial surveillance, though in 2015 the New Mexico Supreme Court ruled that an “aerial search” by police without a warrant was unconstitutional. Cases often come down to whether an act of surveillance violates someone’s “reasonable expectation of privacy.” A picture taken on a public sidewalk: fair game. A photo shot by a drone through someone’s bedroom window: probably not. A satellite orbiting hundreds of miles up, capturing video of a car pulling into the driveway? Unclear.
That doesn’t mean the US government is powerless. It has no jurisdiction over Chinese or Russian satellites, but it can regulate how American customers use foreign imagery. If US companies are profiting from it in a way that violates the privacy of US citizens, the government could step in.
Raymond argues that protecting ourselves will mean rethinking privacy itself. Current privacy laws, he says, focus on threats to the rights of individuals. But those protections “are anachronistic in the face of AI, geospatial technologies, and mobile technologies, which not only use group data, they run on group data as gas in the tank,” Raymond says. Regulating these technologies will mean conceiving of privacy as applying not just to individuals, but to groups as well. “You can be entirely ethical about personally identifiable information and still kill people,” he says.
Until we can all agree on data privacy norms, Raymond says, it will be hard to create lasting rules around satellite imagery. “We’re all trying to figure this out,” he says. “It’s not like anything’s riding on it except the future of human freedom.”
Coletta has been tracking satellites with radio antennas[1] mounted on his house for years. This spring, he’s on a special mission: He wants to catch the transmissions of “SpaceBees,” four satellites that were launched into space without permission.
Last December, the Federal Communications Commission, the U.S. government agency that oversees satellite launches, explicitly told the California-based maker of these satellites that they couldn’t launch them. They did it anyway the following month, marking the first-known unauthorized launch of a commercial satellite in American history.
This sets a dangerous precedent. The satellites’ makers appeared to have good intentions: to bring internet connectivity to people who might benefit from it. Other satellite operators may not—and we may find out too late.
The frequency of the signals matches the frequency the SpaceBees were designed to use. But there’s no way to know whether the satellites are the source. For Coletta, that’s part of the fun. He likes the mysteries best. And what a mystery this one is.
The SpaceBee is a prototype satellite from Swarm Technologies, a start-up founded in 2016 and based in Los Altos, California. There is little publicly available information about Swarm. According to Mark Harris, the reporter at IEEE Spectrum who first broke the story[4] about the satellites’ unauthorized launch, the company is in stealth mode, the term for the period of relative secrecy of a budding start-up and a popular Silicon Valley strategy. Most of what is known about Swarm comes from a handful of websites and public records, including correspondence between the company and the FCC.
In 2016, Swarm applied[5] for a grant from the National Science Foundation. The company’s pitch was to develop a satellite-based communications network for internet-connected devices, particularly in places without access to wireless networks. “Scientific, shipping, tracking, automotive, agriculture, energy, medical, educational, and other commercial entities will have the ability to return their data from anywhere on the planet to support tracking, safe operations, and optimal and timely decision making,” the company explained. In December 2016, the NSF awarded Swarm more than $220,000 as part of a funding program for small businesses.
The FCC came back with bad news. In a letter in December 2017, the agency denied[7] Swarm’s request to launch and operate the satellites, citing safety concerns. According to the FCC, the SpaceBees were too small to be tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network, a military-operated system that catalogs all artificial objects orbiting Earth. If the government can’t track satellites, it can’t protect them from colliding into other satellites. “We cannot conclude that a grant of this application is in the public interest,” wrote Anthony Serafini, the FCC’s experimental licensing branch chief.
Swarm submitted an updated application[8] on January 7, 2018. Five days later, India launched a rocket carrying dozens of small satellites from various countries. The launch inventory[9] says four SpaceBees, made in the United States, were on board. Swarm, it appeared, had launched anyway.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Strategic Command’s Joint Functional Component Command for Space, which maintains the Space Surveillance Network, says the unit was able to spot the SpaceBees in orbit shortly after they launched. The satellites are too small to track, but not too small to be seen. And there’s no hiding from the military, says Scott Chapman, a satellite tracker who, like Coletta, has been following the SpaceBees with antennas on the roof of his home in Virginia. Aside from classified satellites, all objects launched into space get tracked and logged into databases that can be accessed online.
“Ground-based radar and the military—they know exactly what every nut, bolt, and screw floating around in orbit is. On your computer screen, you could probably follow the orbit of a screwdriver that some astronaut accidentally let go of when he was repairing something,” Chapman says. “Whether someone is authorized or not to put something in orbit, once it’s up there, it’s tracked.”
So, what should be done about these SpaceBees?
The FCC completed a “fact-finding inquiry” at the start of May, according to Neil Grace, an agency spokesman. The case is now with the agency’s enforcement bureau. Grace could not say whether a referral to the bureau means a penalty will be implemented. Because the unauthorized launch is a first, it’s not clear what the punishment would be. Spangelo, a former systems engineer at Google and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, did not respond to calls or emails. Neither did others employed by or associated with Swarm, according to the company’s website and public documents.
In the last few years, the rate of launches of miniature satellites has increased exponentially[12]. The industry is “moving away from these really large satellites that are expensive to build, expensive to launch, and into satellites that are highly specialized and often intended to last,” says Lisa Ruth Rand, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the environmental history of near-Earth space. “The smaller the satellite, the cheaper it is to launch, the better rate a company will get.”
But even small satellites can be a hazard. After 60 years of space exploration, low-Earth orbit has become a crowded place. It’s home to about 1,200 functioning satellites, 4,300 defunct ones, and 23,000 pieces of debris, according to the latest numbers[13] from the European Space Agency. Collisions can occur, producing even more bits of floating junk. In 2009, two satellites from different countries knocked into each other[14] and were destroyed. The collision sent hundreds of pieces of fast-moving hardware around the globe. “Even small objects, even things as small as these SpaceBees, traveling that quickly can really be destructive,” Rand says. If they hit something, “both India and the United States would be on the hook if one of these SpaceBees collides with a Russian satellite,” in accordance with international rules.
If Swarm had waited a little longer to launch, its size may not have been an issue, Rand says. Lockheed Martin is currently building a radar system that would allow the Space Surveillance Network to track smaller objects than is possible now. The program is expected[17] to be finished by the end of this year. “With a little patience, perhaps Swarm would have been able to safely move forward with their original small design in a responsible, approved, safe manner,” Rand says.
There’s no way to remove rogue satellites from orbit. Start-ups aiming to develop space-debris-clearing technology are only a few years old and still raising money[22]. According to information Swarm provided to the FCC, the SpaceBees have enough battery power to remain operational for up to 10 years. They will likely fall back down to Earth before that; the satellites are not equipped with propulsion systems, which means they don’t have engines to escape the pull of Earth’s gravity and maintain a stable orbit. Swarm’s application said the satellites will reenter the planet’s atmosphere and disintegrate in a little under eight years.
Coletta and Chapman have no plans to stop tracking the rogue satellites. They’re both a ways away from Georgia and California, where the ground stations that can talk to the SpaceBees are located. But they know where the SpaceBees are and when they’ll be passing over their heads. They can point their antennas in their direction and listen.
When I asked Grace, the FCC spokesman, about the brief signals Coletta has detected, he said he’d look into it. Swarm employees would know whether the pings came from the satellites, but they’re not talking.
These mysterious signals aside, the SpaceBees have been orbiting in silence since they launched. If the FCC decides to clear Swarm, they may turn on and start buzzing. If the agency penalizes Swarm, with fines or bans on future work, the satellites will be sentenced to a lifetime of quietly circling Earth. They will float along with the rest of the space junk until gravity beckons and drags them back down, to the place they were never supposed to leave.