SpaceX’s latest Starship prototype launched on Tuesday, soaring miles above its South Texas facilities in a successful flight demonstration before exploding during the landing attempt. It’s the second failed landing in a row, after a previous prototype, SN8, launched and failed to stick the landing in December.
This week’s launch demo — one of many in the books already — follows weeks of tension between SpaceX and the Federal Aviation Administration, which approves test launches like this one. During its high-altitude test launch with SN8 two months ago, the company violated its FAA launch license. This triggered an investigation that held up today’s SN9 flight and frustrated SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, The Verge reported last week.
In a statement Tuesday morning announcing SN9 was clear to fly, the FAA confirmed the previous violation: Before SN8 launched, the agency had denied a request from SpaceX to waive public safety limits associated with the flight, but SpaceX launched the thing anyway. It’s still unclear what safety limits SpaceX wanted to waive in connection with the launch. The FAA declined to specify and SpaceX has yet to respond for comment.
On Tuesday, with fresh FAA approval for a flight plan that “complies with all safety and related federal regulations,” the 16-story-tall rocket lifted off from SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas test facilities around 3:30PM ET under clear skies, reaching an altitude of 6.2 miles (10km) — a bit shorter than SN8’s target altitude of 7.7 miles. After that, SN9 shut down its three engines to begin a free-falling dance back to Earth, tilting on its side to test new aerodynamic flaps and attempt a “belly flop” maneuver. If all had gone well, the rocket would have landed vertically.
SN9 just before it’s untimely end.SpaceX
Instead, SN9 slammed into the ground at a roughly 45-degree angle, perishing in an explosive fireball just like SN8. “We had another great flight up to the 10km apogee… we’ve just gotta work on that landing a little bit,” said SpaceX engineer John Insprucker, who usually only narrates the company’s live video feeds for routine Falcon 9 launches.
The landing explosion sprayed debris on SN10, another Starship prototype that stood ready for SpaceX’s next test flight. The company wheeled SN10 out of its towering, rocket-shaped facilities last Friday night to make room for future prototype construction.
On the live stream, Insprucker reminded SpaceX’s audience that the SN9 flight, though it ended in a dramatic explosion, was a test, and a number of test objectives were met. It was the “second time we’ve flown Starship in this configuration, we’ve got a lot of good data, and the primary objective to demonstrate control of the vehicle in the subsonic re-entry looked to be very good. And we will take a lot out of that,” he said.
In February 2003, a 19-year-old named Joshua Cooke shot his parents to death in their Virginia home. Cooke told his lawyers that he believed he was living in the Matrix, a simulated universe outlined in the 1999 Keanu Reeves blockbuster of the same name. Cooke pleaded guilty, and the defense was never used. But years later, he still offers a chilling, painful account of the moment he realized that killing another human being felt nothing like an action movie.
This is arguably a spoiler for A Glitch in the Matrix, a new documentary about the simulation hypothesis — the idea that our reality is actually artificial. But it’s key to explaining why the movie never comes together. A Glitch in the Matrix is a quirky overview of a popular and intriguing philosophical conundrum: what if we’re living in a video game? It’s also a film about people who take that conundrum incredibly seriously. But it never reconciles those elements. It’s like watching a dinner party conversation about paranormal activity where one guest is sharing wrenching stories about the spirits of dead loved ones and the other is quoting lines from Ghostbusters.
A Glitch in the Matrix is directed by Rodney Ascher, known for acclaimed documentaries The Nightmare and Room 237. The film is framed by a 1977 lecture from science fiction author Philip K. Dick, who became convinced of the simulation hypothesis after an anesthetic-fueled religious experience. Its core is extended interviews with a few present-day believers who have had metaphysical epiphanies, appearing through Zoom calls where they’re obscured by sci-fi cartoon-character overlays. Gradually, they lay out their own reasons for believing in a virtual world where other people may or may not actually exist.
Like Room 237, which gave obsessive Shining fans space to present elaborate theories about its meaning, A Glitch in the Matrix offers a smorgasbord of justifications for a simulated universe. You’ll find sober probability estimates from philosopher Nick Bostrom, who popularized simulation theory in a 2001 essay, alongside speeches from well-known proponent Elon Musk and clickbait pseudoscience like the Mandela Effect, which posits that widely misremembered pop culture references are evidence of parallel realities.
A Glitch in the Matrix suffers from having woefully little reality, though. The Zoom interviews are understandable during the COVID-19 pandemic, but they’re frustratingly abstract, offering no sense of what it means to actually live your life convinced the world is fake. Instead, the film is mostly spliced together from low-budget animations and copious movie and video game clips. The most compelling details get only a passing mention — like a participant who mentions motivating himself to “level up” in life and try new things, reasoning that this will make him more interesting to an otherworldly observer.
Beyond any factual arguments, the simulation hypothesis seems to offer reassuring answers in a scary and irrational world. Why do celebrities senselessly drain their bank accounts or torch their reputations? Because they’re being controlled by a bored player character. Why would a suicidal man steal and crash an empty plane? Because he knew he could just log out. Why can’t you make friends? Because nobody around you is really human.
As the last question suggests, this path can lead to some very dark places. At least one participant acknowledges that his convictions might stem from social anxiety. A Glitch in the Matrix briefly references the nihilistic 4chan “NPC” meme, which (although the film never mentions it) far-right partisans adopted to paint political enemies as literal automatons. And then there’s Cooke — whose killings seem motivated more by straightforward mental health problems than sci-fi delusions, but who methodically details how The Matrix consumed his life.
A Glitch in the Matrix’s version of simulation theory is basically intelligent design for sociopaths. The film’s most interesting parts are about why people believe it, not whether it’s true. But it spends far too long on scattered and remarkably unconvincing arguments presented with a tone of wide-eyed, innocent fascination — a tone that, as figures like Cooke enter the picture, feels increasingly distracting and downright creepy. And if you do think other people are real, A Glitch in the Matrix probably won’t persuade you otherwise.
Tesla’s redesigned Model S and Model X will have a very unconventional and possibly controversial feature: automatic shifting between park, reverse, neutral, and drive (or PRND). There will be an option to change drive modes on the touchscreen, but CEO Elon Musk made the case for automatic switching on Twitter late Wednesday night.
“Car guesses drive direction based on what obstacles it sees, context & nav map,” Musk tweeted. “After you drive without using a PRND stalk/stick for a few days, it gets very annoying to go back & use a shifter! You can override on touchscreen.”
An internal Tesla document obtained by Electrekexpands, slightly, on what Musk means by “guesses”:
The vehicle uses its Autopilot sensors to intelligently and automatically determine intended drive modes and select them. For example, if the front of Model S/X is facing a garage wall, it will detect this and automatically shift to Reverse once the driver presses the brake pedal. This eliminates one more step for the drivers of the world’s most intelligent production cars.
That’s just one example, and we’ve asked Tesla for more, though the company reportedly no longer has a PR department and has not responded to questions The Verge sends to its general press line since September 2019.
The general idea behind the decision fits into the larger Silicon Valley ethos that Tesla subscribes to, though, of “eliminating friction.” The consequences of trying to automate PRND won’t be clear until people start taking deliveries of these new cars, which is supposed to happen in a matter of weeks.
Automakers have tinkered with the look and location of drive mode selectors for years, enabled by the rise of automatic transmissions and the ability to change modes via software (also known as “shift by wire”). Many companies have ditched the classic steering wheel stalk in favor of a knob on the dashboard or the center console or separate physical buttons.
Others have tried to mix hardware and software, but it has not gone well. Fiat Chrysler had to recall more than 1 million Jeeps, Dodges, and Chryslers because the interface — which involved a lever and a button that always returned to center position — caused enough confusion that some people were run over by their own vehicles. In fact, this “rollaway” problem is likely how actor Anton Yelchin died.
So-called “mode confusion” is a real concern even in simpler designs. In 2018, one of Fiat Chrysler’s own commercials showed actor Kathryn Hahn mistaking the Pacifica minivan’s rotary gear selector for a volume knob.
The removal of the PRND stalk that the Model S and Model X previously featured is part of a wider overhaul of the interior design of those vehicles, but it’s not the only one to conjure a debate about safety. Tesla has ditched its circular steering wheel in favor of one that’s U-shaped — a decision that Roadshow reports has already drawn the interest of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal safety regulator for motor vehicles.
When asked whether NHTSA is looking into Tesla’s decision to automate PRND, the agency answered with a fairly stock response: “Manufacturers must certify their vehicles [to] meet applicable Federal motor vehicle safety standards before putting them on the road,” and that it will require vehicles found noncompliant or that contain a safety defect to be recalled and may impose fines if a manufacturer does not recall vehicles in a timely manner.” The agency said it’s in “regular communication with manufacturers to discuss potential safety concerns” and that it reviews consumer complaints and company data to screen for safety risks.
While federal motor vehicle safety standard number 102 spells out the specific sequence of PRND, and number 114 covers some really basic rollaway issues, it does not appear that any others would necessarily preclude Tesla’s automation or the lack of a physical selector. That’s despite NHTSA saying this all the way back in 1999 in a response to BMW about using alternate gear selection methods like touchscreens, keypads, or voice controls:
We are concerned that, as new designs for automatic transmissions that do not use a shift lever come into the market, there is nothing in Standard No. 102 to prevent misshifting in those vehicles.
Robinhood has started restricting trading in cryptocurrencies this morning, just as the price of joke cryptocurrency Dogecoin has soared more than 300 percent in 24 hours. CNBCreports that Robinhood users started noticing instant deposits for cryptocurrencies were no longer working on Friday morning, and the company has confirmed it has put restrictions in place.
“Due to extraordinary market conditions, we’ve temporarily turned off Instant buying power for crypto,” says a Robinhood spokesperson in a statement to CNBC. “Customers can still use settled funds to buy crypto. We’ll keep monitoring market conditions and communicating with our customers.”
Dogecoin price on Friday morning.Image: Coindesk
Dogecoin came to life in 2013 off the back of a Twitter joke — a play on bitcoin and the doge meme. Its price started soaring yesterday, and Dogecoin currently stands at a more than $7 billion market cap thanks to a huge volume of transactions over the past 24 hours.
The market activity and restrictions over the past 24 hours have now made Dogecoin a popular meme among the r/WallStreetBets investors. Dogecoin has been consistently spammed in the WallStreetBets Discord server over the past couple of days.
Bitcoin is also on the move, up nearly 20 percent over the past 24 hours. Tesla CEO Elon Musk also changed his Twitter profile to include #bitcoin and tweeted “in retrospect, it was inevitable.”
Elon Musk’s Twitter profile now mentions bitcoin.
Robinhood’s latest crypto restrictions come less than a day after the company moved to restrict its users from buying or trading any of the popular Reddit r/WallStreetBets stocks, including GameStop ($GME), AMC ($AMC), BlackBerry ($BB), Bed Bath & Beyond ($BBBY), Nokia ($NOK), and more.
It’s a move that has been met with widespread criticism, and Google was forced to salvage Robinhood’s one-star rating on the Google Play Store by deleting nearly 100,000 negative reviews after unhappy users review-bombed the app. Robinhood says it will now allow “limited buys” of stocks like GameStop starting Friday.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says production for the company’s upcoming Roadster isn’t due to begin until “next year,” roughly two years after the car was initially set to enter production. Tesla announced its $200,000 Roadster back in 2017, when Musk said the car would start being built in 2020.
In a tweet, Musk suggested that work on the car’s “Tri-motor drive system & advanced battery work” were to blame for the delay. Musk says that Tesla hopes to finish engineering this year, and to have a “release candidate design drivable in late summer.”
Finishing engineering this year, production starts next year. Aiming to have release candidate design drivable late summer. Tri-motor drive system & advanced battery work were important precursors.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 28, 2021
The hope, however, is that whenever it does arrive, the Roadster will be a vehicle with formidable specs. When it was announced, Musk said that Roadster would be able to hit 620 miles on a single charge, and hinted at a top speed in excess of 250 mph. He also said that its triple-motor drive system (which includes one electric motor in the front and two at the rear) will allow the car to accelerate from 0 to 60 in just 1.9 seconds, and from 0 to 100 in 4.2.
A real-life trading floor is noisy. You can find traders shouting at each other, especially when the markets are volatile and stock is moving fast. That same environment has been replicated online this week, thanks to Discord.
Getting inside offers a surreal look at an emerging virtual trade floor where people are yelling at each other to invest into GameStop or AMC stocks. Dozens of people join the server every second, and one channel has a stream of memes that looks like pure chaos.
Welcome to the world of r/WallStreetBets.
The r/WallStreetBets Discord server.
Discord is usually the tool of choice for gamers to communicate with friends, Twitch streamers to grow a community, or just small groups of people to share similar interests. It’s a hugely popular app, with more than 100 million monthly active users. The Reddit community r/WallStreetBets has turned to Discord in recent weeks to organize and communicate in real time, as it seeks to force hedge funds into losing millions of dollars on their bets against struggling retail companies like GameStop and AMC.
Amateur traders are flocking to the Discord server to discuss stock movements, share memes, and participate in what feels like an online game. Every post is littered with emoji reactions that fly off the page within seconds, and the calls are full of people shouting “buy GameStop” or “hold GMC” as stock prices go up and down throughout the day.
At times it feels like it only takes one person to shout something on a call or spam a meme enough times for it to catch on and everyone to run with it. I witnessed hundreds of people hit Twitch yesterday to spam “save AMC” in a variety of live streams. Rapper Soulja Boy’s Twitch stream was swarmed with the messages, after calls to visit his stream. But the group failed to convince him to tweet about the struggling theater chain.
The Discord calls and many of the memes are often full of profanity or racial slurs, leading Discord to ban the r/WallStreetBets server last night. It quickly came back to life a few hours later, though, and has already amassed 200,000 members.
“Can we just get one minute of therapeutic silence,” asked someone on the main Discord call yesterday. A few seconds of silence passed before the ask was met with fart sounds, high-pitched music, and sound boards. The members often joke about the FBI or SEC listening in, which prompts many to spam the “FBI, open up!” audio meme.
After last night’s Discord server ban, r/WallStreetBets is rebuilding its Discord community, but a split has emerged. There are now two Discord servers, with an unofficial one at 88,000 members.
Misinformation is common throughout these Discord servers. In the official one, a discussion broke out about the potential for a US-led war to impact stock markets. “There is going to be a war, 100 percent,” claimed one Discord user. “I’m going to bring my gaming chair into the war,” joked another. Fake Elon Musk memes are also as popular as the man himself among this group. “The only thing I want in life is for Elon Musk to tell me I’m beautiful,” said one Discord user praising the Tesla CEO.
Among all the chaos and fake Elon Musk memes, there is some relative organization on the server with calmer heads providing tips to amateur traders. “Only put money in that you can afford to lose,” is a common piece of advice. New members often join and want to know what stock to invest in, but are quickly met with “we are not financial advisors” or “buy what you feel like buying” responses.
I’ve also witnessed what sound like day traders teaching people the basics of options, market retracements, and how to create charts with technical indicators and overlays. Robinhood has made buying and selling stocks as easy as posting a photo to Instagram, and those new to this experiment are eager to learn more.
Others, who have clearly been part of the r/WallStreetBets community for more than a few days, are also quick to advise new members not to try trial broker accounts with fake money for too long. “You need to get used to the emotional reality of a market open,” said one Discord member.
The advice is often interrupted by excitement as GameStop or AMC shares reach new highs. At one point this morning GameStop hit $420 a share in premarket trading, which was met by cheers and surprise on the Discord call.
I personally spend large parts of my day on Discord, but I’ve still never seen anything quite like the r/WallStreetBets server — even in groups with 300,000 members. Dozens of people join every second, and at times it has forced Discord to crash on my high-end gaming PC or take up lots of CPU resources. Even on my iPhone it kills my battery and makes my phone hot to touch.
The question now is how long this mass organized movement can continue on Discord, and the amount of time left in the grand GameStop stock price game. After a ban for “hateful and discriminatory content,” the official r/WallStreetBets Discord server seems less chaotic. But r/WallStreetBets describes itself as “like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal,” and a lot of the Reddit comments contain offensive language.
r/WallStreetBets feels like The Button, an online meta-game that first appeared on Reddit for April Fools’ Day in 2015. Redditors rushed to push a button on a 60-second timer that would reset every time it was clicked. It inspired devotion and obsession much like this GameStop stock rally, and even spawned religions and cults.
The Button ended more than two months after its introduction when the timer finally hit zero with no attempts to reset it. There’s no timer here on this Discord and Reddit trade floor experiment, and nobody really knows exactly how and when it’s going to end.
If you can’t find a PS5 or Xbox Series X, how about an $80,000 electric sports car with comparable performance? Tesla just announced its refreshed Model S today, and a new “Plaid” powertrain isn’t its only performance enhancement — the company claims the car can now compete with next-gen gaming consoles, thanks to a 10-teraflop gaming computer that will apparently come with every new model.
Assuming that refers to GPU performance and Tesla isn’t wildly exaggerating, that might indeed be competitive with a PS5 or Xbox Series X, which offer 10.28 teraflops and 12 teraflops of raw GPU power respectively. There’s more to performance than teraflops, though.
Now, you might ask: who’s going to put a game in your car that might actually take advantage of a gaming PC? For that, I must ask you to look closely at the images above and below. Behold: CD Projekt’s acclaimed sword-slinging adventure The Witcher 3, just as Musk foretold:
Want to play The Witcher game on your Tesla? (you can already watch the show on Tesla Netflix theater)
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 22, 2020
Here are a number of things we still do not know:
Is The Witcher 3 actually coming to Tesla, and when? (We’ve asked CD Projekt.)
Can you play it on the 17-inch, 2200 x 1300-pixel main display, or only on the 8-inch second row display? Or both?
Will you need a new controller? (Tesla says it has “wireless controller compatibility” but that’s all we know.)
Who’s making the GPU? (We’ve pinged Nvidia and AMD.)
Who is going to sit in their $80,000 sports car and play a 70+ hour game? (fingers crossed for cloud saves)
Why not Cyberpunk? (Okay, this one’s a joke.)
You can see the claims for yourself at Tesla’s Model S website, though they’re a little buried: you have to go to the shop, scroll down to “Interior” and click on “Feature Details.”
Tesla’s been bringing games to its cars for a while now: we tried out Tesla Arcade on a Model 3 back in 2019, and both the first level of Cuphead and a car karaoke mode came to the company’s in-car software later that year. Fallout Shelter was added to the cars last year.
Tesla has just announced the first major redesign of the Model S since it launched the electric sedan in 2012. This new version, which will launch later this year, has a refreshed exterior, a simplified interior, and the option for a more powerful powertrain that lets the car travel at least 520 miles and go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in under 2 seconds.
The new Model S has some light updates to the exterior of the car, but the biggest visual change is inside. Tesla has axed the portrait touchscreen in favor of one more like what’s found in the Model 3 and Model Y, though with much smaller bezels. There’s also a stalkless U-shaped steering wheel, much like what we’ve seen in the forthcoming second-generation Roadster, and a screen behind the center console for rear-seat passengers. Unlike the Model 3 and Model Y, the new Model S still features a screen behind the steering wheel.
The new Model S starts at $79,990 for a “Long Range” dual-motor version that gets 412 miles of range. Or people can spend $119,000 for one with the new, more powerful “Plaid” powertrain that goes 390 miles with that sub-2 second 0–60 time. The “Plaid+” version with 520 miles starts at $139,000. The Plaid and Plaid+ versions have top speeds of 200 miles per hour, while the Long Range tops out at 155 mph.
A Model S redesign has been rumored for years, with Electrek posting allegedly leaked renders of the new interior all the way back in 2018. Tesla CEO Elon Musk threw cold water on the idea in 2019, though, when he tweeted “[t]here is no ‘refreshed’ Model X or Model S coming.” Tesla instead was constantly making minor improvements to both vehicles, he said.
But that tune started to change once Tesla started testing out a new powertrain in 2019 dubbed “Plaid” — which, much like the “Ludicrous” acceleration mode in Tesla’s cars, is a Spaceballs reference.
Musk said at Tesla’s Battery Day event in September 2020 that the Plaid Model S would be coming in late 2021. But aside from the basic specs, and the addition of the car to its website, Tesla didn’t mention anything about a design refresh.
The satellite feud between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Amazon spilled out into the open on social media this week, after brewing for months in meetings with regulators. It’s only the latest spat in a new race among billionaires for a slice of a $1 trillion telecommunications market.
Musk and Bezos, the two richest people in the world, are racing to build vast networks of satellites in low-Earth orbit capable of bringing high-speed broadband internet to rural parts of the world that have little or no access to the internet. SpaceX has 955 satellites in orbit for its Starlink network and plans to launch thousands more, while Amazon’s Kuiper System is in earlier stages of development without any satellites in orbit — yet.
The quarrel centers on a filing from last summer, when SpaceX asked Federal Communications Commission officials for approval to change some Starlink satellites to altitudes between 540 and 570 km — close to Amazon’s proposed constellation, which will orbit Earth around a 590 km altitude. SpaceX says the tweak would make it easier to de-orbit old satellites without causing spectrum interference with other satellite operators, but Amazon and other companies beg to differ. They say it would create interference, heighten the risk of satellite collisions, and get in the way of Amazon’s future constellation as approved by the FCC.
“It does not serve the public to hamstring Starlink today for an Amazon satellite system that is at best several years away from operation,” Musk tweeted Tuesday, echoing the points made in feisty SpaceX filings posted on Twitter by CNBC reporter Michael Sheetz. In those filings, SpaceX’s director of satellite policy, David Goldman, said “competitors cherry pick data and ignore the true changes in the modification” in order to “reach misleading claims of interference.”
It does not serve the public to hamstring Starlink today for an Amazon satellite system that is at best several years away from operation
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 26, 2021
Responding to Musk’s tweet, Amazon released a statement saying: “The facts are simple. We designed the Kuiper System to avoid interference with Starlink, and now SpaceX wants to change the design of its system.”
“Despite what SpaceX posts on Twitter, it is SpaceX’s proposed changes that would hamstring competition among satellite systems,” Amazon said. “It is clearly in SpaceX’s interest to smother competition in the cradle if they can, but it is certainly not in the public’s interest.”
The public finger-pointing was an unusual escalation for a kind of industry conflict usually confined to the obscure corners of FCC filing databases. Bezos and Musk’s foray into the world of satellites has generated new excitement — and chaos — for a massive industry filled with incumbents such as SES, Viasat, Intelsat, and others. SpaceX, aiming to invest a total of $10 billion in Starlink, has floated a possibility to investors of splitting the program off into a separate entity sometime in the future and filing an IPO, a prospect that would put Musk’s star power at the helm of another potentially disruptive public company. And despite falling far behind SpaceX, Bezos has pledged to invest $10 billion in Kuiper, cementing its move to compete with both SpaceX and existing satellite internet companies.
“If you are going to put up and basically claim an entire sphere around the earth, then you’re gonna generate a lot more attention and discussion,” said Caleb Henry, a senior analyst at satellite research firm Quilty Analytics. “Because everyone has to know how to operate with respect to that layer of satellites that you put.”
Since its first Starlink launch in 2019, SpaceX has lofted over 1,000 satellites to orbit of the roughly 12,000 needed for continuous global coverage.That deployment pace has been supercharged by Musk’s breakneck push to offer commercial service and start generating revenue to fund SpaceX’s Mars rocket, Starship. In 2018, when development was moving too slow for Musk’s style, he grew angry and fired seven Starlink managers, including the program’s top designer and SpaceX’s VP of satellites. Those two managers now lead Amazon’s Kuiper project.
Last year, SpaceX began an invite-only beta program that now has thousands of users across the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Its initial price is pegged at $99 a month, plus $499 for a setup kit that includes a pizza-sized dish.
Amazon’s constellation promises a network of 3,236 low-Earth-orbiting satellites. The online retail giant last month revealed the design for a phased array antenna that can provide “maximum throughput of up to 400 Mbps,” but it has been largely quiet on its deployment timeline or which rocket it’ll use to put the satellites in orbit. Nonetheless, Amazon is one of a handful of organizations to push back on SpaceX’s rapid Starlink deployment campaign for months.
Satellite broadband firm Viasat joined Amazon last year in asking the FCC to deny SpaceX’s application to move nearly 3,000 Starlink satellites to a lower orbit, saying the Starlink system poses “an unreasonable threat to the continued use of the shared orbital environment.” The company escalated its request in December, calling on the FCC to conduct an environmental assessment of Starlink. And some are concerned that SpaceX’s rush to build and invest in its constellation could make it harder for the FCC to regulate it.
“I built it, now you can’t change it – good policy is never formed that way,” John Janka, Viasat’s chief officer for global government affairs, said in an interview.
Since SpaceX began launching its Starlink satellites in batches of 60 atop its Falcon 9 rocket, astronomy organizations have sounded alarms over the satellites’ brightness in the night sky: capturing long-exposure telescopic images of the cosmos from Earth are now often tainted by ugly light streaks produced by the bright satellites passing by.
Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks Starlink satellites on the side, said the proximity between SpaceX’s proposed altitude and Amazon’s future satellites is slightly concerning, “but the majority of what they’re asking doesn’t seem, to me, to be really interfering with the Amazon ones.” A bigger commercial concern is SpaceX planting its flag in prime orbital real estate, where “it’s high enough that you don’t have to be constantly re-boosting the orbit and using a lot of fuel, and low enough that if things go wrong it’ll reenter naturally” in the Earth’s atmosphere — a key FCC requirement for mitigating debris in orbit.
“The more SpaceX’s satellites are in that altitude range, the less room there is for other companies to later put stuff there,” McDowell said. “The grabbing-up of all the good territory is a reasonable complaint.”
Reddit traders who have successfully profited off GameStop (GME) stock are now turning their attention to struggling movie theater chain AMC. Reddit board r/wallstreetbets has helped push GameStop stock to record levels in recent days, with the stock closing up 92 percent yesterday alone. It’s part of a chaotic, meme-fueled effort to create an organized short squeeze, and force traditional hedge funds into losing millions of dollars on their bets against struggling companies.
AMC appears to be next on the list. Overnight, online traders at r/wallstreetbets’ Discord server spent hours creating memes and spamming AMC emoji in an effort to convince thousands of people to buy AMC stock. Hundreds swarmed rapper Soulja Boy’s live Twitch stream in a failed endeavor to get him to tweet about AMC. At one point in an ongoing Discord call — with dozens of participants shouting profanity and racial slurs — traders thought Elon Musk was on the call. After many called for quiet and to “let Elon speak,” everyone soon realized it was just a prankster using a fake Elon Musk sound board.
It was a surreal moment in what has become the hottest online game.
AMC stock up more than 400 percent in pre-market trading.
The AMC memes appear to be working, though. During pre-market trading, AMC was up more than 400 percent at one point before opening up more than 250 percent. The movie theater chain has struggled with pandemic-related losses, but it did raise more than $400 million in financing on Monday to help it stay afloat through 2021.
The mob of investors are taking part in this incredibly high-risk game in an attempt to punish hedge funds and professional financiers and make some quick cash. Thousands are buying into the idea of pummeling Wall Street professionals, and they’re using Reddit, Discord, Twitter, and Twitch to sell more people on gaming the system.
It works by targeting stocks that have a high amount of short selling attached to them, which is why GameStop and AMC are great targets after struggling through the pandemic. Short selling is a process that lets traders borrow shares for a fee and then sell them for a high price, and buy them back at a lower price to return them. Reddit is trying to force the price up so that investors, and especially hedge funds, that are short selling will lose lots of money as the stock rises. Read our full explainer on how Redditors are gaming GameStop stock.
It’s a risky game that highlights a bigger battle over the future of finance, and the idea that you can do anything online. The vast majority of Reddit investors are young and see hedge funds as the old school controlling stocks and shares and bullying companies into administration through their positions. As one poster on r/wallstreetbets put it, it’s “a tug of war between tradition and the future” that has gotten really personal. “We need to take the wealth back from these boomers,” said one member of the Discord call encouraging investment in AMC.
Investing and trading has also become incredibly easy for amateurs, thanks to apps like Robinhood. Millions have used Robinhood to make commission-free trades, and it’s a practice that has become popular during the pandemic with millions stuck at home.
This online trade game also has real life consequences. One big hedge fund, Melvin Capital, has been forced to close out of its GameStop position today with a huge loss expected, likely in the millions of dollars. It’s not clear if we’ll see the same sequence of events with AMC, but Reddit is trying to make it happen.
An American real estate investor, a Canadian investor and a former Israeli Air Force pilot are paying $55 million each to be part of the first fully private astronaut crew to journey to the International Space Station. The trio will hitch a ride on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule early next year, with a veteran NASA astronaut as the commander.
The Ax-1 mission, arranged by Houston, Texas-based space tourism company Axiom Space, is a watershed moment for the space industry as companies race to make space travel more accessible to private customers instead of governments. Private citizens have trekked to the space station in the past, but the Ax-1 mission marks the first to use a commercially built astronaut capsule: SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, which flew its first two crews to the ISS last year.
“As the first fully private mission to go to the ISS, we feel an enormous responsibility to do it well,” Michael López-Alegría, a veteran astronaut and the mission’s commander, told The Verge on Tuesday. “We realize that this is the trend-setter, the bar-setter for the future, and so our goal is to really exceed all expectations.”
Larry Connor, an entrepreneur and non-profit activist investor; Mark Pathy, the Canadian investor and philanthropist; and Eytan Stibbe, the former Israeli fighter pilot and an impact investor, were revealed by Axiom Tuesday morning as the company’s inaugural crew. Connor, 71, is president of The Connor Group, a luxury real estate investment firm based in Ohio. He’d become the second-oldest person to fly to space after John Glenn, who flew the U.S. space shuttle Discovery at 77 years old.
The crew’s flight to the space station, an orbital laboratory some 250 miles above Earth, will take two days. They’ll then spend about eight days aboard the station’s U.S. segment, where they’ll take part “in research and philanthropic projects,” Axiom said in a statement. Living alongside working astronauts from the U.S., Russia and likely Germany, the private crew members will roll out sleeping bags somewhere on the station.
“There aren’t any astronaut crew quarters for us, which is fine. Sleeping in Zero-G is pretty much the same wherever you are once you close your eyes,” López-Alegría said.
NASA updated its policies in 2019 to allow private astronaut flights to the ISS as part of a broader push to encourage commercial opportunities in space. The agency had previously opposed private visits to the ISS on US spacecraft. Seven private citizens did fly to the station as wealthy tourists on separate missions in the early 2000’s aboard Russia’s Soyuz vehicles.
Private stays on the space station will have a hefty pricetag, according to NASA’s 2019 announcement. It’ll cost $11,250 per astronaut per day to use the life support systems and toilet, $22,500 per day for all necessary crew supplies (like food, air, medical supplies, and more), and $42 per kilowatt-hour for power. That tallies to a nightly rate of about $35,000 per person, which for the four crew members on the Ax-1 mission – including Commander López-Alegría – totals to $1.1 million for an eight-night stay.
The International Space Station in low-Earth orbitNASA
Those nightly costs are included in the $55 million price the private astronauts are already paying, Axiom says. The company bills itself as a “turnkey, full-service mission provider that interfaces with all other parties (e.g. NASA) for” the astronauts, an Axiom spokesman said. “Any and all necessary costs are part of Axiom’s ticket price.”
The Ax-1 mission will have to be approved by the Multilateral Crew Operations Panel, the space station’s managing body of partner countries that includes the U.S., Russia, Canada, Japan and others. That approval process kicked off today, López-Alegría said. “I don’t think that there’s any doubt that the background and qualifications of the crew are more than adequate to be accepted by the MCOP, so I feel good about that,” he added.
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, an acorn-shaped pod with seats for seven, was approved last year by NASA under its Commercial Crew Program to fly humans to the space station. Under that roughly $4.5 billion program, SpaceX developed Crew Dragon alongside its rival Boeing, which is about a year away from certifying its Starliner capsule for human flights. Both companies have contracts with NASA to fly six missions carrying U.S. astronauts to space.
The Ax-1 mission was announced early last year. It is the second space tourism effort for SpaceX, which announced around the same time that it is also working with space tourism company Space Adventures to send up to four private citizens into orbit around the Earth sometime in 2022.
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule approaches the International Space Station carrying three U.S. astronauts and a Japanese astronaut on November 17, 2020.NASA
Space tourism in recent years has sparked a wave of interest from the ultra-wealthy and investors as a growing field of space companies prove out hardware and ramp up uncrewed test flights in and around space. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, now the richest person in the world, has made normalizing space travel and colonizing Mars SpaceX’s top priority. Billionaire businessman Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, which offers groups of four a few minutes of weightlessness in its massive spaceplane for a few hundred thousand dollars, became the first publicly traded space tourism company in 2019. And billionaire Amazon owner Jeff Bezos’s space firm Blue Origin will soon offer similar suborbital experiences with its vertically launched New Shepard rocket.
Axiom’s chief executive Mike Suffredini co-founded the company in 2016 after spending ten years as NASA’s ISS program manager. Already, the company is building its own modules called “Axiom Station” designed to attach to the ISS, offering room for science experiments and more tourists. Ax-1 “is just the first of several Axiom Space crews,” he said in a statement.
López-Alegría, who has flown four times to space as a NASA astronaut, said he’s met with Connor, Pathy and Stibbe a few times at SpaceX’s California headquarters and in Florida during SpaceX’s Crew-1 mission last year. He’ll be in charge of training them in person beginning a few months prior to the flight.
“They’re very individual, but they all have a very common thread, and that is they really want this to be a successful mission that paves the way for future private astronaut missions,” López-Alegría said. “It’s a good crew.”
Valve co-founder and president Gabe Newell talks about Valve’s exploration of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) for gaming and beyond, in an interview with New Zealand’s 1 News. Although Newell admits that the idea of having your brain interface directly with a computer sounds “indistinguishable from science fiction,” he says developers would be making a “silly mistake” if they ignore the area.
Newell says that Valve is currently working with OpenBCI headsets to develop open-source software with the aim of making it easier for developers to understand the signals coming from people’s brains. At its most basic, this could allow software to understand whether a player is enjoying a game, and adjust the experience accordingly. For example, games could turn up the difficulty if they sense a player is getting bored. But Newell’s more ambitious ideas involve actually writing signals to people’s brains, rather than just reading them.
Newell suggests our ability to experience existing games is limited by our physical body — or “meat peripherals” as he puts it. But interfacing directly with a player’s brain could open up a lot more possibilities. “The real world will seem flat, colorless, blurry compared to the experiences you’ll be able to create in people’s brains,” Newell says.
Valve has spoken publicly about its work on brain-computer interfaces before. Back at 2019’s Game Developers Conference, Valve’s principal experimental psychologist, Mike Ambinder gave a talk on the company’s work in the area, VentureBeat reported at the time, covering many of the same possibilities and use cases that Newell outlines in his recent interview.
Beyond their use in gaming, Newell says that BCIs could help with other areas of human life like sleep. “One of the early applications I expect we’ll see is improved sleep — sleep will become an app that you run where you say, ‘Oh, I need this much sleep, I need this much REM,’” he says.
Despite the possibilities, Newell admits that brain-computer interfaces carry their risks. He says that the idea of a BCI making someone feel pain is a “complicated topic,” and adds that the interfaces will be susceptible to viruses like other technologies, suggesting that they’ll need similar safeguards in place.
“Nobody wants to say, ‘Oh, remember Bob? Remember when Bob got hacked by the Russian malware? That sucked — is he still running naked through the forests?’” Newell quips. “People are going to have to have a lot of confidence that these are secure systems that don’t have long-term health risks.”
Regardless, it sounds like Valve doesn’t have any plans to commercialize its research just yet. Newell says that they’re making such rapid progress that any device risks being outdated once it’s gone through the slow process commercialization. “The rate at which we’re learning stuff is so fast,” Newell says.
Other high-profile companies currently exploring brain-computer interfaces include Facebook, which is working on a way to allow users to type with their brains, and Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which is attempting to develop a less-invasive way of connecting a computer to the human brain.
You can check out more of Newell’s thoughts on the potential for brain-computer interfaces in the full write up from 1 News, who he also recently spoke with about Valve’s future game development plans.
SpaceX is locked in a legal fight with a Texas oil company for a plot of land it wants to use to drill for natural gas, according to public records. The 806-acre site in southern Texas sits near SpaceX’s Starship facilities, a sprawling testing ground for its methane-fueled Raptor rocket engine.
Tim George, an attorney for the SpaceX subsidiary fighting for the land, was quoted by Bloomberg News, which first reported the legal despute, as saying methane reserves from the land will be used “in connection with their rocket facility operations.”
In filings with a Texas energy regulator, the SpaceX subsidiary Lone Star Mineral Development LLC demanded that Dallas Petroleum Group (DPG) LLC, which claims ownership to wells on the land, vacate the wells by the end of 2020. The filings allege that the oil firm doesn’t have the right to own them and that it “illegally trespassed and installed a lock on the entry gate to prevent Lone Star’s access to” the wells.
Public records show SpaceX leased the land from Mesquite Energy Inc. in June 2020. DPG says it maintains the right to the wells on the same plot of land and asked a judge to dismiss Lone Star’s claims.
None of the Lone Star or SpaceX attorneys involved in the case could be reached for comment. DPG attorneys likewise could not be reached for comment.
The case is currently before the Railroad Commission of Texas, a state regulatory agency. The Commission’s three commissioners will vote on the outcome of the case once a judge issues a “proposal for decision,” a spokesman for the agency said, a process that could take several months.
SpaceX’s Raptor engines power the company’s heavy-lift Starship system, a shiny rocket tailored for routine flights to Mars. SpaceX has been conducting test flights of early Starship prototypes in Boca Chica, Texas, a rural beachside area in Cameron County.
Last year, the company purchased two deepwater oil rigs for $3.5 million each that it plans to convert into seafaring launchpads for Starship. Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and chief executive, named the rigs Deimos and Phobos.
Lone Star’s dispute with DPG is the latest legal hurdle faced by SpaceX as it aims to turn its Boca Chica site into a launch facility capable of supporting routine orbital Starship missions. Attorneys with SpaceX and its other Texas-based subsidiary, Dogleg Park LLC, have been negotiating with residents of a small Boca Chica community to buy out their properties to make way for SpaceX personnel and other test site expansions.
The Google parent company Alphabet closes the company Loon, which has worked to connect regions with insufficient coverage to the Internet via stratospheric balloons. Originally it was a project from Google’s research department X, in the summer 2018 it was transferred to its own company.
As Loon managing director Alastair Westgarth now explains, it was not possible to reduce the costs of development and construction to such an extent that it was possible to build up a long-term business.
Internet for the “last billion” Google had 2013 the first Test balloons launched for Loon. Long rows of stratospheric balloons were planned, which would be driven around the earth by stratospheric winds at kilometers and act like cell phone towers. They should get their energy from solar modules and be maneuverable. They should communicate with each other and thus form a network in the upper atmosphere. Users should be able to connect to the balloons, which in turn would establish contact with the Internet. This should give people in remote regions of the world the opportunity to go online. The technology had already been used after natural disasters, including a commercial network was planned for Kenya.
Westgarth now explains that Loon was not mainly about that is to get the next billion people on the Internet, but the last billion. He is referring to those who live in regions that cannot be connected to the Internet at affordable prices with current technology. Google is not the only company that has tried completely new approaches to connect such communities to the Internet. Facebook had wanted to do something similar with huge drones that circled at high altitude over remote regions and provided them with network coverage. In the summer 2018 the Aquila project was scrapped.
Currently, several companies are concentrating on satellite-based Internet for similar projects. The Starlink constellation from SpaceX is a clear pioneer. Elon Musk’s space company has now launched more than 1000 satellites into space and the first customers can already test the offer. At prices of 99 US dollars (85 euros) per month, however, it applies probably more to people who are not reached by broadband expansion in industrialized countries and not to the “last billion” that Loon was supposedly aiming at. At the same time, the question of the profitability of such an offer should be easier to answer for SpaceX.
Tesla can get started early with preparations for its planned battery factory near the car factory in Grünheide near Berlin. A spokeswoman for the Federal Ministry of Economics announced on Thursday that the electric car manufacturer was allowed to start preliminary work on application. This also applies to other companies that are part of a major Europe-wide battery cell production project. The financial risk lies with the company.
On 10. The spokeswoman announced that applications for permits and subsidies for the second major European project for battery cell production were submitted to the European Commission on December 31st. These included just under 50 companies in 12 EU countries, including 11 Company from Germany. The preparatory work should begin without losing the later chance of federal funding, although the aid has not yet been approved. But that is independent of a building permit or environmental permit. The Federal Ministry of Economics is not responsible for this.
Tesla’s model range (33 Pictures) The roadster was Tesla’s first production car, the new model should 2020 come on the market.
(Image: Tesla) Tesla is building an electric car factory in Grünheide. Production is scheduled to start in July. Tesla boss Elon Musk had promised last year that the world’s largest battery factory should also be built in Grünheide. The car factory has not yet received an environmental permit, Tesla builds with early permits.
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