Archive for the ‘Elon Musk’ category: Page 246
Oct 5, 2017
New space race to Mars pits NASA vs. SpaceX
Posted by Dan Kummer in categories: Elon Musk, policy, space, space travel
Entrepreneur Elon Musk’s announcement last week accelerating plans for manned flights to Mars ratchets up political and public relations pressure on NASA’s efforts to reach the same goal.
With Musk publicly laying out a much faster schedule than NASA — while contending his vision is less expensive and could be financed primarily with private funds — a debate unlike any before is shaping up over the direction of U.S. space policy.
Read: Before Elon Musk can get SpaceX to Mars, he must overcome these nontechnical hurdles.
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Oct 3, 2017
Tesla says it’s halfway done building the world’s biggest battery
Posted by Dan Kummer in categories: Elon Musk, energy, sustainability, transportation
On Friday, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that the company was halfway done building the battery bank that will become the world’s biggest battery once it’s complete. Musk made the announcement at a party overlooking the project’s construction, ABC News Australia reported.
Tesla is building the 129-MWh battery with French energy company Neoen. The battery will be draw energy from Neoen’s Hornsdale wind farm that’s 142 miles north of Adelaide. The electricity will be delivered to South Australians during peak grid times to reduce the number of blackouts in the area, which are frequent in summer months.
“The system is a big battery, a battery big enough to power 50,000 houses — the biggest in the world,” Neoen global COO Romain Desrousseaux previously told Business Insider.
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Sep 30, 2017
Mercedes-Benz’s $1 billion electric car ‘attack on Tesla’ is missing a zero, says Elon Musk
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: Elon Musk, sustainability, transportation
Daimler, Mercedes-Benz’s parent company, announced last week a $1 billion investment in electric car and battery production in the US.
As with any new EV investment from a legacy automaker, the media painted it as an “attack on Tesla”, but Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO and largest shareholder, doesn’t seem too worried about it.
Sep 30, 2017
Why Futurist Ray Kurzweil Isn’t Worried About Technology Stealing Your Job
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: Elon Musk, engineering, existential risks, Ray Kurzweil, robotics/AI, singularity
Innovation will do more good than harm, he says.
You know a topic is trending when the likes of Tesla’s Elon Musk and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg publicly bicker about its potential risks and rewards. In this case, Musk says he fears artificial intelligence will lead to World War III because nations will compete for A.I. superiority. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has called such doomsday scenarios “irresponsible” and says he is optimistic about A.I.
But another tech visionary sees the future as more nuanced. Ray Kurzweil, an author and director of engineering at Google, thinks, in the long run, that A.I. will do far more good than harm. Despite some potential downsides, he welcomes the day that computers surpass human intelligence—a tipping point otherwise known as “the singularity.” That’s partly why, in 2008, he cofounded the aptly named Singularity University, an institute that focuses on world-changing technologies. We caught up with the longtime futurist to get his take on the A.I. debate and, well, to ask what the future holds for us all.
Continue reading “Why Futurist Ray Kurzweil Isn’t Worried About Technology Stealing Your Job” »
Sep 30, 2017
Elon Musk Named SpaceX’s Moonbase After a Cult Sci-Fi Classic
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: Elon Musk, space travel
Sep 30, 2017
Elon Musk: SpaceX Is Coming for Mars in 2022
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: Elon Musk, space travel
Musk said he’s “confident” the plan will be under way within five years.
“I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars,” Musk said, adding that he thinks SpaceX has figured out a way to make it affordable by using revenues from the company’s satellite launches, service missions to the International Space Station and by making smaller, more efficient rockets that are mostly reusable.
Nine years after SpaceX’s first successful launch — its fourth ever — Musk said his engineers are now perfecting propulsive landing. He believes the BFR rocket can carry out missions to the moon and back without producing propellant, enabling the establishment of a lunar space station.
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Sep 30, 2017
SpaceX’s Musk unveils plan to reach Mars by 2022
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: Elon Musk, space travel
Futurist and inventor Elon Musk unveiled ambitious plans Friday to send cargo ships to Mars in five years and use rockets to carry people between Earth’s major cities in under half-an-hour.
The founder of SpaceX said a planned interplanetary transport system, codenamed BFR (Big Fucking Rocket), would be downsized so it could carry out a range of tasks that would then pay for future Mars missions.
“The most important thing… is that I think we have figured out how to pay for (BFR),” Musk told a packed auditorium at a global gathering of space experts in Adelaide.
Sep 28, 2017
According to SpaceX, the #BFR will be capable of transporting humans from any city to any other city on Earth in under one hour
Posted by Brett Gallie II in categories: Elon Musk, space travel
Sep 24, 2017
SpaceX Files Trademark Documents for its Global Internet Network
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: Elon Musk, internet, satellites
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has trademarked the name “Starlink” for its global satellite internet network, set to launch between 2019 and 2024.