Tag Archives: big ideas

The first detailed look at how Elon Musk’s space internet could work

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When sending an internet message via Starlink, a ground station will begin by using radio waves to talk to a satellite above it. Once in space, the message will be fired from satellite to satellite using lasers until it is above its destination. From there, it will be beamed down to the right ground station using radio waves again.

Source: The first detailed look at how Elon Musk’s space internet could work | New Scientist

Between distant places, this will allow messages to be sent about twice as fast as through the optical fibres on Earth that currently connect the internet, despite having to travel to space and back. This is because the speed of the signal in glass is slower than it is through space.

Plan to tow icebergs from Antarctica to parched Dubai

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Alshehi told NBC that even if 30 per cent of the iceberg melts on the journey, it will still be able to provide between 100 million and 200 million cubic metres of fresh water – enough for 1 million people to stay hydrated for five years.

Private investors have bankrolled the project to the tune of US$60 million (NZ$91 million), according to NBC.

Source: Plan to tow icebergs from Antarctica to parched Dubai | Stuff.co.nz

Papers on this subject matter here.

SpaceX plans to start launching high-speed internet satellites in 2019

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SpaceX hopes to start testing its satellites before the end of this year and continuing through the early months of 2018. If that’s successful, the company plans to launch satellites in phases between 2019 and 2024, after which the system will be at full capacity.

Source: SpaceX plans to start launching high-speed internet satellites in 2019

GE is building America’s first offshore wind farm with turbines twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty

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GE and Deepwater Wind, a developer of offshore turbines, are installing five massive wind turbines in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. They will make up the first offshore wind farm in North America, called the Block Island Wind Farm.

Over the past several weeks, the teams have worked to install the turbines 30 miles off the coast of Rhode Island, and are expected to finish by the end of August 2016. The farm will be fully operational by November 2016.

Source: GE is building America’s first offshore wind farm with turbines twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty

Quest to drill into Earth’s mantle restarts

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Normally, the crust–mantle boundary is thought to be marked by a feature known as the Mohorovičić discontinuity, or ‘Moho’, at which seismic waves change velocity. But at Atlantis Bank, the mantle is thought to bubble up as far as 2.5 kilometres above the Moho, making it easier to reach.

Reaching these deep-Earth frontiers “is one of the great scientific endeavours of the century”, says Henry Dick, a geophysicist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and co-leader of the expedition.

Source: Quest to drill into Earth’s mantle restarts : Nature News & Comment

The largest vessel the world has ever seen

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In Shell’s view, this means avoiding the costly tasks of building a pipeline to the Australian coast and of constructing an LNG facility that might face a long series of planning battles, and require a host of new infrastructure on a remote coastline.

So Prelude will be parked above the gas field for a projected 25 years and become not merely a rig, harvesting the gas from down below, but also a factory and store where tankers can pull alongside to load up with LNG.

via BBC News – The largest vessel the world has ever seen.

Responding to Potential Asteroid Redirect Mission Targets

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NASA is developing an Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) — a first-ever mission to identify, capture and redirect an asteroid to a safe orbit of Earth’s moon for future exploration by astronauts in the 2020s.

ARM will use capabilities in development, including the new Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, and high-power Solar Electric Propulsion. All are critical components of deep-space exploration and essential to meet NASA’s goal of sending humans to Mars in the 2030s. The mission represents an unprecedented technological feat, raising the bar for human exploration and discovery, while helping protect our home planet and bringing us closer to a human mission to one of these intriguing objects.

via Responding to Potential Asteroid Redirect Mission Targets | NASA.

Here is an article from 12/24/2012 about this.

Pinging the Whole Internet Reveals Unsecured Backdoors That Could Tempt Hackers and Cyber Criminals

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Moore’s census involved regularly sending simple, automated messages to each one of the 3.7 billion IP addresses assigned to devices connected to the Internet around the world (Google, in contrast, collects information offered publicly by websites). Many of the two terabytes (2,000 gigabytes) worth of replies Moore received from 310 million IPs indicated that they came from devices vulnerable to well-known flaws, or configured in a way that could to let anyone take control of them.

via Pinging the Whole Internet Reveals Unsecured Backdoors That Could Tempt Hackers and Cyber Criminals | MIT Technology Review.

Supersized Wind Turbines Head Out to Sea

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The new turbines generate six megawatts of power in good wind. Several companies are designing 10- and even 15-megawatt machines with 100-meter blades. These blades would reach two-thirds of the way to the roof of the Empire State Building. The push to supersize wind turbines is part of an effort to reduce installation and maintenance costs, which can be far higher than the cost of the turbines themselves. The pictures in this slideshow give a sense of just why installation is so costly.

via Supersized Wind Turbines Head Out to Sea | MIT Technology Review.