Elon Musk wants to build a city called Starbase in Texas | Mashable

March 4, 2021March 3, 2021 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is getting into the city-building business.

On Tuesday, Musk tweeted about “creating the city of Starbase, Texas.” He followed that up with a few other details, some of which are typically Muskian — for example, he says the city will be dog friendly and its leader will be The Doge, a pun on a medieval elected lord title of the same name and the cryptocurrency DOGE, which is Musk’s favorite.

However, it appears that Musk is serious about creating a new city. SpaceX’s launch and development site for Starship resides in the unincorporated community in Cameron County, Texas. Musk claims he wants to incorporate the village and the land that surrounds it into a much bigger city called Starbase.

Hackers could shut down satellites — or turn them into weapons | Live Science

February 14, 2020February 12, 2020 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Last month, SpaceX became the operator of the world’s largest active satellite constellation. As of the end of January, the company had 242 satellites orbiting the planet with plans to launch 42,000 over the next decade. This is part of its ambitious project to provide internet access across the globe. The race to put satellites in space is on, with Amazon, U.K.-based OneWeb and other companies chomping at the bit to place thousands of satellites in orbit in the coming month.

The top 15 events that happened in space in 2016 | TechCrunch

December 16, 2016 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

2016 was a big year for research and discovery in space. The year started off with Caltech astronomers picking up the presence of a ninth planet while researchers at LIGO were detecting gravitational waves for the first time. NASA’s Juno spacecraft finally arrived in orbit around Jupiter, and astronomers found the closest exoplanet to Earth. Blue Origin showed off their suborbital rocket reusability skills and Elon Musk revealed a plan to colonize Mars. Not to mention the huge developments for SpaceX, which successfully landed a Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship in the ocean for the first time, but then suffered a devastating explosion later in the year. These are the top events for space in 2016.