Category Archives: Science

Business, Financial, Science, TechNews

SpaceX is already breaking the record from the previous year

At the weekend, SpaceX brought its number of rocket launches to 33 with two more missions. Elon Musk’s group broke its record from the previous year – and that in July. 

Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX launched 31 rockets last year. In 2022, the group already exceeded this number when the Falcon 9 rocket sent a load of 46 Starlink satellites into space on Friday, setting off on its 32nd mission. On Sunday, SpaceX added 53 satellites – rocket launch number 33.

The company has already broken its existing record for most rocket launches in a year, as confirmed by Elon Musk on Twitter , where he congratulated his team. In addition, there are still several months left to further expand the record.

Screenshot: Twitter

Elon Musk’s goal for 2022: 52 rocket launches

SpaceX intends to do the same, because at the beginning of the year the ambitious goal was announced of sending 52 rockets into space this year. So far, SpaceX is on track to meet its schedule. This is made possible by the reusable rocket stages of the Falcon 9. The rocket, which was launched on Sunday, has already completed four missions. Another rocket already has 13 missions under its belt. These cycles allow SpaceX to ramp up its rocket launch cadence every year except for 2019, when the number dropped.

In addition, SpaceX is its own customer for a large number of the rocket launches. The company is using the missions to increase its fleet of Starlink Internet satellites. Around 2,900 have been sent into orbit so far, of which around 2,600 are currently active. SpaceX has approval for a total of 12,000 but is seeking to relax international rules to allow up to 30,000 satellites into orbit.

SpaceX has big plans

But even without its Starlink project, SpaceX will not run out of work. Thanks to the cooperation with NASA, the company repeatedly sends off Dragon-type space capsules to send people and cargo to the ISS. There are also SpaceX’s commercial space flights, which take tourists into space, and launches for the US Department of Defense.

In the long term, Elon Musk is pursuing particularly ambitious plans with SpaceX. The billionaire has never made a secret of the fact that he has set himself the goal of populating Mars – and even wants to outperform NASA in the race for the red planet . 

Science, TechNews

Amazing glimpses of the Universe captured by the James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope is perhaps mankind’s greatest achievement (so far). It is a magnificent space telescope originally designed and planned in the late 1990s but not completed and launched until late 2021.

Now the giant telescope is 930,000 miles out of Earth orbit, collecting data using its light-gathering technique, which is 25 square meters and consists of 18 hexagonal mirrors made of gold-plated beryllium.

It aims to give scientists the opportunity to study the history of the universe and explore distant worlds and stars that we have not been able to observe before. Now some of the first images have been revealed and the results are stunning.

Image Comparison

Image: NASA/JPL-CALTECH (LEFT), NASA/ESA/CSA/STSCI (RIGHT)

Before the official images from the James Webb Telescope were released, Nasa released this image to give a taste of what’s to come.

The image shows part of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. Shown on the left is an image taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope’s infrared camera. On the right you can see the same area taken by the James Webb telescope. The JWST promises an unprecedented level of detail that we have never seen before.

Crypto, Financial, Science

Energy Efficiency “crucial” for Crypto Mining

Bitcoin miners say: energy efficiency and regulatory certainty are crucial for success of Crypto Industry

Bitcoin mining is often criticized as an imperfect process due to its energy expenditure, but major firms in the industry are trying to maximize efficiency and sustainability while seeking regulatory clarity.

Image by TeX9.net: Cryptocurrency Revolution
Image by TeX9.net: Cryptocurrency Revolution

In a dimly lit room at the FTX and SALT’s Crypto Bahamas event, some of the largest crypto miners in the world took the stage to discuss the future of the nascent but growing industry in the “Crypto Mining: Maximizing Efficiency and Sustainability” panel.

Crypto miners are looking to improve their market through efforts ranging from improving hashrate efficiency, which is the amount of power that a machine requires to produce a bitcoin, to data mining centers becoming more specialized and optimized for lower energy consumption, Marco Streng, CEO and co-founder of Genesis Digital Assets, said at the event.

Computers that mine bitcoin are 58 times more efficient than they were eight years ago, according to a report by the Bitcoin Mining Council. In addition to machines becoming more efficient, the engineering of the facilities and the sources of power have become much more efficient, which improves the productivity of an individual bitcoin mining computer, Mike Levitt, co-chairman, co-founder and CEO of Core Scientific, said.

Some miners are even using excess heat and converting it into close to 100% heat-generated energy, which would otherwise be wasted but instead is being channeled into energy, Streng said.

“It’s clear now that miners are converging toward renewable sources,” Streng said.

Out of all the energy that gets generated and used in the U.S., about 65% was wasted in 2021, according to a chart by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a research facility funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and UC Berkeley.

Miners can be a solution to the problem of unconsumed energy, Streng said.

Jaime Leverton, CEO of Hut 8, agreed.

“By working together with a local power grid, we actually are a stabilizer,” Leverton said.

The amount of energy that it takes for Bitcoin to produce $1 billion worth of value is significantly less than the amount of energy it takes for something like an airline to produce $1 billion worth of value, Brian Brooks, CEO of Bitfury, said.

A key point that’s hurting the crypto mining industry right now is the lack of regulatory clarity, all the panelists said.