China has said that its population did not drop in 2020. China had about 10-12 million births in 2020 and likely had just short of 10 million deaths. China has reported 9.4 to 9.8 million annual deaths for the last few years. China’s annual census showed 1.4 billion people in China at the end of …
SpaceX presented a version of a fully reusable two-stage Super Heavy rocket in 2016. It was the Interplanetary Transport System. China has now presented a video of a fully reusable two-stage super-heavy rocket. China’s video is more cartoonlike. China will have to upgrade its rendering for a more photorealistic video. You can compare the videos. …
The $2.9 billion NASA funding for the SpaceX Lunar Starship means that a Starship will get man-rated for four astronauts. This means getting the chance of loss of crew less than one in 500 for a lunar landing. SpaceX Lunar Starship will only initially support four astronauts because the launch will be performed by SLS …
In Italy, births plunged 21.6% in December, 2020 from the December 2019 and France had the lowest total babies born in a year since WW2. National birth levels seem to be down around 2-20% around the world. Historically short baby busts are followed by rebounds. A longer crisis increases the chances that potential births aren’t …
Generating artificial gravity inside rotating space habitats has been a dream of science fiction since the earliest pioneers of astronautics. However, rotating to produce artificial gravity poses a serious challenge; Humans experience discomfort and motion sickness when exposed to rotation rates greater than a few RPM. To produce artificial gravity near 1g at rotation rates …
The Solar System Pony Express is a global, multi-spectral, high-resolution planetary surveyor supported by regular visits from a cycler satellite network to retrieve petabits of data for transit to Earth. This is a phase 1 NASA NIAC study. The “courier” satellites use optical communications to receive 1-3 petabits from the surveyor at least once per …
Solar sails allow a low cost pathway to high speed and ubiquitous exploration of the outer solar system and interstellar space. A slingshot maneuver ~2-5 solar radii distant from the sun can propel light-weight cubesat class spacecraft to near-relativistic speeds. They can reach 0.1% of the speed of light (over 300 km/s or restated as …
NVIDIA unviled the DRIVE Atlan Autonomous Vehicle Platform. It is a Next-generation SoC to deliver more than 1,000 TOPS and equipped with BlueField DPU. Atlan will not be available for a couple of years, software development is well underway. During the GTC 21 keynote address this morning, NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced: DRIVE …
On Tesla’s 2020 Battery Day, Elon Musk made the case that there will be a 35 terawatt-hour per year battery market if the world electrifies all vehicles and battery enables the entire electrical grid. Tesla has a goal of making 3 or more terawatt-hours per year of batteries by 2030. The current combined goal of …
The status of the Breakthrough Starshot project (laser pushed sail for an interstellar mission). They have broken it down into three major challenges. The photon engine, the sail and communications. They have twelve academic teams working on the photon engine design and components. They have determined several designs that will not work for the photon …
Steve Ballmer is now the largest shareholder of Microsoft. Bill Gates has diversified his holdings and has very little Microsoft. Microsoft share prices doubled over the last two years and quadrupled over the last five years. Steve Ballmer’s net worth is currently $91 billion and Bill Gates has $144 billion. About half of Steve Ballmer’s …
