Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Sunday said that he hopes for a self-sustaining city on the Red Planet in 20 years’ time, as his space company prepares Starship to take people and cargo to the moon, Mars and beyond.
Musk said in a tweet: ‘I hope there is a self-sustaining city on Mars in 20 years!’
Last month, the world’s richest man said he was optimistic that ‘humanity will reach Mars in your lifetime’.
‘Without a common goal, humanity will fight itself. The Moon brought us together in 1969, Mars can do that in the future,’ Musk had said.
The Tesla CEO had stated that making multiplanetary life will help back up the ecosystems on Earth and added that apart from humans no other species can transport life to Mars.
Referring to Biblical patriarch Noah who built an Ark that survived the great flood on Earth, Musk said his Starship models will be ‘modern Noah’s Arks’, that can save ‘life from a calamity on Earth’.
SpaceX’s Starship consists of a giant first-stage booster called Super Heavy and a 165-foot-tall (50 meters) upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship. Both elements are designed to be fully reusable, and both will be powered by SpaceX’s next-generation Raptor engines, 33 for Super Heavy and six for Starship.
Last week, it was reported that the much-awaited first orbital test flight of the Starship vehicle will not lift off this month as it has not yet received the necessary launch clearance.
Earlier, the launch was scheduled for July and was shifted to August later.
On August 2, Musk said that a successful orbital flight is probably ‘between 1 and 12 months from now.’
According to a radio-spectrum license application that the company filed with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), SpaceX is targeting a six-month window that opens on September 1 for the highly anticipated mission.
SpaceX’s Starship and NASA’s SLS prepare for launch
That’s not to say we’re not nearing launch though. Starship is set to launch from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas. The company is preparing for lift-off, and it recently conducted a “static fire” engine test with both its first-stage Super Heavy booster, called Booster 7, and its Starship prototype, dubbed Ship 24. SpaceX fired up only one of Booster 7’s 33 engines on Tuesday, August 9, while Ship 24 ignited two of its six Raptor engines. While the company is making steady progress towards launch, there’s still a way to go before both are ready for lift-off.
Static fire test of two Raptor engines on Starship 24 https://t.co/NNpViztphI
Both Starship and Super Heavy are designed to be fully reusable, and they are powered by a total of 39 of SpaceX’s next-generation Raptor engines. The improved efficiency of Raptor 2 alongside the full reusability of the launch elements is set to greatly reduce launch and operational costs, which is one of the main factors that will allow Starship to eventually take humans to Mars.
NASA, which may launch its own Space Launch System (SLS) around the moon this month — it’s targeting an August 29 launch date — has opted to use Starship for its upcoming Artemis III moon landing mission. SLS isn’t reusable, and it will be used for Artemis I and II, each of which will travel around the moon before returning to Earth. With preparations well underway, we’re on the verge of two historic launches that will likely usher in a bold new era for spaceflight.
Google executives are telling their employees to shape up or ship out, warning that lay-offs are coming if results don’t meet expectations.
Employees who work in the Google Cloud sales department said that senior leadership told them that there will be an “overall examination of sales productivity and productivity in general.”
If third quarter results “don’t look up, [then] there will be blood on the streets,” according to a message conveyed to the sales team. The warning was first reported by Insider.
Employees told the news site that they are fearful of lay-offs after the company quietly extended its hiring freeze this month without making an announcement, the New York Post reports.
The Post you have sought comment from Google.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai told his employees in an all hands meeting late last month that they needed to improve their focus and productivity due to fierce economic headwinds that have forced widespread belt-tightening all throughout the technology sector.
Mr Pichai said that he wanted to solicit ideas from his employees on how to get “better results faster.”
“It’s clear we are facing a challenging macro environment with more uncertainty ahead,” Mr Pichai said.
“There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the head count we have.”
The search engine also announced a two-week hiring freeze last month, but so far it has not reversed its decision — prompting employees to fear the worst, according to Insider.
Since Mr Pichai’s comments, “everyone has been talking about the company tightening its belt,” one employee told Insider.
Google isn’t the only tech company that has put its employees on notice.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of Facebook’s parent company Meta, blamed “one of the worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history” for a series of cost-cutting measures, including a hiring freeze.
Mr Zuckerberg also made it clear that the company will part ways with employees who do not perform up to par.
“Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg told an all hands meeting in late June.
Facebook’s social media rival Twitter recently rescinded a job offer to a Palo Alto man as part of the San Francisco-based company’s cutting back on hiring.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal informed employees of the hiring pause in a message earlier this year, citing a recent lag on growth and revenue targets.
The company has been thrown into turmoil since Tesla CEO Elon Musk agreed to buy it for $US44 billion — only to back out of the deal. Twitter is now suing Musk in an effort to enforce the terms of the agreement.
This article originally appeared on NY Post and was reproduced with permission
In March 2017, Atlassian chief Mike Cannon-Brookes challenged Tesla boss Elon Musk to make good on a thought bubble about using batteries to solve South Australia’s energy problems.
“Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free,” Mr Musk replied.
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Not to be outdone, Mr Cannon-Brookes upped the ante.
“Legend! You’re on mate,” he responded, before promising to pull strings to secure “mates rates.”
The Twitter exchange has been much mythologised — in the eyes of some, it is an almost Damascene moment in which Australia relinquished its fear of renewables and embraced battery storage.
It is certainly true that it catalyzed the creation of Neoen’s 150-megawatt Hornsdale Power Reserve (aka the big battery), which was first switched on almost five years ago.
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Elon Musk talks about Tesla’s battery plan in July 2017.(ABCNews)
But then-SA premier Jay Weatherill recalls the billionaires’ Twitter banter as a double-edged sword.
“It was certainly not choreographed — it was a shock to see this,” he said.
“We were about to launch our [energy] plan … and it included a renewable technology fund of about $150 million, and one of the first cabs off the rank was likely to be a grid-level battery.
“thisexchange [then] occurred which created a massive problem for me, because everyone was telling me to accept what appeared to be the offer of the century.”
Damaged power transmission towers near Melrose from the time of the September 2016 blackout.(ABC News: Dean Faulkner)
Context is important here — three major blackouts in SA in less than six months, including the statewide outage of September 2016, had poured petrol on an already heated energy debate.
The Twitter exchange occurred a week before the equally notorious, but much more acrimonious, confrontation involving Mr Weatherill and then-federal energy minister Josh Frydenberg over renewables.
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While Mr Musk later joked that all he’d been doing was “talking smack”, Mr Cannon-Brookes has said his own initial tweet had equally humble origins.
It was late at night and Mr Cannon-Brookes was looking after his young child when he spontaneously responded to an Australian Financial Review article about Tesla’s battery plans.
“I just tweeted to Elon, was he serious?” I have told the 100 Climate Conversations podcast.
“I went to bed and then he came back and… we went back and forth negotiating and then sort of all hell broke loose.
“Suddenly [then prime minister] Malcolm Turnbull was on the phone and it went a bit nuts for a couple of weeks.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes was taken back by the response to his off-the-cuff tweet.(ABC)
‘It was a turning point’
During 2017, when Mr Musk enjoyed near-rockstar status among renewables supporters, there were obvious political upsides to Tesla’s proposal.
But Tesla wasn’t the only interested party — indeed, it was a Zen Energy push that had put batteries on SA’s agenda.
Despite the momentum behind the Tesla pitch, the SA government had committed to a procurement process to assess individual submissions on their merits.
Elon Musk was treated to a rockstar’s welcome during construction of the battery in September 2017.(ABC News: Andrew Burch)
“The way I chose to do it was to ring Elon Musk directly and say, ‘Great idea, we’re about to open up a tender process, we’d love you to bid’,” Mr Weatherill recalled.
“He then helpfully tweeted out, ‘Had a great conversation with the premier of South Australia’. That took the immediate pressure off me.
“Fortunately they won the tend on a proper basis, but obviously I was hoping they would win because the reputational benefit and the pulling power and the publicity that Elon Musk was able to generate were obviously powerful.”
On the other hand, “it would have been embarrassing for me — or not so much embarrassing but a lost opportunity — if he didn’t win”, Mr Weatherill said.
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For energy expert Marija Petkovic, part of the battery’s power was the way it provided proof of concept.
“Those of us in the energy industry have known for a very long time that battery storage would be one of the key pieces of technology that’s going to take us to a highly renewable grid,” she said.
“But it’s always hard to be the first off the mark.
“Having that first project be built and operational was a huge deal — it really allowed all the others to follow suit afterwards.”
Marija Petkovic is the founder and managing director of Energy Synapse.(Supplied)
The battery itself hasn’t been entirely free of controversy. In June, the Hornsdale Power Reserve was fined $900,000 for failing to provide grid stabilization services as required in 2019.
But it also recently secured approval from the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) to deliver grid-scale inertia services to the National Electricity Market.
“Batteries provide quite negligible energy in the [wholesale] market, but where they provide value is those ancillary services,” Ms Petkovic said.
“There’s about 100 more in the pipeline — not all of those projects will proceed to construction, some are very early stages … but it is quite promising.”
Ms Petkovic says there are dozens more giant batteries in the pipeline.(Supplied: Tesla)
While Mr Weatherill lost the subsequent election, he remembers those months in 2017 with fondness.
“There are lots of downsides but this is one of the upsides of making big decisions that set new trajectories,” he said.
“It was a turning point, and quite an exciting one.”
Jay Weatherill and Elon Musk struck up what was widely reported as a “bromance.”(Facebook)
Elon Musk shared a picture of a spacecraft on Twitter with the caption, “This will be Mars one day.”
SpaceX founder Elon Musk is known for his ambitious projects with his goal to colonize Mars being the most prominent one. The tech billionaire has, on various occasions, talked about taking humans to the Red Planet saying that it has a “great potential”. He once even proposed the idea of becoming a “multi-planetary species” by building a city on Mars.
In the latest from Mr Musk on his Mars obsession, he has envisioned the day when a rocket successfully lands on the Martian surface. He shared a picture of a spacecraft on Twitter with the caption, “This will be Mars one day.”
The rocket seen in the photo is SpaceX’s Starship project, a reusable rocket system that the company is currently working on. SpaceX recently conducted a static engine fire test of a Starship booster at its Starbase site in South Texas, US. According to SpaceX, the rocket system has been designed to “carry both crew and cargo on long-duration interplanetary flights, and help humanity return to the Moon, and travel to Mars and beyond.”
Elon Musk has not just imagined the possibility of colonizing Mars but seems pretty confident about it. In a recent tweet, he wrote that “Mars may be a fixer upper of a planet, but it has a great potential!”
Mars may be a fixer upper of a planet, but it has great potential!
Responding to this, a user asked him about the estimated timeframe for humans to create a civilization on Mars. He asked, “Elon, What do you think is the estimated timeframe for creating a self-sustaining civilization on Mars? 20 years? Self-sustaining meaning not relying/dependant on Earth for supplies.”
20 to 30 years from first human landing if launch rate growth is exponential.
Assumes transferring ~100k each rendezvous and ~1M total people needed.
Replying to the user, Elon Musk said that it would take two to three decades from the first human landing on Mars to set up a colony on the planet. “20 to 30 years from first human landing if launch rate growth is exponential,” Mr Musk wrote.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk has made no secret of his plans to send humans to Mars by 2050. The tech titan has talked about his dream to make a human colony on the Red planet. In his latest post, Musk envisioned the day when a rocket successfully lands on the Martian surface. The billionaire shared a picture of a spacecraft and caption it, “This will be Mars one day.”
The rocket in the picture is SpaceX’s Starship project–a reusable rocket system on which the company is currently working at.
Last month, the SpaceX CEO wrote, “Mars may be a fixer-upper of a planet, but it has great potential.”
Mars may be a fixer upper of a planet, but it has great potential!
A Twitter user asked Musk about the estimated timeframe for human civilization on Marsh. Musk responded by saying, “20 to 30 years from first human landing if launch rate growth is exponential.”
20 to 30 years from first human landing if launch rate growth is exponential.
Assumes transferring ~100k each rendezvous and ~1M total people needed.
Yesterday, Elon Musk’s SpaceX won certification from the Pentagon’s Space Force to use recyclable boosters on its Falcon Heavy rocket to launch top-secret spy satellites.
The certification for SpaceX — which was issued in June but not previously disclosed — allows the recyclable first-stage side boosters to be used in sensitive national security launches requiring power performance beyond that of the company’s original Falcon 9. The Space Force found that the “recovery, refurbishment, and launch of SpaceX boosters utilizes well-established processes,” the service said in a statement.
The first classified National Security Space Launch mission using a Falcon Heavy with refurbished boosters is scheduled for sometime from October to December, according to the Space Force. It’s a mission to launch a satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office, which develops and manages spy satellites, according to a previous Space Force statement.
SpaceX has launched more than 100 missions using the Falcon 9 with reusable boosters, most of them commercial.
The reuse of previously flown boosters on Falcon 9 missions has “saved the US Space Force more than $64 million for GPS III missions and avoided additional costs for requirements changes while adding manifest flexibility for both the launch provider and our warfighters,” Walter Lauderdale, chief of the Falcon Division within the Space Systems Command’s “Assured Access to Space” organization, said in a statement.
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Tesla boss Elon Musk has sold US$6.9 billion ($9.8 billion) worth of shares in the electric vehicle maker, saying the funds could be used to finance a potential Twitter deal if he loses a legal battle with the social media platform.
Key points:
Mr Musk is selling shares in Tesla as he gets his finances in order ahead of a court battle with Twitter
The social media platform is suing the billionaire over his effort to walk away from an April agreement to buy the company
The Tesla boss has filed a countersuit, alleging Twitter misled him about key aspects of his business
“In the (hopefully unlikely) event that Twitter forces this deal to close *and* some equity partners don’t come through, it is important to avoid an emergency sale of Tesla stock,” he said in a tweet late on Tuesday.
Shares of the microblogging site rose 3.5 per cent to $44.35 in pre-market trading, but were still trading significantly below Mr Musk’s offer price of $54.20 per share.
Tesla shares were up 1.6 per cent at $863.1.
Mr Musk in early July tore up his April 25 agreement to buy Twitter for $44 billion.
Twitter has sued Mr Musk to force him to complete the transaction, dismissing his claim that he was misled about the number of spam accounts on the social media platform as buyer’s remorse, in the wake of a plunge in technology stocks.
The two sides head to trial on October 17.
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Following the announcement of the share sale on Tuesday, Mr Musk took to Twitter and said “yes” when asked if he was done selling Tesla stock, adding he would buy it again if the Twitter deal does not close.
“The removal of the ‘fire sale’ risk, the fact Musk has already raised cash in case of a Twitter decision going against him and the comment that he’ll buy back stock if Twitter deal gets dropped all builds into a positive bias for Tesla ,” said Mark Taylor, sales trader at Mirabaud Securities.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The stock comes out shortly after Mr Musk said at the company’s annual general meeting that Tesla was a “buying opportunity”.
“Elon’s sale of (Tesla shares) over the past three days significantly increases odds the (Twitter) deal gets done, albeit at a slightly lower price $50-$51/share,” Gary Black, managing partner of Future Fund LLC, said in a tweet.
Mr Musk, the world’s richest person, sold $8.5 billion worth of Tesla shares in April and had said at the time there were no further sales planned. But since then, legal experts had suggested that if Mr Musk is forced to complete the acquisition or settle the dispute with a stiff penalty, he was likely to sell more Tesla shares.
Mr Musk sold about 7.92 million shares between August 5 and August 9, and now owns just under 15 per cent of the company, according to Reuters’ calculations.
The latest sales bring total Tesla stock sales by Mr Musk to about $32 billion in less than one year.
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Elon Musk vowing to buy Twitter for $61.4 billion.
Tesla shares have risen nearly 15 per cent since the company reported better-than-expected earnings on July 20, also helped by the Biden administration’s climate bill that, if passed, would lift the cap on tax credits for electric vehicles.
Mr Musk also teased on Tuesday that he could start his own social media platform.
When asked by a Twitter user if he had thought about creating his own platform if the deal didn’t close, he replied: “X.com”
The static fire test of Booster 7, in which one of the rocket’s 33 Raptor engines was ignited. photo: SpaceX
Engineers at SpaceX have performed the first static fire test of Booster 7, a prototype of the Super Heavy first stage. The test, in which just one of the booster’s 33 Raptor engines was ignited, moves the company closer to its first orbital test of the revolutionary Starship system.
The test happened on August 8 at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, according to a company tweet. Ground teams completed a single Raptor engine static fire test as the 227-foot-tall (69 meters) booster stood vertically at the “Mechazilla” launch tower. Booster 7 is equipped with 33 Raptor engines, but SpaceX, in a rare moment of caution, chose to ignite just one.
Encouragingly, a pair of spin-prime tests conducted earlier in the day did not result in an burst. SpaceX avoided a repeat of the July 11 incident in which a gaseous mixture of methane and oxygen was accidentally ignited, causing a significant explosion directly beneath the booster.
Spin-prime tests, in which propellants are pumped through the engines without igniting them, are typically done in preparation of static fire tests (static fire tests involve engine burns without an actual launch of the rocket). They’re done to test the plumbing, but the gasses produced during the July 11 spin-prime test got ignited by an unknown source. The resulting explosion damaged the prototype booster, sending it back to the Starbase factory for repairs.
Booster 7 returned to the launch pad on August 6 following the re-installation of 20 of the rocket’s 33 Raptor engines, accordingly to Teslarati. On August 8, “clearly indicative of a much more cautious second attempt at engine testing, SpaceX ‘primed’ just one of those 20 Raptors by flowing high-pressure gas through the engine to spin up its turbopumps without igniting its preburners (used to generate the gas that powers the turbopumps) or main combustion chamber,” as Teslarati reports.
Later that day, SpaceX ignited the lone Raptor engine. The company have you performed a static fire test of a Starship booster prototype before, but this marks the first static fire test of Booster 7, even if limited in scale. The test appeared to go smoothly, with the engine firing and shutting down following a four-second burn. Not content to stop there, SpaceX also performed static fire tests of two Raptors on an upper stage, namely the prototype Starship 24.
It’s a small step for Starship, but a potentially big leap for SpaceX, as it works to develop its revolutionary heavy launch system. The booster is the first stage of the fully reusable two-stage rocket, with the Starship spacecraft serving as the upper stage. SpaceX envisions Starship as a platform for delivering passengers and cargo to deep space, including future missions to Mars. It’s also NASA’s current first choice to serve as the human landing system for Artemis 3, scheduled for no earlier than 2025.
Both Starship stages are powered by Raptor engines, which are more powerful than the Merlin engines used on the company’s Falcon 9 rockets. The Starship upper stage has already completed a series of suborbital tests, including a successful vertical landing on May 5, 2021. A launch of the fully stacked system has yet to take place, but SpaceX expects to perform an orbital test at some point this year. CEO Elon Musk expects this test will fail, saying a successful orbital test could happen at some point within the next 12 months.
The sight of a single Raptor engine burn is impressive, making it hard to imagine what it’ll look like when all 33 Raptor engines are set to go-mode. The successful test on August 8 suggests a full-fledged static fire test of Booster 7 is closely approaching.
More: Gigantic Crowds Expected for Inaugural Launch of NASA’s Mega Rocket.
Elon Musk’s father has back-pedaled on his comments about his billionaire son after he said he wasn’t proud of his famous offspring.
During the latest episode of Piers Morgan Uncensoredavailable to stream on Flash, Errol Musk, 76, addressed the stunning remark and said he was misquoted.
“I never said anything like that,” he said on the show.
“I have been proud of him since the day he was born.
“A person doesn’t suddenly become proud of your child. That’s ridiculous.
“As far as saying, I don’t like him. I mean, that’s crazy. I love him.”
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The elder Musk made headlines last week after he took a savage dig at the Tesla CEO.
In an interview with KIIS FM’s Kyle and Jackie Othe South African engineer dismissed his son’s success.
“Your offspring is a genius. He’s worth so much money and has created so many things, you can’t take that away from him. Are you proud? Jackie O asked.
“Nope. You know, we are a family that have been doing a lot of things for a long time, it’s not as if we suddenly started doing something,” Errol replied.
The 76-year-old also took a swipe at his son’s physical appearance while discussing recent shirtless photos of Elon on a yacht in Greece.
“Elon is very well-built and he is very, very strongly built, but he’s been eating badly,” he said.
Errol said he had recommended his son take a weight loss supplement called garcinia cambogia, which he claimed has helped him shed the kilos.
Elon is Errol’s eldest son with his ex-wife, model Maye Musk. The former couple also share are Kimbal and daughter Tosca.
The latest episode of Piers Morgan Uncensored will air tonight at 9pm AEST on Sky News. Watch on Foxtel, Stream on Flash.
Elon Musk has called Instagram a “next-level thirst trap” full of attractive women, and admitted that he stopped using the photo-sharing app after he found himself taking too many selfies.
“I was on Instagram for a while but I mean, so the problem is Instagram, man, it’s just a thirst trap, you know?” Musk said on an episode of the full send podcast last week, the new york post reports.
“Instagram is a next-level thirst trap.”
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A co-host then asked Musk to clarify, “On the women side, right?”
“Yeah, yeah, totally,” replied Musk, who has fathered 10 children with three different women.
“But the thing is I found myself taking like a lot of selfies and sh*t and I’m like, what the f**k man. Why am I doing this?
Musk then said that he realized that he was wasting his time with the app and decided to delete his account.
“I’m like, oh I’m trying to get more likes and do selfies, I’m not gonna – I gotta stop,” he said.
Musk said that he now maintains a “secret Instagram account” that he uses to look at posts.
He said he prefers using Twitter to communicate with the public.
“Whatever message I’m trying to get across I can just post on Twitter,” Musk said.
This article originally appeared in the New York Post and was reproduced with permission
