Articles about SpaceX

We reported earlier today that Tesla and SpaceX tycoon Elon Musk looked poised to snap up Twitter, and now we have official confirmation that Twitter’s board has indeed agreed to the takeover.

The social network has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Musk for $54.20 per share in cash, with a transaction value of approximately $44 billion.

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We reported two weeks ago that Tesla and SpaceX tycoon Elon Musk had put in a bid to buy Twitter, though it seemed at the time that the company’s board wasn’t too keen on the idea.

Fast forward to today and it seems that Musk's $43 billion offer is likely to be accepted. Financial site Bloomberg reports that a deal is close with negotiations in their final stages.

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There is lots of good news lately for SpaceX, especially NASA choosing the Hawthorne, CA-based company to build a $2.89 billion lunar lander for NASA’s Artemis Moon landing slated for 2024. Key to that single-source contract, which eliminates two competitors including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, was SpaceX’s willingness to restructure payments to fit the $750 million appropriated by Congress this fiscal year for the project.

Already the lowest Artemis bidder, Elon Musk’s company was willing to make the deal work for the customer, which is unusual thinking for space contractors, with many asking, Where did SpaceX get the money?

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The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently gave SpaceX permission to build Starlink -- Elon Musk's version of satellite-based broadband Internet. The FCC specifically approved launching the first 4,425 of what will eventually total 11,925 satellites in orbit. To keep this license SpaceX has to launch at least 2,213 satellites within six years. The implications of this project are mind-boggling with the most important probably being that it will likely result in SpaceX crushing its space launch competitors, companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin's United Launch Alliance (ULA) partnership as well as Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin.

Starlink is a hugely ambitious project. It isn't the first proposed Internet-in-the-sky. Back in the 1990s a Bill Gates-backed startup called Teledesic proposed to put 840 satellites in orbit to provide 10 megabit-per-second (mbps) broadband anywhere on Earth. Despite spending hundreds of millions, Teledesic was just ahead of its time, killed by a lack of cost-effective launch services. Twenty years later there are several Teledesic-like proposals, the most significant of which may be OneWeb -- variously 882 or 648 or 1972 satellites, depending who is talking, offering 50 mbps. OneWeb has raised more than $1 billion, found a launch partner in Arianespace and even broken ground on a satellite factory in Orlando, Florida.

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The computers the human race currently work with aren't built for space, and can't last long in off-planet environments. Astronauts aboard the ISS need new machines every month, as the old ones get destroyed by various factors that don't exist on Earth, like solar flares, radiation, subatomic particles, and irregular cooling.

Considering that SpaceX is currently preparing for a mission to Mars, it is paramount that the astronauts that eventually head out there have durable, working machines. Now, HP has announced it is working with NASA to create such a computer.

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Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has revealed plans to send a constellation of 700 low-orbit satellites, which would be capable of powering the world’s wireless Internet.

That plan took its next step when Musk filed the project to the Federal Communications Commission. Musk will also need permission from NASA to launch the satellites, alongside a few other organizations in the US government.

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Elon Musk is renowned worldwide for his roles as co-founder of PayPal and CEO of green technology giants Solar City, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors. Now, the billionaire has crafted a feasible plan for supplying Internet to all areas of the world through the use of low Earth orbit satellites -- a project which he hopes will also act as a monetary springboard for an ambitious attempt at colonizing Mars. Of course, Musk has not forgotten his eco-friendly roots, and he is expanding on those with new technology for reducing environmental impact at home.

To grant Internet access to the entire globe, Musk wants to launch hundreds or possibly thousands of satellites. Since satellite Internet typically involves high latency and slower connections, due to the time a signal takes bounce between the Earth’s surface and a geostationary satellite, one of the major aims of Musk’s approach is to replace the current approach of using a small number of large, expensive satellites with an approach that instead uses hundreds of smaller, cheaper devices, expanding coverage and reducing data transmission times.

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