SpaceX has officially confirmed that it has received an investment for a total of one billion dollars from Google and Fidelity Investments, a multinational financial services corporation. The rumors of Google’s involvement in the aerospace company begun a few days ago, after its founder Elon Musk announced a project to build and launch a constellation of satellites that will provide Internet services around the world and even in space.
In recent days the NGTS (Next-Generation Transit Survey) has been put into operation. It’s a new instrument to search for exoplanets built to find super-Earths with a size starting from twice the Earth up to Neptune-like planets eight times the size of the Earth. It’s composed of an array of 12 telescopes with an aperture of 20 cm each which is located at the ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile.
The novel “Starship: Mercenary” by Mike Resnick was published for the first time in 2007. It is the third novel in the “Starship” series and follows “Starship: Pirate”.
After rebelling, the crew of the former Republic starship Theodore Roosevelt spent a period in which they were pirates but it wasn’t the right choice. Now Captain Wilson Cole started offering the starship and crew’s services as mercenaries selecting jobs to keep certain ethical and moral values.
Wilson Cole is assisted by the alien who calls himself David Copperfield in finding paid jobs but the ones he found tend to be really dangerous. Cole decides to reach a space station that is important as a leisure center but also for contacts in the frontier. There, he and his crew will find new opportunities but also new dangers.
OneWeb, Ltd announced plans to launch a series of satellites in low Earth orbit to bring telephone services and especially broadband Internet worldwide. The first investors investors are Qualcomm, an American semiconductor and telecommunications company, and the Virgin Group with its founder, Sir Richard Branson, personally committed.
OneWeb was in talks with Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, for a partnership, but the ideas were different concerning the constellation’s architecture. It’s for this reason that Musk has just announced his own similar project that seems more ambitious considering that he also intends to bring the Internet into space, until Mars to connect future colonies. It’s a project even more expensive since we’re talking about a $10 billion investment.
On January 10, 2015, after having successfully launched the Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station, the first stage of the rocket Falcon 9 SpaceX attempted a controlled landing on an automated marine platform. A few hours later news arrived that the first stage had reached the platform but had landed too fast, smashing into pieces. Yesterday Elon Musk, SpaceX founder, released the impressive pictures of the event.
