#spacex-starlink

[spacenutspod]

Astronomy Daily - The Podcast: S03E192 Welcome to Astronomy Daily, your premier source for the latest news in space and Astronomy. I'm your host, Anna, and today we're embarking on a cosmic journey that spans from the militarization of space to the mysteries of Venus. Highlights: - Militarization of Space: As space becomes a potential battleground, nations worldwide are investing in space defense. With both kinetic and non-kinetic weapons being explored, the risks of an arms race in space are growing, raising concerns about the need for updated international regulations. - ESA's HERA Mission Success: The European Space Agency's HERA mission marks a milestone with its CubeSats, Juventus and Milani, successfully signaling from deep space. This achievement paves the way for future deep space missions using these miniature satellites. - Launch Schedule: A busy week for space launches includes China's Shenzhou 19 mission, SpaceX's multiple Starlink launches, and a secretive Russian mission. With Rocket Lab also joining the action, the global space launch landscape continues to expand. - China's Space Milestone: Wang Haoze becomes China's only female spaceflight engineer to join the Tiangong Space Station crew, marking a significant step in China's space exploration efforts and highlighting its commitment to diversity. - NASA's Artemis 3 Landing Sites: NASA narrows down potential landing sites for the Artemis 3 mission near the Moon's south pole. These sites offer scientific value and the potential for sustainable lunar exploration, setting the stage for future human missions to Mars. - Venus's Ancient Impact Craters: New research suggests the discovery of ancient impact craters on Venus, providing insights into the planet's geological history and challenging our understanding of planetary evolution. For more cosmic news, visit our website at astronomydaily.io. Sign up for our free Daily newsletter and explore sponsor links for great deals. Catch up on all our previous episodes and join our celestial community on social media. Find us as #AstroDailyPod on Facebook, X, YouTube, Tumblr, and TikTok. Share your thoughts and connect with fellow space enthusiasts. Thank you for tuning in. This is Anna signing off. Until next time, keep looking up and stay curious about the wonders of our universe. Sponsor Links: NordVPN - www.bitesz.com/nordvpn - currently Up to 74% off + 3 extra months Old Glory - www.bitesz.com/oldglory Official NASA Merch. Over 100,000 items in stock Proton Mail - www.bitesz.com/protonmail Secure email that protects your privacy Malwarebytes - www.bitesz.com/malwarebytes Premium protection for you and all your devices! Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-the-podcast--5648921/support

[without-ado]

SpaceX Falcon 9 Launches Starlink 6-55

l Charles Boyer l Cape Canaveral SFS, FL

[odinsblog]

Elon Musk essentially has veto power over our government on Ukraine. This is no less than a national security concern, and everyone should have a BIG problem with Elon Musk, an unelected Libertarian billionaire, being the sole veto over whether or not Ukraine can take back their own country. Today he’s siding with Russia against Ukraine, but tomorrow, who knows…? StarLink and SpaceX need to be nationalized.

👉🏿 https://apple.news/A5IfJ-36wQLStZuLoGvDd-g

👉🏿 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/elon-musks-shadow-rule

[tomorrowusa]

Elon Musk, Donald Trump's chief pompom boy, has been secretly communicating with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin for the last few years.

A report that Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has been in regular contact over the past few years with President Vladimir Putin will not come as much of a surprise to officials in Ukraine—or to the frontline troops fighting a brutal war of attrition with Russian forces. In the few months after Putin’s illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the South African-born billionaire was hailed a hero by the country’s defenders as they used Musk’s Starlink satellite terminals to coordinate their military operations. Freely provided by Musk in a gesture of solidarity, the terminals gave Ukrainians a crucial battleground edge against the numerically superior Russian forces. Since then, however, relations between Musk and Ukrainian leaders have deteriorated significantly. The Wall Street Journal report on the regular contact between Musk and the Kremlin—the newspaper says Putin even asked Musk not to activate Starlink over Taiwan as a favor to China’s Xi Jinping—will only confirm suspicions in Ukraine that, if not yet a full-blown Russian asset, Musk is becoming a Russian ally. And Starlink is the key. The portable satellite terminals, allowing reliable and secure internet access, remain the backbone of Ukraine’s frontline communications—although the bill is now picked up by the Pentagon rather than Starlink, a subsidiary of Musk’s SpaceX. Increasingly, however, the Russians are using them too. Ukrainian officials say Russian forces are deploying thousands of the terminals in captured Ukrainian territory, closing the technology gap and enabling their grindingly slow and brutal offensive in the Donetsk region. Because of international sanctions, Starlink cannot sell its hardware in Russia and its satellite do not cover Russian territory. But the Russians appear to have a reliable supply of smuggled Starlink terminals through a third country, which its forces can then use in Ukraine.

Well, now we know how Putin obtained those Starlink terminals.

While Russia illicitly using Starlink in communications networks and drones is an alarming sign that they can access American technology to make their drones better, they might not become commonplace. Russian forces on the ground are in desperate need of stable communications and the military might prioritize giving them Starlink access over putting the hardware in a drone that will more than likely be shot down after a single use. Even if Starlink is put in some Shahed variants, it’s unlikely that every single one of the dozens of drones launched per month would have it. Even so, Russia’s use of Starlink to coordinate its forces and drones create new worries for Ukraine and SpaceX alike.

It's deeply troubling that somebody with close ties to America's space program should be playing footsie with one of America's enemies.

With Election Day 10 days away, what are YOU doing in real life to defeat the Trump-Musk-Putin Axis? You can inform low information voters, you can help people vote, and you can shoot down bullshit you hear being publicly spewed by MAGA cultists.

If you don't have a bone spur or something, see how you can help in the final stretch of the campaign.

Volunteer | Kamala Harris for President

[michaelpaul7]

☝️💲💲💲💲💲

[pear-boy]

To anybody wondering what exactly happened to twitter on Brazil here's the full version of the story coming from a brazilian:

-Elon closes the branch offices in Brazil as some sort of protest.

-Supreme court sends an email to the legal representative to ask for the removal of about 14 far right/nazi accounts.

-Twitter doesn't respond, a daily fine of 20.000 reais and an arrest warrent for the national administrator (15 days to 6 months + fine).

-Elon takes away the coutry's legal representative. Foreign companies need an office and/or a legal rep to be allowed to operate in Brazil.

-The official twitter account posts about being censored in Brazil, mentioning by name the judge who had sent the intimation and arguing that it wasn't made public. The judge in question then commented under the post, leaving the whole document for anyone to read as they like. Twitter has 24 hours to appoint a new rep and pay their more then 150 million reais in accumulated fines or it'll be blocked in Brazil.

-Elon says he will not comply with the Supreme court's decisions and instead resorts t posting corny AI generated images on his account.

-24 hours pass with no other negotiations from Twitter and as such the process of blocking the site as well as shutting down related Starlink accounts and freezing both of their bank assets starts. (https://noticias-stf-wp-prd.s3.sa-east-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/wpallimport/uploads/2024/08/30171714/PET-12404-Assinada.pdf)

-At this point the brazilian army sends a message to the supreme court stating that they were using Starlink for their own communications.

Elon had no problems with blocking accounts in other countries like in India but he had long been attacking the brazilian government since the 2022 election where former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro lost. Elon had been eyeing up brazilian lithium, Starlink was primarily sold to illegal miners in the Amazon and the military had been using it to coordinate about mineral deposits. Anyone can clearly see Elon's true intentions were to spread misinformation and destabilize the country for his own gain, we already know what his position with South America is when Bolivia nationalized it's lithium. Please spread the truth and don't believe this coward's lies, Brazil is a free, democratic sovereign country and he will stop at nothing until it's back at where it was in the 60's if it meas he'll have to spend slightly less money to make his stupid cars.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Lisa Needham at Public Notice:

Elon Musk is busy. No, not because he’s attending to any of his multibillion-dollar companies. For Tesla and SpaceX and Starlink, he’s full of wild promises with very little actual progress. But what Musk is really spending time on these days is attacking the core foundations of American democracy on multiple fronts. There’s his thus-far successful effort to get rid of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). There’s his political action committee, America PAC, which pretends to help register people to vote but is just hoovering up voter data to give to the Trump campaign. And there’s his lawsuit seeking to force companies to advertise on X, despite the fact advertisers generally do not want their ads running next to the Nazi content X is full of now. All of these efforts have the potential to succeed because the federal courts are broken, and the administrative state is dying a slow and painful death. 

Immiserating workers

Let’s start with the NLRB. It’s no surprise that Musk is no friend to labor. He doesn’t believe in unions, saying that they create “a lords and peasants sort of thing,” whatever that means. When workers at his Fremont, California, plant began an organizing campaign, he tweeted that they would lose their stock options if they joined the union. This sort of threat is extremely illegal, and the NLRB sided with the workers who brought multiple unfair labor practices charges against Tesla. Tesla also prohibited workers from wearing t-shirts with union insignias, even though the right to wear pro-union clothing at work has been a legally protected activity for several decades. Then, of course, there’s the class-action lawsuit in California state court, where almost 6,000 Black workers at the Fremont factory recently got the right to sue Tesla for ignoring massive racism at that plant. How massive? Nooses at the workstations of Black workers massive.  [...]

A scam PAC

America PAC purports to help people register to vote. If you live in a state that isn’t a swing state, that’s what the PAC’s website does — sends you over to your state’s voter registration page. But if you live somewhere in play this November, the America PAC website asks you for detailed personal information, including things utterly unrelated to voter eligibility, like your cellphone number. After all that is entered, the PAC doesn’t register you at all. It doesn’t even send the user to their state registration website. It just displays a “thank you” page.  So, swing state voters may think they’re registering, but they’re not. Instead, they’ve handed over their data to a PAC that is coordinating with the Trump campaign. While PACs are generally not allowed to work directly with campaigns, America PAC is a door-to-door canvassing group, and those, inexplicably, can work hand in hand with a candidate. However, pretending to register people to vote is probably a bridge too far.

[...]

Suing advertisers

Mr. Free Speech is also availing himself of the courts to try to force companies to advertise on X. On Tuesday, X filed a lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), an advertising trade group, in the Wichita Falls Division of the Northern District of Texas. Why Wichita Falls, some 300 miles from Austin, where Tesla is located? Because the Northern District of Texas enthusiastically embraces judge shopping, and every case in Wichita Falls goes to Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee who routinely tries to throw out the whole of the Affordable Care Act and is a reliable vote for anything conservatives want. (The WFA announced Thursday that it’s shutting down because it does not have the financial resources to fight X in court.) Musk already has another case before Reed O’Connor on a similarly twisted legal theory.

Late last year, X sued Media Matters in O’Connor’s court after Media Matters accurately pointed out that ads were appearing next to the Nazi and white nationalist content that is rife on X now. That case shouldn’t exist, period, and it especially shouldn’t be in O’Connor’s courtroom. As Mike Masnick pointed out over at Techdirt, X is incorporated in Nevada, with headquarters in California. Media Matters is in DC, and the Media Matters writer named in the suit is in Maryland. The only connection to Texas is that Reed O’Connor is very friendly to conservatives.

Elon Musk is selling out to enemies of America who seek to erode our democracy.

[jackass-democrats]

The socialist democrat party is trying to sabotage America's efforts to stay ahead of our enemies, china and Russia.

[jackassdemocrats]

The socialist democrat party is trying to sabotage America's efforts to stay ahead of our enemies, china and Russia.

[juhnkit]

The First time I had ever seen this was November of 2021. I thought for sure that the Aliens had arrived. The coolest thing I'd ever seen in the sky. SpaceX Starlink Satellite

[sobie-pan]

A SpaceX Starlink satellite train in the nightsky.

[without-ado]

Launch of SpaceX Starlink 66-5 l Pete Carstens

[probablyasocialecologist]

In the past twenty years, against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where, after decades of privatization, the state has receded. The government is now reliant on him, but struggles to respond to his risk-taking, brinkmanship, and caprice. Current and former officials from NASA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration told me that Musk’s influence had become inescapable in their work, and several of them said that they now treat him like a sort of unelected official. One Pentagon spokesman said that he was keeping Musk apprised of my inquiries about his role in Ukraine and would grant an interview with an official about the matter only with Musk’s permission. “We’ll talk to you if Elon wants us to,” he told me. In a podcast interview last year, Musk was asked whether he has more influence than the American government. He replied immediately, “In some ways.” Reid Hoffman told me that Musk’s attitude is “like Louis XIV: ‘L’état, c’est moi.’��”

[thepastisalreadywritten]

The remainder of the crew’s time in orbit was spent carrying out nearly 40 science experiments and research, including some that sought to better understand space adaptation syndrome — a type of microgravity-specific motion sickness.

Gillis, a trained violinist, also brought her instrument along for the mission and delivered a rendition of “Rey’s Theme” from “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”

Gillis’ music was sent back to Earth using SpaceX’s Starlink as a test of the satellite network’s potential to provide in-space connectivity.

Menon also took time to read a book she coauthored — called “Kisses From Space” — to her family as well as a group of patients from St. Jude Children’s Hospital as part of a fundraiser.

Sunday’s anticipated return marks the conclusion of the third trip to space for the specific Crew Dragon capsule powering the Polaris Dawn mission.

The spacecraft — named “Resilience” by the NASA astronauts onboard its first trip to space in November 2020 called (Crew-1) — flew the 2021 Inspiration 4 mission.

That trip, also funded by Isaacman, saw him and three crewmates circle Earth for three days as part of a fundraiser for childhood cancer research.

[thefreethoughtprojectcom]

Starlink satellites consist of more than 7,000 small satellites in low Earth orbit. SpaceX has plans for 12,000 satellites over the coming years. Should we be worried?

Read More: https://thefreethoughtproject.com/government-surveillance/elon-musk-spacex-are-helping-us-intelligence-build-the-worlds-largest-spy-satellite-network

#TheFreeThoughtProject