SpaceX agrees to take Italian experiments to Mars
"Italy is going to Mars!" Italian Space Agency president Teodoro Valente said on X, adding that the scientific experiments would fly on the first Starship trips to the red planet that have customers.
Musk dreams of colonising Mars using Starship; however, the massive rocket has suffered several setbacks after recent tests ended in spectacular explosions.
Still, the world's richest man, who is known for his aggressively optimistic timelines, maintains that the first Starship launches will take place next year.
SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell also announced the "first-of-its-kind" deal with the Italian Space Agency, saying that there was "more to come."
"Get on board! We are going to Mars! SpaceX is now offering Starship services to the red planet," she posted on X, formerly Twitter.
Musk, the world's richest man and a former close advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump, has cultivated close ties with Italy's hard-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
A proposed cybersecurity deal between the Italian government and Musk's satellite company Starlink was heavily criticised by opposition parties in Italy earlier this year.
In June, a SpaceX Starship rocket exploded during a routine ground test, resulting in the complete loss of the vessel.
Standing 403 feet (123 meters) tall, Starship is the world's largest and most powerful rocket and is billed as a fully reusable rocket with a payload capacity of up to 150 metric tons.
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Hindustan Times
35 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
Fuel Fill-Ups in Space? Musk and Bezos Are Working on It
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are trying to figure out how to pump gas in space. The billionaire space rivals are working on ambitious missions to the moon or Mars, and a crucial design element for each venture is using spacecraft that take on additional fuel while orbiting Earth. Vehicles that could grab propellants in orbit would be less weighed down at liftoff, letting planners design missions to travel farther from Earth with more cargo, scientific gear or crew members, advocates say. Having depots or in-orbit refueling that give spacecraft something like a truck stop to pull into may sound like science fiction. It is also a concept that engineers have been working on for years. One of the biggest challenges to making it a reality: moving and storing massive amounts of supercold propellants that are prone to boil off in the void of space. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin have much to prove. Some space-industry officials are skeptical that either will have moon landers that depend on orbital fueling ready to meet National Aeronautics and Space Administration timelines. The agency has worked closely with contractors to understand the challenges of in-space refueling, a NASA spokesman says. SpaceX conducted a fuel-transfer demonstration inside a Starship spacecraft during a 2024 test flight and next year is aiming to move propellants between two vehicles. That test has been delayed as the company has faced setbacks with the massive rocket, including an explosion during a ground test in Texas in June. Blue Origin is developing a transporter vehicle that would take on propellant near Earth. Then, it would fly to a lunar orbit, where the transporter would prepare a lander that would take astronauts arriving on a different ship down to the surface of the moon. That mission depends on the company's New Glenn rocket, which the company launched for the first time in January. Engineers have long built rockets and spacecraft to take on all the fuel they need while still on the ground. Those designs have proven their value. They also have their limitations. Take NASA's Apollo missions to the moon. Saturn V, the rocket that sent agency astronauts there, weighed 6.5 million pounds at liftoff, and around 5.5 million of those pounds were fuel. Combined with reusable rockets, fueling in space could make deep-space flights cheaper over time and ease mission logistics, supporters say. 'It has got to be done,' says Dallas Bienhoff, who formerly studied setting up a low-Earth-orbit propellant depot for Boeing and now works for Pasadena, Calif.-based robotic-mining company OffWorld. 'Otherwise, we're going to be limited with what we can achieve in space.' Musk put it this way during a conference talk in 2017. Starship, which then went by a different name, was expected to loft a spacecraft carrying a large amount of mass to low-Earth orbit. The ship wouldn't be able to travel farther without more fuel, he said. 'If you send up tankers, and refill in orbit, you can refill the tanks all the way to the top,' Musk said then. That would allow the ship to continue out to Mars, he added. From Apollo to the present Orbital refueling isn't a new idea. In the early 1960s, NASA officials considered such operations as they tried to figure out how to land astronauts on the lunar surface before the Soviets. The idea didn't go forward then, but it didn't go away. A range of in-space fueling experiments or operations have been conducted over the years, including by Russia. In 2007, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and partners conducted more than a dozen fuel transfers between two satellites. But no U.S. company has put in-space propellant transfers at the center of their deep-space plans as SpaceX and Blue Origin have. Part of the reason is making it all work is difficult. Spacecraft will need to rendezvous in orbit, connect with each other and flow large amounts of propellants from one vehicle to another. The nature of the propellants SpaceX and Blue Origin have proposed using makes transferring them especially tricky. The fuels are chilled to supercold levels to keep them liquid, and have a tendency to boil off. 'It wouldn't be easy to do on Earth. But now you have to do it in space, pumping it from one big refrigerator to another,' says Thomas Cooley, formerly chief scientist for a space-vehicles group at the Air Force Research Laboratory who now has a space-consulting business. Dave Limp, chief executive at Blue Origin, said in a social-media post in July the company had made major progress maturing technologies that aim to prevent propellants from boiling off in space. Fuels also behave in odd ways in space. When you pump gasoline into your car's tank, the gas flows in a predictable manner but that isn't necessarily the case in orbit. 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During a presentation earlier this year, a Blue Origin executive didn't specify how many refueling flights the company may need for a NASA mission that has it transporting astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon. For its NASA astronaut moon missions, SpaceX has been planning to conduct multiple launches of a tanker variant of its Starship spacecraft to fuel up a Starship depot in low-Earth orbit, according to NASA officials. Then the company would send a moon-lander Starship to the depot to take on fuel. After that, the lander would fly out to the moon. An executive at SpaceX early last year estimated a moon mission for NASA could take around 10 flights, while a different leader at the company last fall predicted around 16. Some current and former space-industry officials say the number of launches needed may be higher. One former NASA leader during a congressional hearing in February said as many as 20 could be required. A technical paper that has circulated among some industry officials and was viewed by The Wall Street Journal suggests it may take up to 40. Musk, during a recent presentation about SpaceX's plans for Mars, didn't discuss the number of flights that would be needed to send a Starship to the red planet. Staff at the company have talked about trying to send a basic, uncrewed ship out there next year with as few as three refueling flights, the Journal has reported. In a recent post on his social-media site X, Musk said a Starship flight to Mars in 2026 would be tough, giving it just a slight chance of happening. Micah Maidenberg is a reporter in the Chicago bureau of The Wall Street Journal. Email him at
The Hindu
35 minutes ago
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India.com
an hour ago
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Rs 2580000000: Sacked by Elon Musk, this Indian-origin founder makes a bold comeback, launches his own company; name is.., he is…
Indian-origin Parag Agrawal, former CEO of Twitter (now called X), is once again in the news headlines. In 2022, Elon Musk acquired Twitter and rebranded it as X. Out of significant changes, including the rebranding of the social media platform, the new owner, Musk, removed the then-CEO Parag Agrawal, along with several top executives. Who is this Indian-origin founder making a comeback after being sacked by Elon Musk? Once again, Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has made a new comeback with his AI startup: Parallel Web Systems. Primarily, the AI startup is a cloud platform that is specifically designed for AI systems to assist them in performing online research. What is the name of the company he has launched? 'The open web is a miracle. Anyone can publish, learn, and collaborate. It's the closest thing to humanity's living memory. This open ecosystem fueled today's AI breakthroughs,' reads the official website of Parallel Web Systems. Parag Agrawal is a prominent Indian-American software engineer who has had a significant impact in the tech industry. On November 29, 2021, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced Parag as the company's next CEO when he stepped down. However, following Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter in October 2022, he was released from his position. Hailing from Ajmer, Rajasthan, Parag Agrawal completed his Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Furthermore, he completed his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computer Science from Stanford University. How much funding has the new company raised so far? In 2023, Agrawal established Parallel and quietly assembled a 25-member team in Palo Alto. The company secured funding from notable investors Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, and Index Ventures. In two years, the company has pulled down $30 million (around Rs 258 crore). It is to be noted that we are taking the rate of 1 USD = Rs 86, $30 million equals Rs 2,580,000,000 (Rs 258 crore). The company states that the Parnelle system executes millions of research tasks daily, and the founding clients were some of the fastest-growing AI companies. According to Parallel's blog post, the company is already processing millions of research tasks daily, and some of its clients are the fastest growing AI companies in the world. In simple terms, the ex-twitter CEO's new AI platform allows, and assists AI applications to access real-time public internet data and apply it directly in its responses. It is like giving AI access to a browser that grabs the right information, reviews, verifies and organises it. According to the company's blog post, their AI systems are able to provide as many as eight different research engines. The fastest system allows a response time as low as a minute. The company's most advanced Ultra8x can look for highly details information or data for thirty minutes. The company offers that its Ultra8x had over 10 percent better performance than OpenAI's GPT-5 in BrowseComp and DeepResearch Bench.
