Elon Musk Helps Washington Town Destroyed By Wildfires By Supplying Starlink Internet For Free
A Washington town ravaged by wildfires this month has been supplied with an internet connection thanks to Elon Musk's "Starlink" project.
The state's Emergency Management Division shared a photo of a SpaceX antenna on its Twitter profile yesterday—taking advantage of Musk's in-progress satellite constellation, which has been pitched as way of providing high speed broadband across the globe.
SpaceX Is Trying To Launch 60 Starlink Internet Satellites Into Space
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Authorities indicated that it was supplied for first responders working to rebuild the small town of Malden. On September 8, police said 80 percent of the area, including homes and city government buildings, had been totally destroyed by flames.
"Happy to have the support of @SpaceX's Starlink internet as emergency responders look to help residents rebuild the town of Malden, WA that was overcome by wildfires earlier this month," WA Emergency Management wrote in a caption.
It added: "Malden is an area where fiber and most of the town burned down. Without this equipment, it would have been much harder for folks to get internet in that area." In a later update, the account said that the equipment was provided for free.
In a tweet on Monday, SpaceX's billionaire CEO Musk said he was "glad" to help and noted the project was now "prioritizing emergency responders and locations with no internet connectivity."
There are currently around 120 Starlink satellites being built every month, with hundreds already launched into orbit, according to SpaceX data obtained by CNBC. Ultimately, the plan is to have around 12,000 units beaming internet down to earth.
The 260kg satellites are shot into space onboard a "Falcon 9" rocket in batches of 60. SpaceX forecasts that "near global coverage" could be achieved next year.
Musk, who also runs electric car company Tesla, suggested on his Twitter account yesterday that Starlink would potentially be on the stock market in the future, teasing the venture could undergo an initial public offering (IPO).
He tweeted: "We will probably IPO Starlink, but only several years in the future when revenue growth is smooth & predictable. Public market does not like erratic cash flow haha. I'm a huge fan of small retail investors. Will make sure they get top priority."
SpaceX confirmed in a mission update on Monday that it was forced to delay a launch of 60 more Starlink satellites, citing unfavorable weather conditions.
It said: "SpaceX will announce a new target launch date once confirmed, and Falcon 9 will lift off from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at Kennedy Space Center in Florida."
"Following stage separation, SpaceX will land Falcon 9's first stage on the "Of Course I Still Love You" droneship, which will be stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. One of Falcon 9's fairing halves supported two previous Starlink launches ... Satellites will deploy approximately one hour and one minute after liftoff," the update added.
Falcon 9, a reusable rocket, recently supported the launch of Crew Dragon's first flight to the International Space Station with two American NASA astronauts onboard.
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Video: Radiation Levels on the Moon Are Alarmingly High According to New Report (Amaze Lab)
Radiation Levels on the Moon Are Alarmingly High According to New Report
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The System, Book Review: How The Internet Works And Who Runs It
The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us • By James Ball • Bloomsbury • 288 pages • ISBN: 978-1-52-660724-9 • £18 (hardback) / £14 (e-book)
It's been a while since the last book explaining how the internet works. I believe it was was in 2012, when US Senator Ted Stevens' (R-AK) characterization of the internet as "a series of tubes", inspired Andrew Blum to write Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet to explore the network's oft-forgotten physical underpinnings -- a theme also taken up in Michael Lewis's Flash Boys, which showed how physics helped high-frequency traders exploit the financial markets. Now, here is James Ball, with The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us, to examine the internet and power.
Internet history can be slippery. Contrary to expectations in the 1990s -- and then again in 2011, crediting social media with the Arab Spring -- the internet has not changed the world's overall system. To understand why, Ball moves methodically through network layers, starting with architects ("the mechanics"), building through protocols and cables ("the cable guys"), to governance bodies (such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN), venture capital, advertising intermediaries, intelligence agencies and their adversaries, regulators, and digital rights activists.
SEE: Technology in education: The latest products and trends (free PDF) (TechRepublic)
Ball doesn't try to be comprehensive: he discusses ICANN, which governs the domain name system, but not technical standards bodies such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and while the Federal Trade Commission appears as a regulator, he's interested in network neutrality, but not the failures of antitrust law to contain the internet's monopolies.
It says something about the speed of change and the scale of its development that a new book about how the internet works is now so far removed from what one of Ball's interviewees calls "the romantic internet", that 1990s books about its origins such as Katie Hafner's Where Wizards Stay Up Late and Janet Abbate's more internationally-oriented Inventing the Internet don't appear in its 'further reading' list (although Tubes does).
Ball does, however, talk to people who were there, such as internet pioneer Steve Crocker, who explains why some of the basic characteristics of the internet are what they are. The lack of provision for billing is because government services didn't need it, while the documents that set the standards are called RFCs -- Request for Comments -- because they were written by graduate students who lacked authority.
Most of Ball's other interviewees aren't as well-known, but each is a keeper of a significant piece of how the internet is run. He also attends in person the arcane secure key signing ceremony that keeps the internet's root intact.
This is a British book written by a British journalist, yet the book's sources are predominantly American. Of course, much of these aspects of the internet's development has been led from the US, but even so, given that we're shaping up for a trade war over data protection laws, it's odd to find these laws and the brewing conflict largely ignored. Ball's discussions with EFF (the Electronic Frontier Foundation) and Wikipedia fill the chapter on activists, while the 30-year-old London-based Privacy International and the rest of Europe's activists are omitted. The huge shift in telecoms industry power structures brought by the iPhone/Android duopoly is also left untouched.
Which all leads me to wonder. To date, all the internet histories we know have been Western, telling the same story of a great cooperative experiment, now commercially captured. What would the story of the internet look like as written by Ball's equivalent in China, with its different set of burgeoning businesses and comprehensive firewall?
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