Collins Baker 🇨🇱

Michael Nicolls just just laid out SpaceX's ambition for connectivity that extends beyond Earth “We will connect the Moon with a constellation, and then we will connect Mars” "Our goal, again, is to extend consciousness beyond this planet, and we want to go and connect the Moon and Mars But before that on Starlink, we're creating the technologies to connect the Moon with very high-bandwidth connectivity systems, very high-bandwidth lasers And we will connect the Moon with a constellation, and then we will connect Mars, and we will form an interplanetary mesh of connectivity that is fundamentally driven by the same technologies we're working on with Starlink To make this happen, SpaceX needs to keep improving safety in LEO so everyone can operate and scale safely” Build safe, coordinated infrastructure in LEO first then extend connectivity and human presence to the Moon, Mars, and beyond

Elon Musk explains why Starlink will actually increase the GDP of entire countries “If you don’t have access to the internet, or it’s too expensive or low bandwidth, you cannot access MIT lessons, you can’t access information, and you can’t sell your goods and services” Starlink changes that “Starlink will actually move the GDP of countries. It’s going to be that kind of thing” Because connectivity unlocks far more than internet access It gives people access to education, information, jobs, customers and global markets When millions of people become more productive and economically connected, the impact will show up across an entire country

Starship reached orbit for the first time on Monday. One of my favorite potential use cases is launching the next generation of space telescopes faster and with far fewer constraints. Today, engineers designing the largest space telescopes face extreme mass and volume limits that forces them to make telescopes lighter, foldable, and dependent on incredibly intricate deployment mechanisms, adding years of engineering complexity and increasing the risk of failure. Starship changes that tradeoff. Thanks to its massive payload capacity and volume, telescope builders could "convert risk into mass": build heavier, simpler observatories instead of optimizing every component around launch constraints. That could accelerate the next generation of space telescopes, and astrophysics research, by decades!