Just to clarify - Orion is a partially reusable spaceship, developed by NASA with Lockheed Martin as the prime contractor, while SLS is a non-reusable launch vehicle, developed by NASA with Boeing as the largest contractor. SLS has been a poster child for cost overruns and delays - but so far is still intended to launch the crewed missions to Gateway, while it was never intended to launch the non-crewed Gateway launches.
NASA is looking at domestic commercial launchers powerful enough to reach lunar orbit for non-crewed elements of Gateway. As far as we know now of what will be available at the intended launch time in 2024, that will be SpaceX Falcon Heavy, ULA Vulcan, or Blue Origin New Glenn.
Falcon Heavy has the advantage that it's already in service. The other two are currently expected to make their maiden flights late this year.
It's possible that SpaceX could get Starship ready for launch by 2024 too, at their aggressive rate of development, which would be super cool, though it's early to order for launch services.
I'm super excited about returning people to the Moon. But Lunar Gateway is a bad mission architecture that really reduces the cost-effectiveness of returning to the Moon. It costs way more delta-v to reach the Gateway and then proceed to the lunar surface than just to go straight to the surface.
https://x-r.ai is applying AI to accelerate technology development - initially by applying AI to accelerate patent attorney work to reduce the time and resources required to resolve patent disputes and to shut down patent trolls.
We are developing an AI-powered work platform for patent attorneys to do all their work on which will replace the inefficient decades-old software they currently use, and make their work dramatically faster, more efficient, and more thorough. We have a handful of enterprise customers, who spend billion-dollar-scale per year on patents, in our private pro beta free trial, and they are getting rapidly more excited and asking us how quickly we can take more of their work and how soon we can expand coverage for their work in Europe and Asia.
We are targeting for x-r.ai to become the indispensable platform that all patent attorneys need to work competitively. Under our anti-troll license, any non-practicing entity and their outside law firms, and anyone who sues a startup for patent infringement and their outside law firms, will be banned from using x-r.ai, while startups sued for patent infringement and their outside law firms can use x-r.ai pro for free. Once we reach our target capabilities, it will be impossible for any patent attorney to work for a troll or for someone who sues a startup and ever be able to do their job cost-effectively again.
Help us revolutionize a giant market and lift a burden from the entire tech world by fixing patents with software.
I just started x-r.ai in April and we are still a very small team; all positions currently come with significant equity. We're based in beautiful, affordable Portland, Oregon and will also be doing in-person interviews in the Bay Area and Seattle/Redmond regularly, including in SF, SV, and Berkeley before and after the Deep RL bootcamp at Berkeley in late August. Work in-person in Portland at least occasionally is preferred, but we will evaluate case-by-case for the right people. Successful applicants should show evidence of high levels of drive, intelligence, and team fit, and interesting machine learning applications they've developed. So far our back-end is all python ML ecosystem but we're starting to get into lua as well. We're working to incorporate bleeding-edge deep learning architectures just released in the past few weeks, and to build a great AI engineering team ready to go after more verticals to accelerate development of new technology and to work toward artificial general intelligence. Apply via email on https://x-r.ai/careers and/or via scoutsavvy.co. Thanks much.
Most patents are probably not valid, and most patents used in licensing offers / threats are probably not strong enough to avoid being invalidated or found not infringed if litigated, but the would-be licensor / troll counts on the threatened party to settle rather than pay millions of dollars for litigation.
While there aren't any easy tactical solutions and a policy fix is a dim hope, we should be able to at least partly solve the problem by training an AI to do automated and thorough prior art search and analysis relevant to a patent, so a lot of the legwork of a patent litigation threat becomes orders of magnitude faster and cheaper, and it becomes vastly easier and less intimidating for a trolling target to respond to a patent threat like this, and quickly get their focus and resources back to developing their technology. Software eats patent attorneys, and reduces the burden of patents on the technology community.
(disclaimers: I am a patent attorney and I'm currently working full-time on coding a patent search & analysis AI service, this is not legal advice, etc.)
The author, Andrea Ghez, is one of the leading researchers on observing the center of our galaxy, and the stars that orbit the central black hole, among other things.
Looking for more, Paul. This from a Swiss news site says he had previously reported threats to the police, S3's data center was broken into and flooded with a fire hose, and that he remained in the hospital in serious condition with burns on his torso, arm, neck, and face, and would likely need transplants:
Yes, brief sitting meditation and running meditation every day. There's evidence of physical and mental health benefits. It seems to help bring calmness, focus, and new ideas.
Yes -- even a breakeven on the satellite business that pays for more launches would be a big win, though I don't think SpaceX would do this without having good ideas for a niche with decent margins. But I wonder if this might mean foregoing potential future launch business with other satellite providers who would see SpaceX as a competitor instead of just launch service provider.