Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: Elon Musk – Page 248

A so-called ‘Starman,’ which is a life-size mannequin wearing a production version of the SpaceX crew spacesuit; a miniature car created by Hot Wheels to commemorate the Roadster and its primary passenger; and something called an Arch (pronounced “Ark”), which is not so easy to summarily describe.

The Arch on board is a data crystal (sort of like a Jedi Holocron if you’re mad for Star Wars lore) that contains all three books from Isaac Asimov’s classic Foundation trilogy. It’s actually a modest amount of data relative to the possibilities of the storage medium – in this case, a quartz silica structure which, using 5D optical storage techniques, can eventually achieve a max storage capacity of 360 terabytes on a disk just 3.75 inches in diameter.

But why shoot a tiny quartz disc into space? Why Foundation, and why aboard the Falcon Heavy, the crowning achievement of Elon Musk’s SpaceX private launch venture thus far?

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The successful launch of the new rocket, the Falcon Heavy, by SpaceX from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida into a Mars orbit around the Sun, has captured the world’s imagination and attention mainly because of its power but also because of its payload.

Famously aboard the spacecraft is a Tesla Roadster, owned by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, but joining the bright red sports car on its journey around our solar system is the Arch Library, created using 5D optical storage technology developed by Professor Peter Kazansky and his team at the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre.

This first Arch library (pronounced Ark) – known as the Solar Library — contains the Foundation Trilogy of science fiction books written by Elon Musk’s favourite American author, Isaac Asimov… Archs are the vision of the Arch Mission Foundation which wants to permanently preserve and disseminate human knowledge as part of an ‘Encyclopedia Galactica’ across time and space for the benefit of future generations.

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But that doesn’t mean the company isn’t working on cool new features. During the earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that within three to six months, he expects Tesla cars to be able to drive autonomously from U.S. coast to coast.

SEE ALSO: Tesla’s bringing Powerwall batteries to 50,000 homes in Australia

Musk originally promised this in Oct. 2016, which is when the company also showed a video of a Tesla car driving itself to work without human intervention. But that was just after the company ended its partnership with Mobileye, the developer of the original self-driving system for Tesla cars, and switched to a system built in-house. It took quite a while for Tesla’s technology to catch up with what Mobileye had built.

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The Falcon Heavy is finally on its way to mars and this rocket has had its fair share of delays. Elon Musk gave us a first glimpse of the rocket a couple of months ago and then a little later announced the unique cargo that it would be carrying. At the start of this year, he announced that the rocket will be launched within the first month but there were more unexpected delays and things finally got back on track as it completed the static test last week.

The Falcon Heavy Rocket launched its test flight successfully from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Millions of fans from all around the globe watched the launch go off without a hitch. The Falcon Heavy has 27 engines which give a thrust equal to 18 Boeing (BA) 747 jetliners making it the biggest rocket ever made. “It’s the biggest rocket in the world by far,” SpaceX CEO Musk told CNN’s Rachel Crane on Monday.

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