THE MUSK THINGZ :- NEURALINK ,BORING COMPANY ,OPEN AI , HYPERLOOP , STARLINK , SOLARCITY.....

1. NEURALINK

Neuralink Corporation is a neurotechnology company developing implantable brain-machine interfaces (BMIs). Co-founded by Elon Musk, Max Hodak and Paul Merolla, the company is headquartered in the Pioneer Building in San Francisco and shares offices with OpenAI. Neuralink launched in 2016 and was first publicly announced in March 2017.

Since its inception, the company has hired several top neuroscientists from various universities. By July 2019, it had received $158 million in funding (including $100 million from Musk) and employed 90 employees. At the time, Neuralink announced it was working on a "sewing machine-like" device capable of implanting very thin (4 to 6 μm wide) threads into the brain, and demonstrated a system that reads information from a lab rat via 1,500 electrodes. They anticipated starting human experiments in 2020; but they have since moved that projection to 2022.

Several neuroscientists and publications, including the MIT Technology Review, have criticized Musk's claims about Neuralink and its technology.

History

Neuralink was co-founded in 2016 by Elon Musk, Max Hodak and Paul Merolla. The group of early employees consisted of experts in fields such as neuroscience, biochemistry, and robotics. The "Neuralink" trademark was purchased from its previous owners in January 2017.

In April 2017, Neuralink announced that it intended to produce a device for the short-term treatment of severe brain diseases with the ultimate goal of human enhancement, sometimes called transhumanism. Musk said his interest in the idea stems in part from the science fiction concept of "neural lace" in the fictional universe in The Culture, a series of 10 novels by Iain M. Banks.

Musk defined neural lace as a "digital layer over the cortex," which doesn't necessarily involve extensive surgical insertion, but ideally an implant through a vein or artery. He said the long-term goal is to achieve "symbiosis with artificial intelligence," which he sees as an existential threat to humanity if left unchecked. He believes the device will be "something analogous to a video game, like a saved situation in a game where you can restore and load your last state" and "deal with a brain injury or a spinal cord injury and compensate for the loss of capacity that someone has. chip."

Technique

In 2018, Gizmodo reported that Neuralink had "remained highly secretive about its work", although public records showed that it had sought to open an animal testing facility in San Francisco; she subsequently began conducting research at the University of California, Davis. In 2019, during a live presentation at the California Academy of Sciences, the Neuralink team revealed to the public the technology of the first prototype they were working on. It is a system that includes ultra-thin probes that will be inserted into the brain, a neurosurgical robot that will perform the operations, and a high-density electronic system capable of processing information from neurons. It is based on technology developed at UCSF and UC Berkeley.

Probes

The probes, composed mostly of polyimide, a biocompatible material, with a thin gold or platinum wire, are inserted into the brain using an automated process performed by a surgical robot. Each probe consists of a wire area that contains electrodes capable of locating electrical signals in the brain, and a sensory area where the wire interacts with an electronic system that allows amplification and retrieval of the brain signal. Each probe contains 48 or 96 wires, each containing 32 independent electrodes, making a system of up to 3072 electrodes per formation.

Robot

Neuralink says they have developed a robot capable of quickly inserting many flexible probes into the brain, which can avoid the tissue damage and longevity issues associated with larger, more rigid probes. This robot has a delivery head with a 40 μm diameter tungsten-rhenium needle designed to connect to delivery loops to transport and introduce individual probes and penetrate meninges and tissue. The robot is capable of inserting up to six wires (192 electrodes) per minute.

Electronics

Neuralink developed an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) to create a 1536-channel recording system. This system consists of 256 individually programmable amplifiers ("analog pixels"), on-chip analog-to-digital converters ("ADCs"), and control peripheral circuitry for serializing the acquired digitized information. Its goal is to translate the information obtained from neurons into an understandable binary code in order to achieve a greater understanding of brain functions and the ability to stimulate these neurons back. With current technology, the electrodes are still too large to record the firing of individual neurons, so they can only record the firing of a group of neurons; Neuralink representatives believe that this problem could be mitigated algorithmically, but it is computationally expensive and does not produce accurate results.

In July 2020, according to Musk, Neuralink received FDA Breakthrough Device Designation, which allows for limited human testing under FDA guidelines for medical devices.

Animal testing

Neuralink is testing their devices by surgically implanting them into the brains of live monkeys, pigs and other animals. Neuralink's methods have been criticized by groups such as PETA.

2. BORING COMPANY

The Boring Company (TBC) is an American infrastructure and tunneling services company founded by Elon Musk. Its ongoing and proposed projects are designed for inner-city ("loop") transit systems.

TBC has completed two tunnels in Las Vegas for loop travel. Completed one test tunnel in Los Angeles County.

Musk cited Los Angeles' traffic woes and what he saw as the limitations of its two-dimensional transportation network as his initial inspiration for the project. The Boring Company was founded as a subsidiary of SpaceX before the spin-off in 2018. As of December 2018, Musk owned 90% of the equity, with 6% held by SpaceX in exchange for the use of SpaceX's resources during the company's launch. . External investments during 2019 changed the distribution of equity capital.

History

Elon Musk discusses The Boring Company at TED 2017.

Musk announced the existence of The Boring Company in December 2016. By February 2017, the company had begun digging a 30-foot-wide (9 m), 50-foot-long (15 m), and 15-foot-deep (4.6 m) test trench at SpaceX's Hawthorne offices because construction on its site would not require a permit. When employees said Friday afternoon that it would take at least two weeks to move employee cars into the parking lot and begin digging the first hole with the TBC tunneling machine, Musk said, “Let's start today and see what the biggest hole is. we can dig between now and Sunday afternoon and run 24 hours a day." Later that day, the cars were gone and there was a hole in the ground. The Boring Company was founded as a subsidiary of SpaceX.

In an interview during the April 2017 TED conference, Musk estimated that the Boring Company project took up 2-3% of his time, making the venture a personal hobby.

In March 2017, Musk announced that sometime in April, the company would begin using a tunnel boring machine (TBM) to begin excavating a usable tunnel at SpaceX. In late April 2017, SpaceX spotted a TBM called The Boring Company on its side. TBM's name was revealed as Godot in May 2017, named after Beckett's play Waiting for Godot. Future TBMs were also to be named after poems and plays. Musk said the first route created will go from LAX to Culver City, then Santa Monica and end in Westwood. Musk claimed that the trip through the tunnel would take five minutes, compared to the above-ground drive, which takes 45 minutes in normal traffic (from LAX to Westwood). These journeys were to be realized by placing the car on an electric sled and traveling at 120 miles per hour (200 km/h) through the tunnels. By November 2017, the company had filed a permit application with Los Angeles government regulators to build a tunnel from Hawthorne along Interstate 405 to Westwood. The project never progressed.

At the same time that the Los Angeles tunnel system was announced, another project involving a Hyperloop (closed tube) running underground from New York to Washington, DC was announced. Musk claimed that it would take 29 minutes to drive from one city center to another.

In July 2017, Musk uploaded a video showing a successful test of a car elevator prototype. In October, Musk revealed that the second TBM would be called Line-storm, after Robert Frost's poem "A Line-Storm Song". In March 2018, Elon Musk announced that the company would modify its plan to prioritize pedestrians and cyclists over cars; automobiles would be considered for transportation only after all other "personal mass transit needs" have been met.

Elon Musk during the inauguration of the test tunnel in Hawthorne, California.

In early 2018, The Boring Company was spun off from SpaceX and became a separate corporation. A little less than 10% of the equity was given to the first employees and more than 90% to Elon Musk. Subsequent concerns from SpaceX shareholders led to a redistribution of 6% of The Boring Company's equity to SpaceX in December 2018.

TBC provided an update on the status of its technology and product line in December 2018 when it opened its first 1.6km test tunnel to the public in Hawthorne, California. In July 2019, The Boring Company sold $120 million worth of stock to venture capital firms after raising $113 million in non-external capital during 2018.

In November 2019, Steve Davis became the company's president after leading efforts for Musk since 2016. Davis was one of SpaceX's first employees (in 2003) and holds two master's degrees in particle physics and aerospace engineering. In November 2020, TBC announced it was hiring for positions in Austin, Texas, and by December 2020 had leased two buildings in a 14-acre (5.7 ha) industrial complex northeast of Austin, approximately 26 km north of the Texas Gigafactory. .

On April 20, 2022, the company announced another $675 million Series C funding round, valuing the company at approximately $5.675 billion. The round was led by Vy Capital and Sequoia Capital, with participation from Valor Equity Partners, Founders Fund, 8VC, Craft Ventures and DFJ Growth. In addition, several real estate partners participated in the round, including Brookfield, Lennar, Tishman Speyer and Dacra. The company said the funding from the round will be used to "significantly increase hiring across engineering, operations and manufacturing processes to build and scale Loop projects, including Vegas Loop and others, in addition to accelerating research and development of Prufrock and future products." ."

Objectives

According to Musk, the company's goal is to increase the speed of tunneling enough to make it financially feasible to create a tunnel network.

If you imagine tunnels 10, 20 or 30 layers deep (or more), it is clear that 3D descent will cover the needs of any urban transport of any size.

The company says future drilling operations will introduce simultaneous tunnel boring and reinforcement to reduce costs, in addition to reducing tunnel size, reusing earth materials for tunnel construction and other technological improvements.

According to venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, tunnels specifically built for electric vehicles can be reduced in size and complexity, thereby reducing costs. The insight that I find so powerful is that if you envision only electric vehicles in your tunnels, you don't have to do air conditioning for all the carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, you know, basically the pollutants in the exhaust. You could have washers and a number of simpler things that collapse everything into a smaller tunnel size, which dramatically reduces costs... The whole concept of what you do with tunnels changes. "

Musk hinted that underground infrastructure technology could be used for his project to create a self-sustaining human colony on Mars: “And then, along the way, building underground habitats where you could get radiation shielding... you could build a whole city. underground, if you will."

3. OPENAI

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory consisting of the for-profit company OpenAI LP and its parent company, the nonprofit OpenAI Inc. Considered a competitor to DeepMind, the company conducts research in the field of artificial intelligence with the stated goal of promoting and developing friendly artificial intelligence in a way that benefits humanity as a whole. The organization was founded in San Francisco in late 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman and others, who collectively pledged $1 billion. Musk stepped down from the board in February 2018 but remained a donor. In 2019, OpenAI LP received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft.

History

The Pioneer Building in San Francisco, home to OpenAI and Neuralink offices

In December 2015, Elon Musk, Sam Altman and other investors announced the creation of OpenAI and pledged more than $1 billion to the venture. The organization said they will "collaborate freely" with other institutions and researchers by making their patents and research available to the public.

On April 27, 2016, OpenAI released a public beta version of "OpenAI Gym", its reinforcement learning research platform.

On 5 December 2016, OpenAI released "Universe", a software platform for measuring and training general AI intelligence across the world's range of games, websites and other applications.

On February 21, 2018, Musk resigned his board seat, citing a "potential future conflict (of interest)" with Tesla's development of artificial intelligence for self-driving cars, but remained a donor.

In 2019, OpenAI transitioned from non-profit to "capped" for-profit. The company distributed capital to its employees and partnered with Microsoft Corporation, which announced a $1 billion investment package in the company. OpenAI then announced its intention to commercially license its technologies, with Microsoft as the preferred partner.

As of 2020, OpenAI is headquartered in San Francisco's Mission District, sharing the former Pioneer Trunk Factory building with Neuralink, another company Musk co-founded.

In June 2020, OpenAI announced GPT-3, a language model trained on trillions of words from the Internet. It was also announced that an associated API, named simply "API", would form the heart of its first commercial product. GPT-3 focuses on answering questions in natural language, but it can also translate between languages ​​and continuously generate improvised text.

In January 2021, OpenAI introduced DALL-E. A year later, their latest system, DALLE 2, generates more realistic and accurate images with 4x the resolution.

Participants

CEO: Sam Altman, former president of startup accelerator Y Combinator

Ilya Sutskever, research director and former Google machine learning expert, 

CTO: Greg Brockman, former CTO and Stripe's third employee

Other supporters of the project include

Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal

Jessica Livingston, founding partner of Y Combinator

Companies:

Infosys, one of the Indian IT companies,

Microsoft's cloud services division

The group started in early January 2016 with nine researchers. According to Wired, Brockman met with Yoshua Bengie, one of the "founding fathers" of the deep learning movement, and they put together a list of "the best researchers in the field." Microsoft's Peter Lee said the cost of a top AI researcher exceeds the cost of a top NFL quarterback prospect. While OpenAI pays corporate-level (rather than nonprofit) salaries, it doesn't currently pay AI researchers comparable to those of Facebook or Google. Nevertheless, Sutskever said he was willing to leave Google for OpenAI "partly because of the very strong group of people and largely because of its mission." Brockman stated that "the best thing I could imagine was to move humanity closer to building true artificial intelligence in a safe way." OpenAI researcher Wojciech Zaremba said he turned down "borderline crazy" offers of two to three times market value to join OpenAI instead.

Some scientists, such as Stephen Hawking and Stuart Russell, have expressed concern that if advanced artificial intelligence one day gains the ability to transform itself at an ever-faster pace, an unstoppable "intelligence explosion" could lead to the extinction of humanity. Musk has characterized AI as "humanity's greatest existential threat". The founders of OpenAI structured it as a non-profit so that they could focus their research on creating a positive long-term human impact.

Musk and Altman said they were motivated in part by concerns about the existential risk of artificial general intelligence. OpenAI states that "it is difficult to understand how much human-level artificial intelligence could benefit society", and that it is equally difficult to understand "how much it could harm society if built or used incorrectly". Security research cannot be safely postponed: "given the surprising history of artificial intelligence, it is difficult to predict when human-level artificial intelligence might come within reach." OpenAI states that artificial intelligence "should be an extension of individual human wills, and in the spirit of freedom should it was to be as wide and even as possible". Co-chair Sam Altman expects the decades-long project to surpass human intelligence.

Vishal Sikka, the former CEO of Infosys, said that the core requirement for its support was "openness", where the effort would "produce results in the greater interest of humanity at large", and that OpenAI "fits very well with our long-term values. ” and their “effort to do purposeful work”. Wired's Cade Metz suggests that corporations like Amazon may be motivated by a desire to use open-source software and data to level the playing field against companies like Google and Facebook, which own vast troves of proprietary data. Altman says Y Combinator companies will share their data with OpenAI.

In 2019, OpenAI became a for-profit company called OpenAI LP to secure additional funding while remaining under the control of a non-profit called OpenAI Inc in what OpenAI calls a "capped-profit" structure and was previously a 501(c)(3) . ) a non-profit organization.

Strategy

Musk asked the question, “What is the best thing we can do to make sure the future is good? We could sit on the sidelines, we could support regulatory oversight, or we could engage with the right structure with people who are deeply interested in AI development. in a way that is safe and beneficial to humanity." Musk acknowledged that "there's always some risk that in really trying to advance (friendly) artificial intelligence, we might create the thing we're concerned about"; however, the best defense is to “enable as many people as possible to have artificial intelligence. If everyone has AI abilities, then there is no person or small group of individuals who can have an artificial superpower.”

Musk and Altman's counterintuitive strategy of trying to reduce the risk of AI causing overall harm by providing AI to everyone is controversial among those concerned with the existential risk posed by artifiCIAL...................

4.HYPERLOOP

The Hyperloop is a proposed high-speed transportation system for both public and freight transportation. The term was popularized by Elon Musk to describe a modern project based on the vactrain concept (first appearance in 1799). Hyperloop systems consist of three basic elements: tubes, pods and terminals. A tube is a large, sealed low-pressure system (usually a long tunnel). Underneath is a bus pressurized at atmospheric pressure that uses magnetic propulsion (augmented by a fan in some cases) with essentially no air resistance or friction inside that tube. The terminal processes arrivals and departures under The Hyperloop, as originally designed by Musk, differs from vacuum trains in that it relies on the residual air pressure inside the tube to provide lift for the wings and propulsion by fans.

The Hyperloop has its roots in George Medhurst's concept from 1799 and was subsequently developed under the names pneumatic railway, atmospheric railway or vaktrain. Elon Musk renewed interest in the hyperloop after mentioning it at a speaking event in 2012. Musk further promoted the concept by releasing a white paper in August 2013 that envisioned a hyperloop route from the Los Angeles area to the San Francisco Bay Area , roughly along the Interstate 5 corridor. His first concept involved low-pressure tubes with pressure capsules powered by air bearings driven by linear induction motors and axial compressors. Transportation analysts disputed the cost estimates contained in the white paper, with some predicting that the hyperloop would be several billion dollars over budget when implemented. .

The hyperloop concept was pioneered by Musk and SpaceX, and other companies or organizations were encouraged to collaborate and develop the technology. In July 2019, the Technical University of Munich Hyperloop set a hyperloop speed record of 463 km/h (288 mph) in a pod design competition hosted by SpaceX in Hawthorne, California. Virgin Hyperloop conducted its first human test in November 2020 at its test site in Las Vegas, reaching a top speed of 172 km/h (107 mph).

History

Conceived in 1799, the Vactrain was invented in 1904 by Robert H. Goddard, a freshman at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

At a July 2012 PandoDaily event in Santa Monica, California, Musk first mentioned that he was thinking about the concept of a "fifth mode of transportation", calling it the Hyperloop. This hypothetical high-speed mode of transportation would have the following features: weather resistance; collision-free; twice the speed of the aircraft; low consumption; and energy storage for 24-hour operation. The name Hyperloop was chosen because it would go in a loop. Musk imagines that more advanced versions will be able to travel at hypersonic speeds. In May 2013, Musk compared his Hyperloop to "a cross between Concorde and a railgun and an air hockey table".

From late 2012 to August 2013, a group of engineers from Tesla and SpaceX worked on modeling Musk's Hyperloop. An early conceptual model of the system has been published on the Tesla and SpaceX blogs, which describes one potential design, function, route and cost of the hyperloop system. According to the alpha design, the modules would gradually accelerate to cruising speed using linear electric motors and glide above their track on air bearings using tubes above ground on poles or underground in tunnels to avoid the danger of overruns. An ideal hyperloop system would be more energy efficient, quieter and more autonomous than existing modes of mass transit. Musk also invited feedback to "check if people can find ways to make it better." Hyperloop Alpha was released as an open source design. The trademark "HYPERLOOP", applicable to "high-speed transportation of goods in tubes", was issued to SpaceX on April 4, 2017.

In June 2015, SpaceX announced that it would build a 1.6 km long test track to be located next to the SpaceX Hawthorne facility. The runway was completed and used to test module designs supplied by third parties in the competition.

In November 2015, with several commercial companies and dozens of student teams developing Hyperloop technologies, the Wall Street Journal declared that "The Hyperloop Movement," as some of its unaffiliated members refer to themselves, is officially bigger than the man who started it."

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hyperloop team developed the first prototype hyperloop module, which they unveiled at the MIT Museum on May 13, 2016. Their design uses electrodynamic suspension for levitation and braking using eddy currents.

On January 29, 2017, approximately one year after the first phase of the competition under the hyperloop, the hyperloop under MIT performed the world's first ever low-pressure hyperloop run. In this first competition, the Delft University team from the Netherlands achieved the highest overall score of the competition and won the award for "Best Overall Design". The "fastest pod" award went to the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany, and the WARR Hyperloop team. The MIT team placed third overall in the competition, judged by SpaceX engineers.

The second hyperloop pod competition took place from 25 to 27 August 2017. The only criteria for judging was top speed if followed by a successful deceleration. The TUM WARR Hyperloop won the competition by reaching a top speed of 324 km/h (201 mph), breaking the previous record of 310 km/h (190 mph) for hyperloop prototypes set by Hyperloop One on their own test track.

The third hyperloop pod competition took place in July 2018. The defending champions, the hyperloop team TUM WARR, broke their own record with a top speed of 457 km/h (284 mph) during their run.

In the fourth competition in August 2019, the TUM team, now known as TUM Hyperloop (from NEXT Prototypes e.V.), won the competition again, breaking their own record with a top speed of 463 km/h (288 mph).

The first test of passenger hyperloop technology was successfully carried out by Virgin Hyperloop with two company employees in November 2020, when the unit reached a maximum speed of 172 km/h (107 mph).

In 2022, journalist Paris Marx claimed that "Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was trying to get lawmakers to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California — even though he had no plans to build it."

Hyperloop capsule: axial compressor in the front, passenger compartment in the middle, battery compartment in the back, and air wheels at the bottom

The vactrain concept resembles a high-speed rail system without significant air resistance, as it uses magnetically levitating trains in evacuated (airless) or partially evacuated tubes. The difficulty of maintaining VACUM

5.STARLINK

Starlink is a satellite internet constellation operated by SpaceX, providing satellite internet coverage to 40 countries. It also aims for global coverage of a personal communications satellite service after 2023. SpaceX began launching Starlink satellites in 2019. As of September 2022, Starlink consists of more than 3,000 mass-produced small satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) that communicate with country designated transceivers. Starlink provides internet access to more than 500,000 subscribers as of June 2022.

SpaceX's satellite development facility in Redmond, Washington houses the Starlink research, development, manufacturing and orbit control teams. The cost of the ten-year project to design, build and deploy the constellation was estimated by SpaceX in May 2018 to be at least $10 billion. In February 2017, documents indicated that SpaceX expected to generate more than $30 billion in revenue from its satellite constellation by 2025, while revenue from its launch business was expected to reach $5 billion in the same year.

On October 15, 2019, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on behalf of SpaceX submitted applications to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to allocate spectrum for 30,000 additional Starlink satellites to complement the 12,000 Starlink satellites already approved by the FCC.

Astronomers have raised concerns about the constellation's impact on ground-based astronomy and how satellites will add to an already congested orbital environment. SpaceX has attempted to alleviate astronomy concerns by implementing several improvements to Starlink satellites aimed at reducing their brightness during operation. The satellites are equipped with krypton-powered Hall thrusters that allow them to drop out of orbit at the end of their life. In addition, the satellites are designed to autonomously avoid collisions based on uplink tracking data.

Low Earth orbit satellite constellations were first conceptualized in the mid-1980s as part of a strategic defense initiative where weapons were to be placed in orbit to intercept ballistic missiles at short notice. The potential for low-latency communications was also recognized and development offshoots in the 1990s led to a number of commercial mega-constellations using around 100 satellites such as Celestri, Teledesic, Iridium and Globalstar. However, all of the entities entered bankruptcy after the dot-com bubble burst, in part due to excessive start-up costs at the time.

In June 2004, the newly formed SpaceX acquired a stake in Surrey Satellite Technology (SSTL) as part of a "shared strategic vision". At the time, SSTL was working on extending the Internet into space. However, SpaceX's stake was eventually sold back to EADS Astrium in 2008 after the company became more focused on navigation and Earth observation.

In early 2014, Elon Musk and Greg Wyler reportedly collaborated to plan a constellation of around 700 satellites called WorldVu, which would be more than 10 times the size of the then-largest Iridium satellite constellation. However, these discussions collapsed in June 2014, and SpaceX instead submitted an application to the ITU through the Norwegian telecommunications regulator under the name STEAM. SpaceX confirmed the connection in a 2016 Starlink license application with the FCC. SpaceX has retained the trademark "Starlink" for its satellite broadband network; the title was inspired by the book The Fault in Our Stars.

Development phase (2015–2020)[edit]

SpaceX's satellite development facility in Redmond, Washington was in operation from 2015 to mid-2018.

Starlink was publicly announced in January 2015 with the opening of SpaceX's satellite development facility in Redmond, WA. During his opening remarks, Elon Musk said there is still significant unmet demand for low-cost broadband options worldwide. and that Starlink would target bandwidth to carry up to 50% of all backbone traffic and up to 10% of local Internet traffic in high-density cities.

Starting with 60 engineers, the company operated in a 2,800 m2 (30,000 sq ft) leased space and by January 2017 had expanded to a second 2,800 m2 (30,000 sq ft) facility, both in Redmond. In August 2018, SpaceX consolidated all of their operations in the Seattle area with a move to a larger three-building facility in the Redmond Ridge Corporate Center to support satellite manufacturing in addition to research and development. In July 2016, SpaceX acquired an additional 740 m2 (8,000 sq ft) of creative space in Irvine, California (Orange County). The Irvine office would include signal processing, RFIC and ASIC development for the satellite program.

In October 2016, the satellite division focused on the significant business challenge of achieving a low-cost enough design for user equipment. SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said afterward that the project remained in the "design phase as the company tries to address cost issues for end users."

In November 2016, SpaceX filed an application with the FCC for a "non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) satellite system in Fixed-Satellite Service using the Ku and Ka frequency bands". In March 2017, SpaceX filed plans with the FCC to place a second orbital envelope of more than 7,500 "V-band satellites in non-geosynchronous orbits for the purpose of providing communications services" in an electromagnetic spectrum not yet heavily used for commercial communications services. . The larger, originally planned group of 4,425 satellites would operate in the Ka and Ku bands and orbit at an altitude of 1,200 km (750 mi).

In September 2017, the FCC ruled that half of the constellation must be in orbit within six years to meet license conditions, while the entire system should be in orbit within nine years from the date of license.

SpaceX filed documents with the FCC in late 2017 to clarify its space debris mitigation plan, in which the company had:

implement an operational plan for the proper de-orbit of satellites that are nearing the end of their useful life (roughly five to seven years) much faster than required by international standards. "[The satellites] will be de-orbited by propulsion to a disposal orbit from which they will re-enter Earth's atmosphere within about a year of completing their mission."

Falcon Nine will lift off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station isToday, Nov. 11, 2019, (CCAFS), Florida, to launch 60 Starlink satellites into orbit.

In March 2018, the FCC granted SpaceX approval for the first 4,425 satellites with certain conditions. SpaceX will need to obtain separate approval from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The FCC supported NASA's request to ask SpaceX to achieve an even higher level of de-orbit reliability than the standard NASA previously used for itself: reliably de-orbiting 90% of satellites after completing their missions.

6.SOLARCITY

SolarCity Corporation was a publicly traded company based in Fremont, California that sold and installed solar power generation systems and other related products and services to residential, commercial and industrial customers. The company was founded on July 4, 2006 by Peter and Lyndon Rive, cousins ​​of SpaceX and Tesla, Inc. CEO Elon Musk, and nephews of model Maya Musk. Tesla acquired SolarCity in 2016 for approximately $2.6 billion and reorganized its solar business as Tesla Energy.

SolarCity has focused heavily on door-to-door sales of leased systems, where customers pay no upfront costs but agree to buy the electricity generated by the panels from the company for 20 years. The business model became the most popular in the US and made the company the largest residential solar installer, but also left SolarCity over $1.5 billion in debt at the time of its 2016 acquisition.

Prior to the Tesla acquisition, the two companies had a close relationship. SolarCity offered Tesla Roadster owners free charging at its charging stations. SolarCity became one of the first battery installers for the Tesla Powerwall home energy storage system, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk served as chairman of SolarCity.

SolarCity was founded in 2006 by brothers Peter and Lyndon Rive following a pitch for a solar company from their cousin Elon Musk, who was chairman and helped found the company. By 2009, the solar panels it had installed were capable of generating 440 megawatts (MW) of power.

In 2011, the company began expanding on the East Coast with the acquisition of the solar divisions of Clean Currents and groSolar. Following the acquisitions, SolarCity expanded operations on the East Coast, opening in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Florida, Vermont and New Hampshire.

In 2013, SolarCity was the leading residential solar panel installer in the U.S. magazine. Solar Power World, which ranked it second in total solar installations in the US. In 2013, SolarCity purchased Paramount Solar from Paramount Equity for $120 million. By 2015, its installed panels were capable of generating 870 MW of solar power and accounted for approximately 28% of non-utility solar installations in the US that year.

In October 2014, SolarCity announced that it would offer up to $200 million in solar bonds in its first registered public bond offering in the United States. In March 2016, SpaceX bought shares of SolarCity for $90 million.

In late 2015, SolarCity pulled back from selling and installing solar power in Nevada following a decision by the state's Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to increase the monthly service fee for rooftop solar customers and gradually reduce the return on solar power sold back to the grid under the state's rule pure measurement. Under the new rules, the monthly service fee imposed on Nevada Power's rooftop solar customers increased from $12.75 to $17.90 and was set to increase to $38.51 by January 1, 2020; at the same time, the rates provided to rooftop solar customers for their excess solar power were also withdrawn and were set to continue to decline over the next four years. As a result, SolarCity has cut more than 550 jobs in Nevada.

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