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In spite of the current difficult times (wars, protests, pandemic…), and from an information and technology accessibility point of view, we live in a wonderful time. On the one hand, regarding knowledge, anyone with a decent internet connection and sufficient time can learn everything on the internet for free. On the other hand, the maturity of technologies and means of production allows today to put in the hands of ordinary people real jewels that allow them to develop/experiment in their garage projects worthy of big laboratories and companies....

Hi friends 🖖; Hope you’re all right and that the confinment situation is under control. In this editorial, I chosed to put together some not-so-common amazing facts about space and satellites. Please enjoy, and as always, all sorts of feedbacks and comments are very welcome: Here’s a small read and an artist’s impression about the exoplanet J1407b and its amazing MASSIVE ring system. How loud would the sun be if it wasn’t in the vacuum of space?...

You remember this post of the newsletter on why adapting space to humans where we can adapt humans to space. I have since been searching quite actively on the internet for resources that have explored this option. I came across a great paper from 1960 entitled “Cyborgs and space” co-authored by Manfred E. Clynes, research director in electronic data-processing systems, and Nathan S. Kline, research director in psychiatry. In the abstract, it reads:...

Hi friends; Because of COVID-19, several countries have decided to close their borders to limit the spread of the pandemic. As a result, air traffic is severely impacted and several lines are simply suspended. The daytime sky is almost free of airplane trails and the night sky is almost free of bright and fast moving dots (except for a few Starlink satellites but that’s another story). It is time to raise your head up and admire the sky as our ancestors once saw it....

The two main challenges in colonizing other planets are transportation and survival once there. For the first point, in addition to the economic costs and technological challenges, the very long duration of the journey makes the crossing psychologically and biologically stressful. Remember that The Voyager 1 probe has covered only 0.0005% of the distance to the nearest star, yet it has been traveling nonstop for 42 years at an insane 60....

In the previous issue, we explored a little bit the considerations we need to take into account with these mega-constellation programs. As announced last time, I will try to complete this list here: If the price and performance of the networks offered by these constellations are as planned, it’s very likely that this will become the standard for connecting to the internet. We will therefore be witnessing a paradigm shift: whereas today satellites are seen more as a backup solution for terrestrial networks (earthquake, tsunami, pandemic, etc....

Last week during a coffee break, I discussed with a friend on white zones in France and the role that satellites can play in reducing them. Everybody pretty much agrees on the positive role that satellites can play in connecting the world. Here, I would like to set out my vision of the dark side of the recent initiatives toward this goal. There are today several mega-constellation projects with the promise of offering a very high speed internet connection, at affordable prices and anywhere on the globe....

Following the last launch of Starlink satellites, I came again across the video of Elon Musk in which he shares his vision and plan to make humans an interplanetary species. I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole about the feasibility or not of this surrealistic project…Let us assume here that this will happen in the near future. Close enough to be able to transpose the vision of our world as we know it today....