Set aside, space barons. Steve Wozniak has announced space plans.
Sunday night, Wozniak he tweeted a cryptic ad: “Start a private space company, unlike the others.” The company’s embedded video ad, Privateer, deceptively resembles most other billionaire space ads, with platitudes like “together, we’ll go far,” over what appear to be images of space milestones. It boils down to images of a climate march and the statement: “this is not a race,” an obvious reference to the original “space race” of the Cold War era, and possibly a nod to things like Blue Origins choosing a fight on Twitter with Richard Branson about who comes to call himself a true astronaut.
Woz did not share any additional details beyond the video (see below), which confusingly mixes a bonfire, clouds of smoke coming out of fossil fuel power plants, people reaching for the sky, a child with a astronaut suit and an -up of an iris. “Here you take care of what we have so that the next generation can be better together,” the voice-over says.
He Corsair website is in stealth mode, but says more details about the company will be unveiled at the AMOS Tech 2021 conference, which begins Tuesday in Maui, Hawaii, and will run through the end of the week.
According to the YouTube video description, Woz co-founded Privateer with Alex Fielding, a member of the iMac first team. The two co-founded Wheels of Zeus (“WoZ”), a now-closed start-up that created GPS location tags connectable to commonly lost objects.
The Privateer website does not contain contact information and the contact form does not process requests from publication. We have contacted Wozniak to comment and we will update when we hear about it.
If the reaction is great why, pink ??!?!?, does not seem to play by the rule of space alongside Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos. It seems, instead, that he plans to take out space junk; an August Press release for an unrelated 3D titanium alloy printer, he described Privateer as a “new satellite company focused on monitoring and cleaning objects in space.”
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Woz would be doing these guys a favor. The space has become a dump of dead satellites and launches vehicle rockets, so much so that in 2019, He called NASA Earth’s low orbit “the world’s largest landfill,” with about 6,000 tons of waste. NASA has warned that space debris threatens space visitors with debris that reaches up to seven times faster than a bullet reports that even paint stains have shattered the shuttle windows. The agency currently controls 27,000 larger pieces of space junk.
The cleanup will cost money that the U.S. government does not allocate. Last year, former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine urged Congress to fund a $ 15 million cleanup mission. piulant: “In the last 2 weeks, there have been 3 potential conjunctions of great concern. The rubbish is getting worse! ”The most recent space financing bill, approved by the Senate, has not set aside these funds, but directs the Office of Science and Technology Policy to assess the situation. (The conversation around this bill focused primarily on the Blue Origin campaign to write to $ 10 billion check for government contracts to compete with SpaceX.)
Amazing delights fill the waste management space. Lasers! Space claws! Tentacles! The space company Astroscale, funded by the government of the United Kingdom and Japan it has already begun testing magnetic coupling systems that tow future space debris and use the Earth’s atmosphere as an incinerator. (Although customers should build the appropriate docking boards before launching boats.)
Former NASA scientist Donald Kessler predicted in 1978 that the dense minefield would grow exponentially more dangerous over the next few decades, as future collisions erupt into more garbage. Last year, he he said Scientific American, that space has long been “expected” for a catastrophe.