Cosmic Log
One hundred megawatts. That’s how much electrical power the world’s biggest lithium-ion battery system will store when Tesla builds it for the state of South Australia.
And it’ll be built in 100 days, or it’s free.
The agreement, announced today in Adelaide, follows through on a pledge that Tesla CEO Elon Musk made during a Twitter exchange with Australian billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes about South Australia’s power woes back in March.
Tesla’s billionaire CEO, Elon Musk, says the first production model of the company’s anxiously awaited mass-market Model 3 electric car will roll off its assembly line on July 7.
Pre-production prototypes of the car have been spotted over the past few months, but in a series of tweets on July 2, Musk said the model met all of its regulatory requirements two weeks ahead of schedule and is ready for purchase.
Musk said the first 30 customers would get their Model 3’s at a party on July 28, and that the production rate at Tesla’s plant in Fremont, Calif., would ramp up to 20,000 cars per month by the end of the year
The billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk, says he spends only about 2 percent of his time working on tunnels, and some of that time was allotted this week to tweeting about the digging that’s being done on SpaceX’s property in Hawthorne, Calif.
Musk tweeted video clips that highlighted the riggings for a “car/pod elevator” that’s taking shape in an old parking lot. “Should be operating next week,” he said.
In its on-the-scene report, the Daily Breeze says the finishing touches are being put on a roughly 600-foot-long bore pit and tunnel entrance, dug 20 feet beneath the ground-level lot.
Musk’s aim is to extend the tunnel as an experiment that could lead to a high-speed transit system for cars beneath Los Angeles. He jokingly calls his venture The Boring Company.
One problem: Musk hasn’t yet gotten the regulatory go-ahead to dig beyond SpaceX property.
For the second time ever, SpaceX has sent a telecommunications satellite into orbit on a previously flown Falcon 9 rocket – but today’s launch of BulgariaSat-1 is notable for other reasons as well.
The first-stage booster landed successful at sea after liftoff, marking the first time the same rocket has made successful touchdowns off America’s East Coast as well as the West Coast.
And if the schedule holds, yet another SpaceX launch will take place two days from now, to put 10 more satellites into orbit for the Iridium NEXT telecom constellation.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s vision to send a million people to Mars is now in print, but the billionaire visionary says he’s already working on an update.
The newly published print version, appearing on the New Space website, recaps Musk’s 95-minute talk at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico last September – during which he laid out a decades-long plan to develop and launch fleets of giant spaceships to Mars, each carrying 100 passengers at a time.
The presentation has been online in video form for months, with accompanying slides, but the text-plus-graphics version is arguably easier to scan and digest.
Billionaire Elon Musk’s Q&A sessions are traditionally the most entertaining part of Tesla’s annual shareholders meeting, and this year’s appearance did not disappoint.
During today’s hourlong meeting at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., Musk fielded questions about what he does during his off time, and whether a nuclear fusion reactor would fit in the front trunk of Tesla’s Model S electric car.
But there was also serious substance to Musk’s talk. One of the biggest applause lines came when he discussed preparations for the unveiling of Tesla’s Semi electric-powered truck in September. He said a prototype of the truck already has been shown to organizations that buy heavy-duty trucks.
“They all love it,” he said. “They just want to know how many can they buy, and how soon. … We’re getting them closely involved in the design process.”
Tech billionaire Elon Musk says he’ll have no choice but to leave his posts on the White House’s advisory councils if President Donald Trump decides to withdraw from the landmark Paris climate accord.
Multiple news reports, attributed to unnamed administration officials, suggest that Trump is leaning toward doing just that – although there may be some added “caveats” that complicate the outcome.
Musk, a strong proponent of a revenue-neutral carbon tax, said he’s been urging the president to abide by the Paris pact, which calls on nations to reduce their carbon emissions in accordance with voluntary plans.
“Don’t know which way Paris will go, but I’ve done all I can to advise directly to POTUS [president of the United States], through others in WH [White House] and via councils, that we remain,” Musk tweeted.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, demonstrated once again that he’s serious about boring tunnels beneath Los Angeles. But not boringly serious.
In a series of Twitter and Instagram posts, the billionaire brainiac showed off pictures of The Boring Company’s experimental tunneling machine (nicknamed “Godot,” after the famous Samuel Beckett in which the characters wait for something to happen, which doesn’t happen).
One video clip focuses on Godot’s slowly rotating cutter head, which will look familiar to anyone who’s kept track of Seattle’s recently departed Bertha machine.
But the piece de resistance is a clip showing the test run of a prototype sled, through what is obviously SpaceX’s mile-long Hyperloop tube track in Hawthorne, Calif. The lights that flash as the sled zooms through the tube earn the video a cautionary label. “Warning, this may cause motion sickness or seizures,” Musk writes.
Tesla has started taking orders for traditional-looking glass roof tiles that soak up solar power to generate electricity.
Installations are to start next month, beginning with California and gradually rolling out to other U.S. markets, Tesla said. Overseas markets will be added to the mix next year, said Elon Musk, Tesla’s billionaire CEO.
“I think it will be great,” Musk tweeted.
In a blog posting, Tesla said “the typical homeowner can expect to pay $21.85 per square foot” for the product it calls Solar Roof. That’s significantly more than the cost of a traditional asphalt roof, based on Consumer Reports’ estimates, but closer to competitive in price when the anticipated electric-bill savings are factored in.
When billionaire Elon Musk sat down for a 40-minute TED talk last week in Vancouver, B.C., he could have started out talking about SpaceX’s rockets, Tesla’s electric vehicles, his Hyperloop mass-transit concept, his role as an adviser to President Donald Trump or the Neuralink vision for implanting computer chips in our brains.
Instead, he began with a boring topic – as in boring tunnels underground.
“We’re trying to dig a hole under L.A.,” Musk told TED head curator Chris Anderson. “This is to create the beginning of what will hopefully be a 3-D network of tunnels to alleviate congestion.”
Musk said traffic congestion was “soul-destroying,” and “particularly horrible in L.A.”
He showed off a video concept that calls for platforms he calls “car skates” to lower vehicles into the tunnel system from surface streets. Down in the tunnel network, cars could ride the electric-powered, rail-borne skates at speeds of up to 130 mph.