Technology

Ad Astra: SpaceX Falcon Heavy launches to deploy the Arabsat-6A satellite.

Early February brought news that Elon Musk had merged SpaceX with xAI to create a company worth $1.25tn. Musk believes this was necessary to bring his plan to fruition of launching datacentres into space, building lunar factories, and, eventually, setting up shop on Mars. Musk has always been a polarising figure, but whichever side of the fence you’re on, he’s betting the farm on this latest venture. These bets include that the price of launches will gradually decrease, and that as AI evolves and more people use it, there will be an appetite for more compute. A SpaceX IPO is on track for June and could raise $50bn, the largest to date.

The plan entails launching up to a million satellites, which SpaceX says will be the first step towards becoming a “Kardashev II-level civilisation”. This refers to the work of Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev, who proposed the system in 1964 as a measure of a civilisation’s technological advancement. In his thinking, a type-II civilisation can directly consume a star’s energy from space.