Category: Space Technology

China Ministry granted Tesla a certificate it needs to start production in the country. Tesla intends to produce at least 1,000 Model 3s a week from the Shanghai factory by the end of 2019.

Tesla China’s second-generation Model 3 production line will be at least 50% cheaper per unit of capacity than its Model 3-related lines in Fremont.

Tesla will start building a simplified, more cost-effective version of their Model 3 line with capacity of 150,000 units per year – the second generation of the Model 3 production process. Chinese customers bought well over a half-million mid-sized


premium sedans in 2019. Thi market poses a strong long-term opportunity for Tesla.

Tesla continues to target production of over 500,000 vehicles globally in the 12-month period ending June 30, 2020.

Tesla will start producing the Model Y in 2020. They forecast Model Y will be a more profitable product than the Model 3

Reports indicate that the US and China could agree to a partial trade agreement. It is expected to cover currency and agriculture purchases and a delay in the tariff hike scheduled for next week.

Trump and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He are now scheduled to meet at 2: 45 p.m. ET.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission said Friday overseas financial service companies in futures, securities and mutual funds will be able to apply for total control of onshore ventures starting in 2020. This will speed up the opening of China’s financial markets.

Good things are happening at China Trade Talk Meeting. Warmer feelings than in recent past, more like the Old Days. I will be meeting with the Vice Premier today. All would like to see something significant happen!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 11, 2019

Malcolm Handley of ARPA-E had a presentation that made the economic case for nuclear fusion. The economic case also applies to molten salt nuclear fission reactors and other high-temperature nuclear fission projects. Molten salt nuclear reactors were built and operated in working prototypes in the 1960s and 1970s.

Malcolm indicated that early nuclear fusion reactors could have a reasonably sized market if the price of energy produced was about $60-$75 per megawatt-hour. This could be about $10-30 per megawatt-hour more if there was some of the proposed costs for carbon were introduced.

Process heat is high-temperature heat for industrial purposes. This is 20% of energy usage. Renewables like solar and wind are very inefficient at generating high-temperature heat. These are markets for many nuclear fusion designs and some high-temperature nuclear fission designs. Citing restriction mean nuclear fission would only be able to address 20% of this market. However, if there were safer advanced nuclear fission then the same restrictions on where they could be built may not apply.

Historical solar and wind deployments have been slower than nuclear deployments in Sweden, France and the USA.

SOURCES – ARPA-E


Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

Tesla bought Deepscale, an artificial intelligence vision company.

* The modular AI components could speed up development.


* the DeepScale software could make self-driving more energy efficient

In January, 2019, DeepScale introduced Carver21 which is AI building blocks for intelligent cars. Carver21 offers a portfolio of perception software modules that give Tier-1s and OEMs the flexibility they need to create modular, scalable ADAS. (advanced driver-assistance systems).

Carver21 can be used in small SoCs that would be embedded in edge ECUs, which typically require less than 5W power consumption and are still the status quo for the distributed electrical architectures used in today’s ADAS.

DeepScale’s full-stack deep learning methodology enables cohesive integration of AI software with various processors and sensors for customizable automated driving features. Full-stack deep learning means that DeepScale has experts working together on every aspect of deep neural network (DNN) training, development, deployment, and even data collection/curation to produce proprietary state-of-the-art AI solutions.

DeepScale can run three parallel deep neural networks while using only ~2% of Nvidia’s Drive AGX Xavier processing. Xavier has 30 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of available power.

SOURCES- Tesla, DeepScale


Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

Boston Dynamics will start selling a first-generation universal robot which is like a robot dog. Spot is an agile mobile robot that you can customize for a wide range of applications. The base platform provides rough-terrain mobility, 360 degree obstacle avoidance, and various levels of navigation, remote control and autonomy. You can customize Spot by adding specialized sensors, software and other payloads. Early customers are already testing Spot to monitor construction sites, provide remote inspection at gas, oil and power installations, and in public safety. Spot is in mass production and currently shipping to select early adopters.

* It can carry up to 14 kilograms.


* It has two payload ports.


* It moves at 3 miles per hour and can move for 90 minutes on a single charge. It has 4.5 miles of range


* The battery pack can be swapped out


* It can move over difficult terrain


* there is a robotic arm attachment for opening doors and other tasks

The video shows how it can be useful in an industrial, factory, construction or warehouse setting.

Boston Dynamics Has a Gymnastic and Pakor Capable Human Form Robot

Boston Dynamics Atlas robot is capable of tumbling and jumping. Atlas is not for sale but it demonstrates the agility of their robots.

SOURCES- Boston Dynamics

SpaceX installed battery packs equal to the batteries used in four Tesla Model X cars to power the movement of wings on the SpaceX Starship. Moving the wings will enable the Starship to generate lift during re-entry to lower the peak temperature. This along with lightweight reusable tile heatshields will prevent damage during re-entry.

Elon Musk will present the new SpaceX orbital Starship design on September 28.

Many powerful electric motors & batteries. Force required is enormous, as entire fin moves. More about this on the 28th.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 24, 2019

Exactly. For reusable heatshield, minimize peak heating. For ablative/expendable, minimize total heat. Therefore reusable like Starship wants lift during high Mach reentry for lower peak, but higher total heat.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 24, 2019

Better just to ride your max temp all the way down & let T^4 be your friend. Lower atmosphere cools you down real fast, so not crazy hot after landing.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 24, 2019

Could do it, but we developed low cost reusable tiles that are much lighter than transpiration cooling & quite robust

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 24, 2019

SOURCES – Elon Musk Twitter, SpaceX


Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

Elon Musk tweeted that the Super Heavy booster grid fins will be made of welded steel instead of titanium.

Btw, regarding Super Heavy: given that Falcon 9 grid fins are *already* the largest single piece titanium casting ever (humans for scale in pic below) … how on Earth are you going to manufacture the grid fins needed for Super Heavy!? 🤯 pic.twitter.com/iG6jQovyvt

— Viv 🎃💉 (@flcnhvy) October 1, 2019

Welded steel

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 3, 2019

Elon Musk in his Starship presentation had said that the Mark 3 version of Starship would be the version that goes to orbit. Recent video of the construction shows that new single seam rings are being made. Those would appear to be the first rings for a Mark 3 Starship.

SOURCES- SpaceX, Elon Musk, LabPadre Youtube


Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

Kneron, the San Diego and Taipei-based AI algorithm, core IP and fabless chip company, and industrial PC maker Aaeon have an AI accelerator card for edge applications based on the company’s first chip, the KL520. The M2AI-2280-520 card will accelerate AI models in IoT, smart home, security and mobile devices.

The KL520 runs 0.3 TOPS (trillion operations per second) at 0.5 W (equivalent to 0.6 TOPS/W).

It is optimized for image processing models based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), including but not limited to Kneron’s own models for facial recognition. Kneron also has its own neural processing unit (NPU) IP, neural network models for image processing, and a toolchain.

Kneron’s facial recognition model was previously recognized by NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) as the best performing model under 100MB.

“In fact, the model is 57 MB,” Ong said. “It even outperformed competitors’ models that were bigger than 1 GB. For embedded applications, it can be compressed even further, down to 32 or even 16 MB.”

Kneron NPU IP Series are neural network processors that have been designed for edge devices. These processors provide high computing performance with low power consumption and are small in size. Kneron NPU IP Series can be applied to smart homes, smart surveillance, smartphones, and wearable devices that have high requirement for low power and space. The entire product consumes under 0.5W and can even drop below 5mW for specific applications.

The KL520 edge AI chip is a culmination of Kneron’s core technologies, combining proprietary software and hardware designs to create a highly efficient and ultra low-power Neural Processing Unit (NPU). Running AI computations on the end device will help generate real-time insights without relying on the cloud.

Features and targeted applications for the KL520:

* Low-powered with a small physical footprint


* The KL250 can run alongside a main chip as a co-processor; will not need a replacement chip


* For smart door lock applications, KL520 includes two ARM Cortex M4 CPU, which can serve as the main processor.


* Balances the need of performance, power and cost to bring the best solution for edge applications


* Applicable to various 3D sensor technologies such as structured light, dual-camera and ToF, and Kneron’s exclusive 3D sensing technology


* Well-suited for applications including smart locks, security cameras, drones, smart home appliances and robotics

Kneron will be releasing its second-generation chip during Q4 of 2019 which will target the surveillance and security market. Samples of the second generation will be available in Q1 2020.

EUV Lithography is enabling another reduction in chip dimensions by 5 to 10 times in line geometry and this will extend Moore’s law and improve processing speed, component density and reduce energy used.

ASML is a World leader in lithography equipment. ASML 2019Q3 net sales came in at EUR3 billion.

This will power 5G connectivity, Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Driving, Big Data, and Emerging Memory.

EUV lithography requires lasers to hit droplets of tin 50,000 times per second. Each droplet has to be hit twice.

The previous immersion and quadruple patterning technology was reaching economic limits at about 7 nanometers. EUV is taking over 7 nanometers layers and enabling improved performance and economics to 2 nanometers and possibly to 1 nanometer.

An inexpensive thermoelectric device harnesses the cold of space without active heat input, generating electricity that powers an LED at night, researchers report September 12 in the journal Joule.

Above – In this photograph, the thermoelectric generator harnesses temperature differences to produce renewable electricity without active heat input. Here it is generating light. CREDIT Aaswath Raman

The device developed by Raman and Stanford University scientists Wei Li and Shanhui Fan sidesteps the limitations of solar power by taking advantage of radiative cooling, in which a sky-facing surface passes its heat to the atmosphere as thermal radiation, losing some heat to space and reaching a cooler temperature than the surrounding air. This phenomenon explains how frost forms on grass during above-freezing nights, and the same principle can be used to generate electricity, harnessing temperature differences to produce renewable electricity at night, when lighting demand peaks.

Raman and colleagues tested their low-cost thermoelectric generator on a rooftop in Stanford, California, under a clear December sky. The device, which consists of a polystyrene enclosure covered in aluminized mylar to minimize thermal radiation and protected by an infrared-transparent wind cover, sat on a table one meter above roof level, drawing heat from the surrounding air and releasing it into the night sky through a simple black emitter. When the thermoelectric module was connected to a voltage boost convertor and a white LED, the researchers observed that it passively powered the light. They further measured its power output over six hours, finding that it generated as much as 25 milliwatts of energy per square meter.

Since the radiative cooler consists of a simple aluminum disk coated in paint, and all other components can be purchased off the shelf, Raman and the team believe the device can be easily scaled for practical use. The amount of electricity it generates per unit area remains relatively small, limiting its widespread applications for now, but the researchers predict it can be made twenty times more powerful with improved engineering–such as by suppressing heat gain in the radiative cooling component to increase heat-exchange efficiency–and operation in a hotter, drier climate.

SOURCES- Stanford, Journal Joule, Eurekalert


Written by Brian Wang