Listening to starlight: Our ongoing search for alien intelligence

Six hours a day, seven days a week, for four straight months. That’s how long radio astronomer Frank D. Drake pointed the 26-meter telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) research facility in Green Bank, West Virginia, towards the heavens, looking for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. He dubbed his efforts Project Ozma, in honor of the Queen of Oz from L. Frank Baum’s famed children’s book series.

National Radio Astronomy Observatory – Image: Education Images/UIG via Getty Images

Between April and July of 1960, Drake recorded some 150 hours of tape speckled with radio noise. While no meaningful encoded signals or patterns emerged from those readings, Drake still earned himself a place in history for performing what would become the first scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the modern era.

Since then, research organizations around the world have performed nearly 100 SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) experiments. Even NASA got in on the hunt, working with the SETI Institute between 1988 and 1993, when Sen. Richard Bryan (D – Nevada) introduced an amendment that cut the program’s government funding.

“Senators kind of looked at this line item and said, ‘Hey wait a minute. Are we are we paying to search for little green men?’” explained Steve Croft, an assistant project astronomer at the UC Berkeley SETI Research Center and researcher with the Breakthrough Discovery project. “That’s kind of a laugh factor which has always come along with it.”

But as the next generation of telescopes come online, like the upcoming Webb Space Telescope or dedicated planet hunter the Kepler Telescope, the scientific community is beginning to warm to the idea of SETI as not just a valid scientific discipline but an essential one. “I think people are kind of coming around to the idea that SETI as a scientific endeavor is one that’s worth pursuing,” Croft added. Especially, “when we can answer a scientific question or attempt to answer the scientific question are we alone in the universe?”

The SETI Institute of California is trying to do just that. The 33-year-old organization formed in 1984 with the mission of understanding the origins and nature of life in the universe. It employs 120 staffers, 75 of whom are PhD-level researchers, and conducts research among 22 fields of inquiry over seven branches of research: astronomy and astrophysics, geoscience, exoplanets and exploration, exobiology and SETI.

The SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array – Image: Reuters

For its SETI efforts, the Institute relies on radio and optical telescopes. On the radio side, the Institute leverages its Allen Telescope Array (ATA), a 42-dish setup located at Hat Creek Radio Observatory, nearly 300 miles Northeast of San Francisco. It can scan 4 octaves of radio frequency and generates roughly 55 TB of data every day. Unlike conventional radio telescopes used for radio astronomy, the ATA scans a broader swath of the radio spectrum, albeit at a lower sensitivity.

The group is also working with Paul Horowitz, a physicist and electrical engineer at Harvard, to develop “all sky all the time optical SETI survey systems” where the ATA would perform wide surveys of the sky while other, more sensitive telescopes — like the Lick — would follow up with more focused surveys covering a smaller portion of sky.

For its optical surveys, the Institute splits its time between the UC Berkeley’s Lick Observatory and the Harvard Haystack telescope. These telescopes are looking for laser emissions, specifically. These could be from any number of alien sources including communication arrays, weapon tests or transportation (hello, laser sails). “But in any case a monochromatic high-intensity highly focused coherent beam of light would be a fairly indicative sign of technology that could potentially be seen from very far away,” Bill Diamond, CEO of the SETI Institute explained.

However, both the radio and optical instruments have noticeable limitations. While humankind is theoretically capable of blasting a laser beam into space that is 10,000 times stronger than the sun, Diamond continued, “there isn’t an instrument on Earth that can detect an Earth-like planet with Earth-like leakage of electromagnetic radiation.” This leakage refers to the general emission of radio signals a civilization gives off through its various technologies, rather than powerful, highly focused signals intentionally designed to get another planet’s attention. And while using overlapping technologies, as in the case of the SETI Institute-Horowitz collaboration, can boost our relative capabilities, it’s still not good enough to intercept complex communications that rely on, say, wideband carrier signals.

“We don’t want to make too many assumptions about the kind of signals that an extraterrestrial civilization might be sending,” Croft said. “It might not be kind of a simple tone. You know a transmission which is a single frequency will have a drifting tone because it is on a planet that’s going around a star.” [Thanks, Doppler effect – ed] Who knows, maybe Frank Drake did find an alien message in that radio static but it’s encoded in a manner that researchers haven’t yet been able to identify and decipher. “They might be sending some kind of complicated data; we make all sorts of complicated transmissions ourselves as humans,” Croft concluded.

This technological wall has spurned SETI researchers to seek out more effective means of scouring the galaxy. In the case of Berkeley’s Breakthrough Listen project, that involved securing a 10-year, $100 million funding grant from Yuri Milner, a Russian entrepreneur, and physicist Stephen Hawking. This money will be used to buy time on two of the world’s most powerful telescopes (the Green Bank in West Virginia and the Parkes in Australia).

The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope – Image: John B. Carnett via Getty Images

“We are in a position with the telescopes that we would be able to detect transmissions at a level that is similar to what we ourselves as humans generate,” Croft said. “As of right now we’re kind of relying on the fact that if civilizations are out there that they’re broadcasting to higher power than we are. But we’re not very far off being able to detect human-like emissions.” Hopefully, as the Square Kilometer Array comes online in Australia and South Africa, that will actually happen.

Over the past 18 months, the Breakthrough Listen Initiative has also teamed with the SETI@Home project, run by a team from UC Berkeley, to process a portion of the data generated each day. SETI@Home launched in 1999 as a means of distributing the computational workload that analyzing dozens of terabytes of radio signal data generated by the Arecibo telescope across hundreds of thousands of personal desktop computers. “Actually Berkeley and the SETI Institute have a long history together,” Diamond said. “Berkeley was involved with us in the very early days of developing the Allen Telescope Array, so we go back a long time. “

The program currently only has around 150,000 volunteers (down from a peak of 1.5 million users) and “we’re getting back into our problem again in that the telescope can generate far more data than we can analyze with the best sensitivity,” said Dr. Eric Korpela, head of the SETI@Home project.

The Breakthrough Listen Initiative has a “pipeline” that divides 1 GHz of spectrum into 3hz channels (330 million in total) that are scanned for potential signals. You want the channels to be as narrow as possible in order to maximize the sensitivity, however, as both the Earth and whatever exoplanet the telescope is looking at move through their respective solar systems, signals tend to “drift” in frequency. “You want to use computer power to correct for that motion,” Korpela explained, although the process is incredibly CPU-intensive. But that’s exactly what SETI@Home is trying to do.

However, even with the million-odd CPU cores at SETI@Home’s disposal, analyzing all that data is still slow going. Its volunteers only account for around 2 percent of the Breakthrough Listen Initiative’s analytical power. The program simply doesn’t have enough volunteers to keep up with the demand. And the fact that many people have ditched their desktops for mobile devices is not helping either.

“It is an issue that we worry about,” Korpela admitted. “We do have an app for Android. The processors that are in a typical phone right now are not comparable with what are in most desktops, but they’re certainly better than a processor from 1999.” The app is currently running on 22,000 volunteer mobile devices, or around 15 percent of the total base. However, these devices are only contributing 2.3 TFLOP/s of processing, 0.5 percent of the program’s total computational power. As such, SETI@Home doesn’t face a technological hurdle in accelerating its search for intelligent extraterrestrial life so much as a societal one.

“But given that there are a couple billion Android devices out there,” Korpela mused, “there are another 200 petaFLOP/s out there that we haven’t tapped yet.” The SETI@Home team hopes to garner new interest in their efforts when they release their report from the Breakthrough Listen Initiative this fall.

As for the SETI Institute, its technological roadblocks are being resolved with upgrades — and lots of them. The research group is looking to expand the number of dishes in the Allen Array from 42 to at least 128 in the near term before eventually growing it to more than 300 dishes. The Institute is also improving the sensitivity of its feeds — the antennas that take the collected radio signals from the dishes and convert them into digital signals — as well as their frequency response and converting the whole feed system to run cryogenically. “That improves the signal-to-noise ratio,” Diamond explained “since heat generates radio noise.” Finally, the Institute is looking to upgrade the antennas’ backend to enable them to sample more parts of the night sky — expanding from current 3-beam system up to 12.

“But even those enhancements probably don’t get us to the point of being able to detect Earth-like leakage,” Diamond lamented.

That’s why the SETI Institute is teaming with IBM to apply the company’s advanced machine learning algorithms to the Institute’s massive data archive. The Institute is already the only SETI group that performs real-time analysis of its collected signals, using fast Fourier transform to look for narrow-band carrier signals that would indicate a non-natural source. The Apache Spark cluster computing tools, however, “have the ability to extract, if it exists, from patterns that, to us, would otherwise look like radio noise,” Diamond said. “It’s given us the ability to actually do experiments that we’ve never been able to do before, including possibly detecting an Earth-like planet that’s just emitting leakage.”

Essentially, the Institute can point the ATA at a known exoplanet (or system like TRAPPIST-1), measure the star system’s radio signature, then wait for the planet to transit behind the sun and measure the system’s radio signature again. If there’s a significant difference in the readings, that could mean there’s something afoot on that exoplanet. The Institute wouldn’t necessarily be able to understand what’s encoded in the transmission but it would provide strong impetus for other astronomical research groups to follow up with their own observations. This is actually very close to what the Breakthrough Listen Initiative team is doing, albeit with a less sensitive piece of equipment.

And while the SETI Institute (as well as the Breakthrough Listen Initiative and SETI@Home, for that matter) can’t say for sure when humanity will find life outside of our own, the group is already cultivating interest in the subject with the next generation. The SETI Institute is sponsoring an IBM hackathon this June — they’re giving teams from around the world access to ATA data as well as to IBM’s machine learning tools. The competition will finish up with a live event in San Francisco come August. For now, though, we’re still alone (as far as science knows).

Welcome to Tomorrow, Engadget’s new home for stuff that hasn’t happened yet. You can read more about the future of, well, everything, at Tomorrow’s permanent home and check out all of our launch week stories here.

Rocket Lab nails first orbital rocket launch from a private pad

Rocket Lab has successfully launched its 56-foot-tall Electron rocket for the first time. The relatively tiny vehicle designed to ferry small payloads to orbit reached outer space around 20 minutes past midnight (Eastern time) on May 25th. Rocket Lab opened its 10-day launch window on May 21st and had to scrub three times due to poor weather conditions. Now that Electron was finally able to head outside our planet’s atmosphere, the company also became the first to launch an orbital-class rocket from a private facility.

Rocket Lab chief Peter Beck said in a statement:

“It has been an incredible day and I’m immensely proud of our talented team. We’re one of a few companies to ever develop a rocket from scratch and we did it in under four years. We’ve worked tirelessly to get to this point. We’ve developed everything in house, built the world’s first private orbital launch range [in New Zealand], and we’ve done it with a small team.”

The Electron has a carbon-composite shell and uses the company’s proprietary Rutherford engines, which has 3D-printed primary components. It can carry up to 330 pounds worth of cargo to orbit, so its main payloads will mostly be small satellites like CubeSats. The company expects to stage a lift off 50 times a year, though it’s legally allowed to launch up to 120 times. That’s probably more than what it can realistically book at this point in time — as Wired points out, there were only 85 overall launches in 2016.

Rocket Lab believes it can eventually do more launches than other aerospace companies, though, since it will offer cheaper services to customers who typically have to pay big money to hitch a ride on larger rockets. It already has clients lined up, including NASA, but before it can officially fulfill their order, it still has to successfully complete its next two test flights. The Rocket Lab team plans to use what it learns from this round to plan for its second flight, which will send an Electron to orbit.

Source: Rocket Lab

Imzy, the nice Reddit, is shutting down

Imzy, an online community that billed itself as Reddit, but for nice people, has announced that it will be closing down. In a statement, CEO Dan McComas admitted that after two years, the site was unable to find its “place in the market.” Imzy’s last day of operations is June 23rd, giving folks around a month to move their communities to other places online. McComas also noted that the site’s users don’t need to worry about their personal data being sold on later, saying that “nothing” will happen to it from now.

McComas joined Reddit after his project, RedditGifts, was acquired by the site, and rose to the role of SVP of Product in the company. He subsequently left to found Imzy, which operated on a similar model to Reddit, albeit with a mission to foster a much nicer community. McComas intended to do so by designing out toxicity by ensuring users only had one log-in per board and enabling moderators to set their own standards. Unfortunately, history is replete with “alternatives” to popular web communities falling by the wayside, just ask App.net, Orkut, Secret (for now), and So.cl, amongst others.

Source: Imzy

Alto uses your emails to clean up your calendar

Smartphones are an absolute godsend for organizing… well, pretty much everything. Yet despite all they do for us, it can still be hugely frustrating when your various calendar apps don’t play nicely with each other. AOL (Engadget’s parent company, for full disclosure) is trying to solve this headache with the latest update for its Mail tool, Alto.

For the uninitiated, Alto is an iOS and Android app that combines all your calendar appointments and email accounts into one tap-able hub. While it’s it looks like AOL is addressing a few of them in its latest update. Although it has always combined your various email inboxes, annoyingly, Alto would only previously track your appointments if they were made via Google Calendar.

Now, the app will link together all of your different email calendars whether they’re from Exchange email accounts, Yahoo, iCloud or most other providers. This will allow users to schedule, track and edit all their appointments in one easy to manage place. In another nice touch, this update makes Calendar events appear as actionable cards in the app’s dashboard, helping appointments to stay just as visible as important emails.

For those who prefer talking to their phone rather than swiping at it, the update also looks to make its existing Alexa support more useful. Previously, Amazon’s personal assistant only really integrated with Google Calendar, merely allowing users to ask about events that you’d penciled in already. Now, she will have access to all of your email accounts too, meaning that by asking her a simple question she can dig through your inbox for you, finding the date of that meeting that you’ve been dreading.

If like me, you sorely need a bit of organization in your life you can download the Alto update now from both the App Store and the Google Play Store.

IFTTT’s free ‘maker’ tier lets anyone create and share recipes

We thought the combined might of Domino’s Pizza and IFTTT shortcuts was as good as it might get, but that may just be the start. IFTTT is opening up its recipe/ applet creating platform to everyone, with a free ‘maker’ tier that offers deeper (read: harder) programming options beyond the simple “if this then that” UI most IFTTT aficionados use. You could already do this, making private applets for your own use, but this announcement means part-time developers can share any awesome applets with the greater IFTTT community, including lazy ingrates like myself.

Its means that any developer with a smart idea (even if they’re not directly involved with a company or online service), can bring their own internet shortcuts to the masses. Better still, because of how these applets work, they’ll do the job on any connected device, even if the developer doesn’t own the device themselves. There are already 440 services to tap into on IFTTT, and you’ll be able to apply your own Javascript code to recipes.

“Over 200,000 makers already use IFTTT to play, iterate, and test,” said IFTTT cofounder and CEO Linden Tibbets. “Giving them access to the tools our partners have is a no-brainer — it’s a win for both users and partners. We’re excited to see what they create and in the future, we expect to see new services originating from makers as well.”

More fast-food applets, then, if you could.

Via: VentureBeat

Source: IFTTT (1), (2)

New York Mag’s Lauren Kern Named First Editor-in-Chief of Apple News

Lauren Kern, Executive Editor at New York Magazine, has been named as the first editor-in-chief of Apple News, according to Politico.

It’s unclear what exactly the role will entail, but it suggests Apple has bigger ambitions of some kind for its News app on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Kern declined to comment for the story, and Apple has yet to confirm the hiring.

Apple News is not a firsthand source of news, so Kern’s role could be at least partially related to curation of other news sources. In February, Apple executive Eddy Cue said the company wants to “vet and make sure that the news providers” in Apple News are “legitimate,” in an effort to cut down on “clickbait.”

Apple News gathers stories from several leading news sources and displays them all in one place. The app launched on iOS 9 in the United States, and it has since expanded to Australia and the United Kingdom. The app was redesigned for iOS 10 with a bolder, simpler interface that puts content front and center.

Tag: Apple News
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New Images Provide Detailed Glimpse Into Apple Orchard Road in Singapore

After removing the barricades from its brand new retail location in Singapore, Apple this week has allowed a few reporters to tour the inside of Apple Orchard Road ahead of its grand opening this Saturday, May 27 (via Mashable). The location marks Apple’s first store in Southeast Asia.

The outside of the store features an all-glass design that spans 120 feet, allowing anyone passing by to glimpse into the two-story location. The bottom level of the store houses the traditional retail aspect of Apple locations, letting customers browse and purchase products like iPhone, Apple Watch, and MacBook.

A curved staircase inspired by Apple Park leads up to the second story where customers will find a large grove of trees that was specially brought in from Malaysia, and that Apple hopes gives off a “modern-day town square” vibe. Next to the trees sit a collection of cubes and a large screen — an area specifically designed for “Today at Apple” events.

In one moment during the media’s tour through Apple Orchard Road, an illustrator was seen drawing on iPad with Apple Pencil, and the store was displaying her progress on the screen. Like all Today at Apple events, the company wants customers to be able to walk into Apple at any time of the day and find inspiration.

“You can see an illustrator just sitting over there and we’re air-playing her illustration on the video wall — that’s the real goal at Apple. You can come come in and be inspired or buy an iPhone, but we wanna show people what they can create with our products.”

“You can see an illustrator just sitting over there and we’re air-playing her illustration on the video wall — that’s the real goal at Apple. You can come come in and be inspired or buy an iPhone, but we wanna show people what they can create with our products.”

Apple Orchard Road represents one of nine major next-generation Apple Store redesigns, which also includes its spots at Union Square in New York, Dubai, Ginza, and more. The major changes began last summer when Apple dropped “Store” from its retail branding, signifying its shift to a communal gathering place over a purely merchandise purchasing experience.

After a year and a half, Apple Orchard Road will finally open to the public on May 27 at 10:00 a.m. local time. Check out more photos of the store taken by Mashable and CNET, including the location’s boardroom that has murals of Apple Park hanging on the walls and Designed by Apple in California sitting on a few tables.

Tags: Singapore, Apple retail
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OnePlus 5 vs OnePlus 3T: What’s the rumoured difference?

OnePlus’ next flagship killer has been stealing several headlines over the last few weeks. It is rumoured to arrive some time in June, which will be around seven months after its predecessor, the OnePlus 3T hit shelves. 

The question is, how much has changed in half a year? Here is how the OnePlus 5 compares to the OnePlus 3T, based on the speculation. 

OnePlus 5 vs OnePlus 3T: Design

• OnePlus 5 rumoured to be coming with dual camera
• No antenna lines expected for the OnePlus 5
• Ceramic or glass build rumoured for OnePlus 5

The OnePlus 5 is rumoured to be coming with a dual rear camera, along with a ceramic or glass build. It has been claimed a fingerprint sensor will be placed within the screen on the front, but there have also been suggestions that the fingerprint sensor will sit within a capacitive button on the front, like the OnePlus 3T.

Based on the leaked images, the antenna lines featured on the OnePlus 3T will be removed for the OnePlus 5 and USB Type-C will be present at the bottom, flanked by speakers on either side. It is not currently clear if the headphone jack will remain intact.

There have yet to be any leaked measurements for the OnePlus 5, but the OnePlus 3T measures 152.7 x 74.7 x 7.35mm and weighs 158g. It has an anodised aluminium build, available in three colours and it offers a single lens rear camera, USB Type-C and a headphone jack.

• OnePlus 5: Release date, rumours and everything you need to know

OnePlus 5 vs OnePlus 3T: Display

• OnePlus 5 could see a screen size reduction 
• Bump in resolution expected for OnePlus 5
• Both expected to be Optic AMOLED 

The OnePlus 5 is rumoured to be reducing its display size to 5.3-inches, though 5.5-inches has also been suggested for the new device. It has also been claimed the resolution would see a bump to Quad HD, which would put its pixel density at 554ppi or 534ppi, depending on the size.

We’d expect the panel to be Optic AMOLED like the OnePlus 3 and 3T rather than LCD like the OnePlus 2.

The OnePlus 3T features a 5.5-inch screen with a Full HD resolution, resulting in a pixel density of 401ppi. The new device should therefore deliver crisper and sharper images than its predecessor, assuming the bump in resolution is true.

• OnePlus 3T review

OnePlus 5 vs OnePlus 3T: Camera

• Dual-camera reported for OnePlus 5
• 23MP and 16MP or 16MP and 16MP front and rear sensors rumoured
• OnePlus 3T has 16MP and 16MP sensors with f/2.0 aperture 

Leaked images all suggest there will be a dual-rear camera on the OnePlus 5 and there has been some discussion of a dual-front camera too.

The resolutions of the sensors are still up in the air, with some rumours claiming 23-megapixels on the rear and 16-megapixels on the front, while others have claimed 16-megapixels on both the front and rear.

The OnePlus 3T by comparison offers a 16-megapixel single rear sensor with an f/2.0 aperture, coupled with PDAF and OIS, both of which we’d expect on the new device. The front camera is also 16-megapixels with a f/2.0 aperture.

OnePlus 5 vs OnePlus 3T: Hardware

• OnePlus 5 will have performance improvements
• RAM and storage could stay the same
• Battery capacity likely to increase for OnePlus 5

OnePlus has confirmed the OnePlus 5 will arrive with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset, though it has yet to specify the RAM and storage configurations that will be available. 

Rumours have suggested 6GB or 8GB of RAM for the OnePlus 5, as well as 64GB or 128GB storage capacities, while the battery is rumoured to be 4000mAh. No doubt the company’s Dash Charge will also be on board for quick charging.

The OnePlus 3T features the Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor, coupled with 6GB of RAM and either 64GB or 128GB of storage. This means the new device will offer a bump in performance, as you would expect, even if the RAM and storage remain the same. 

It’s also set to see a bump in battery as the OnePlus 3T has a 3400mAh capacity, which too supports Dash Charge.

OnePlus 5 vs OnePlus 3T: Software 

• Both likely to run on OxygenOS
• OnePlus 5 may have a few additional features

The OnePlus 5 will no doubt launch on OxygenOS, a customised version of Android, like the OnePlus 3T runs on, meaning the software experience should be pretty similar between these two devices. 

The new handset is likely to offer a few new features that the OnePlus 3T may not get, even with an update, but overall we’re expecting the user experience to be very familiar.

OnePlus 5 vs OnePlus 3T: Conclusion

As with any flagship successor, the OnePlus 5 is rumoured to offer several improvements over the OnePlus 3T, including camera, design, display and performance.

For now, only the upgrade in chipset has been confirmed but we will update this feature and our rumour round up as soon as any more leaks or official details are revealed.

Siri will soon control Belkin’s WeMo smart switches

WeMo, Belkin’s line of smart light switches and plugs, will soon be compatible with Apple’s HomeKit. Its products already give you a way to control the electronics in your home wherever you are, but HomeKit support means you’ll be able to ask Siri to do it for you. You can, for instance, tell virtual assistant to “dim the lights in the living room” or switch them on or off completely. That said, you’ll have to do more than update your software or download an app to get that feature. You’ll have to get WeMo’s upcoming HomeKit-enabled device called Bridge to be able to ask Siri on your iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch to control supported devices.

Belkin chief technology officer Brian Van Harlingen said in a statement:

“WeMo is offering this bridge to address the overwhelming request from customers to make currently installed Wemo products work with HomeKit and other HomeKit compatible products. We’re proud to work with Apple to bring together two of the most influential Smart Home platforms. The WeMo Bridge will allow current and future WeMo users to experience the benefits of HomeKit, including Siri integration and interoperability with other HomeKit devices while also leveraging all the WeMo features customers enjoy.”

The Bridge (pictured above) adds HomeKit integration into WeMo’s smart plugs and light switches by using your WiFi connection. You’ll have to connect it to your router with an Ethernet cable so it can do its job. While Belkin doesn’t have a price or a specific release date for it yet, it has at least revealed that the device will be available sometime this fall.

Source: WeMo

SpaceX begins test-firing parts of its biggest rocket

Sorry folks, things are about to get heavy, by which we mean that SpaceX has begun test-firing the boosters for the Falcon Heavy. The company posted a clip of the event from last week, showing a side booster being put through its paces. Elon Musk subsequently tweeted that, when the Falcon Heavy launches, it’ll be this powerful, but “times three.” The CEO aded that “one way or another, launch is guaranteed to be exciting.”

Static fire test of a Falcon Heavy side booster completed in McGregor, TX last week. This booster previously launched Thaicom 8. pic.twitter.com/nWrNCXtu13

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 25, 2017

The first Falcon Heavy launch is expected to take place at some point this summer, with its two boosters being re-used from previous flights. The one in the video, for instance, was previously used to send Taiwanese communications satellite Thaicom 8 to the heavens. The vehicle itself, meanwhile, will be an extraordinary piece of equipment, with SpaceX saying that it’ll be able to push 54 metric tons into space.