How Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are ushering in a new era of space startups

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In early February, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the planet’s wealthiest entrepreneurs, dropped the bombshell announcement that he would be stepping down as CEO to free up more time for his other passions. Though Bezos listed a few targets for his creativity and energy— The Washington Post and philanthropy through the Bezos Earth Fund and Bezos Day One Fund—one of the highest-potential areas is his renewed commitment and focus on his suborbital spaceflight project, Blue Origin. Before space became a frontier for innovation and development for privately held companies, opportunities were limited to nation states and the private defense contractors who supported them. In recent years, however, billionaires such as Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson have lowered the barrier to entry. Since the launch of its first rocket, Falcon 1, in September of 2008, Musk’s commercial space transportation company SpaceX has gradually but significantly reduced the cost and complexity of innovation beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. With Bezos’s announcement, many in the space sector are excited by the prospect of those barriers being lowered even further, creating a new wave of innovation in its wake. “What I want to achieve with Blue Origin is to build the heavy-lifting infrastructure that allows for the kind of dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion of thousands of companies in space that I have witnessed over the last 21 years on the internet,” Bezos said during the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in 2016. During the event, Bezos explained how the creation of Amazon was only possible thanks to the billions of dollars spent on critical infrastructure—such as the postal service, electronic payment systems, and the internet itself—in the decades prior. “On the internet today, two kids in their dorm room can reinvent an industry, because the heavy-lifting infrastructure is in place for that,” he continued. “Two kids in their dorm room can’t do anything interesting in space. . . . I’m using my Amazon winnings to do a new piece of heavy-lifting infrastructure, which is low-cost access to space.” In the less than 20 years since the launch of SpaceX’s first rocket, space has gone from a domain reserved for nation states and the world’s wealthiest individuals to everyday innovators and entrepreneurs. Today, building a space startup isn’t rocket science. Related: Jeff Bezos: Blue Origin ‘is the most important work I’m doing’ The next frontier for entrepreneurship According to the latest Space Investment Quarterly report published by Space Capital, the fourth quarter of 2020 saw a record $5.7 billion invested into 80 space-related companies, bringing the year’s total capital investments in space innovation to more than $25 billion. Overall, more than $177 billion of equity investments have been made in 1,343 individual companies in the space economy over the past 10 years. “It’s kind of crazy how quickly things have picked up; 10 years ago when SpaceX launched their first customer they removed the barriers to entry, and we’ve seen all this innovation and capital flood in,” says Chad Anderson, the managing partner of Space Capital. “We’re on an exponential curve here Read More …

This ideal résumé template to use if you’re looking for a job in tech

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Technology companies are booming despite the pandemic, and technology professionals have never been in higher demand. So now’s the time for software engineers to update their résumés to take advantage of this extraordinary hiring environment. At Leet Resumes , we’ve assessed the résumés of tech professionals from thousands of companies. Here are a few quick tips for making a more effective résumé for the New Year. Purpose : Remember that the purpose of your résumé is to generate interview requests. It’s not your bio, your academic CV, an exhaustive list of everything you’ve done, or even a good representation of the complete you. The purpose of a résumé is to get interviews, and everything that isn’t essential to that goal should be jettisoned. Scannable: Your résumé needs to be scannable. When it comes to your professional summary—the top ⅓ of the page of your résumé—it needs to be easy for the reader to digest in only a few seconds. As a first pass, they’re scanning it as quickly as possible to determine whether or not you belong in the “read more carefully” pile. That means they’re skimming through your résumé at top speed to decide whether to send you along to the next stage, whether that’s a quick Zoom screen or a full interview with the engineering manager. Paragraphs won’t cut it. When résumé readers lose their train of thought in your paragraph or are distracted by complex sentences, they move on. It’s essential that you keep their attention with short words and phrases that attract their interest. Headline: You’ll need a professional headline that sums up your role and level for easy comprehension. This concise statement encapsulates your professional standing in a few words. Great professional headlines include: Passionate Open Source Engineer Top-performing BI Analyst Innovative Machine Learning Expert Successful Front-end Engineer Dedicated DevOps Professional For the HR professional or engineering manager reviewing résumés, this clear professional headline grabs attention and serves as a ready shorthand summation of your career to date. After your professional headline, you’ll share four job titles you’d actually accept for your next role. Read More …

Spotify just unveiled “lossless” CD-quality music. Your move, Apple

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Given Apple’s long history in high-quality music technology, it’s strange to see the company get left behind in the sound quality of streaming music. On Monday, Spotify followed Amazon, Tidal, and Deezer in announcing a new, higher-fidelity streaming music service level, which it says will become available later this year. The new service, called Spotify HiFi , promises to stream content to smartphones and connected speakers in CD quality, with a wider dynamic frequency range (higher highs, lower lows) as well as more definition, sound placement, and clarity. The format is “lossless,” meaning that the music is not compressed but sounds exactly the way it does after mixing and mastering. Spotify says it’s now working with several manufacturers to design HiFi-ready speakers. There’s reason to believe that Apple will add lossless sound quality to Apple Music sooner or later. The company announced a whole line of 5G iPhones last fall ; 5G wireless service supports larger streams with higher reliability, which would come in handy for lossless audio. As 5G service becomes more widespread, a lossless version of Apple Music might be a natural upgrade. Apple continues to focus on audio hardware of high quality and high price. The company’s HomePod smart speakers are one example–the original HomePod costs $299, while even the new $99 HomePod Mini emphasizes sound quality more than rival entry-level smart speakers that cost less. Apple recently released a new pair of high-quality over-ear headphones called AirPods Max , which sell for $549. Spotify said both listeners and artists have said that higher music quality is a highly desired feature. “Adding a HiFi tier of streaming service to their platform . . . will enable more consumers, and a younger generation of listeners, to experience their music with more detail, dynamics, and realism,” says Jeff Poggi, Co-CEO of McIntosh Group, which makes audiophile-grade components and speakers. Spotify enlisted Billie Eilish to explain (in the video below) why it’s important to artists. “We want our music to be heard the way it was recorded,” she said. Spotify said earlier this month that its paid subscriber count had increased 24% to 155 million from the same time last year. Read More …

Watch the ‘Perseverance’ rover land on Mars in this just-released video

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Since we began sending probes to the surface of Mars, our experience of their landings was a nail-biting silence, punctured only by a NASA Mission Control engineer announcing milestones in the spacecraft progress. That all changed with the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover filming its February 18 landing . Six of the 23 onboard commercial cameras shot high-definition footage of the supersonic descent—dubbed the “ 7 minutes of terror “—and first surface movements. Three cameras trained on the parachute, while another three videoed the descent stage, rover, and approaching ground. Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Pasadena, California, facility that built the rover and manages the $2.7 billion mission, premiered its high-resolution video during today’s briefing . This marks the first time we’re able to watch a spacecraft land on another planet. “These images and videos are the stuff of our dreams,” said Mars 2020 entry, descent, and landing (EDL) lead engineer Allen Chen. “I just couldn’t believe my eyes; the images were better than I could have imagined,” JPL’s Adam Nelessen told Fast Company about his initial reaction to the footage. An EDL lead systems engineer, Nelessen focused on the EDL camera technology. “There is a lot that we can learn from the imagery. One of the best engineering outcomes is going to be recording the inflation of the parachute at a high frame rate. We’re going to learn just how well this thin piece of fabric is actually performing.” This is also the first time EDL engineers have seen the landing process unfurl in its entirety, as they were only able to run tests in separate stages on Earth. The footage revealed that the EDL navigation system came to within 16 feet of its landing target. The video also gave a better sense of the debris that kicks up during landing, particularly as NASA looks to land increasingly heavier items on Mars. “We worry about dust and sand confounding radar sensors and making our landing more difficult,” he adds. “So seeing what the dust environment and hazards are like in the area have really good engineering uses for us.” Plus, observing the landing site on approach offers a head start on how to best navigate the area to achieve the science objectives. More raw images of Mars can be found here . High-resolution photo from the descent stage camera of Perseverance being lowered to the Martian surface via the sky-crane mechanism Read More …

I’m an ethical hacker. Here’s how I could use social media to scam you

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Scam emails aren’t what they used to be. Gone are the days of fraudulent emails filled with typos and Nigerian princes promising riches if only we hand over our credit cards. Today’s phishing emails can be quite convincing, often addressed to us by name or with specific personal details. Modern hackers can find everything they need to know about a potential target through Google or social media and use this information to architect the perfect scam. Read More …