The 2017 U.S. Department of Defense project Maven was launched to apply AI-based computer vision to analyze drone surveillance footage in the Middle East, with fielding by year’s end. In 2019, China released its National Defense White Paper announcing the goal of “intelligentized warfare” and a plan to become the world AI leader by 2030.…
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In April 2023, AST SpaceMobile’s BlueWalker 3 demonstrated the first two-way voice call from an off-the-shelf smartphone (Samsung Galaxy S22) to a satellite. In November 2022, Apple launched Emergency SOS via Satellite on iPhone 14 using Globalstar, with the service free for two years. In September 2022, Lynk Global received the FCC license for commercial…
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By 2040, analysts expect the global GEO replacement rate to be 10–15 new satellites per year, totaling about 200 GEO satellites from 2024 to 2040 and replacing most of today’s roughly 350-satellite fleet. A typical GEO satellite is designed for about 15 years, but all-electric propulsion and on-orbit servicing can push operational life to 20–30…
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OpenAI launched GPT-4.5 “Orion” on February 27, 2025, as the largest model to date with improved reasoning and a chain-of-thought mode. Google’s Gemini 2.5, released in 2025, is a multimodal AI that handles text, code, images, audio, and video and comes in Nano, Flash, Pro, and Ultra tiers with an AI Pro plan and Deep…
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The first space images were captured in 1946 from a sub-orbital U.S. V-2 rocket at about 105 km altitude. The first actual satellite photograph of Earth was taken on August 14, 1959 by the U.S. Explorer 6 satellite. In 1960, TIROS-1 transmitted the first television image of Earth from orbit, a milestone for weather observation.…
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