Posts tagged with "physics"

Cryptocurrency illustration by Heather Skovlund for use by 360 Magazine

The Richest Under 30: Sam Bankman-Fried

29-year-old Sam Bankman-Fried has made his mark in the world of crypto, rising to prosperity in such a short period of time as comparable to that of Austin Russell’s Luminar. But how exactly did he do it?

Sam Bankman-Friend is the son of two Stanford Law School professors who graduated with a degree in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2014. Following his graduation from university, Sam worked for Jane Street trading ETFs from 2014 to 2017.

He created his first liquid crypto market business in 2017, more commonly known as Alameda Research.

In an interview with Forbes, he discussed the purpose behind the company, stating, “We saw that crypto was exhibiting all the signs that there would be a lot of demand for liquidity but with very little liquidity available. Everyone on the street was talking about crypto during that time.

“We were seeing huge price movements and inflows which clearly pointed to a lot of people from many different countries trying to buy many different varieties of crypto currencies using different acquisition methods. Despite how big it had become, it still had only been a few months. This meant that there had not been enough time for most of the buyers globally to onboard into the crypto ecosystem.”

Then, in April of 2019, Sam co-founded FTX, the cryptocurrency essentially “built by traders, for traders.”

FTX is primarily used by consumers to trade spot, futures, stock, leverage tokens and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTS). The objective of FTX is “to develop a platform robust enough for professional trading firms and intuitive enough for first-time users.”

In 2021 alone, FTX brought in $900 million from companies like Coinbase Ventures and Softbank, attributable to an $18 billion estimate, following another $25 billion valuation in October.

This success amounts to how Sam was able to make the Forbes 30 Under 30 Hall of Fame, naming him the wealthiest person in the world under 30. His net worth as of February 5, 2022, sits at $24.5 billion.

Portions of this revenue has been flowed into marketing for the company, as the FTX serves as “the official cryptocurrency exchange of the MLB.” FTX was noticeably seen throughout the World Series in signs, commercials and even patches on the umpires’ uniforms.

The company, too, houses the Miami Heat as the play in the FTX Arena. The rise of Sam’s business has been exponential, so much that he is richest person to have obtained wealth so rapidly behind Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook.

What does the richest person under 30 plan to do with all this money?

Well, Sam prides himself on being a believer of “effective altruism,” a practice that involves making large amounts money to, in return, be donated back to boost one’s own influence.

One of his primary donations went towards the push for the removal of former US President Donald Trump from office. Sam donated a whopping $5.2 million to the Joe Biden campaign, which was the second greatest donation to the campaign following past New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

FTX Foundation contributes 1% of all net fees to active organizations around the world, while Sam himself has donated 0.1% of his own to issues surrounding voter registration, global poverty relief and artificial intelligence security.

space illustration bv Samantha Miduri for use by 360 Magazine

Civilian Space Flights

By: Emily Bunn

3,2,1… Liftoff! On July 20, Blue Origin LLC, an American privately funded aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company, launched its first crewed mission. July 20 marks the anniversary of the first ever human landing on the moon, by Buzz Aldrin on the Apollo 11.

Blue Orbit, founded by Jeff Bezos, took the billionaire Amazon CEO and his brother, Mark Bezos into orbit. Also aboard the aircraft is Wally Funk. Funk is American aviator and Mercury 13 astronaut. The final passenger aboard the mission is eighteen-year-old physics student, Oliver Daemen.

Jeff Bezos has been excitedly anticipating this mission. He commented to NBC’s Today Show on Monday, July 19, stating I’m so excited. I can’t wait to see what it’s going to be like… People say they go into space and they come back changed. Astronauts always talk about that, whether it’s the thin limb of the Earth’s atmosphere and seeing how fragile the planet is, that it’s just one planet. So I can’t wait to see what it’s gonna do to me.”

The daring mission took place on Blue Orbit’s New Shephard rocket this morning. The spacecraft is made from a rocket, topped by a capsule. New Shephard took off at 9:11 a.m. EDT (1311 GMT) and stands as the company’s first human flight. This momentous occurrence marks Blue Orbit’s first crewed flight.

During the flight, the New Shephard climbed to a peak altitude of 351210 ft into the atmosphere. In total, the capsule carried the four passengers 66.5 miles (107 kilometers) above earth. Jeff Bezos enjoyed his space mission, remarking “Blue Control, Bezos. Best day ever!” during the mission. Once completed, the flight took just over ten minutes from liftoff to landing.

At 9:40, the New Shephard returned to earth and landed in the Texas desert. The space craft was aided in its landing by parachutes. Upon touching down onto the dessert soil, a sonic boom erupted and dust temporarily muddied the surrounding arid landscape. In the course of the landing, Jeff Bezos enthusiastically exclaimed, “You’ve got a very happy crew, I want you to know,” reports Space. The members of the suborbital spaceflight were greeted by their family immediately after exiting the aircraft.

Live updates as well as a post-flight press conference can be viewed on Space’s website HERE.

However, Bezos isn’t the only billionaire to launch into space as of late. On July 11, the founder of the Virgin Group, Richard Branson, also was catapulted into orbit. Branson traveled on the VSS Unity space plane, of which was Virgin Galactic’s first fully crewed flight. In fact, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origins are each other’s most competitive rivals in the race for the suborbital space tourism business. Both billionaires basked in a few minutes of weightlessness and once in a lifetime view of earth.

Looking ahead, both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin seek to continue their successful test flights. With a ticket costing $250,000, Virgin Galactic’s luxurious mission offers passengers a priceless field of vision. Blue Orbits’ spacecraft tickets are estimated to also cost around the same price. As suborbital space tourism takes off, the world waits in earnest to see who is next to visit space.

Challenger: The Final Flight

By Cassandra Yany

On Wednesday, Netflix released “Challenger: The Final Flight,” a four-episode docuseries about the tragic explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger.

The doc was directed by Daniel Junge and Steven Leckart, and executive produced by JJ Abrams and Glenn Zipper. It provides a complete look at the events leading up to the takeoff and includes interviews with family members of the seven astronauts who died in the explosion.

According to CNN, the series uses archival footage and home videos, along with interviews from officials and crew members to shed light on the poor decision-making and systemic failures that led up to the disaster, as well as the aftermath that followed.

Challenger took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral on January 28, 1986. Just 73 seconds after it launched, the shuttle began breaking apart, due to malfunctioning O-rings in the rocket boosters, which hardened as the temperature decreased. NASA had reportedly known about this damaged hardware for months prior, according to Vanity Fair.

The purpose of mission STS-51-L was to deploy a satellite to study the approaching Halley’s Comet, but it had been delayed multiple times because of technical difficulties.

The crew was one of NASA’s most diverse to date, as reported by the New York Post. One of the astronauts was a teacher, so school children across the country watched in class as the shuttle went down, engulfed by a huge, ominous cloud of smoke. The explosion devastated the nation, especially all of the young children who had watched it live.

Nearly thirty-five years later, we remember the passengers who lost their lives on that dreadful day:

Christa McAuliffe

Christa McAuliffe was a teacher at Concord High School in New Hampshire who learned of the Teacher in Space Project— NASA’s plan to fly an educator into space. NASA had hoped that this would help increase public interest in the space shuttle program. 

Along with 11,000 others, McAuliffe applied in 1984 to be the first teacher to communicate with students from space. She was chosen as one of two finalists from New Hampshire, then was selected to be part of the STS-51-L crew by a Review Panel in Washington, D.C.

McAuliffe took a year off from teaching to train for the space shuttle mission. While in orbit, she was planning to conduct experiments in chromatography, hydroponics, magnetism and Newton’s laws. She also would have taught two 15-minute classes— one providing a tour of the spacecraft, the other about the benefits of space travel— which would have been broadcasted to students on closed-circuit TV. 

The nationwide excitement of having McAuliffe in space was a significant reason why the explosion had such a lasting impact on the country, and was especially upsetting for young students who watched the takeoff or extensive coverage in class. 

Gregory Jarvis

Gregory Jarvis was an engineer for Hughes Aircraft who served as Payload Specialist 2 on Challenger. In 1984, he was one of two employees from the company that were selected for the Space Shuttle program. 

Jarvis was originally supposed to make his shuttle flight in April 1985, but was rescheduled to early January 1986, then rescheduled again, landing him a spot on the STS-51-L crew. From space, he planned to conduct experiments on the effects of weightlessness on fluids. 

Dick Scobee

Dick Scobee earned his pilot wings in 1966 and served as a combat aviator in the Vietnam War, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal.

After the war, Scobee graduated from the USAF Aerospace Research Pilot School and became an Air Force test pilot. He was the commander on Challenger and died a lieutenant colonel.

Judith Resnik

After graduating from Carnegie Mellon, Judith Resnik worked as a design engineer in missile and radar projects at RCA (Radio Corporation of America). There, she performed circuit design for the missile and surface radar division. She later developed electronics and software for NASA’s sounding rocket and telemetry systems programs. 

Resnik qualified as a professional aircraft pilot in 1977 and was recruited into the NASA Astronaut Corps in 1978. She was one of six women selected for the program out of 8,000 applicants. At NASA, and piloted the Northrop T-38 Talon, trained intensely, conducted research, and developed different systems and software. 

Resnik served as a mission specialist on the maiden voyage of Discovery in 1984 for her first space flight from August to September. During this flight, she operated a shuttle’s robotic arm (which she created), and deployed and conducted experiments on a solar array wing to determine if there was a way to generate additional electric power during missions. She was the second American woman in space and the first Jewish woman in space. 

Resnik was a mission specialist on Challenger. After the explosion, further examination of the cockpit shows that her Personal Egress Air Pack was activated, indicating that she may have been alive after the cockpit separated from the vehicle to activate it. Her body was the first to be recovered from the crash by Navy divers. 

Ellison Onizuka

Ellison Onizuka served as a flight test engineer and test pilot for the U.S. Air Force in the early 1970s. After attending the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School from 1974 to 1975, he became a squadron flight test engineer there and worked as a manager for engineering support in the training resources division. 

In 1978, Onizuka was selected for the astronaut program and later worked in the experimentation team, orbiter test team, and launch support screw for the STS-1 and STS-2. At NASA he also worked on the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory test and revision software team. 

Onizzuka’s first space mission was one year before the Challenger explosion, on the mission STS-51-C on the shuttle Discovery. This was the first space shuttle mission for the Department of Defense, and he became the first Asian American to reach space. 

Onizuka was a mission specialist aboard Challenger. Similar to Resnik, it is speculated that he could have been alive when the cockpit separated from the vehicle because his Personal Egress Air Pack was also activated. When he died, he held the position of lieutenant colonel, but was later promoted to the rank of colonel. 

Ronald McNair

Ronald McNair received his Ph.D. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976 and became nationally recognized for his work in laser physics. After graduation, he worked as a staff physicist at the Hugh Research Lab in Malibu, CA. 

McNair was one of the ten thousand applicants to be selected in 1978 for the NASA astronaut program. He became the second African American astronaut in 1984 when he flew as a mission specialist for STS-41-B on Challenger from Feb. 3-11. 

McNair later served as a mission specialist for STS-51-L. During this flight, he had planned to record the saxophone solo for a song he had worked on with composer Jean-Michel Jarre for his upcoming album Rendez-Vous. This would have been the first original piece of music to be recorded in space. 

McNair was also supposed to participate in Jarre’s Rendez-Vous Houston concert through a live feed from Challenger. To honor McNair, Jarre dedicated the last song on the album to him and subtitled it “Ron’s Piece.”

Michael J. Smith

Michael J. Smith served in the Vietnam War, then attended U.S. naval Test Pilot School. After graduation, he was assigned to the Strike Aircraft Test Directorate at NAS Patuxent River in Maryland, where he worked on the A-6E TRAM and Cruise missile guidance systems. In 1976, later returned to NTPS for 18 months as an instructor. 

Smith was selected for the astronaut program in May 1980, in which he served as a commander in the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory, the Deputy Chief of Aircraft Operations, the Technical Assistant to the Director, and the Flights Operations Directorate. 

Smith was the pilot for Challenger, and was set to pilot another mission the following fall. His voice was the last heard on the flight deck tape recorder with his final words being “Uh oh.”

All seven passengers were awarded with the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 2004.