Elon Musk’s satellite Internet venture is helping to restore connectivity to the Pacific island nation of Tonga, said an official in Fiji, where the work is under way.
Tonga’s sole fiber-optic link to the Internet and the rest of the world was severed by a volcanic eruption on Jan. 15 and only limited connectivity has been possible since.
“A SpaceX team is now in Fiji establishing a Starlink gateway station to reconnect Tonga to the world,” Fiji Attorney General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum said on Twitter.
Photo: AP
Starlink is a division of Tesla chief executive Musk’s SpaceX aerospace company and last month Musk himself had taken to Twitter to mention that Starlink might be able to help.
The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano eruption triggered a tsunami that destroyed villages and resorts and blanketed the capital of the nation of about 105,000 people in ash, as well as cutting the fiber-optic communications cable.
The timing of SpaceX’s work is not clear, although Fijian Broadcasting Corp, citing Sayed-Khaiyum, said engineers would operate a ground station in Fiji for six months.
SpaceX did not immediately respond to an e-mailed request for comment. Tonga’s prime minister’s office and state telecom Tonga Communications Corp could not immediately be reached by telephone or e-mail.
Refinitiv shipping data show that cable repair ship Reliance has been off the coast of Tonga’s main island for nearly a week as it seeks to fix the damaged subsea cable.
Any improvement in communications is likely to be a relief for Tongans who have struggled to stay in touch with relatives abroad and to assist recovery efforts that have also been hampered by a COVID-19 lockdown.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.