Arvind's Newsletter

1. India’s NE strategic rail link to LAC with China gathers pace, plans to connect 8 capitals too. Mooted by Army in 2010-11, the plan to connect key border areas including that in Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur & Sikkim by railways are finally gathering pace.

2. Efforts to repair the ozone layer are working

What’s the ozone layer? An atmospheric shield that blocks harmful ultraviolet sunlight from reaching Earth’s surface. It’s key to protecting human health and food security.

The good news: The layer is thickening as we phase out ozone-eating chemicals, a new study found, proving that big environmental problems can be tackled when nations work together.

3. Noma will close for regular service at the end of 2024. The Copenhagen restaurant, which repeatedly tops lists of the world’s best restaurants, will become a full-time food laboratory focused on its e-commerce operation. It will open to diners only for periodic pop-ups.

Noma has fundamentally changed gastronomy: Foodies often book flights to Denmark’s capital only after they clinch a reservation. And its creator, René Redzepi, has been hailed as his era’s most brilliant and influential chef.

But Redzepi said that the current model, which changed fine dining forever, was “unsustainable.” Staff at Noma work grueling hours. The workplace culture is intense, and the restaurant long relied on an army of unpaid interns. One alumnus compared the industry to ballet, another elite pursuit that has abuse built into its very model.

“We have to completely rethink the industry,” Redzepi told The Times. “This is simply too hard, and we have to work in a different way."

4. IBM (finally) realises the importance of focus in the age of open innovation. It will no longer pursue goal of numeric patent leadership.

5. Starlink's performance in Ukraine has ignited a new space race (and its not to the moon), opines the Economist.

“It’s a fact: we’re in a space race.” So said Bill Nelson, the boss of NASA, on January 1st. If China managed to land on the Moon before America returned there, he warned, it could seize lunar resources for itself, and even tell America: “Keep out, we’re here, this is our territory.”

Mr Nelson is right to foresee a space race, but wrong to focus on the Moon. It has symbolic value, but no useful resources that cannot be obtained much more easily back on Earth. The next space race has been triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is happening closer to Earth. And it is one which America, thanks largely to a single company, is winning.

The company is SpaceX. Founded by Elon Musk to enable the colonisation of Mars, it makes very cheap, reusable rockets, whose first stages return from the upper atmosphere, landing gracefully on their tails. They have made the firm a space superpower: SpaceX now flies more things into orbit than all other companies and countries combined.

Since 2019 it has put that capacity to use building Starlink, a “mega-constellation” of satellites designed to beam the internet to places unreached by conventional broadband. In three years SpaceX has launched around 3,500 Starlink satellites, roughly half the total number of active satellites now in orbit. It plans to launch as many as 40,000.

Starlink is aimed at consumers. But early in the war Ukraine’s government asked SpaceX to send it the small, portable dishes that allow users to connect to the network. As our briefing explains, it has since become vital to the Ukrainian war effort. Soldiers use it to communicate, identify targets and upload footage for pr purposes. Satellite internet is not a new idea, even in a war zone. But Starlink represents a step-change in two ways. One is the sheer amount of capacity it offers. Previously, satellite links were largely reserved for senior officers, headquarters and drone pilots, with the bulk of lower-level communication handled by radio. Starlink means front-line troops can sling around videos, images and messages in real time, even as they advance beyond the reach of mobile networks. That provides the sort of tactical agility vital to modern warfare.

The second is its resistance to attack. Starlink has, so far, survived attempts to jam or hack it. Russia has said that its use in Ukraine makes it a legitimate military target. But whereas traditional satellite networks, made up of small numbers of big, complicated satellites, are vulnerable to anti-satellite missiles, Starlink is not. The number of satellites, and the speed with which SpaceX can replace them, make trying to shoot it down futile. The firm averaged around a launch a week in 2022, and expects to go even faster this year.

There are downsides to relying on a whimsical tycoon for vital infrastructure. Mr Musk has complained about the cost of subsidising Ukraine’s use of Starlink, which he says runs to $100m or so. He backed down after a backlash, but was surely correct. Charity is no way to run a war: no one expects Lockheed Martin to donate missiles. Better for America’s government to cover the cost, as it does with other military aid.

In October a row erupted with Ukraine’s government, when Mr Musk suggested a peace plan that involved Russia keeping hold of Crimea, which it invaded in 2014. Although relations have been mended (at least in public), SpaceX is still reluctant to let Ukraine use its system to launch attacks in occupied territory, or inside Russia itself.

But, generally speaking, the system has performed well. In 2022 SpaceX unveiled Starshield, a division aimed at adapting Starlink for government and military customers. (America’s armed forces had been experimenting with Starlink even before the invasion.) America’s friends and rivals have taken note, too. As with GPS, which proved so useful that many other countries decided they must have sovereign systems of their own, Europe, China and Russia are all racing to build their own mega-constellations. China and Russia are trying to come up with ways to attack or disrupt Starlink should the need arise. The race is on. For now, though, America, thanks to SpaceX, has a huge lead.