Apple co-founder Wozniak to ‘map’ space junk, praises Elon Musk

Riyadh: Calling for international standards on space-junk data sharing, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said on Sunday that his new space venture called Privateer will “map” space junk.

Speaking at the ‘Global Entrepreneurship Congress’ (GEC) event, Wozniak noted that currently, the efforts and launches and money that is coming from private instead of public sources to get into space, satellites and the like, is crossing over to where more of it is now private enterprise, and that’s one of the reasons for launching ‘Privateer’.

“Our lives depend on things that come from satellites, our navigation systems, a lot of our television, a lot of our internet, our phone calls from country to country, go through satellites,” he said during a fireside chat.

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Praising SpaceX CEO Elon Musk as “one of the outstanding experts in the world” on space who is providing cheaper internet via his Starlink internet services, he said Privateer is largely focused on space junk.

SpaceX has already launched more than 2,000 Starlink craft since 2019, and many more will go up in the relatively near future.

“That means we got to track, to know the countries that have equipment up in space that can measure it, and spot it and detect it. They got to share their information. We need worldwide standards so that some of it can be understood,” said Wozniak who co-founded Apple with business partner Steve Jobs in 1976.

Wozniak said that at the beginning, money was the future to Jobs.

“About once a year for five years leading up to Apple, Steve would come into town from whatever state he was in and he would see my latest invention, and he would always go turn it into money because he had zero money. Zero money, that forces you,” he said.

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