The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 33, November 2021 Page 9 From the series The war industry and European defence Next Spring SpaceX will be 20 years old. The company founded by Elon Musk has rapidly achieved a key role in international space activity. The first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket has recently been recovered, reconditioned and reused for the tenth time. SpaceX has already repeated this type of reflight 70 times or so; it allows for substantial savings when compared to the losses incurred in the first stages of a traditional rocket launch. It is for this reason that it is being considered as the standard for the future. According to NASA’s calculations, the average cost of launching a satellite into orbit has fluctuated around the level of $18,500 per kilogram for the whole period between 1970 and 2000. SpaceX has reduced this figure by seven times. Internet constellations In recent missions Falcon 9 rockets have put a total of 60 Starlink satellites ...

Internationalism No. 33, November 2021 Page 5 From the series The struggle against coronavirus Around 227 million people have been infected by the novel coronavirus SARSCoV-2 worldwide, causing 4.7 million deaths [Johns Hopkins University, September 17 th , 2021]. If tracked over time, both figures can be seen as indicators of the pandemic’s evolution . However, they do not give the full picture of the humanitarian disaster — not only because the coldness of the statistics hardly expresses the violence with which this health crisis has disrupted the lives of millions, but also because the official figures are believed to greatly underestimate the real situation. Missed diagnoses The number of Covid-19 cases indentified and registered in the statistics depends in fact on the number of diagnostic tests performed. It also varies greatly from country to country and in the different phases of the pandemic curve, as well as being...