News
Sonder London to launch Uplink, Comms Accelerator to boost European space and collaboration
Uplink is designed to equip space startup founders with the tools, tactics and materials needed to increase their visibility and negotiate the media landscape. Sonder also aims to facilitate dialogue between governments and the continent’s space sector.​
War Unfolding in Slow Motion: Russia vs. NATO
The American writer and thinker Michael Lind thinks we ought to stop invoking the two world wars. For him, pointing to the appeasement of Hitler, or the stoutheartedness of Churchill or the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact – what Christopher Hitchens called the “midnight of the century” – just muddies the water. Our present conditions are different, says Lind. The upshot of making such comparisons is bad foreign policy.
He may well be on to something.
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Europe must build its own critical infrastructure
Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is the largest cloud provider in the United Kingdom. It holds between 40 and 50% of the market for Infrastructure-as-a-Service, and its technology underpins the National Health Service, the Ministry of Defence and a wide range of public utilities and private companies. When there’s an outage, therefore, the effect is profound. And that’s just what happened on October 20. AWS went down.​
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Marshal the City to Boost UK Defence, Urges Report
A landmark report argues that the UK must mobilise its financial and professional services to strengthen national security and defence. The authors say that in the teeth of increasingly serious geopolitical threats, the government budget is insufficient by itself to fund the pace and scale of innovation needed.
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Europe Must Get Real about Defence
Europeans are in the habit of thinking that war is something that happens elsewhere. But the danger posed by Putin what Peggy Noonan calls ‘rising authoritarians’ everywhere is real – and the clock is ticking.
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Comms Failure is a Threat to Space Ambitions
Good space communication is about explaining what you do and why that matters – in language that doesn’t require a PhD to comprehend. Investors don’t back what they don’t get, policymakers don’t defend what they can’t explain. And the public doesn’t throw its support behind something that rouses no emotion.
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