State Of The Race

Driving The News

SpaceX launched the first ever all-civilian crew into orbit. 

Refresher: SpaceX came up with the Inspiration4 mission to take regular people, aka people who aren’t professional astronauts, to space. It's unclear how much the entire trip cost, but payments company founder Jared Isaacson, who funded the trip, said it cost less than US-$200 million. 

The Falcon 9 rocket launched into orbit on Wednesday at around 8 pm EST and the crew will remain in orbit for a total of three days.

Zoom out: Regular people don’t undergo extensive training before they head into space like astronauts do, and are basically putting their lives in the hands of private space companies.

Lucid Motors beat Tesla to net the longest driving range for an electric vehicle (EV).

The luxury EV company just one-upped Tesla. The Environmental Protection Agency found Lucid Motors' Air Dream Edition can drive 520 miles on a single charge, which beats Tesla Model S' range of 405 miles per charge. 

Lucid knows a thing or two about batteries: Aside from creating their own in-house battery technology, Lucid also makes batteries for Formula E race cars. And it doesn't hurt that one of their founders is a former Tesla exec. 

​That battery technology comes with a steep price tag: Lucid Air Edition starts at US-$169,000 compared to Tesla’s Model S that starts at US-$89,000. 

A key concept in online marketing is the backlink.

What’s a backlink: It’s a link from another website to yours. Think of a backlink as a vote from another website telling people that you do good work, have a great product, or have a helpful piece of content.

At Hey Tony we help our clients get valuable backlinks every month. How? By submitting guest posts on established, credible websites. Many websites welcome guest posts, and we have a list of 500 of them that we use regularly (if you want the list, email me at [email protected] with the subject line “Send Me The Guest Post List!” and I’ll send it over).

To get personalized advice and recommendations on how to grow your business online, book a free 15 minute discovery call with us today.

Suncor Energy teamed up with Indigenous groups and bought a stake in the Northern Courier Pipeline.

What’s that? Launched in 2018, the Northern Courier Pipeline project is made up of two pipelines that move crude to and from their mining site and Suncor's terminal in Alberta.

Suncor, along with three First Nations and five Métis communities, bought TC Energy's stake in the pipeline, which is valued at ~$1.3 billion.

Zoom out: More Indigenous groups have begun to strike deals on pipeline projects. In June, Pembina teamed up with the Western Indigenous Pipeline Group to place a bid for the Trans Mountain Pipeline.

E-scooter startup Gogoro plans to go public at a US-$2.35 billion valuation.

What’s Gogoro? Taiwan-based Gogoro makes e-scooters, energy-efficient batteries, and battery-swapping stations.

The deal: Gogoro will gogoro public (sorry) through a SPAC merger with Poema Global Holdings to help it raise cash to expand to China and India and continue developing their battery-swapping technology. 

Zoom out: Scooters are much more popular in Asia than in Western countries, which helps explain why Gogoro is growing so quickly.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is launching a space startup. But it’s not the Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos kind of space company…

Wozniak revealed that his company, named Privateer Space, will instead set out to clean up space junk. 

What’s space junk? We’ve been hurling rockets and satellites into space without cleaning up any mess we leave behind. As a result. there are ~29,000 pieces of space junk in orbit that are larger than 10 cm (and those are just the ones big enough to be tracked down). 

Why it matters: All the space junk is crowding low Earth orbit, which is where companies, like SpaceX and Canada-based Telesat, are launching their satellite networks. 

Zoom out: The more space junk in low Earth orbit, the higher the likelihood of collisions that can in turn create more space junk. If we don’t tackle the problem now, we could reach a point at which it’s too dangerous to embark on more space missions. 

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