13/06/2026

BIZ & FINANCE SATURDAY | JUNE 13, 2026

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Science fiction? Sceptics doubt Musk’s SpaceX goals

T-Rex cell leather bag fails to sell at Paris auction PARIS: A leather bag made from Tyrannosaurus rex (T-Rex) cells failed to sell on Thursday, the Paris auction house Drouot said, commenting that bids were well below expected. Auctioneers Giquello had touted the “one-of-a-kind” piece to sell for more than US$500,000 (RM2 million) but bids barely broke the US$150,000 mark, said the Drouot house where the sale took place. Unveiled in the spring in Amsterdam, the bag was created from traces of collagen from the femur of a T-Rex found in the US state of Montana 25 years ago. “In recent years, we’ve developed techniques – biotechnologies that allow us to instruct a cell culture to produce, so to speak, genuine T-Rex skin in the laboratory,“ Iacopo Briano, a palaeontology expert associated with the sale, recently told AFP. He noted the material differs from vegan leather, which is mostly made from plastic. “In this case, it’s derived from a cell culture, so it’s 100% skin. And at the same time, it comes from an animal that went extinct 67 million years ago!” he said. With no precedent to go on, Alexandre Giquello, whose auction house is organising the sale, explained they had to “come up with a price” that would reflect both the amount of investment required to create the bag and its rarity. Giquello estimated the value at between €300,000 and €500,000 (RM1.4 million to RM2.3 million).

they will solve the problem, the thing is the schedule,” he added. SpaceX has other major projects on its plate – including building a modified Starship to use as a lunar lander for Nasa’s Artemis programme, and developing a new satellite constellation to serve as orbital AI data centres. While the idea of moving energy-intensive AI data centres off-Earth may sound appealing, most experts remain skeptical. “If you do conquer all the technical hurdles, there’s still the economic aspect, and it’s just not financially reasonable at this point in time,” Kathleen Curlee, a space analyst at Georgetown University, told AFP. Zubrin was more blunt: “This AI data centres in space thing is fiction,” he said. “If you owned a company that could build ocean ships better than anyone else, you would say the place to do AI is in the middle of the ocean,” he quipped. Thanks to the unprecedented influx of cash from SpaceX’s IPO, the company will nonetheless have plenty of resources to devote to the project and others. While flying high for the moment, SpaceX could still face unexpected turbulence – as evidenced by competitor Blue Origin’s recent launchpad mega-explosion. Zubrin linked Musk’s potential for failure to French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s calamitous campaign in Russia. If he were to fail, Zubrin said, it’d be because “he had succeeded in everything he had done before, and so no one could tell him that he was wrong.”

o Experts question whether Mars settlements, orbital AI hubs and other ambitions can be achieved within his timeframe

WASHINGTON: Elon Musk’s SpaceX has made awe-inspiring achievements since its founding over two decades ago and has big ideas – colonies on Mars, orbital AI data centres, rapidly reusable rockets – for the future. But as SpaceX makes its record-breaking public market debut, some experts express doubts it can reach its lofty goals, especially on its planned timeline. “We achieve what others think is really the impossible, and we make that possible,” CFO Bret Johnsen said in a recent video. Indeed, the company’s development of a partially reusable rocket – which has allowed it to conduct more launches than all other providers combined – was once thought unattainable. “SpaceX has accomplished a great deal, that’s quite real,” Robert Zubrin, an engineer and president of the Mars Society, told AFP. “On the other hand, Musk frequently makes claims that are not real,” he said, citing deadlines that are regularly pushed back. While many experts believe they will see SpaceX send humans to Mars in their lifetime, the prospect of a mass inhabited colony will take much, much longer – if ever. “The simple answer is that I don’t see this as realistic at all,” said Christian Bach, head of the space transportation division at Germany’s Technical University of Dresden and co-author of HUDIKSVALL: When they get home, the residents of a small housing association on the outskirts of Hudiksvall, Sweden, plug in their electric vehicles (EV) to charge them or, intriguingly, power their homes. The two-way energy exchange enables the eight families living there to save a lot on electricity bills, resident Filip Kiltorp, a 33-year-old salesman, told AFP. “We use the cars to power our homes when our energy demand is high,“ Kiltorp said, standing next to his electric vehicle. The cars are connected to charging points by the garages for the flats, which are in traditional red buildings bordered by birch trees and a large golf course. Electric vehicles, when not in use, often have surplus energy stored in their batteries. But having a bi-directional charger means this stored energy can be fed back into the grid to power the flats’ electrical appliances, lighting and other systems. The software controlling the system ensures that the car batteries charge up in off-peak hours, when demand for electricity in the flats is low. And it switches the flow so the batteries feed electricity back into the local power grid during peak usage hours, when electricity from the network is most expensive, and during power outages. This helps stabilise the grid, explained Klas Boman, the driving force behind the project. It also lowers the occupants’ electricity bills. “Living here is undeniably cheaper,“ Kiltorp said. “Electricity costs are a recurring topic of discussion at the office or among friends. We use the same amount of electricity as other homeowners but our bill is much lower,“ Kiltorp continued.

a critical analysis of Musk’s Mars plans. He said that even just settling a handful of people on the Red Planet is unlikely this century due to unsolved technological and biological challenges. To make the roundtrip journey to Mars, which takes about three years, Musk and Spacex are counting on their newest rocket under development: Starship. However, perfecting launches with Starship will not be enough, warns Scott Hubbard, a former senior Nasa official. Astronauts will also need new life-sustaining systems, such as oxygen and water recyclers. “They like to portray it that they can do it on their own, they cannot,” said Hubbard. He believes Nasa – which is planning future missions to explore Mars but not to colonize it – will have to join the project for it to become a reality. SpaceX also faces a major hurdle, Hubbard noted, over its goal of refuelling rockets in-orbit. The idea would be to launch several rockets, one carrying crew or cargo, and the others carrying tanks of liquid oxygen and liquid methane that would be offloaded through coupling. That capability “is something that is absolutely crucial to their plans that has never been done before,” he said. “They have extraordinarily good engineers...so The flats are powered by other, renewable energy sources too, making them “almost self sufficient”, Kiltorp said. No longer simple modes of transport, the cars now also serve as mobile energy storage units. In addition, the eight flats have a shared heat pump, which helps manage heating costs. And they have solar panels on the roofs, combined with stationary storage units that hold any surplus power generated by the solar panels. The pilot project is a joint enterprise by housing association BRF Stenberg, carmaker Volkswagen and Swedish utility company Vattenfall. It aims to demonstrate that V2G (Vehicle to Grid) technology can work on the scale of a residential complex. “We’re trying to be a source of inspiration for others,“ said Boman, who used to work in the vehicle industry. In Sweden, the technology is also being tested in larger buildings, universities and start-ups. Gavle University in central Sweden staged a power cut in the middle of a speech there by the higher education minister to demonstrate how its bi-directional chargers worked. They plugged an electric car in and this kept the premises working for several hours. “I call this a battery on wheels,“ Nicholas Etherden, a lecturer and researcher in energy systems at the university, told AFP. “Cars drive about 5% of the time. 95% of the time they are standing still in a car park somewhere,“ he explained. “If we connect them to the grid, we have a resource that will, at any given time, provide more electricity than the amount people draw from the grid at the highest peak times.” On average, a vehicle battery can cover a household’s needs for between five and seven

Battery on wheels – Sweden powers homes with EVs

A Volkswagen EV charges at the BRF Stenberg condominium association in Hudiksvall, Sweden. The residential pilot project uses V2G technology, enabling EVs to act as mobile energy storage units capable of supplying electricity back to the local grid when needed. – AFPPIX

a bi-directional charging system, said Bertling Tjernberg, who is professor of power grid technologies at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. She lamented that incentives to promote the technology were always changing. Potential wear on the vehicles batteries is also a concern for some. Bertling Tjernberg said this aspect needed more research although experience suggested batteries were lasting longer than expected. Etherden, for his part, is convinced this isn’t an issue, given the evidence garnered from the past 10-20 years of using electric vehicles.

days before running down. “So we have huge potential,“ the researcher said. Wider adoption of the model still faces several obstacles. It requires a large share of the vehicle fleet to be electric, which is far from the case in Sweden, unlike in neighbouring Norway and Denmark. Bureaucracy and a conservative automotive sector are also slowing down large-scale adoption of the technology, even though it has been available for a long time, according to professor Lina Bertling Tjernberg. The next major step to accelerate its development is to equip every electric vehicle with