According to Li Tongyu, general manager of the marketing department at the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), engineers are currently studying a rocket engine with the thrust of 600 tonnes, burning highly potent liquid oxygen and liquid oxygen propellant.

If China succeeds in the development of such power, it would increase the nation’s capabilities in space by orders of magnitude.

For comparison, China is currently well in the development of its most powerful rocket to date – Long March-5 – that would sport engines with the thrust of 120 tonnes.

“Rockets (with 600-tonne thrust engines) would only be justified for things like sending humans to the Moon, if such projects are approved,” Li Tongyu told BBC News.

In March, the official China Daily newspaper disclosed that CALT was studying a super-heavy launch vehicle, which could be used to mount lunar expeditions.

At the time, the newspaper quoted CALT Vice President Liang Xiaohong as saying that the total lift-off thrust of the future heavy launcher would be 3,000 tonnes.

‘Grander scale’

To develop such thrust, the first stage of the proposed rocket would need five 600-tonne engines, possibly distributed between one central stage and four strap-on boosters.

The rocket’s architecture would thus be similar to the one adopted for the Long March-5 rocket, but at a considerably grander scale.

Although the expected payload of the future heavy lifter had not been disclosed, available details allow placing it close to the same category with that of the Saturn-5 rocket, which carried US astronauts to the Moon.

In the meantime, the development of the Long March-5 rocket was proceeding well toward its first test launch, currently expected in 2014, Li Tongyu said.

The vehicle’s first stage engine had already accumulated more than 10,000 seconds of firing during tests – an important milestone on the way to its certification for real missions.

A full-scale prototype of the Long March 5 rocket would be ready for testing in 2012 and a year later, test firing of fully assembled rocket stages would be conducted.

When operational, Long March-5 is expected to deliver up to 25 tonnes of payload, including space station modules to the low Earth orbit, and up to 14 tonnes to the so-called geostationary transfer orbit, where most communications satellites are released after launch.

At the UK’s Farnborough airshow, CALT demonstrated computer-generation videos, showcasing impressive new assembly and launch infrastructure of the Long March-5 rocket.

Newly built facilities will feature a sprawling campus not far from Chinese capital Beijing, where the rocket would be assembled.

The rocket stages would then be shipped to the launch site in the very south of China, where it could take advantage of the Earth rotation to maximise its cargo capabilities.

Along with Earth-orbiting satellites, the Long March-5 is expected to carry Chinese spacecraft into deep space, including unmanned missions to return soil samples from the Moon.

They are among the true monsters of space – colossal stars whose size and brightness go well beyond what many scientists thought was even possible.
One of the objects, known simply as R136a1, is the most massive ever found.
The star is seen to have a mass about 265 times that of our own Sun; but the latest modelling work suggests at birth it could have been bigger, still.
Perhaps as much as 320 times that of the Sun, says Professor Paul Crowther from Sheffield University, UK.
“If it replaced the Sun in our Solar System, it would outshine [it] by as much as the Sun currently outshines the full Moon,” the astronomer told BBC News.
The stars were identified by Crowther’s team using a combination of new observations on the Very Large Telescope facility in Chile and data gathered previously with the Hubble Space Telescope.
R136, a cluster of young, massive and hot stars (ESO). Astronomer Maggie Aderin-Pocock explains why the discovery is significant
The group studied the NGC 3603 and RMC 136a clusters – regions of space where thick clouds of gas and dust are collapsing into even denser clumps.
In these places, huge stars ignite to burn brief but brilliant lives before exploding as supernovas to seed the Universe with heavy elements.
NGC 3603 is relatively close in cosmic terms – just 22,000 light-years distant. RMC 136a (more often nicknamed R136) is slightly further away, and is sited within one of our neighbouring galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud, some 165,000 light-years away.
The team found several stars with surface temperatures over 40,000 degrees – more than seven times hotter than our Sun.
The research shows these young stellar objects to be unbelievably bright, truly massive and also extremely wide – perhaps 30 times the radius of our Sun in the case of R136a1.
Up close the stars would look a mess, however. Unlike our Sun which appears as a defined disc on the sky, the giants identified by Professor Crowther and colleagues would be losing so much material through powerful winds from their puffed up atmospheres that they would have a fuzzy look about them.
One thing seems for sure – no planets would exist in orbit about them.
“Planets take longer to form than these stars take to live and die. Even if there were planets, there would be no astronomers on them because the night sky would be almost as bright as the day in these clusters,” Professor Crowther joked.
“Some of these big stars are relatively close to each other, so even at ‘night’ you’d have another very bright star shining on you.”
Previously observed giants had been seen to get as big as 150 times the mass of our Sun. The latest findings raise interesting questions about what the upper limits on size might be.
Ordinarily, there should come a point where the pressure from all the radiation emitted by a stellar behemoth pushes back against any further infall of gas and dust. In other words, there ought to be a physical barrier to excessive star growth.
But Professor Crowther adds a second factor – that of resource. There may not exist in today’s Universe places that have sufficient supplies of gas and dust to feed ever more massive stars.
However, the new observations do give a tantalising glimpse of what the very early Universe might have been like. Many objects in the very first population of stars to shine shortly after the Big Bang are thought to have been monsters like R136a1.
When these objects blew apart, their cataclysmic demise was so violent they may not have left behind a remnant core of material as is often the case following a supernova; or even a black hole which is another common consequence, too.
Instead, these giants may simply have dumped all their contents back into space, dispersing heavy elements like iron equivalent to the mass of 10 of our Suns.
“The bigger picture to this research is that it gives us confidence that there were probably more of these really massive stars in much greater numbers early on in the Universe,” Professor Crowther told BBC News.
The new results appear in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

A new study has suggested that cell phone radiation may be contributing to declines in bee populations in some areas of the world.
Bee populations dropped 17 percent in the UK last year, according to the British Bee Association, and nearly 30 percent in the United States says the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Parasitic mites called varroa, agricultural pesticides and the effects of climate change have all been implicated in what has been dubbed “colony collapse disorder” (CCD).
But researchers in India believe cell phones could also be to blame for some of the losses.
In a study at Panjab University in Chandigarh, northern India, researchers fitted cell phones to a hive and powered them up for two fifteen-minute periods each day.
After three months, they found the bees stopped producing honey, egg production by the queen bee halved, and the size of the hive dramatically reduced.
It’s not just the honey that will be lost if populations plummet further. Bees are estimated to pollinate 90 commercial crops worldwide. Their economic value in the UK is estimated to be $290 million per year and around $12 billion in the U.S.
Andrew Goldsworthy, a biologist from the UK’s Imperial College, London, has studied the biological effects of electromagnetic fields. He thinks it’s possible bees could be affected by cell phone radiation.
The reason, Goldsworthy says, could hinge on a pigment in bees called cryptochrome.
“Animals, including insects, use cryptochrome for navigation,” Goldsworthy told CNN.
“They use it to sense the direction of the earth’s magnetic field and their ability to do this is compromised by radiation from [cell] phones and their base stations. So basically bees do not find their way back to the hive.”
Goldsworthy has written to the UK communications regulator OFCOM suggesting a change of phone frequencies would stop the bees being confused.
“It’s possible to modify the signal coming from the [cell] phones and the base station in such a way that it doesn’t produce the frequencies that disturb the cryptochrome molecules,” Goldsworthy said.
“So they could do this without the signal losing its ability to transmit information.”
But the UK’s Mobile Operators Association — which represents the UK’s five mobile network operators — told CNN: “Research scientists have already considered possible factors involved in CCD and have identified the areas for research into the causes of CCD which do not include exposure to radio waves.”
Norman Carreck, Scientific director of the International Bee research Association at the UK’s University of Sussex says it’s still not clear how much radio waves affect bees.
“We know they are sensitive to magnetic fields. What we don’t know is what use they actually make of them. And no one has yet demonstrated that honey bees use the earth’s magnetic field when navigating,” Carreck said.

Researchers have discovered stone tools in Norfolk, UK, that suggest that early humans arrived in Britain nearly a million years ago – or even earlier.
The find, published in the journal Nature, pushes back the arrival of the first humans in what is now the UK by several hundred thousand years.
Environmental data suggests that temperatures were relatively cool.
This raises the possibility that these early Britons may have been among the first humans to use fire to keep warm.
They may also have been some of the earliest humans to wear fur clothing.
The discoveries were made in Happisburgh, in the north of Norfolk. At the time there was a land bridge connecting what is now southern Britain with continental Europe.
There are no early human remains, but the researchers speculate that the most likely species was Homo antecessor, more commonly – and possibly appropriately – known as “Pioneer Man”.
Remains of the species have been found in the Atapuerca region of northern Spain, and dated to 0.8-1.2 million years ago. So the species could well have been in Britain at around that time, according to Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London.
“If the climate was good and the land bridge was there, there’s no real reason they couldn’t have come (to Britain) as far back as 1.2 million years ago,” he told BBC News.
Pioneer Man was much like our own species in that it walked upright, used tools and was a hunter gatherer.
But physically the species looked rather different. It had a smaller brain, strong brow ridges and big teeth, with some primitive features such as a flat face and no prominent chin on the lower jaw.
‘Real pioneers’
The discovery raises many new questions, such as how these creatures dealt with the cold winters that existed at the time. Scientists have also speculated that they may have used shelters and clothing.
It also raises the possibility that Britain was the first place where fire was used in a controlled way for warmth.
“Although we don’t have the evidence for fire or of clothing to get through the winters up here, I think they must have had some extra adaptations,” said Professor Stringer.
“I think the evidence suggests that they were living at the edge of the inhabited world in a really challenging environment and indeed they were real pioneers living here in Britain, nearly a million years ago,” he said.
The research was led by Dr Nick Ashton of the British Museum, London, as part of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB) project.
“The discovery is immensely surprising because we are dealing with an incredibly early date,” Dr Ashton said.
He added that the environmental data that indicated the relatively low tempertures was “even more surprising”.
“It’s unusual to find humans in such a cool climate this far north at this very early date,” he said.
This area of Norfolk was quite a different place one million years ago.
“The [River] Thames was flowing through this area. And at the site we have sediments laid down by the Thames,” he explained.
Pioneer man was eventually wiped out by an Ice Age. These occurred about every 100,000 years, and each time that happened Britain was depopulated.
As conditions became more benign, a new group of humans arrived.
There were at least eight different waves of people that came in and died out before the last wave, which is the one that survives today.

“Hi, thanks for coming,” the medical assistant says, greeting a mother with her 5-year-old son. “Are you here for your child or yourself?” The boy, the mother replies. He has diarrhea.
“Oh no, sorry to hear that,” she says, looking down at the boy.
The assistant asks the mother about other symptoms, including fever (“slight”) and abdominal pain (“He hasn’t been complaining”).
She turns again to the boy. “Has your tummy been hurting?” Yes, he replies.
After a few more questions, the assistant declares herself “not that concerned at this point.” She schedules an appointment with a doctor in a couple of days. The mother leads her son from the room, holding his hand. But he keeps looking back at the assistant, fascinated, as if reluctant to leave.
Maybe that is because the assistant is the disembodied likeness of a woman’s face on a computer screen — a no-frills avatar. Her words of sympathy are jerky, flat and mechanical. But she has the right stuff — the ability to understand speech, recognize pediatric conditions and reason according to simple rules — to make an initial diagnosis of a childhood ailment and its seriousness. And to win the trust of a little boy.
“Our young children and grandchildren will think it is completely natural to talk to machines that look at them and understand them,” said Eric Horvitz, a computer scientist at Microsoft’s research laboratory who led the medical avatar project, one of several intended to show how people and computers may communicate before long.
For decades, computer scientists have been pursuing artificial intelligence — the use of computers to simulate human thinking. But in recent years, rapid progress has been made in machines that can listen, speak, see, reason and learn, in their way. The prospect, according to scientists and economists, is not only that artificial intelligence will transform the way humans and machines communicate and collaborate, but will also eliminate millions of jobs, create many others and change the nature of work and daily routines.
The artificial intelligence technology that has moved furthest into the mainstream is computer understanding of what humans are saying. People increasingly talk to their cellphones to find things, instead of typing. Both Google’s and Microsoft’s search services now respond to voice commands. More drivers are asking their cars to do things like find directions or play music.
The number of American doctors using speech software to record and transcribe accounts of patient visits and treatments has more than tripled in the past three years to 150,000. The progress is striking. A few years ago, supraspinatus (a rotator cuff muscle) got translated as “fish banana.” Today, the software transcribes all kinds of medical terminology letter perfect, doctors say. It has more trouble with other words and grammar, requiring wording changes in about one of every four sentences, doctors say.
“It’s unbelievably better than it was five years ago,” said Dr. Michael A. Lee, a pediatrician in Norwood, Mass., who now routinely uses transcription software. “But it struggles with ‘she’ and ‘he,’ for some reason. When I say ‘she,’ it writes ‘he.’ The technology is sexist. It likes to write ‘he.’ ”
Meanwhile, translation software being tested by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is fast enough to keep up with some simple conversations. With some troops in Iraq, English is translated to Arabic and Arabic to English. But there is still a long way to go. When a soldier asked a civilian, “What are you transporting in your truck?” the Arabic reply was that the truck was “carrying tomatoes.” But the English translation became “pregnant tomatoes.” The speech software understood “carrying,” but not the context.
Yet if far from perfect, speech recognition software is good enough to be useful in more ways all the time. Take call centers. Today, voice software enables many calls to be automated entirely. And more advanced systems can understand even a perplexed, rambling customer with a misbehaving product well enough to route the caller to someone trained in that product, saving time and frustration for the customer. They can detect anger in a caller’s voice and respond accordingly — usually by routing the call to a manager.
So the outlook is uncertain for many of the estimated four million workers in American call centers or the nation’s 100,000 medical transcriptionists, whose jobs were already threatened by outsourcing abroad. “Basic work that can be automated is in the bull’s-eye of both technology and globalization, and the rise of artificial intelligence just magnifies that reality,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Conditions favorable to life may once have existed all over Mars, the European Space Agency said Friday.
Two spacecraft have found evidence that liquid water was widespread over the red planet.
The ESA’s Mars Express and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have discovered hydrated silicate minerals in the northern lowlands of Mars, a clear indication that water once flowed there, the ESA said.
The two spacecraft had previously found thousands of small outcrops in the planet’s southern hemisphere where rock minerals had been altered by water, it said. Many of these outcrops are in the form of hydrated clay minerals known as phyllosilicates. They indicate the planet’s southern hemisphere was once much warmer and wetter than it is today.
No such sites had been found in the northern lowlands until this week, the ESA said. The northern lowlands are covered in thick blankets of lava and sediments up to several kilometers thick and that had hampered efforts to probe what lay beneath.
The ESA’s Mars Express found the first hints of water in the northern plains, but the outcrops were small and more detailed observations were needed to confirm the evidence, the ESA said.
NASA’s Orbiter provided higher resolution data that showed at least nine northern craters with phyllosilicates or other hydrated silicates, the ESA said. The finding was reported this week in the journal Science.
Those minerals formed in wet environments and were identical to those found in the southern hemisphere.
“We can now say that the planet was altered on a global scale by liquid water more than 4 billion years ago,” said the report’s lead author, John Carter of the University of Paris.
Scientists said it’s difficult to draw conclusions about the type of environment that existed on Mars when it had water, but they do have some clues.
The sites “are rich in iron and magnesium, but less in aluminum. Together with the close proximity of olivine, which is easily modified by water, this indicates that the exposure to water lasted only tens to hundreds of millions of years,” said Jean-Pierre Bibring, the OMEGA principal investigator from the University of Paris.
The scientists’ search concentrated on 91 sizeable craters where incoming asteroids have punched down the planet’s surface by several kilometers, exposing “ancient crustal material,” the ESA said.
The results could also suggest sites for future Mars landers, because evidence of water during the planet’s early history suggests conditions in those spots may have been favorable to the evolution of primitive life, the ESA said.

Following their success in genome sequencing of jute, the Bangladesh Jute Research Institute is now trying to invent a technology that will allow jute retting with less water.

The new machine will peel off the skin of raw jute.

Later, the fibre will be extracted using a special chemical with low water content providing better output.

The institute’s researcher Dr Samiul Alam announced this on Wednesday at a press conference organised by young researchers’ organisation Swapnajatra to mark the success of Dr Maqsudul Alam and his team in genome sequencing.

All members of the team were introduced at the conference, including the 35 young scientists, who were involved in the seven months of scientific research.

A number of them shared their experience of working in the team.

Maqsudul Alam said, “We are trying to ensure various facilities including infrastructure to utilise the merit in the country. The researches are receiving government funds. So we will be able to do something good very soon.”

Addressing the success in genome sequencing, he said, “A number of countries are working on this. However, Bangladesh has taken the lead.”

He said this discovery will allow Bangladesh to invent better strains of jute, including ones with better fibre and better immunity to diseases.

Alam continued to say the benefits of the success will take around five years to reach the grassroots farmers.

The researchers’ organisation called for ensuring employment and financial support for future researches of everyone in the team.

The stage has been set for what many predict will be an ugly fight over broadband plans for US citizens.
The Federal Communications Commission has taken the first formal steps towards tougher rules for broadband.
It asked for public comment on three different plans, igniting an expensive lobbying campaign by all sides.
The looming battle follows a court ruling questioning the FCC’s right to regulate internet service providers after one throttled traffic to users.
That court ruling dealt a major blow to a central plank of the FCC’s broadband plan called net neutrality which demands that all data traffic be treated equally.
The five commissioners on the FCC board were split 3-2 in putting out for public comment proposals on new regulations for the broadband industry.
‘Third way’
One of the three plans the public is being asked to comment on, and which is favoured by FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, is called the “third way”.
This would involve reclassifying broadband so it went from being a lightly regulated service to one with more vigorous oversight.
In return for this tightening up, Mr Genachowski has proposed the new classification would not regulate on how much people pay for their broadband. It would also shy away from overseeing internet content, services, applications or electronic commerce sites.
The other two options include leaving the existing regulatory framework in place or imposing the full force of stricter regulations.
ISPs, such as Comcast, AT&T and Verizon, prefer the status quo and have come out against the “third way” proposal.
“This is impossible to justify on either a policy or legal basis and we remain confident that if the FCC persists in its course – and we truly hope it does not – the courts will surely overturn their action,” said Jim Cicconi, AT&T’s senior executive vice president for external and legislative affairs.
Verizon said the FCC’s move was “a terrible idea”.
By contrast, web giants such as Google and Amazon extol the value of free-flowing web traffic and an open internet.
“Broadband infrastructure is too important to be left outside of any oversight,” said Richard Whitt, Google’s telecom and media counsel in a blog posting.
‘To the death’
The political dynamics of the FCC board, two Republicans and three Democrats, imply that the “third way” looks almost certain to be the plan it adopts.
Some suspect this will provoke more lobbying and may draw legal challenges.
“There is a very big fight brewing and it’s the carriers versus everybody else,” said Erik Sherman, analyst with BNET.com, part of CBS’s digital business network.
“There is little doubt it’s going to be a right data Donnybrook and I am not sure the consumers are winners in any circumstances. These companies are not fighting for the little guy. They are fighting for themselves and higher profit margins.”
That view was echoed by Public Knowledge, a Washington based public advocacy group.
“It’s a tough road ahead and the telcos are going to fight this to the death,” communications director Art Brodsky told BBC News.
“AT&T in the first quarter of this year spent $6m on lobbying. That is one company. One quarter. Compare that to Google which spent $4m in the whole of last year.”
The Computer and Communications Industry Association said the “third way” option is the only realistic option.
“Without deliberate FCC action, consumers, entrepreneurs, small businesses and non-profits will be left completely powerless against the corporate commercial interests of their unregulated internet access providers,” said Ed Black, association president.
‘Misguided’
A research paper released ahead of the FCC vote warned that net neutrality rules could cost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the USA .
The report argued that a 10% reduction in investment by broadband providers would cost more than 500,000 jobs before 2015.
“These regulations severely restrict the ability of network companies to manage their own network traffic, what technology and what techniques they will use to get a robust service and will close off important new business models in this new world we live in,” Bret Swanson, president of technology research firm Entropy Economics told the BBC.
Fellow author Charles Davidson of the Advanced Communications Law & Policy Institute at New York Law School said: “With the US economy still in a fragile state, imposing restrictive regulation on one of the country’s most dynamic sectors is misguided.”

In 2007, Estonia was the subject of a series of cyber attacks which crippled the internet across the country.
Banks, government departments and the national media all found their websites swamped by a tidal wave of spam which took them down.
The perpetrators were never caught.
Some evidence pointed to Russian government involvement in the attacks, but no definitive link to the Kremlin was found.
So was it the first ever act of cyber-war?
Defining cyber war
Experts from nearly 40 countries gathered in the Estonian capital Tallinn to discuss the latest issues in the fight against virtual attackers.
Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves opened the conference with a stark warning about the seriousness of cybercrime.
“Our critical infrastructure, electricity grids, transportation networks and mobile phone networks are so enmeshed and tied to the internet that any open society is open to complete and utter failure,” he said.
Worse still, it’s not easy for a country to protect itself from such an attack, added Estonia’s Minister of Defence Jaak Aviksoo.
“There are no smoking guns, no foot or fingerprints in virtual reality,” he said.
“The computers used in the (Estonia) attacks were distributed worldwide, in more than 100 countries. The attackers can hide very easily, and that is a problem.”
For Mikko Hypponen, chief security officer at F-Secure, what happened in Estonia was not an act of war, especially as the country’s military systems were not targeted.
“In my book, real cyber-war would be when the army of Country A attacks the computer systems of Country B. And that hasn’t happened, yet,” he said.
“In the attacks we’ve seen so far, there’s no way to prove direct government involvement.”
They were certainly classed as a national security threat though.
In Estonia, the vast majority of all banking is done online. And when the attackers took the banks down, there was pressure on the Estonian government to do something, and fast.
“If people can’t access their money, if they can’t buy milk and bread, then you’re going to have problems,” said Kenneth Geers, a US Navy representative.
“Data packets via the internet are fired all the time in anger. However, if no one dies, then according to the laws of war, we’re not in conflict.”
For the experts in Tallinn, the threats were all too real, and many believed the motivation for cyber attacks had moved beyond politics.
“In real space, there are real lines between criminals and soldiers,” said Heli Tiirmaa-Klar, Estonia’s national cyber-defence coordinator.
“But in cyberspace, the criminals could be used as mercenaries and proxies to fulfill the tasks others have told them to do.”
Easy hacking
Skilled hackers at the conference said malware designed to be used in attacks could be purchased for a few hundred dollars online, or even downloaded for free.
Haroon Meer is a hacker and lead researcher at thinkst, a company that does penetration testing for clients.
He helps companies and organisations determine their own online weaknesses by breaking into them.
But he has also done a lot of thinking about how he would attack an entire country.
“When people talk about cyber-defence, they instantly say, ‘we’ll protect control systems.’ But what about banks, what about the internet service providers? Should the United States protect Amazon or eBay, which are huge financial income for the country?” he said.
Security consultant Dr Charlie Miller demonstrated just how quickly and easily he could take control of a single machine through a programming flaw he’d found in a web browser.
In less than 10 seconds, Dr Miller, who once worked for the US National Security Agency, took complete control of a machine remotely. He gained access to e-mail, activated the laptop’s built-in camera and took a picture of the victim.
He said that with a budget of $100m (£67m) he could train a team to carry out a major cyber attack on an industrialised nation, with targets including military systems, critical infrastructure and banks.
“We would be able to get into many sensitive systems and cause disruption,” he said.
“It’s certainly not the same thing as dropping a bomb, but with a few years and enough money, we could cause havoc.”
But consumers are not deterred by the magnitude of the potential threat, and even in Estonia e-services have continued to grow at a healthy rate since the attacks.
“Estonians were not frightened by what happened in 2007,” said Heli Tiirmaa-Klar.
“We don’t think dependency on IT is a bad thing. It’s a good thing, and we are used to it.”

Millions of Facebook addicts worldwide worry that someday soon they’ll have to pay to use the site.
If you go to Facebook.com and search for the terms “Facebook free” or “Facebook charge,” you’ll find hundreds of groups with names like, “If 1 Million People Join Before 9th July 2010 Facebook Will Stay Free!” or “If Facebook Charges A Fee We Will Discontinue Using It.” Some of these groups have dozens of users, others have thousands.
During a recent press conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said while Facebook users do care about privacy, the question of whether or not Facebook will eventually charge for its service is actually a much bigger concern among the site’s 500 million users.
But are these fears justified?
No! Facebook will never charge you to be a member and use the site.
Don’t take it from me. Here’s Facebook spokesman Larry Yu on the issue:
“We have absolutely no plans to charge for the basic service of using Facebook.”
He continues: “Last year we saw a similar rumor circulating that Facebook was going to begin charging $1.99 to use the site, but this year we’re hearing that fee increased to $14.99 with the spread of this rumor. We look forward to hearing what Facebook might be rumored to cost for use next year.”
If you press Facebook employees on this, they will tell you the reason they will never charge for access is that putting up a paywall runs counter to the company’s mission to make the world more open and connected.
But even if you don’t buy that idealistic hoopla, you should understand Facebook has a deep profit motive to never charge you for access.
Why?
Because Facebook makes its money bringing together as big of an audience as possible and then selling that audience’s attention to advertisers. It’s a business that works. Facebook should bring in as much as $2 billion in revenue this year. That’s more than twice as much as Facebook brought in last year. If Facebook started charging users, its membership would start shrinking fast — and so would its revenues.
So while Facebook may charge you for certain bonus features, such as gifts for your friends, or credits to play games like Farmville, it will never charge for basic access to the site.
Why then do people worry Facebook might start charging soon? Probably because Facebook users feel like they’re getting something valuable for free, and everybody knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Just remember: The fact that you keep coming back to Facebook makes it easier for Facebook to sell more ads — and make more money.
Your lunch isn’t free, it’s sponsored.( By Nicholas Carlson,CNN)