I have to say, it's surprising to me that none of the megacompanies is taking on true moon shots with their billions in spare cash sitting around.
Google's "Moonshot" department is mostly ironic, at this point. Literal moonshots have been demonstrated by SpaceX to cost somewhere in the 2-20 billion dollar range with current technology.
Makes me wonder why they're not funding more large scale research - throw a few billion at carbon sequestration, maybe?
Bighead is a clueless bumbling startup guy with no experience. Hooli is massive company like Google. In the show, they give the incompetent guy control of the entire research department.
I think it is double negative as “nobody” before “doesn’t” is supposed to emphasize the negation, not reverse it. With that the sentence is supposed to mean: “Only body that watches the show could have the slightest idea what that sentence meant”.
Such constructions are frequent in Russian, like “it is not true that I have not done nothing” but apparently people use them in English too.
I ain't no english major, but everyone I know in America uses the "Two negatives resolving to a positive" form of english [0]. I'm pretty sure Australia is the same as I actually had this funny code review a few weeks ago which involved flipping an if statement based on a triple negative which unsurprisingly caused a bug. One of the guys in Sydney approved it, then unapproved it because he thought the original if statement was right, then realized the fix was right and approved it again while commenting that we should fix this horribly confusing function.
Megacorps are usually publicly traded. They have to be careful how they spend their stacked up billions. If Monsato starts building Moon elevator, soon enough you will have high caliber lawyers fishing for Monsato stockholders to sue the corp based on suspicious that they waste their money by going away from their main objectives.
That's not why corporations get sued by shareholders. A corporation's objectives are whatever they say it is, and they can spend money on them however they like. They have to disclose what's going on and the risks thereof. They get sued for failing to disclose material info and risks.
So if Monsanto wants to start an expensive project to build an extremely risky space elevator, all they have to do is make the proper disclosures and they're probably fine.
What is interest here too, is Musk is always having lawyers trying to sue him think that can get a great pay-day. But when they try to get shareholders as clients they keep finding the shareholder have already bought into Musk's dream and are not interesting in suing him.
This is what gets me though and it's so confusing. If I were a stockholder of a big megacorp and they weren't spending their money on looking climate change solutions - especially the corps causing the most damage (due to future lawsuit concerns I would expect these companies to be most on board; if they don't get on board then the future will consider them mass-murders and their money-making opportunities will shrink further than I outline in this post) - then I would be leading the charge to sue for poor use of money.
The companies are leaving trillions on the table right now by not spending their money wisely. The future economy is going to be based around climate change cleanup at the rate we're going right now and most companies are trying to lose customers by accelerating global climate change to make their customers pay more money to relocate, fix environmental issues, instead of buying their products.
Our society is going to be so financially strained in the future and it is a Direct result of the megacorps not spending their money in sustainable, responsible ways.
They should all be facing constant lawsuits from their stockholders for not doing better to protect the environment. Since their high-payed lawyers are presumably the ones that lobbied congress in the first place to make sure environmental care was not going to be part of taxes, and in fact that they should pay nearly no taxes at all, suggests to me that they think that the public good is best taken care of by corporations. It seems the only logical conclusion of this line of thinking: if the corps don't want to pay big taxes because they think it is a waste of money, then they have to be in charge of clean air for us, bu they don't actually care about that and so we're all going to suffer and pay less for their products because we have to pay more to fix the air.
I just don't get it.
Edit: For example, how many people in North Carolina will be buying new consumer electronics this Christmas? Will it be fewer than normal, because they have to spend a lot of their own money cleaning up from a storm that was exasperating via climate change and had to deal with a government that made planning for climate change illegal? I think so. I think fewer people there will buy iPhones this winter and fewer people there will buy TVs are even new fancy cars too. But really why are these corporations losing these sales already? It's because an area hit by a climate-change-fueled storm was unprepared by not taxing companies correctly and by the corporations themselves trying not to be taxed; so we end up with the population themselves trying to fix the errors of their government and this process takes expected money out of the corporation's hands.
But the storms will come, and come, and come, and there will be fewer opportunities to make money from people affected by climate change.
I think you underestimate the power of "not my problem" thinking.
I agree future historians will judge our governments and our megacorps, the current keepers of humanity's resources, very harshly. However, many of those at the ships' helms are insulated from their own externalities, the consequences of their decisions. And most of the shares are held by others who are similarly insulated, or abstracted away through 401ks and mutual funds.
The core of the problem is that our entire system of resource allocation is based on who can make the most money with them and construct the tallest walls around them, not who uses them to better the most lives.
For every million lives destroyed by climate change, there is a million more that doesn't care about anything beyond their family, their friends, and their iPhone. A warming planet will make much of Siberia arable, for example.
I think the answer to your questions begins with another question: what would make a CEO not use lobbying to resist taxing externalities of his company? What about a board of directors? A shareholder? An "average voter?"
When we can answer those questions, we can begin to make progress.
In which states exists a tax on "job creation"? Genuine question. I know of, e.g., taxes on a company's profits (where wages are subtracted from profit before it is taxed), and I know of income taxes, which is basically a tax on personal profit. None of those would qualify as a tax on "job creation".
What would these companies be getting sued for exactly in your mind?
Do you own any stocks? Even holding a broad exchange fund makes you a stockholder. Have you led the charge in any lawsuits or is this just lip service outrage?
> What would these companies be getting sued for exactly in your mind?
I was responding to a comment, sorry if this message got lost. Companies who do not spend their money according to stockholder wishes get sued, correct? For misuse of funds?
My post was attempting to explain that I consider it a gross misuse of corporate funds to not spend excess cash-on-hand on projects to reduce the effects of climate change on humanity. To me, it is clear that a corporation wishing to maximize profit must address climate change or risk being sued for misuse of their funds.
> Do you own any stocks? Even holding a broad exchange fund makes you a stockholder.
No I do not own any stocks.
> Have you led the charge in any lawsuits or is this just lip service outrage?
There's no need to be rude. I stand by my words. I have no resources or funds or stocks to give me the standing to approach this topic with a corporation or lawyers. I just get by every month. There's no need to insult my opinions and call my description and opinions 'lip service'. I'm being serious, no need to belittle me.
> Companies who do not spend their money according to stockholder wishes get sued, correct? For misuse of funds?
No, they get sued for malfeasance: taking investments and failing to return a profit.
It doesn't matter what stockholders want, the purpose of buying stocks is to make a return, and if a company fails to prioritize profit above all else, then they have broken the implicit or explicit contract with their shareholders: investment now in return for dividends later.
So let's say you're an influential shareholder at a big company, this company has been successful because it did a few things well, and there are a bunch of other shareholders with their own agendas.
Meanwhile you are a human being just like any other so fundamentally you're making decisions about what you're going to do with your own life, which is the only thing you really control.
Now, you're concerned about climate change. Does it really make sense to try to lasso this big company into doing something about climate change, if it has no experience in that field, and no one there joined in order to work on climate change?
More likely you would put some of your own (presumably considerable) resources into some other project that's focused on climate change. Because that's going to have a better chance of success than trying to sequester resources away from BigCorp for something that BigCorp fundamentally isn't committed to.
The point is you are an investor and it just doesn't make sense to invest resources into X with the goal of doing Y's job. You would invest in Y instead. Put another way if you own an all-star basketball team and you want to win an ice hockey championship you don't tell them to start playing hockey on the weekends, you use the money they made to go buy a hockey team.
Company's function in respect to the shareholder is to earn him money. It's government's function to enforce environment protection. If company voluntarily enforces more strict environmental norms than competition, and becomes less competitive because of it, it violates it's primary goal and should be sued by shareholders, not the other way around.
What you don't get is that the problem of climate change among some circles has been greatly exaggerated.
Yes, the number of hurricanes could increase. But it might double, over the next century.
That's bad, but in the vast scheme of things, it isn't that bad.
No scientist believes in something like day after tomorrow, or anything coming close to what you are implying is going to happen.
It will be more like trillions of dollars in damages, over the next century. Not some world changing event.
We've been dealing with hurricanes for a while now, and if they double, it isn't going to cause the entire economy to stop.
If you want some recent example, look at Puerto Rico. ~5K people died in the recent hurricane. This is bad. But if it happened twice as often, would the world coming grinding to a halt? No. The Earth would keep spinning, people would continue to go to work every day, and watch TV.
If you want to learn from the experts on the actual scale of damage and timeline, go read what the IPCC have to say on the matter. They are the official authority on the matter. And they do not agree with the idea of world ending consequences, like people imply all the time.
I’m not sure why this author’s posts keep getting voted down. They’re not doing climate change denial, they are pointing out what the real consequences are likely to be.
Yes, lots of people will die especially in places like Bangladesh. Yes this is terrible, especially when it should have been prevented.
No, this isn’t a Hollywood movie where the species is about to disappear.
> For example, how many people in North Carolina will be buying new consumer electronics this Christmas? Will it be fewer than normal, because they have to spend a lot of their own money cleaning up from a storm that was exasperating via climate change and had to deal with a government that made planning for climate change illegal? I think so.
It's entirely possible that more consumer electronics and home appliances will be purchased in North Carolina in Q4 this year, because so many were damaged in the flooding and will be repurchased out of necessity, coupled with some flood insurance money.
Sure, google's not working on any literal moonshot program (that we know of) but they're interesting and potentially largely profitable and scalable ventures coming out of it, such as loon or waymo.
And this is literally off the top of my head. All six of these companies have been spun out from projects working within X, so I don't see how you can say with a straight face that Google isn't reinvesting huge amounts of capital into innovation and technology. No other company currently exists which is as diversified in its efforts or as willing to take risks as Alphabet is.
Google is known for execution of existing ideas. Chrome, Gmail, Android etc all had other companies doing the same thing. Waymo is again solid execution but many companies are doing the same thing and waymo has zero original game changing tech. Many companies have been doing ground source heating for private homes, but again they are not changing the game just playing it slightly better than the competition.
The bar is high for this stuff. Having the first stage of a rocket land on a barge changes the economics of spacecraft. That’s the kind of innovation people are looking for.
Google has been working on making self-driving a thing ever since the DARPA Challenges back in the 2000's. It's amazing to me that you would think Waymo of all companies is the second comer with no originality.
I'm really trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here, but this honestly just shows a glaring lack of knowledge/insight.
It's funny, because in the meantime SpaceX has literally gone to orbit. I'd bet they're going to be on their way to commercial moon landings before waymo releases a generally available product of any kind. It's not that Waymo is not original, it's that there's no gradual deployment. It's "We're going to keep it in the lab until it's perfect" project which is exactly the problem.
Even in this regard Elon via Tesla is beating them at that, by deploying as many self-driving features as the risk-reward calculus allows. That's what I was trying to express, perhaps poorly, in my original post.
No offense to the AutoPilot team at all, and I think Andrej Karpathy is a really smart guy who can probably do some great stuff for the company in the coming years, but Tesla and Waymo are in different leagues when it comes to self driving. If you’re looking for a real upstart company that legitimately has a chance at going head to head with Waymo, you should be looking at companies like Cruise Automation not Tesla.
Because though Tesla is a great car company with an even better brand name that I’m sure will carry it very far, one thing it is not currently, is a self driving car company. Perhaps this will change in the future. For now, Tesla has other problems to deal with and focus on.
Because moon landings can be done with tech from the 60s with less computing power than an iPhone. Getting autonomous cars on the streets is an order of magnitude more complex.
And isn't execution much more important than just having an idea?
> It's "We're going to keep it in the lab until it's perfect" project which is exactly the problem.
That doesn't seem to match what I am seeing. They are giving out rides in phoenix arizona already and plan to fully launch there by end of year. They have also officially ordered 62,000 chrysler pacificas and 20,000 jaguar SUVs to scale out their service in the coming years.
There used to be an old joke that went like this: "How do you make a billion dollars in the space business? Answer: start out with two billion dollars." And for a long time that was not necessarily inaccurate. Making money through innovation in the space business was difficult and rare, most of the money came from just being a big, reliable government contractor or sub-contractor. Let the government do the innovating, you'll build what they want and cash their checks, easy peasy.
In the '90s there was a huge wave of "New Space" companies, some with better ideas than others, most fueled by silicon valley venture capital looking for "cool game changing technology". Unfortunately, that combo was not suited to the space business. A lot of companies got set up with their eyes on essentially quantum leap "beyond state of the art" technology, the sort of stuff that would warrant mass influxes of investment because it had the potential to result in orders of magnitude RoI down the road, just like the computer/software business. Except all of it was too far reaching, too ambitious, with not nearly enough R&D expenditure to make it real at the time (it likely would have cost billions). The archetypal plan for such companies was to build a fully reusable orbital launch vehicle, likely a single stage rocket (aka RLV SSTO) and then swoop in and take over the launch business with hugely lower costs, all while launch orders would grow by orders of magnitude as well due to a booming space tourism business coupled with the deployment of multiple LEO satellite constellations.
However, the investment capital dried up during the dot com bubble burst around 2000 and none of the companies had anything viable built already so they just starved to death. Meanwhile, the dot com bust also killed off the fantasies of mega satellite constellations and the launch market slowed down.
It took a company like SpaceX to cut a pragmatic path toward innovation in space launch. Starting with a tried and tested design (2 stage kerolox) that dated back to the 1950s even. And being insanely practical as well as extremely cost and risk conscious through the whole process. They boostrapped into profitability with expendable launches. They built a "dual use" expendable/partially-reusable launcher so they could flight prove the technology using commercial launches. And so they could perform reusability R&D subsidized by commercial launches as well. Every single booster landing attempt they made before they nailed the process was R&D using tens of millions of dollars in flight hardware, except they got others to pay for the hardware and they just used it afterward, when normally the booster gets thrown away.
Even a very smart megacompany like google wouldn't necessary have the savvy to attack the problem in that way. And if you look at what a crap-ton of money plugged into the high tech ecosystem does produce you can look at Blue Origin, who are performing a much more traditional development program. Start with sub-orbital, build and test everything in a reusable flight configuration on your own dime before offering it up commercially, etc. And the result is much slower progress plus the requirement of massive infusions of cash up front for an extended period of time.
I appreciate the long form response. This exactly what I was talking about - I think SpaceX has taken the classic startup model to a place nobody expected it to go, and the question I'm asking is, why have other people not done this? Especially Google should know how to release early and iterate, but really X has released no products to date that I'm aware of.
Lately I read an article from a french space guy (the french are actually pretty good at stuff like that as well) raising the question why one would work on developing a reusable first stage. His theory was that it doesn't make that much sense commercially but it actually could make a lot of sense in a military environment. Also he raised the question to which degree SpaceX is subsidizing commercial launches with government and military ones. Sounded reasonable enough to not discard it out of hand, I didn't have time to dig deeper into it so.
That being said, SpaceX really showed other companies, like Ariane Space, that you don't need 50k + people in three countries and 15+ years to get a new rocket to LEO.
>doesn't make that much sense commercially but it actually could make a lot of sense in a military environment
That's very interesting, what were his reasons ? I can see how the price reduction of reusable stages is much more attractive to commercial launches, whereas military launches are much less price sensitive. Military launches could benefit from the mass launch (dozens to hundreds of payloads in a critical week) capability that a dozen reusable launchers give you.
What he suggested was that technically it made perfect sense if you wanted to launch or landing something from a place without atmosphere. I really have to look it up again think about it. I'll post a link ti the article if manage to dig it up again.
A lot of big money is held by public companies who generally don't like these longshots. Elon talks about it all the time himself.
It also should be a rare thing; they're moonshots, after all. The intersection between "has billions to spare" and "is insane enough to try things like going to space" is not large.
I wouldn't call, say, SpaceX building the Falcon 9 as it exists today anything like a "moonshot". It didn't require an upfront cash injection of billions, and after getting out of the initial stage and into the viable business stage it's been generally cash flow positive. Tons of other orgs could have done the same thing with a comparatively modest investment. Again, this isn't moonshot territory, this is in the realm of crappy little startups doing crappy little questionably viable things who get a few hundred million in VC then mostly just fizzle out. There are a hojillion of those, and that's the scale of investment needed to start building a reusable rocket company. Nobody else is doing it not because it's exceptionally expensive, but rather because they don't know how.
The frustrating thing for me is not that they're not taking the risks, for sure. It's that the money is sloshing around in short term securities and cash-equivalents instead of being invested. It's pretty obvious that they can't find worthwhile ways to use the money, so either admit it and return it to shareholders or really take some big bites of fundamental world-changing R&D.
Building a highly capable rocket company like SpaceX is one of those things that seems like an obvious process but for various reasons is surprisingly not. One common way to go about it is to get a bunch of money together, hire a bunch of aerospace engineers with relevant expertise, come up with a design, then build that design and parlay that into a business.
This works, but it's not as effective as you'd think. It's hugely expensive, it's slow, it has a lot of traps and pitfalls for the unwary, it often leads to highly compromised and undertested designs that are often kind of mediocre in one or multiple respects. And, again, it's expensive, it leads to expensive rockets and expensive launch costs. Ironically, developing for lower cost launches is seemingly even more expensive in up front costs due to the extra engineering, lower margins, etc.
Additionally, one of the dirty little secrets of the rocket business is that very, very few organizations actually have any current practical experience in creating new rockets from scratch. It's one thing to run through all the machining, assembly, etc. for a rocket that's already been designed, built, proven, etc, it's quite another thing to start off with a blank piece of paper and build a rocket starting from nothing.
So the smart way to build rockets isn't the above "obvious" way, it's an inherently iterative (agile) approach. Step 1 isn't building a rocket, it's building a team that can build a rocket. And you don't just iterate through improving the capabilities of your rocket design you also iterate through leveling up the skillset (at individual and organizational levels) of your company. It's a sort of tick/tock cadence, and each side is just as important as the other. Then, you build out a "minimum viable business" so that you can get revenue (and profits and investment capital) rolling in, keeping the company afloat, paying for new engineering and the development of new capabilities. Then you iterate and iterate and iterate your way to bigger and better things.
This model might seem extremely familiar and extremely obvious to the silicon valley set but it really is kind of foreign in the aerospace world (there's actually a bunch of interviews on youtube from NASA engineers working with SpaceX being amazed at what they were able to do and how much their process differed from the bureaucratic norms in the field). And, to be fair, plenty of New Space companies have followed similar models (Armadillo Aerospace, X-COR, Masten, several others) but for one reason or another none of them had the capabilities or the capital to jump to the level of success of SpaceX (so far).
In any event, this is precisely what SpaceX did. They started out with a dead simple (decades old) rocket design, they built a team that built a small rocket capable of getting some launch business. They streamlined the company by vertically integrating to allow faster iteration and lower costs. They iterated like crazy, they made a few mistakes here and there, had some bad luck here and there, but they managed to scrape through the choke points. They were able to launch a payload and get enough business to stay afloat, they were able to get investments and development contracts for future business that would allow them to fund further iterative improvements to their rockets. They relentlessly managed risks in an incredibly savvy way that should be taught in business schools and were able to operate an R&D program that made use of about a billion dollars in aerospace hardware for a fraction of the cost to the company itself.
A lot of this stuff is textbook modern software dev technique. Continuous integration, continuous delivery. Feature flags (to let you test new code works doing the "old" job before testing that the new code also performs new features). You'd think a big company like Google would be able to get this right, but it requires a level of commitment and an acceptance of loss ("failures" during R&D) that big, established companies are often reluctant to take on.
Couldn't agree more, aerospace is is an incredibly hard business, espiacially due to the pittyfull long development cycles. For aircraft you could as far as saying that one generation of engineers is developing it, the second one is using it and for the successor you need a third generation all together. Knowledge for these projects is incredible hard to develop, retain and keep. So the real moonshot in that industry would be a solution to get the development cycles down to more human levels.
You seem to be fairly knowledgeable about all this and/or have thought about it long and hard. Do you have any idea, how would one apply the same kind of process to building a moon lander?
Also, do you have any further links to the kinds of organisational structure that SpaceX has, which I think is the main advantage over traditional organisations like NASA, Airbus, ULA (well, in addition to having someone crazy like Musk - it's been said that SpaceX has enough amazing engineers that they'd probably be flying and landing rockets even without him, but the probably wouldn't be landing them on water)? Like those YouTube interview you mention, or how they manage risks, etc.
Feel free to email me, this is a very fascinating discussion for me.
Maybe I can prvide some insight into Airbus (as a whole, not the civilian aircraft section). It is important to know that Airbus is an inherently political company. It was founded as the result of a political initiative. That resulted in, among other things, a rediculous work-share distribution between countries and within. Also the national entities are totally ad odds with each other. One example can be the A380 delay because they moved the toilets for one customer from one side to the other. The German design team that did so did not tell the French team responsible for the wiring and they did not use a common software. The reault was a couple of months of delay. Now imagine the same thing playing out on every level for every project.
More relevant for SpaceX is Ariane Space. There it is Airbus plus every other ESA country. When you do the same thing without political interference you are faster.
Another example is the A400M, Airbus military tranport plane. They almost screwed the program and ruined Airbus military aircraft business by insisting, politically, on a European developed turboprop engine. And this political incursions into design can be seen all over the place.
EDIT: I just realized I talked a lot about aircraft. Seems I'm still confused by EADS now being Airbus and Airbus (EADS times) is now part of Airbus (old EADS)...
Thanks, I’ve heard before how utterly disfunctional EU/ESA/Airbus is. But that’s kind-of obvious, and I guess it’s not why e.g. NASA and ULA (Lockheed Martin + Boeing) are so inefficient - they sure are very political as well, but probably not so fractured (because it’s all US). What makes SpaceX better than them?
Now I'm just guessing obviously. First is focus, SpaceX is only building and launching rockets, the others are doing a lot more.
Then you have programs like the F-35 (Lockheed) which is intentionally very international and thus political, even morw so than your average defence program. No matter how much everybody is talking about strategy and core technologies in the end the only questions governmants and politicians care about how much money is flowing into their home turf.
The equivalent to EU politics in the US could be Congress and the Senate medling with budgets? But I'm just guessong here. In general being in a very protected industry, politically and by high barriers of entry, makes people lazy. And politics rub off, so even you don't want to you get political by working with politics for too long.
Overhead builds over time, maybe SpaceX did have the time for that yet. And now the last, and arguqbly controversial point, I'm not sure if SpaceX is better by the degree it seems they are. Again, that is just my personal opinion.
EDIT: What does ULA mean? I never heard of that acronym.
> Makes me wonder why they're not funding more large scale research - throw a few billion at carbon sequestration, maybe?
Businesses need to ensure they can make profit before throwing money at huge problems, otherwise they'll just lose money and go out of business. This goes double for problems which have no clear solution. Even if you technically know how to solve a problem, if that technique is not profitable then it's literally not worth solving.
One example: Supersonic Commercial Travel. We have supersonic jets, and we have people who want to travel faster, so why isn't Boeing throwing billions of dollars into supersonic jets? Among other reasons (e.g. they are a nuisance), it's because it's not profitable yet.
Imagine you’re Google and you have a tech ready & demonstrated to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, say, with 30% the binding energy required that’s gained by burning fossil fuels to CO2. You keep innovating and stay ahead of the competition, using 5% of profits or such. Now go 20y into the future and USGov starts waking up to the mess they’ve creates. Miami is about to sink, Hurricanes are eating deep into their budget and Methane released from Sibirian traps is making it worse every year. The solar cycle is almost unrecognizable, every year is now El-Nino. China has ther own sequestration tech going and is net carbon negative, Europe is trying but failing, and all the world is screaming at the US to stop fucking around and do something. Who do you think they’ll throw all their money at? This kinda tech would be their license to print money. A nice percentage of everyone’s carbon tax.
Your scenario is one of many (infinite) possible scenarios and a probability can be put on it. In the context of your example, my point is that Google needs to be confident that their math works out such that them inventing (hiring, R&D) and implementing (infrastructure) the carbon machine is profitable for their business. Unfortunately, they are a business, not a charity, so they'll have to be selling their new carbon tech eventually. If no one will buy it, then it won't be done, because it would have to be done at a loss.
Back to real life, Google doesn't provide search because it makes the world a better place. Google provides search at the scale that they do because they had a clear business model and an incentive to do so. In an alternate reality, if it turned out nobody clicked ads, then Google would probably not exist at the scale that it does. Ten years ago, some decision to build 50,000 more processing servers would have been rejected by the board because they would have deemed it unprofitable.
The profits a company makes gives them the ability to make a choice on where to expand. If they keep expanding into avenues that do not return profit, they will be given fewer of these choices -- and will eventually go bankrupt.
Well atleast Gates invested in Carbon Engineering which does exactly that.
At the moment they estimate it to cost between $94 and $232$ to pull 1T CO² out of the air. [1]
So atleast someone is playing that game already, same with Ocean Cleanup Drones etc. etc. Lot's of people try to use market forces to save the planet, and Big Tech Co's are investing in that space, but it's not something where one can expect results in less than a decade.
The Carbon Engineering story is interesting, because it politely but firmly shows an earlier claim from an APS study about the economics of direct air capture was just bad. The APS study made some bad engineering choices and other mistakes and wrongly concluded DAC would have to cost $600/ton of captured CO2.
Well, an alternative explanation is that your premise is wrong.
No scientist believes that global warming is as bad as you are making it seem.
Yes, it will cause trillions of dollars in damages over the next century or so, as sea levels go up by a couple feet.
But that is hardly the end of the world, as you are making it seem. For example, Miami is not predicted to disappear, in a mere 20 years, as you imply.
The actual negative effects of global warming are closer to being within an order of magnitude of badness to an Iraq war, in a century, than is it to being an extinction event.
There are no negative predictions especially nor 1000 years out, and asking for them shows a complete lack of understanding of how prediction science works.
Nevertheless: And the researchers say this means the probability of the ECS being less than 1.5°C—the Paris Climate Agreement’s super optimistic goal beyond the 2°C goal—is less than 3 percent. The upside, though, is they say this new estimate means the probability of the ECS passing 4.5°C is less than 1 percent.
Well, the IPCC doesn't think that, and also doesn't believe that we are going to get to 6 degrees C of warming.
The predictions that I follow are not the pop doomsday predictions made on the internet. It is instead the predictions made by the official government experts on climate change.
Also, all of this is definitely not predicted to happen within 20 years. actually bad effects are predicted more like 200 years+ from now. Which is plenty of time, if you just look at how much the human race has accomplished in the previous 200 years.
>> Businesses need to ensure they can make profit before throwing money at huge problems, otherwise they'll just lose money and go out of business.
Can you say this is true about Tesla and/or SpaceX? It doesn't particularly seem like Elon cared about those things all that much when he launched them.
It doesn't need to be said for Musk, since a visionary entrepreneur is the exception, not the rule. Musk's choices can be explained away -- a smart domain expert like Musk probably has a better understanding of the risks and rewards in his domain of work than most other people. There are always exceptional people in the world who can not only imagine futures, but make them reality.
Hiring a think tank to solve a problem is a brute force search; almost like a random walk in the solution space. That's a huge risk for someone with lots of money and no domain expertise, but perhaps less a risk for an Einstein who has relevant knowledge and skills. Lots of solutions were found in the proverbial garage, and perhaps would have never been the product of a billion dollars and the best MIT grads you could hire. Nonetheless, spontaneity is, by definition, not something you can really throw money at and expect to happen. Even a trillion dollars will not help you find the next Einstein who can solve the exact problem you are working on.
Well, I think I have to disagree with a couple of points here.
First, Musk is not a domain expert in building rockets (by no means deminishing SpaceX technical achievements) nor in building cars (which is showing itself clearly as of late).
Secondly, most problems one likes to solve are surprisingly easy to solve within the existing realm of knowledge. SpaceX itself is not a real moon shot (figuratively speeking, literally they are) but rather catching up with 60s and 70s space tech. And electrical cars have been around since the 1900s, so again nothing resembling a moon shot. Automotive mass production on the other hand is a very well understood problem space, one Tesla failed exploit so far in any meaningful way so far.
My main point was actually that Musk is not really worth mentioning here at all, because the vast majority of businesses do not operate like Musk's. The adjectives I used to describe Musk are not relevant here.
> Secondly, most problems one likes to solve are surprisingly easy to solve within the existing realm of knowledge
"Easy to solve" means something different for a scientist, engineer and businessman. Something which can be theoretically or technically solved may not be practically solved (the supersonic commercial jet example I mentioned earlier). I agree with you that most of the time, it's pretty clear whether or not something will require new science or can be built with existing knowledge, and most business are in the business of doing the latter. I would add that new science is capable of turning impractical solutions into practical ones, and a multi-billion dollar business can spend easily spend unpredictable amounts of money trying to do so -- which makes it a very risky investment.
Businesses can also fail at implementing existing solutions and burn huge amounts of mones trying to do so.
And yes, Musk is relevant in a discussion about SpaceX and to degree Tesla. Have both endevours been "visionary" to a certain degree? Sure. At SpaceX I'd agrue that it was not Musk himself who designed, say, the Falcon 9 all by himself. Sure his education and background helped a lot.
At Tesla, the approach was disruptive as well. Especially tackling the lacking charging infrastructure as well. That gave him a huge head start, mass-production cost a lot of that head start already. SpaceX profited a lot from vertical integration, Tesla did not. Seeing Musk as some kind of genius in everything he does is doing two things, none of them good: 1) Reinforcing Musks pre-existing sense of superiority (again, based to a not inconsiderable amount in truth) to levels that are hurting and 2) making people an approach that worked once (vertical integration at SpaceX for example) will work elsewhere as well.
This is in effect suppressing diferent opinion and the free exchange of ideas. Reality usually punishes you for that at one point or another. And it would really be a pitty if either one, Musk, Tesla or SpaceX would be in the future.
You're setting up a straw man; the original discussion I started was never about Elon Musk in particular; I used him as an example to make a completely different point. Seeing as there's some baggage around Musk that is preventing you from seeing my point, please pretend I mentioned someone other than Musk to make my point (Edison, Ford, Larry Page, Steve Jobs, etc.). Musk was not actually relevant to my discussion at all, unless you're hijacking it to start a new discussion about Musk.
Yes, you can. There were existing high-value ($100B/$1T+) markets before either of those companies started.
Focussing on SpaceX specifically, Musk has always been clear that his business goal was to provide space transport at 10% the current cost. There's a story that he'd worked out (based on his existing rocket-building knowledge) that it seemed entirely practical to build a rocket for far less than going rate - on a plane while flying back from Russia. He had a business case before he spent his first dollar.
There's obviously remaining uncertainty but it would be foolish to start a project without some idea of how you'd profit.
Its certainly pretty amazing. But the moon landing was likely to be something just totally different: I can't even imagine just how many things could have gone wrong with the technology then, how precise everything had to be in order to take people to the moon and bring them back. The kind of expertise, testing etc. required for such an absolutely critical task.... blows my mind. e.g. they only had one shot at it; they had to get it right the first time; they only had the primitive computing and communication technologies of their era etc.
Having stayed up nights to fix some critical production outages, I've felt the stress of having a company's fate hang in your hands. Cant even imagine what it would've been like to be in the Control center for the moon landing; having the entire world watching ...
Those were written by William Safire, who's to speech writing what Mozart was to composing music. Previous HN discussion of what's been called the greatest speech never given here:
It is different not only on a technical level, but culturally as well. I don't think the entire country is rooting for SpaceX as representative of the group. Instead, it's Elon's company. If they get to the moon... good for Elon.
I think that's most likely just you projecting your own views. See people's reactions to their launches. YouTube is the home to some of the most antagonistic commentary, yet check out the comments to the Falcon Heavy Launch. If you can make YouTube look like a great group of enthusiastic, optimistic, unified aspirants - then it's safe to say they're already bringing the world like nothing before. And that's with little more than the launch of a special rocket. When SpaceX is putting people on another planet, I think we will have entered into the beginning of a new era in humanity.
I read an article (blogpost?) by one of the Apollo programmers who presented a very elaborate argument saying that the Apollo mission would have ended in disaster if not for one very specific code change that happened by accident.
Sadly I haven't been able to find it again for the last year or two, but if anyone knows what I'm talking about I'd be grateful.
You mean the hollywood stage ? must have been quite chill.
sarcasm aside it's true that it was sooooo impressive. I visited NASA last year and they have a way of presenting the space race as a human achievement that brings out many emotions of pride even as a foreigner.
I'm glad you are looking forward to such an event, but I doubt it will be very comparable to what the moon landing felt like. About the only similarity would be the fact of space travel + other planet(oid).
The pure risk, in both technological and human terms, the sheer number of things that had never been done before at all, the extent to which so many people didn't think it could be done, the utter shock of watching it live when there was no such thing as significant live coverage, won't be re-created in my opinion.
Just like it is hard today to understand just how shocking Orson Welle's head projected to enormous size on a movie screen saying "Rosebud" was in a movie theater - something people had never seen at that scale before - it will be hard to understand how shocking and amazing the moon landing was when looked at by near-future sensibilities.
I disagree. I think that landing on Mars for the first time will be more awe-inspiring and impressive than landing on the Moon for the first time was. In a lot of ways the Moon is just a dead end, equivalent to first making landfall on a barren island devoid of fresh water in the middle of the sea. Landing on Mars will be like making it to the Americas for the first time.
What is the evidence of that, aside from “stuff Musk says” of course? Everything they do seems geared to commercial launches, which make sense, and stands to open up LEO enormously. I’m not seeing a realistic path to Mars outside of verbiage, while there is clearly amazing progress made in less expensive commercial launches.
They’re pouring almost all of their R&D effort into a massive rocket that only really makes sense if you want to go to Mars. BFR is absurd overkill for anything related to commercial LEO.
My statement also has another meaning: SpaceX was founded after Musk tried and failed to purchase a Russian rocket to land a greenhouse on Mars as a stunt.
BFR is not overkill if you want to launch huge numbers of satellites into LEO. Look at their recent falcon9 multi-satellite per rocket launches for iridium. Now scale that up to 30-40 sats per launch and the second stage is fully resused. Or if you want to launch really gargantuan things into geostationary transfer orbit. Right now the largest satellite that's ever been put in geostationary orbit is about 7000 kilograms. Imagine the transponder capability, and solar panel power generation ability if you were able to launch a 18000 kg satellite into GTO.
It doesn’t matter how many satellites you’re launching, BFS has a lot of stuff on it that you don’t need for satellites. It can get away with that because reusability means it’s still cheap, but if satellite launches were your goal you’d skip the solar panels and living quarters and in-orbit refueling and a bunch of other stuff.
What does that have to do with "why spacex was founded"? The only person who would know why spacex was founded was the guy would founded it. Elon Musk. The guy said why he founded spacex. What more is there? If you have issues with the progress of achieving the goal. Fine. But that has nothing to do with the founding of the company.
The conversation here is not just about why they were founded, but their current purpose as a company. Why they were founded is, of course, a major driver of that. The BFR's design confirms that this purpose continues.
Are you kidding? It’s expected to replace the Falcon Heavy for LEO launches and further bring down the $/kg for launches. To say it only makes sense for Mars goes against both common sense, and SpaceX’s own claims.
From Wikipedia:
BFR is planned to execute five diverse flight use cases:[75][5]
legacy Earth-orbit satellite delivery market
long-duration spaceflights in the cislunar region
Mars transportation, both as cargo ships as well as passenger-carrying transport
long-duration flights to the outer planets, for cargo and astronauts[76]
commercial passenger travel on Earth, competing with long-range aircraft[77]
Musk and Shotwell have touted the ability of BFR to carry passengers on suborbital flights between any two points on Earth in under one hour.[62][78]
Launching sattelites and ferrying people are things they can actually do alone, while the rest is very much a pipe dream requiring massive hpthird party investment. Again, putting aside “stuff Musk says” you’re left with strong commercial applications for BFR that have nothing to do with Mars. While it could be used for Mars, SpaceX has no plans to make that happen and acknowledged the vast amount of third party effort required.
See:
In July 2017, Musk indicated that the architecture had "evolved quite a bit" since the 2016 articulation of the Mars architecture. A key driver of the updated architecture was to be making the system useful for substantial Earth-orbit and cislunar launches so that the system might pay for itself, in part, through economic spaceflight activities in the near-Earth space zone.[49]
BFR is planned to execute five diverse flight use cases:[75][5]
legacy Earth-orbit satellite delivery market
long-duration spaceflights in the cislunar region
Mars transportation, both as cargo ships as well as passenger-carrying transport
long-duration flights to the outer planets, for cargo and astronauts[76]
commercial passenger travel on Earth, competing with long-range aircraft[77]
Musk and Shotwell have touted the ability of BFR to carry passengers on suborbital flights between any two points on Earth in under one hour.[62][78]
Finally
SpaceX have indicated that they only intend to create the transport system to Mars, and that other aspects of colonization (habitats, mining, etc.) will need to be contributed by third parties.[28] A successful colonization would ultimately involve many more economic actors—whether individuals, companies, or governments—to facilitate the growth of the human presence on Mars over many decades.[29][30][31][5][32] Work contributed by others will allow colonization to progress far beyond what SpaceX projects to build alone.[24]
I was thinking of various replies to this, but then I realized I don’t really want to have a conversation with someone who starts their comment with “Are you kidding?” Suffice to say that if you wanted to build a rocket to launch satellites as cheaply as possible, the result wouldn’t be an A380-sized spaceship with enough living space for a hundred people.
At the risk of sounding like someone you might not want to have a conversation with, forgive me but I must ask, what the hell are you talking about?
I doubt BFR even exists outside of graphics renditions. You shouldn't believe everything Elon says, given that he is obviously biased towards his company and has a vested interest in generating hype for it. And people for some reason lap it up no matter how unreasonable and utterly idiotic his claims. Don't forget, Elon's credibility is at an all time low. SpaceX has yet to put a man or woman on ISS or even LEO. Mars colonization is well beyond their technical capabilities even if there is a market for it. No matter how much Elon may want it. Wishing something to be true doesn't magically make it true, otherwise Carmen Electra would be my wife right now.
NASA for example didn't start by putting a man on the moon. Space exploration is a dangerous, slow, expensive, stepwise process. They did mercury, gemini, and then finally Apollo. And even before landing on the moon there were many flights prior to that. Some were on earth, testing the capabilities of the LEM in LEO, some were on the ground, and some were in lunar orbit like Apollo 8. We are nowhere near the technical capabilities of Mars colonization and if Elon implies that we are, ask for hard evidence of the capabilities of his technology rather than just drinking the Kool aid. Having a great vision doesn't mean you can execute on it.
“I doubt BFR even exists outside of graphics renditions.”
They already have sections of BFS built. They showed a photo of that Japanese guy who bought a trip around the moon standing in one. Gwynne Shotwell (the sensible one, not Musk) is talking about doing test hops late next year. They’ve been test-firing the engine for a long time. So: what the hell are you talking about?
You can find videos documenting these things on the spacex website in the presentation that was given announcing the first commercial trip around the moon. You can also find videos documenting the firing of the engine in earlier tests years back in videos introducing the BFR and ITS.
Also, since you seem extremely ignorant of SpaceX, I also recommend you watch videos documenting the landing of the two boosters of Falcon Heavy, so that you might better understand the sense of optimism which the company's accomplishments have generated. It is, to put it lightly, incredibly inspiring.
Then you're proving my point that the rocket doesn't exist outside of CGI. Musk himself said that they haven't even built out the prototype fairings yet. The engine has been fired for 1200 seconds as per Wikipedia but I can't find a source for it.
Also, this isn't technical documentation, it's the sort of thing that'd impress people ignorant about the complexities of spaceflight. You are wrong that I am ignorant of SpaceX. I watched the landing of the Falcon Heavy boosters and even saw the core crash into the ocean on the day of the test launch.
Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to be a debbie downer. However, I am a skeptic and Musk continues to over promise and under deliver across all of his ventures. He continuously makes promises he won't be able to fulfill. Like this one:
"We will make one of the mini-sub/pod going all the way to Cave 5 no problemo. Sorry pedo guy, you really did ask for it"
I love spaceflight and have loved it all my life. I think the hype that SpaceX has generated is amazing. But that doesn't mean that we should suddenly throw aside our thinking hats. Hype generated on the basis of falsehoods is wrong.
Re-reading my response, I think I didn't give you enough credit for being genuine. Here is a more direct link to the proof. I can understand how you would miss it. The presentation is very long. https://youtu.be/zu7WJD8vpAQ?t=2679
When I read what you wrote, it appears to me that you are confused as to what we were talking about. You asked for proof of a thing that was stated. I gave it. We were talking about proof of the rocket being more than just a render, with some parts having been under construction and testing. Please re-read the thread context.
This is going a little too far into conspiracy theory territory, don't you think? SpaceX already has successful launches of the Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Falcon Heavy behind them. By their own admission, the majority of their R&D effort is going into BFR, as Falcon 9 Block 5 is essentially a complete platform and Falcon Heavy is a bit of a technological dead-end that will be obsoleted by BFR.
You can argue that they won't meet their timelines, as they haven't before, but what is the specific accusation here? That it's all lies or some grand cover-up? I don't understand this level of skepticism for a company with a proven track record of results. Maybe you're letting your personal dislike of Elon Musk cloud your judgment too much?
> And even before landing on the moon there were many flights prior to that.
And SpaceX can (and does!) use the knowledge from all those missions, including the various rovers and other Mars missions.
That's partially a reason why SpaceX can work at all. They have access to all the knowledge that NASA and ESA spent billions and billions of dollars on, and the flexibility of being private and not bound to usual molasses-slow government processes as well as changing administrations with changing desires.
SpaceX as a result has both a higher rate of development and higher focus, as they can keep R&D/construction/ops concentrated and not spread around the whole US for "political" (aka senator money coffers) reasons. NASA always has to take politics into account, SpaceX can freely allocate funds wherever they believe is best for progress.
You are absolutely correct in that SpaceX has access to tons of research conducted by NASA/ESA and other space agencies. However, BFS is fundamentally different than what Apollo did. Arguably, developing a rocket capable of providing the required amount of delta-v to achieve free return trajectory around the moon or Mars is the easy part in a crewed mission. Hell, the BFR in the proposed specs is only slightly stronger than Saturn V and that was half a century ago. The hardest part is man rating the whole thing. That takes a lot of time.
Seriously? 61.8MN is just “slightly stronger” than 35.1MN?
I guess that no one would call something almost twice as powerful “slightly stronger”, but looking at your other comments you are here just to spread misinformation about space x.
You realize that BFR is much heavier than the Saturn V stack, right? The thrust means nothing. Look at the effective payload weight. Yes the thrust is higher, but it weighs nearly 1.5 times more so it can't haul as much payload.
Notice how the payload to LEO is less than the Saturn V. I am not spreading misinformation. I'm here to educate.
You realise that the overwhelming majority of the weight in a rocket is fuel, right? The empty mass of the Saturn V first stage is 130000kg while its gross mass is 20 times more.
Obviously a rocket designed to go to mars needs to carry much more fuel.
The strength of a rocket is given by the lifting force that it can produce and 61.8MN of BFR is almost double the 35MN of Saturn V. And if we look at the second stages the 14MN of BFR are almost triple the 5.1MN of Saturn V.
You are not educating at all, you are knowingly and deliberately spreading lies and misinformation. The pure and cold numbers that I posted instead are facts.
Look buddy, you are wrong. No one looks at the thrust values to determine the strength of the rocket besides you. A rocket's job is to haul payload and so the strength of a rocket is determined by how much payload it can haul not max thrust values. As you can clearly see in this case, despite having more thrust the BFR can haul less payload to LEO than the Saturn V.
All you did in your last comment is literally repeat what you said earlier. The "pure and cold numbers" you posted shows how ignorant you are about spaceflight. Come up with something original and present an argument for why the thrust is a better and more useful metric for measuring the strength of a rocket than its payload capacity.
It's useless to discuss with you, you are just wasting my time.
The numbers are there, the BFR lifting force is almost double Saturn V and the total mass that BFR is bringing in orbit is double the one that Saturn V brought in orbit.
Please, continue with your non-sense if you like, I think that it's clear to everyone who is spreading mis-information and ignorance saying the BFR is only slightly more powerful than Saturn V.
The payload is such an interesting comparison that there is a word for it.
The wikipedia articles give 100,000 kg for the BFR and 140,000 kg for the Saturn V.
For hundreds of missions, the BFR strategy of refueling to leave orbit probably makes sense, but it's pretty clear which rocket puts more payload in a 90 mile orbit, a very direct comparison of launch capability.
And of course, BFR may exceed projections (or fail to meet them).
Wikipedia’s number for the BFR is payload other than the BFS itself. BFR puts up a gigantic spaceship, and a huge payload inside it. Saturn V did not do this. Apollo (or Skylab) was the payload.
The BFS is part of the whole stack, it is the second stage. It is unclear because of lack of technical specification from SpaceX but at the moment it seems unlikely that the BFB will fly without the BFS. So you can't look at the BFS as a separate thing as you are implying, it is a core part of the architecture. It'd be like saying that the Saturn V can haul x amount of payload in addition to its second stage.
You can’t ignore it either. The BFS isn’t a useless hunk of metal once it’s in orbit, it’s still very useful.
Consider a past example. The Space Shuttle’s payload to orbit was many times smaller than Saturn V’s. Yet the Shuttle could do missions over two weeks long with seven crew, far more than Apollo could. How is that possible? Because the orbiter didn’t count as part of the “payload”.
BFR is going to send 8 people on a trip around the moon. Saturn V couldn’t do that, even though it could orbit more “payload.”
It all depends on the mission. If you just want to put satellites in orbit, Saturn V is more capable (ignoring costs). If you want to send people somewhere, BFR is way more capable. BFR can put a lot more mass into orbit, it’s just that a lot of that mass is taken up by mandatory stuff. If that stuff is useful for you then it should count. If it’s not then it shouldn’t.
And that brings us back to my original point, way up there, that BFR is major overkill for a satellite launcher, but makes perfect sense for a Mars mission.
Saturn V and Apollo were designed for a very specific purpose. And so the CSM could only sustain the crew for the trip to the moon. The 310k lbs payload did not include the CSM and LEM. In theory the Saturn V booster could haul up a BFS style ship if such a thing existed.
“The 310k lbs payload did not include the CSM and LEM.”
Are you saying the Saturn V was able to lift 310k lbs plus the CSM and LEM? I’m pretty sure that not true.
Saturn V was a general purpose rocket. It wasn’t tied to Apollo, as evidenced by Skylab. It just worked out that nobody found a cost-effective use for it beyond Apollo and Skylab.
Sorry for the confusion, I meant that the Saturn V could haul 310k lbs and the payload didn't necessarily need be the CSM/LEM. So in theory they could attach a dragon/bfs type thing as payload.
I see. You’re right that it could. It wouldn’t be as good, though, since the BFR’s total mass to orbit is greater. That’s why I’m saying you need to take BFS into account and not just look at “payload” numbers.
Is it? The mission profile shown during the presentation makes no mention of that. It also shows only 30 minutes in orbit before the lunar injection burn, which wouldn’t be enough to refuel from a tanker.
And BFR will launch 100 Mg for a tiny fraction of the price of the 140 Mg that the Saturn V could do. Add to that the fact that the plan is for two BFRs to dock in LEO and shuttle across supplies and you end up with larger mission capacity, still at a fraction of the price.
Reusability is the huge game-changer here. When you're reusable, the max payload per launch doesn't matter nearly as much since it's not a one-shot deal.
I have no stock in the proposed cost savings until it actually becomes a reality. What people don't realize is that reusability isn't as straightforward as SpaceX makes it seem. A used stage has to be taken apart, inspected and refurbished. It is unlikely that SpaceX saves any money on reusing their stages, they might even be losing money.
They have stated that their very first reused booster cost less than half as much money to refurbish than it cost to build a new one.
That was quite a while ago, with a much less advanced reusable design. The current version of the Falcon 9 incorporates lessons learned from tearing down and reflying the earlier units, so should be much cheaper. Even if you think there are no possible improvements, it can’t possibly get worse than a 50% savings.
Unless you’re proposing that they’re lying out their asses?
The irony of course is that all participants here feel the same, but with different conclusions. It’s a shame thst we couldn’t have a functional conversation without derailing into what amounts to faith based arguments, but there we are. In a few years let’s have some fun looking back on this, and while we’re at it here’s another for the bin: Hyperloop as a vactrain will never happen.
I seem to have really strong opinion on things that you really don't seem to know much about.
> I doubt BFR even exists outside of graphics renditions.
We know what exists and what doesn't. The most important thing about a rocket is a new engine, and they have showed videos of it firing 3 years ago and have since then shown many more videos of it firing for different duration and so on.
They have bought a factor and they have shown of structural tools to build the frame of the BFR. They have started to construct sections. The have already build and tested a carbon fiber tank for example.
So, yes, it doesn't exists yet but they are very clearly building it and working on it right now.
Its not some hype where everybody just believes Elon because he has a mindspell on everybody, they are actually showing of hardware all the time.
> Mars colonization is well beyond their technical capabilities even if there is a market for it.
Mars colonization is incredibly difficult and of course it is outside their technical capability, and everybody including Elon would agree with you. The important point is that they are working towards resolving this, unlike most people.
> NASA for example didn't start by putting a man on the moon. Space exploration is a dangerous, slow, expensive, stepwise process. They did mercury, gemini, and then finally Apollo.
Yes and SpaceX started with the Falcon 1, then the Falcon 9, then Falcon Heavy and then BFR.
The also started with Dragon 1 then made that reusable, now they are building Dragon 2 (Cargo and Crew) and they will fly those for a couple of years. And they are working on the next generation after that with the BFS.
They will start by sending humans to the space station, then around the moon and probably do some other stuff before sending people to mars.
Your narrative that they are ignorant and just make a mars shot is false, the have a very deliberate and systematic growth in their capabilities.
Your constant claims that everybody is just "drinking the Kool aid" and your the only one smart enough to understand what is really going on is just false. I and others understand exactly what SpaceX current capabilities are, what they are doing in the short term and what they are devloping in the longer term. That's why we are exited.
When they don't even have a launch vehicle yet, let alone a man-rated launch vehicle. Not to mention the other billion challenges in a crewed 7+ month flight. These are some of the challenges in human certification: https://nodis3.gsfc.nasa.gov/npg_img/N_PR_8705_002C_/N_PR_87...
Hell, forget BFS, Dragon2 isn't even human certified and isn't expected to be human certified till 2020 as per the U.S government.
> Your constant claims that everybody is just "drinking the Kool aid" and your the only one smart enough to understand what is really going on is just false. I and others understand exactly what SpaceX current capabilities are, what they are doing in the short term and what they are devloping in the longer term. That's why we are exited.
I am not the only skeptic calling bullshit on Elon's premature announcements. Also, just look at some of the comments in response to his twitter announcement about Mars base alpha.
Clearly you haven't been following along, but NASA is SpaceX's primary customer. If SpaceX does not man rate the BFR, they'll go bankrupt real quick.
Additionally, spaceflight is under the domain of the FAA so there are a crap of regulations there that they have to be compliant with even if they aren't flying with NASA.
NASA has not booked or given any indication that they care about BFR specially for humans.
There is a large difference between being the primary costumer of SpaceX and BFR.
If NASA wants to fly Astronauts on BFR, then SpaceX can tell them that they have to pay for human rating. SpaceX development targets that, they just don't go threw all the paper work.
Also, the reality is that this 'human rating' is really not clear at all. NASA has no clue how to human rate anything because nothing was really human rated according to the NASA guidelines. They specially have no idea how to human rate a shit that goes to Mars. Every-time they do a rating it is a new and different process.
The problem with this process is well known in the industry. The reality is SpaceX simply couldn't develop it fully human rated because its not clear what that even means. All they can do is build the best possible ship and see where the dice fall.
Living space for a hundred people? Where are you getting that? Space for a 100 people on one of their planned 1hour trips to anywhere on the globe, sure, but that’s decidedly not living space. Again, putting side the hype so many of you are desperate for, the use case is to bring the launch costs even further down below the Falcon Heavy, by bundling multiple payloads. Skimming some money with what would be astronomically expensive commuter flights that the private jet set will be thrilled to pay? Sure. A trip to Mars?
Well, thst requires a lot more than big rockets, and all of the downvotes and petulance in the world can’t change that. On the bright side, time will tell, and I’ll be sure to save this thread for future enjoyment. BFR, if it’s ever completed (it very well may be, it might not be) will be used almost exclusively for LEO; satellite launches, cargo runs, and ferrying people. The technology for people on Mars simply doesn’t exist yet, and trillions of R&D SpaceX has declared zero interest in, and no one else is doing is on the road to Mars.
For a group of supposed empiricists, rationality and skepticism seems to die where this topic is concerned. It’s frankly annoying.
Everything here is completely consistent with what Musk has been saying from day one - he wants to open up Mars to humanity, not to colonize it by himself.
As for BFR, so sure, they found some extra uses after reviewing newest design. They have to earn the money for the Mars mission. But the story has been completely transparent from day one - SpaceX is means to an end, to get people to Mars. All their developments - from reusable launches to BFR - are directly in line with this goal. If Musk was in for the money, there are many easier ways for a person with his resources to multiply their wealth.
When you see a group of people that claim to pursue a particular goal, and then spend a decade doing exactly that, you should consider giving them the benefit of the doubt and assume they might be actually honest about it.
It depends on how wealthy you want to be. If you want a few billion, no doubt. I’d you want Bezos money... much harder. If you want to be the first trillionaire, the equivalent of temple railroad barons for space? No, this is pretty much it. He already hit the first mark, and I think he’s aiming for the third with the second along the way. I also think he likes rocketry and being seen as a visionary and a hero, and PayPal money wasn’t going to get him any of that. He’s clearly very into risky endeavors and relentless self-promotion; his cult of personality didn’t build itself. He also clearly likes to make money, and win against the odds.
I think if you look for the intersection of all of his more obvious needs and desires SpaceX makes sense in the commercial sense.
SpaceX can't grow money on trees, of course the BFR has various commercial uses. The commercial demand for flights to Mars is pretty low, and if they built a vehicle that only makes sense for mars they would have no money left for any investment in Mars (sending colony ships or whatever).
But for getting the most profit out of LEO launches and suborbital passenger trips they could have built a much smaller rocket, slightly bigger than the Falcon Heavy. As $/kg for launches goes down, you expect average payload size to go down, not up (since it makes less sense to pay for overengineered satellites with lots of redundancies).
ha - the opposite, more like! "Overengineering" is what allows payloads to be as light as they are. You spend a fortune squeezing every last gram out of the design because it costs so much to get it up there. Lower launch costs allow heavier (cheaper) stuff to be economical.
> What is the evidence of that, aside from “stuff Musk says” of course?
Shouldn't a statement from the founder of spacex be enough? The guy who founded spacex said he founded spacex to get to mars. What more evidence do you need as to why spacex was founded? What other answer can he give other than what the founder said?
The story about how he went to Moscow to try to buy an ICBM to land a greenhouse on Mars, couldn’t work out a deal, and basically said “I’ll build my own rockets, with blackjack, and hookers” is corroborates by the people who went with him, too.
I just want to say, as an outside observer, that your comments throughout this thread have been awful. You consistently miss other peoples’ point, pick fights, shift the goalposts, and rely on logical fallacies. The people responding to you, while flawed, generally have done so with good faith reasoning and citations.
You seem really out of touch with both the space industry and the social dynamics of this conversation.
>The internal NASA attempts to derail the program were the most difficult to overcome
As much as SpaceX owes to NASA, from talking to someone directly working on SLS, it seems apparent that this is still the case and there is a dismissive mindset towards SpaceX and their potential.
A moon orbiting space station in 2028 still seems to some, the obvious next step
If you ignore cost, SpaceX still has a lot to prove. They are doing amazing things and I personally wouldn't bet against them, but the people they are fighting against have a lot higher success rate at this point, and a LOT more experience.
SpaceX is changing the game, and reducing the cost of getting to space might be what causes the next great age in humanity, but at the same time I have to say that I'm relieved that the James Webb telescope is going up on Ariane 5.
And if you worked at NASA and really want the absolute best, I can see why you'd want to avoid the "cheap" option, even if you agree that they might one day be better.
I think you said it yourself in the middle, it will never be worth sending me to space on an Ariane X, but maybe I can afford a spot on the falcon 25. That’s what I find so exciting about the cheap version.
Looking at their wikipedia pages, the Ariane 5 has had a total of 5 (partial and full) failures out of 99 launches. This is a 95% success rate. Falcon 9 has 3 failures out of 61 launches. Their success rate is actually slightly better.
Now we are picking timeframes and deconstructing the meaning of "failure" (BTW, that too is not that much more favorable to Ariane 5). The upshot is that their reliability is not dramatically different, they are comparable.
In terms of percentage, yes. But also mean time to failure, in that case to launch failure, is the really interesting point. So the better comparison would be the last 60+ launches. And then you get 3 failure for SpaceX vs. 0 for the Ariane 5. I did not double check the numbers myself, just the values stated above.
Picking n = 60 compares Falcon's first n attempts with Ariane's best stretch. It conveniently ignores Ariane's initial mis-steps that every complex system is prone to.
By the same token I can cherry-pick n=30 and claim victory :-) Neither is a fair comparison.
Honestly, I think it's remarkable that Falcon has had only 5% failure rate considering that the launch vehicle has undergone constant tweaking for reusability. I am not familiar with Ariane's evolution but I would be surprised it it's seen similar amount of change.
Maybe we should wait until Falcon catches up with the total number of launches and compare apples to apples then?
No disagreement there, just pointing out that a) a simple failuee rate percentage is insufficient and b) one should not discard Arian out of hand based on SpaceX hype alone. Again, SpaceX did an incredible job, no doubt there. Doesn't change the reliability numbers of the last launches. And yes, ultimately SpaceX will catch-up. And then we can have discusion about the reliability of the Falcon Heavy or BFR vs. the new Ariane rocket. Hopefully giving Ariane the same benfit of doubt in case SpaceX is further down in the rocket life cycle for a comparable rocket. ;)
> but the people they are fighting against have a lot higher success rate at this point, and a LOT more experience.
I just don't think this is true outside a few areas. SpaceX has built a team that did a lot of these things and not that long ago.
Most people working on the Ariane, SLS were not around when these rockets and engine were built originally. Remember that SLS is just a lot of old parts stitched together a different way (with the explicit goal that this would be cheaper, ironically).
So in terms of building new rockets I think its absolutely clear that SpaceX has the most experience of anybody.
> SpaceX is changing the game, and reducing the cost of getting to space might be what causes the next great age in humanity, but at the same time I have to say that I'm relieved that the James Webb telescope is going up on Ariane 5.
I mean while that is a fair sentiment, we are comparing on of a rocket that has virtually not evolved for a very long time against a rocket that was created by a company that didn't even exist for most of the time Ariane 5 flew.
The more interesting question is if you would put more trust in the Ariane 6 and I think not, that rocket will have to show that it can build the same kind of reliability history.
> And if you worked at NASA and really want the absolute best, I can see why you'd want to avoid the "cheap" option, even if you agree that they might one day be better.
But that is one very, very specific mission, I see absolutely no issue with Falcon 9 launching most NASA payloads. They already have launched stuff like TESS for example. I mean the reality of the situation is that Falcon 9 is a human rated rocket, the Ariane 5 or Ariane 6 will both not be human rated and that would indicate Falcon 9 has some additional safety requirements.
SpaceX would probably be fine with Gwynne Shotwell running it, absent Musk, at this point. Perhaps they'd lose some of their media/PR attention and the daring to take chances that Musk is known for. I'd expect SpaceX would become a bit more conservative in its ambitions, and would probably continue to operate well and be very successful as a business.
It's the Apple model without Steve Jobs. Cook is a tremendous operator, he's just not a visionary or new product guy. Apple won't have to worry until the next big inflection point. SpaceX could probably ride - with modest incremental improvement - on its technology lead for the next 10-15 years.
In the case of Tesla, the best thing they could do is hire a talented operations heavy CEO and have Musk be the product lead. He has never shown himself to be a particularly talented CEO, it'd be better if he focused on what he's the best at.
While most details of the crucial launch were mostly hidden, Elon has shares numerous times that fate was kind to them on that day. I wish SpaceX godspeed into the future. Spacex has put sci-fi authors on notice.
Google's "Moonshot" department is mostly ironic, at this point. Literal moonshots have been demonstrated by SpaceX to cost somewhere in the 2-20 billion dollar range with current technology.
Makes me wonder why they're not funding more large scale research - throw a few billion at carbon sequestration, maybe?