Posts by gecho 87 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Mar 2013
Billionaires like to perpetuate the myth that they are paying for these things themselves when it is really investors doing the heavy lifting. SpaceX isn't funded by Musk but billions and billions from investors. Throw in a small fraction of the money for a large fraction of the ownership. It is a trickier dance for publicly traded companies as it is easier for investors to pull the rug out from beneath you.
There should be a pretty good chance of the next launch succeeding. The first stack was strong enough to flip end over end at supersonic speeds and survive the FTS detonation for a time. It launched with engines, and a thrust vectoring system that had already been due to be replaced with something better.
And the launch pad concrete is considerably more beefy with a water cooled steel plate on top.
I wonder if something like the AMS experiment could be salvaged and moved to a new station. They went to the trouble to repair it, so it must be sort of important. A commercial station would certainly have a much different orbital inclination favoring launches from the US as there would be no need to accommodate Russia. I get the impression changing the inclination of an orbiting object is much more complex than changing its altitude.
Perhaps one of the more unsettling things about Starship is the power it will give SpaceX in space. They can launch everyone else's cargo at just enough under competitors rates such that the competitors will find themselves unprofitable. Probably at least 8 years until anyone beside Blue Origin has a hope of fielding something similar since they'd have to develop both heavy lift and propulsive landing at the same time. Meanwhile SpaceX can launch all their own stuff at cost giving all their ventures a huge cost advantage. Right now that is just Starlink, but that could quickly expand into other areas either developed in-house, through acquisition or partnerships.
The marginal cost of building another ship / booster is about 3 orders of magnitude less than an SLS. The development cost will also be spread out over thousands of launches vs maybe 8 total for SLS. Hell current billion dollar launch tower will only be used twice for SLS before being scrapped because they need a new billion dollar one after switching to a taller second stage.
If Starship becomes operational in the near future it will change a lot of things. I have to wonder how much effort SpaceX is putting into the DragonXL cargo vehicle as there really won't be any reason for it to exist. I think NASA is quietly hoping to roll the Falcon Heavy / DragonXL resupply contract over to Starship.
Solid state batteries expected within a few years should reduce battery size and weight by 30 to 50%, which in turn means weight can be removed from the vehicle structure as well. We're in the late early adopter stage for EVs. Most of the vehicle electrical systems are quite mature, it's just the batteries that need a bit more work before mass adoption.
Large fleet operators often have their own onsite fuel tanks. I don't see it being any different with EVs. Several shipping container sized batteries to act as a buffer so they aren't hammering the grid.
Public EV charging stations will likely need on site battery storage as well to help balance demand. They can recharge their storage at night when power is cheaper, or through solar on the charging station canopies.
China fucked with Canada for years over this costing billions of dollars in trade and held a few citizens hostage in retaliation. All for doing America's thankless bidding.
On the plus side it forced Canada to invest in processing canola domestically instead of exporting raw seed. Downside, I think a lot of that is destined for biodiesel, not human consumption.
I imagine the red tape and lead time for getting an experiment flown on the ISS is rather spectacular. We should see a (metaphorical) explosion in research once the private space stations launch. The uncrewed New Shepherd flights always seemed to be flying a bunch of experiments, which made me wonder how much science you could do in a few minutes of microgravity.
I deleted my account a few months ago. What finally made me ditch my account is when they introduced topics and bulk subscribed me to hundreds of them completely flooding my feed. You had to remove each one at a time.
There are still a few people I like to follow. Twitter must have realized a bunch of people were doing this because after you scroll past a few posts on the web the UI get locked and you are prompted to log in.
Where I live they ditched expiration stickers 20 years ago (along with front plates). Maybe they make more sense in places with police that do foot patrols. Whenever a driver gets pulled over the officer punches the plate # into their in vehicle terminal to check registration status. And now an increasing number of police cars are equipped with plate scanners.
Yeah, sounds like a delaying tactic to slow the court case, which is something he wanted from the start of litigation. If he did managed to get the case dropped or paused, there would be a problem with financing after a drawn out period of nothing happening.
"said he would go ahead and buy Twitter after all, provided he had the debt financing in place to bankroll the acquisition and that Twitter's lawsuit against him in a Delaware court was immediately brought to a halt."
No the ones here are cameras, I looked up the model on the manufacturers website. Before that I did actually make a corner reflector and attached it to my bike to no effect.
Over the past few years they "upgraded" to new cameras. The old ones had a huge sweet spot for detection. The new ones are much more focused so they can ignore vehicles making right turns. But the wind knocks them out of position, and on a bike you sometimes need to ride in the oncoming traffic lane to trigger a change.
This sort of thing is supposed to be address in V2X in a more cross industry wide basis. I would expect that the tech would eventually be mandatory in all phones / vehicles as an OS feature, not a 3rd party app. I think its based on broadcasting position and direction vectors.
It should cut down on rear end collisions by detecting when vehicles ahead of you out of site suddenly brake. Or a when a vehicle from the side is going to blow a stop sign / red light.
As a cyclist I really looking forward to it. People have a habit of waiting until the last second to pass cyclists, screening you from the vehicle behind until they have completely switched lanes which ends up being 10-15 feet behind you, then blam-o zero time for driver behind to react. Would also be a huge help for pedestrians when drivers are making right (left in UK) turns and typically only look upstream for traffic not even looking the other way for anyone on the sidewalk.
It would also let traffic light know that a cyclist is approaching. The camera based detectors which are on 95% of our intersections only pickup cyclists 25% of the time. No detection, no green light, if a vehicle pulls up behind you they are too far back to trigger a green as well.
One obvious abuse would be to attach something with V2X to done and flying it into traffic to trigger auto braking in cars.
Elon does what billionaires do to avoid paying taxes. Instead of selling stock which generates a taxable income, he uses that stock as collateral for loans. The only reason he sold stock last year was to cover the taxes on stock options that were about to expire. With his shenanigans causing the stock price of Tesla to fall, he's at risk of the banks demanding more collateral. If he's suddenly forced to sell a bunch of stock to cover the twitter deal he could be facing another billion dollar tax bill. And dumping more Tesla stock could further drive down Tesla's stock.
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