Do they need a landing pad? They have to be capable of landing on unimproved martian or lunar rock, with enough spare capacity for either the fuel for a return flight (from the moon) or a local fuel generator (from Mars).
That should work, but it will likely not be able to safely launch again even if you managed to refuel it. The engine power needed to launch in Earth gravity, even with a small hop fuel load might be too much for engines so close to the ground & with thick atmosphere preventing the exhaust from dissipating.
Oh... I forgot about the noise from launch, which is loud enough that echos could damage the vehicle if not damped.
Some form of tower to stand off the exhaust would be required.
What annoys me that I would want to be a fan of someone like him but I just find his personality and behavior repulsive. After Jobs and Musk many people will now think you have to be an asshole to be successful and will try emulate the bad parts too. People are biased towards simple explanations of the world so they're biased towards either either Musk is amazing or Musk sucks. The reality is that he's a great enterp…
The personality and behavior that you find repulsive is probably the most conducive to progress. I am not one of those (if I do say so myself). I don't like to step on other peoples' toes or piss people off. I value the happiness of certain other people over my own, mostly. I am unwilling to sacrifice certain things (family) for other goals that I might have. These traits (some might say virtues) are limitations on w…
I mostly disagree. Acting in a way that is optimal for the project doesn't require you to be narcissistic, thin-skinned, revengful, etc.
Empathy can be a hurdle in making the right decisions, for example firing a low performing employee. You could argue that someone who takes pleasure in the pain of others could be a better leader. Possibly. But first, I would still find them repulsive and second, I think you can be both decent and a good leader who makes the right decisions. Personally if I were in a leadership position I would try to "hack" my emotions and convince myself that e.g. firing someone who doesn't do a good job is a good thing overall.
That seems very expensive and inefficient compared to planes or ships. What's the use case you're imagining where a plane is just too slow? The only thing I can think of is if some service like FedEx can amortize the cost of the launch across a very large number of low-mass items and charge a premium for fast delivery. Still, I'd assume that this would use vastly more fuel per mass of cargo moved than a plane, and sh…
The last time I remember seeing calculations on this, it worked out that it does use more fuel per kilogram than a cargo plane, but only about 1.5x as much - the reason being that the starship spends most of its flight coasting with nearly zero drag, which an airplane has to fight drag in the atmosphere the whole way to its destination.
Huh, that's interesting and completely at odds with my intuition. If it works out like that maybe it is an economically and (sort of) environmentally viable option.
What has Elon Musk done for humanity? He got extremely wealthy from a payment processing website. Now he runs a company that makes luxury cars and another one that is or aims to be a global military arms logistical network [0]. If I had to pick amongst the exorbitantly wealth, without any serious research I'd say we need more people like Bill Gates. 0. https://futurism.com/the-byte/spacex-building-military-rocke...
I guess you missed the decades before Bill went big on philanthropy and was much reviled as an anti-social workaholic, tyrannical CEO, and rabid monopolist.
And Elon Musk is not much of a philanthropist that I am aware of but is a guy who claims to care about the future of humanity so he builds luxury cars & rockets instead of doing things for humans alive today with difficult lives. Gates wasn’t always the Gates of today but whats good about Musk outside of the people who fantasize about living his life? The degree to which he’s any better for humanity than literally any other rich businessman seems dependent on buying into his marketing uncritically.
To quote Crocodile Dundee: "that's not a user guide". SpaceX do amazing things, and shows that private space is good. But you have to admit that government space programs have better public documentation. The ISS operating guide, in all it's glory: http://spaceref.com/iss/operations.html
>The ISS operating guide, in all it's glory: You are comparing an 'user guide' for a 20 year old mature project to one which will launch in ~N years in the future. That is like comparing Linux man pages with an early stage startup pitch deck.
It's getting real. 12.5km hop test hopefully happening within the next 24 hours. 3 Raptor engine launch, free fall in "belly-flop" orientation and powered landing with 2 engines at launch site. Proceedings scheduled to start at 1400 UTC (0800 at Boca Chica, Texas). Official SpaceX YouTube stream from 1200 UTC https://youtu.be/nf83yzzme2I
Their channel is still quiet, maybe coming up at 4:00 CST, but Lab Padre is showing now. The channel is saying target time is 4:30 CST; NASA's WB-57 is in the air; and they've been doing some venting so far.
What really stands out is the impact of this guy, too. Imagine he just wouldn't have done those things. Imagine no PayPal, no Tesla, no SpaceX ... it's easy to say "Yeah, someone else would have probably done it then." but that's just not right. Otherwise we'd see a lot more of those things by now. Sure, there are some now, but most if not all are the result of him setting the bar in the first place.
"People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better" - Elon Musk, at Ted 2017
This really nails it. The world does not build itself. We build the world. Nothing is preordained, except in retrospect.
I guess you missed the decades before Bill went big on philanthropy and was much reviled as an anti-social workaholic, tyrannical CEO, and rabid monopolist.
And Elon Musk is not much of a philanthropist that I am aware of but is a guy who claims to care about the future of humanity so he builds luxury cars & rockets instead of doing things for humans alive today with difficult lives. Gates wasn’t always the Gates of today but whats good about Musk outside of the people who fantasize about living his life? The degree to which he’s any better for humanity than literally an…
I think you're strawmaning Musk's popularity. People aren't fantasizing about living his life, they're adoring him for building the future that a lot of people want to live to see. Honestly, philanthropy should not be the main concern of billionaires. They should put their money and expertise to work running and funding businesses that have a direct impact on people's lives. Throwing money at problems is an incredibly inefficient and wasteful way to solve them since it more often than not gets vacuumed up by intermediaries and managerial bloat. If you really want to fix something you need to do the work yourself. Gates is actually quite good at this because he's very hands on, he personally researches (as in actually learns the science behind things) and visits the companies and orgs that he donates to. Guess what, that's also Musk's approach. The only difference is that Gates is retired with little interest in starting new companies, Musk is still young enough that he's in the thick of it managing his existing companies and occasionally starting a new one. That's what people with the means to should be doing, rolling up their sleeves and grappling with the problems themselves not throwing bags of money over a wall and hoping it lands on someone competent.
What annoys me that I would want to be a fan of someone like him but I just find his personality and behavior repulsive. After Jobs and Musk many people will now think you have to be an asshole to be successful and will try emulate the bad parts too. People are biased towards simple explanations of the world so they're biased towards either either Musk is amazing or Musk sucks. The reality is that he's a great enterp…
The personality and behavior that you find repulsive is probably the most conducive to progress. I am not one of those (if I do say so myself). I don't like to step on other peoples' toes or piss people off. I value the happiness of certain other people over my own, mostly. I am unwilling to sacrifice certain things (family) for other goals that I might have. These traits (some might say virtues) are limitations on w…
I think about this all the time.
I love Miles Davis' music. Love it.
And by multiple accounts, Miles was probably a bad person.
Can I love his music while not loving the man? How do I reconcile that?