51–60 of 351 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Next week, Musks inbox is flooded with "Weld 28467 is looking slightly bubbly. It'll probably be okay, but wanted to pass the buck to you".
That was my first thought as well - how does the spiritus movens behind both Tesla and SpaceX have the bandwidth to pull off that level of (micro)management?
Humans are not biologically adapted to surviving on Mars, and for that reason, any settlement to Mars is bound to fail in the long term.
Excerpt: "Just iterate, baby" "I’ve spoken with plenty of the earliest engineers who worked at SpaceX, and almost all of them have noted that Musk tackles the hardest engineering problems first. For Mars, there will be so many logistical things to make it all work, from power on the surface to scratching out a living to adapting to its extreme climate. But Musk believes that the initial, hardest step is building a re…
> for the extremely hard problem of getting a super-large vehicle out of Earth’s gravity well into orbit Why does it need to be super-large? To simulate gravity?
Humans are not biologically adapted to surviving on Mars, and for that reason, any settlement to Mars is bound to fail in the long term.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> for the extremely hard problem of getting a super-large vehicle out of Earth’s gravity well into orbit Why does it need to be super-large? To simulate gravity?
>Why does it need to be super-large? To simulate gravity? Rocket efficiency scales infinitely with size.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
Because space is hard and expensive, when designing payloads, they also have to be over-engineered to make sure you're getting the most out of your ride, which then makes the rockets over-engineered and expensive to make sure they don't blow up carrying the precious cargo. It's a positive feedback loop. So we end up with incredible telescopes like Hubble or James Webb, but it's literally a once-in-a-generation event. There's no tolerance for failure, so budgets and timelines ballon.
What if you knew you could get a cheap ride anywhere anytime? Why not mass-produce slightly lower quality telescopes instead of these masterpieces. The JWST's successor is LUVOIR, slated for sometime in the 2040s (!!), why not build a dozens JWST-like telescopes and use interferometry to build giant telescopes larger than the earth with higher light-gathering ability than even ground-based telescopes? This is the technique used by Event Horizon Telescope to capture the first picture of a black hole last year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferome...
I don't know about the Starship a week but he definitely fulfils his hyperbolic bullshit per day quota. And it's mostly "our" fault, "we" let him getaway with so much shit ( from market manipulation to criminal workplace offences ) because he entertains our egos with the promise of getting all our problems solved ( which is ridiculous at so many levels ). OK let's pretend Elon builds one Starship a week, at which cos…
The only reason why we have the prosperity that we have today is because inventive people built things that people like you said were not worth the time.
Does it? Do you have some examples? As far as I can tell, societal progress moves slowly and incrementally, with many people contributing by building on the works of others.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Why does it need to be super-large? To simulate gravity? Rocket efficiency scales infinitely with size.
The rocket equation [0] disagrees: "In what has been called 'the tyranny of the rocket equation', there is a limit to the amount of payload that the rocket can carry, as higher amounts of propellant increment the overall weight, and thus also increase the fuel consumption" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Musk has come to believe the only way to realistically achieve this is through trial and error, by iterating closer and closer to the right design" This how everything is made. Revolutionary.
No, not in aerospace. The common approach is to spend years designing, simulating, and then actual tests come at the very end, and sometimes you don't even test because you can't or it would be too expensive. That's what Boeing are doing with their own rockets; Mars missions until now didn't really go through an iterative process; satellites are usually manufactured only by one and they better work once in orbit.
So trial and error, but virtually.
You're telling me we went to the moon on the first try? We went into space on the first try? The Wright brothers were successful on their first flight?
No, it was all trial and error.