And I'm pretty sure she did it just for laughs. I also built a listening device to hear what my mom was saying when I wasn't there. But it was too boring to me to actually listen to the conversations, I don't think I ever actually did it. But I did enjoy immensely setting it up.
I'm not sure there are many countries that actually have free childcare and free buses. Talk about it, yes. Subsidized to a degree, yes. But pretty much every municipal transport is already heavily subsidized.
It takes as given that the tech is here, and it's economically feasible, but it's not giving any arguments. Just blames the people.
It's also not exactly defining the problem space. Is it talking about air-air AC with heating? Those are common and very cheap. Is it talking about large HVAC systems that include hot water? Those are indeed a hellof a lot more expensive, but also a hellof a lot more complex. And no matter what the author is saying, technology isn't to the point of giving us hot water from heat pumps. The math just isn't mathing - to take cold water and heat it up to "hot" by cooling off freezing air, you'd simply have to cool huge amounts of air. Yeah, probably, if you put a room-sized HVAC system and spend a ton on electricity - but that's where it stops being competitive.
Is it talking about geothermal heat exchangers? Because those are indeed a lot more efficient - but also more expensive for obvious reasons. You need to drill.
Yeah, happened to me too. Brief but intense. Strangely, only the first time.
When I got out I told the technician (I though I had a panic attack, and was puzzled that it happened at the end of the session), and she said "oh, it was probably the contrast, happens rarely". Apparently rarely enough that they don't warn the patients. To be fair it was harmless, and they'd have many more cases of nocebo nausea than actual nausea.
So that's an European thing? huh. We have this in Romania - a couple years back when the war in Ukraine started just as the green deal took effect, the gov started spending like crazy on subsidizing energy. But they did it in a convoluted way with a layer of intermediaries that basically were allowed to invoice the state for price differences from arbitrary price levels. Almost "I'd like to sell at twice the price but you're not letting me, so gimme the difference" - if not exactly that.
I'm not sure if I'm feeling better or worse that it's a EU invention. Either way, it's hellof a corrupt practice.
- what's the actual oxygen carrying capacity? If they're up to human trials then I imagine they've already validated this step in animals
- can it also scrub CO2?
Without doing more research, I'm putting most of the probability mass into it being be a small but significant oxygenation aid. Not enough to let us survive without working lungs, but enough to push the odds in emergency situations, while also being harmless. Something like 5% extra survivability for a $100 cost and a sore butt. Well worth it, but not a revolution.
That's an ECMO machine, and it works. It's also cumbersome and expensive. This kind of thing might easily become a standard resuscitation step in first responders.
I'm not really sure if keeping a strict schedule has any real relevance here, outside maybe PR and politics. Starships will drop the cost to other bodies in the same way Falcon dropped the cost to orbit. Why would anyone want to invest in a technology and a project that will be obsolete by the time it's implemented?
There is still a lot of work to be done on Starship before it is going to be useful for going to other bodies. The entire interior/cabin/life-support system, for example. This is years away from hitting factory tooling.
This work could revolutionise America's manufacturing/industrial base, if there was someone around who could direct the ship in that direction.
I could imagine, given a bit of funding bump, the van-lifers and the earthship folks could find themselves with a life-support-system revolution to participate in .. especially if it were oriented not just towards starship interiors, but life-on-the-streets/in-the-woods/on-mars solutions .. the good ol' USA has tons of test monkeys for that scenario.
Seeing some sort of van-life/starship-crew-cabin crossover would be interesting. But i'm not confident that your aspiration makes sense.
A lot of institutional knowledge is locked behind corporate walls. We can assume a crew cabin will be partly designed by engineers poached from other companies who can leak some of the institutional knowledge. That said, some of the crew cabin will be designed whole-cloth. At some point SpaceX will need to build it's own knowledge base. I would be curious to see how other components were built, i.e. the parachutes. A parachute has a lot of built-in institutional knowledge, and I'd be curious to see behind the curtains where SpaceX got that knowledge. You can't exactly check out a library book.
The concept of boutique engineering shops tackling chunks of the design is an interesting premise. But I don't see how the financials work. The more realistic scenario is that SpaceX will build it's own machine shops under it's umbrella.
Winnebago is churning out Ekko campervans at $250,000 and somebody is buying those. But you look at the quality of the interior, it's same as everyone else, lots of particle board. The point is, the most expensive campervans built by the corporate world are using cheap throwaway materials, not space age innovation. I shudder to think of the cost of what a space age campervan costs.
The Apollo program was at the unique juncture in history where distributed companies with institutional knowledge were rapidly maturing their products concurrently with NASA's demand. In today's world, you will not see the same number of companies spooling up assembly lines without massive costs.
>you will not see the same number of companies spooling up assembly lines without massive costs.
It's true, but I think this subject will scale throughout the entire survival category.
Cheap throwaway materials is one thing .. in situ 3D replication, another thing entirely.
The cottage industries can do a lot of the innovation. I think the sailboat/winnebago/portable-living engineering is going to come to a head, eventually .. and we will see new technologies, perhaps, springing up around the subject of human/biosphere construction.
If you're suggesting that we won't have winnebago's on Mars, I don't wanna go there.
I don't see any real possibility of Artemis 3 launching before 2030, frankly. That "mid-2027" timeline is a joke said with a straight face.
There are enough contractors involved and enough delay potential on the table that getting all the ducks in the row in time for the 2027 date would require nothing short of divine intervention.
> enough contractors involved and enough delay potential on the table that getting all the ducks in the row in time for the 2027 date would require nothing short of divine intervention
Or a fuckton of money for an administration priority.
Probably; the moon landings had the US' popularity skyrocket, firmly landing them in every history book worldwide. If they lose this second space race to China it won't undo that achievement, but it'll be embarrassing to the ego-driven people at the top right now (notably Trump and Musk himself).
Recently I saw someone claiming they voted for Trump because he hugged a flag once, and plenty of Americans proudly claim they voted for Trump so that he would "troll" their opposition.
Funny thing is, even Starship's failure (to make a reusable upper stage) would be hailed as a spectacular success by any other company (since now that any other company would have at least a cheap, partially reusable superheavy launcher of unprecedented capability).
Falcon 9 is a massive success. Raptor is currently the best engine for a first stage (unless there is something I am not aware of), and at least a very good one for an upper stage. The Starship itself is almost operational, being able to deliver dummy payloads into orbit, though it does require some reliability improvement.
SpaceX may not be stellar, but it is definitely out of this world ;)
Elon Musk is just a guy, a key figure for SpaceX, but there are 10000+ other people, including Gwynne Shotwell who most people say is really in charge. In fact, I am not sure if Elon Musk does any actual work at SpaceX and Tesla now.
Musk got SpaceX to build a reusable rocket booster. It launches spacecraft and then flies back to Earth in a controlled manner, landing safely without blowing itself up as well as everything else around it.
That alone overshadows everything NASA has done since the moon landing.
Except it kinda was stellar? When the test pad blew up I was absolutely sure we won't be seeing a V3 this year, but they recovered amazingly, with the last V2 test checking pretty much every goal they set for it.
But only if you are looking at the revised goals, if you look back at the original goals, things look different. It was supposed to fly around the moon with people on board two years ago.
If you want to look long term, well, they're still stellar :) Considering everything they're achieving, and how they're so much better than everybody else in the field.
It's a failure only if you look at a rather small time range and criteria. Which I don't think was a surprise for anybody - Elon is famous for going for moon shots and failing, but still delivering better than anybody else.
Wasn't Elon kind of treated like a child to be distracted and kept at arms length at Spacex? He is apparently really really good at fundraising, marketing and publicity (well he used to be anyways). But the stories that have come out of Tesla, and Paypal and SpaceX seem to me like the people actually running the show have tried to distract him as much as possible, and any of his actual decisions have been awful. I recall a story from PayPal's early days where he wanted to swap the servers to windows, and then he got canned as the CEO.
When something goes wrong a one of Elon Musk's companies, it's clearly his fault. When something goes right, it's because he isn't actually running the company. Schrodinger's CEO!
But let's pretend for a minute that you're right and all Elon Musk does is hire great people that then do all the work building the company for him and keep him at arms length doing nothing. The skill to hire like that alone still puts him in the top 0.01% of CEOs.
Assuming SpaceX can deliver it. They've failed to do a successful test flight with even a fraction of the officially planned capacity. Who knows how long it will take them, if they can even pull it off, to deliver it.
Reusability is not a bonus like Falcon 9. The whole concept assumes reusability to refuel the lunar lander in Earth orbit since it cannot get to the Moon on its own. It must be refuelled between 10 and 20 times. They won't even say exactly how many times yet. You cannot just yeet that many Starships to get to the Moon once. You must reuse.
Could they? The Apollo program took 9 years from conception to landing the first person on the moon, and cost $257 billion adjusted for 2020 dollars ($25.4B at the time). For comparison, the Artemis program was budgeted for $86B [0], with less to spend due to NASA budget cuts. The SpaceX Artemis contract is "only" worth $2.9B. Finally, the Starship program has cost an estimated $5-8B so far [1].
Some conclusions / opinions: Starship so far is relatively cheap compared to the previous program that took Americans to the moon. Developing a moon capable rocket takes a long time, especially if they don't just copy the existing designs from 60 years ago. And a single purpose rocket will long-term be more expensive than a more generalised / reusable platform, but that's more capitalist objectives than political (e.g. beating the commies).
And I'm pretty sure she did it just for laughs. I also built a listening device to hear what my mom was saying when I wasn't there. But it was too boring to me to actually listen to the conversations, I don't think I ever actually did it. But I did enjoy immensely setting it up.
reply