Muskyâs brain-killing device has been legally struck down.
Thank satan. That thing was gonna kill people for nothing.
This is the same guy who made documentaries on Enron, Scientology, Theranos, and other big scams. Itâs in good hands.
A couple of news bites today.
Using a non-Tesla EV at a Tesla charging station requires two parking spots. (Video included.)
Can someone please stop this madman?
Itâs actually not a bad idea to build a town. If I had his money I would also build a town. Probably many towns.
The thing is, the town I would make would be a car free beach paradise, and heâs going to make some kind of hellhole.
Thatâs what his tunnel company is named.
It gives me mining town vibesâŚmaybe heâll even issue ScrpCoin; that will be the official payment method of choice.
Um⌠âSuccessful failure?â
It wasnât a failure at all. It was a rocket test with a disposable test article. The way they disposed of it was dropping it into the ocean, just like every other rocket test.
The other way to develop space hardware is NASAâs way, which is to spend billions per launch (not per vehicle development), launch a decade behind schedule, put humans on the second ever flight, and if lessons arenât learned from the shuttle, kill multiple crews of astronauts before canceling and moving onto the next project.
https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/1649588065738924032
https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/1649590246416211968
(Embeds broken, hereâs the text)
NASA built the largest rocket in history. On its first launch it delivered an unmanned crew capsule around the Moon and back to the Earth as designed. NASA didnât consider the test successful because the capsule suffered unexpected damage.
SpaceX built a slightly bigger rocket still, and on its first launch, six of its engines failed before it it exploded.
Elonistas call the explosion a remarkable success because of all the data collected.
The framing of these programs needs to align better.
(Also it was eight engines, not six, he corrected that later. I wonder - and weâll likely not find out for a while, if at all, how much of the problem was caused by some clueless dickhead going âExhaust trenches and dampers, which weâve been using since the 60s? Ha I know better than all of them, weâre just launching straight off dirt and concrete.â)
Iâm super not comfortable with the framing of someone who understands two different styles of space hardware development as an âElonistâ.
There is no way to âalignâ anything between the SLS development and the Starship/Superheavy development, nor their launches. They are going about things in completely different and opposite ways, with incomparable goals and methods. I enjoyed following along with both launches.
Just because I understand the differences, and Iâm still excited about LITERALLY THE BIGGEST EVER ROCKET LAUNCH doesnât make me an âElonistâ and all the negative connotations that come along with that name. Elon can go fuck himself for many, many reasons.
Meanwhile, it doesnât matter about âframingâ because over here reality, the head of NASA understands and seems okay to help fund SpaceXâs development.
âEvery great achievement throughout history has demanded some level of calculated risk because with great risk comes great reward,â NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement after the test flight. âLooking forward to all that SpaceX learns, to the next flight testâand beyond.â
I think on one hand NASA is forced to work well with SpaceX because popular opinion compels them to, and the claims and momentum of SpaceX are more aligned with results than some of the other players. So it makes them the only viable option to back. It doesnât mean that NASA particularly appreciates the way in which SpaceX is going about their development of Starship, only that theyâll publicly affirm support. As long as theyâre making progress thereâs no benefit to trying to move the needle too far away from the current approving support of whatever they want to do over in Texas.
On the other hand the way SpaceX is doing it is definitely a valid and fairly common approach to development, even if itâs almost by definition amateurish. It seems to make sense given their circumstances. Iâve done development for projects using both methods. It certainly sucks to keep making stuff that doesnât work but it is often very educational. When you know enough to be dangerous but donât have the refined expertise to know all the little details and nuanced issues, certain ideas make a lot of sense until they are put together as a whole and it turns out to be a dead end.
Itâs nice to work with seasoned experts who have been designing the same thing for decades and come up with an engineered design that uses that experience and works great. But it often does end up looking and working a lot like the things that were done decades ago.
Itâs probably worth factoring that NASA at the time of Apollo was firing on many cylinders and was leveraging the actual design and manufacturing from companies that all had huge R&D budgets and experienced teams that were forged in WWII. Companies that were making X-planes and going into things like ICBM development, high-altitude anti-air missiles, long range guided cruise missiles, etc. And all of those smaller programs were absolutely throwing shit at the wall to see what stuck well before the manned space race took off in earnest. Launching untold wild ideas into the skies and creating tons of wreckage. But the result was for Apollo, NASA could effectively and confidently take teams who knew how to do their various things really well from having flown and blown up a lot of stuff, and have them do a slightly different thing, and result in a massive moon rocket that was impressive and mostly worked from the get-go. They still had a lot of assumptions that ended up being shown to be wrong or flawed, from fully oxygenated capsules to the amount the LEM would collapse into the regolith, but luckily the major stuff did work as needed and they did quickly learn what they needed for next time.
Since SpaceX probably doesnât have too many of those original engineers on staff, and is largely trying to attempt something like Apollo by itself (with ample support Iâm sure) theyâre having to re-tread a lot of that ground for themselves all over again. I could be generous and say that in part they want to test whether some of those legacy assumptions hold true in a new context, and that can sometimes be smart to challenge the old wisdom. But Iâm sure a lot of their issues are mostly because thereâs some ignorance, hubris, and genuine lack of awareness of the old lessons learned. Especially among the management: âuntil things explode thereâs no proof it wonât work, right?â
A lot of obvious things are probably not being implemented with Starship right now due to inertia and internal ignorance. Even the obvious stuff like, flame suppression systems. âWell we wonât have that when we launch from another planetâ well thatâs fair but maybe they do need that, or, need to account for a lot more weight on the rocket itself to add armor and legs and whatever else. At least if youâre planning to survive a ground lift-off.
Engineering considerations and the experience of seasoned experts arenât why the SLS looks a lot like previous NASA rockets. Instead, the reason is political. Congress literally mandated that the new rocket MUST use legacy shuttle technology, as a jobs program for employees of companies that worked on the Shuttle and other NASA projects.
A quick google finds: Why we have the SLS
the U.S. Senate, led by Senators from Texas and Florida, passed the NASA Authorization Act of 2010, which rejected the full cancellation of Constellation by retaining the Orion crew vehicle and the heavy-lift rocket program, now called the Space Launch System. It directed NASA to leverage existing Shuttle and Constellation contracts to create the SLS, ensuring the continuation of extant funding streams and thousands of jobs.
" SLS CONTRACTORS ARE EVERYWHERE According to NASA, their prime contractors Aerojet Rocketdyne, Boeing, Jacobs, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman have more than 3,800 suppliers in all 50 states and Puerto Rico.Image: NASA"
The Space Shuttle was a good idea, but in the end held back by a massive compromises, and many of those compromises, plus more new ones, have carried over to SLS. Which is why it costs just as much, is just as much of a pain to launch, and is also fully disposable.
And now, due to it taking so long to launch the SLS, and how many years might pass between launches, thereâs a big new risk factor that a lot of the experts are retiring or leaving, and there is an increasing LACK of expertise, and that expertise will be lost between launches. That has huge safety concerns for the upcoming manned flights.
Fun fact - The entire reason SpaceX exists is because NASA was out there throwing shit at the wall and paying TRW inc to develop more modern landable rockets and rocket engines(Since they already DID develop them with the Apollo project). Elon couldnât buy the company - they were already in a contracted acquisition by Northrop-Grumman, IIRC, and they were not interested selling - but he was able to hire the people, and basically the entire early research/development/manufacturing staff of SpaceX were just those same TRW employees.
(Which might also explain why SpaceX engines are often described as being TR series engines with incremental improvements and the serial numbers filed off. Further fun facts - the Injectors and injection system from a retired TR-201 Series engine is almost fully 1:1 swappable with the system on a Merlin engine! Though Iâm sure serious space understanders, unlike us ignorant plebs, know that this is obviously because of SpaceXâs genius ability to recycle for the environment, or something.)
NASA is now having to learn the same lessons with the new space suits. I canât find it now but I saw a diagram of how all the different suit components were designed and built by different companies, like one company making the glove and another company making the wrist connector, and another making the arm. About 30 contractors in total just for the physical systems. Because, of course, fixed price contracts and spreading jobs to as many states as possible.
Now all of that technology and know-how is being transferred to a single company who will build and own and operate and lease the space suits to NASA. In the short term the suits will actually get built and in the long term it is cheaper and the tech becomes available more easily to more customers.
Again, if sensible policy was in place and not a reliance on cost-plus contracts, the engineers would be free to work on actually good solutions. NASA knows this:
Oh noâŚ
