Is it really so unbelievable that a car company with access to rocket engineers, built a car with rocket engines?
That is of course very very far away from reality (though, progressing to a feasable program faster than any space observers predicted.)
THat, combined with Elon signaling to investors/market that tesla no longer produces cars.....it's hard to imagine the company splitting their very, very , very over-commited engineers to a flying car. At least, they aren't commiting the point that this will be a consumer-market car, or even a halo car.
No contradiction between "more than everyone else combined" and "it is unfeasable to launch 36,500 metric tons per year compared to the about-2,500 tons in the last 12 months".
Especially as the working launch vehicle is getting retired and the replacement has only had one circularized orbit, and is currently behind the development pace set by the Saturn V, N1, and even the Space Shuttle.
I suppose, depending on how you count.
The N1 was cancelled after four explosions, and the fourth Starship launch was non-explody.
But the fourth N1 launch was 10 years after the N1 work was started. Starship began work under a different name in 2012, and by 2022 it had yet to launch at all, let alone reach the non-explody stage.
If you assume all the pre-2016-rebrand work was scrapped, then you can have it beating the N1; otherwise I think my point stands.
Comparing apples to apples, this seems to be the appropriate starting point for N1:
> Studied and designed by OKB-1 since 1959, it was the counterpart to the US Saturn V
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket)
First launch was 1969. Starship's first launch was in 2023, so it took one extra year from initial concept to launch.
Starting from first launch, N1 did four launches in three years and never succeeded. Starship did 15 launches in three years, had multiple mission successes in which they achieved orbital velocity but had planned a suborbital trajectory, and then orbited on the 15th launch. Their first mission reaching orbital velocity was in 2024.
Also worth mentioning that a lot of the Starship work focuses on full reusability, a quite difficult problem which N1 did not attempt.
I assume you’re dirty on Usain Bolt for not running faster?
That said, a few seconds of cold gas thrust is more "cybertruck" bad than "theranos" bad.
Starlink alone is the biggest contributor to it. If i remember correctly it was 1000 tones before and because of starlink its 3000t
Starlink as is only has 10 million customers, borderline most of them people who can afford something like this.
And every other 9 billion human has to accept that the sky now has a lot more starlinks in orbit and astrophysics is disturbed.
I personally gain a lot more from astrophysicsi than from Starlink.
Good way to show your privilege.
Starlink is changing peoples lives around the world, previously the fastest they had was dialup, now they’re video calling doctors and family and doing school online.
I’ve seen it with my own eyes in rural Australia, arctic Canada and Tunisia.
Talk to people who really benefit from it.
You saw what? Rich people in other countries (a small amount of) having now fast internet?
Wow.
Now take my proper argument, stop nitpicking and compare a handful of peple on a planet with 9 Billion people.
My main argument was and is, that a lot more people are getting hurt by this than gain something. Loss of research and clear night sky and risk of atmospheric poisening vs. a handful of peple now benefitting from it...
Especially in contrast to the other option: Landlines and mobile network. Most of the planet is connected one war or the other ALREADY. Even shepards on mount everest or people in mongolia have one or the other.
“Handful of people” benefiting from it is vastly missing the mark.
Someone in a 3th world country or someone who doesn't has any real internet access, can't afford starlink.
Given that they have largely relied on reusability rather than strongly ramping up production of boosters for Falcon 9, and given that they have performed 3 launches in a single day, one launch per day is clearly achievable without any further advances, and without even using Starship.
To be clear, the stated goal for Starship is one launch per hour throughout the year, which would still be a tiny number compared to, say, airline flights, but quite impressive for orbital flight.
It would also mean nearly 900.000 tons of resources leaving earth for ever and potentially poluting our atmosphere if they have to ever reenter.
Preparing this while our planet earth has A LOT of empty space and desserts and no breakthrough in quantumslipstream or warp core tech is ridicolous dangerous for all of us :|
Reentry of dead satellites and other debris does seem like it's eventually going to be more of an issue, so that will be something to work on.
I wouldn't count on any warp drive breakthroughs, potentially ever, but the whole solar system is still out there for living and industrial space.
We are so so so far away of mining resources on other planets/moons than earth, setting this up now is just crazy though.
And lets think crazy wild: in 20 years we send up enough stuff like machines and resources to start mining and setting things up, to do what? I love scifi but it has to reach some kind of goal.
Nobody else comes close, whether considering individual companies or entire nations.
I can go even further and say I trust they will be the company to deliver, given the decades long historical relationship between US Space Agencies and Vendors.
That said, 2.6 test falcon launches per week, is so, so many orders of magnitude away from "~150 full payload delivery and recovery missions per week".
I struggle to think how anyone with experience in the industry (and eye balls) thinks this is aligning with reality.
This is a mathematically silly assertion. Over the past decade, SpaceX has scaled their launch capacity from ~20 metric tons per year to ~2,300 metric tons per year. That's more than two orders of magnitude. It's not unreasonable to imagine that they could scale a further 0.3 orders of magnitude if there were customers willing to pay for this amount of lift.
CUrrently they're averaging, what, max 3 falcons per week, usually in test configuration?
The partnership scope calls for.....~150 launches per week, delivering payload and returning the module.
Trust me, I love space and pushing the frontier at the cost of US dollars, but that is....so significantly far away.
COnsider the boeing 737-8,9,10 MAX. That program is far, far less grandiose in it's delivery scope, has an ancient legacy OEM that is very familiar with regulated contracts w/ the gov, and they can't deliver a plane within 5 years of the expected contract completion to their premier airline partner.
I can be convinced IE; some transparent internal reporting on project lead's current understandings as the project progresses, but there just isn't any statements from SpaceX/Nasa/USGOV on what we can all see with out eyes.
Fool me once...
Even if they didn’t deliver FSD, the data says they delivered something people are choosing to pay $100 per month for.
There are a couple Chinese companies with better tech, but you obviously can’t get those in the US.
They’ve been selling it for a decade, when exactly do you expect it to undo them?
The moment his criminal shield is removed from power.
Watch.
Your Dad cannot fully self drive (I am a huge fan of Tesla FSD given that no other equivalent option exists in the market at that price point, but I have had to take over and drive it, at least as of the most recent free demo last Christmas season).
A more objective definition is any entity that is not willing to take on the financial liabilities of driving is not capable of full self driving. The minute Tesla says they agree to take on full liability is the minute I buy and use FSD for all of my trips.
Are you conceding that FSD is in fact correctly named in terms of its technical capabilities, and only falls short in terms of legal liability?
I should note that my Dad is a perfectly competent driver who has not been in any car accident in the last 30 years (at least, I'm not aware of any). But he drives in a way that makes me feel somewhat uncomfortable as a passenger. It's hard to explain.
Assuming your evaluation that FSD is better in every way, which I suspect is wrong because FSD is lacking at edge cases, such as parking. It’s good, but I suspect your dad is more competent at figuring out many edge case scenarios.
>but then proposed an "objective" definition which my Dad unquestionably satisfies.
Right, which is that if Tesla was so confident, they would take on the liability, like Waymo does. It’s possible your dad is so bad at driving he shouldn’t be taking on that liability (like Tesla has decided to). But apparently he’s good enough for an insurance underwriter to trust him.
From videos I've seen FSD is perfectly capable of parking. It doesn't yet have the ability to reliably discern which spaces will reliably avoid parking fines, but it can park just fine.
This really gets to the question of what qualifies as driving. A robotaxi can't top up its own wiper fluid either, but keeping that topped up is, IMHO, a critical part of being a responsible driver.
> if Tesla was so confident, they would take on the liability, like Waymo does
This is a non sequitur. Both operators accept the same liability under the same conditions. Both Waymo and Tesla accept liability for vehicles in their own autonomous taxi fleets. Neither Tesla nor Waymo have proposed any mechanism to accept liability for customer-owned vehicles.
IMHO transferring liability for customer-owned vehicles is a deeply non-trivial matter, and I doubt it will ever occur in any absolute sense. For example, how does liability shift if an autonomously operated vehicle crashes into a pedestrian because it was raining and the tires were overdue for replacement? What if the crash occurred because of prior damage to the suspension which the owner knew about and chose to ignore?
True, I had not thought of this. Thanks for engaging, I would say you have convinced me the definition of driving, or self driving or full self driving, is not so simple.
A car company that has a long history of making false claims? Are you really asking me that?
It’s dangerous for you to let your dislike of someone or some company to cloud your judgement like this. You know other companies have launched failed products too, right?
No one is falling for it.
> where are the fabricated demos?
Why not even make it more specific? "Where are the demos where he had a fake flying car before"? No one's falling for that one either.
I have no idea what your game is now - but I'm not playing.
But sure, if I actually need to, let me spell it out.
The statement: "He is a liar" is stronger than the statement "He is a liar who sometimes tells the truth", despite the fact that the second is more detailed. Extraneous details distract from the main argument. Also - there is almost no example in the world of someone who makes only false statements. It's a ridiculous insertion.
I hope you can understand why your suggestion above is nonsensical.
> is an assertion without supporting evidence
I’m sorry, I thought the evidence was obvious. Allow me to explain it to you: someone who has a history of lying has a significantly higher chance of lying again than someone who does not.
> You also construct your own straw man
Asking a question is not putting words in someone’s mouth - and it was resolved with his simple “No”.
> The insults
Oh my. Do you really want to go there after this sequence:
> you're moving from the territory of reasonable questions to moderately desperate conspiracy theory
> Your confusion is understandable given your own (excruciatingly obvious) motives.
> find the words to make yourself feel good when pressing 'reply'
> I humbly apologise. When I said you were confused, I only meant to state a fact, not cause you harm.
> These linguistic motte-and-bailey tricks are pure debate bro.
Motte-and-bailey? I have not retracted a single thing.
> hope of actually changing the other person's mind
HA! I realized that would be impossible quite a long time ago. Now it’s just a fun game to see how bloodied you get.
As I said, pure debate bro.
How the mighty have fallen.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
OH! No need. I enjoyed explaining it to you.