Random fun fact 2: They even removed that piano because it was to heavy.
5,493 karma · joined July 29, 2010
It is far, far, far easier to design a reactor to withstand high temperature and corrosion then operating a reactor under gigantic amount of pressure.
All the major companies at the forefront of reactor commercialization have high temperature reactors.
The optimal today for a reactor is having one reactor with output X and then add 3X worth of turbines and a way to store hot solar salt. This way you can produce huge amount of energy at the times when prices are high.
Of course it also means the nuclear part of the project would only be a small part of the overall cost.
FlibeEnergy hopes to use it, and I know the other vendors are not planning to use it, but if it came about they would love it.
Fighting in the Middle East is evidence of a broken political process, not an inevitable outcome of Offensive Realism.
Total nonsense. They wont even make it to the moon by then.
Their Long March 9 rocket need for Mars will barley even fly before 2030, let alone will they make a Mars mission with it.
Raptor 1 is already better then any Russian engine along most metrics.
And Rogozin is a journalist made oligarch, he doesn't know shit. Accusing Elon of not being an expert is quite funny coming from him.
The Russians have turned into a hindrance. Every error that happens is a conspiracy. When one of their workers drilled a whole into their spacecraft they publicly accused Americans astronauts to be spies who sabotaged their hardware.
Those who say 'but then they will work with China', ok, go ahead, destroy their space station. Let China finance their broken industry if they really want to.
NASA needs to move on from ISS and move to a privately operated station with the main focus on the moon and Mars.
John Mearsheimer opposed to these idiotic middle east wars and has been for a long time.
Because a factory would still test its input, or the input would have been tested by the supplier.
Watch this interview with a former Astronaut who worked with SpaceX for Crew Dragon. He made this comparison on TV and talked about it with Musk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNG6ZzDh9C8
Quite a funny story.
In a risky venture this is very hard to achieve.
SpaceX can just say 'we are gone do it this way' and they have almost everything required in house and can plan for mass manufacture from the beginning.
BE-4 and Raptor are both Methalox:
A type of binary rocket fuel composed of liquid oxygen (lox) oxidizer and liquid methane combustible.
> which really has never been executed successfully before
A staged combustion cycle that is used by BE-4 has seen flight with kerolox (RP1 and oxygen) engines. Mostly Russian engines such as the historic NK-33 and current versions like the RD-180. In this version the pre-burner that drives the turbine uses very little fuel and a lot of oxygen and in the combustion chamber you mix gaseous oxygen with liquid fuel.
A staged combustion cycle has also been achieved in the US with the SSME or RS-25, the engine on the Space Shuttle. This engine was staged but in a very different way then. Important to know that this is a fuel rich engine, meaning that to drive the turbine (or rather turbines in this case) burn a little bit of oxygen with a lot of fuel leading to gaseous fuel and liquid oxygen being mixed in the main combustion chamber.
There has never been a flown version of either of these engines types using methalox.
SpaceX Raptor is even another step beyond either of these, refereed to as 'Full-Flow Staged'. In this version you have one fuel-rich and one ox-rich pre-burner and you end up mixing gaseous fuel with gaseous oxygen. This allows for much better mixing of propellants and thus a higher combustion rate and thus a higher efficiency.
> Blue origin is going from 0 to 1 and space x is going from n to n+1. Obviously the short term results are going to be worse than Space X but I’m not convinced their engines will be worse.
I think I explain above that this is incorrect understanding.
The BE-4 is a considerable worse engine then the Raptor. The Raptor is blowing it away in all key comparative metrics by a huge amount, if far more reusable, has a higher throttling range and is far cheaper to build.
The Raptor is evolving considerable faster then the BE-4, as Raptor 2.0 is already as far in development as BE-4 initial version. The Raptor 2.0 as a sea-level engine will almost match thrust of the BE-4 while being a far smaller engine.
It has to be understood that the BE-4 delivered to ULA will be considerably less capable then what they promised with BE-4. The removed a lot of features that are not needed by ULA in order to get this done. In order to fly their own New Glenn rocket, they will need to evolve the engine considerably.
The Raptor also has a Vacuum version, refereed to as RVac. In the initial presentation about NewGlenn, they presented a vecuum version of the BE-4 but that was scrapped very early.
In summation, BE-4 is a really nice engine but its at a technology level that is still below some of the Russian engines like the RD-180. The Raptor is a true next generation engine.
> That being said obviously ULA made the wrong deal since it’s not clear they will alive long enough to benefit from interplanetary refueling.
I am not sure what you are talking about. ULA has no interest in interplanetary travel and ULA will be around for quite some time.
Also, the BE-4 is strictly an engine used to launch from earth and only for the first stage, so your comment about interplanetary refueling makes no sense.
Maybe you are mixing up the BE-4 with the BE-3U, an upper stage engine they are also developing.
ULA would not have wanted to buy the engine from its competitor SpaceX. And the military would not want that either, as a collapse of SpaceX would have meant both military providers being unable to launch, thus violating redundant access to space requirements.
SpaceX and Tesla were mostly funded by him because he couldn't find investors. Literally nobody wanted to touch electric cars or rockets. Pretty strange for a guy who is supposedly some mastermind investor whisperer.
They had massive amounts of funding issues and went almost bankrupt because there were so few people willing to invest.
> He's grabbed $20+ Billion for Tesla.
Tesla went threw multiple founding rounds and they have like $17 billion in cash on hand and have retired almost all debt.
So what exactly is your problem? Their automotive margin and operating margin are industry leading and the company has positive cashflow.
Go and compare Tesla funding with other EV companies like Lucid or Rivian. Tesla actually research starved, not over-funded.
> Pretty much every time I've seen him go back to the market (be it 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020...) to ask for more money, he convinces the banks, the stock traders, everyone to give him more money over-and-over-and-over again.
They literally grew a manufacturing company from nothing to a serious global player. Look at their growth rate in deliveries over the years you mentioned.
And the later rounds were popular, guess what, because the company successfully executed with the last investment and fulfilled what investors wanted. That is literally exactly what the whole point of investing is.
Look at the growth of his companies. Claiming its all because of raising money is just so incredibly idiotic. Its the other way around, he can raise money because his company show growth rate and they use the invest money well. There were competitors companies who raised far more, many of them are now gone.
Literally ask anybody who has invested in SpaceX or Tesla in the last 10 years (other then traders) if they think their investment was worth it.
> Which btw: happens to be the skill Edison had over Tesla. But Edison made a lasting company (General Electric) for over a century, while Tesla died dirt poor with only his patents in his name.
Edison was a better business men but he was also a smart guy. This idiotic binary thinking of Tesla smart <-> Edison evil business men is overplayed nonsense. Tesla died poor mostly because his visionary ideas didn't actually work in practice and his attempts at independent business failed because of his technical misunderstandings.
Yes, Tesla invented some brilliant things, but he also had ideas that didn't make any sense at all.
> Many others try to do what Elon Musk does. But they all fail. Elon Musk is the king of raising money.
Yes, they fail because they can raise money and then don't execute, and that's why people wont give them more money.
SpaceX managed to build the first orbital rocket at comparable budget to companies that did it 10 years later (and most have not even flown), when the political and technological environment for doing so was much easier.
Virgin Orbit raised 500M for a much smaller rocket. RocketLab also raised 100M but built a much smaller rocket. Relativity has raised almost 1 billion before they even launched their first rocket. Firefly aerospace had 100M+ and went bankrupt and has since been revived and has raised another few 100M, and they only now are about to launch for the first time.
And all of these companies faces a much, much friendly investor base and much friendly government.
Do the same and compare how much money Tesla raised to get to 100000 cars, and then compare it to how much EV companies now have raised before even delivered a single car. You can even go back and compare it to all other automotive startups in the US history, go ahead and honestly evaluate it. Fact is, Tesla was capital efficient and still are.
The story that his companies constantly make mistakes and fail to execute and this is simply papered over with more money raising is simply factually incorrect. It simply doesn't hold up.
To make the argument that SpaceX was successful because they raised so much more money then the competition is the height of idiocy. If you look at how much access to capital the competition had, SpaceX was basically made fun of for a decade because nobody thought such a small and insignificantly funded company they could build a rocket that could compete internationally and on complex military contracts. If it was about money, and how much you can raise the competition would have crushed them.
Total nonsense. Multiple engineers from inside and outside his companies have talked highly of him as an engineer.
> But Elon Musk's decisions are "Lets have an automated factory line, and I'm planning the factory will only have 30,000 workers".
Yes. He made a mistake. How horrible, he should be executed.
He addmited the mistake and has analyzed why it happened and is now trying to avoid that mistake.
If you don't risk things and don't try to push the boundaries then you want achieve anything.
> and now his financials are a mess and he has to build a Tent in the parking lot to house all of the extra production lines. And now people wonder why their Model 3 / Model Y have paint issues or other quality-control defects (Wompy Wheels)
Are you a time-traveler from 2017 or something? Like literally is everything you know a few news articles from 2017 and that has formed your total opinion?
Tesla has done extensive renovation on the paint shops in Fremont, those were older paint shops. Paint quality was an issue and is now very good. Paint quality from China are excellent. Austin and Berlin will both have newest generation paint shops that should be excellent as well.
Overall the drive train, electronics and suspension of Tesla have been very reliable and have a good reputation.
They will defiantly need batteries optimized for the booster. They are basically caring a bunch of car batteries around.
> better/faster/cheaper than everything
So do talking down SpaceX based on that makes no sense.
The they didn't. What nonsense. They just keep flying the same old stuff as the quality gets worse and they don't do anything new.
Its not actually practically relevant and every-time people used it as an argument it has been proven in terms of practical impact.
Nobody actually interested in space believes this.
> So until that changes
It wont change unless you try to change it.
They have really not been slowed down that much FAA.
So everybody should just chill out.
Btw, for people interest, this interview with Ken Davidian FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation is interesting:
https://www.interplanetary.org.uk/podcast/episode/90af4411/2...
See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11hYo9UTSRM
And the corresponding book:
How To Industrialize Mars: A Strategy For Self-Sufficiency: How To Settle A Lethal Vacuum In 400 Easy Steps
Part of the whole project of Mars is making this very thing possible in the first place. It requires rethinking a lot of how we do things.
In a 100 years you will look back and write Hacker News comments and say 'but they had the technology in the 60s, why were they not using it. It makes no sense'.
With the billions and billions BlueOrigin spend they could have done amazing things in space. But instead they are building inferior version of rockets.