Between Elon Musk's description of global thermonuclear destruction (he advocated... more as a joke but it was a semi-serious suggestion... that the polar icecaps of Mars could be nuked to release atmospheric gasses to terraform the planet), building tunnels under cities, having orbital space lasers under his control (with the Skylink satellites), and a forgotten island retreat under his control (Kwajelin Island)..... does that make him into a Bond villain?

It is merely a matter of perspective, but billionaires like him certainly seem like they have the potential to be a supervillain as much as a superhero.

What these dudes making AI with a PhD are doing instead is a new level of bullshitting with fancy words that impresses people with money and of course legislators who are about as clueless regarding computer technology. They think manipulating a URL to look at the image directory of a server is "hacking".

Machine learning isn't all that complex and it sure isn't even new either. I agree with others here that this is just an ignorant journalism major spouting off buzz words.

If you want to see a really nice GUI designed AI interface? Grab Scratch from MIT and then look at some of the AI experiments that have been done in that programming environment. They aren't necessarily all that fast and certainly some other programming environments would make them work more efficiently, but it isn't even all that new.

Also.... the other shoe dropped when they got into the "app store" business model the developers of this "Cortex" programming environment started to explain what they were doing. It is a scam to separate you from money in your wallet where the author bought into the buzz words to make this seem like a cool thing.

SpaceX set a company record for the most flights in a calendar year, but not quite a global record for any company/organization. They are doing some good though and are definitely a competitor in the global launch market and having a significant impact upon launch prices right now.

And I agree with you that any company which can send aloft a piece of equipment which functions at all while in orbit is pretty damn impressive. Getting into space is just barely possible and has almost no room for excuses or lazy engineering. Virgin Galactic is an example of a company who has tried and failed with unfortunately several deaths associated with their efforts too.

What you are describing is what is called a test pilot. The crews have even already been announced and are among some of the most experienced pilots you could ever imagine existing and veterans of several shuttle flights too I might add along with years of experience being test pilots with aircraft and many other accomplishments.

That is how you do a crewed test flight. A test pilot is somebody who is both an engineer and an accomplished pilot and gives detailed engineering analysis both during and after the flight based upon actual experiences.

As a side note, every aircraft ever made commercially has a test pilot which flies that aircraft for the first time before it is handed over to a customer, sometimes it is flown several times. That doesn't happen much with spacecraft other than most pilots and commanders of space missions in the past have traditionally been test pilots anyway including usually a thousand hours+ of experience operating multiple kinds of aircraft and spacecraft.

While space-based factories might be useful a century from now, the infrastructure needed to get one built simply doesn't exist right now.

I'm sure Elon Musk has heard every crazy idea you can think up and more, 99.99% of which he legitimately ignores as a waste of his time and even has hired multiple assistants to filter out the cranks and scam artists who try to give him such suggestions. It is a bit harder to filter out ideas from actual SpaceX employees, but then they tend to be a bit more grounded because they are producing actual spacecraft doing things in space.

There is zero reason for Elon Musk to be reading any of these comments, and little if any reason for any of those assistants who filter the crap like this to bother reading either.

That perfectly describes air traffic at Heathrow or O'Hare. A "collision" in this case is multiple aircraft trying to take off or land at a given airport where there is a priority scheduler which decides what "packet" or aircraft will enter the "airstream".

On rare occasions though, actual collisions do happen. It can be a fatal error too. It is mainly an issue of the proper "software" being "installed" or taught properly to avoid those errors.

The first flight of the Space Shuttle (STS) was incredibly risky. So much so that the astronauts actually sat in ejection seats (which were removed in later flights) and only two astronauts flew in what was arguably a test flight without any cargo at all... other than the two crew members and food for about a day. It didn't spend that much time in space either, but was mostly a flight up, a few orbits to evaluate systems in actual spaceflight, and then an incredibly risky landing.

It should be pointed out also that there were nearly a dozen landing tests prior to STS-1.

The Shuttle flew without major problems and did not blow up on the pad on the first flight (that happened later). The truth be told, the Shuttle was an experimental vehicle on all 135 flights, and on the last flight it was evaluated that the odds of survival (literally.... the odds of the crew living after the flight) was less than 90%. That is less than a Sigma 1 reliability... hardly something of any kind of praise.

I agree. The Falcon Heavy isn't a successor. It is an additional launch vehicle which can put up payloads that the Falcon 9 simply can't do.

The largest advantage of the Falcon Heavy is that it shares a great many components with the Falcon 9, including the engines and the internal tank design. That is also the reason why it has taken so long to get built, as the Falcon 9 design kept shifting and getting rolled onto the Falcon Heavy. As a matter of fact, the Falcon 9 is currently capable of sending the same tonnage that was anticipated for the Falcon Heavy when it was originally unveiled at the National Press Club so many years ago.

That whole thing is moot anyways as both the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy are slated to be retired as a design in the next 5-10 years and factory production may even be slowed down or stop altogether in the next couple of years in favor of the BFR. The only thing that will keep them coming out of the factory is due to the fact that the BFR is by necessity going to be built in another factory as the City of Hawthorn has refused to give permits to move the BFR through city streets. And yes, SpaceX asked.

What testing would a Tesla Roadster need to go through that hasn't been already done by the U.S. Department of Transportation, given that the vehicle has already a mountain of test data simply to put the vehicle into serial production?

It would be far more expensive to certify a block of concrete than to take a vehicle which already has the data needed for evaluation available. It isn't like this is the first automobile that the FAA has needed to certify for flight worthiness before.

The other choice is to do something like the RatSat spacecraft which flew on the Falcon 1 Flight 4. That was basically a big hunk of Aluminum which had the names of the SpaceX employees who were working for the company at the time go up into space (and it is still in orbit BTW).

Oddly enough, sending up a Roadster is actually cheaper than the custom made spacecraft even if it is just a hunk of metal. A bill of materials can even be quickly sent to the FAA-AST for clearance and review in a format that they can evaluate as well.

To paraphrase Douglas Adams, Space is big. Very big. You really can't comprehend just how large the Solar System is on a human scale, where something which is very definitely on a human scale in the form of a Tesla Roadster really is an insignificant hunk of nothing that won't even get in the way for the next billion years, won't even hit the Earth in that time frame nor even get to Mars.

Well before it becomes an object to be concerned about (which it isn't even if it was filled with swamp water and the deliberate goal was to infect Mars with life... of which some swamp water from the K-T Event on the Earth likely hit Mars a long, long time ago doing the same thing), this particular Tesla Roadster is going to be "rescued" or "salvaged" by some future team of archaeologists who are going to be drooling over the unique preservation of early 21st Century automobiles in this fashion.

I give it under 10k years before it is salvaged from a deliberate effort to locate this Roadster in the future. In that time frame, it won't even be a hazard at all and can't possibly hit Mars.

You mean an untested rocket like the original maiden launch of the Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule that currently hangs above the cafeteria in the SpaceX Headquarters?

Having the ashes of James Doohan (yes.... Mr. Scott from Star Trek) scattered all over the South Pacific instead of in space due to mishaps and rocket failures is not the kind of publicity anybody wants. That is precisely what happened with the Falcon 1.

SpaceX could give somebody (maybe a university) a free launch though.

They have. The first Falcon 1 launch had a satellite built by the students at the U.S. Air Force Academy. While there was practically no chance to get that satellite to fly as there was no budget to make it happen without this "free" launch, it was sort of sad to see literally years of effort on the part of the academy cadets blow up on the launch pad and have parts and pieces of that satellite scattered across the South Pacific in an explosion.

I can appreciate that SpaceX would rather not see that happen. Again. If there is going to be a "free" launch, it will be on a much better flight proven vehicle on a space available basis where the primary customer is happy to see them come along for the ride. There is room on the SpaceX Dragon capsules (and the Orbital ATK Cygnus capsules I might add) for university experiments where funding is even available including from any ISS participating country to help build the experiment.

This is just too risky of a flight even for a supposedly "throw away" space craft.

It should be pointed out that these subsidies were in place well before Tesla existed as a company and were intended to encourage companies like GM, Ford, and Chrysler (as well as foreign companies) to try an invest in "green" automobiles. If the government is pouring so much money around that it is raining cash everywhere, you would be an idiot if you didn't pick up a bucket and start collecting that cash where it might do some good.

It also turns out that even with those subsidies they did almost no good. General Motors made the infamous EV-1 that turned out to be so expensive they wouldn't even offer the vehicles to be sold. The purpose of that vehicle really was to kill the subsidy and to in particular get the California Air Resources Board (the California equivalent to the EPA but operating at the state level) to stop making electric automobiles any sort of big deal. I guess that blew up really well.

Other automobile companies have tried to take advantage of those same subsidies. GM started the Volt literally right as it was going bankrupt and that was the only vehicle which survived the bankruptcy as a major engineering project. The Fisker Karma was actually built depending almost exclusively on those subsidies, and of course you have the Nissan Leaf.

If Tesla is able to make a business case for electric automobiles, I would dare say it is in spite of those subsidies instead of because of them. Yes, a thumb is on the scale in Tesla's favor, but they weren't really enough to make other companies profitable and there have been some spectacular failures and bankruptcies resulting from people other than Elon Musk trying to grab that same cash.

I also don't think the switch to electric automobiles is necessarily inevitable either. There are other "alternative fuel" sources which in theory could work out better as well. What makes electric vehicles work isn't the subsidies, but rather the energy density due to somewhat recent developments in energy storage technologies (aka batteries). It is also interesting that Tesla is now putting some significant money into basic R&D for that technology too and not simply waiting for some other company to come up with the next best thing.