I have no doubt at all that Oracle committed fraud and lied a lot. I have no doubt Oregon's project management failed to give adequate oversight to the project, failed to adequately specify the project, and repeatedly changed what little specification they provided.

Neither matters. I have no doubt this lawsuit will ultimately fail, because the Oregon attorney general doesn't have the technical ability to prove the fraud and lies. The state has already proven they don't understand what they're doing. We're about to get a second demonstration.

What corporate shills? SpaceX is not publicly traded. They're privately held and self-funding from their own profit. What is said about them on random Internet discussion forums has absolutely no affect on their continuing success or failure. They will have to have a satisfactory explanation for the contracts people who have put down heaps of money to buy launches, but none of those conversations will involve random Internet discussion forums.

We're spectators, having a rather short and noncontroversial discussion about a small explosion in the sky. What are you, that you feel obliged to shit on the subject? A corporate shill perhaps? Employed by a SpaceX competitor?

Probably not. You're just a random Internet misanthrope.

He was probably referring to the elemental weight, not the weight used.

It's not much of a risk. Every single battery chemistry has been played with, at one time or another. And by that I mean rigorously and exhaustively scientifically investigated. In consequence, not only has everything been tried, but we now know what works and why it works. That's why it's science, and not merely engineering.

Lithium will always remain a preferential element because it's the element that is the strongest reducing agent in the periodic table, short of hydrogen, which is too hard to hold on to. The stronger the reducing agent, the higher the voltage a cell can develop and the better a battery can be. At the other end, you want a strong oxidizing agent. Fluorine would be ideal, if it wasn't such a viciously strong oxidizing agent that it eats your whole battery, not just the electrons you want it to. Presumably this situation is what the spokesdroid was referring to, without explaining what the hell he was talking about.

Lithium is the cathode of choice since it's a metal that can be conveniently nailed down while still possessing a very good electrode potential. As an ion, it's nicely compact, being the lightest of metals, so it migrates through a battery most conveniently. What to pair it with is a little more complicated, and the subject of much research. This is where manganese, cobalt, and carbon come in. Various combinations of those elements and their immediate neighbors on the periodic table are used to make anodes. Some work better than others. Some may work better yet depending on how they're assembled.

Rest assured, whatever develops in terms of battery assembly, lithium will remain the cathode, and much of the macroscopic assembly will be the same or close enough to the same that the gigafactory will always be busy. The assembly and packaging to be done is fairly common, regardless of chemistry.

You're probably correct, at least for the prospects of an initial outpost. Except for freezing sewage. I can't imagine they'll ever have excess sewage to freeze. All that water gone to waste. Not to mention valuable nitrogen and readily metabolizable organic material. More likely it will get processed and its constituent parts reused, and fairly quickly. Yes using human waste as feed stock for food plants is a little risky, but the chill and near vacuum conditions allow for industrial processes that could mitigate the risk rather cheaply. It certainly won't be an option to once-through all that material. A closed cycle will be required.

Cubes do seem to be likely, for an extended period, despite the issues with pressurizing them. Ease of precise assembly and speed of assembly will be the watchwords for building pressure vessels.

In any case, it'll be Elon Musk making the real decision. I suspect hexagons will get short shrift.

You forget who Comcast owns. They wholly own NBC and Universal Studios, two major sources of Netflix content. And they're already screwing with the availability of NBCUniversal content on Netflix. If Netflix tries to play hardball, a whole boatload of shows and movies will just vanish out of their catalog.

A media company that owns the last mile is an abomination, and the FTC should do something about it.

So, John Steele's brother Robert Steele?

Experiment on Venus first. I'd rather not suffer through yet more perturbations on Earth thankyouverymuch.

Venus has a serious greenhouse problem. Fix that, then we'll talk.

But they soon will be doing something illegal! I mean look at them. They're obvious criminal types. Her clothes and his hat offend the sensibilities of all decent right-thinking people. Obviously they should be locked up.

</sarcasm>

That was brutal. Worthy of Jon Stewart, except he was the guy standing next to the generator, thinking he was making the jerky taste better.

My mod points expired a couple of hours ago, but I'd have commented anyway. I am in awe.

The Chicago Manual of Style has detailed explanations of correct comma usage. So does Strunk and White's Elements of Style. You can also look up individual recommendations. Things like the Serial Comma have Wikipedia articles that quote both of those sources as well as half a dozen more.

Commas to delimit prepositional phrases have only recently been deprecated. I was taught to use them as well.

And in any case, the US government isn't paying a nickel for Falcon Heavy design or manufacturing or that test launch.[1] So they have absolutely nothing to complain about.

Has since the very beginning. Elon Musk is no Tony Stark. He doesn't design it all himself. He pays people who know what they're doing to design things, and he decides which option to take if there are several choices, and he uses criteria like reliability, manufacturability, and cost to make his choices, instead of "which lobbyist will give me the best vacation package to Aruba this year."

Anonymous Coward, just makin' shit up.

I haven't seen nearly as much out of those people in the last several threads about SpaceX. Now that Falcon 9 is one of only four rocket families ever developed that have had 11/11 successful launches, the ULA partisans have very little to talk about.