Comment Re:Makes sense. (Score 1) 37
Not with far-UV (~222nm) you didn't.
Not with far-UV (~222nm) you didn't.
Leaders aren't there out there e.g. building the rockets or doing the vast majority of the engineering. Musk doesn't get credit for that. But they do set the culture and direction for their companies. And in this regard, the "build quickly, launch quickly, fail quickly, learn quickly, and iterate quickly" culture developed for SpaceX happens to be very effective. Musk gets credit for instilling that. Another thing he should get credit for is the broad design strokes such as "focus on designs that are cheap enough that they can be mass produced, gaining you economies of scale and the ability to iterate quickly during testing, but are still capable of being reused" (this differs from the two previous predominant paradigms, either super-expensive low-volume reusables, or cheap high-volume disposables).
I don't like the guy, but absolutely, credit where it's due.
Except that Musk is allowed to show up at work or not whenever he feels like it, so he's a giant hypocrite who forces everyone else to do that which he himself is not willing to do.
I think a lot of people miss the fact that SpaceX engineers know very well that what they're doing might fail spectacularly, and that this is the cost of speed.
A random example: autogenous pressurization.
It's beneficial to have a rocket's engines pressurize the tanks themselves rather than to haul up pressurant tanks and a separate pressurant. But it's surprisingly tricky. For a methalox rocket, you ideally want hot methane injected into the methane tank, and hot oxygen into the oxygen tank. But hot oxygen is very difficult to work with in an engine, as it tends to eat your engine.
If you're still working on reliably producing hot oxygen, there is a hack available to you, but it's not pretty: just inject exhaust into the oxygen tank; after all, it's not combustible. BUT, it is water and carbon dioxide. Both can settle out as frosts or plated ices, and in the liquid, the water ice will float at the top, while the CO2 will form a snow at the bottom. Frosts / ice plating can block e.g. your RCS jets. The CO2 snow will kill your engines. You can put in filters around their intakes, but it'll clog your filters. You might try expanding the filters, and maybe that'll work for a while, but then you rotate the rocket, the snow rushes ti one side, and a bunch of engines die from clogging. You may put some big mesh plates across the whole tank to keep the snow off the bottom, but they can cause their own problems with fluid flow and still sometimes clog or let snow through during maneuvers. Etc.
So then comes the question: put Starship on hold while working on getting the engines to reliably produce hot oxygen, potentially for years, or forge ahead with a hack solution that you know has a reasonable chance of killing your rocket?
To SpaceX, the question is obvious. You cannot afford to give up years of critical flight data just to avoid some booms. The decision is immensely lopsided in favour of "put in the hack solutions and launch, while you work on the proper solutions". Because you learn SO much from every launch that can be used to evolve your design. And you also learn so much from every rocket that you build, whether you launch it or not, so you might as well launch it.
To be clear, you don't want to lose rockets due to doing stupid things. Like, for example, if it turns out that some SpaceX engineer installed the wrong COPV and caused the recent pad explosion**, basically the only thing they would learn from that is "have tighter controls on your COPV processes", which isn't at all worth the cost of the explosion. But in general, if you launch and it clears the pad, you're getting good, important data from it, it's worth it even if it blows up seconds later, and it's on to the next evolved version of the rocket in your production sequence with both production- and flight lessons learned.
** It's clear that the recent explosion was from a COPV failure, but it's unclear why. Some claimed leaks state that a COPV may have been coded to a higher pressure than it actually was during production, so when they scanned it it checked out as being the right tank, but actually was not designed to handle the needed pressures. But I'll wait for official confirmation on this. SpaceX only makes some of their COPVs, usually not the smaller ones - ones that have washed up ashore were made by Luxfer. So this could be a supplier problem, like the strut failure on a 2015 Falcon flight. But again, too early to say.
"What am I missing?"
That the author of this article is an idiot.
Yes, humans went to the moon in the 1960s. It also consumed a huge chunk of the federal budget. Adjusting for inflation by NASA's NNSI inflation index, the entire Lunar program cost $288,1B. If the US were to prioritize a project to the same degree today as then, accounting for GDP growth in inflation-adjusted terms, it would be $702,3B. NASA's annual budget is around $25B.
The cost of access to space today is a tiny fraction of what it used to be, when accounting for inflation. And keeps pushing lower. No, it's not "easy", but it absolutely is being done.
For that matter, you can already get WiFi 7 equipment... you can get m.2 modules for 20 or 30 bucks, even with master mode. I spent under $30 for a complete MT7925 kit, 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax/be 2T2R 2.4/5G/6GHz. It's only a 160 MHz chip but it was cheap and has pretty snazzy bluetooth as well. Anyway, oh well, at least it does all those other things. Anyway, can't vendors "solve" this (except for the customers being pissed off part) with firmware which prevents selecting 6 GHz? That seems like a pretty simple patch.
At the time I had no credit due to being a victim of identity theft.
Now my credit is fixed but I just like not having a contract, and it's $35/mo. I only get I think about a dozen GB of internet, but that is fine for my purposes since I don't stream video.
I realize I wrote that wrong, but what I meant to say, it's not slower than the old M chip. That is, it's not slower than all of the M chips. I realize that's a very different thing than what I wrote, my bad.
But it's also true that it's within the range of the M chips, and it's intended to be low cost and low power, and if you have low expectations then it should be plenty of machine. For your average web surfer, it'll be fine. I wouldn't buy one, even at their most Open, Apple was irritating at best to deal with. But to me the tradeoff is reminiscent of my AMD laptop, which has only a couple of cores and a few GPU cores (literally) and does all the things I expected it to do while using very little power. It was $300 in a retail box a couple of years ago. This is the Apple-priced version of that, which is another reason I wouldn't buy one.
"So when Microsoft continually abused their monopolistic control of 90% of the PC market, they were let off the hook"
Apple has not actually been punished yet. They still have the opportunity to pay a bribe.
"just allow side loading like mac os and alot of issues go away."
"Not really. If you aren't on the App Store your sales will take a hit."
Uh, you think the sales of apps which most users cannot now load on their devices will go down?
"Android makers are whining when they already own the biggest slice of the pie?"
They do not in the US, which is what this story is about.
IDGAF, I scarcely use gimp any more due to the interface still being shit even after they allegedly improved it.
I'm a VZ prepaid customer in the US and I get unlimited text.
What about existing equipment? Will it be banned? Or will it just interfere the mobile carriers' use of the spectrum?
Where's the budget to compensate owners for this "taking" if the equipment is banned?
Two percent of zero is almost nothing.