There are lots of receivers. Many of them are publicly accessible on the Internet. Also, the plane receiving the commands is required to acknowledge them.

So at a conservative estimate it saved them about $200,000,000 in Falcon 9 launches.. if throwing away a booster and Starship costs less than that then they're already making a per-launch operating profit.

The contract price for a launch of a fully recovered Starship+booster is $90 million. We don't know how much it costs to build one, but its going to be more than that. Unrecovered, Starship should be very uncompetitive, particularly with something like Falcon.

SpaceX is at the point where they can start taking the edge off the cost of their testing program by launching useful payloads though.

Yeah, he only owned a few percent of Nvidia. Much easier to get voted out when you're not voting half the shares yourself.

Full moon areas are pretty standard units in astronomy journalism. The summary also says it's 14% of the mission goal, which is "more than a third."

Their IPO paperwork was, to put it lightly, very confident in that future.

It wasn't really. It talked about it a lot but on the will-it-work front it said "we've got no idea."

I'm sure this is just a test. I'm looking forward to seeing the prototypes that sit in the Arizona desert and don't use any water at all, generate their own electricity, have no fans, and require zero staff or maintenance.

Anyhow, there's nothing wrong with settling on the side.

They wanted it sitting upright so the upper deck would be shallow enough that recreational divers could reach it easily and have a decent amount of time on site. It would also be safer sitting upright because the superstructure creates a minimum of overhangs that way. Diving in an overhead environment is much more dangerous. Finally, ships are designed to sit upright. They deteriorate and collapse faster when they're on their sides, which would put the shallowest part of the ship even deeper.

Guess what - we're stuck with that guy.

You're stuck with him because a large enough proportion of the voters, acting through their elected representatives, don't think its worth getting rid of him. Nvidia's voters, acting through their elected representatives, will make the same decision: is his value to the company greater or less than the damage from the bad PR he's brought.

They've all pretty much converged into being same thing so the choice is more what colour you prefer for the logo.

Yeah, I doubt resale value is high on fashion truck buyers' lists either.

I remember commenting when they were announced that they might make great work trucks. Tesla doesn't seem to have had the needs-a-car-but-wants-a-truck market in mind when they designed it though.

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hi...

Solar or wind farms, which pollute just as much if not more due to the production pipeline to make those machines?

It's funny the things you can claim when you're allergic to numbers, hey? The typical CO2 payback time for a wind project in Wyoming is six months or less on an operational life of 20 to 30 years. Solar seems to be a bit longer but still under a year.

They're not using gasoline. They're using natural gas. Natural gas in places like Wyoming is cheap and generally getting cheaper because it's basically a waste product from oil production.

And, until recently, being a fashion statement wasn't high on most truck buyers lists.

Bullshit. There are some people who buy trucks because they need a vehicle that carries lots of cargo. Farmers, contractors, etc. There are more people (in the US) who buy a truck because they like trucks.