Of course, the "Hyperloop competition" blurred the line as to what counts as "hyperloop" anymore, because it was based around a bunch of purely maglev options that were radically different from the Hyperloop Alpha design (in many ways beyond just the levitation means).
It's a common nickname for Lorikeets in the international pet market (although to be fair it's usually spelled "Lori" - but as you can see from the above link "lorry" also gets plenty of hits).
Perhaps, perhaps not. Venus is still very poorly understood. In its high temperature environment its conditions are largely self-sustaining (preventing the sequestration of CO2 in rock), although it's also unstable, prone to broad temperature and pressure swings. It also appears to have undergone a global resurfacing event about 300-500mya, if that gives a clue as to how unstable the planet as a whole is.;) We don't know what caused it, or really anything about it. Part of the planet's properties are now a result of it having lost its water rather than being a cause, such as its hard crust. Obviously its lack of a magnetic field is responsible for its loss of water, but we don't know exactly when or why it disappeared (there are of course theories... I had always just assumed it was the slow rotation rate, but the last research I read suggested that not enough to account for it). Other issues as to how Venus ended up as it did may be related to size - although it's only a bit smaller than Earth, that may be the initial factor that set its fate in motion - for example, its lithosphere in general appears to be thicker and higher viscosity on Earth, which could have hindered or prevented plate tectonics, and thus subduction of carbonates.
Either way, it's a mess now at the surface (though rather comfy ~55km up;) ). And I'm not so sure I buy into some of the proposed ways to fix it (terraforming). For example, some have suggest mass drivers ejecting the atmosphere. Let's just say you can pull it off, and then you start building oxygen in the atmosphere - what happens next? The crust is something like 7-9% FEO; it's going to rust away whatever oxygen you make in short order.
Interestingly, I'd argue that this is possibly the salvation to Sagan's airborne-microbe concept for terraforming Venus. The main criticism is that if you engineered some sort of carbon-sequestering microbe on Venus (or artificial equivalent), you'd end up with a deep surface layer of graphite surrounded by some hugely hot, dense oxygen layer, and the atmosphere would explode. But that would never happen; at Venus surface temperatures and pressures, the surface rocks would rust away the oxygen as fast as it was created, even in tiny quantities, with the wind blowing the dust around to collect at low/eddy areas. So you're laying down bands of carbon and iron oxide as you burn through the planet's iron buffer. Where have we seen this before? Right, Earth, ~2,3 billion years ago, banded iron formations. Just like on Earth, you'd eventually burn through the iron and start to accumulate oxygen. But by then the graphite is already underground, buried in iron dust.
It's not a fast process. But it has precedent. Microbes already rusted at least one planet, and that planet's surface conditions weren't nearly as favorable for rusting as Venus's.
I don't know how China managed to melt so much arctic ice, leading to the absurd situation that just a couple days before the winter solstice this year I went on a hike through the snowless mountains in Iceland among chirping songbirds digging for worms. All I have to say to China about this is: Best. Conspiracy. Ever. Well played, China. Well played.
What I find funny is how little attention JAXA gets. You almost never hear about them, even though they're continuously launching payloads, satellites, probes, etc. Russia, China and to a lesser extent India get far more headlines.
NASA: $19,3B ESA: $5,8B Roscosmos: ~$2B/yr JAXA: $2,0B CNSA: $0,5B official / $1,3B est. ISRO: $1,2B
It's not just US bias that leads to most stories coming from NASA. NASA really does spend the most on space research and exploration, by large margins.
Still, the public perception is that NASA's budget is far more than it actually is.
Venus has multiple "tropopauses" and "stratospheres", depending on how you define them. The atmosphere is like a layer cake with multiple convection zones (like Earth's troposphere) separated by areas of dynamic stability (like Earth's stratosphere). And again, ~50-70km is an awfullly long way from the surface, and surface winds are weak. But, there's a lot about Venus that we don't understand.
.... is the size, not the intensity. The air moves only slightly faster or slower than the surrounding atmosphere as one passes through the wave.
They weren't expected on Venus, though. Venus's surface is dozens of kilometers down, thick and "soupy" there, transitioning to thinner layers above. It was surprising to see that surface features that far away, in a fluid that can compress, would still make clear phenomena like gravity waves in the high atmosphere.
.... who can't help but cheer at my screen when they nail one of those landings? Now I finally understand how sports fans feel when they watch a game and do the same thing;)
One thing nobody can deny about them is optimism.;) Seriously, their IPS numbers are, pardon the pun, out of this world. $200k per booster launch. $500k per tanker launch. I mean, really? Good luck with that. No, seriously, good luck with that; I won't be expecting anything close to that, but please by all means prove me wrong;) ITS would be a great system to have, I've been playing around with some Venus trajectories with it recently. Looks like it can do a low-energy transit with nearly 300 tonnes of payload from LEO and back again with the same, over 400 if starting at a high orbit - but from an economics perspective the high energy transfers actually make more sense.
I noticed a lot of people were confused about why Musk wanted the trips to be so short and was willing to sacrifice so much payload to do so - many assumed it had to do with radiation or something. But the issue is, when your craft costs so much but your launch costs are cheap, you can't have it spending all of its time drifting in deep space, you need to get it back for a new mission as soon as possible. There's a balancing point, in that if you try to go too fast, you reduce useful payload below the point of making up for it with going faster - but a minimum energy trajectory is just not optimal when the ratio between launch costs and transit vehicle cost is so extreme. I come up with the same thing from Venus as they were getting for Mars, although for the Venus case you end up aerobraking to a highly elliptical orbit rather than to the surface for ISRU refill (you need ISRU, but for the ascent stages, so it's not realistic to do so for the return stage in the nearer term). So for Venus they get no refill like on Mars, but they also don't have to do a powered landing nor do an ascent on return - it's six of one, half a dozen of the other. Both are quite accessible with it.
It depends what you mean by "refurbishing"; each element is different.
The solid rocket boosters, for example, suffered a hard impact into salt water. They then had to be fished out of the water. And of course you don't just "refill" a SRB, they have to be taken apart and recast, then put back together.
The ET is disposable, and had to be rebuilt from scratch.
The orbiter was legitimately reusable, but with design flaws.
I don't blame the shuttle program - they were sort of pigeonholed into this dead end by circumstances. The concept came about during the heyday of the Apollo Programme, when NASA budgets were serious. It was supposed to be a much more reusable, much more maintainable, and somewhat smaller system. It was supposed to then have a huge flight rate supporting all of these big projects that were on NASA's docket, including a permanent moon base and a huge manned orbital station dwarfing ISS, which was supposed to replace Skylab.
But of course, Vietnam and the realities of having soundly trounced the USSR in the space race led to their budgets being slashed, which pushed the program into ever more untenable positions until it was nothing more than a jobs programme. Forget full flyback reusability of all parts. Forget the titanium frame for the shuttle, which would have let it run hot and thus not required so sensitive of a TPS. Go begging for money and be forced to modify the design to meet Air Force requirements, pushing you into an inferior design position. On and on.
If I'd fault them for anything, it'd be for going straight for a full reusable workhorse rather than a small-scale pilot programme first. But those were the days of optimism. Optimism which only recently seems to start being regained.
Either way, the Falcon boosters are a very different beast. A vertical soft landing is hugely different from the SRBs, yet the thermal issues are far easier than with the Shuttle. And the Merlins were designed from the start under the principle of preventing the need for a full teardown. That doesn't mean that they will be cheap to reuse. But it does mean that they have the possibility of it.
I do think SpaceX had a rather clever strategy, in that while their goal was reusable, they made a rocket that in the process was cheap as a disposable. So they could get volume and flight history while working on getting the kinks out. They may have flown too close to the sun with the densified propellants and (externally) unlined COPVs, but obviously, with a company like this, their whole existence is to push the envelope.
Most of Europe agrees with you. And even the US agrees with you up through high school plus with various forms of assistance for college, including state-subsidies, particularly for state colleges, and federal subsidies (direct subsidies, tax credits, and tax breaks), roughly $80B/year each. Pell grants alone cost the government $35B.
* Getting the failure rate down in the lower tenths of a percent or better is what they need to be able to ~10x their launch rate and still be economically viable, since a pad explosion will leave them stuck for just as long and scare off just as high a percentage of their customers whether they're launching 12 a year or 120.
* SpaceX wants to have reliability like airplanes, and has talked about this frequently.
* What they want to achieve, and what they need to achieve, are not the same thing. They do not need to achieve airplane-like reliability for the Falcon 9 to be viable.
* That said, if they ever want to achieve their ultimate IPT plans, they absolutely will need airplane-like reliability. Because they're calling for ~1000 launches per booster on that thing with a turnaround cost of ~200k. They really cannot have anything go wrong with it.
It most certainly would be extreme reliability by the standards of the launch industry. The only ones that have better reliability than that that don't have nearly a statistically significant enough number of launches under their belt to assert that. Aka, "they haven't had a failure yet but nowhere near the several hundred launches required to assert a lower fraction of a percent or better failure rate".
We're not talking about airplane reliability here, we're talking about economics (the title of the article is "SpaceX Accident Cost it Hundreds of Millions"). Airplane-like reliability is for the future. We're living in the present.
All COPVs use an inner liner. The problem with SpaceX's COPVs is that they have no outer liner to separate the carbon fibre from the LOX. Outer liners are optional. SpaceX didn't use one. They lost a rocket because of it. They're going to keep trying doing without one. I really hope it doesn't cost them another. CF and LOX aren't fast friends.
It's hard enough to find affordable LOX dewars. Seems like little ones cost about as much as big SUV-sized tanks. Everyone has LN2 dewars for sale, but you don't put LOX in a LN2 dewar as a general rule unless you're absolutely positive it has no organics (and preferably no silicone) in it, or certain metals. Otherwise it can get a bit... "explodey". The simpler, all-stainless LN2 dewars usually don't have lids, which with LOX would be just plain stupid. You can find used LOX converters online for very cheap, but they generally only will take LOX in, you can only get GOX out.
What I'm saying is if anyone happens to run into an affordable LOX dewar, drop me a line....;)
If they $250M per failure and have a failure 5% of the time on a $62M rocket then the per-rocket cost is $12,5M, or 20% of the rocket's value.
Now they're trying for two things: a big scaleup, and greater safety. So let's say that they get the accident rate down to 2%, and they 10x their value. The cost of a failure should scale proportionally to the size of their market because it means a standstill in launches, the same reputation hit, etc. So now it's a $2,5B failure, occurring 2% of the time, or $50M per launch on a $62M rocket, aka 81% of the rocket's value.
Their business model and scaleup plans appear to be built on a premise of extreme reliability. Whether they can ever actually get that, I don't know. I like to hope so; airplanes have done it, and I know they're thinking, "if we launch enough, like them, we'll have gotten all of the potential kinks out". And there's probably some truth to that. But can they scale reliability at the rate they want to scale their launch rate? I have my doubts, and if so, their expansion plans (and thus business model in general) is erroneous.
A particular aspect that concerns me about them getting failure rates down into the lower tenths of a percent is their use of unlined COPVs. I don't trust them. I don't have some massive level of confidence that simply toying around with their pressurization regimen and getting better at void prevention is going to provide some sort of permanent fix; LOX and composites just plain don't play nice together. Their solution is like (to be hyperbolic here) having a nitroglycerine-fuelled rocket and losing one because during pressurization the tank buckled, and the buckling set off the nitroglycerine, and then announcing that you've got a solution and the tank shouldn't buckle anymore. Well, that's great, return to flight and all, but at the end of the day, you still have a nitroglycerine-fuelled rocket.
I'd feel a lot more comfortable about their business model if they announced plans to switch to lined COPVs, and take the (several dozen?) kilogram mass penalty. But as I always say, I would love to be proven wrong on this!
I actually love that. Replacing "plans" with "threatens" makes any new announcement better.;) From Google news today:
Mt. Ashland threatens lodge upgrades, expansion Fiat Chrysler threatens to invest $1 billion in 2 US factories as it expands... Summers Warns of Financial-Crisis Risk From Trump Economic Threats Defense chief threatens to visit Filipino soldiers in West PH Sea Local groups announce threat to 'resist Trump-era immigration policies' Tracee Ellis Ross Threatens to Hide Her Golden Globe in a Future Black-ish Episode MBTA threatens to part with warehouse ops Elizabeth Warren Threatens To Introduce Bill To Resolve Trump's Conflicts Apple to meet Indian officials to discuss iPhone manufacturing threats Greta threatens 'fair and balanced' show on MSNBC East Timor threatens to restart border talks with Australia German Green Party threatens to pay for people to have sex with prostitutes in new scheme
There’s a lot of conflicting information about saturated fats. Should I eat them or not?
The American Heart Association recommends limiting saturated fats – which are found in butter, cheese, red meat and other animal-based foods. Decades of sound science has proven it can raise your “bad” cholesterol and put you at higher risk for heart disease.
The more important thing to remember is the overall dietary picture. Saturated fats are just one piece of the puzzle. In general, you can’t go wrong eating more fruits, vegetables, whole grains and fewer calories.
When you hear about the latest “diet of the day” or a new or odd-sounding theory about food, consider the source. The American Heart Association makes dietary recommendations only after carefully considering the latest scientific evidence.
Yes, because recommending eating "fruits, vegetables, whole grains and fewer calories" is totally a recipe for "almost single-handedly made America obese". Damn those fattening fruits, vegetables, whole grains and reduced-calorie diets.
Medical, scientific, heart-health, governmental and intergovernmental, and professional authorities, such as the World Health Organization,[2] the American Dietetic Association,[3] the Dietitians of Canada,[3] the British Dietetic Association,[4] American Heart Association,[5] the British Heart Foundation,[6] the World Heart Federation,[7] the British National Health Service,[8] the United States Food and Drug Administration,[9] and the European Food Safety Authority[10] advise that saturated fat is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD), and recommend dietary limits on saturated fats as one means of reducing that risk.
There is a difference between "... a study says...." and "... the body of evidence as a whole says...". And it's not for a WSJ author to decide the difference, it's for major medical associations to decide. The article goes into several dozen studies, which is in turn just a tiny fraction of the entire corpus.
"The fact that the negative health effects of things like saturated fats were discovered later than the negative health effects of saturated fats was a consequence of them being little used previously but increasingly used after the health effects of saturated fats were discovered.
Since when have nutritionists pushed starch? Fats were indeed treated as bad - first all fats because studies showed links between fat-rich diets and heart disease. It was later shown that it wasn't "all fats", just saturated fats. And nothing has changed that; it's still widely accepted my medical science that saturated fats are associated with heart disease. The problem was all in manufacturer responses. Manufacturers largely responded to requests for fat reduction not with increases in fiber, protein and healthy fats (monounsaturated, omega-3) as nutritionists preferred, but with with carbohydrate increases and replacing saturated fats with trans fats - both of which were on their own harmful, and in some cases worse.
The fact that the negative health effects of things like saturated fats were discovered later than the negative health effect was a consequence of them being little used previously but increasingly used after the health effects of saturated fats. So it's not negligence on the part of nutritionists, they were just investigating the health issues in the diets that were the most common at the time. To be fair, it would be nice if the food industry would do a lot more of the precautionary principle (including nutritionists).
Concerning this: note that you almost have to have either some dairy, egg, or meat in your diet; or, to take supplements. Because primarily of B12. It's not produced by plants. It's not even found in many unicellular species like spirulina. It's only produced by certain types of primary unicellular producers that are not generally consumed by humans.
Indeed. Which is the whole reason behind the gigafactory - get battery costs down, so you can put that much battery energy in a vehicle without having to pay out the nose.
I had always thought of the Solar City acquisition as just a "Musk bailing himself out" thing, and the powerwall as just an also-ran product, but it increasingly occurs to me... it's all about the gigafactory. They want to be selling as many batteries as possible, to give them as good economies of scale as they can on the batteries for their cars. So the more home-scale backup systems they sell, the more "complete" home solar systems they sell with integrated battery backup, the more grid-scale backup systems they sell, etc, the more they accomplish that. So it makes sense that they'd try to make as many battery-related spinoffs as they can.
Because Gigafactory 1 is only the start of their plans. They plan a whole network of gigafactories around the world. Each one targeting a lower production cost than the last.
Slashdot Mirror
Wheels at low speed, not maglev.
Of course, the "Hyperloop competition" blurred the line as to what counts as "hyperloop" anymore, because it was based around a bunch of purely maglev options that were radically different from the Hyperloop Alpha design (in many ways beyond just the levitation means).
It's a common nickname for Lorikeets in the international pet market (although to be fair it's usually spelled "Lori" - but as you can see from the above link "lorry" also gets plenty of hits).
A rainbow-coloured, nectar eating parrot.
How it wrecked his car, I have no clue. They are pretty cute, though, he probably got distracted.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Venus is still very poorly understood. In its high temperature environment its conditions are largely self-sustaining (preventing the sequestration of CO2 in rock), although it's also unstable, prone to broad temperature and pressure swings. It also appears to have undergone a global resurfacing event about 300-500mya, if that gives a clue as to how unstable the planet as a whole is. ;) We don't know what caused it, or really anything about it. Part of the planet's properties are now a result of it having lost its water rather than being a cause, such as its hard crust. Obviously its lack of a magnetic field is responsible for its loss of water, but we don't know exactly when or why it disappeared (there are of course theories... I had always just assumed it was the slow rotation rate, but the last research I read suggested that not enough to account for it). Other issues as to how Venus ended up as it did may be related to size - although it's only a bit smaller than Earth, that may be the initial factor that set its fate in motion - for example, its lithosphere in general appears to be thicker and higher viscosity on Earth, which could have hindered or prevented plate tectonics, and thus subduction of carbonates.
Either way, it's a mess now at the surface (though rather comfy ~55km up ;) ). And I'm not so sure I buy into some of the proposed ways to fix it (terraforming). For example, some have suggest mass drivers ejecting the atmosphere. Let's just say you can pull it off, and then you start building oxygen in the atmosphere - what happens next? The crust is something like 7-9% FEO; it's going to rust away whatever oxygen you make in short order.
Interestingly, I'd argue that this is possibly the salvation to Sagan's airborne-microbe concept for terraforming Venus. The main criticism is that if you engineered some sort of carbon-sequestering microbe on Venus (or artificial equivalent), you'd end up with a deep surface layer of graphite surrounded by some hugely hot, dense oxygen layer, and the atmosphere would explode. But that would never happen; at Venus surface temperatures and pressures, the surface rocks would rust away the oxygen as fast as it was created, even in tiny quantities, with the wind blowing the dust around to collect at low/eddy areas. So you're laying down bands of carbon and iron oxide as you burn through the planet's iron buffer. Where have we seen this before? Right, Earth, ~2,3 billion years ago, banded iron formations. Just like on Earth, you'd eventually burn through the iron and start to accumulate oxygen. But by then the graphite is already underground, buried in iron dust.
It's not a fast process. But it has precedent. Microbes already rusted at least one planet, and that planet's surface conditions weren't nearly as favorable for rusting as Venus's.
So win-win.
I don't know how China managed to melt so much arctic ice, leading to the absurd situation that just a couple days before the winter solstice this year I went on a hike through the snowless mountains in Iceland among chirping songbirds digging for worms. All I have to say to China about this is: Best. Conspiracy. Ever. Well played, China. Well played.
What I find funny is how little attention JAXA gets. You almost never hear about them, even though they're continuously launching payloads, satellites, probes, etc. Russia, China and to a lesser extent India get far more headlines.
Well, when it comes to space budgets....
NASA: $19,3B
ESA: $5,8B
Roscosmos: ~$2B/yr
JAXA: $2,0B
CNSA: $0,5B official / $1,3B est.
ISRO: $1,2B
It's not just US bias that leads to most stories coming from NASA. NASA really does spend the most on space research and exploration, by large margins.
Still, the public perception is that NASA's budget is far more than it actually is.
Venus has multiple "tropopauses" and "stratospheres", depending on how you define them. The atmosphere is like a layer cake with multiple convection zones (like Earth's troposphere) separated by areas of dynamic stability (like Earth's stratosphere). And again, ~50-70km is an awfullly long way from the surface, and surface winds are weak. But, there's a lot about Venus that we don't understand.
.... is the size, not the intensity. The air moves only slightly faster or slower than the surrounding atmosphere as one passes through the wave.
They weren't expected on Venus, though. Venus's surface is dozens of kilometers down, thick and "soupy" there, transitioning to thinner layers above. It was surprising to see that surface features that far away, in a fluid that can compress, would still make clear phenomena like gravity waves in the high atmosphere.
.... who can't help but cheer at my screen when they nail one of those landings? Now I finally understand how sports fans feel when they watch a game and do the same thing ;)
One thing nobody can deny about them is optimism. ;) Seriously, their IPS numbers are, pardon the pun, out of this world. $200k per booster launch. $500k per tanker launch. I mean, really? Good luck with that. No, seriously, good luck with that; I won't be expecting anything close to that, but please by all means prove me wrong ;) ITS would be a great system to have, I've been playing around with some Venus trajectories with it recently. Looks like it can do a low-energy transit with nearly 300 tonnes of payload from LEO and back again with the same, over 400 if starting at a high orbit - but from an economics perspective the high energy transfers actually make more sense.
I noticed a lot of people were confused about why Musk wanted the trips to be so short and was willing to sacrifice so much payload to do so - many assumed it had to do with radiation or something. But the issue is, when your craft costs so much but your launch costs are cheap, you can't have it spending all of its time drifting in deep space, you need to get it back for a new mission as soon as possible. There's a balancing point, in that if you try to go too fast, you reduce useful payload below the point of making up for it with going faster - but a minimum energy trajectory is just not optimal when the ratio between launch costs and transit vehicle cost is so extreme. I come up with the same thing from Venus as they were getting for Mars, although for the Venus case you end up aerobraking to a highly elliptical orbit rather than to the surface for ISRU refill (you need ISRU, but for the ascent stages, so it's not realistic to do so for the return stage in the nearer term). So for Venus they get no refill like on Mars, but they also don't have to do a powered landing nor do an ascent on return - it's six of one, half a dozen of the other. Both are quite accessible with it.
It depends what you mean by "refurbishing"; each element is different.
The solid rocket boosters, for example, suffered a hard impact into salt water. They then had to be fished out of the water. And of course you don't just "refill" a SRB, they have to be taken apart and recast, then put back together.
The ET is disposable, and had to be rebuilt from scratch.
The orbiter was legitimately reusable, but with design flaws.
I don't blame the shuttle program - they were sort of pigeonholed into this dead end by circumstances. The concept came about during the heyday of the Apollo Programme, when NASA budgets were serious. It was supposed to be a much more reusable, much more maintainable, and somewhat smaller system. It was supposed to then have a huge flight rate supporting all of these big projects that were on NASA's docket, including a permanent moon base and a huge manned orbital station dwarfing ISS, which was supposed to replace Skylab.
But of course, Vietnam and the realities of having soundly trounced the USSR in the space race led to their budgets being slashed, which pushed the program into ever more untenable positions until it was nothing more than a jobs programme. Forget full flyback reusability of all parts. Forget the titanium frame for the shuttle, which would have let it run hot and thus not required so sensitive of a TPS. Go begging for money and be forced to modify the design to meet Air Force requirements, pushing you into an inferior design position. On and on.
If I'd fault them for anything, it'd be for going straight for a full reusable workhorse rather than a small-scale pilot programme first. But those were the days of optimism. Optimism which only recently seems to start being regained.
Either way, the Falcon boosters are a very different beast. A vertical soft landing is hugely different from the SRBs, yet the thermal issues are far easier than with the Shuttle. And the Merlins were designed from the start under the principle of preventing the need for a full teardown. That doesn't mean that they will be cheap to reuse. But it does mean that they have the possibility of it.
I do think SpaceX had a rather clever strategy, in that while their goal was reusable, they made a rocket that in the process was cheap as a disposable. So they could get volume and flight history while working on getting the kinks out. They may have flown too close to the sun with the densified propellants and (externally) unlined COPVs, but obviously, with a company like this, their whole existence is to push the envelope.
Most of Europe agrees with you. And even the US agrees with you up through high school plus with various forms of assistance for college, including state-subsidies, particularly for state colleges, and federal subsidies (direct subsidies, tax credits, and tax breaks), roughly $80B/year each. Pell grants alone cost the government $35B.
To be clear:
* Getting the failure rate down in the lower tenths of a percent or better is what they need to be able to ~10x their launch rate and still be economically viable, since a pad explosion will leave them stuck for just as long and scare off just as high a percentage of their customers whether they're launching 12 a year or 120.
* SpaceX wants to have reliability like airplanes, and has talked about this frequently.
* What they want to achieve, and what they need to achieve, are not the same thing. They do not need to achieve airplane-like reliability for the Falcon 9 to be viable.
* That said, if they ever want to achieve their ultimate IPT plans, they absolutely will need airplane-like reliability. Because they're calling for ~1000 launches per booster on that thing with a turnaround cost of ~200k. They really cannot have anything go wrong with it.
It most certainly would be extreme reliability by the standards of the launch industry. The only ones that have better reliability than that that don't have nearly a statistically significant enough number of launches under their belt to assert that. Aka, "they haven't had a failure yet but nowhere near the several hundred launches required to assert a lower fraction of a percent or better failure rate".
We're not talking about airplane reliability here, we're talking about economics (the title of the article is "SpaceX Accident Cost it Hundreds of Millions"). Airplane-like reliability is for the future. We're living in the present.
All COPVs use an inner liner. The problem with SpaceX's COPVs is that they have no outer liner to separate the carbon fibre from the LOX. Outer liners are optional. SpaceX didn't use one. They lost a rocket because of it. They're going to keep trying doing without one. I really hope it doesn't cost them another. CF and LOX aren't fast friends.
It's hard enough to find affordable LOX dewars. Seems like little ones cost about as much as big SUV-sized tanks. Everyone has LN2 dewars for sale, but you don't put LOX in a LN2 dewar as a general rule unless you're absolutely positive it has no organics (and preferably no silicone) in it, or certain metals. Otherwise it can get a bit... "explodey". The simpler, all-stainless LN2 dewars usually don't have lids, which with LOX would be just plain stupid. You can find used LOX converters online for very cheap, but they generally only will take LOX in, you can only get GOX out.
What I'm saying is if anyone happens to run into an affordable LOX dewar, drop me a line.... ;)
And more to the point, in this case, the cost of the rocket costs little compared to the cost of all of the lost business, delays and pad repairs.
Propellant costs essentially nothing compared to the cost of the rocket.
It's a somewhat problematic business model.
If they $250M per failure and have a failure 5% of the time on a $62M rocket then the per-rocket cost is $12,5M, or 20% of the rocket's value.
Now they're trying for two things: a big scaleup, and greater safety. So let's say that they get the accident rate down to 2%, and they 10x their value. The cost of a failure should scale proportionally to the size of their market because it means a standstill in launches, the same reputation hit, etc. So now it's a $2,5B failure, occurring 2% of the time, or $50M per launch on a $62M rocket, aka 81% of the rocket's value.
Their business model and scaleup plans appear to be built on a premise of extreme reliability. Whether they can ever actually get that, I don't know. I like to hope so; airplanes have done it, and I know they're thinking, "if we launch enough, like them, we'll have gotten all of the potential kinks out". And there's probably some truth to that. But can they scale reliability at the rate they want to scale their launch rate? I have my doubts, and if so, their expansion plans (and thus business model in general) is erroneous.
A particular aspect that concerns me about them getting failure rates down into the lower tenths of a percent is their use of unlined COPVs. I don't trust them. I don't have some massive level of confidence that simply toying around with their pressurization regimen and getting better at void prevention is going to provide some sort of permanent fix; LOX and composites just plain don't play nice together. Their solution is like (to be hyperbolic here) having a nitroglycerine-fuelled rocket and losing one because during pressurization the tank buckled, and the buckling set off the nitroglycerine, and then announcing that you've got a solution and the tank shouldn't buckle anymore. Well, that's great, return to flight and all, but at the end of the day, you still have a nitroglycerine-fuelled rocket.
I'd feel a lot more comfortable about their business model if they announced plans to switch to lined COPVs, and take the (several dozen?) kilogram mass penalty. But as I always say, I would love to be proven wrong on this!
I actually love that. Replacing "plans" with "threatens" makes any new announcement better. ;) From Google news today:
Mt. Ashland threatens lodge upgrades, expansion ...
Fiat Chrysler threatens to invest $1 billion in 2 US factories as it expands
Summers Warns of Financial-Crisis Risk From Trump Economic Threats
Defense chief threatens to visit Filipino soldiers in West PH Sea
Local groups announce threat to 'resist Trump-era immigration policies'
Tracee Ellis Ross Threatens to Hide Her Golden Globe in a Future Black-ish Episode
MBTA threatens to part with warehouse ops
Elizabeth Warren Threatens To Introduce Bill To Resolve Trump's Conflicts
Apple to meet Indian officials to discuss iPhone manufacturing threats
Greta threatens 'fair and balanced' show on MSNBC
East Timor threatens to restart border talks with Australia
German Green Party threatens to pay for people to have sex with prostitutes in new scheme
As for what AHA says about saturated fat, link.
In particular, the end:
Yes, because recommending eating "fruits, vegetables, whole grains and fewer calories" is totally a recipe for "almost single-handedly made America obese". Damn those fattening fruits, vegetables, whole grains and reduced-calorie diets.
From the Wikipedia article on saturated fats and health, with links to the organization statements:
There is a difference between "... a study says...." and "... the body of evidence as a whole says...". And it's not for a WSJ author to decide the difference, it's for major medical associations to decide. The article goes into several dozen studies, which is in turn just a tiny fraction of the entire corpus.
Wow, I can't type. That should be:
"The fact that the negative health effects of things like saturated fats were discovered later than the negative health effects of saturated fats was a consequence of them being little used previously but increasingly used after the health effects of saturated fats were discovered.
Since when have nutritionists pushed starch? Fats were indeed treated as bad - first all fats because studies showed links between fat-rich diets and heart disease. It was later shown that it wasn't "all fats", just saturated fats. And nothing has changed that; it's still widely accepted my medical science that saturated fats are associated with heart disease. The problem was all in manufacturer responses. Manufacturers largely responded to requests for fat reduction not with increases in fiber, protein and healthy fats (monounsaturated, omega-3) as nutritionists preferred, but with with carbohydrate increases and replacing saturated fats with trans fats - both of which were on their own harmful, and in some cases worse.
The fact that the negative health effects of things like saturated fats were discovered later than the negative health effect was a consequence of them being little used previously but increasingly used after the health effects of saturated fats. So it's not negligence on the part of nutritionists, they were just investigating the health issues in the diets that were the most common at the time. To be fair, it would be nice if the food industry would do a lot more of the precautionary principle (including nutritionists).
Concerning this: note that you almost have to have either some dairy, egg, or meat in your diet; or, to take supplements. Because primarily of B12. It's not produced by plants. It's not even found in many unicellular species like spirulina. It's only produced by certain types of primary unicellular producers that are not generally consumed by humans.
Indeed. Which is the whole reason behind the gigafactory - get battery costs down, so you can put that much battery energy in a vehicle without having to pay out the nose.
I had always thought of the Solar City acquisition as just a "Musk bailing himself out" thing, and the powerwall as just an also-ran product, but it increasingly occurs to me... it's all about the gigafactory. They want to be selling as many batteries as possible, to give them as good economies of scale as they can on the batteries for their cars. So the more home-scale backup systems they sell, the more "complete" home solar systems they sell with integrated battery backup, the more grid-scale backup systems they sell, etc, the more they accomplish that. So it makes sense that they'd try to make as many battery-related spinoffs as they can.
Because Gigafactory 1 is only the start of their plans. They plan a whole network of gigafactories around the world. Each one targeting a lower production cost than the last.