Maybe it's just me, but when I picture commercial launch services offered by North Korea, the image that immediately comes to mind is the Druuge starships from Star Control II;)
I'm also embarrassed by him. Ariane is our equivalent of ULA. A dinosaur. And we have no SpaceX or Blue Origin in the wings, and an environment that I don't think would ever create one. Ariane will never adapt. It's structurally incapable of it. And it doesn't help that Europe spends a small fraction as much on space as NASA does. So we can't endlessly make up for inefficiency with pork.
And yes, in general SpaceX puts in bids a lot higher for the government than they do for private companies, but so? They can make their bids whatever they want. The government is choosing them because they're still cheaper than ULA. Whatever ULA bids, SpaceX will undercut them - even though that undercutting is still a windfall for SpaceX. What alternative does the US government have? Maybe there will be a serious drive-down-costs bidding war when (if) Blue Origin ever makes it onto the scene in a serious way. Maybe. I'm not a big Blue Origin optimist - but at least they're not ULA.
SpaceX's success is a mix of factors. Part of it is that they did take a good design approach - combining both reusability and disposability and mass production into a single rocket line. Many identical (or near identical engines per rocket), and many rockets produced, means a very large number of engines, meaning you get good at making them, cheaply. Very similar upper and lower stages, and again a large number of rockets, means - again - you get good at making them cheaply, and can quickly go through development iterations. Any accidents in the development process, while painful, only take out a single disposable launch vehicle and its payload (accidents are much more painful for obligate-reusable rockets). Eventually you get a good, cheap-to-manufacture rocket with a lot of flight hours. If you can then have that same rocket then become reusable... the game is changed.
Most new "game changer" designs have called for just one of the above philosophies. OTRAG, for example, was based around the idea that mass production of identical stages as cheaply as possible. It was to have terrible performance (and certainly no reusability), but be so cheap to make that it would overcome this. Skylon, on the other end was to go high-tech and be so affordably reusable that you could use it like an airplane. OTRAG, for its part, would have been inherently limited in its ability to lower launch costs (if at all) due to the veritable skyscraper of stacked stages you have to build, which are trashed each time. Skylon would have gotten almost no mass production benefits, a much slower learning curve, and any accident would have taken out a launch vehicle that is not cheaply replaceable. SpaceX's choice of the middle ground rather than going hard toward either philosophical extreme really seems to have been the wise choice.
That of course doesn't mean that SpaceX's approach is the only one that could have worked. For example, I kind of like the idea of launching rockets as floating spar platforms. It means you have to build them capable of withstanding saltwater exposure (more restrictive alloy and design selection) and deal with engine-water interactions at launch. But it means you have no diameter restrictions due to overland transport (make it as big as you want!), nor any pads to damage if something goes wrong - just tow, fill, and go. As an example. But what matters is, SpaceX's approach turned out to be a good one. And this combined with the "we can't fire people" environment that its competition operated in, once SpaceX had crossed that capital moat, the writing was on the wall.
They've suffered from the same program that NASA itself has, albeit to a lesser extent: they're jobs programmes. Part of their rationale for existing is the number of people they employ, and how their business operations are spread around politically-convenient areas. Same story for both Ariane and UAW. As Charmeau put it:
"Let us say we had ten guaranteed launches per year in Europe and we had a rocket which we can use ten times - we would build exactly one rocket per year. That makes no sense. I can not tell my teams: "Goodbye, see you next year!" "
In any normal business, in a competitive environment, focused on its bottom line, this would mean that you need to downsize 90% of your staff. If you're over capacity, you don't just stay over capacity for the heck out of it, or build hardware that's 1/10th as labour efficient just to justify keeping as many employees on the books as possible. It's an absurdity, but that's been the way the launch industry has operated for the past decades. Improved designs have been bad specifically because they'd streamline the industry.
But they got away with that specifically because there was such a capital barrier to entry in their industry. Lots of small companies had tried and failed. Some because their designs didn't really pan out, but some simply because they just couldn't get enough cash. Established players became dismissive of upstarts as a result - but it was really just a matter of time.
This lesson should be applied to a lot more capital-intensive industries than just rocketry. Thinking of capital barriers to entry as your uncrossable moat is a dangerous attitude.
A large number of new people started showing up and attacking her, not preexisting followers. At the exact same time that they started showing up on Musk's feed and attacking him. And for what crime? Literally nothing more than responding to someone who was repeating the UAW stuff, "he has never prevented them from unionizing it's quite literally fake news". Which is simply true.
I think Fancy Bear comes in through the data pipes, so you'll need a firewall to stop them. Which I think means you have to get firewire first? I've been thinking about having the IT out to install it, I already have a propane tank so it shouldn't cost too much? I shut my computer off at night but I know that a really good hacker could just turn it back on and get in.
The thing with Musk, you just never know. It could be a joke as in "the joke is a name to make fun of people who make false stories", or it could be "the joke is that the entire concept of the site is a joke".
That said, Elon being upset with people lying about him in the press is no joke. UAW and their allies particularly. One of the big ones recently was a campaign from a pro-union group called "Reveal" arguing, among other things, that Musk demanded that the factory not use yellow safety tape or have forklifts beep because it upset his aesthetic sensibilities. Which is something that can literally be proven false in less than a minute on Google Images or YouTube. And then when the falsehood was pointed out to them, of course they issued no correction, but just continued their attack-series-disguised-as-journalism.
Meanwhile, UAW still can't even get enough Tesla employees to sign that they even want a vote. Musk called for a vote on Twitter the other night. Sounds very confident that UAW would lose any vote by huge margins, as UAW dropped NUMMI like a hot potato during the recession to protect their Detroit base, there was double the injury rate when they were there, and nobody working for UAW anywhere gets stock options as part of their compensation.
I'm sure that the fact that UAW supporters have started harassing his girlfriend online didn't help his view on the manner any.
No, it was a serious question, and "deflection" is trying to move on without answering a question directly posed to you. This conversation will not move forward until it gets an answer: "What's going to be your go-to line when the Model 3 SR starts deliveries Q4-ish?"
I have some great news AC, but you may want to be sitting down for it. Ready?
There exists a world outside of America!
I don't live in the US. What happens to your tax incentive has no bearing on me.
As for those who do: how does moving the expected SR delivery time foward hurt those waiting on the SR? You do realize that this timetable laid out by Musk means that the start delivering the SR with 1/2 to 1 1/2 quarters of full credit left, plus 2 quarters of half credits, plus to quarters of quarter-credits, don't you?
Heh, sorry the debate tends to polarize so much.:) And yeah, a new order today with the long-range battery and AWD is a 6-9 month delay, which is too long for a lot of people.
Out of curiosity, have you ever driven a Tesla? Definitely do so if you have a chance.;)
People on the waiting list have been debating since day 1 how much of the US tax credit they'd get. Nobody is in for a "shock", they're following it in way more detail than you.
And the credit does not disappear at 200k. Rather, 200k (which Tesla looks to be trying to deliberately delay to Q3) starts a timer. The first two quarters (aka, Q3 and Q4) are full credit. Then Q1 and Q2 are a half credit, then Q3 and Q4 are a quarter credit. Then it disappears.
Yes. Tesla can't run a business. Which is why their stock is by and large held by major institutional investors, who are lately even upping their stakes.
Meanwhile, AC, your multi-billion dollar business is....?
I love how the trolls switched from "You can't get a Model 3" as their go-to line to "you can't get a $35k Model 3". What's going to be your go-to line when the Model 3 SR starts deliveries Q4-ish? Better think of the new one now so that you don't have to struggle with it later.
The market disagrees. Otherwise Bolts would be pouring out the doors rather than half a million people waiting on the Model 3.
And the biggest reason people haven't been flocking to the Bolt is not its slower speed... not the fact that it can't be optioned to much higher range... not the fact that its options are poor in general by comparison... or that its standard features aren't as good... or that it looks kind of dorky... or has a plasticky econobox interior... or is a Chevy... or anything of that nature. It's that it charges at a third the speed, from a fragmented, often poorly maintained network. Heck, even that's an optional extra.
She was even walking a bike across, which is a giant radar reflector. And she was a moving target, so shouldn't have been filtered out as clutter. That accident still just amazes me that Uber's system was so bad as to have missed her. Lidar missed her. Cameras missed her. Radar missed her. Ultrasonics missed her. No braking attempt whatsoever until the impact. I still want to know how that happened. I can at least understand the high profile Tesla accidents, but I just can't understand this one.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it's just me, but when I picture commercial launch services offered by North Korea, the image that immediately comes to mind is the Druuge starships from Star Control II ;)
I'm totally going to have to steal this wording at some point ;)
I'm also embarrassed by him. Ariane is our equivalent of ULA. A dinosaur. And we have no SpaceX or Blue Origin in the wings, and an environment that I don't think would ever create one. Ariane will never adapt. It's structurally incapable of it. And it doesn't help that Europe spends a small fraction as much on space as NASA does. So we can't endlessly make up for inefficiency with pork.
And yes, in general SpaceX puts in bids a lot higher for the government than they do for private companies, but so? They can make their bids whatever they want. The government is choosing them because they're still cheaper than ULA. Whatever ULA bids, SpaceX will undercut them - even though that undercutting is still a windfall for SpaceX. What alternative does the US government have? Maybe there will be a serious drive-down-costs bidding war when (if) Blue Origin ever makes it onto the scene in a serious way. Maybe. I'm not a big Blue Origin optimist - but at least they're not ULA.
SpaceX's success is a mix of factors. Part of it is that they did take a good design approach - combining both reusability and disposability and mass production into a single rocket line. Many identical (or near identical engines per rocket), and many rockets produced, means a very large number of engines, meaning you get good at making them, cheaply. Very similar upper and lower stages, and again a large number of rockets, means - again - you get good at making them cheaply, and can quickly go through development iterations. Any accidents in the development process, while painful, only take out a single disposable launch vehicle and its payload (accidents are much more painful for obligate-reusable rockets). Eventually you get a good, cheap-to-manufacture rocket with a lot of flight hours. If you can then have that same rocket then become reusable... the game is changed.
Most new "game changer" designs have called for just one of the above philosophies. OTRAG, for example, was based around the idea that mass production of identical stages as cheaply as possible. It was to have terrible performance (and certainly no reusability), but be so cheap to make that it would overcome this. Skylon, on the other end was to go high-tech and be so affordably reusable that you could use it like an airplane. OTRAG, for its part, would have been inherently limited in its ability to lower launch costs (if at all) due to the veritable skyscraper of stacked stages you have to build, which are trashed each time. Skylon would have gotten almost no mass production benefits, a much slower learning curve, and any accident would have taken out a launch vehicle that is not cheaply replaceable. SpaceX's choice of the middle ground rather than going hard toward either philosophical extreme really seems to have been the wise choice.
That of course doesn't mean that SpaceX's approach is the only one that could have worked. For example, I kind of like the idea of launching rockets as floating spar platforms. It means you have to build them capable of withstanding saltwater exposure (more restrictive alloy and design selection) and deal with engine-water interactions at launch. But it means you have no diameter restrictions due to overland transport (make it as big as you want!), nor any pads to damage if something goes wrong - just tow, fill, and go. As an example. But what matters is, SpaceX's approach turned out to be a good one. And this combined with the "we can't fire people" environment that its competition operated in, once SpaceX had crossed that capital moat, the writing was on the wall.
They've suffered from the same program that NASA itself has, albeit to a lesser extent: they're jobs programmes. Part of their rationale for existing is the number of people they employ, and how their business operations are spread around politically-convenient areas. Same story for both Ariane and UAW. As Charmeau put it:
"Let us say we had ten guaranteed launches per year in Europe and we had a rocket which we can use ten times - we would build exactly one rocket per year. That makes no sense. I can not tell my teams: "Goodbye, see you next year!" "
In any normal business, in a competitive environment, focused on its bottom line, this would mean that you need to downsize 90% of your staff. If you're over capacity, you don't just stay over capacity for the heck out of it, or build hardware that's 1/10th as labour efficient just to justify keeping as many employees on the books as possible. It's an absurdity, but that's been the way the launch industry has operated for the past decades. Improved designs have been bad specifically because they'd streamline the industry.
But they got away with that specifically because there was such a capital barrier to entry in their industry. Lots of small companies had tried and failed. Some because their designs didn't really pan out, but some simply because they just couldn't get enough cash. Established players became dismissive of upstarts as a result - but it was really just a matter of time.
This lesson should be applied to a lot more capital-intensive industries than just rocketry. Thinking of capital barriers to entry as your uncrossable moat is a dangerous attitude.
A large number of new people started showing up and attacking her, not preexisting followers. At the exact same time that they started showing up on Musk's feed and attacking him. And for what crime? Literally nothing more than responding to someone who was repeating the UAW stuff, "he has never prevented them from unionizing it's quite literally fake news". Which is simply true.
Who is saying that this botnet seizure is part of a fight against Trump?
I think Fancy Bear comes in through the data pipes, so you'll need a firewall to stop them. Which I think means you have to get firewire first? I've been thinking about having the IT out to install it, I already have a propane tank so it shouldn't cost too much? I shut my computer off at night but I know that a really good hacker could just turn it back on and get in.
Come on, I don't think Russians - and especially Putin - find this whole situation funny.
The thing with Musk, you just never know. It could be a joke as in "the joke is a name to make fun of people who make false stories", or it could be "the joke is that the entire concept of the site is a joke".
That said, Elon being upset with people lying about him in the press is no joke. UAW and their allies particularly. One of the big ones recently was a campaign from a pro-union group called "Reveal" arguing, among other things, that Musk demanded that the factory not use yellow safety tape or have forklifts beep because it upset his aesthetic sensibilities. Which is something that can literally be proven false in less than a minute on Google Images or YouTube. And then when the falsehood was pointed out to them, of course they issued no correction, but just continued their attack-series-disguised-as-journalism.
Meanwhile, UAW still can't even get enough Tesla employees to sign that they even want a vote. Musk called for a vote on Twitter the other night. Sounds very confident that UAW would lose any vote by huge margins, as UAW dropped NUMMI like a hot potato during the recession to protect their Detroit base, there was double the injury rate when they were there, and nobody working for UAW anywhere gets stock options as part of their compensation.
I'm sure that the fact that UAW supporters have started harassing his girlfriend online didn't help his view on the manner any.
I feel about this "Pravda" project the same way I felt about him joining Trump's business council - "This is not going to end well."
Seriously. I like most of Musk's projects, but this is counterproductive.
No, it was a serious question, and "deflection" is trying to move on without answering a question directly posed to you. This conversation will not move forward until it gets an answer: "What's going to be your go-to line when the Model 3 SR starts deliveries Q4-ish?"
I have some great news AC, but you may want to be sitting down for it. Ready?
There exists a world outside of America!
I don't live in the US. What happens to your tax incentive has no bearing on me.
As for those who do: how does moving the expected SR delivery time foward hurt those waiting on the SR? You do realize that this timetable laid out by Musk means that the start delivering the SR with 1/2 to 1 1/2 quarters of full credit left, plus 2 quarters of half credits, plus to quarters of quarter-credits, don't you?
"Fast" is a relative term.
Hint: when someone ends a sentence with a question mark, that makes it a question, and you're supposed to respond with an answer.
Captcha: no captcha. I'm logged in because I'm not afraid to defend my views in public rather than posting AC.
Heh, sorry the debate tends to polarize so much. :) And yeah, a new order today with the long-range battery and AWD is a 6-9 month delay, which is too long for a lot of people.
Out of curiosity, have you ever driven a Tesla? Definitely do so if you have a chance. ;)
People on the waiting list have been debating since day 1 how much of the US tax credit they'd get. Nobody is in for a "shock", they're following it in way more detail than you.
And the credit does not disappear at 200k. Rather, 200k (which Tesla looks to be trying to deliberately delay to Q3) starts a timer. The first two quarters (aka, Q3 and Q4) are full credit. Then Q1 and Q2 are a half credit, then Q3 and Q4 are a quarter credit. Then it disappears.
Underrated post of the day :)
Yes. Tesla can't run a business. Which is why their stock is by and large held by major institutional investors, who are lately even upping their stakes.
Meanwhile, AC, your multi-billion dollar business is....?
Wish I could get gas that cheap. Most gas stations right now seem to be selling for 225 ISK/l... aka $2,13/l... aka $8,05/gal.
I love how the trolls switched from "You can't get a Model 3" as their go-to line to "you can't get a $35k Model 3". What's going to be your go-to line when the Model 3 SR starts deliveries Q4-ish? Better think of the new one now so that you don't have to struggle with it later.
The market disagrees. Otherwise Bolts would be pouring out the doors rather than half a million people waiting on the Model 3.
And the biggest reason people haven't been flocking to the Bolt is not its slower speed... not the fact that it can't be optioned to much higher range... not the fact that its options are poor in general by comparison... or that its standard features aren't as good... or that it looks kind of dorky... or has a plasticky econobox interior... or is a Chevy... or anything of that nature. It's that it charges at a third the speed, from a fragmented, often poorly maintained network. Heck, even that's an optional extra.
She was even walking a bike across, which is a giant radar reflector. And she was a moving target, so shouldn't have been filtered out as clutter. That accident still just amazes me that Uber's system was so bad as to have missed her. Lidar missed her. Cameras missed her. Radar missed her. Ultrasonics missed her. No braking attempt whatsoever until the impact. I still want to know how that happened. I can at least understand the high profile Tesla accidents, but I just can't understand this one.
Yes, because as we all know, airplane autopilots are totally designed to replace a pilot, and that's why we don't have pilots anymore.
Meanwhile, it's not Tesla that's calling its cars "self-driving".