Not for a from-scratch rocket, it isn't. Atlas, which was to become our workhorse, had an atrocious start. 3 MX-774 failures, then two XSM-65A failure. The third flew to its desired range, but that was only a mere 1,100km. 5 out of the 8 XSM-65s were failures. Then they had 10 launches of Atlas B with 3 failures, 6 launches of XSM-65C with 2 failures, The Atlas D had 135 launches with 32 failures. The Atlas E had 48 launches with 15 failures. Atlas Able had 4 launches, 4 failures. The Atlas F had 70 launches and 17 failures. I could keep on going. The overwhelming majority of these failures were early on in the program, in the 1950s and 1960s.
Yes, SpaceX has the benefit of looking back at what worked and what didn't. But they don't have the benefit of adopting already-tested technology, for the most part. And, to make it worse, they have to pull everything off in what's almost a mass-production environment.
This was a stage separation problem, one of the most common types of launch failures in orbital rocketry. The length of time of the scrubbed launch had nothing to do with it, just like the previous launch's "bump" and "slosh" had nothing to do with its prior abort, either. Quit attributing failures to false causes.
And by the way, don't forget that this is, for the most part, a "from scratch" launch system. Picture the atrocious failure rates early in the US space program. Developing a new launch system is very hard work.
So, as the record stands, SpaceX had one corrosion issue, and two stage separation issues. Good to know that this wasn't another corrosion issue; it was another case of a problem on stage separation, which they hadn't yet mastered. I wonder if their attempt to fix the "bump" from last separation is what led the stages to stick together.
On the upside:
* SpaceX modified their Merlin engine to be regeneratively cooled and get more power since their last launch, introducing a new element of risk. This regeneratively cooled engine is what is to power the Falcon 9, so they wanted to get it test flown. The new engine performed flawlessly.
* SpaceX has two more finished rockets lined up for launch. We should know their launch dates soon.
* The Falcon 9 rocket has finished its static test firing series without a single failure. Its schedule shouldn't be delayed by this.
It's not a case of "private versus public". Orbital has their own custom rockets, too, but they're not particularly cheap. SpaceX has a custom version of a Russian Zenit that they launch, and again, while their prices are a bit low, it's nothing to write home about. And even most of our "government" rockets were built and are operated by private companies on a basis where lowering operations costs means more profit for them.
The big deal about the Falcon is that it's largely "from scratch". Rocketry has been heavily burdened with history, in that we have a case where nobody wants to invest the large amount of money it would take to start from scratch when you can adopt an existing system and adapt it. Another big issue is the design route they chose. Rocketry is mostly about labor costs, so they set about looking at how much they could possibly reduce labor at each step of the way -- as few people needed as possible to build it, to transport it, to launch it, and so on -- without compromising on the amount of payload you can get out of the launch. They came up with some rather interesting solutions. One of my favorite is their adoption of a hybrid approach between conventional rigid tanks and balloon tanks. Rigid tanks can support their own weight during launch, but are heavier, and thus reduce payload. Balloon tanks would collapse if not pressurized, and so are more expensive to handle, but they reduce a lot of weight and thus increase payload capacity. SpaceX took a hybrid approach: their tanks are rigid enough to support themselves on the ground, so the rocket is easy to transport, but not rigid enough to withstand the forces of launch without being pressurized. It's a "best of both worlds" approach.
SpaceX has really demonstrated some impressive things so far, including nearly making it to orbit on their second launch (all but for either a bump or a baffle, both of which have been remedied) on a rocket that's almost completely designed from scratch (which is a much bigger deal than it sounds, given all of the new systems). My favorite, which I'm sure impressed potential clients, was the ability to hold down the rocket, abort just seconds before launch, reinspect and refuel the rocket, and then relaunch within hours of the abort. That's darned impressive.
I am not without concerns, of course. Mainly, on the Falcon 9. They've demonstrated quite a few successful test firings, including their recent tests of a full compliment of 9 engines. But they've not yet seen an engine failure, and it looks like they don't plan to simulate one. On the Soviet N1 moon rocket, they had the problem where one engine failure would lead to damaging the surrounding engines, ultimately dooming the rocket. The Falcon is designed to reduce this risk, but I'll feel a lot more comfortable about it once I actually see it happen in practice. Apart from that, I like the design. The ability to hit your launch target after losing one engine, if achievable, will be quite impressive and should significantly boost reliability. And their performance is nice, too. And if their stages prove recoverable, like they hope, that should help with improving prices all the more.
25kW times a generous $5 a watt = $125k, the price of a small house. Even if you assume that you only need to be able to provide half of that, that's over $60k. And this ignores the price of all of the other components, too. By contrast, PbA batteries are about $0.20/Wh and automotive li-ions, which will last for decades, about $0.50/Wh (they should approach PbA over time; their raw ingredients are cheap). Let's go with $0.50/Wh to be pessimistic. The average home uses around 30kWh a day, most of that during "peak hours" when there's sun out. But hey, let's assume that you need 50kWh for *non*-peak hours. That's $25k. Oh, and 50kWh of LiP batteries would be able to provide about 1 1/2 *megawatts* of power output.
There's really no excuse for fuel cells for applications like this at this point in time, or in the foreseeable future.
A large fuel cell stack will cost you around $10 a watt (smaller ones are more expensive per watt). Let's say that some big fuel cell manufacturer and can afford to sell them in bulk for $5 a watt. Well, go check out your breaker box. How many watts is it rated for -- 30kW? 50kW? 100kW? That's hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of fuel cells alone. Not exactly affordable. Even if you were to use a battery or capacitor buffer so that you only need to be able to provide a fraction of that, it's still priced way out of any semblance of affordability. Of course, you don't *have* to use fuel cells. You could use a H2 ICE or turbine. But then your efficiency is *even lower*.
Batteries are really the only realistic option in the foreseeable future.
I don't even think it's MIT making bad claims. I'm sure it's just plain bad reporting. You can't do electrolysis with only 10% of the energy we use now and get the same amount of hydrogen because that'd mean *several times more than 100% efficiency*. It's a physical impossibility; you're not going to get over-unity electrolysis. So just ignore this number; it's flat wrong.
Secondly, the big problem isn't electrolysis; it's *the fuel cells*. They're just too expensive (partially because of all of the platinum they use) and, as a system, are really inefficient. There's just no reason to use them instead of batteries. You'll pay a lot more and lose most of the energy, even if your electrolysis was 100% efficient. And lithium phosphate batteries, for example, have a lot of price improvement potential to come, since they're nowhere near their raw materials costs, a lot of lab techs or mass production should bring them that low, and there are some major anode energy density advancements that can be paired with them.
As is usual whenever electric cars comes up, it's time for some mythbusting.
No, they don't increase pollution and overload the grid; precisely the opposite (more specifically, the only pollutant that goes up is particulate matter, and it's displaced away from population centers. NOx and SOx remain the same, CO2 drops, and CO and VOCs are nearly eliminated; the grid gets to make use of its surplus off-peak capacity and, with smart charging, can eliminate the supply/demand fluctuations that are currently so troublesome).
No, modern batteries don't take forever to charge. The phosphates, titanates, modern spinels, and others can all charge in 5-20 minutes, given sufficient power.
No, the batteries are not toxic. Current li-ions are only mildly toxic, and this only because of their cobalt-based cathode. The phosphates and spinels eliminate this cathode in favor of nontoxic elements.
Yes, the batteries last a long time. The phosphates last 7000+ gentle cycles, having only 20% capacity loss after 1000 abusive cycles. The titanates? 20,000 cycles. Accelerated aging tests suggest LG Chem's packs will last 40+ years in typical use.
I like the idea of giving the child the incentive that if they learn well enough, they can work for you instead of at fast food;)
As for programming languages, I can see two potential routes for the OP's son to start out.
1) Javascript. I assume he has a website of some kind or another, no? Basic Javascript could be a neat way to impress his friends -- buttons that run away from the cursor, interactive animation, etc. The payback period would be pretty quick. You could then help transition him to other languages via CGI.
2) C/C++, but fast track it to OpenGL. Graphics is where a lot of the "fun" is for young programmers, and where they can impress their peers the easiest. Depending on his interests, you could help him out from there -- if he's more interested in how the engines work, help him learn to write his own 3d engine. If he just wants to write games, point him to Ogre or something of the sort. Might want to hook him up with Blender if he's going to be spending a lot of time working in 3D.
Back in the day, I got my start in QBasic in middle school. I was really driven on by friendly competition with my friends. One would write a program that would make it "snow" one pixel snowflake at the time, my version would make it snow many flakes, and by the time the back and forth was done, there was a veritable blizzard of flakes blowing in the wind and accumulating into drifts at the bottom of the screen. Fractals, simple artificial life simulations, wireframe 3d and crude raycasting (the best we could pull off in QBasic;) ), and so on -- we tried to outdo each other on it all. Also, using hex editors to tweak video games was kinda fun;) With modern OSS games, you can do a heck of a lot more than just a hex editor!
The only thing that could have helped accelerate my learning is if either my parents had gotten me more books or if we had had net access back then. For example, for my first couple 3d engines, I didn't know how to rotate a point in 3d. I did, however, know middle school-level geometry;). So, I figured out that I could determine the angle to each point with arctangents, then I'd rotate that angle, and then I'd use sines and cosines to convert it back to 3d. Very slow, but it worked;) Also, my parents were hesitant about letting me mess with hardware, which slowed down my learning of that aspect.
Working against that, you need to amortize your capital costs and pay for maintenance. Still, in some parts of the country, solar can indeed give you a reasonable mortgage length and IRR
That's too obvious. If you're going to make a "weapon" out of it, at least make a HERF gun. Don't even have to silver it for that;)
If you are going to silver it... hmm, how perfect of a parabola is it? If it's good enough, or if you could machine it to that good of precision, you could use it as the primary mirror on a huge truss tube telescope.
I'm no rocket scientist (though I am an engineer), but a simple look at the NASA plan shows that the crew vehicle is much simpler than this Jupiter plan. The Jupiter are looking to use 2 shuttle boosters and the center fuel tank with shuttle engines mounted on it to put a crew into space, while NASA is using only one booster and one engine for the 2nd stage.
Jupiter has three times the payload capacity. Jupiter uses the normal 4-segment SRBs, while Ares uses a brand new five segment SRBs. The 5-segment SRB is really a completely different rocket; it even uses a different propellant mix with a different core shape. Even with its larger rocket, it may not be able to cut it with that. Ares has so many design flaws, it's not even funny. The whole thing is way overweight, the reentry G-forces would be like riding a centrifuge pointed backwards, the vibration loads are going to be terrible... it's just a bad design.
But, as the Jupiter team points out, the biggest issue (cost-wise) is that while Ares may resemble the Shuttle family, most of the components are only "similar". It is constrained by what the Shuttle system was like, but doesn't benefit from all of the trial and error experience on that hardware. Even things you might think would carry over, like SRB recovery, have to be completely reworked with the new stack. They're even having to rebuilt a lot of the ground infrastructure to accomodate the changes -- the crawlers, the VAB, etc. They might as well just have started a brand new program; they would have been in a far better position. There's a reason the first crewed launch got pushed back from 2011 to 2015. With Jupiter, the components aren't just similar; they're the same; the expensive shuttle orbiter is all they're really ditching. Nothing needs to be completely re-engineered.
He's also sued the Magna Carta.;) I actually read about him when he triggered one of my Google News Alerts by suing Steve Fambro, founder of Aptera Motors, for not giving him a long-sleeved shirt to stay warm with. Aptera is the company that's making the two hyper-efficient spaceship-like three wheelers: the $27k, 120-mile range Aptera Typ-1e electric car and the $30k Aptera Typ-1h plug-in hybrid.
When gas is under two dollars a gallon electric cars are not as good as gas.
The price of electricity is roughly the equivalent of gas at $0.75 a gallon. And it's cleaner whether gas is that cheap or not.
But the thing is that you can make gasoline with electricity, air, and water if you have cheap enough electricity.
True -- and that's something most people don't realize (I'm glad you're informed enough on this topic to be aware of that). But try running the math on how much that'll cost you. You'll come up with at least $8 a gallon with current electricity prices after factoring in losses. Not end-of-the-world prices, but way, way too expensive.
But you keep talking about the future. I am talking about today and last year.
I must have misunderstood your intent, then. I'm talking about what'll be out in the next couple years, from almost every major car manufacturer in the world.
I'd like you to defend your "minimal environmental damage" statement at the very beginning. If you had a magic wand, and we were all driving electric cars tomorrow, what would the additional load be on the electric grid, and how much more pollution would that load cause when fed (mostly) by coal-fired power plants?
How about a DOE study conducted by PNL? We could convert 84% of our existing vehicles over to PHEVs running mostly on electricity without building a single new power plant. Even though the extra power would be mostly coal, the only pollutant to rise would be particulate matter. CO2 would drop by a third, NOx would stay roughly the same, SOx woudl stay roughly the same, and CO and VOC pollution would be virtually eliminated. To top it all off, the pollution would be displaced from "ground-level in densely populated areas" to "out of the cities and emitted at altitude".
Here's another study for you. Check out the graph.
I contend that energy consumption is energy consumption, and moving everyone from hydrocarbon burning to burning coal isn't really fixing anything in the long-run.
I contend that not only is it far easier to clean up the grid than to clean up individual tailpipes, but that the very basic fact that power plants are far more efficient than individual ICEs makes even coal cleaner. And I'm backed up by peer review. And you?
Slashdot Mirror
Not for a from-scratch rocket, it isn't. Atlas, which was to become our workhorse, had an atrocious start. 3 MX-774 failures, then two XSM-65A failure. The third flew to its desired range, but that was only a mere 1,100km. 5 out of the 8 XSM-65s were failures. Then they had 10 launches of Atlas B with 3 failures, 6 launches of XSM-65C with 2 failures, The Atlas D had 135 launches with 32 failures. The Atlas E had 48 launches with 15 failures. Atlas Able had 4 launches, 4 failures. The Atlas F had 70 launches and 17 failures. I could keep on going. The overwhelming majority of these failures were early on in the program, in the 1950s and 1960s.
Yes, SpaceX has the benefit of looking back at what worked and what didn't. But they don't have the benefit of adopting already-tested technology, for the most part. And, to make it worse, they have to pull everything off in what's almost a mass-production environment.
This was a stage separation problem, one of the most common types of launch failures in orbital rocketry. The length of time of the scrubbed launch had nothing to do with it, just like the previous launch's "bump" and "slosh" had nothing to do with its prior abort, either. Quit attributing failures to false causes.
And by the way, don't forget that this is, for the most part, a "from scratch" launch system. Picture the atrocious failure rates early in the US space program. Developing a new launch system is very hard work.
So, as the record stands, SpaceX had one corrosion issue, and two stage separation issues. Good to know that this wasn't another corrosion issue; it was another case of a problem on stage separation, which they hadn't yet mastered. I wonder if their attempt to fix the "bump" from last separation is what led the stages to stick together.
On the upside:
* SpaceX modified their Merlin engine to be regeneratively cooled and get more power since their last launch, introducing a new element of risk. This regeneratively cooled engine is what is to power the Falcon 9, so they wanted to get it test flown. The new engine performed flawlessly.
* SpaceX has two more finished rockets lined up for launch. We should know their launch dates soon.
* The Falcon 9 rocket has finished its static test firing series without a single failure. Its schedule shouldn't be delayed by this.
I didn't. But perhaps I wasn't paying enough attention.
No, that's what it normally looks like. The higher up you get, the wider the exhaust plume and the less "firey" it looks.
Houston, we have a problem.... :(
One of the hundred-some launch parameters was off by 1% :P They think they'll *probably* be able to restart the clock soon at a little over 10 minutes.
Got it -- it was just quiet. Now the countdown is truncated, though :P
Is it just me, or are others not getting sound on it?
Grr, that'll teach me not to preview. *SeaLaunch* deals with the Zenits. :P
It's not a case of "private versus public". Orbital has their own custom rockets, too, but they're not particularly cheap. SpaceX has a custom version of a Russian Zenit that they launch, and again, while their prices are a bit low, it's nothing to write home about. And even most of our "government" rockets were built and are operated by private companies on a basis where lowering operations costs means more profit for them.
The big deal about the Falcon is that it's largely "from scratch". Rocketry has been heavily burdened with history, in that we have a case where nobody wants to invest the large amount of money it would take to start from scratch when you can adopt an existing system and adapt it. Another big issue is the design route they chose. Rocketry is mostly about labor costs, so they set about looking at how much they could possibly reduce labor at each step of the way -- as few people needed as possible to build it, to transport it, to launch it, and so on -- without compromising on the amount of payload you can get out of the launch. They came up with some rather interesting solutions. One of my favorite is their adoption of a hybrid approach between conventional rigid tanks and balloon tanks. Rigid tanks can support their own weight during launch, but are heavier, and thus reduce payload. Balloon tanks would collapse if not pressurized, and so are more expensive to handle, but they reduce a lot of weight and thus increase payload capacity. SpaceX took a hybrid approach: their tanks are rigid enough to support themselves on the ground, so the rocket is easy to transport, but not rigid enough to withstand the forces of launch without being pressurized. It's a "best of both worlds" approach.
SpaceX has really demonstrated some impressive things so far, including nearly making it to orbit on their second launch (all but for either a bump or a baffle, both of which have been remedied) on a rocket that's almost completely designed from scratch (which is a much bigger deal than it sounds, given all of the new systems). My favorite, which I'm sure impressed potential clients, was the ability to hold down the rocket, abort just seconds before launch, reinspect and refuel the rocket, and then relaunch within hours of the abort. That's darned impressive.
I am not without concerns, of course. Mainly, on the Falcon 9. They've demonstrated quite a few successful test firings, including their recent tests of a full compliment of 9 engines. But they've not yet seen an engine failure, and it looks like they don't plan to simulate one. On the Soviet N1 moon rocket, they had the problem where one engine failure would lead to damaging the surrounding engines, ultimately dooming the rocket. The Falcon is designed to reduce this risk, but I'll feel a lot more comfortable about it once I actually see it happen in practice. Apart from that, I like the design. The ability to hit your launch target after losing one engine, if achievable, will be quite impressive and should significantly boost reliability. And their performance is nice, too. And if their stages prove recoverable, like they hope, that should help with improving prices all the more.
25kW times a generous $5 a watt = $125k, the price of a small house. Even if you assume that you only need to be able to provide half of that, that's over $60k. And this ignores the price of all of the other components, too. By contrast, PbA batteries are about $0.20/Wh and automotive li-ions, which will last for decades, about $0.50/Wh (they should approach PbA over time; their raw ingredients are cheap). Let's go with $0.50/Wh to be pessimistic. The average home uses around 30kWh a day, most of that during "peak hours" when there's sun out. But hey, let's assume that you need 50kWh for *non*-peak hours. That's $25k. Oh, and 50kWh of LiP batteries would be able to provide about 1 1/2 *megawatts* of power output.
There's really no excuse for fuel cells for applications like this at this point in time, or in the foreseeable future.
A large fuel cell stack will cost you around $10 a watt (smaller ones are more expensive per watt). Let's say that some big fuel cell manufacturer and can afford to sell them in bulk for $5 a watt. Well, go check out your breaker box. How many watts is it rated for -- 30kW? 50kW? 100kW? That's hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of fuel cells alone. Not exactly affordable. Even if you were to use a battery or capacitor buffer so that you only need to be able to provide a fraction of that, it's still priced way out of any semblance of affordability. Of course, you don't *have* to use fuel cells. You could use a H2 ICE or turbine. But then your efficiency is *even lower*.
Batteries are really the only realistic option in the foreseeable future.
I don't even think it's MIT making bad claims. I'm sure it's just plain bad reporting. You can't do electrolysis with only 10% of the energy we use now and get the same amount of hydrogen because that'd mean *several times more than 100% efficiency*. It's a physical impossibility; you're not going to get over-unity electrolysis. So just ignore this number; it's flat wrong.
Secondly, the big problem isn't electrolysis; it's *the fuel cells*. They're just too expensive (partially because of all of the platinum they use) and, as a system, are really inefficient. There's just no reason to use them instead of batteries. You'll pay a lot more and lose most of the energy, even if your electrolysis was 100% efficient. And lithium phosphate batteries, for example, have a lot of price improvement potential to come, since they're nowhere near their raw materials costs, a lot of lab techs or mass production should bring them that low, and there are some major anode energy density advancements that can be paired with them.
As is usual whenever electric cars comes up, it's time for some mythbusting.
No, they don't increase pollution and overload the grid; precisely the opposite (more specifically, the only pollutant that goes up is particulate matter, and it's displaced away from population centers. NOx and SOx remain the same, CO2 drops, and CO and VOCs are nearly eliminated; the grid gets to make use of its surplus off-peak capacity and, with smart charging, can eliminate the supply/demand fluctuations that are currently so troublesome).
Yes, they are far more energy efficient than their alternatives.
No, modern batteries don't take forever to charge. The phosphates, titanates, modern spinels, and others can all charge in 5-20 minutes, given sufficient power.
Yes, fast chargers exist. The SAE J1772 standard covers Level 3 charging at hundreds of kilowatts. Yes, chargers as strong as 250kW exist. Yes, there's already a network of 60kW Level 3 chargers in place around Oahu. Install one yourself.
No, the batteries are not toxic. Current li-ions are only mildly toxic, and this only because of their cobalt-based cathode. The phosphates and spinels eliminate this cathode in favor of nontoxic elements.
No, lithium is not running out.
Yes, the batteries last a long time. The phosphates last 7000+ gentle cycles, having only 20% capacity loss after 1000 abusive cycles. The titanates? 20,000 cycles. Accelerated aging tests suggest LG Chem's packs will last 40+ years in typical use.
Yes, both rapid charging stations and EVs make financial sense.
Hmm, did I miss any?
I like the idea of giving the child the incentive that if they learn well enough, they can work for you instead of at fast food ;)
As for programming languages, I can see two potential routes for the OP's son to start out.
1) Javascript. I assume he has a website of some kind or another, no? Basic Javascript could be a neat way to impress his friends -- buttons that run away from the cursor, interactive animation, etc. The payback period would be pretty quick. You could then help transition him to other languages via CGI.
2) C/C++, but fast track it to OpenGL. Graphics is where a lot of the "fun" is for young programmers, and where they can impress their peers the easiest. Depending on his interests, you could help him out from there -- if he's more interested in how the engines work, help him learn to write his own 3d engine. If he just wants to write games, point him to Ogre or something of the sort. Might want to hook him up with Blender if he's going to be spending a lot of time working in 3D.
Back in the day, I got my start in QBasic in middle school. I was really driven on by friendly competition with my friends. One would write a program that would make it "snow" one pixel snowflake at the time, my version would make it snow many flakes, and by the time the back and forth was done, there was a veritable blizzard of flakes blowing in the wind and accumulating into drifts at the bottom of the screen. Fractals, simple artificial life simulations, wireframe 3d and crude raycasting (the best we could pull off in QBasic ;) ), and so on -- we tried to outdo each other on it all. Also, using hex editors to tweak video games was kinda fun ;) With modern OSS games, you can do a heck of a lot more than just a hex editor!
The only thing that could have helped accelerate my learning is if either my parents had gotten me more books or if we had had net access back then. For example, for my first couple 3d engines, I didn't know how to rotate a point in 3d. I did, however, know middle school-level geometry ;). So, I figured out that I could determine the angle to each point with arctangents, then I'd rotate that angle, and then I'd use sines and cosines to convert it back to 3d. Very slow, but it worked ;) Also, my parents were hesitant about letting me mess with hardware, which slowed down my learning of that aspect.
Working against that, you need to amortize your capital costs and pay for maintenance. Still, in some parts of the country, solar can indeed give you a reasonable mortgage length and IRR
What about rebuttals that don't actually rebut the topic? Did he say anything about that?
My first thought is - why not just stick with the orbiter then? The main engine cost alone would probably keep it from being cost effective.
The SSMEs are on the Shuttle, which, as I just mentioned, they're ditching.
Look; McCain no longer doesn't know how to use a computer. He's busy learning how to get on himself. Why, he's already been using a google. I think that by the time all is said and done, he'll finally understand economics and bring the Republican party into the modern age.
It's my understanding that tax cuts really do increase revenue,
The late, great Steve Kangas takes that myth on with statistics.
That's too obvious. If you're going to make a "weapon" out of it, at least make a HERF gun. Don't even have to silver it for that ;)
If you are going to silver it... hmm, how perfect of a parabola is it? If it's good enough, or if you could machine it to that good of precision, you could use it as the primary mirror on a huge truss tube telescope.
I'm no rocket scientist (though I am an engineer), but a simple look at the NASA plan shows that the crew vehicle is much simpler than this Jupiter plan. The Jupiter are looking to use 2 shuttle boosters and the center fuel tank with shuttle engines mounted on it to put a crew into space, while NASA is using only one booster and one engine for the 2nd stage.
Jupiter has three times the payload capacity. Jupiter uses the normal 4-segment SRBs, while Ares uses a brand new five segment SRBs. The 5-segment SRB is really a completely different rocket; it even uses a different propellant mix with a different core shape. Even with its larger rocket, it may not be able to cut it with that. Ares has so many design flaws, it's not even funny. The whole thing is way overweight, the reentry G-forces would be like riding a centrifuge pointed backwards, the vibration loads are going to be terrible... it's just a bad design.
But, as the Jupiter team points out, the biggest issue (cost-wise) is that while Ares may resemble the Shuttle family, most of the components are only "similar". It is constrained by what the Shuttle system was like, but doesn't benefit from all of the trial and error experience on that hardware. Even things you might think would carry over, like SRB recovery, have to be completely reworked with the new stack. They're even having to rebuilt a lot of the ground infrastructure to accomodate the changes -- the crawlers, the VAB, etc. They might as well just have started a brand new program; they would have been in a far better position. There's a reason the first crewed launch got pushed back from 2011 to 2015. With Jupiter, the components aren't just similar; they're the same; the expensive shuttle orbiter is all they're really ditching. Nothing needs to be completely re-engineered.
He's also sued the Magna Carta. ;) I actually read about him when he triggered one of my Google News Alerts by suing Steve Fambro, founder of Aptera Motors, for not giving him a long-sleeved shirt to stay warm with. Aptera is the company that's making the two hyper-efficient spaceship-like three wheelers: the $27k, 120-mile range Aptera Typ-1e electric car and the $30k Aptera Typ-1h plug-in hybrid.
When gas is under two dollars a gallon electric cars are not as good as gas.
The price of electricity is roughly the equivalent of gas at $0.75 a gallon. And it's cleaner whether gas is that cheap or not.
But the thing is that you can make gasoline with electricity, air, and water if you have cheap enough electricity.
True -- and that's something most people don't realize (I'm glad you're informed enough on this topic to be aware of that). But try running the math on how much that'll cost you. You'll come up with at least $8 a gallon with current electricity prices after factoring in losses. Not end-of-the-world prices, but way, way too expensive.
But you keep talking about the future. I am talking about today and last year.
I must have misunderstood your intent, then. I'm talking about what'll be out in the next couple years, from almost every major car manufacturer in the world.
I'd like you to defend your "minimal environmental damage" statement at the very beginning. If you had a magic wand, and we were all driving electric cars tomorrow, what would the additional load be on the electric grid, and how much more pollution would that load cause when fed (mostly) by coal-fired power plants?
How about a DOE study conducted by PNL? We could convert 84% of our existing vehicles over to PHEVs running mostly on electricity without building a single new power plant. Even though the extra power would be mostly coal, the only pollutant to rise would be particulate matter. CO2 would drop by a third, NOx would stay roughly the same, SOx woudl stay roughly the same, and CO and VOC pollution would be virtually eliminated. To top it all off, the pollution would be displaced from "ground-level in densely populated areas" to "out of the cities and emitted at altitude".
Here's another study for you. Check out the graph.
I contend that energy consumption is energy consumption, and moving everyone from hydrocarbon burning to burning coal isn't really fixing anything in the long-run.
I contend that not only is it far easier to clean up the grid than to clean up individual tailpipes, but that the very basic fact that power plants are far more efficient than individual ICEs makes even coal cleaner. And I'm backed up by peer review. And you?