Tesla in fact has three factories, for whatever that's worth. And I'm sure the people lending them money see where they're going as well, mass market electric cars, trucks, a global charging network, self driving, residential solar, residential and commercial energy storage. There is a roadmap for profitability around Q3-Q4 of this year.
And sure Musk sets optimistic and ambitious goals timelines that he usually doesn't achieve, but the goals are eventually achieved. And while the ramp up for Model 3 production is slower than expected, the news I see from other car companies is 'We'll have our Tesla-Killer any moment now, in 2020', 'We're starting mass production of battery cells... in 2024', 'By 2028 half the cars we produce will be electric...'
SpaceX managed to track down a faulty strut by acoustic triangulation of a few milliseconds of data from some accelerators, I'm sure it would be much easier for Tesla in a controlled environment where the vehicle doesn't explode.
I'm not just sitting around twiddling my thumbs, I might be eating a meal or sitting with friends, or in the middle of work. And there's no reason for me to drop everything just because someone picked this arbitrary point in time to have a conversation.
I don't think this article is particularly newsworthy for anyone who's familiar with the subject or even stopped for a few seconds to think about it.
But here are a few points why multiple smaller engines are better in this case.
* Mass production makes things cheaper and sometimes better. If you look at the cost of an engine, the raw materials are a pretty small percentage of the total cost, It's more about the manpower and tolerances required. If you have a guy performing a certain task maybe once every two months, he'll be slower and less proficient at doing it than say every few days. And overall, economies of scale make more engines cheaper to manufacture.
* Redundancy, as mentioned already in the thread. SpaceX has already lost one of the engines on one of the earlier flights and continued to complete the mission. They have walls between them that prevent the explosion of one from damaging the next. And it's only going to improve for Falcon Heavy and BFR, they'd be able to lost multiple engines and compensate for the imbalance.
* Telemetry collection. You get to build up a history of past performance a lot faster with ten engines than you do with one or two. After 54 flights, SpaceX has gathered operational telemetry on 486 first stage engine firings and 54 second stage ones (Not including all the test firings).
* Throttling, maneuverability, unique thrust characteristics. In the early stages of landing R&D SpaceX had a rocket called the Grasshopper, which was modified Falcon 9, that was able to fly up, hover, and then land. Most larger engines would not be able to throttle low enough to maintain a hover. This one is just a guess, but I imagine it's much easier and faster to gimbal a smaller engine, and you don't have to put the smaller, cheaper gimbaling hardware on all the engines. It seems that the exhaust from the multiple engines behaves somewhat similarly to an Aerospike engine, which gives the configuration some extra efficiency.
That's all I could think of, but I'm sure there are more reasons.
Or, you know, one of the founders of what would become Paypal might know a thing or two about the trade offs of distributed computing vs. more monolithic systems. But a reporter who writes an 'article' based on a single oversimplified analogy quote might not hit the nuances you're looking for.
I just tried it and it does a pretty decent job with PSDs, but it doesn't have all of Photoshop's features so it has to resort to using rasterized versions of those particular layers.
For example, I use smart objects pretty extensively in my work and the import just flattens them to a pixel layer.
Check out the torrent sites, you can still get Adobe and Autodesk software with these countermeasures disabled, sometimes even before they come out officially for paying customers.
This has nothing to do with piracy, it's just a way to ensure a steady flow of monthly earnings.
This may work if you use the software for a hobby, maybe even in some cases as a freelancer if you end up delivering a flat file, but as someone who works at a studio, our internal pipeline is set up to work with these formats, they might need to import these files into other software that doesn't support Affinity Photo or Gimp editable files. We have files that we exchange with our client or subcontractor and they're going to require a certain format and expect that it looks exactly the same on the other end as it does here.
So the studio is going to pay the monthly fee, and anyone who works with it will also need to have the software, as long as there is no widely accepted open source alternative.
According to Wikipedia 2,000 kilometres (1,200 mi) is the upper bound of what's considered to be LEO.
SpaceX is planning their constellations to be much lower. "...the larger groupâ"7,518 satsâ"would operate at 340 kilometres (210 mi) altitude, while the smaller groupâ"4,425 satsâ"would orbit at 1,200 kilometres (750 mi) altitude."
So somewhere between 1/2 - 1/6 of your numbers. And when you consider longer distance communication between satellites, the initial hop up starts becoming irrelevant when consider the speed of light through vacuum as compared to glass.
Being somewhat familiar with SpaceX's plans here are a few advantages of their approach, I guess compared to traditional satellite providers:
They're planning to deploy thousands of cheap, small, short-lived satellites in LEO, which means: -They get the advantages of cheaper production due to economies of scale, orders of magnitude better than something like GPS or Iridium. -So many units means they can just over-provision, use less hardened, cheaper components, and just replace units as they fail. -Being in LEO means they have a shorter lifespan due to atmospheric drag, so they stay up for maybe 5 years, drop into the atmosphere and are replaced by newer, better hardware. -I did a back of the envelope calculation once and I think I came up with something like 1/3 the latency of fiber when going halfway around the earth, due speed of light in glass vs air/vacuum, and the various geographical features cables need to contend with. -One of the reasons I remember being mentioned for SpaceX getting into building their own satellites when their rocket reuse program was just getting off the ground is they'll eventually end up with a supply of rockets that's larger than the entire launch market is going to need, at least in the short term, so this is a way for them to be their own customer and amortize the cost of the rocket by reflying it 10 times with cargo they can afford to lose.
I've read rumors that they needed to scavenge some parts off the drone ship to repair the drone ship on the other coast. It would make sense to prioritize it since the next launches from Florida are Zuma which will be a new booster, and the Falcon Heavy which is a custom center booster.
Well, parent was talking about 'the rocket' which I take to currently mean the booster, and has a much broader impact on accessibility to space than Dragon.
Here's another quote from the press event: "...Some of the initial ones we flew, a lot of those components on those vehicles were only going to fly one time. One of the biggest things we did, starting on roughly the CRS-8 mission, is we significantly increased the water sealing capability of the vehicle. And that allowed for a much easier refurbishment process from flight to flight..."
So I think one can assume 'much easier refurbishment process' also means cheaper, and that the first attempts would have been more expensive than subsequent ones.
My understanding is, with Dragon 2, they'll have both a crewed and uncrewed version, and while water intrusion might do a number on the superdracos on the crewed version, the cargo version will be simpler and they would implement some lessons learned from the current reuse articles in the design.
And of course there will be full reuse with land-landing with the BFR, whenever that actually happens.
First you ask how much of it is replaced and then you immediately claim it's 'practically completely rebuilt'?
Here's a direct quote from the prelaunch press event:
Jessica Jensen: Sure thing. So, the biggest thing is insuring that all the hardware is qualified for multiple flights. And basically we do that with test units that are built to the same specification as the flight hardware, and make sure those can go through multiple life cycles. So for example, we will take one of our engines and fire it in Texas over and over and over again to simulate multiple flights. In between flights, the goal is to not swap out hardware. Basically, every piece of hardware has a service lifetime, based on that testing I just talked about, and if it's still within its service lifetime, we verify that all of the environments on the previous flight were good, then you can just continue to reuse it. We do, in between flights, do very thorough inspections, to make sure that something off-nominal didn't happen on the previous flight. So we go through, we look at critical areas, we inspect welds, but we do not, generally, replace engines. If we need to, we can do that, but in general, we do not do that. So, it's mostly just inspecting everything and making sure we're good to go. One of the other things we do, as you know, our stages go to Texas prior to each mission, where we do a stage firing. And after that we do a series of pressure tests and all kinds of avionics checkouts on the vehicle afterwards. We do that same set of tests now after each flight. And what that is, it gives us high confidence moving into the mission, like Kirk said, we're basically at an equivalent level of risk as we were on the first flight.
I'm not sure where you're getting this 3000lb figure, I'm assuming it's based on the weight of the car, but that's supposed to be heading for Mars at a high velocity, the payload capacity for low earth orbit is quoted to be 63,800kg (140,660 lb). And to 26,700kg (58,860 lb) to geostationary transfer orbit.
Anyway, that's a lot of experiments and a lot of people involved, so you'd like them to delay the launch of a rocket that's already late by quite a few years by another couple of years, until all that is sorted out? Delay the launches of customers who already have payloads waiting? Would you have preferred they had the experiments ready for the initial planned launch date in 2013 and disappointed the highschool kids who have since finished college?
Have you considered that the guy running the space launch company might have a better grasp of the logistics of what you're talking about than you?
-That this is an experimental launch and they're trying to minimize potential losses. -Putting a Dragon capsule on top of it to send experiments to the ISS would be pointless because: A. It would double the price of the launch. B. part of the certification requirement for the government is for there to be a payload fairing on top of the rocket, and the capsule can't launch with one equipped. C. The capsule is already volume constrained so it wouldn't be able to carry any more than a regular launch, thus failing to demonstrate the heavy-lift capability (If the car is going to Mars, it would be light, but will have a much higher velocity).
Or would you rather they wait a few years (decades?) for someone willing to build a heavy satellite that they don't mind losing? What they're doing is not letting a precious opportunity not go to waste. Where in any other test launch the payload would have been a block of metal mass simulator, they're doing something fun, something that will get people talking about space for decades, and some bonus advertising for his other company out of his own pocket.
From what I've read, there's a chance they might even be able to make it to orbit while losing two of them, depending on how heavy the payload is. And since they're planning all three cores of the FH, there's going to be more margin to bring the payload up in expendable mode if an engine fails.
So the question is, do you prefer the chance of losing one big engine and the whole mission, or betting that you won't lose 2-3 engines on the same launch (For F9, I'm not sure how many it would be for FH).
Of course, SpaceX has other considerations with the number of engines they use, like the ability to use fewer of them for landing, and general economies of scale for production and testing.
Oh, I know very well why people are trying to mix things up. Because using similar-sounding terms, words that have multiple distinct meanings as if they are the same meaning (like a scientific law and a legal law), words that have different meanings in different contexts (Evolution is just a theory, see even the scientists say so!), misappropriating terms like Quantum, etc, is an easy way to confuse someone who wouldn't think too deeply about what was said and will just go with it and support their agenda.
I think Nuclear is great too, but with the amount of regulation, NIMBYism, cost of initial investment, time of construction, waste disposal, cost of eventual decommission, even though it makes sense in the long run, few are willing to make the investment.
What I find interesting about wind/solar/battery is they're modular. If you have some land, some roof space, you can put up a certain amount of power generation, maybe add to it later, replace parts.
In less densely populated areas you could have a decentralized mesh network of power generation. Maybe all the home owners in a town organize to pool their solar resources and balance their loads. Or sell some power to the next town over when they're running low. Or the next town after that, but town in the middle gets a cut of the profits for using their transmission lines.
Don't know about specific people, but they seem to be disrupting a lot of entrenched industries.
Traditional car manufacturers, car dealerships, oil and coal producers and users, automotive manufacturing unions, possible driving jobs in the future, the list goes on. I'm sure at least some of those industries are happy to spend a few million in lobbying and astroturfing, convincing workers their jobs are at risk, riling up people who think anything having to do with 'renewable energy' is a vast liberal conspiracy to take their tax money and god-given right to breathe petroleum exhaust.
Slashdot Mirror
Tesla in fact has three factories, for whatever that's worth.
And I'm sure the people lending them money see where they're going as well, mass market electric cars, trucks, a global charging network, self driving, residential solar, residential and commercial energy storage.
There is a roadmap for profitability around Q3-Q4 of this year.
And sure Musk sets optimistic and ambitious goals timelines that he usually doesn't achieve, but the goals are eventually achieved.
And while the ramp up for Model 3 production is slower than expected, the news I see from other car companies is 'We'll have our Tesla-Killer any moment now, in 2020', 'We're starting mass production of battery cells... in 2024', 'By 2028 half the cars we produce will be electric...'
SpaceX managed to track down a faulty strut by acoustic triangulation of a few milliseconds of data from some accelerators, I'm sure it would be much easier for Tesla in a controlled environment where the vehicle doesn't explode.
I'm not just sitting around twiddling my thumbs, I might be eating a meal or sitting with friends, or in the middle of work.
And there's no reason for me to drop everything just because someone picked this arbitrary point in time to have a conversation.
So you're saying that on top of navigating the currents of time these fuckers are fucking ninjas as well?
You'd be in a lot of trouble if he wasn't case-sensitive.
Water cheats at elevation level by finding cracks in rock.
I don't think this article is particularly newsworthy for anyone who's familiar with the subject or even stopped for a few seconds to think about it.
But here are a few points why multiple smaller engines are better in this case.
* Mass production makes things cheaper and sometimes better.
If you look at the cost of an engine, the raw materials are a pretty small percentage of the total cost, It's more about the manpower and tolerances required.
If you have a guy performing a certain task maybe once every two months, he'll be slower and less proficient at doing it than say every few days.
And overall, economies of scale make more engines cheaper to manufacture.
* Redundancy, as mentioned already in the thread.
SpaceX has already lost one of the engines on one of the earlier flights and continued to complete the mission.
They have walls between them that prevent the explosion of one from damaging the next.
And it's only going to improve for Falcon Heavy and BFR, they'd be able to lost multiple engines and compensate for the imbalance.
* Telemetry collection.
You get to build up a history of past performance a lot faster with ten engines than you do with one or two.
After 54 flights, SpaceX has gathered operational telemetry on 486 first stage engine firings and 54 second stage ones (Not including all the test firings).
* Throttling, maneuverability, unique thrust characteristics.
In the early stages of landing R&D SpaceX had a rocket called the Grasshopper, which was modified Falcon 9, that was able to fly up, hover, and then land.
Most larger engines would not be able to throttle low enough to maintain a hover.
This one is just a guess, but I imagine it's much easier and faster to gimbal a smaller engine, and you don't have to put the smaller, cheaper gimbaling hardware on all the engines.
It seems that the exhaust from the multiple engines behaves somewhat similarly to an Aerospike engine, which gives the configuration some extra efficiency.
That's all I could think of, but I'm sure there are more reasons.
Or, you know, one of the founders of what would become Paypal might know a thing or two about the trade offs of distributed computing vs. more monolithic systems.
But a reporter who writes an 'article' based on a single oversimplified analogy quote might not hit the nuances you're looking for.
I just tried it and it does a pretty decent job with PSDs, but it doesn't have all of Photoshop's features so it has to resort to using rasterized versions of those particular layers.
For example, I use smart objects pretty extensively in my work and the import just flattens them to a pixel layer.
Check out the torrent sites, you can still get Adobe and Autodesk software with these countermeasures disabled, sometimes even before they come out officially for paying customers.
This has nothing to do with piracy, it's just a way to ensure a steady flow of monthly earnings.
This may work if you use the software for a hobby, maybe even in some cases as a freelancer if you end up delivering a flat file, but as someone who works at a studio, our internal pipeline is set up to work with these formats, they might need to import these files into other software that doesn't support Affinity Photo or Gimp editable files.
We have files that we exchange with our client or subcontractor and they're going to require a certain format and expect that it looks exactly the same on the other end as it does here.
So the studio is going to pay the monthly fee, and anyone who works with it will also need to have the software, as long as there is no widely accepted open source alternative.
What a time to be alive!
According to Wikipedia 2,000 kilometres (1,200 mi) is the upper bound of what's considered to be LEO.
SpaceX is planning their constellations to be much lower.
"...the larger groupâ"7,518 satsâ"would operate at 340 kilometres (210 mi) altitude, while the smaller groupâ"4,425 satsâ"would orbit at 1,200 kilometres (750 mi) altitude."
So somewhere between 1/2 - 1/6 of your numbers.
And when you consider longer distance communication between satellites, the initial hop up starts becoming irrelevant when consider the speed of light through vacuum as compared to glass.
Being somewhat familiar with SpaceX's plans here are a few advantages of their approach, I guess compared to traditional satellite providers:
They're planning to deploy thousands of cheap, small, short-lived satellites in LEO, which means:
-They get the advantages of cheaper production due to economies of scale, orders of magnitude better than something like GPS or Iridium.
-So many units means they can just over-provision, use less hardened, cheaper components, and just replace units as they fail.
-Being in LEO means they have a shorter lifespan due to atmospheric drag, so they stay up for maybe 5 years, drop into the atmosphere and are replaced by newer, better hardware.
-I did a back of the envelope calculation once and I think I came up with something like 1/3 the latency of fiber when going halfway around the earth, due speed of light in glass vs air/vacuum, and the various geographical features cables need to contend with.
-One of the reasons I remember being mentioned for SpaceX getting into building their own satellites when their rocket reuse program was just getting off the ground is they'll eventually end up with a supply of rockets that's larger than the entire launch market is going to need, at least in the short term, so this is a way for them to be their own customer and amortize the cost of the rocket by reflying it 10 times with cargo they can afford to lose.
I've read rumors that they needed to scavenge some parts off the drone ship to repair the drone ship on the other coast.
It would make sense to prioritize it since the next launches from Florida are Zuma which will be a new booster, and the Falcon Heavy which is a custom center booster.
Well, parent was talking about 'the rocket' which I take to currently mean the booster, and has a much broader impact on accessibility to space than Dragon.
Here's another quote from the press event:
"...Some of the initial ones we flew, a lot of those components on those vehicles were only going to fly one time. One of the biggest things we did, starting on roughly the CRS-8 mission, is we significantly increased the water sealing capability of the vehicle. And that allowed for a much easier refurbishment process from flight to flight..."
So I think one can assume 'much easier refurbishment process' also means cheaper, and that the first attempts would have been more expensive than subsequent ones.
My understanding is, with Dragon 2, they'll have both a crewed and uncrewed version, and while water intrusion might do a number on the superdracos on the crewed version, the cargo version will be simpler and they would implement some lessons learned from the current reuse articles in the design.
And of course there will be full reuse with land-landing with the BFR, whenever that actually happens.
First you ask how much of it is replaced and then you immediately claim it's 'practically completely rebuilt'?
Here's a direct quote from the prelaunch press event:
Jessica Jensen: Sure thing. So, the biggest thing is insuring that all the hardware is qualified for multiple flights. And basically we do that with test units that are built to the same specification as the flight hardware, and make sure those can go through multiple life cycles. So for example, we will take one of our engines and fire it in Texas over and over and over again to simulate multiple flights. In between flights, the goal is to not swap out hardware. Basically, every piece of hardware has a service lifetime, based on that testing I just talked about, and if it's still within its service lifetime, we verify that all of the environments on the previous flight were good, then you can just continue to reuse it. We do, in between flights, do very thorough inspections, to make sure that something off-nominal didn't happen on the previous flight. So we go through, we look at critical areas, we inspect welds, but we do not, generally, replace engines. If we need to, we can do that, but in general, we do not do that. So, it's mostly just inspecting everything and making sure we're good to go. One of the other things we do, as you know, our stages go to Texas prior to each mission, where we do a stage firing. And after that we do a series of pressure tests and all kinds of avionics checkouts on the vehicle afterwards. We do that same set of tests now after each flight. And what that is, it gives us high confidence moving into the mission, like Kirk said, we're basically at an equivalent level of risk as we were on the first flight.
It seems pretty foreign to me that they can do whatever they please with the property of someone whose trial hasn't even been set yet.
I'm not sure where you're getting this 3000lb figure, I'm assuming it's based on the weight of the car, but that's supposed to be heading for Mars at a high velocity, the payload capacity for low earth orbit is quoted to be 63,800kg (140,660 lb).
And to 26,700kg (58,860 lb) to geostationary transfer orbit.
Anyway, that's a lot of experiments and a lot of people involved, so you'd like them to delay the launch of a rocket that's already late by quite a few years by another couple of years, until all that is sorted out?
Delay the launches of customers who already have payloads waiting?
Would you have preferred they had the experiments ready for the initial planned launch date in 2013 and disappointed the highschool kids who have since finished college?
Have you considered that the guy running the space launch company might have a better grasp of the logistics of what you're talking about than you?
-That this is an experimental launch and they're trying to minimize potential losses.
-Putting a Dragon capsule on top of it to send experiments to the ISS would be pointless because:
A. It would double the price of the launch.
B. part of the certification requirement for the government is for there to be a payload fairing on top of the rocket, and the capsule can't launch with one equipped.
C. The capsule is already volume constrained so it wouldn't be able to carry any more than a regular launch, thus failing to demonstrate the heavy-lift capability (If the car is going to Mars, it would be light, but will have a much higher velocity).
Or would you rather they wait a few years (decades?) for someone willing to build a heavy satellite that they don't mind losing?
What they're doing is not letting a precious opportunity not go to waste.
Where in any other test launch the payload would have been a block of metal mass simulator, they're doing something fun, something that will get people talking about space for decades, and some bonus advertising for his other company out of his own pocket.
They actually lost an engine and completed the mission on one of their earlier launches ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?...) .
From what I've read, there's a chance they might even be able to make it to orbit while losing two of them, depending on how heavy the payload is.
And since they're planning all three cores of the FH, there's going to be more margin to bring the payload up in expendable mode if an engine fails.
So the question is, do you prefer the chance of losing one big engine and the whole mission, or betting that you won't lose 2-3 engines on the same launch (For F9, I'm not sure how many it would be for FH).
Of course, SpaceX has other considerations with the number of engines they use, like the ability to use fewer of them for landing, and general economies of scale for production and testing.
Oh, I know very well why people are trying to mix things up.
Because using similar-sounding terms, words that have multiple distinct meanings as if they are the same meaning (like a scientific law and a legal law), words that have different meanings in different contexts (Evolution is just a theory, see even the scientists say so!), misappropriating terms like Quantum, etc, is an easy way to confuse someone who wouldn't think too deeply about what was said and will just go with it and support their agenda.
I think Nuclear is great too, but with the amount of regulation, NIMBYism, cost of initial investment, time of construction, waste disposal, cost of eventual decommission, even though it makes sense in the long run, few are willing to make the investment.
What I find interesting about wind/solar/battery is they're modular.
If you have some land, some roof space, you can put up a certain amount of power generation, maybe add to it later, replace parts.
In less densely populated areas you could have a decentralized mesh network of power generation.
Maybe all the home owners in a town organize to pool their solar resources and balance their loads.
Or sell some power to the next town over when they're running low.
Or the next town after that, but town in the middle gets a cut of the profits for using their transmission lines.
Tesla uses different battery chemistry for the stationary storage units.
Don't know about specific people, but they seem to be disrupting a lot of entrenched industries.
Traditional car manufacturers, car dealerships, oil and coal producers and users, automotive manufacturing unions, possible driving jobs in the future, the list goes on.
I'm sure at least some of those industries are happy to spend a few million in lobbying and astroturfing, convincing workers their jobs are at risk, riling up people who think anything having to do with 'renewable energy' is a vast liberal conspiracy to take their tax money and god-given right to breathe petroleum exhaust.