Elon Musk unveils first tourist for SpaceX 'Moon loop'
bbc.com
bbc.com
And more importantly, the risk:reward of failure involving Elon is bad. Right now he's managed to spark a number of competitors such as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, but these companies have yet to achieve much of anything and it's not out of the question to consider that if Elon died tomorrow, we might enter into another 50 years of space stagnation. Contrast that against the pleasure gained from a space voyage and it's just a bad risk:reward ratio, even when the risk is mostly negligible.
Can he? He definitely has the potential to be massively wealthy. If Tesla/SpaceX/BoringCo/etc exit at some point he'll walk away with '*&^@ you money', but until then he doesn't seem to have that much. According to Bloomberg he's in debt with personal loans to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars[1].
To be honest though, I don't really understand how normal money-you-buy-stuff-with works for people who are billionaires when most of their wealth is in stock and options.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-16/musk-pick...
The super rich don't have a lot in liquid cash, it's all tied up.
He takes out loans with his shares as collateral to get spending money.
Why not just sell? Because he expects the shares to appreciate more than what he'd pay in interest and/or to retain the shareholder vote.
Strange undeed.
If you pay taxes in USA, you partially own tiny bit of every single conpany other than x/paypal that Musk ever -funded-
Is it because Elon offended the press few weeks ago? I don't understand why press thinks it is above some criticism?
A less positive interpretation is that voters have very little say over what goes on the front page — or more specifically, what stays.
This isn't happening with other stories. The system is clearly being gamed.
But calling a fly to the moon "antics" is rather unfair.
It’s certainly the most newsworthy thing of the week IMO.
Dear Mods,
Put it back. And deduct 100 points from whoever flagged it off.
I remember the days in the 70s when flying was too expensive for families to consider. Even making a long distance call was reserved for special events.
I don't suspect travel in space will be that way in my life time being that I am in my fifties but I can hope.
Electricity as well. The very first few installations of electricity in homes by Edison were in Pierpont Morgan's home and soon followed by Morgan's friends' homes.
It makes logical sense too that it should be this way because early on, tech is usually very expensive and highly experimental such that if it fails, only the rich can afford the losses and upkeep.
I imagine the poor would adopt things too if they had money.
That has already been an enormous revolution in space access, and it's just the beginning. They haven't been landing rockets for shits and giggles. Relative to the cost of a rocket, fuel is practically free. The real cost is in the actual materials for the rocket and engines. And previously companies have just thrown those away. Even the Space Shuttle had 'reuse' only on paper rather than any significant reusability. But the Falcon rockets are genuinely reusable, and them autonomously landing rockets is now, amazingly, starting to become business as usual. Go for a flight proven rocket and the costs drop even further.
This is only what has already happened. None of this is future or speculative. This is happening at this very moment. If you want to see what the plants are then look into the goals for the BFR and Mars. This is the thing that's so disappointing. We're currently going through one of the biggest revolutions in technology today, that will likely be a keystone moment for our species' entire existence, and most people have absolutely no idea the relevance or scale of what's happening - instead distracted by irrelevancies that nobody will even remember in 10 years, and in many cases - 10 months if not 10 weeks.
https://nypost.com/2018/07/21/elon-musk-is-a-total-fraud/amp...
Looks to me like chronic overwork. How do we convince him to take a holiday?
Ill get the tinfoil now...
Unless you buy the theory that he did it to cleverly deflect attention away from something else.
But for all their present economic success there has been a subtle yet distinct erosion of product clarity and software quality since his passing. Take 3D touch as an example: a great idea in theory but from a UX perspective it's just a bunch of hidden easter eggs. Or the iOS flat UI which sometimes gives zero affordance to the tapability of many elements.
Another one: Watch was released with a whole pile of bad assumptions[1] and basically hoping that a market would darwinistically emerge. Luckily one did—fitness and heart health. It could just have easily been an epic flop.
[1] Wrapping the equivalent of an iPhone 2G or Macintosh 128k in 18-karat gold. With zero upgrade path. Seriously? Did they really think a first generation wrist gadget was going to be purchased as an heirloom? (And it gets magnificently worse with their rose gold, where the same expensive raw material is chemically molested to look nothing like what anyone would interpret as expensive.)
http://www.who.int/choice/publications/p_2007_Scaling-up_Imm...
That's Elon's point & goal.
Or it could be spent on mosquito nets. I’m told those are very cost-effective.
Or it could be spent on testing African-Americans for sickle-cell anaemia as children. I’ve been told that’s so cost-effective that it’s actually a negative cost per person once your account for necessary medical treatment as adults, as it’s much cheaper to provide effective treatment for those same people as children.
Or it could be spent replacing fossil fuels with solar power and electric cars so people don’t die from air pollution oh wait hang on…
Or we can make self driving cars so that distracted drivers don’t crash and kill so many people… hang on a minute, there’s a pattern here isn’t there?
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html?...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Stuhlinger&sort=byPopularity&p...
Rockets dont feed people, a billion pounds or rice do! Otoh, great letter indeed!
You argument make sense if we take human out of equation. Then we shouldn't be feeding poor AT ALL, given 1,000 years of founding tech with 100% budget would definitely save more lives.. eventually.
Edit: put it in other words: somebody is dying of hunger today so we can fund better technology for tomorrow, sure. Let's just hope its not me or you starving, if that kind of argument helps you sleep at night.
It's is entirely possible to fund agricultural development and space technology, and balance the two to complement each other. Space technology has a proven track record of massive technological and humanitarian benefits. Why are you complaining about it, instead of say people wasting hundreds of billions each year on Hollywood movies and TV shows, or many other unproductive activities which we spend more on than space.
Snakeoil?
wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware
And the OP replied to clarify, so I think vaporware is an unfair characterization. But I think that regardless, to be clear.
Maybe people have wrong expectations from working in software. SLS has a longer development time with a more tried-and-true design, and yet their deadlines slip as bad as those of SpaceX
Tesla is not only selling the Model S and X for many years, and has with the Model 3 in the meantime the best-selling electrical car in the US.
So how are they not delivering?
As rocket science is.. rocket science, I do expect delays on the schedule. Especially safety concerns can easily make a development schedule slip. Yet, the SpaceX schedule slips seem to be small compared to other space ventures. The production of the first BFS prototype is under way, we are going to see the first test hops next year.
(If you wanted something that was a bit more polished, you could say "Promise the stars, deliver the moon." or as a complete sentence, "They promised the stars, then delivered the moon.")
-Signed someone with a day one Model 3 reservation still waiting for the 35K version.
When they announced their vertical landing program, critics across the industry laughed at them. Only a couple years later, their landings are so routine they don't even warrant press anymore.
Off of the top of my head, with parachute landing you add mass because both:
- the large parachutes are quite heavy themselves as above (add some overhead for covers and support installation; I can't find any numbers)
- needs increased structural integrity to handle the tug during deployment and the much faster touch-down on landing; with propulsive landing you can essentially touchdown at 0/0/0 vertical/horizontal/angular velocities, as soon as you nail down the math of flight characteristics and engine control
- possibly some sort of reaction control, to achieve proper deployment attitude
- probably a smaller drogue chute(s) to handle supersonic flight, with all the complexity it adds
Moreover, using chutes:
- completely prevents RTL flights
- complicates abort modes; you'd need to dump fuel and oxidizer quick (without mixing and igniting, good luck) to be able to rely on the chutes alone.
However I guess the overriding concern for Musk was quick turn-around. With a parachute landing you have less control over the touchdown point [3]; the logistics of recovery, refurbishment and relaunch become much more involved, possibly spanning an ocean [4]. And with longer turn-around you need more flight hardware, and more ground support, to handle given amount of orbital or surface-to-surface traffic. Call it reducing the capex by going for somewhat costlier option that ensures much higher flight hardware utilization.
Lastly, using parachutes would create an image of low reliability; it's not something we would consider as to be routinely performed by commercial passenger flights. You don't want to ship passengers to "somewhere near your destination"; you want to deliver them to the airport, right next to the jet bridge (call it rocket bridge?) and promptly usher them to the passenger terminal.
Yes, yes, the routine BFR passenger travel is coming.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Solid_Rocket_Boo...
[2] http://www.spaceflight101.net/falcon-9-v11.html
[3] Gemini-style Rogalo wing would help, if it could be scaled. See https://i.pinimg.com/564x/b0/84/87/b08487e18f16402e4867981ff... and https://vintagespace.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/rogallo-win... Not as preposterous as it may seem, given that Buran's side-boosters were to glide to landing on deployable wings; see http://www.buran.ru/images/jpg/gk175-5.jpg
[4] you could bulk up the 1st stage enough to let it coast suborbitally all the way around globe to RTL, but that's another matter - and again uses up valuable fuel, and you run up against the rocket equation pretty quickly.
2. Turnover of 24 hours would become impossible.
3. Structural stress so 10 re-flights would become unlikely.
SpaceX tried it too, but had significant problems even re-entering without the rocket ripping apart, not even getting to the problems of recovering and refurbishing salt-water damaged hardware.
This kind of attitude might have made more sense before SpaceX had demonstrated it was possible. After showing how the technology can be further refined for full and rapid reuse, and landing on Mars, it just reads as ignorant or intentionally misleading.
Vertical landing a post-orbit rocket onto a floating barge is not a parlor trick. The DC-X never did that. And vertical landing for real commercial orbital flights—then reusing those rockets for more real commercial orbital flights—is orders of magnitude more impressive again.
If you want to land you need a bigger rocket for the same payload. But with how expensive rockets are, building them bigger and reusing them seems cheaper than letting them burn up. (And after a splashdown in saltwater refurbishment is way too expensive, so parachutes don't work well for reusability)
Yeah what are they doing for space exploration anyway?