Google's "Moonshot" department is mostly ironic, at this point. Literal moonshots have been demonstrated by SpaceX to cost somewhere in the 2-20 billion dollar range with current technology.
Makes me wonder why they're not funding more large scale research - throw a few billion at carbon sequestration, maybe?
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/technology/google-makes-1...
And Jeff Bezos has Blue Origin, so in a way Amazon is also funding a space program.
Such constructions are frequent in Russian, like “it is not true that I have not done nothing” but apparently people use them in English too.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_negative#Two_negatives_...
(tries to apply double-negative parsing, suspecting an off-by-one error)
(stops and laughs realizing the commenter was criticizing its parent for writing something unclear)
(edits original reply from "one too many negatives there" to this ridiculous response you've now finished reading)
The companies are leaving trillions on the table right now by not spending their money wisely. The future economy is going to be based around climate change cleanup at the rate we're going right now and most companies are trying to lose customers by accelerating global climate change to make their customers pay more money to relocate, fix environmental issues, instead of buying their products.
Our society is going to be so financially strained in the future and it is a Direct result of the megacorps not spending their money in sustainable, responsible ways.
They should all be facing constant lawsuits from their stockholders for not doing better to protect the environment. Since their high-payed lawyers are presumably the ones that lobbied congress in the first place to make sure environmental care was not going to be part of taxes, and in fact that they should pay nearly no taxes at all, suggests to me that they think that the public good is best taken care of by corporations. It seems the only logical conclusion of this line of thinking: if the corps don't want to pay big taxes because they think it is a waste of money, then they have to be in charge of clean air for us, bu they don't actually care about that and so we're all going to suffer and pay less for their products because we have to pay more to fix the air.
I just don't get it.
Edit: For example, how many people in North Carolina will be buying new consumer electronics this Christmas? Will it be fewer than normal, because they have to spend a lot of their own money cleaning up from a storm that was exasperating via climate change and had to deal with a government that made planning for climate change illegal? I think so. I think fewer people there will buy iPhones this winter and fewer people there will buy TVs are even new fancy cars too. But really why are these corporations losing these sales already? It's because an area hit by a climate-change-fueled storm was unprepared by not taxing companies correctly and by the corporations themselves trying not to be taxed; so we end up with the population themselves trying to fix the errors of their government and this process takes expected money out of the corporation's hands.
But the storms will come, and come, and come, and there will be fewer opportunities to make money from people affected by climate change.
I. just. don't. get. it.
Do you own any stocks? Even holding a broad exchange fund makes you a stockholder. Have you led the charge in any lawsuits or is this just lip service outrage?
I was responding to a comment, sorry if this message got lost. Companies who do not spend their money according to stockholder wishes get sued, correct? For misuse of funds?
My post was attempting to explain that I consider it a gross misuse of corporate funds to not spend excess cash-on-hand on projects to reduce the effects of climate change on humanity. To me, it is clear that a corporation wishing to maximize profit must address climate change or risk being sued for misuse of their funds.
> Do you own any stocks? Even holding a broad exchange fund makes you a stockholder.
No I do not own any stocks.
> Have you led the charge in any lawsuits or is this just lip service outrage?
There's no need to be rude. I stand by my words. I have no resources or funds or stocks to give me the standing to approach this topic with a corporation or lawyers. I just get by every month. There's no need to insult my opinions and call my description and opinions 'lip service'. I'm being serious, no need to belittle me.
No, they get sued for malfeasance: taking investments and failing to return a profit.
It doesn't matter what stockholders want, the purpose of buying stocks is to make a return, and if a company fails to prioritize profit above all else, then they have broken the implicit or explicit contract with their shareholders: investment now in return for dividends later.
I agree future historians will judge our governments and our megacorps, the current keepers of humanity's resources, very harshly. However, many of those at the ships' helms are insulated from their own externalities, the consequences of their decisions. And most of the shares are held by others who are similarly insulated, or abstracted away through 401ks and mutual funds.
The core of the problem is that our entire system of resource allocation is based on who can make the most money with them and construct the tallest walls around them, not who uses them to better the most lives.
For every million lives destroyed by climate change, there is a million more that doesn't care about anything beyond their family, their friends, and their iPhone. A warming planet will make much of Siberia arable, for example.
I think the answer to your questions begins with another question: what would make a CEO not use lobbying to resist taxing externalities of his company? What about a board of directors? A shareholder? An "average voter?"
When we can answer those questions, we can begin to make progress.
It's entirely possible that more consumer electronics and home appliances will be purchased in North Carolina in Q4 this year, because so many were damaged in the flooding and will be repurchased out of necessity, coupled with some flood insurance money.
Example of head tax: http://www.astoria.or.us/Assets/dept_1/pm/pdf/occupational%2...
There was recently a big fight over a head tax Seattle tried to impose.
So let's say you're an influential shareholder at a big company, this company has been successful because it did a few things well, and there are a bunch of other shareholders with their own agendas.
Meanwhile you are a human being just like any other so fundamentally you're making decisions about what you're going to do with your own life, which is the only thing you really control.
Now, you're concerned about climate change. Does it really make sense to try to lasso this big company into doing something about climate change, if it has no experience in that field, and no one there joined in order to work on climate change?
More likely you would put some of your own (presumably considerable) resources into some other project that's focused on climate change. Because that's going to have a better chance of success than trying to sequester resources away from BigCorp for something that BigCorp fundamentally isn't committed to.
The point is you are an investor and it just doesn't make sense to invest resources into X with the goal of doing Y's job. You would invest in Y instead. Put another way if you own an all-star basketball team and you want to win an ice hockey championship you don't tell them to start playing hockey on the weekends, you use the money they made to go buy a hockey team.
Yes, the number of hurricanes could increase. But it might double, over the next century.
That's bad, but in the vast scheme of things, it isn't that bad.
No scientist believes in something like day after tomorrow, or anything coming close to what you are implying is going to happen.
It will be more like trillions of dollars in damages, over the next century. Not some world changing event.
We've been dealing with hurricanes for a while now, and if they double, it isn't going to cause the entire economy to stop.
If you want some recent example, look at Puerto Rico. ~5K people died in the recent hurricane. This is bad. But if it happened twice as often, would the world coming grinding to a halt? No. The Earth would keep spinning, people would continue to go to work every day, and watch TV.
If you want to learn from the experts on the actual scale of damage and timeline, go read what the IPCC have to say on the matter. They are the official authority on the matter. And they do not agree with the idea of world ending consequences, like people imply all the time.
Yes, lots of people will die especially in places like Bangladesh. Yes this is terrible, especially when it should have been prevented.
No, this isn’t a Hollywood movie where the species is about to disappear.
So if Monsanto wants to start an expensive project to build an extremely risky space elevator, all they have to do is make the proper disclosures and they're probably fine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/technology/google-makes-1...
Okay then:
Waymo - https://waymo.com/
Verily - https://debug.com/
Loon - https://loon.co/
Dandelion - https://dandelionenergy.com/
Wing - https://x.company/wing/
Chronicle - https://chronicle.security/
And this is literally off the top of my head. All six of these companies have been spun out from projects working within X, so I don't see how you can say with a straight face that Google isn't reinvesting huge amounts of capital into innovation and technology. No other company currently exists which is as diversified in its efforts or as willing to take risks as Alphabet is.
The bar is high for this stuff. Having the first stage of a rocket land on a barge changes the economics of spacecraft. That’s the kind of innovation people are looking for.
???
Google has been working on making self-driving a thing ever since the DARPA Challenges back in the 2000's. It's amazing to me that you would think Waymo of all companies is the second comer with no originality.
I'm really trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here, but this honestly just shows a glaring lack of knowledge/insight.
Even in this regard Elon via Tesla is beating them at that, by deploying as many self-driving features as the risk-reward calculus allows. That's what I was trying to express, perhaps poorly, in my original post.
Because though Tesla is a great car company with an even better brand name that I’m sure will carry it very far, one thing it is not currently, is a self driving car company. Perhaps this will change in the future. For now, Tesla has other problems to deal with and focus on.
And isn't execution much more important than just having an idea?
That doesn't seem to match what I am seeing. They are giving out rides in phoenix arizona already and plan to fully launch there by end of year. They have also officially ordered 62,000 chrysler pacificas and 20,000 jaguar SUVs to scale out their service in the coming years.
In the '90s there was a huge wave of "New Space" companies, some with better ideas than others, most fueled by silicon valley venture capital looking for "cool game changing technology". Unfortunately, that combo was not suited to the space business. A lot of companies got set up with their eyes on essentially quantum leap "beyond state of the art" technology, the sort of stuff that would warrant mass influxes of investment because it had the potential to result in orders of magnitude RoI down the road, just like the computer/software business. Except all of it was too far reaching, too ambitious, with not nearly enough R&D expenditure to make it real at the time (it likely would have cost billions). The archetypal plan for such companies was to build a fully reusable orbital launch vehicle, likely a single stage rocket (aka RLV SSTO) and then swoop in and take over the launch business with hugely lower costs, all while launch orders would grow by orders of magnitude as well due to a booming space tourism business coupled with the deployment of multiple LEO satellite constellations.
However, the investment capital dried up during the dot com bubble burst around 2000 and none of the companies had anything viable built already so they just starved to death. Meanwhile, the dot com bust also killed off the fantasies of mega satellite constellations and the launch market slowed down.
It took a company like SpaceX to cut a pragmatic path toward innovation in space launch. Starting with a tried and tested design (2 stage kerolox) that dated back to the 1950s even. And being insanely practical as well as extremely cost and risk conscious through the whole process. They boostrapped into profitability with expendable launches. They built a "dual use" expendable/partially-reusable launcher so they could flight prove the technology using commercial launches. And so they could perform reusability R&D subsidized by commercial launches as well. Every single booster landing attempt they made before they nailed the process was R&D using tens of millions of dollars in flight hardware, except they got others to pay for the hardware and they just used it afterward, when normally the booster gets thrown away.
Even a very smart megacompany like google wouldn't necessary have the savvy to attack the problem in that way. And if you look at what a crap-ton of money plugged into the high tech ecosystem does produce you can look at Blue Origin, who are performing a much more traditional development program. Start with sub-orbital, build and test everything in a reusable flight configuration on your own dime before offering it up commercially, etc. And the result is much slower progress plus the requirement of massive infusions of cash up front for an extended period of time.
A lot of big money is held by public companies who generally don't like these longshots. Elon talks about it all the time himself.
It also should be a rare thing; they're moonshots, after all. The intersection between "has billions to spare" and "is insane enough to try things like going to space" is not large.
This works, but it's not as effective as you'd think. It's hugely expensive, it's slow, it has a lot of traps and pitfalls for the unwary, it often leads to highly compromised and undertested designs that are often kind of mediocre in one or multiple respects. And, again, it's expensive, it leads to expensive rockets and expensive launch costs. Ironically, developing for lower cost launches is seemingly even more expensive in up front costs due to the extra engineering, lower margins, etc.
Additionally, one of the dirty little secrets of the rocket business is that very, very few organizations actually have any current practical experience in creating new rockets from scratch. It's one thing to run through all the machining, assembly, etc. for a rocket that's already been designed, built, proven, etc, it's quite another thing to start off with a blank piece of paper and build a rocket starting from nothing.
So the smart way to build rockets isn't the above "obvious" way, it's an inherently iterative (agile) approach. Step 1 isn't building a rocket, it's building a team that can build a rocket. And you don't just iterate through improving the capabilities of your rocket design you also iterate through leveling up the skillset (at individual and organizational levels) of your company. It's a sort of tick/tock cadence, and each side is just as important as the other. Then, you build out a "minimum viable business" so that you can get revenue (and profits and investment capital) rolling in, keeping the company afloat, paying for new engineering and the development of new capabilities. Then you iterate and iterate and iterate your way to bigger and better things.
This model might seem extremely familiar and extremely obvious to the silicon valley set but it really is kind of foreign in the aerospace world (there's actually a bunch of interviews on youtube from NASA engineers working with SpaceX being amazed at what they were able to do and how much their process differed from the bureaucratic norms in the field). And, to be fair, plenty of New Space companies have followed similar models (Armadillo Aerospace, X-COR, Masten, several others) but for one reason or another none of them had the capabilities or the capital to jump to the level of success of SpaceX (so far).
In any event, this is precisely what SpaceX did. They started out with a dead simple (decades old) rocket design, they built a team that built a small rocket capable of getting some launch business. They streamlined the company by vertically integrating to allow faster iteration and lower costs. They iterated like crazy, they made a few mistakes here and there, had some bad luck here and there, but they managed to scrape through the choke points. They were able to launch a payload and get enough business to stay afloat, they were able to get investments and development contracts for future business that would allow them to fund further iterative improvements to their rockets. They relentlessly managed risks in an incredibly savvy way that should be taught in business schools and were able to operate an R&D program that made use of about a billion dollars in aerospace hardware for a fraction of the cost to the company itself.
A lot of this stuff is textbook modern software dev technique. Continuous integration, continuous delivery. Feature flags (to let you test new code works doing the "old" job before testing that the new code also performs new features). You'd think a big company like Google would be able to get this right, but it requires a level of commitment and an acceptance of loss ("failures" during R&D) that big, established companies are often reluctant to take on.
Also, do you have any further links to the kinds of organisational structure that SpaceX has, which I think is the main advantage over traditional organisations like NASA, Airbus, ULA (well, in addition to having someone crazy like Musk - it's been said that SpaceX has enough amazing engineers that they'd probably be flying and landing rockets even without him, but the probably wouldn't be landing them on water)? Like those YouTube interview you mention, or how they manage risks, etc.
Feel free to email me, this is a very fascinating discussion for me.
More relevant for SpaceX is Ariane Space. There it is Airbus plus every other ESA country. When you do the same thing without political interference you are faster.
Another example is the A400M, Airbus military tranport plane. They almost screwed the program and ruined Airbus military aircraft business by insisting, politically, on a European developed turboprop engine. And this political incursions into design can be seen all over the place.
EDIT: I just realized I talked a lot about aircraft. Seems I'm still confused by EADS now being Airbus and Airbus (EADS times) is now part of Airbus (old EADS)...
Then you have programs like the F-35 (Lockheed) which is intentionally very international and thus political, even morw so than your average defence program. No matter how much everybody is talking about strategy and core technologies in the end the only questions governmants and politicians care about how much money is flowing into their home turf.
The equivalent to EU politics in the US could be Congress and the Senate medling with budgets? But I'm just guessong here. In general being in a very protected industry, politically and by high barriers of entry, makes people lazy. And politics rub off, so even you don't want to you get political by working with politics for too long.
Overhead builds over time, maybe SpaceX did have the time for that yet. And now the last, and arguqbly controversial point, I'm not sure if SpaceX is better by the degree it seems they are. Again, that is just my personal opinion.
EDIT: What does ULA mean? I never heard of that acronym.
That being said, SpaceX really showed other companies, like Ariane Space, that you don't need 50k + people in three countries and 15+ years to get a new rocket to LEO.
That's very interesting, what were his reasons ? I can see how the price reduction of reusable stages is much more attractive to commercial launches, whereas military launches are much less price sensitive. Military launches could benefit from the mass launch (dozens to hundreds of payloads in a critical week) capability that a dozen reusable launchers give you.
EDIT:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hidden-agenda-between-pentago...
There you go. At least the financing part seems reasonable.
Businesses need to ensure they can make profit before throwing money at huge problems, otherwise they'll just lose money and go out of business. This goes double for problems which have no clear solution. Even if you technically know how to solve a problem, if that technique is not profitable then it's literally not worth solving.
One example: Supersonic Commercial Travel. We have supersonic jets, and we have people who want to travel faster, so why isn't Boeing throwing billions of dollars into supersonic jets? Among other reasons (e.g. they are a nuisance), it's because it's not profitable yet.
Can you say this is true about Tesla and/or SpaceX? It doesn't particularly seem like Elon cared about those things all that much when he launched them.
Hiring a think tank to solve a problem is a brute force search; almost like a random walk in the solution space. That's a huge risk for someone with lots of money and no domain expertise, but perhaps less a risk for an Einstein who has relevant knowledge and skills. Lots of solutions were found in the proverbial garage, and perhaps would have never been the product of a billion dollars and the best MIT grads you could hire. Nonetheless, spontaneity is, by definition, not something you can really throw money at and expect to happen. Even a trillion dollars will not help you find the next Einstein who can solve the exact problem you are working on.
First, Musk is not a domain expert in building rockets (by no means deminishing SpaceX technical achievements) nor in building cars (which is showing itself clearly as of late).
Secondly, most problems one likes to solve are surprisingly easy to solve within the existing realm of knowledge. SpaceX itself is not a real moon shot (figuratively speeking, literally they are) but rather catching up with 60s and 70s space tech. And electrical cars have been around since the 1900s, so again nothing resembling a moon shot. Automotive mass production on the other hand is a very well understood problem space, one Tesla failed exploit so far in any meaningful way so far.
> Secondly, most problems one likes to solve are surprisingly easy to solve within the existing realm of knowledge
"Easy to solve" means something different for a scientist, engineer and businessman. Something which can be theoretically or technically solved may not be practically solved (the supersonic commercial jet example I mentioned earlier). I agree with you that most of the time, it's pretty clear whether or not something will require new science or can be built with existing knowledge, and most business are in the business of doing the latter. I would add that new science is capable of turning impractical solutions into practical ones, and a multi-billion dollar business can spend easily spend unpredictable amounts of money trying to do so -- which makes it a very risky investment.
And yes, Musk is relevant in a discussion about SpaceX and to degree Tesla. Have both endevours been "visionary" to a certain degree? Sure. At SpaceX I'd agrue that it was not Musk himself who designed, say, the Falcon 9 all by himself. Sure his education and background helped a lot.
At Tesla, the approach was disruptive as well. Especially tackling the lacking charging infrastructure as well. That gave him a huge head start, mass-production cost a lot of that head start already. SpaceX profited a lot from vertical integration, Tesla did not. Seeing Musk as some kind of genius in everything he does is doing two things, none of them good: 1) Reinforcing Musks pre-existing sense of superiority (again, based to a not inconsiderable amount in truth) to levels that are hurting and 2) making people an approach that worked once (vertical integration at SpaceX for example) will work elsewhere as well.
This is in effect suppressing diferent opinion and the free exchange of ideas. Reality usually punishes you for that at one point or another. And it would really be a pitty if either one, Musk, Tesla or SpaceX would be in the future.
Focussing on SpaceX specifically, Musk has always been clear that his business goal was to provide space transport at 10% the current cost. There's a story that he'd worked out (based on his existing rocket-building knowledge) that it seemed entirely practical to build a rocket for far less than going rate - on a plane while flying back from Russia. He had a business case before he spent his first dollar.
There's obviously remaining uncertainty but it would be foolish to start a project without some idea of how you'd profit.
No scientist believes that global warming is as bad as you are making it seem.
Yes, it will cause trillions of dollars in damages over the next century or so, as sea levels go up by a couple feet.
But that is hardly the end of the world, as you are making it seem. For example, Miami is not predicted to disappear, in a mere 20 years, as you imply.
The actual negative effects of global warming are closer to being within an order of magnitude of badness to an Iraq war, in a century, than is it to being an extinction event.
I'd call that fairly impactful.
The predictions that I follow are not the pop doomsday predictions made on the internet. It is instead the predictions made by the official government experts on climate change.
Also, all of this is definitely not predicted to happen within 20 years. actually bad effects are predicted more like 200 years+ from now. Which is plenty of time, if you just look at how much the human race has accomplished in the previous 200 years.
Mankind's history is full of periods of technological stagnation and regression.
Don’t pass on crazy predictions like that, it causes people to ignore the real problems a 1 or 2 degree increase will cause.
I want my grandchildren to be able to see their grandchildren grow up on habitable planet.
But if you say that 6 years isn't going to happen in 1000 years and point me to sources then I'd be very happy to hear that.
Nevertheless: And the researchers say this means the probability of the ECS being less than 1.5°C—the Paris Climate Agreement’s super optimistic goal beyond the 2°C goal—is less than 3 percent. The upside, though, is they say this new estimate means the probability of the ECS passing 4.5°C is less than 1 percent.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-dizzying-science-of-climate-...
Thank you for the link.
Back to real life, Google doesn't provide search because it makes the world a better place. Google provides search at the scale that they do because they had a clear business model and an incentive to do so. In an alternate reality, if it turned out nobody clicked ads, then Google would probably not exist at the scale that it does. Ten years ago, some decision to build 50,000 more processing servers would have been rejected by the board because they would have deemed it unprofitable.
The profits a company makes gives them the ability to make a choice on where to expand. If they keep expanding into avenues that do not return profit, they will be given fewer of these choices -- and will eventually go bankrupt.
So atleast someone is playing that game already, same with Ocean Cleanup Drones etc. etc. Lot's of people try to use market forces to save the planet, and Big Tech Co's are investing in that space, but it's not something where one can expect results in less than a decade.
[1] https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/06/07/...
http://carbonengineering.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/CE_A...
SpaceX is doing revolutionary things no doubt. But it has one clear mission compared to other companies.
But time went on and like embalming replaces blood with preservatives, level headed business people took over to maintain the status quo.
No doubt in decades SpaceX will succumb too, and this is why need a constant flow of new companies