Elon and the collective
blog.piekniewski.info
blog.piekniewski.info
Talk about moving the goalposts! They already reuse boosters, and they already give discounts for doing so! And using the shuttle as proof that reusability is not tenable is disingenuous: we know the reasons why the shuttle was expensive and absolutely could design a version where it was not.
Looking through the rest, it's clear this guy has goggles on where he sees everything around Musk in a negative light. There is absolutely stuff to criticize about about Musk, and there for sure exists a cult around him. But I think this guy is in another cult, where Musk can do no right.
One of the cars was supposed to drive itself across the country with no driver intervention, including navigating off highway, by the end of tomorrow.
The rocket as it performs ascent and then descent undergoes some serious accelerations (way higher than a typical plane), while being built extremely delicately to minimize the mass (much tighter margins than an airliner). The rocket engine undergoes much higher stress than a jet engine. Hence all that stress can cause material fatigue and small malfunctions, while the margin for error on a rocket is extremely small. Hence if e.g. it turns out that the risk of mission failure on these reused boosters increases substantially after every use, all the anticipated savings from reusability may be quickly wiped out by one or two lost missions. And it should be noted, that the cargo that goes into space is often MUCH more expensive than the rocket itself.
> when one of the SpaceX boosters will have flown 100 times with between flights maintenance at an economical level, then it will be an actual success
The hope is that the boosters will be able to be reused indefinitely (stated goal of 10+ for block 5 I think?) but they only need to be economical to refly once and they will be successful. There is some argument that they need to refly multiple times in order to recoup development costs, but the reality is that they are already cheaper than the competition on expendable flights.
We know it's already economical, because as stated in parent they have flown reused boosters at a discount.
The concern you quote above is that reused boosters are somehow more likely to fail, but the best indicator that a booster can fly is if it has already flown before. Recovering the boosters has allowed the effect of stresses during flight to be measured, and we have seen them make design modifications in response. It's plausible that this has already improved reliability of all boosters, but more importantly it means that the boosters that have been reflown (or ones like them) have been heavily investigated.
Of course everyone knows that reused boosters need to be dependable, the fact that they're being reflown means that the engineers are at least reasonably confident that they're not going to blow up with the payload on top. Even if a reused booster blew up, you would need to identify that something about it being reused was at fault. If you did, and were not able to fix that issue for some reason, we still have the situation that the boosters are already cheaper in expendable mode than the competition.
First problem is "if". In "if e.g. it turns out that the risk of mission failure...". The problem is - what if not? What if those "much tighter margins" and "much higher stress" nevertheless don't translate into substantially higher - and unpredictable - mission failure risks?
Then all those anticipated savings will just keep accumulating.
Second problem is with costs of cargo. There are reasons why a lot of cargo going to space is expensive. A lot of those reasons are related to the incentive to make cargo working on the first try. You can't go and fix things, saying goes, so you have to make your payload reliable - on the first and often only attempt. That's a good recipe for raising costs.
This is admittedly not the only reason. You can imagine unique enough telescope which would be as hard - relatively speaking - to build on Mauna Kea as it would be to launch to Sun-Earth L2. But even in those cases you could perhaps split the system, build pieces with some spares and assemble them - given that you could actually fly, repeatedly, there.
And for all others less exclusive payloads, that's even more true.
Now, the big reason why we usually don't consider that a viable option is because we used to think - over 60 years of Space Age - that Getting There Is Expensive.
But the whole point of many efforts - of both SpaceX and their likely-minded colleagues elsewhere - is to make getting there cheaper. First somewhat cheaper, then seriously cheaper, and then commodity-level cheaper. Then we won't need to create so unique payloads - because we'll have the benefits of available extra mass, for fuel, for construction margins, for extra systems, for docking, for service flights etc. We'll do building systems more and more as we do it with orbital station - instead of building unique Skylab we launch more specialized ISS modules, and much less of them are so critical to the whole project that we need to spend so much efforts to get them right the first try.
So this quote appears to me missing some important points.
SpaceX has already made numerous modifications to support reuse based on data from previous flights.
Also I think Elon is generally looking at problems we have (traffic congestion, expensive space travel, fossil fuel cars) and trying different things to fix them with his considerable funding. Why is this a problem?
It's much easier to criticize others ideas on a blog then it is to generate and execute ideas yourself.
It started getting lazy a lot sooner than the end. The "debunking" by pointing out that there are some destinations that are more than 30 minutes away? That's not the actual position they were presenting. There is a lot of the world's population which lives in a strategically drawn circle of that travel radius. They know full well that going halfway around will take a bit longer. Also, the issue of flying around bombs is already mitigated by SpaceX's current practices with reusable Falcon boosters. (Namely that on approach, the trajectory is designed such that everything has to go right for the booster to do other than land in the ocean. Also, by the time the ship gets to the end of a flight, it will be mostly empty, so the explosion risk will be much less than 20kt.) The fact that none of that is talked about indicates to me that this is a hit piece.
https://cleantechnica.com/2017/10/07/musks-suborbital-flight...
And for the moment, flights are nowhere near numerous enough to have any effect on CO2 levels.
Also, I think Musk's extensive self-promotion means that public criticism is entirely within bounds. Especially given Musk's dedication to criticizing his critics, like the Thai cave diver he called a pedophile. Or his obsession with people shorting Telsa.
[1] E.g., https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/2018-tesla-model-3-test...
Im really not a Musk fanboy and I really don’t want to come across as anti-market as I recognize the market’s incredible ability to drive some innovation, but I’d like to point out how markets which are intrinsically linked to quarterly growth can often lead to a race to the bottom and can often lead to a serious reluctance to pursue big experiments—the kind of experiments which can take humanity to the next level.
I certainly don’t know the answer but we need a way to incentivize large risks which, when successful, have a high likelihood to reward humanity.
As the above post illustrates, a system which measures success as quarterly growth is disincentivising big projects and may be making us risk averse on big research, the kind of research and risks we very badly need right now.
Big experiments are only good if they need to be big. Otherwise, they're just wasteful. That waste a) raises risk unnecessarily, b) starves others good experiments of capital, and c) makes people less willing to experiment.
Measured in those terms, I think Musk is particularly bad, and it's due to his need to showboat. The manufacturing philosophy, Lean (or TPS) was brought to America right in the building he occupies. But he has made a raft of mistakes, ignoring that history, consuming far more capital and creating more risk than needed to gain any particular learning that Tesla has produced.
In contrast, look at how Toyota tackled the Prius. They also pioneered an entirely new category of eco-friendly car. But they did it quietly and patiently. It's now one of the world's top-selling cars, and sparked widespread interest in greener living. I don't think they've published their capital costs, but looking at their gradual production ramp-up, I suspect they were much better experimenter than Musk has been at Telsa.
I think we’re mostly in agreement regarding Musk himself, I’m no expert on the guy, mostly just casual reading when he makes the news. His showboating has definitely seemed kind of unnecessary, though if I’m being my most charitable, I would say he may be showboating in an effort to inspire people to think and act on these large problems we face. And if I’m at my most uncharitable I might say it’s all an ego stroke. I honestly have no idea where his thinking really is on that spectrum.
Regarding large risky projects, the three that come to mind from Musk are SpaceX, Tesla, and the hyperloop thing. I personally believe all three of these are absolutely worth the risk and that all three are in the general direction of major changes humanity needs to turn.
Making a sexy, luxury, sporty electric car ubiquitous will, in my opinion, be a major step forward. Think of how many suburban folks we could never convince to buy a Prius, solely because its not as sexy as the neighbor’s car, or the masses of hillbillies who don’t need but surely love their massive trucks. Many of those people sneer at a Prius driver much the same way a racist sneers at a brown immigrant. My initial instincts would be to see this sneering and say “Fuck em, they’re just stuck in their ways, they’ll come around when electric is their only option” but I suspect Musk’s approach of building a sexy, fast, and luxurious car will do more to onboard the hillbillies and vanity-prone-keep-up-with-the-Jones-suburbanites than a Prius ever will. Also his public twitter antics with Australia’s power grid was an interesting study on how to snatch the world’s attention and bring awareness to the technology.
SpaceX seems rather important as a concept, to me anyway. But I can definitely understand why some people wouldn’t mark it as a priority.
The hyperloop project is a direction I’d love to see humanity look towards. Not necessarily the specific idea of a hyperloop, but ffs, lets at least start exploring ideas for new modes of mid-distance transportation.
Like I said, I’m no expert on the guy, but I do appreciate a risk taker who takes the risk-taking-urge and channels the energy towards thinking big and attacking some our collective problems.
All of that said, I can definitely understand why he rubs some people the wrong way.
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1115487_xl-hybrids-adds...
And which will be made by Toyota in volume:
https://www.equipmentworld.com/toyota-to-offer-electric-powe...
Moreover, even if you were right, that Tesla's real innovation is marketing electric vehicles to non-Prius audiences, there's no particular reason to think he had to spend $15 billion of other people's money building (and rebuilding) factories to conduct some marketing experiments. It would have been much easier to go the add-on/rebuild route, which has been going on in the auto world for decades. Or he could have just done a design/marketing partnership with some carmaker. It would have cost far less and achieved just as much.
The reason he didn't is his enormous vanity. I think it would have been much better to spend $1-5 billion on an approach like that so we could spend another $10-14 billion on other long-term, longshot projects.
I'm not particularly anti-Musk. I'd like somebody to succeed in the some of the fields he's hyping. I'm just not convinced he's doing it, and I'm concerned his taste for self-aggrandizement will be the cause of landmark failures in some areas where I think we need progress.
As for Tesla whether they succeed or fail it's great for the automotive industry - getting the old oem giants off their wallets and looking over their shoulder is great for the consumers.
For someone who claims to be dedicated to saving the world he (1) is receiving one hell of an executive package and (2) spending a significant amount of time being a rude asshole to critics.
Dude literally is, to quote the author, "the next Steve Jobs, but better". Is he occasionally an idiot? Yes. Is he occasionally an asshole? Also yes. But he's on track to have done not one, not two, but _three_ things others widely consider impossible (SpaceX, Tesla, StarLink) and may even squeeze in 2-3 more of those things in his remaining lifespan. If that's not genius, I don't know what is.
What's the most important for me is that Elon showed people that clean great electric cars are possible (and China already has a higher growth rate in electric cars than Tesla). I'm literally sick of the toxic air pollution that cars make, which is a problem I didn't have when I was younger.
I have no idea why people give him credit for it.
At the same time Elon is making huge mistakes and huge risks as well (and also has borderline lies that sometimes step over the border), so I'm not saying he's perfect, just the best we have right now.
Doesn't that mean he co-founded PayPal?
PayPal clearly existed by October 1999: https://web.archive.org/web/19991013140707/http://paypal.com...
Your web page shows the merger was in March 2000. Musk was pushed out by October 2000.
I'd put mars colonization and hyperloop under the "widely considered impossible" category though.
News to me, link?
Quote: "We were streaming 4k YouTube and playing ‘Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’ from Hawthorne to Redmond in the first week"
When it launches publicly I'd like to get a satellite "modem " and test it myself. Although I'm sure others will before I do.
And in case the author objects to me dissecting his rough sketch of an argument and drawing conclusions about him from it, he should have thought of that before taking 5 sentences spoken in a podcast and assuming he understands what the complete idea someone else has in mind is.
Edit: It looks like you deleted the post I was replying to, but a 737 with 72 tonnes of MTOW does not carry just 17 tonnes of fuel; you can easily look up the product matrix on Wikipedia.
It's a fairly lazy argument, but also one that effectively illustrates the challenge.
...disingenuous because that's a 35% battery mass fraction, and Musk has already revealed that he's assuming a 70-80% battery mass fraction at 400 Wh/kg[1].
So this 'argument' boils down to, "some numbers that Elon says don't work... don't work."
Not to be pedantic, but it was technically impossible to land a rocket booster on a barge. SpaceX did the R&D to make it happen. They made it technically feasible by developing the technology for a task that was previously not technically feasible.
The article started with a biased premise and then worked to prove that.
It's a company running in the red. Unfortunately EBITDA is still negative (much less earnings). The jury is still out on whether or not SpaceX's approach is in fact commercially viable.
I know first hand this statement is absolutely false. In fact, a GNC engineer in a Large Aerospace Organization That You Would Recognize asserted to me that a booster landing on a barge is impossible. And strangely, he said it just a few weeks before it was accomplished and after SpaceX had demonstrated land landing.
There's a bit of emotion in this post, but that's alright.
How can you say this much about an unreleased product to which you have zero insight on technical details? This is even more bs than if the tiles never come to market...
Also, you can’t call a machine-bored tunnel a “tube” and expect to be taken seriously. Questioning lofty, sci-fi-is goals? Fine and reasonable. Gaslighting actual, tangible products? Sounds shady.
Other companies already have solar roof tiles on the market.
http://www.dyaqua.it/invisiblesolar/_en/
They are popular in areas of Europe where architecture is regulated. Sure they are more expensive and less efficient, but there is a niche market for it.
This info is summarized in this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...
One booster seems to have been reused in just 2 and a half months (launched July 25, 2018 and October 8, 2018), compared to a new-production time of about 18-24 months from aluminum stock to launch. So a ~tenth the time of production and so probably about a tenth the labor (for the first stage).
As far as slowing down production...
...SpaceX's production rate of new boosters has been roughly flat while their launch rate has increased, so this effect has not occurred. In fact, you can make a good argument that the primary benefit of reuse for SpaceX is that it has allowed them to squeeze a lot more launches (double) out of the same production capacity. They launched cores 23 times (3 at once for Falcon Heavy) in 2018, and only 10 of those were new. In 2017, it was 18 total launches, 5 with reused cores and 13 new.
SpaceX can switch resources between upper stages and first stages, too, and eventually mothball first stage production or convert it to BFR production, thus giving them a benefit from reuse that you might not consider from a first-pass analysis.
Only if you assume the market demand is constant. We already know that's not true.
They still have to build expendable second stages for the falcon 9 and that uses practically the same engine (it's optimized for vacuums). Also, I doubt rocket companies gain much from economies of scale considering how low launch rates are so scaling back production probably doesn't increase costs much.
tl;dr - Recoup on development costs is slow right now, but the post-development economics of rocket reuse are a big game change. Space shuttle comparison is flawed because both the nature of the system and the need for teardown were significantly impacted by being manned.
Comparing tunnels to planes is weird too - the target is an order of magnitude greater passenger throughput at a majorly reduced energy cost. The speed comparison is superficial.
On Twitter there are people whose existence is only to bring anything about Elon/Tesla into a negative light and whip up storms in teacups. Sure, he's probably not a saint but man that must be tiring.
So tiring that he falsely accuses a critic of being a pedophile.
He can't control his emotions.
- "Rockets are irreconcilably more dangerous than planes": That might actually be true, at least for many more decades. Rockets are at least 10^5 times more dangerous than planes and the failure modes are much, much worse. That doesn't mean that SpaceX can't revolutionize space transport for satellites, unmanned commercial endeavors, and limited manned missions. A tenfold decrease in the cost of space access would make entire new industries economically feasible, even after accounting for risk. SpaceX is currently kicking ass, and I have no reason to doubt they will continue at it.
- "Earth-to-Earth passenger rockets are insane": Yes, they may well be. I did a detailed analysis here: https://www.bzarg.com/p/some-numbers-about-the-spacex-passen... As before, safety needs revolutionary changes, probably several times over. Economics and engineering will be very difficult, and the hardest part-- still totally unsolved-- is making something that can withstand re-entry many dozens of times without being totally rebuilt.
- "The advertised orbital travel times are wrong": This is likely garbage. The details of flight navigation are something SpaceX has down pat and would not reasonably lie to themselves or the public about. Without a proper orbital analysis to back up this claim, I would not give it much credence. The point about transport to and from the launch pad adding time is likely valid, though-- his figure of a 5 mile journey from city center would actually be more like 10 miles, minimum. In a ferry this would be multiple dozens of minutes, which would add up at either end, especially once you account for travel to the ferry terminal itself. 30-40 minutes would be launch-to-landing time only, not door-to-door.
- Colonizing mars: Mars being inhospitable is a solvable problem. Radiation can be avoided by living underground, and temperature and pressure can be maintained inside a habitat. The unanswered question is economics and logistics-- It would require many billions of dollars of infrastructure-- flight costs not included-- to get a colony going. SpaceX isn't working on these logistics; their attitude is "someone else will figure that out." It's not clear what pot of gold would drive that initial investment, and by whom.
- "Extinction danger is a bad reason to go to Mars" - Agree that this is mostly BS; even the worst Earth is much more comfortable than Mars. But I would say there are plenty of other, better philosophical reasons to try-- What is the economic and social value of an entire inhabited planet? We should treat the failure to pursue it as an opportunity cost of that magnitude.
- "We should go to the moon first" - Going to the moon is not mutually exclusive with going to other places in the solar system.
- "Hyperloop is infeasible" - Maybe. I'll believe it when I see it, but happy to let them try.
- "Neuralink is garbage" - Neuroscientists I've spoken to would love to see more advanced neural probes. Money toward that problem could reasonably do a lot of good and make a lot of progress. Right now we can get about 100 neuron readings from a small area, and this is already used in humans with various degrees of paralysis to control artifical limbs. We are a long way from a "seamless brain-computer interface", and it is probably 10 times harder than Elon imagines-- I doubt he understands it-- and healthy skepticism is in order. But investment in the problem would give real returns, especially for the quality of life of disabled people. A limited consumer brain-computer interface within the next three decades is probably not terribly outlandish if resources are dedicated to making it happen. A hell of a lot can happen in 30 years.
- "Boring company is dumb" - Solution to mass transit? I agree that the idea is probably not very thoroughly thought through. Are 10x gains in the efficiency of tunnel drilling possible? I could believe it. If Elon and his company have to convince themselves that subterranean packet-routed car skates are the future, only to arrive at mass transit later on, so be it if that results in making infrastructure 10 times cheaper to construct.
- "Self-driving is dangerous" - Self driving does not have to be impeccable to be a benefit-- it only has to be better than the average driver, which is often quite bad in some pretty trivial/preventable ways. About 50,000 Americans die in cars per year, so there is a lot of room for improvement and a lot of potential good. As a society, we should try to make this work. I do agree that Elon way oversells its capability, and that's dangerous/disingenuous. I also think that many car localization and navigation problems are very solveable, but Tesla does not seem to be solving them effectively-- see examples of autopiloted cars hitting dividers earlier this year. The hard part is getting machines to participate in the nonverbal social environment that is a road full of human drivers... but Tesla seems to be struggling on problems several tiers below this.
- Problems in Tesla management - From the outside, it looks as if Musk's stubbornness may have lead to his underlings being unable to convery to him what is realistic to accomplish, resulting in repeated missed deadlines, as predicted by the people who appear to have been oustered for saying so. He does not seem like someone who it is easy to give bad news to, which means he and his company are going to have a hard time seeing and reacting to peril. I do not side fully with the shorts, though; Tesla is positioned to completely change the auto industry. I just hope they can execute without shooting themselves in the foot.
- Elon's childish toxicity - Completely agree. Not behavior becoming of a leader at his level, let alone any emotionally well-adjusted adult. It's a huge liability, c.f. the SEC fiasco, which Musk still doesn't seem to comprehend. Musk supporters frustratingly seem to attribute his companies' success as being due to these flaws instead of in spite of them.