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Comment by faitswulff | Hacker News Reader

Mentioning SpaceX and autonomous Teslas in the same breath makes me wonder if the Starlink satellite internet program is related to his plans for self-driving cars.

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There's synergy between everything he works on, it seems to be a natural extension to his flow of thinking - expanding further into the next biggest market. It's the ESSO (gas company) model: they needed a truck to transport fuel, so they designed a truck to manufacture, and sell it to others too, and so on.

Can I coin the phrase full-stack entrepreneur?

I like it. Sustained!

Absolutely. You just need to go back in time to before July 2016, at least.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-full-stack-entrepreneur

No problem for a full stack entrepreneur to do that.

There is already "vertical integration".

SpaceX is vertical integration taken literally.

Technically, they integrate horizontally, then the rocket is tilted vertical.

Is that what we are calling Rockefeller this century

Don't forget he wants to bore underground cities on Mars. https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-use-boring-company-tunnelin...

The boring company could provide the tech to build tunnels on Mars. And with the minimal atmosphere you'll have a Hyperloop. Hardly a coincidence.

Oh my god.

I literally just now got the joke: the boring company.

Because they bore tunnels.

Good morning :)

Apparently it took over a year for the coffee to kick in! I just always shrugged and thought it was a cutesy name for a company that did something boring like dig tunnels. I cannot believe that pun escaped me for so long. :)

I wear the hat everyday - a good conversation starter. Some people guess it's an accounting company name.

They are aiming for 1223 kmph (760 mph) on Earth, I wonder how that differs with lower gravity.

Please tell me that is not what Musk really thinks he's doing...

Nobody is boring cities on Mars with diggers designed to bore small sewer tunnels. Boring Co still has a long way to go to demonstrate basic competence at digging small tunnels and this is an area where obstacles increase with scale.

Maybe it is rather to create entrance tunnels into existing caves. Because of low gravity on Mars, lava tubes are expected to be enormous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_lava_tube

I suspect tunnels are plan B for earth.

It makes sense to pursue technologies that can pivot from expanding humanity's potential to simply guaranteeing survival. But only the former is what people are going to want to hear about, while the latter is where we seem to be heading.

In the software world, we call that NIH syndrome.

The difference between NIH and vertical integration is in the result. When accounting for cost of effort, does it end up inferior to some third-party solution, or does it allow for a more efficient business process?

Most of the time, you're right: one is better off going with a solution put together by some other group who made it their core expertise. But if you keep bumping into limits, and have the resources to throw at the problem, you can develop a compelling solution in-house.

It's a bit like the tradeoff (for enterprises) between buying a turn-key solution and going with an opensource project. The latter is often more expensive (once you factor in the cost involved in figuring everything out) BUT will end up much more taylored to your needs—especially if your usage involves controbuting patches to the project.

> self-driving cars.

Why not just "cars"? Teslas with or without FSD capability already use Internet connections for OTA updates, maps, audio. Other manufacturers will likely follow sooner or later. That's a good outlook for any global Internet provider... I'd offer maps, audio services to other car makers in his position, wouldn't you?

Starlink will require a phased array antenna that is pizzabox-sized and also not cheap (in fact, making them cheap enough to make the business case worthwhile is a major challenge). Using 3G, LTE or 5G seems like the vastly cheaper and easier option.

And if 3G, LTE, or 5G is not an option? (It isn't to most of the world.)

Could you please go more in detail about what makes the antenna expensive? Why isn't the cost solved by metal 3d printing?

EDIT: Sorry for asking a question I guess, what's so wrong I'm getting so many downvotes?

Metal additive manufacturing has never solved a cost problem AFAIK. The problem it solves is the manufacture of parts that have physical characteristics that are difficult to machine, or in the case of Inconel, materials that are simply difficult to machine period. Neither of those characteristics are going to be a problem for the Starlink antennas.

> The problem it solves is the manufacture of parts that have physical characteristics that are difficult to machine

I thought this is the case. Thank you for answering!

A small series (when producing other tooling would be too expensive; a single, bespoke part would be the extreme thereof) or ones that would be impossible to machine otherwise are candidates for additive manufacturing.

Mass production is usually less suited for that.

Not sure how their antennas are constructed - if they are fabbed on a PCB, often at microwave frequencies you need exotic substrate material (e.g., Rogers) to cut down on losses. Those substrates are expensive compared to FR4 (fiberglass common in PCBs).

I don't believe the physical antenna itself is difficult or expensive. The expensive part is all the digital phase control circuits that are needed to actively steer the antenna beam. A electronically scanned array antenna is actually a whole lot of little antennas fed by an equal number of phase control electronics. The phase control electronics need to be small and inexpensive (since there are a lot of them) and also able to accurately adjust the phase of a very high frequency signal (24++GHz). That is difficult.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_electronically_scanned...

Example pulled from a google search: https://www.fairviewmicrowave.com/sma-8-bit-programmable-pha...

$12,000 (less in quantity ;-)

Aha! Thank you.

> Using 3G, LTE or 5G seems like the vastly cheaper and easier option.

Starlink isn't meant to compete with that. It's main target markets are remote areas than are not connected by fiber, planes, and boats which are all currently serviced by low bandwidth and high latency geo-synchronous satellites.

All vaporware is theoretically related.

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