I’m not sure if that’s standard procedure but it does seem a bit unfair to add double work for everyone else.
If electric transportation is not part of the solution, you're right about that being a distraction.
I'm very hopeful that this will get trough to people. Someday.
There are many things, that come to my mind with this statement, but I will just say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Because yes, he did gave momentum to the conservative car makers to get them to move their asses. But cars are only responsible for a tiny fraction of CO2 - and the whole green technology was kind of a thing before, with lots and lots of research about it all around the world. And implementing that research. Long before Musk was known outside a small bubble.
It is just, that we are increasingly starting to see the effects of climate change that makes people act.
I respect Musk for what he contributed. But I feel that glorifying him in this way, puts down all the other work in a unbalanced way.
"Bezos is literally the greedy avatar of Edison in this race, who's only advances are only made through parasitic monopolies, tyranny, and his own ego."
And I really hate to defend Bezos, but I do not think the success of Amazon comes out of a parasitic ego. But rather smart and efficient logistics. Incorporating robots and automatisation wherever possible. While exploiting the workforce, yeah, but Musk has not really a great record in that realm either.
Road vehicles account for 5% of global CO2 emissions.
That's not a tiny fraction IMO. It's not huge, but road transportation alone (not counting shipping) account for 5X as much CO2 aviation.
I mean cars are very visible, so any movement there helps with the public image that things can change.
But he still was only one player in a comparitivly small segment, when green technology is so much bigger than just "cars". And "green cars" was and is much more than just "Tesla".
And such is the case here. But Tesla is not just going after cars. They’re going after the whole energy production/transportation complex, which really is the biggest single contributor to greenhouse gases.
It just so happens that cars was the weak point that could be most easily attacked, and Tesla went for it. But there is much more on the table than just cars.
There is. And I do consider Tesla to be a driving force for necessary revolutionary change.
I just do not agree, that they are the sole reason we had the change and momentum we are witnessing.
Before Tesla, "green cars" were basically hybrids like the Prius. Tesla legitimized purely electric cars as an actual alternative.
Direct emissions are in single digits, but what about decades of maintenance that requires oil changes, parts production, transmission changes, etc?
An EV is much simpler than an ICE vehicle, has lesser metal and requires fewer moving parts.
Metal production is highly carbon intensive. Not to mention recycling and reusing.
As well as leaving out stuff like: AC, car-grade entertainment computers (look at SV superfunds sites for how great chip production is), electrical seat-actuation, windows and ...
"Future ozone losses from unregulated rocket launches will eventually exceed ozone losses due to chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which stimulated the 1987 Montreal Protocol banning ozone-depleting chemicals, said Martin Ross, chief study author from The Aerospace Corporation in Los Angeles"
"If left unregulated, rocket launches by the year 2050 could result in more ozone destruction than was ever realized by CFCs."
I think their, and the government's, motivations should be under heavy scrutiny right now. They're both externalising costs. The damage needs to be priced in. I think there's a lot of untapped research to be explored for alternative ways of lobbing things in to orbit.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090331153014.h...
I mean, yeah, if every billionaire tackles a fraction, then we saved ourselves?
> I respect Musk for what he contributed. But I feel that glorifying him in this way, puts down all the other work in a unbalanced way.
The thing is, beyond this HN bubble, most people need a leader of some sort. He takes credit for everything (and also the blame if things go wrong). I'd have a more funnier persona than Elon, but his cyberpunk style sells me too.
> While exploiting the workforce, yeah, but Musk has not really a great record in that realm either.
No one and no country does.
Isn't Musk the guy who crashed bitcoin after making a pile of money claiming it was dirty? How much pollution does just one of his mega-sized moon-mission rockets eject? Just for his personal (yes) entertainment.
Rich sportsmen buy expensive cars. Super- rich businessmen play with rocket launches.
Rocket business is even riskier. The market is small and is absurdly difficult to enter. Musk almost got bankrupted when Spacex failed to reach orbit after three tries in 2008. He went all in.
Of the current crop of newly launched rocket companies -- Rocket Lab, Astra, Firefly, Relativity -- do you spot any super rich businessmen?
You can see a map of their global wind and solar farms here: https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/the-cloud
His big trucks deliver a few packages daily to one, or two, households.
Those electric fleet commercials seem like PR BS.
If I ever do see an electric truck barreling up my street; I bet they will be heavily subsidized by our tax money in the form of credit.
What is he doing that's green?
That cowboy hat was pure ego, and vanity. Two bald men on a carnival ride might not be good for his single sexy time?
All the money in the world, and you will never know which lady of the night truly loves you? He should have pulled a Zuckerburg.
20 people in your neighborhood take a 2.5 ton car to the store and back, or one truck drives around multiple neighborhoods and drops off packages. I don't think delivery is a clear cut loss
Fuel spent per item is more or less the same upto the nearest warehouse, whether that is Amazons or walmart.
Fuel spent per item from walmart to home is more because you have one car going to amazon for the item and a bunch of others. However, with Amazon, it is one truck delivering hundreds to a neighbourhood.
Ao, in almost all cases, delivery by Amazon is better for the environment, or at worst, same as that of alternatives.
I don't think regulators should force companies to be conservative in unrelated technical development when it doesn't have any material impact on others.
The Starlink constellations in this proposal are large, and any future development by others will have to account for the orbits of these potential constellations.
That's 30k new objects to plan for, and with two configurations at play, that means accounting for essentially 60k objects in motion, effectively doubling the work someone would have to do to plan their deployments.
Anyways, it is my impression that space is kinda big..
This is, at best, misleading. The objects that have to keep clear of each other are (effectively) points, and they can share orbits with different phasing. The most obvious real-world example of multiple objects sharing an orbit is geostationary orbit.
So the obvious case for geostationary orbits is significantly better than for LEO.
Nevertheless, LEO isn't bad. A height of 400 km translates into a circle of about 42,655 km (orbital length of ISS according to NASA). That is enough to park several satellites in without them being parked bumper to bumper.
Because it encourages squatting and low-value rent seeking from the first people to get there.
It's not like Starlink is,going to exhaust all viable orbits.
These constellations aren't stationary, they move based on their orbital parameters, and to properly predict their orbits, you'll have to account for their future movement for the next while (depending on expected lifetime and how close they come to your intended orbit).
Saying this is like buying a plot of land is missing the level of work and complexity that goes into orbital mechanics.
If you need to illuminate the same area of the earth, which would make sense if you're also looking to serve the same populations, then you'll need to either be at a different altitude or have neighboring or intersecting orbits, which will need to handle the orbits of all other objects. That's why the level of complexity increases a fair bit when you need to plan for two large-scale configurations.
No, but it is worth noting that there are about 7000 satellites in orbit right now, of which a little over half are actually operational[1]. Starlink intends to increase that number 10 fold by launching 30,000 of their own. It will have a significant impact on which orbits are available, it will cause extra work for everyone who operates in space, and (in my opinion) the benefit of "broadband internet everywhere on Earth" isn't so big that people shouldn't think about whether it's worth it. Especially given the fact there are other competitors in the market who'll be wanting to launch their own constellations too.
We could end up with many tens of thousands of internet provider satellites, and the market probably isn't big enough for more than a couple of companies providing that service. At the very least there should be rules demanding that each company makes their satellites interoperable with all their competitors, so if one company withdraws from the market someone else can take over their orbiting hardware so we're not left with immense amounts of space junk.
[1] https://www.geospatialworld.net/blogs/how-many-satellites-ar...
This.
Also, I would expect that there should be some kind of worldwide organism supervising this nowadays, not just the US FCC. I mean, LEO is a whole Earth thing, not just one nation's.
and starlink is in low LEO
Which just requires choosing a different shell (altitude). It takes me more effort to write this post.
It's more work during launch and orbit raise, but at that point you don't have to worry about hypothetical or future satellites, only the existing ones. Space is big, it's easy to avoid millions of satellites, as long as they're actively powered and you know where they are.