Blue Origin manufactured solar cell prototype from lunar regolith simulants
blueorigin.com
blueorigin.com
Another big question is how much mass needs to be shipped up from earth to manufacturer solar cells. Dopants will still need to be shipped up as they cannot currently be obtained with this method, but the mass per area solar cell is practically nothing. More concerning are the electrodes for their electrolysis cell.
They are literally electrolyzing molten lava. Molten silicates are a very good solvent and the hot oxidizing environment of the anode is quite harsh. We do have materials which can withstand this environment, but how long will they last? How much power can the whole set up produce and would it be more than landing the setup's weight in solar cells?
Regardless this is still a major advance. Materials processing of this level suitable for the lunar environment has not been previously demonstrated.
[0]https://www.niac.usra.edu/files/library/meetings/annual/jun0...
[0]http://www.greenrhinoenergy.com/solar/technologies/pv_manufa... [1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00380....
It's not like we have huge space constraints for small starts, I reckon?
The real challenge with solar power on the Moon remains the two-week day/night cycle, which means either massive batteries (impractical) or awkward polar cliff locations to minimize the hit.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LADEE/news/lunar-atmosphe...
Now you just need to bring big enough batteries to survive 14 days in a row with no sun.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance#Irradiance_on...
A 10 ton rock, lifted up to 50m high, will store up to 810M Joules at moon gravity
Wrong prefix? I think you meant 810K Joules.
For Earth gravity: 10,000 kg times 9.8 m/s^2 times 50 m = 4.9 megajoules, 1.36 kilowatthours. (Anker sells a 2.04 KWh battery pack for US$1999: https://www.anker.com/products/a1780 The manual says it masses 30.5 kg, so that's a cool 491.88x difference in mass power density.)
Again, that's for Earth gravity. Lunar gravity: 10,000 kg times 1.62 m/s^2 times 50 m = 0.81 megajoules, 0.225 kilowatthours. (2,976x difference in mass power density vs the lithium battery.)
Gravity storage isn't economical on Earth, and it's really not economical on the Moon, where gravity is lighter.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/34025/moon-polar-d...
There's no shortage of places to put solar panels, and nothing that will reduce the amount of light getting to them (except the rotation of the Moon itself), so actual efficiency isn't that important.
This... may or may not matter. When it comes to solar power on the Moon, there are significant advantages and some serious disadvantages. The most obvious advantage is that there is no weather and no atmosphere. This means a lunar solar cell has way more potential power generation than an terrestrial solar cell. The big disadvantage is the long day night cycle. The Moon is tidally locked with Earth with an orbit of 28 days so that's basically 14 days of day and 14 days of night.
You have to work around this problem with batteries, which add a ton more mass, having panels (and settlements most likely) at the poles or running a network of solar cells around the Moon with power cables.
Settling the poles makes sense as this is where the most water is.
But having a network of panels probably makes a lot of sense too. For one, aluminium is abundant so making electrical cables should be entirely possible.
> Another big question is how much mass needs to be shipped up from earth to manufacturer solar cells.
Yes, this is a huge factor, probably way more than efficiency is. Or at least we should look at power generation per unit mass shipped from EArth.
They can make batteries out of moon rocks [1], use fly wheels, melt lava, etc. None super efficiently, but as a start.
It's only a problem if you want to use the energy for systems that must be always available. If you intend to use it to power a factory, let's say to make more panels, you just operate 50% of time that, without clouds or any atmosphere filter, is actually better than on Earth.
For continuous support, take a nuclear reactor or build a wired net near a pole so when night comes to one station, you receive power from another.
Oh, of course this is terrible now. It would have a very, very large required scale to come out ahead compared to just shipping power or power generation some other way (if this is true at any scale). It is also surely not fully baked yet.
On the other hand... it's a notable step towards being able to build "big" in space and might be worth doing to learn more about the practical aspect even if it's higher risk and more costly than shipping a bunch of PV.
The bigger problem is how practical is it to use PV at all on much of the moon.
I think part of the solution will involve using "regular stuff" (which can be sourced from lunar atoms) like batteries.
Don't use lithium batteries to continuously power an oxygen generator. Instead, have an enlarged oxygen generator and store half the flow for use at night.
Don't use lithium batteries to power a heater at night, instead "pre-charge" heat in a dirt thermal mass during the day.
Don't use lithium batteries to power a continuous CO2 scrubber, instead use a liquid amine scrubber and recharge the fluid tanks during the day.
Etc etc
Obviously you need to do in-depth tradeoff math for each case, but my napkins say "the system is the battery" wins in many cases.
Storing 14+ days worth of <everything> is going to mean massive amounts of storage.
...which is why you want to be extra careful in how mass-efficient you are storing it.
A tank of liquid oxygen masses only a few percent of its contents, and its contents store more chemical energy per mass than a lithium battery. Later on, insulated tanks are vastly easier to produce from lunar materials vs batteries. These are all nice leverage multipliers.
MEA amine solution is made of 80% lunar-abundant elements, and stores 22% its mass in CO2.[0] Importing the amine, tanks, and extra equipment requires under 3 kg/person for energy storage, vs 34 kWh[1] of batteries.
Nuclear is a popular notion, but the real-world economics don't seem to favor it. Effectiveness beats elegance,[2] apparently.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amine_gas_treating
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/Gellett_Solid...
Making liquid oxygen (as opposed to gaseous oxygen) is not a terribly efficient process.
The energy for compression or liquefaction isn't necessarily a show-stopper, it just works into the total energy efficiency of the storage system. Compression is nice because practical isothermal compressors are now being demonstrated.[0]
Both liquefaction and compression require cooling. I do think it probably makes sense to do the thermal storage trick in reverse also, storing up a bank of "cold" at night to be used during the day. The thermal radiator panels still provide (derated) cooling in the day, but the thermal storage pool time-shifts the natural oversupply of cooling power at night.
[0] https://newatlas.com/good-thinking/carnot-centrifugal-air-co...
Care to elaborate? As an interested layperson I always thought the major factor for losses in open air was radiation into space. As such an atmosphere's thermal mass would be benfitial, no?
A tactic I've used in Dyson Sphere Program is to build an equatorial belt around the entire moon so that some % of panels are always in sunlight. On our actual moon that would be approximately 7.2m panels, assuming they were a single tightly packed row of 5' x 3' panels.
This sounds like an insane amount but several of the largest solar installations on Earth each have more than that, with Bhadla Solar Park in India having over 10 million[1]. It's a dumb solution but is one which requires no shipment of energy storage. If you're able to mass manufacture panels in-situ, it may be simpler to do something like that than to ship large batteries to the Moon in order to use them as storage.
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/11/3/india-solar-rene...
If you take the linked page at face value, it explicitly states:
> without special substances brought from Earth.
(I suspect, like most press releases, some important details aren't being provided. Maybe dopants aren't considered "special substances")
If it's not included, then the extra energy available could raise the output to an equivalent of a 12-18% efficiency cell on Earth's surface, wouldn't it?
[1] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/EnergyBalance/pag...
If it can be automated you could essentially launch space craft factories that land and build solar panels prior to humans arriving. Far fetched but neat to think about. Approaching von Neumann probe territory
You likely still have to send along a whole lot of electronics pars because making those on the spot would be difficult.
They wouldn't use pure ice. But in cold places, with ice mixed with some other materials you can actually make quite good materials. Consider that in most places gravity is much lower then on earth so it doesn't need to be carbon fiber to be useful.
Yes things still have mass but if you are building a robot that moves around there is a big difference in what kind of quality structural materials you need for the robot to be viable.
Part of the research that would go into such project would be to look at what local resources are, and how to make them into useful materials. For example, using ice in combination with some filler material has been shown to be quite usable in cold temperatures.
The exact materials you would use depend on where you would want to use this kind of system. Maybe in the far future these kind of system would look around to analyses the environment and make smart choices about what materials to use to build themselves.
Our moon is something like 45% silica on the surface. That is a fuckton of silicon. Step one is definitely making a solar panel factory, and then using that power to smelt aluminum, iron, titanium, etc. It seems to me that the moon would make for a good floating semiconductor fab, and eventually, data center. It would be great for making large structures for spacecraft, since the materials are right, and the lower gravity makes it much cheaper to get the parts into space.
It doesn't make sense for a ton of people to live there, since we would have to bring all of our own carbon, which is kind of important for biological life.
Is there a technology available now or soon that can scrub carbon out of the ambient air and capture that in an easy to reuse medium?
(edit: nevermind, I was confused about the submarine thing, the user "idlewords" below has a lot of good commentary about this)
At any given moment, any human is about 18% carbon. Carbon is also pretty important in *carbo*hydrates. Any plants that we would grow would need a ton of carbon. It can be done, but any moon colony will basically always be dependent on getting extra carbon from Earth, so it can never be "self sufficient" in the way that Mars can eventually be.
It is kind of funny that on Earth, we're obsessed with capturing and burying as much carbon as possible, when it's going to be an incredibly valuable resource on the moon, assuming that a bunch of people are gong to want to live there.
Everything is easy to do in theory. Recycling carbon in practice is very, very hard if you don't have plants to help you.
Additionally, flame is very restricted on a sub. You wouldn't be using any sort of methane to cook.
https://www.answers.com/Q/What_fuel_does_a_submarine_use_for...
Going CO2 -> C + O2 -> (+ 2x H2) -> CH4...
But the combustion of CH4 is CH4 + 2x O2 -> CO2 + 2x H2O.
The loss of O2 to water means that each time through this removes O2 from the atmosphere which would need to be replenished.
That ignores all the energy losses in the process and requirements...
As to the uboat - https://uboat.net/men/foodstuffs.htm
> The galley was located on the starboard side, between the chiefs' quarters and the wardroom, and was made up of three hotplates and two small electric ovens. It also contained a refrigerator, self-heating soup kettle, provision lockers, and an enamel sink with hot and cold fresh water and hot salt water.
https://maritime.org/tour/cm.php?pano=nr
https://maritime.org/pres/potrack/pots.php
> The custom built pots were designed fit the Edison Type B range/oven built used on the fleet boats.
https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/pig-boats-fleet-boat...
> Fleet subs of the Gato (SS 212) and Balao (SS 285) classes boasted sizable freezer and refrigerator compartments, and their galleys, though diminutive, were well-equipped, generally with two griddles, a deep-fat fryer, two electric ovens, a hefty electric mixer, and a two-gallon coffee urn. Fleet boats usually boasted an ice cream maker as well, even when lack of space in the galley or crew mess made it necessary to install the machine among the bunks in the crew's berthing space.
(Note the 'deep-fat fryer' bit and the modern sub https://youtu.be/bPJUVKizh90?t=364 )
Do note that submarines were built by the Electric Boat Company founded in 1899. Electric systems were in use since the start.
Well you're missing half the equation on the CO2->CH4 process. To get the 2 H2 molecules you'll need to split 2 H2O in all likelihood so you're already getting the 2 O2 from splitting the CO2 and then the 2 H2O so in theory it's oxygen neutral.
That said it's a silly process to go through because there's already absolutely massive electrical supplies available on submarines to power the engines while submerged or to recharge those batteries while on the surface in the case of old subs or modern diesels. Why add a whole "mini" sabatier reactor just to cause more problems with your air quality and recycling when you can just cook electric and toss the captured CO2 overboard.
Neat info about the UBoats. Wonder if they were allowed to use the electric ranges while submerged. UBoats exist in this fascinating in between period where they were both surface and subsurface ships because of the limitation on things like their speed underwater.
As to the ranges while submerged...
https://www.wearethemighty.com/popular/life-aboard-wwii-subm...
The serving of food was often times also dictated by restrictions on the submarines movements. Submarines were under strict orders not to surface during the day when they were within 500 miles of a Japanese airfield in order to avoid aerial observation and attack. In the early days of the war in the Pacific this meant just about everywhere as the Japanese were in control of vast swaths of territory and ocean.
This meant that the submarines stayed submerged during the day and only surfaced at night. In order to compensate, many crews flipped their schedules doing their normal daily routines at night. The crews called this “going into reverse.” This allowed the crew to take advantage of the time the sub was on the surface.
This was important because once the submarine dove after running its diesel engines for hours, the boat would quickly heat up. The engine room temperature could soar to over 100 degrees before spreading throughout the sub. Combine that with the 80 men working and breathing and the air inside could quickly become foul.
The men knew the air was getting bad when they had trouble lighting their cigarettes due to the lack of oxygen (oh the irony).
---
That leads me to https://web.archive.org/web/20170121073605/http://www.public...
Much of a submariner's limited physical activity consequently took place after dark. Some crews still adhered to the standard meal schedule for a U.S. warship at sea, but others turned night into day, adapting meal times to their upside-down shipboard routine.13 The crews called this "going into reversa." Breakfast was served at nightfall. Lunch was dished out at midnight. And dinner, the heaviest meal, came at dawn. The "reversa" timetable was particularly suited to the oppressive conditions on the antiquated S-boats, with their lack of air conditioning. Cool night air entering the surfaced submarine not only reinvigorated the sweating, oxygen-deprived crewmen but helped counter the additional heat of a busy galley.
Even on air conditioned fleet subs, some kitchen crews chose to do heavy cooking at night, when the submarine would not be buttoned up and the ventilation system could whisk cooking smoke along with other foul odors right out of the boat.14 Having the boat open to the atmosphere was particularly helpful for dissipating the intense heat of baking. USS Gudgeon (SS 211), which conducted the first submarine war patrol out of Pearl Harbor, continued to serve meals at standard Navy hours throughout the patrol, but her galley crew put off baking until after dark.15 A bold submarine commander might keep his boat on the surface for all or part of the day, but the galley crew could never count on that, and a boat exposed on the surface in daylight was more likely to make a crash dive at any moment, not an ideal situation for anyone trying to do something complicated in the galley.
...
Bad cooks could certainly decimate a potential meal. Battle could do the same. Whenever Bullhead's deck guns fired, Piatt's muffins and cakes invariably collapsed into lifeless deflation.25 A maritime cooking disaster occurred on USS Harder (SS 257) in 1942 when torpedomen flooded the forward tubes with far too much water. Result: an unexpected nosedive of many fathoms. The crew quickly regained control, and the boat leveled off. A safety inspection revealed no injuries or damage — until it got to the galley. There stood Ship's Cook and Acting Commissary Steward Thomason, "ankle-deep in mashed potatoes garnished with a glittering sea of what had been steaks, gravy and fried eggs."26 In all probability, the meal that eventually got served was a mixture of tinned ham, sugar, salt, water, and modified potato starch, with a little dash of sodium nitrate to preserve its rosy color.
---
That article is a good read for some of the stories. It appears that cooking was preferably done on the surface - not for battery reasons but rather air / veneration. Also not the USS Harder was cooking while firing torpedoes - suggesting submersed operation.
https://www.wisconsinmaritime.org/programs-and-events/think-...
> April 6: Food Stories of WWII
> Ever wondered what the food was like in WWII? During this talk, we will explore common meals for those on the Wisconsin home front as well as submariners at sea.
They even have a Sub BNB (through Air BNB) https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/44643094
Food https://youtu.be/bPJUVKizh90
Air https://youtu.be/g3Ud6mHdhlQ (MEA and LIOH for CO2, electrolysis and "candles" for oxygen)
Toilet https://youtu.be/SYFuA3xnkUE?t=985
Nothing is "recycled" as such - and certainly not any of the carbon (you're not eating the carbon captured from MEA or LIOH... or your waste).
> The story follows Trish, the sole survivor of a terrible crash landing on the Moon. After regaining her senses, she contacts Earth and learns that it will be thirty days before a rescue mission can reach her. In the meantime, she depends on a wing-like solar panel to provide power to her suit's recycling facilities, and lunar night is approaching.
But yes, real-time video chat and gaming will be kinda hard. Full disclosure, Google asked me this on a PM interview once: "knowing these lasers exist, how would you design an internet for Mars astronauts, and what limitations would it have?"
And yes, I failed. So take my words with a grain of salt. (Though I actually felt like this was the one question I nailed.)
[1]: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220913005840/en/Aal...
Yes, and those usecases that "could tolerate it" will be a super-minority of usecases compared with usecases that "prefer moon-local latency".
Specifically for moon-local activities:
For example, the moon will likely host the largest telescopes and other measurement devices. Think JWST but 10^5x bigger! Including other measurement devices important for deep space exploration.
It'll be significantly cheaper to use AWS' moon-region (with 3 AZs of redundancy) for storage and processing, rather than shipping the data back to Earth for initial processing. Earth based users of the data can get local read-replicas of the post-processed data, with the ability to request transfer of the raw files.
It will also likely host the largest hadron collider, fusion research lab, etc. Anything that requires lots of land, few humans, and would otherwise disproportionately "impact the environment" or "cost too much based on land value" will likely be hosted on the moon. Additionally, anything like anti-matter research that might be considered "too risky for Earth".
Including ofcourse the moon wide Iron Dome's processing needs to protect the upcoming infrastructure from asteroids.
Additionally, coordination of large scale robotics on the moon for infrastructure creation will also be cheaper to host storage and processing on the moon.
Not really, silicon is abundant everywhere with rocks. Most rocks anywhere are going to be about half silicon, not that this is exactly true everywhere but nobody is ever going to wonder where they’re going to be getting their silicon.
That's a big citation needed.
There is very little carbon on the sites that we have studied, but they were all fairly similar equatorial locations. CO2 is heavy enough that it doesn't immediately escape moon, when some is delivered (for example by a meteorite), it will bounce around for a while. If, during that time, it hits a really cold surface, it will freeze and stay there. Such cold surfaces are available in abundance at permanently shadowed craters at the poles, and also inside lava tubes.
We have gone a long way since we thought that moon was dry and lacked carbon. These days, most of the people studying it are fairly confident that every single permanently cold crater holds a glacier, composed of mixed ices, mostly water, CO2 and methane.
The only element needed for people that we still think that the Moon has a shortage of is nitrogen.
[0]https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022GL09... [1]https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.13521.pdf
Moon dust is toxic and jagged ( https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex... and https://www.livescience.com/62590-moon-dust-bad-lungs-brain.... ).
> In several lab tests, a single scoop of replica moon dust proved toxic enough to kill up to 90 percent of the lung and brain cells exposed to it.
I can see the end of certain rituals on account of that little fact.
I wish more people on HN would talk about von Nuemann probes and things like seed factories[0] instead of smartphone apps and people pooping on the streets of San Francisco.
I just reposted it[1], Let's see if it gets some comments this time.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/user/danielravennest [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34795006
But really what needs to be solved for self-replicating machines is determining a way to make actuators. On the Moon this is harder due to the difficulty of making bearings and gears. Because of vacuum welding making bearings is much more difficult. While solid lubricants do exist, it's difficult to obtain the materials necessary on the Moon. Traditional machining and polishing processes don't work well in a vacuum either due to vacuum welding and the inability to use lubricant.
If we wish to carry out said processes in a pressurized environment we run into another problem: seals. In order to make good seals we need elastomers, and elastomers require elements such as hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen which are difficult to obtain on the Moon.
If it is the former it seems like the solution is as simple as building a pressurized manufacturing facility.
Unlikely. We have yet to master nutrition when it comes from plants, it will be even worse for a bioreactor. Unfortunately, the list of food ingredients that you see listed in minimum recommended intake values is woefully incomplete. There's a whole bunch of micronutrients we get from food that are difficult to replicate.
Bioreactors could be useful for making supplements (say, Omega-3) to offset specific deficiencies.
If we are to eat just processed food in space, we'll need a lot more research on this. It would be better if we just grew food from plants.
The problem is not finding food that is still edible after years in storage, but food that the crew can eat long term without getting sick and without developing deficiency diseases. For example, the Pentagon says you can't eat MREs for longer than 21 consecutive days.
The space food problem is genuinely hard and interesting, you can get a sense of it in this paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221455242...
The black shit were Apollo moon rocks that this group had analyzed for isotopic abundance. This grit was being reclaimed from the spectrometer glass-tube flange part. “We have to account for every last gram of this NASA sample.”
There was a little residue off to the side. I touched it.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/02/nyregion/fbi-revisits-ear...
If Musk had left the company in 2014, do you think Starship and Starlink would be what they are now? Because I think that is pretty unlikely.
One could have made the argument that Musk should have gone after the Falcon 9 was reusable as well.
Shotwell is certainty competent and would likely do a good job as you suggest. But the best thing is if they just continue to work together as they have, that seems to have worked the best and I wouldn't want to mess with it.
Maybe you could argue who's more in charge of strategic direction at SpaceX, but on the other hand SpaceX seems to be doing great in that division.
> Shotwell: The way Elon and I share the load, he focuses on development. He's still very highly engaged in the day-to-day operations, but his focus is on development. He was the lead on Starlink, and I started shifting my focus to Starlink around late spring, early summer of last year. Elon’s focus in that time was moving to Starship, that is his primary focus at SpaceX. It doesn't mean he's not thinking about the company on a day-to-day basis, but his emphasis is to get the Starship program to orbit.
This of course is slightly old because Shotwell has done another shift and has taken (at least temporary) control of Starship.
Generally if it's something interacting with the US government, Shotwell handles it.
Also maybe it's simply being a good corporate leader, but I've seen her stick her neck out and defend Elon many times against criticism. They obviously like each other and get along with each other. They're both needed.
But until then Blue Origin has basically no actual revenue beyond a very small amount of BE-4 sales.
Are we expecting Bezos just to continue to drop billions of $ into Blue Origin for unlimited amount of time? Because non of the projects they have will ever make this company profitable.
To be fair, he's been shoveling money into this unproductive dumpster fire for more than 20 years already.
Then it got bigger and bigger, but only in the mid 2010s did the company seriously start to grow.
He was dropping 1 billion per year towards the end of 2010s but the company has been ramping up even more over the last 3-5 years.
By now the HR cost alone are probably going towards 2 billion $ a year, they are not so much smaller then SpaceX with no revenue.
Rocket delays are inevitable. But since you mentioned New Glenn's perpetual delays, let's also be fair and note that Starship's orbital test has been teased by Elon for quite awhile now [0]. I happen to think an April/May launch is possible, but we'll see. And also good to note that this is still very much a "pathfinder" vehicle, in SpaceX's style of iterative design & test. So not at all the same as whenever New Glenn's first launch will be.
Falcon Heavy beats New Glenn on most things, so New Glenn is more comparable to that generation rocket. New Glenn was sized up because Bezos wanted to have something bigger then Falcon 9.
Its always funny when people say that.
Musk has been the longest serving CEO in both the Space and the Automotive industry. With both companies having an almost absurdly good track record of execution.
And yet somehow it isn't trust worthy? Based on what? Comments on twitter?
Yes. Mostly his.
From the very first model 3, to full self drive, to cybertruck, to the boring company, to the starship itself. All of those were/are later than the dates that he gave, and cost more (for the ones that are for sale) than he said they'd cost. He was saying the orbital launch for starship was weeks away more than a year ago. It's still not happened.
Elon makes his own propaganda
If it succeeds, New Glenn is going to be superfluous and starting at a massive timing disadvantage.
Musk has consistently produced the wrong numbers. Some examples (and there are many, many more):
Number of teslas in 2018? Musk: 500k Actual: 35K
Tesla base price objective, 2016: Musk $35k Actual: Much more
Self Driving Cross Country Trip: Musk: in 2017 Actual: NaN
Financing Rounds: Musk (2011) "We will never need another financing round" Actual: there were many more
Supercharging cost: Musk (2013) "Always free" Actual: Definitely not free
Tesla Semis Production Line Date: Musk: "2019" Actual: Not yet happened
Gigafactory placement: Musk (2017) "Two to four more" Actual: Only one operational
Hyperloop NY-Phil-Balt-DC: Musk (2017) "I have verbal approval, 29 minutes NY-DC" Actual: This appears to be made up
Mars Missions: Musk: "Every launch window from 2024 onward" Actual: TBD, maybe 2029?
Neurallink: Musk: "Human trials in 2021" Actual: "Lots of dead monkeys"
Covid-19 Ventilators: Musk "Our factories will produce them" Actual: Musk sent 1,000 cpap machines
Updated Tesla Roadster: Musk: "It exists!" Actual: "It doesn't"
There are so, so so many more of these. There's nothing remotely close to an "absurdly good track record". SpaceX is doing well because of Shotwell, not Musk, and Tesla has been plagued with build quality and recall issues from day 1. (To say nothing of absurd repair costs and issues with FSD.)
And what, you created a brand new account just to post this nonsense again? I've seen this before.
Also, when it's something that literally no company has ever done before, being off by a lot is expected.
And many, many of Tesla's predictions aren't predictions. In 2014, Tesla promised full self driving on cars and took money for it. Those cars today will never have it (despite paying for it), and it's been nearly a decade with FSD still an indeterminate period away.
And yeah, new account. That's how I interact with HN -- create an account, keep it until it gets some amount of karma (usually 500-1000) decide it's too much of a drain to try and be grounded here, and delete the account. Inevitably, someone comes along and makes a breathy and incredible claim like "tesla is an absolute success" and I feel like I need to come in and provide just a little bit of "Hey, so, the facts don't exactly line up there..." To be clear, I don't create anti-tesla accounts, and this isn't an alt for another existing account, I just don't like having a long term account here.
Yes there's an occasional point that is correct, like this one, but you're mixing in outright incorrect statements, predictions that were missed on dates because they're hard to predict, and statements that have some accuracy, all together. And I don't want to bullet point by bullet point refute you as it's tiresome and there's thousands of breathless posts just like this one all over the internet.
There is lots of evidence that his micro-managing as you call, is actually really, really successful. And there is also a huge amount of evidence that Musk is actually not short-sighted, but in fact thinks far ahead of the competitors.
In 2014, the Gigafactory was considered crazy and a car company investing so much of its own capital in something that suppliers were supposed to do, was seen as idiotic. Now this model is literally copied by everybody. In the meantime, Tesla was a tiny car company in 2017, still seen as somewhat of a joke. But even then they were already starting to transition into a battery company and now Tesla makes it own batteries, based on its own chemistries in its own battery factory that is run with its in-house designed and manufacturing machines.
So while GM and its partner is still trying to get its first own Gigafactory online (and suffering serious delays), Tesla has moved past that and is literally building its own factories with its own chemistry.
We could go threw countless other examples. People love to pick out cases where things didn't work and ignore all the other cases where it did work.
It's entirely unclear to me whether or not Tesla's battery manufacturing is bearing any fruit in practice. Here's the most recent article I found, from September: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/inside...
The sources predict that Tesla will find it difficult to fully implement the new dry-coating manufacturing process before the end of this year, and perhaps not until 2023. Stan Whittingham, a co-inventor of lithium-ion batteries and a 2019 Nobel laureate, believes Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk has been overly optimistic on the time frame for commercializing the new technique.
[...]
Tesla acquired the know-how in 2019 when it paid over $200 million for Maxwell Technologies, a company in San Diego making ultracapacitors, which store energy for devices that need quick bursts of electricity, such as camera flashes.
[...]
"They can produce in small volume, but when they started big volume production, Tesla ended up with many rejects, too many," one of the sources with ties to Tesla told Reuters. Production yields were so low that all the anticipated cost savings from the new process were lost, the source said.
This sounds exactly like Elon Musk's usual MO: 1) acquire a company and then take credit for their inventions in order to paint himself as a visionary, 2) overpromise and underdeliver, counting on his legions of blind faithful to keep stock prices irrationally high in the process, and 3) base all profitability on the availability of government handouts, in this case the tax incentives for US-sourced batteries.
Tesla has issues manufacturing its own cells with its own chemistries and its own production equipment. At the same time its competitors all have issues with manufacturing even while depending on battery partners that take most of the profits (look at GM if you want an up to date example).
And the article even suggest that they will solve this and that there are very real serious saving that Tesla can achieve. Even the most negative talking point only suggest that the potential savings are lost, well ok, so in the worst case they are still as well of as their competitors.
Quite basically every other car company would kill to be in Tesla position. Its as simple as that.
> This sounds exactly like Elon Musk's usual MO: 1) acquire a company and then take credit for their inventions in order to paint himself as a visionary,
First of all, Musk or Tesla never took credit for inventing dry-coating manufacturing, this is just something you made up because it seems you have some personal issues with Musk. Dry coating is a good idea has been known for a while, making it practical for real large scale production has always been the issue. Musk even talked about Maxwell in some of the presentation on the topic.
And if you actually start to look into this whole topic, its quite clear that for Maxwell they initially developed some small prove of concept, then engaged partners to work with them to get this technology to a scale where its viability could be assets, Tesla was their major partner in this. At that point the promise of the technology was so large that Tesla decided to simply acquire the company rather then to continue as a partnership.
When Tesla bought Maxwell the technology was nowhere near ready for prime time. Tesla had to still do a huge amount of work, with many, many more iterations on the technology and major effort at scaling. Tesla is building its own coating huge scale machine to achieve this.
Its a complete misunderstanding of how large scale battery manufacturing works to claim that they simple bought a company and that's why they don't actually didn't do anything or don't deserve any credit.
Dry coating is just one of many things Tesla had to do to become a battery manufacturer. There are many, many other things that I don't have time for in this comment. Tesla bought a number of companies other then Maxwell as well, Hiber is another example. There are more.
There are very few new companies that turn into battery manufacturing companies. And most of them are just that, manufacturing companies. They license most of their technology and buy standard construction equipment. Tesla of course does some of these things to, but they also did a huge amount of the technology on both the cell and the manufacturing equipment.
But Tesla turning itself into a battery company is clearly a major achievement and was incredibly forward looking when they started and is still way ahead of everybody. Tesla was literally doing advanced research in battery manufacturing while the Ford CEO was still walking around talking about how 'batteries are not an issue and can easily be bought on the open market'.
Of course that CEO was fired and now Ford is doing what Tesla did in 2014.
> 2) overpromise and underdeliver, counting on his legions of blind faithful to keep stock prices irrationally high in the process, and
Ok, this is another one of these Anti-Musk truism that sound smart but are actually stupid.
If you underdeliver on making your company into a the a large battery manufacturer, that is still a huge success that literally every other car company would kill to have.
He under-delivered vis-a-vis his own predictions. His own predictions aren't relevant. Many of the actual stock analysts actually assumed there would be delay. And the major institutions who actually buy most Tesla stock knew that. The idea that Tesla stock is only owned by some legion of brain-dead individual investors is just false.
And as you can see from their delivery numbers, issues with their own production has not crashed the company, because guess what, Tesla planned ahead because they knew that scaling a totally new battery manufacturing was incredibly difficult.
And anyway, Tesla hasn't even raised any cash during most of that time. You seem to be stuck in pre-2018 way of thinking with regards to Tesla.
They have not raised money for years and the last couple times they did raise money they didn't actually spend it. The have retired some debt but mostly their cash balance has been growing. So any claim that Tesla has been doing stuff to manipulate the stock price only so they could raise more money to fuel their sinking company is just blatantly false. Its not actually a defensible position, Tesla is public, go look at the financials.
The anti-musk conspiracy theory logic that literally anything he does is some 6D galaxy brain move to convince people in the short term to boost stock value is just not real, it doesn't even make sense as a strategy. Tesla has been working on cell chemistry and cell manufacturing for well over 10 years and has been serious about become a sell manufacture for at least 7 years. They have early on made strategic choice that battery manufacturing is a major core competency and have pursued it. During that time stock has gone up and down and up and down, legislation regarding to EV and batteries have been changing all over the world in many way. But the strategy from Tesla has been consistent.
So the idea that this is about short term stock manipulation is just so bad that I can't even wrap my had around how somebody could believe it. The only reason I can think of that somebody would actually believe such an insane argument is if they just have deep personal hate for Musk that overwrites any logical thinking skills and any anti-Musk argument has to be true. Musk is easy to hate, but really it shouldn't overwrite basic logical reasoning.
3) base all profitability on the availability of government handouts, in this case the tax incentives for US-sourced batteries.
First of all, please give an actual links to the exact intensives you are talking about. As far as I know before the Biden IRA no such thing existed and I have not heard of details of what was introduced.
Second, this claim is mostly nonsense in general. Tesla profited from general mechanism, mainly EV credits and ZEV credits, both system were available to all car companies. So why are other car companies not as successful profitable. Clearly you suggest this is easy, just take handouts make profits, and yet, seem to only work for Tesla. During the time frame you 'analyze' Tesla has gone from making little money to more money then Ford and GM combined. Yet Ford and GM combined had 2x as much access to those same intensives.
And anyway, Tesla was already building batteries in the US in Nevada since 2015 and that what matters for any intensives in regards to battery manufacturing. They located in the US long before battery manufacturing was considered strategic. And the actual resources for these cells, will not come from the US whether Tesla or Panasonic builds the cells.
So really non of your points hold up.
> after which Musk was then fired for incompetence
The other founders wanted to sell the company, Musk wanted to turn it into an internet bank.
Looking back Musk strategy was actually what Paypal should have gone with, rather then shackling itself to ebay.
> But he sure is great at taking credit for the work of others
Yeah because what really mattered for Tesla is what happened before 2008, every after that doesn't matter.
Like seriously dude, I understand you dislike Musk on a personal level. But how can you be so blinded by hate as to suggest being CEO of a car company for literally 15 years (longest in the car industry) and that car company going from basically bankrupt to having the highest profit in the industry (outside of maybe Toyota) is not 'good management'?
> including the work of Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX, who is, by all accounts, the real person in charge.
'By all accounts' and by that you mean by all accounts that Anti-Musk Twitter has made up to fuel their rage boner?
Because its not the case based on Shotwells own account. Its not the case based on the account by literally anybody who actually worked there. Its not the case by the account by journalists and other observes who know the company very well. So really its not the case by any serious account.
Shotwell was head of business development until well into the Falcon 9 development, did she do everything then too?
"But he got fired once" is hilarious.
In any other company, Elon would have had "founder status" as part of the negotiations when he bankrolled the company basically from day 1. The company wouldn't have existed at all without him. This isn't abnormal for people who provide initial startup capital, are the chairman of the board, and are directly involved with company operations, being considered as founder.
I really don't like this repeated attempts to try to discredit Elon's involvement in Tesla.
And no, there's no evidence of him being "fired for incompetence" from Paypal.
> But he sure is great at taking credit for the work of others,
On the contrary, whenever people in interviews try to credit him with things he immediately returns credit to whichever company is being talked about. I've seen this dozens of times. He's not once tried to take public credit for the work of Tesla or SpaceX workers.
I've been waiting for..... 10 years? for something from BO to get into orbit. 5 if I'm being nice.
I want SpaceX to have competition and for a few years BO was going to give it - such was the dream.
I get that right now, the effect would be infinitesimally small. But some comments are talking about turning the moon into a massive factory, using the lunar materials to fabricate semiconductors, data centers, spacecraft. What happens when those products are exported from the moon, thereby reducing the mass of the moon? After hundreds of years of mining and exporting, could we see a change in tidal activity on the Earth, for example? If the moon's pull on the oceans decreased, could that actually help mitigate sea level rise?
The mass of the Moon is ~7 × 1^22 kilograms.
We'll cook ourselves long before any amount of mass transfer becomes meaningful.
There's a missing step in there - the production of solar cells on the lunar surface. Having the materials to do so is one thing, but being able to manufacture them to spec on the surface of the moon is another. The article only lightly touches on this.
Still, this is a surprising achievement from an organization I didn't even know did chemistry.
Let SpaceX focus on the rockets, and Blue Origin on bootstrapping a moon base.
It sounds like there isn't oxygen input required.
It's electrical heating, not coal fire heating, which requires no oxygen.
They are talking about transport of molten regolith. Not rockets.