> California unable to change emissions policy
The same one that needed me to show them the smog sticker to show that I didn't need to do a smog check ... for my out-of-state Model 3
1,732 karma · joined February 3, 2019
The same one that needed me to show them the smog sticker to show that I didn't need to do a smog check ... for my out-of-state Model 3
And some of us work in the industry that is in the form it is today, as big as it is today, majorly due to the one company alone. The one that puts more mass into orbit every year than any other entity in the world - nation states included.
As for "massively missed milestones" - it is easy to predict milestones when you are making CRUD apps in React. Not so when building the largest rocket that has ever existed, and making it fully reusable.
> coherent business case that can no longer be supported.
Lol. They operate the most successful and most profitable rocket in history, and they are confident enough that they have stopped taking bookings for it. And they just demonstrated a system that can bring the cost down another 1 or 2 orders of magnitude with nearly zero competition even close to them. No coherent business case indeed.
As it stands today - Starship Flight 14 just deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites, 52 tonnes total. At around $110M marginal per launch, that is about $2.1M per tonne. A Falcon 9 at $30M carrying 15 tonnes is about $2M per tonne. So even as a fully expendable rocket, Starship is already basically in Falcon 9 cost-per-ton territory.
> and they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system.
Or increase performance in the engines and elsewhere. Falcon 9 Block 1 was 9000kg to LEO. The Block 5 that is flying now is 22000 kg to LEO. It's not magic. They already have a path forward with Raptor 4 and other improvements.
> needs a launch cadence fast enough so that refueling doesn't take 15 separate starship tankers
They don't need to launch special tanker missions for a depot. Their goal is to start launching Starlinks and AI inference sats en-masse. Once they demonstrate on-orbit fuel transfer, the easiest way is to fill the depot during normal missions. They can cut out some payload from specific flights to carry excess fuel and top off the depot. The sheer scale of their other flights is enough to keep it full. It is infrastructure that they need for higher energy missions. I doubt they are going to launch 15 dedicated flights just to fill up the tank.
> just a minor milestone on the way to that launch cadence: catching both stages.
They can hit massive cadence even fully expending every Starship, still work out kinks with reusability in the process and still make a profit off of Starlinks given their pace of production.
And given what they have shown so far, I think they are going to try to catch both in the next 2-3 flights barring unforeseen issues.
> Once both stages are reliably caught after a mission, refurbishment needs to be minimal
Nope. Even a cadence of once a week means that by the time they have 10+ launch pads up (in LA+FL+TX), they can be launching once a day if not more frequently. Their rate of production can already sustain that. What's missing is fuel source which will get built out in Louisiana.
> really big blind spot for the project management implications
Lol. The guy got partially reusable rockets and human rated spacecraft working at a cadence unheard of in the aerospace industry. Quite the accomplishment with such a blind spot for the project management!
And corporations are made up of people. People who decide to organize to form a legal entity so that they can operate as a business. Some people may choose to run it as a solo proprietorship - others want to raise money and form groups so they can do bigger things. They are still people.
I feel amazing that code that I wrote contributed to development of this amazing technology. "Greedy corporations"? I can download Qwen 3.8 27B today for free and run it myself and not pay for anything but electricity. I get the same performance that I would have had to pay $20-$100/mo. ~6 months ago (which frankly, was pretty cheap for what it got me).
The "greedy corporations" btw, also spent billions and did a lot more than just dump the code into a gradient descent algo (RLVR and more) to get the models to the place they are at today. Simply dumping GitHub into a transformer neural net would not give you a coding model even close to what exists today - open or proprietary. For $20/mo., I can now explore subjects that I wouldn't have even considered looking at before. For me, personally, that is a good tradeoff.
And that means nobody can make money off of their derivative work? If I open source my work, that means it is open source (by definition). It is a gift[1] - to everyone. If someone uses it to create value, good for them!
I live in a major city. It is more like ~4 hours/wk for me. The car drives itself. It is very relaxing. It is my alone time for either thinking or listening to podcasts. I am in a nice air-conditioned, HEPA-filtered cabin and I can be on my own schedule.
> Gwynne Shotwell is the actual reason SpaceX is as successful as it it.
Weird take. If you read any of the biographies or books about SpaceX, you would know that many key personnel at SpaceX (e.g. Tom Mueller [1], Hans Koeniggsman[2], Tim Buzza [3], Jim Cantrell[4], Garrett Reisman [5]) have all mentioned his major role in the engineering decisions there.
Gwynne has done an amazing job at running the company - but she doesn't make the engineering decisions. You cannot deny the achievements of the company - so you just say that he had no role in it. This sort of retconning of history just because people don't like him, is super weird.
> When we first started he didn't know a lot about propulsion. He knew quite a bit about structures and helped the structures guys a lot. Over the twenty years that we worked together, now he's practically running propulsion there because he's come up to speed and he understands how to do rocket engines, which are really one of the most complex parts of the vehicle. He's always been excellent at architecting the whole mission, but now he's a lot better at the very small details of the combustion process. Stuff I learned over a decade-and-a-half at TRW he's picked up too."
> Musk "didn't know a lot about rockets initially, but he learned a lot over time," Koenigsmann said. Musk picked knowledge up quickly, which was "amazing to watch," he added. "I really enjoyed working with him and learning how he sees things," Koenigsmann said. "He sees things from a different perspective." Musk provided a "unique perspective" on scenarios involving basic physics by asking what the limiting factor was, according to Koenigsmann. An example of this was when Musk pushed his engineers to shorten the time it took to fuel SpaceX's rockets. Musk said SpaceX should aim to reduce the time from 30 minutes to eight minutes — the same time it takes to empty a rocket tank, according to Koenigsmann. SpaceX uses propellant at very low temperatures to increase its density, allowing engineers to cram more into each rocket, Insider previously reported. Rockets need to be fueled quickly before launch so the propellant doesn't warm up. As a result of Musk's direction, SpaceX's rockets are fueled "in a remarkably short time," Koenigsmann said."
[3] https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/buzzat-1-15-...
> Elon Musk is our chief designer. I think between himself and the technical design teams, they came up with the initial concepts of the size of the vehicle, how much propellant's on board, what the engine thrust is going to be, two stage rocket, that kind of stuff.
[4] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/former-spacex-exec-explains-e...
[5] https://magazine.wharton.upenn.edu/digital/from-nasa-to-spac...
> The thing that impresses me the most is his ability to reach very, very, very deep into particular technical topics, but across an incredibly wide scope. He’s the only person I’ve ever seen that can really do it with that level of acumen. He can jump from talking to our electronic experts about the arcane details about the architectures of the processor inside the flight computer, and then talk to our structures guys about a particular type of alloy in their welding techniques. His ability to switch gears and interact at such a very high technical level with experts in each of these subjects, and not only keep up, but surpass them in many cases, is remarkable.
I keep seeing this take about how GPUs are going to lose value and yet somehow they don't? Why is it that A100s (released in 2020) are still in high demand and fetching high prices? E.g. RunPod is still charging $1.40-$1.60/hr for A100s and making money. Lambda Labs is charging $2.00-$2.80/hr for the same GPU.
Wow! Was there a Musk company dedicated to building that? Where is the press release announcing it? Surely it must have been a big deal if you are so excited about it's failure!
> And FSD is coming next year now
It is already here. You can hail one right now in multiple cities.
And in my own car, I use it every day and have for 2+ years. For the $3k I paid in 2019, I definitely got what I paid for. It's also gotten dramatically better since then. It drives me to and from work every day without having to so much as touch the wheel. And there is no 2018/19 non-Tesla that can do what it does.
So yes, by all means, keep listing the things you think prove Musk is a fraud. You're mostly just making my point for me.
[x] Partially reusable rocket that dropped cost to orbit by an order of magnitude. And no, the space shuttle (while an amazing piece of engineering), doesn't really count. It cost a billion+ to refurbish and did nothing to make space more accessible. Now we have businesses that exist purely because the Falcon 9 exists. Heck, the entire new space industry got validated (and hence got investment) due to SpaceX's success.
[x] Returning human spaceflight capability to the US at a fraction of the price, using the same reusable rocket platform after the old defense primes failed to do so. And then making it cheap enough that it has now also flown about half as many private missions as it did for NASA.
[x] Global satellite constellation providing gigabit-scale internet with 10000+ satellite (once written off by "experts" as yet another "incredibly ambitious project" that will never happen).
[x] Commercializing and bringing down the cost of electric cars to the point where they are actually a viable option now (unlike the compliance cars made by OEMs 10 years ago).
[x] Building the largest rocket to ever exist that now has a clear path to being the first ever fully reusable launch vehicle.
[x] A BCI implant that has now brought back mobility and communication ability to multiple patients with debilitating conditions.
Given that each of these were things that no one had done successfully before, or had failed spectacularly - I don't really care that they took longer than initially planned.
There is, in fact, a graveyard here. It is mostly filled with confident predictions that his companies would never do the things they have since done.
yes. It is open source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL
It is not rolled forward. If they don't want to pay the $433, then they don't. They return the device and the new device's lease doesn't include that $433.
It's not like a used car loan that some people have that keeps growing with each transaction (and at insane interest rates).
What infrastructure will these open weight models be trained on?
When weather conditions permit, regardless of whether an operation is conducted under instrument flight rules or visual flight rules1, vigilance shall be maintained by each person operating an aircraft so as to see and avoid other aircraft.
I had some aircraft pop in from off-screen and just run into another one that just took off.
But to "get there" within any reasonable timespan requires going really fast - which is currently highly impractical. And then once you get there, you have to them cancel pretty much all of that velocity which is not just a "few percent more delta V".
Database updates are still using SD cards though, but just a normal one as far as I know.
Huh. I have never experienced this and didn't even know this was a thing. My cheapo Chinesium scale that I bought from Amazon years ago occasionally jumps by a pound or so. I measure myself a couple of times to be sure. But it definitely doesn't "freeze" measurements, as I see a different measurements shoes on in back-to-back measurements.
That's not even close to what the Golden Dome is.
> The Golden Dome is a planned multi-layer missile defense system for the United States, intended to detect and destroy ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles before they launch or during their flight.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
[citations needed]