panick21

Its an incredibly complex ever evolving situation.

Basically, originally Starship has entered development for SpaceX had nothing todo with any of this. SpaceX started to spend on Starship for their own reasons.

Then in Trump 1, he simply inveded a super agressive 'get to the moon' goal. 'Moon 2024'. This was mostly a fantasy goal but it sounded good politically. NASA for various reasons, had aboslutly no money to fund a moon lander. But if the president asked, they have to do it. So they threw out very opened ended ask for a moon lander, and a single moon landing.

There wasn't the kind of question asked like, what kind of system should we use for moon exploration in the next 2 decades. Or anything like that. It was more like 'how can we land on the moon once in 2024 and then we do new contracts after that'.

SpaceX, naturally justed adopted their existing Starship platform. But to make that work, they would need to figure out many things beyond just a 'lander'. And SpaceX bid was wildly to ambitious. It in many cases provided far, far more then NASA asked for. But NASA doesn't care about the capability, only if the bid can do the minium they asked for.

SpaceX won because they were willing to pay for almost all of it themselves, only asking for 2.3 billion $. And that included a test moon landing before the real one.

This is of course only a fraction of the cost for the whole Starship program.

So Space didn't spread themselves to thin, they are all in on Starship, but the simple reality is, its an incredibly difficult wide reaching program. And the moon lander part is just a little add on to that larger project. And that's the only reason 2.3 billion $ would be acceptable to SpaceX.

The simple reality is, nobody on the planet knows how to do a moon lander for 2.3 billion $, literally nobody.

So the time table way always fantasy and literally everybody knew that as soon as it was announced. Nobody was to public about it because offending Trump is bad, so lets all just collectivly pretend its real.

The government contract was unfocused and short term focused, without a larger strategy for moon exploration.

The real issue however isn't with this one contract, but the how the whole NASA Human Spaceflight program is organized.

SLS was 6 years and like 10-20 billion $ over budget and nobody ever complainged, in fact they got consistantly more and more money. And that is for technology that is fundamentally from the 1970s.

Starship is trying to do the hardest thing in the history of space flight. And of course its not on schedule, its schedule was always insane.

The way of approching things as 'is X on schedule' is a fundamentally false way of approching the problem. The question is who makes the schedules and why. Who decides the budget and why. Who planes for the architecture and why.

Just thrwing around and accusing different groups about who is 'delayed' is kind of counter-productive.

The fact is, the schedule is something Trump made up to sound cool in his first term, and has since been revised for multible reasons. And the demand for a lander was equally rushed. So the schedule is mostly just whatever politics at the moment wants to project.

This is all just politics.

Artemis from the beginning was just politics. And it wasn't driven by how to best do things, or any kind of coherent strategy. Its basically was a compromise, that had one of its pillars, that SLS and Orion need to continue to be used. Those two project have spend decades getting untold amounts of money. And even after all that money, their development isn't finished and they would need more money.

Then with the very, very little money left over, NASA tried to precure a moon lander. It was basically no money at all.

SpaceX won this competition, because SpaceX was willing to do things for an absurdly cheap price. Mostly because they are already investming themselves into the project. And their own investment was significantly larger then what NASA paid them.

Only after BlueOrigin lost, did they start a massive lobby campaign to figure out how to get more money out of congress so they could fund another lander.

But both landers, SpaceX and BlueOrigin, do not receive enough money to cover their cost. Not even close. So basically the US is relaying on massive companies in SpaceX case, and simply the private money of Bezos in BlueOrigins case to sponsor a moon program for them. Because all NASA money is going into legacy contracts that have very bad return on invesmtent.

The political move to now blame SpaceX for being late is just an excuse so that the overall project doesn't have to be reevaluated. The reality is, SpaceX is likely not the only reason for a delay. The suits are unlikley to be ready anyway. And even if Artemis III goes off, the SLS Block 2 is behind as well and will cost many additional billions.

And threating SpaceX with paying some legacy company to do a cost-plus lander isn't going to do anything, its just a fantasy thread, or at best the deamnd by some in congress to push even more money into legacy companies. Its not going to fix Artemis III or anything. Its funny how delays in cost-plus contract always lead to simply more money and more political support. Almost as if there was some other motives behind the decition when delays are unacceptable and when they are.

The reality of all of this is that NASA is completely mismanaged and fundamentally set up incorrectly. And just making big political waves on blaming whoever is politically out of favor will never actually work. The only reason SpaceX and the New Space economy exist is because clever teams inside of NASA and in Obamas team managed to sneak a few good programs, Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew past congress. Without those people, the US would already be far behind in terms of space.

The question the US (Congress/NASA) should be asking is not 'how can we get Artemis III' but rather 'what kind of Space program do we want over the next 30 years'. The US has an incredible space industry, and more private investment then everybody combinaed. There is no question that the US and NASA could be far, far beyond everbody else, and achieve amazing thigns, but Congress and NASA fundamentally misguided approch is holding it back.

So please, stop talking about Artemis III and start asking some more fundmanetal questions.

AI and focus on Self-Driving has been the biggest failure and blindspot for Tesla (Musk). So much of the strategy evolved around that, its a big reason why I pulled my investment. I invested because they were growing fast, had a pretty good product and had very high marin despite massive investment charging, service and verticial integration. And their next generation product should have been a reusable platform that could delvier a basic van, basic suv and basic pickup, all from the same assembly line. After that focus on a cheaper smaller electric car.

I thought it made a lot of sense to focus on a well functioning Level 2 System that they owned themselves. Make highway driving, start-stop traffic and such easy as possible. Make the car helpful and easy to use.

But then Tesla started focusing on making complex navigation and remote summening a feature when tons of basic stuff didn't work very well yet. For example, automated parking, 360 view, detection of features like shadows and such. Why not focus specifically on the actual dangrous problem looking around blind corners and installing a sensor suit that can help humans with the problem.

Promsing Full Self Driving with existing hardware and selling that when they had not proven that it could work was idioitc and I always felt like it was a liability. They should have been sued over this a while ago.

Initially Tesla messaging was save, nice software, fun to drive and green, and it then became half baked software, don't drive it and risky.

When it came out that Musk said they should build a cheaper next generation car, because Self-Driving would collapse the car market by 80% I knew the company had completely lost its way.

They have 2 gigantic space programs, Starliner and SLS. Both among the worst projects in the last decade.

Their experience from ISS is decades ago.

> Do people on this site really want Bezos to give up

How about not blocking everybody else constantly suing everybody and delaying the process. If he actually wanted to achieve a goal, that's what he would do.

Bezos is driven by pride more then anything else. It was clear that SpaceX was way ahead of them in terms of rockets. Instead of leveraging that and investing in space station or moon lander, they had to 'beat' SpaceX at rockets.

BO has been chasing its own tail and then suing everybody and claiming everything is unfair.

For a company that has achieved mostly nothing, to claim everybody else shouldn't get contracts and that they would be better is just the hight of arrogance. Not surprising it has left many space fans with a bad taste.

Additionally, this is a station that will only be build for a government contract. BO might be willing to spend actual money on idealism, but Boeing and Sierra are not.

> I'm starting to get the impression many on this site aren't really pro-space, they are just pro-Musk.

Maybe they are pro companies who actually achieve things and are not happy that the can finally sue everybody to 'flex their legal muscle' as BO CEO actually said.

Nobody dislikes Firefly, RocketLab, Relativity or any number of other space companies.

> 3. It makes absolutely no sense for the battery to 'brick' or declare 'out-of-range' while regeneration is adding charge back to the battery

Wait so how often are you in this situation? Like one ever 1000 drives? Or am I missing something?

> feed more data in the machine learning pot, stir it, and see what comes out.

Very reductive and dismissive way of describing what they are doing.

I have stated a fact, battery swapping is a niche and it will continue to be a niche. You attempts to claim this is not the case have been pathetic.

P.S: Calling people 'son' in a technical discussion is pathetic.

> Tesla has been building them for nine years and still hasn't reached 3,500 stations:

I misread, still 288 a Qarter and that is growing. Compared to 500 in 4 years. These stations have more threw put then any individual swapping station. Literally nothing you said changes anything about my argument.

Tesla is just one company, the simply fact is, battery swapping is a tiny niche and you can deflect as long as you want, its a simple fact.

> 94% efficient

Even 0.1% less efficiency would be a gigantic amount when you consider that we are talking about charging 1-2 billion cars.

Ok, somebody being competitive on twitter means that person is mentally unstable?

I mean you want to call him a asshole fine, but doesn't mean he is unstable.

If everybody that gets on fight on twitter or is sending tweets that shouldn't be sent is considers 'unstable' then most people on twitter are unstable.

> Tesla has been promising a car for $35k

That was their target price before the product launch, must be the first time in history a company didn't hit is project price. For a while they did have a version at that price, that version was supposed to have no Autopilot and few other things were missing. They discontinued that option.

> The solar roofs exist

Oh now they do exist. Don't hurt yourself running down field with those goalposts.

> bail out Elon's cousins

Lol, what nonsense. If it was about that they would have just continued with normal solar panels.

> lower than 20% of Tesla's projections and are declining rapidly

Wrong they are actually increasing, 46% growth in solar YoY this Quarter. And I'm sure that its the first time in the history of capitalism that a company didn't reach the production volume they had planned.

This is a huge growth market and continuing to play in it makes simple sense even if its not a huge part of current revenue.

> They have made not even a single working prototype.

There is literally footage from a prototype on a testing area from like a week ago. And the initial prototype has been driving around all over the place.

> They are bad roofs because they are more expensive to manufacture, far more expensive to install,

They are supposed to be for people who would then put solar on their roof after, of course its more expensive to install. What you should compare it to is building a normal roof and then add solar installation on top of that.

> and far less durable than ordinary roofs.

There are literally videos out-there where in a massive hale-storm you see many people with damaged roofs and the solar roof is perfectly fine.

> There has been no news since

There was 'no news' about a refresh of Model S/X for a long time, they even said its not gone happen. And then it happened. Crazy how companies don't feel the need to update you every second on what they are doing. I guess as soon as company doesn't update you, every project should be considered dead.

There was actually a bunch of news but I guess you decided its a fake product so following it isn't relevant.

And again, they are literally building a gigantic factory, they are LITERALLY ordering tools from suppliers for that factory. IRDA for example has publicly stated they are building an 8000 ton press for the rear under-body of the Cybertruck. There has been some leaked info about Tesla ordering the stainless steal, its actually their own material so they need have somebody make it for them in gigantic quantities.

Literally every indication is that there is a very active program at bringing the vehicle to market, no matter if you like it or not.

> The Semi is an asinine idea and cannot ever work.

Now you are just embracing yourself.

> well under half the capacity

What nonsense.

Tesla alone adds 3500 new stations (each with avg. 8 chargers) per QUARTER. And that will continue to grow. And that is outside of many companies doing such network.

But yeah 5000 stations in 2025 maybe, how amazing. I know understanding scale is hard.

And the government is subsidizing it in China as well. When they stop some car makers there will also stop.

Wireless charging is a waste of energy, and literally a horrible thing for climate change.

What is it with the endless whining about this decision, by Californians and you. California got exactly what wanted, its leading in EVs. It got a huge number of jobs, including reopening a big plant. Its leading in battery tech. Those companies help fund their universities.

Tesla is one of the few companies mass manufacturing in California at all. They got more then their monies worth.

Tesla even did really fast charging just not with swapping. So I really don't see why people are so upset about this. Swapping was clearly the wrong solution, and Tesla instead invested in a better solution. Thanks to that California has a huge amount of fast charging stations.

It seems to me what it is really about is just finding any reason to be angry at Tesla. If you actually think about it, with a fixed amount of capital, what should they have done, build battery swap station or deploy fast chargers?

> you're not even the person I was replying

So, this is normal on HN.

> So it started as "battery swap stations will never happen" but now it's having a whinge that they're not more widely used

What are you even talking about? Nobody accept you is "whinging" about anything.

The fact is 99% of EV companies have decided against battery swapping. What does that tell you?

The whole point of energy credits is that slow moving large companies who use bad old technology give money to fast moving young technology who use modern green technologies.

That is exactly what has happened and was a success as a business was created that no longer relies on credits and it has clearly accelerated the advent of EVs.

Not sure what your issue is with that.

How many % of overall EV are refueled by battery swapping? That is actually a better indicator then saying X company has performed X swaps. Its probably like 0.0001%.

Compare the amount of swap station to the amount of fast chargers.

Battery swap is niche of niche of a niche for cars.

Gogoro is for scooters, I think its pretty clear we were talking about cars.

They still have a gigantic factory in California, they built a battery factory there and have a huge battery research team in California, they have another research team in San Diago and they just announced building a Megapack production factory in California.

Jesus why are Califonians so thin skinned.

You can get all that money back if you do no longer want to wait for the product. What's your issue?

> with no new tangible updates since 2017.

They have just installed Megacharger in Nevada. New Test Semi were spotted a couple of time. They are hiring people for the Semi part of the company pretty constantly.

> with no new tangible updates.

Other then building a gigantic factory dedicated for building the car.

> to unknowing consumers.

I assume you mean consumers who are unable to read.

All Model S did support that capability early on. Because of reports about Tesla on fire Tesla added a shield under the car that made hot swapping no longer possible.

The reality is, as a company they had X amount of capital to solve long distance driving. It was clear pretty quickly that Superchargers was far better and more scalable technology. When they started with Model S they were not yet sure what the better strategy was.

Model 2 is literally a name something that fans made up. Tesla is internally working on a cheaper car then Model 3 (obously) but they have not talked about it more then 'we are working on it')

Solar roofs are deployed literally every week. By what measure are the 'not real'?

The other products are clearly in the pipeline, calling the a scam is dumb. Lots of car companies have announced products that will not be actually build for a few years. What the big deal? Products get delayed all the time in automotive.

I assume this is mostly so they can have a relationship with another supplier and in future get offers from both BYD and CATL for more supply.

A lot of issues like that are with the battery packs, not the cells. Tesla buy cells and makes their own packs.

The non radar version was verified to successfully handle all cases and actually outperforms the radar and has less false positives.

The had been planning on that anyway eventually.

Not that temporary for people who died.

Actually look into modern GenIV reactors and try to come up with scenarios where a large numbers of people die. Its basically impossible. Maybe if you use multiple terrorists and multiple natural catastrophes in a coordinated you might get somewhere.

Any practical failure mode would not leave the exclusion zone of the plant. And even those are incredibly unlikely.

The thing is there is simply nothing that convince you otherwise. If you believe the only relevant argument is the very maximum damage possible no matter the circumstance then I lost the debate. The question to me is what is the practical danger and how many people would die if you powered a whole country of 300 million people with a technology.

With GenIV nuclear plants you could power 300 million people for 100 years and the expect times you would have a Chernobyl style event would still be far below 1. The expect number of people to die would be far smaller then wind as well. If you include home solar, it would be less as well. Maybe centralized solar is comparable.

Edit: You can lots of articles and reporting on them. Its mostly people who just never left. The area is depopulating as people die of old age and there is no migration to the area.

What is your evidence of him being unstable?

In general yes, they solved their manufacturing issues on the Model 3 line and it reached the required speeds and saved the company. See the cashflow turnaround in 2018-2019. They managed to scale that line far beyond their initial targets.

However that experience did teach them that their design was flawed and for future vehicles after Model 3 they did switch to large castings anyway rather then traditional welding of stamping.

If you are interested in the flaws of the initial Model 3, see this interview with Elon and Sandy Munro where the discuss this:

https://youtu.be/YAtLTLiqNwg?t=1026

First they had two casting in the back for the wheel area, then moved to one. Now they are moving to replace the whole front.

So the new car designs will be two big castings connected by a structural battery pack (yes its removable).

Here you see the changes:

https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/04/Tesla...

The new design:

https://468y981o84o43v2wo2600a0gcj-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/w...

Example casting:

https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0173/8204/7844/files/Scree...

Here the first press in operation:

https://youtu.be/BwoiFC-HwPE?t=302

Since then they have order many of these, 8 for Berlin for example. This should support around 500k cars production.

These custom made for Tesla by IDRA in Italy, they put out a lot information:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onCrHQEvgYs

Even more information:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyvdbTy3v1d4fxNvP0HTB...

They are moving to even larger presses for the Cybertruck.

This is really only the case on some older Model S from around before 2018 or so. That is a vanishingly small % of their cars produced.

Then compare it to BMW, Geely or other manufactures that are more comparable.

They didn't have that for all the development of Falcon 9. SpaceX deliberately vertically integrated and moved to automotive and other suppliers because space suppliers were so bad.

I would be surprised if they have to use this process all that often, specially now that they have reduced construction rates.

Your objection is flat embracing.

He has Degrees in physics, and many people with such degrees end up getting positions in engineering companies and are called engineers. He was accepted at Standford PHd program for materials science. That would natural lead into an Materials engineering position in some company if completed.

Of course instead of doing that, he left and started companies, as a software engineer he was the core developer one Zip2 and early on on PayPal. If that doesn't qualify you as an engineer I don't know what does.

Literally he has been the Chief Engineer at SpaceX since its founding. And the argument that its just an empty title just don't work. They were a small company for quite a while and somebody made all the final decisions. The are multiple stories where he works directly with other engineers on the rocket as well if 'making engineering decisions' is not enough. Multiple former employees have directly contradicted these sort of 'not engineer claim'.

Just recently former lead engineer at Ford with 50 years experience in automotive, defense and aerospace was allowed to sit in on a meeting for Starship. He said he had never seen anybody CEO be that involved in detailed decisions, about manufacturing processes and design choices and so on.

So just because you don't like him or his product, doesn't make him not an engineer. He has the education many other people that call themselves engineers have, and he has the title of engineer and that title has been officially recognized by NASA and DoD.

---------------

    Elon is both the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer of SpaceX, so of course he does more than just ‘some very technical work’. He is integrally involved in the actual design and engineering of the rocket, and at least touches every other aspect of the business (but I would say the former takes up much more of his mental real estate). Elon is an engineer at heart, and that’s where and how he works best.

    Former Head of Software Quality Assurance at SpaceX