domain:greyenlightenment.com
I thought a bit more about it:
It is very easy to prove Elon Musk wrong, because almost everything he says or hypes up will not happen. Like his plan to build a prototype of Starship and have it 6 month later orbital, ugh, that was not only optimistic, that was hopelessly naive! Same es full driving I guess.
And he always makes the same mistake in taking zero buffer into account for problems or "unknown unknowns". He also primarily focuses on engineering challenges: is something against the laws of physics? No? Then it is possible and can be done super quick … or not, because he missed that there is a slow bureaucracy which has to approve it and permits have to be done and environmental reviews have to be studied etc etc. Musk has a big blind spot for politics and social stuff. If he were more clever, if he were a true evil genius, he would forge relationships and network with the (leftist) political elite. He would rub shoulders and finance AOC. He would charm and disarm his political opponents. Instead he shitposts on twitter when Biden didn't invite Tesla to the electric vehicle summit.
I personally don't believe I will see a Mars city in my lifetime (though hope dies last) and I think his Mars presentations should be seen psychologically as Elons "happy place". His castle in the sky which he can build in his imagination unimpeded by real life constraints. But in real life there will be astronomical hurdles, from the biggest technical challenge humanity has ever seen, to needing the US President being on board, to the UN not outlawing Mars colonization, to avoiding a veto by China, and what about public opinion and anti-billionaire sentiment etc etc.
BUT all this said:
SpaceX is on the cusp of making Starship working (next test flight 4 is planned in a week). Starship will enable a fuel depot in orbit. An orbital fuel depot will slash costs for the coming lunar base (which also sounds like a pipe dream, but will be built in the 2030s).
You linked to Destin from Smarter every day. There is a small cute twist here. Destin is a smart guy and does his homework, I bet he could recite by heart every size and dimension of the Apollo Eagle lander (especially as his grandfather worked for NASA). And he surely saw the graphics of the Starship HLS lander. If pressed he would have freely confessed that HLS is bigger and that this is nice and enables cool missions etc, but it wouldn't change his criticism much. Because this is factual knowledge. It is memorizing a few numbers and facts. This is not understanding.
Look what happens when Destin for the first time sees the mockup of the SpaceX rocket, feels the space, and imagines that this is really going to the Moon:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=AiZd5yBWvYY&t=2719
NASA 42:25:
"Okay, so this semicircular here is a representative of the human landing system, the lander. etc etc"
Destin 46:25:
"And so when I looked at this ring, I was like, eh, it's a ring. You know, it's just a psychological representation of the diameter of that rocket."
"And then I was like, wait a second. That's a big rocket. And then I got excited. I started thinking about all the engineers designing things to go in there and, like, what it was going to look like in the end."
"And so I thought that was really interesting, and it took my mind to weird places, realizing that this is a lot bigger than what Neil and Buzz went to the moon in. And so this is the first moment that I got really excited."
Seeing is believing.
FeepingCreature
2hr ago
Space mining may become advantageous if we have significant material demands in orbit.
sliders1234
2hr ago
I feel like this is maximally negative on huge accomplishments.
And you can do the same thing for Steve Jobs. He invented nothing. Animation and smart phones existed before him. The gap between electric cars and electric golf carts is far more than BlackBerry to Apple. You can always repeat that’s not a big accomplishment. But I think those are big accomplishments.
FeepingCreature
2hr ago
The thing is, if it's not the case, we have to consider that SpaceX is putting down more launches than the rest of the market put together as some sort of stunt or fraud, which starts to edge into conspiracy theory. Either Musk is a machiavellian genius running a massive misinformation campaign using billion dollars of hardware, or F9 launches are profitable and more launches are more profitable, which would explain why SpaceX literally started a separate company to justify being able to make more launches.
dr_analog
razorboy
2hr ago
One of my complaints about privacy and digital hygiene obsession that's so in vogue with early middle aged white people is that they all appear to believe that they're subversives, potential enemies of the state, and that they best adopt Signal for e2e messaging privacy, and use VPNs to avoid tracking, and limit their socials, etc.
There are other reasons to care about digital hygiene, but the most anodyne people worrying that the FBI is maintaining a dossier about them is probably an effect of five decades of media obsession with counter-culture and rebellion.
dr_analog
razorboy
2hr ago
They are, at the minimum, exciting new brand development opportunities.
If you reuse your rocket, that last bit will be necessary to bring your rocket back.
The trick is that you split the rocket in two halves, and then you end up on the good side of the rocket equation because you mostly only need to brake your engines and your landing fuel, and also you can use a lot of air friction. Now, I refuse to watch an hour long video with that title, lol, but any video that doesn't at least account for these two factors is bullshitting you. (How about link the actual spreadsheet instead of the video, and I'll try to fix it?)
The Shuttle wasn't exactly due to NASA incompetence, because by the time the final plans were drawn up the damage was already done. However, the Shuttle was an still an unusually bad example of a reusable rocket.
Also the fuel costs are basically a nonfactor. SpaceX have an issue in that their F9 rockets are overbuilt and undersized, to the point where they've literally started making their engines worse as a cost-cutting measure by saving on material. Landing is an unusually good value proposition for them, because they already have isp overhang. The rocket equation is simply not a relevant limiting factor for their market.
SkoomaDentist
2hr ago
That's the effect of five decades of large segments Anglo-American media being absolutely obsessed with counterculture & rebellion. We're luckily somewhat isolated here in Finland (when did you last hear journalists hyping "working class artist / musician" as a term outside niche stuff?). Alas, it has leaked everywhere in English speaking countries (although I'd love to hear any Australian / New Zealand perspective on this).
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2hr ago
In addition to this, there are some less-obvious pernicious possibilities: running the factory to make rockets is, itself, a cost, and doesn't scale amazingly well with respect to cost or quality. One could conceivably develop reusable rockets, meaning you could reduce (first-stage) production from every couple weeks to a couple new units a year, which sounds like a cost savings, but suddenly you need to reorganize your employees and roles are no longer as specialized, your QA folks are dragged into an unfamiliar task every six months, and a lot more time is spent churning on unfamiliar tasks. And good luck running a "do it the same, right way every time" quality program when nobody immediately remembers the last one: suddenly your high-throughput factory is now making bespoke aerospace parts like old-school space programs are famous for, and costs rise accordingly.
I'm not saying that has happened, but it's at least a possibility.
Just from the sheer energy inputs, space mining rockets will not compete with terrestrial dump trucks while there are any appreciable mineral reserves on earth. When industrial civilization reaches out for asteroids, it will be "resorting" to spice mining, not "advancing" to space mining.
There is also the matter of $5 trillion platinum asteroids and the like, but the price of such metals would crater if you tried to sell any appreciable amount.
roystgnr
3hr ago
some might even consider me biased against him
Might?
If you wanted to deliver cargo (or people, which SpaceX still cannot do to my knowledge) to orbit
more than three years AFTER SpaceX put people in orbit. SpaceX was then (and still currently is, though I'm excited and hopeful for Starliner this week) in fact the only American team putting people in orbit. Is there any explanation other than bias for opining with that level of ignorance? Was that incident still not enough to make it obvious to you that you're coming to your conclusions first and then trying to assemble facts to rationalize them afterward?
That should have been the point where the laudable idea of:
I would love to be proven wrong.
hit the uncomfortable reality of being proven wrong, smashed your broken epistemology to splinters, and gave you a chance to build a working one to replace it.
"I'll happily wear the DUM DUM hat for the rest of the day", though a tiny step (on the order of 1 day / 3 years, 0.1%) in the right direction, was clearly not a rebuild in progress.
The irony here is that, though I'd agree with many of your points above (as would most techies; e.g. "Elon time" is something in between a sad joke and an actual conversion coefficient at this point), I still can't actually trust your presentation of them to add anything on top the bare hyperlinks themselves, and even with the links I've got to worry that selection bias is a problem. How could I justify further trust as more than Gell-Mann amnesia?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
Starlink brought in $4B in 2023, up from $1.4B in 2022, latest estimate $6.6B for 2024. Development via investment dollars is much faster than via cash flow alone would be, but it's not a necessity.
Very nice, now show me their costs so we can calculate the profits...
first place is SpaceX
The overwhelming majority of their launches is Starlink itself, a project of unknown profitability / sustainability.
The thrilling upcoming news is that they might launch New Glenn later this year
To Mars... on first attempt...
and if they evolve it twice as fast as SpaceX did once they got their first partly-reusable launcher to orbit, they'll have a Falcon-9-killer by 2030, tops
So... what's your estimate on Starship being functional under those assumptions?
spring
3hr ago
As a relatively new user I made the jump to start frequenting the motte because the discussion at my former haunts had become increasingly shrill and monocultural. Moderation might be a little more hands off, but I see no such trend towards deeper and thoughtful discussion on the wider web.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
3hr ago
I'm more and more curious what you do now, given that short of you owning your own business you're certainly in the thrall of some yachterati or another.
Eh, I'm pretty sure he isn't really interested in improving the human condition and would be happier spending money on a better yacht. But that's not why I work for him; I work for him for money for me.
Of course not having to work is luxury.
In that case, should we abolish retirement and force the elderly to work?
Have I said I want to abolish luxury? I have no problem with working, saving, and retiring on one's savings. That works a lot better when the proceeds of the working aren't funneled to the never-working.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
The motte for Elon Musks is he’s the most important person of the 21st century to date and the most important engineer since probably 1900.
Ok, well that, to me, is the Bailey. Upon interrogating the arguments, the Motte ends up being something like "Ok he's hyped up, but he still innovated a lot of stuff" or "But look at how much his companies are worth".
Electric cars didn’t exists before him.
The hell they didn't. They were driving around golf courses for decades before that. People didn't drive them on roads before, because it might no economic sense, and here's the kicker: we still don't know if it makes any economic sense. They're being hyped and subsidized by tech enthusiasts, and clueless green activists, in a futile attempt to do something about global warming, and despite that they're not really enticing when compared to ICE cars.
I believe he’s the only person to start a car company from scratch in a 100 years without state backing.
A completely meaningless achievement, if it's based on promises he will never deliver on, and his company ends up crashing.
Rockets had completely had no advance for 60 years before him.
Reusability is not a fundamental advancement, it was always a question of whether it's worth the effort, and again, it's even less clear that it is, then in the case of electric cars, since we have no insight into the costs.
The motte for him is no reason to dump Musks as an ally. There is no human on earth I would prefer as an ally.
I hope you're right, and I end up looking like an idiot, but don't say I didn't warn you, if I don't.
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
3hr ago
The logistics of sending any kind of vehicle or probe to a specific asteroid in the asteroid belt for mining are so ludicrously expensive in terms of energy/momentum spend that the astrophysics community has largely treated space mining as a joke proposal for science fiction books since about the 60s - and that's before you get to the economics problems (there is virtually nothing in space worth mining and returning to Earth that couldn't be extracted more profitably on Earth in the first place). The case for space mining is a complete, unsalvageable disaster. "Short" version:
- Getting places in space is convoluted to begin with, and all trips beyond Earth orbit require carefully calculated momentum assists from various heavenly bodies. The error on these calculations is pretty large relative to the size of most asteroids. It's infeasible to pre-plan a route so specific and so accurate that one could send a spacecraft to a specific asteroid in the asteroid belt once, let alone reliably at different times. The energy and time cost for any such trip would be enormous as well.
- Long, energy-intensive trips necessitate bringing a lot with you. If an asteroid mining mission is crewed, you need food and water for many months, radiation shielding, a mechanism to avoid significant harm due to bone and muscle density losses, etc - space is extremely unfriendly, and long voyages are not desirable.
- And these trips are one-way. You will need an implausibly vast store of resources and a powerful engine to make it back to Earth in any reasonable amount of time. It's barely possible today to bring enough fuel for a two-way trip in an extremely light craft to a much closer celestial body (the moon). You'd need a bunch of fuel-only pre-flights to stockpile the resources needed to get to one asteroid and back, and substantially more than that to impart enough momentum on mined asteroid fragments that they can be shipped anywhere useful.
- Quick side note: you are NOT going to planets or planetary satellites for resource extraction. The gravity wells around planets make these almost-guaranteed to be one-way trips. I guess in principle it's not impossible to set up a planetary or satellite resource extraction operation, but it already takes civilization-scale logistics to get off of Earth - we'd be well into science fiction by the time you could practically mine planets or satellites of planets.
- You get to your asteroid, and... It's mostly silicon, iron, nickel, and other crap you can dig up back on Earth for way, way cheaper. There might be some high-value exotic elements like Californium that are kinda valuable, but how do you find any?
- You would need survey equipment, a bunch of which has to be entirely novel, since a lot of Earth-based survey techniques depend on liquid injection.
- You also need digging tools. I am actually pretty confident you can build those from mostly raw materials available on most asteroids, and even do so economically. I am less confident about the thermodynamics and robustness of such equipment being good enough to extract meaningful quantities of anything out of any asteroids.
- Now you need to do something with all the stuff you mined. Remember, there's virtually nothing you can profitably send back to Earth, and what you do find has such a limited market that your mission to one asteroid cost orders of magnitude more than the TAM for the material. There's maybe, maybe a plausible case to be made for antimatter, presuming we had a useful application for it by the time this whole mess is feasible - but I bet it would be cheaper to just invent a way to make and capture antimatter on Earth.
- So basically, you can only really use the resources you find in space. And the farther you have to ship it, the more compelling it becomes to instead just send it one-way from Earth.
- At this point it should be clear that you very much do not want to send people to mine asteroids. We could imagine instead sending autonomous mining probes...
- Except now you have lots of new and interesting different problems, chiefly that mining stuff is not at all a straightforwardly automated task, and you'd need really powerful software consuming a lot of power to coordinate surveying, mining, and payload delivery autonomously (on top of the already large and heretofore unmentioned energy expenditure just to mine in the first place, and the payload delivery expenses). You'd very likely need fabrication facilities for the entire suite of things needed, including unimagined novel requirements discovered on-site, meaning solar panels, semiconductors and lithography equipment, forging and casting tools... All of which has virtually no heatsinking and an endless bath of radiation to contend with during manufacturing.
- But suppose you actually got that insanely complex symphony of automation humming along. Great job, you can now... build more space robots, I guess. Whoopie. I suppose you could start working on even more stupid science fiction vanity projects like Dyson spheres or Matrioshka brains or whatever. If this was your plan all along, I am interested to learn how you managed to trick someone into funding the entire world's GDP a dozen times over into the first thousand steps of this plan.
I don't doubt that SpaceX will happily take the money of anyone foolish enough to ignore all of the above at their own expense and perform their services as advertised. But their business model does not depend on people with more money than common sense - their big moneymaker is, as others have noted, building a novel telecommunications network with broadband-like performance and selling it to the US government, using novel reusable rocket components that cost orders of magnitude less than the previous state-of-the-art and that can be launched quickly and regularly. I expect their next steps for profitability all revolve around expanding the use of this network to things like surveillance satellites, content providers, etc. I grant that they have some appetite for ridiculous vanity projects like the mars launch stuff, but this is ultimately a manageable marketing expense. But for anyone with some rudimentary literacy in the subject, it should be clear that space mining is not a sustainable business, and as a marketing stunt it is extremely boring (heh).
Shrike
3hr ago
orbital delivery would already be absolutely revolutionized
There aren't that many people who want to launch satellites, or do that many things in space.
I think quite the opposite – if you get the cost low enough, sending stuff to space becomes a high school science project and everyone wants to do it. Lots of amateur CubeSats in this vein.
I think he'll run out of hype before he manages to get it to work.
Maybe you're right. To clarify, your position is that Starship will never make a successful orbital payload delivery? Or that it will never land successfully?
Sure... but the glowies can pay Bezos instead.
Right now they can't, can they? New Glenn is having its own developmental issues, leaving the only functional Blue Origin delivery vehicle New Shepard, which is designed for orbital tourism, not payload delivery.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
3hr ago
It doesn't exist enough to be a "subculture". Being a right-winger is like being the class clown or something; you may be counter, but you're not culture.
roystgnr
3hr ago
I think he'll run out of hype before he manages to get it to work.
Starlink brought in $4B in 2023, up from $1.4B in 2022, latest estimate $6.6B for 2024. Development via investment dollars is much faster than via cash flow alone would be, but it's not a necessity.
orbital delivery would already be absolutely revolutionized
The bright side of having a problem so bad you want to graph it on a semilog plot is, it gives you room for multiple revolutions.
And your prediction came true - the first revolution did already absolutely happen, even with launch vehicles that are only partly reusable! I used to summarize this as "first place is SpaceX, second is the entire country of China, third is the rest of the world put together", but looking at the latest numbers, that still understates things. Q1 2024 saw launch upmass that was around 86% SpaceX, 6% China, 7% the rest of the world put together.
but the glowies can pay Bezos instead.
The thrilling news from Blue Origin so far this year was that they launched two BE-4 engines (original ETA: 2019) on the first Vulcan Centaur test. Again, "understates things" understates things here. The thrilling upcoming news is that they might launch New Glenn later this year (be sure to go to the New Glenn wiki page for that, though; the BE-4 page still says "The first flight and orbital test is planned for no earlier than late 2022,[27] although the company had earlier expected the BE-4 might be tested on a rocket flight as early as 2020.", because apparently editors there have the appropriate level of excitement here), and if they evolve it twice as fast as SpaceX did once they got their first partly-reusable launcher to orbit, they'll have a Falcon-9-killer by 2030, tops. Hopefully I'm being too pessimistic here, but Bezos himself shares my pessimism: see "Amazon buys SpaceX rocket launches for Kuiper satellite internet project" from last year.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3hr ago
The Dutch alt-right is pretty explicit about this. Pim Fortuyn was openly gay, and both Fortuyn and Geert Wilders have made "Muslim immigrants are violently homophobic, which is un-Dutch" key points in their campaign rhetoric.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
It is interesting that it has become a moniker for "fighting for what's right" and so on, even among the more conservative section
I dunno, it's not exactly mind-blowing that even people I'm vehemently against are fighting for what they believe is right. I also have no issues admitting it takes a special kind of person to commit to such a fight, when all "respectable" society is against you, and to admire that, even when I disagree with what they're trying to achieve.
Likewise, being "countercultural" by itself would indicate being satisfied with a certain niche status instead of taking over the actual general culture
Oh, that might be an actual thing that changed. I think there's a whole bunch of factions, not just conservatives, that written off mainstream society, and are just looking for ways for their communities to survive whatever the powers that be have in store for us.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4hr ago
Working so other people (who have yachts with little support yachts) can implement their vision of improving the human condition does not appeal to me.
I'm more and more curious what you do now, given that short of you owning your own business you're certainly in the thrall of some yachterati or another. Besides, we're both arguing over the betterment of the human condition right now, unless your perspective is driven strictly through self-interest.
Of course not having to work is luxury.
In that case, should we abolish retirement and force the elderly to work? End school and send the children to work in the Tesla mines?
In the fully-automated AI world, the AIs are the slaves to the humans. In the welfare world, the productive are slaves to the unproductive.
These are not binary outcomes, but a spectrum. We're several steps down the road to the fully-automated world already; it seems foolish for the productivity gains to go entirely to capital and force others to live in hovels.
Not to mention in your model, the lowliest of slaves own mansions full of servants and cars while the slavemasters wallow in garbage in a drug-induced fugue state. I wonder if their masters wish they could be slaves, too.
ChickenOverlord
4hr ago
I don't have a WSJ subscription so I can't confirm the details, but it looks like Starlink turned profitable ~4 years after thet started launching the satellites, which is a pretty crazy turnaround given the massive amount of capital poured into it: https://www.wsj.com/tech/behind-the-curtain-of-elon-musks-secretive-spacex-revenue-growth-and-rising-costs-2c828e2b?page=1
I don’t even understand these arguments. The motte for Elon Musks is he’s the most important person of the 21st century to date and the most important engineer since probably 1900. Electric cars didn’t exists before him. I believe he’s the only person to start a car company from scratch in a 100 years without state backing. Rockets had completely had no advance for 60 years before him. His satellite internet is an entirely new industry. He’s also the first backer of openAI which is like Microsoft’s entire bet the company bet.
Bill Gates invented a computer operating system and excel. Steve Jobs improved smart phone tech that already existed and created an animation company. Also competed in computers. Musks accomplishments seem above these two guys.
What is the Bailey for Elon Musks? He’s literally god or at a minimum a comic book super hero here to save mankind?
The motte for him is no reason to dump Musks as an ally. There is no human on earth I would prefer as an ally.
Nevertheless, the FBI (or some three-letter agency) is indeed maintaining a dossier about them. It's just a very boring dossier.
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