Posts by Flocke Kroes 4560 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2007
Because you are looking in the wrong direction.
The waste products of getting oxygen out of regolith are silicon, iron and aluminium - ingredients for solar panels. Searching for solar power from regolith shows several sites covering the same story. Using iron to support aluminium mirrors gets the thermal energy for half the process and solar panels generate the electricity for the other half of separating regolith into metals and oxygen. The missing part is a supply of cold to liquify the oxygen for storage (not impossible but I haven't come across anyone demonstrating tech to make a good thermal connection to the low temperatures available for half of each moonth).
I suppose humans on the Moon might like a little oxygen but that is a rounding error compared to what is needed for rocket propellant. Oxygen is the heavy half of propellant whether you pick hydrogen or methane for the fuel. Sending excess fuel to the Moon and getting the oxygen locally is a big step in the right direction. Hydrogen from the Moon is a more difficult problem and carbon is even worse - unless someone finds a large deposit of carbonates.
Some laws of software
1) Anything not tested should be assumed broken.
2) Anything not covered by automated tests will be broken real soon now.
3) Any breakage left lying around will cause a work around.
4) Any bug fixed late will cause a work around to fail.
Argument was valid for a week because SpaceX average two launches per week. Argument was less valid for a quarter where you need to maintain a higher proportion of non-Starlink launches over a run of 25. That has already happened according to Shotwell - a far more reliable source than Musk. This article is about a Musk statement for the year. Reversion to the mean will not save you this time. Massively more likely that Musk is just lying, and I would go with that if SpaceX had split off Starlink and were advertising an IPO. This is journalists remembering old statements about when an IPO would suit SpaceX and noticing the conditions have just about been met.
https://www.starlink.com/business/maritime.
They took the low hanging fruit first, brought in step ladders some time ago and are moving on to cherry pickers. By the time Amazon has an operational system they will find Starlink at every profitable level of the market. That will not stop Jeff. He will shovel cash into a furnace for a decade to take control of a large market.
SpaceX are not turning away any launch customers. If a new customer turns up that means one less Starlink launch. The launch cost is only this low because overheads get divided by the large number of launches. Costs are set to drop because the number of launches next year will be higher. Part of that comes from increased rocket performance allowing more return to launch site missions. That saves waiting for (and paying for) a drone ship.
There is more to LEO vs GEO. LEO is nearer so the ground antenna size can be smaller, radio power can be lower or bandwidth can be higher (reality is a mixture of all three). On the downward side, the cell size is smaller for LEO. Starlink gets to multiply the bandwidth by a larger number of cells in the same area covered by a GEO satellite.
LEO also gives the opportunity to talk directly to a cell phone. Not that valuable in the US where supporting one phone call uses bandwidth that could support a number of high paying Starlink customers (lower power and antenna size means fewer bits hogging the same amount of time as a large number of bits from a Starlink dish). The capability becomes more valuable when you have satellites that would otherwise be idle over poor countries. $100/month is to much in most of the world but shared between more subscribers it makes a reasonable back haul in remote areas.
Starlink started with the easy target market, Americans. It is adapting the effectively free coverage elsewhere to what those markets can use. It isn't the huge income Musk was talking about but no-one with a clue takes his Tweets seriously - certainly after "funding secured".
Buying a Falcon 9 launch costs about $70M because it would cost you more to buy from someone else - if they had a working rocket and would not just pinch your satellite. Popular guesses at the internal cost of a Falcon 9 launch are under $20M. Add in $5M ish for a fairing full of Starlinks and multiply by 60ish launches per year gets you to $1.5B - near enough Starlink revenue for a back-of-envelope calculation.
The real problems with Starlink lie elsewhere: The US has a good supply of wealthy rural customers barely served by complete arse-hole ISPs (even compared to Musk). That does not apply so well to the rest of the world, which is what Starlink needs to scale. That and a CEO who does not work hard to alienate half the planet on Twitter.
The next step up would be a cheaper rocket carrying larger number of bigger satellites. A much simpler problem to solve than a personality transplant for the CEO.
Senators would not mess around with details requiring expert knowledge. A simpler knob to turn without risk of scandal would be to prioritize other responsibilities of the US F&WS.
LM are responsible for the Orion capsule for Artemis. Artemis II is independent of Starship but the Orion for Artemis III depends on Starship landing on the Moon and another ready to meet up with Orion. Delaying Artemis III is somewhat in LM's interest: cost plus contract to store an idle Orion but this delays invoicing for the Artemis IV Orion. Delaying SpaceX might not delay Artemis III. The space suit contract is difficult and was awarded too late to be certain of being ready on time. Delays to Artemis I have delayed Artenis II - bits of the Orion from one are needed for the other, This means that currently Orion is expected to be ready later than the SLS for Artemis II - but Boeing are working on that. LM are likely to bid on other contracts that require Starship so parts of LM have an interest in Starship becoming operational.
The other place to look is United Launch Alliance (half LM and half Boeing). An operational Starship would limit opportunities for ULA's Vulcan rocket that will be ready real soon now. So would RocketLab's Neutron, Stoke Space or any of the other medium sized rockets under development. ULA is looking for a buyer so long term Starship is not a competitor to LM and Boeing's launch business (they won't have one).
The simplest explanation for any delay is under resourced agencies working with difficult regulations having to produce results that will withstand the scrutiny of Blue Origin's lawyers.
Careful: Musk might accept. Think of what you are buying.
$13B of debt - that money was lent to X holdings which merged with Twitter, not to Musk directly.
Various unpaid bills from former employees, landlords, suppliers and anyone else Musk thought he could stiff.
A collection of fines for privacy violations and spreading disinformation.
Responsibility for compliance with consent decrees. Twitter Version 1 evaded some legal consequences by signing consent decrees: promises to do better, monitor performance and report results back to US courts. The people originally responsible for compliance left when Musk bought Twitter. Getting that stuff wrong could land you in prison.
Part of the last sale was that if X sues former Twitter executives, X has to pay their legal fees. Do you really want to pay Musk's legal fees?
Musk lost a fortune by not doing due diligence. So far his lawyers have kept more serious consequences at bay. What sort of legal representation can you afford?
The real money is from the everything app. The idea is to replace adverts with purchase buttons. One click tells the vendor your address and what to send. The balance shown on the vendor's bank of X account increases by a little less than the amount the purchaser's decreases. No actual money changes hands - Musk already spent it. Everyone will sign up and put their life savings into X because they do not want to miss out on the high interest rate that shows on account balances.
Musk genuinely believes he can succeed because he knows he is much smarter than Sam Bankman-Fried. He has all the proof he needs because he is certain IQ is measured in dollars.
You need practice thinking like an authoritarian. Instead of paying money you hint at what you want a court order to say and one will be issued promptly. Old Twitter challenged such orders in local courts regularly. For a functional democracy Musk will make an excuse and do nothing but for an authoritarian Musk will censor whatever you want.
If the system does not have secure communications it can be defeated by a man in the middle attack. The man in the middle sends an extra ping to the storage facility and stores the result. From then on he can return that result to verification facilities as required and can make off with the bombs at his liesure.
The previous management took Twitter from nothing through the money pit stage to the point of making a modest profit. When they got an offer to sell out well above market value they converted the offer into a binding legal commitment and completed the sale despite Musk shrieking like a stuck pig.
I am surprised Musk's critical employee retention skills and rapid changes without any consideration for the consequences have not caused Twitter to cease functioning. I found out how Twitter lasted this long financially: Musk had Twitter borrow more than it needed to complete the purchase from the original shareholders. He has matched expenditure to the halved income by delaying paying most bills. Some of those bills have effectively gone away because the creditors believe they will never be able to collect. Others are a time bomb waiting for crunch time. The bills that actually matter - interest payments on Twitter's loans - have been paid from the excess capital raised for the purchase. That money is coming to and end, the bad debts are getting to the final stages of litigation and Twitter's lack of regulatory compliance is turning into fines. The time is approaching for Twitter to get fresh investment (I can only name one man foolish enough for that) or declare bankruptcy. I suppose trading while insolvent is also an option for someone who thinks unpaid lawyers will save him.
If you had ever had a significant bad debt get zeroed by bankruptcy you would understand half the hatred. The other half comes from Musk supporting hatred against certain minority groups. Last time I checked bankers were unable to sell Twitter's debt at 60cents per dollar. You have the opportunity to put your retirement fund where your mouth is. Buy some of that debt and hope for that 66% return on investment. I would rather you lost out than have a bunch of bankers split the losses among their investors.
I very much appreciate that ARM has collected less baggage over its history than x86. On the other hand people have put enormous effort into optimizing x86. It takes the same number of transistors, time and power to do a multiply on ARM as x86. The big performance winner for Apple is HBM and having appropriate silicon to take advantage of the extra bandwidth. If Intel had a high performance ARM chip to plug into an x86 socket the speed and power requirements would be very similar.
Intel now have to take huge steps to produce chips that take full advantage of HBM without a helpfully timed fuck-ups from competitors - like AMD had with Itanium and RDRAM.
To me (and some of the others here), PC means a big box with a motherboard that has sockets for CPU and memory. The article and most of the quotes assume Personal Computer is most likely to be a laptop. Gelsinger wants Apple M series performance. That is not going to happen with a motherboard restricting bus width and latency while increasing power requirements. Intel will have to use HBM, which will require big changes on many levels.
Intel has spent decades making their CPUs immune to iterative memory technology improvements. This was a business decision: any investment in memory technology would be punished by being unused in Intel CPUs until the feature came as standard from all the major suppliers. That kept memory a low margin competitive market and reserved all the profits for Intel.
All the effort put into coping with low memory bandwidth must now be thrown out and replaced by silicon that makes best use of high bandwidth. It means engaging with memory suppliers as partners instead of as second class citizens. It means the desktop computers become laptop boards in a different box - where that has not happened already.
An x86 thoroughly designed for HBM should be able to compete with Apple M series. Intel will need two or three generations to catch up. I hope they do. It was bad when they were effectively a monopoly but I do not want anyone else to achieve that level of dominance either.
Some fool who believed Republicans went for a job interview. The employer quickly interpreted his answers to match Republican beliefs and fed them back to him (they would have fed back Democrat beliefs if he had identified as one). Confirmation bias made the employer a trusted source of information and the fool started work with enthusiasm. The job was to set up web sites with no financial connection to each other and no common pattern in their creation or maintenance linking them. The fool knew his stuff and did an excellent job.
The expensive part of bringing a drug to market is proving it is safe. When it first became clear that a drug to treat COVID was required all sorts of drugs were tested for effectiveness in human cell cultures. Priorities were low price and high availability. Ivermectin showed up as a winner, but only at dosages that would make a complete human very ill. The results were published on the internet and the genuine page for invermectin became the base of a tree of fake websites.
The low level fake web sites were somewhat technical, extolled ivermectin's effectiveness against COVID, linked to the genuine (but very technical) results but missed out the dangerously high dosage requirement. Higher level fake web sites were more numerous, less technical and cited to the next level down in the chain as evidence. The top level consisted of social media posts.
We know all this because the fool eventually boasted of his achievements to the press and there was evidence to back him up. Most of your beliefs come from the naturalnews chain of fake websites. They bought enough ivermectin to create a shortage and made a killing selling it at inflated prices.
Big Pharma was not the trigger. It was your username and all the delusional trash you have written in the past.
There was an actual study on the use of ivermectin to treat COVID patients. It was abandoned because of the statistically significant increase in the death rate.
If you want a big meds company to get really angry at, try naturalnews.
He started buying in secret - legal up to a point. When that point passed he did not file the appropriate papers with the SEC and kept buying. This can normally be dealt with by filing 'Oops! Sorry' paperwork. Work and apologizing are beyond his ability but when he got caught someone filed the right paperwork for him.
Musk had already bought a hefty chunk of Twitter before he was told "Stop buying - if you get any control here you will wreck Twitter". At the time I believed it was an honest response, not a strategy to provoke a buy-out. I would not like to bet on it either way.
I know. It is hard to believe but you actually get people clutching their pearls about rocket emissions injected directly to all levels of the atmosphere on the way up. Given years of optimistic growth this could eventually turn into an utterly insignificant issue. It is as if they decide to be angry first and never bother to check the current state of research.
Switching a home from gas to heat pump and generating the additional electricity using gas results in a net reduction in gas use. If you want a better solution that works when Europe has several days in a row with almost no wind: import nuclear from France. There have been accusations that France subsidizes its nuclear electricity. If true that would mean French tax payers would be subsidizing UK heating.
If you form 8000kg of iridium into an Orion capsule shape then add about 1000kg of heat shield and parachutes you have something you could safely send to Earth. At 2020 prices that would be worth $400M - except the world market for iridium in 2020 was only 8000kg. Humans are exceptionally good at not needing iridium.
$400M is a tight budget for sending any large vehicle to the asteroids. To make a profit, the vehicle has to manufacture a steady stream of precious metal capsules plus (solar electric?) engines plus solar panels plus propellant (cheap metals?).
Much easier to forget the asteroids and precious metals. A working Orion capsule is worth more than double one made of iridium.
The US government switched interest from space to money. When the Space shuttle proved too expensive to use for regular access to space the same components from the same suppliers got re-shuffled into a jobs program called Constellation. The huge quantities of cash that Constellation spread across every state protected the jobs that matter most: senators and congressmen. When it became abundantly clear that Constellation was more expensive than the shuttle the program was renamed SLS and has become even more successful - at financing politicians.
Billionaire rocket companies have made only two differences to SLS:
*) a rush to get every possible cost plus contract signed with expensive cancellation clauses before the gravy train gets derailed.
*) a desperate search for a replacement gravy train.
N1 engines could only be started once. If you tested one - pass or fail - it could not fly because some of the valves were actuated by explosives.
Raptor engine parts and subassemblies are tested non-destructively. All raptor engines are test fired at McGregor before being installed at Boca Chica. For some reason some commenters like to say raptors have a high failure rate because of failures on the super heavy launch. A more reasonable guess at the time (later confirmed in the mishap report) was a system level issue rather than an engine issue. (Leaky pipes on the booster started a fire that burned the connection between the engines and their control computer)
The "plan" was that clicking on a Twitter advert would take you to a Twitter page where you could buy things by transfering money from your Twitter bank account to the vendor's Twitter account.
The web browser would remain talking to Twitter. As the money never leaves Twitter, Musk could spend it and no-one would notice - just like a cryptocon exchange.
This keeps coming up, so yet again: Musk never had the option to cancel for $1B. He would have jumped on such a cheap opportunity and tried to reach it by round about means.
There was a way out for $1B if Musk was unable (not unwilling) to complete the deal. Acceptable examples would be the US government blocking the merger or the bank loan falling through.
The bank loan was signed and sealed deal when Musk bought Twitter - well before he realised he was massively over paying. The banks could not back out any more than Musk could but there was a time limit.
If Musk's legal delaying tactics had succeeded he could have run out the time limit on the loan agreement then legitimately claimed he could not afford Twitter and escape for a measely billion.
The banks agreed to the loan because they believed they could sell the debt on to greater fools. The loan was more than enough to buy Twitter and left cash in Twitter's account to cover the first few interest payments. The banks might have gotten away with it too if some meddling kid had not trash talked Twitter's value. Tesla trades well above any sane valuation so the same could have been true for Twitter. On top off the trash talk, the world in general and fools in particular had a shortage of money at the time. Since then, Musk has worked hard to earn a reputation for not paying debts. There is still a shortage of fools with money and no-one is dumb enough to lend Musk money now.
Musk's "don't pay any bills" strategy is getting to the point where courts are enforcing payment. The banks' greater fool strategy is clearly busted and they are now looking for a different way to get paid.
Secondary purchasers theoretically get the right to watch a TV series. Pretend the tech works: purchasers do get to watch and others don't. I pay about £1/episode for a TV series (it can take a while for the price to drop but I am patient and so far behind what is current that there is a steady stream reaching my price). Call six episodes $10 to buy, or watch and resell for $9.75 because of the 2.5% that goes to primary purchasers.
That original price of $800 breaks even after 3161 re-sales with the risk that some collector will decide to keep the series and end royalties before investment is returned. Clearly a business plan worthy of the underpants gnomes.
Plan B: repeatedly auction the NFT to my aliases at ever increasing prices until some fool bids more than $800 plus transaction fees + lawyer's fees + fines.
At its peak, Atlas V flew about once per month. The gap between the last two launches was 11 months so there has been plenty of room in the schedule for Kuiper but no launches. The reason for that is Amazon did not want to waste a powerful Atlas V launching just two experimental satellites. Assume the first Atlas V launch goes this month. There will be some delay while the satellites get tested, with the possibility of some more delay if those tests show a need to re-work the current inventory. Once Amazon have confidence in their satellites the remaining Atlas launches should easily launch in the time available - but there are only 9. ULA stopped building Atlas cores to coincide with the end of their stock of Russian made engines. In theory Amazon could pay to get Vulcan human rated to free up some Atlases reserved for Starliner. Cue complaints from Amazon shareholders and NASA.
Falcon 9 launched twice in its first year (2010), zero times the following year and did not break 10 launches per year until 2017 - coinciding with the first booster two fly twice. Although this was a different era for launch demand, SpaceX was famous for their long waiting list. Most of the delays came from ramping up production and learning how to quickly cycle the ground support equipment. RocketLab currently launch about once per month but that involved considerable time switching from hand made by rocket scientists to mass production by trainees. A part of their rapid growth was launching from New Zealand. Falcon gets to launch so often because they now get a very narrow launch corridor with minimal disruption to congested Florida airspace.
Blue Origin are just starting their transition to engine mass production, with a much more difficult engine than the electrically pumped Rutherford or even Merlin - which benefited from years of research into simplifying manufacture. Vulcan is going to start with a shortage of engines and if that gets fixed will smack into trying to get frequent licenses to launch an experimental rocket into congested airspace.
Ariane 5 maxed out at seven launches per year. Kuiper has 18 Ariane 6 launches booked. Like Atlas and Vulcan, these are expected to bare the brunt of the early launches while New Glenn gets started. Ariane is building up a backlog of other commitments (like Vulcan) so will have to start their cadence at a sprint to meet the deadline.
The plan for New Glenn is to land successfully on the first attempt. By itself that is ambitious. It took SpaceX a year to re-qualify a used Falcon 9, and that was with a rocket that had been flying for six years. New Glenn also has to start at a sprint. The cores are not as easy to build as Falcons so if one gets dented it will hurt the schedule.
Amazon could still meet their deadline with their existing plan but that requires everything else to go smoothly with a new satellite, three new rockets, two new engines and first time re-use.
The current records on Earth are 130°C for survival and 122°C for reproduction. A hyperthermophile principle would require something able to think one up, which is well beyond the abilities of Earth bacteria. Complex multicellular life on Earth requires moderate temperatures, which can be found close to but not in a hydrothermal vent.
For all we know, he got the whole $1.75M + court costs + legal fees and possibly a working email address.
If there had been some real chance of Microsoft being legally required to provide quality customer support then congressmen and senators would have well funded re-election campaign funds until the judge was replaced and the law was fixed.
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