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Khaldun
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Reply #595 on: September 28, 2016, 08:17:33 PM

It's pretty charitable to call them plans. His plans on Mars are only a bit ahead of Theranos' plans for a magic blood-testing technology. The stuff that he's punting down the road to think about later is utterly fundamental, profoundly difficult. Plus he doesn't even have anything besides shopworn SF-fan fetish ideas about whether the entire idea of living on Mars makes even a lick of sense, even for the objective of putting our eggs in more than one planetary basket. I can buy that he might be able to manufacture a rocket that can get there, and maybe even a landing vehicle that can get humans to the surface. Maybe, maybe, one that can get them off the surface, though that's a different kettle of fish. But even with fueling in orbit, putting one hundred people in that rocket for an 80-day voyage and then just somehow having them build everything they need to survive indefinitely from the raw materials on Mars, since there's no way even with drops sent ahead to provide everything they'd need to become self-sustaining before they all starve, suffocate and die of thirst. Sorry, no way, no how, not with anything available in the next two or three decades even in the most optimistic funding scenarios. And doing it through funding just tossed into the project by aspirant travellers, other private companies, and public agencies alongside whatever he's going to contribute while keeping all of them totally out of the loop on any decisions related to the project? Also not going to happen no matter how much he thumbs through his copy of Atlas Shrugged.
calapine
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Reply #596 on: September 29, 2016, 02:36:40 PM

It's pretty charitable to call them plans. His plans on Mars are only a bit ahead of Theranos' plans for a magic blood-testing technology. The stuff that he's punting down the road to think about later is utterly fundamental, profoundly difficult. Plus he doesn't even have anything besides shopworn SF-fan fetish ideas about whether the entire idea of living on Mars makes even a lick of sense, even for the objective of putting our eggs in more than one planetary basket. I can buy that he might be able to manufacture a rocket that can get there, and maybe even a landing vehicle that can get humans to the surface. Maybe, maybe, one that can get them off the surface, though that's a different kettle of fish. But even with fueling in orbit, putting one hundred people in that rocket for an 80-day voyage and then just somehow having them build everything they need to survive indefinitely from the raw materials on Mars, since there's no way even with drops sent ahead to provide everything they'd need to become self-sustaining before they all starve, suffocate and die of thirst. Sorry, no way, no how, not with anything available in the next two or three decades even in the most optimistic funding scenarios. And doing it through funding just tossed into the project by aspirant travellers, other private companies, and public agencies alongside whatever he's going to contribute while keeping all of them totally out of the loop on any decisions related to the project? Also not going to happen no matter how much he thumbs through his copy of Atlas Shrugged.

Try saying that in a Space-related webforum  awesome, for real

Edit:

And of course it's not easier arguing against this if serious outlets like Slate write articles titled "Elon wants to put a million people on Mars. He might do it."
« Last Edit: September 29, 2016, 02:44:48 PM by calapine »

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Chimpy
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Reply #597 on: September 29, 2016, 02:47:51 PM

Which is the whole problem I have with SpaceX.

Musk is hero-worshipped by the "neckbeard" community so much that being critical of anything he says is like you killed their firstborn. They bring out the knives at any remotely critical comment about SpaceX, Tesla, or Musk himself. Then, on the flip side, you say anything positive about ANY other company building rockets and you are shouted down by the mob.

Taking the stuff he announced at anything close to face value is like watching the Jetsons in the 1960s and believing that was what 1975 America would look like.

'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
calapine
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Reply #598 on: September 29, 2016, 03:14:50 PM

Yes. Even if one disagrees with Khaldun and considers the idea workable in general, the presentation contains so many hair-raising details that should set of any bullshit detector:

Such as the planned 1000x (one-thousand) times re-use of the huge 42-engine first stage. Even 50 times would be a technical revolution...
The 200k/per person flight-price is calculated with the amortization over 1000 flights as well btw...

Or the price of colony ship for 100 people, departure mass 2250 tons. Will be able to land on Mars and Earth: 200 m $. In other words, less than a Boeing 777 or 1/10th of a Space Shuttle

How...?  Ohhhhh, I see.


Change of topic:

Rosetta performed her collision burn, duration 208 seconds.

Next stop: Surface of 67P in about 13 hours from now. 12 years of operation are coming to end. Heartbreak



Once upon a time... Rosetta's grand finale
« Last Edit: September 29, 2016, 03:26:27 PM by calapine »

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Khaldun
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Reply #599 on: September 29, 2016, 05:03:24 PM

I actually think it's workable and I like the idea. Which is EXACTLY why I think everyone who agrees should be grabbing pitchforks and torches and going after Musk, because he's gonna fuck the whole thing over when it turns out in 2025 he's snuck off to a tax haven island with what's left of the $100,000 checks some possible passengers wrote him.

The thing that I should not have to tell an arch-capitalist like Musk who masturbates to pictures of Ayn Rand is you gotta have a profit motive. There is no profit motive to going to Mars. If it was easy to make Mars colonies, we'd already have pizza shops on Vinson Massif in Antarctica, a vastly more forgiving place. If Musk were serious, that is exactly what he'd do: take a prototype "Interplanetary Transport" into orbit successfully and land it with 200 colonists in interior Antarctica and test making a colony from scratch with the materials in the rocket, no assistance from anywhere. At least there's water and air and non-contaminated soil. If they can't do it and have to call home for rescue, it's not ready. If they can do it, it's probably still not ready, but you're close. But Musk just wants to go go go because he has this thing that says, "I am the savior of all human beings" in his head. It's dumb and the only people who fall for it are people with an equally dumb form of beta-male self-celebration thrumming through their brains. It's a con game at best, a lunatic religious movement at worst.

I want us to be out there in the galaxy as well. The fact is that we're only getting there, at least in our short-term future, via robotic probes. A real visionary understands that we're at the bottom of a well more fierce than gravity, it's a well called time. The things we want to do at our most visionary happen only at time scales that make the vanity of someone like Elon Musk irrelevant. The real visionaries might learn to accept their smallness in the big picture of things and do the small but wonderful things that put us on the road to being something more than they are. No one will remember us, if we do our job right, when the grand and beautiful things that might come to pass eventually bless us as a species.
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Reply #600 on: September 29, 2016, 05:48:43 PM



Digging the 20-year old UI/window manager they are using still.

Morat20
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Reply #601 on: September 29, 2016, 06:06:41 PM

Wasn't Musk the hyperloop guy too?

Because I admit, I don't know much about public transport, but I could spot some kinda big "Whats" in there, at least with the rough budget and speed/time estimates he gave. (Like I'm pretty sure purchasing the land, or the right of ways at least, wouldn't be nearly that cheap. And also, you can't maintain maximum speed between two endpoints unless those are the ONLY places the thing stops, which didn't jive with some of the hype. And no talk about recovering from errors or accidents, and a whole lot of engineering stuff kinda hand-waved away).

Too much hype, not even meat.

Same problem here.

"Yeah, that SEEMS like it works, but um....how are you gonna turn those stages around that fast? What are you doing about radiation -- solar flare possibilities and the like? How the fuck do you plan to live on Mars, which is about as inhospitable as the Moon. Hell, why aren't you going to the Moon which is just as killer, but has a lower escape velocity? Try stuff out right next door, you know?"
KallDrexx
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Reply #602 on: September 29, 2016, 07:57:13 PM

Not only that I imagine that the Moon could have a real profit motive with it for mining.
calapine
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Reply #603 on: September 29, 2016, 07:59:02 PM

Digging the 20-year old UI/window manager they are using still.

 Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly? Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?

Since the Rosetta mission was designed in the early 1990 (start 1992) there is lot's of old shit...

Rosetta runs with a Dynex 16 Bit @ 25 Mhz CPU from the 80ies

Philea runs 2 RTX2010 @ 8 Mhz, plus another 8 of them for the scientifc experiments. The software is in Forth.

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Reply #604 on: September 29, 2016, 09:08:11 PM

Not only that I imagine that the Moon could have a real profit motive with it for mining.

I saw a show that said that one of the keys to cheap nuclear fusion is mining Helium-3 on the moon as it is prevalent there but is insanely rare on Earth.

But these "visionaries" don't want to go to the Moon because men have been there before and you don't get as much recognition for "first guy in 50 years to land on the Moon".

'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
Sky
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Reply #605 on: September 29, 2016, 09:34:56 PM

Space tourism to the moon would be huge.
Khaldun
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Reply #606 on: September 30, 2016, 05:02:39 AM

Completely. There's a genuine profit motive. Look what rich assholes will pay to be carried to the top of Mt. Everest, more or less. Offer them a chance to be one of a small number of tourists to go to the moon and they'd probably be willing to pay $100 million for it or more. Any technology for building a base there will work elsewhere in the solar system. If something goes actually wrong in the base and you have a regular pipeline for getting people up there and back, it might not be a death sentence. If you can learn to make water and air and food for a moonbase, you can do it anywhere. Helium-3 might have genuine value in our actually existing economy.

But yeah, Musk's not doing any of that because vanity. And he's got perfect California Ideology armor: you're just a second-hander if you try to pull the great visionary down, you're just a collectivist filled with jealousy for a man of vision!

No, we're just people who actually like the idea of human beings actually slowly expanding into the wider solar system and don't want to see a preening narcissist ruin it.
calapine
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Reply #607 on: September 30, 2016, 07:06:30 AM

I missed it, sleepting until 15:00 :(

Rosetta's last image:
2.4x2.4 meter across, from a distance of 51 meters (new data suggest 23 meters), seconds before impact. Blurry because it's too close for the cameras to focus.




Higher quality image , from 1.2 km, showing an area of 33x33 meters.

NASA Deep Space Network helped out at the end of mission as the 70-Meters antennnas allowed for a higher bandwith in the crucial phase.

For Chimpy Trippy, old-timey UI showing incoming packets:
Rosetta was programmed to turn off once a sudden shift in orientation, as caused by touching the surface, was detected, so that definitely was the last of it.

And here is the final update in the video series:
Once upon a time...Mission complete
« Last Edit: September 30, 2016, 07:48:35 AM by calapine »

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Reply #608 on: September 30, 2016, 07:42:36 AM

Trippy commented on the UI, not me. I spend enough time living in 1990s IBM interfaces that I don't get that nostalgic for old school computers DRILLING AND MANLINESS

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calapine
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Reply #609 on: September 30, 2016, 07:45:42 AM

Trippy commented on the UI, not me. I spend enough time living in 1990s IBM interfaces that I don't get that nostalgic for old school computers DRILLING AND MANLINESS

Your names are too close!  tongue

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MahrinSkel
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Reply #610 on: September 30, 2016, 07:06:09 PM

If you want profitable "in our lifetime" space exploitation, you have to be looking at asteroid/comet capture. Anything else is a bid for the history books, not the bottom line, the costs of pulling it out of the gravity wells will make it nonviable.

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Morat20
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Reply #611 on: September 30, 2016, 07:12:30 PM

Trippy commented on the UI, not me. I spend enough time living in 1990s IBM interfaces that I don't get that nostalgic for old school computers DRILLING AND MANLINESS
There's also the fact that a LOT of the engineers prefer simplistic UI's.

I did design work for Shuttle and Station, and their primary requirements were data flexibility (they wanted to be able to attach to a giant range of data types and sources) and display flexibility (they wanted to be able to do graphs, real-time numbers, dials, buttons, colors, alarms and to be able to customize it by group and even by individual).

And by and large, the more experienced they got? The simpler the displays. Mostly numbers, with the occasional small graph.

We had some we made for "visitors" (stuff like 2D outlines of the shuttle, where the wing leading edges and nose changed colors according to thermal measurements during landing, along with temperature readouts) but the folks using it? They often just made boxes, each with several readings (just numbers, colored by ranges sometimes). Sometimes hooked to audible alarms.  Admittedly some of them mimicked the layout of the control panels and such, so they could direct astronauts to the right area to double check the telemetry against onboard readings.

But mostly it was lots of numbers, in lots of colors, sometiems with flashing borders or background colors -- critical stuff easy to spot at a glance, warnings and problem areas jumping out, etc.

Managers often wanted fancy. Engineers wanted simple, modifiable, and without frills. They wanted a display they could pack with sensor readings in an order they liked, that reacted exactly as they liked.
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Reply #612 on: October 04, 2016, 04:05:36 PM



The JWST main mirror becomes quite impressive when pictured besides humans for scale...

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ajax34i
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Reply #613 on: October 05, 2016, 07:45:01 AM

The JWST main mirror becomes quite impressive when pictured besides humans for scale...

Sigh...  bananas!
calapine
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Reply #614 on: October 05, 2016, 10:31:42 AM

Blue Origin update:

Blue Origin flew New Shepard today and tested the Launch Abort System (LAS) during midflight. It worked.

Surprisingly the first stage kept going as well and then performed a successful landing. Because the way the LAS is built - the solid rocket motor is on the downside of the capsule and shoots directly onto the first stage - this wasn't a given at all.
Impressive demonstration by Blue Origin.

But watch yourself: Liftoff is at 1:06:18


SpaceX update:

Gywnne Shotwell gave an interview today at the Asia-Pacific APSCC conference. Two intersting takeaways:

1) She specified the earlier investigation statement saying the pad explosion was caused "anomaly into the Helium system" into "We believe that the composite over wrapped pressure vessel [the helium bottle], known as a COPv, let go in the tank."

I believe I deserve a pat on the head for calling it!

2) SpaceX reduces the price discount for booking a re-used first stage to 10% (formerly 30%). She justified that by the higher reliability of an already-flown rocket.

Considering how much Musk was touting re-usabilty as a game-changer for the last years, a 10 % saving sounds rather underwhelming.


ESA Update:

The Exomars Trace Gas Orbiter is going to reach Mars on 19th and drop the Schiapperlli lander before starting it's science mission.

EDM Schiapperli (Entry, Descent and Landing Demonstrator Module) is basically a 600 kg testbed for the landing system of the 2020 Exomars rover. It's job ist just to land, really. It has a minor science suite that will work a few days, than batteries run out - no solar panels or RTG even.

Definitely not the cheapest way to do this, but very typical of ESA's careful, step-by-step approach.

Picture of both, EDM on top:


Exomars, with Human and Mars Express for scale:
« Last Edit: October 05, 2016, 10:35:39 AM by calapine »

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KallDrexx
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Reply #615 on: October 05, 2016, 11:11:49 AM

As much as I agree with the sentiment here that Musk is over-sensationalized, the one thing I at least am happy with is the fact that since everyone is head over heels in love with everything that comes out of his mouth, it at least is spurring good competition in the space
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Reply #616 on: October 05, 2016, 12:17:25 PM

I actually think it's workable and I like the idea. Which is EXACTLY why I think everyone who agrees should be grabbing pitchforks and torches and going after Musk, because he's gonna fuck the whole thing over when it turns out in 2025 he's snuck off to a tax haven island with what's left of the $100,000 checks some possible passengers wrote him.

The thing that I should not have to tell an arch-capitalist like Musk who masturbates to pictures of Ayn Rand is you gotta have a profit motive. There is no profit motive to going to Mars. If it was easy to make Mars colonies, we'd already have pizza shops on Vinson Massif in Antarctica, a vastly more forgiving place. If Musk were serious, that is exactly what he'd do: take a prototype "Interplanetary Transport" into orbit successfully and land it with 200 colonists in interior Antarctica and test making a colony from scratch with the materials in the rocket, no assistance from anywhere. At least there's water and air and non-contaminated soil. If they can't do it and have to call home for rescue, it's not ready. If they can do it, it's probably still not ready, but you're close. But Musk just wants to go go go because he has this thing that says, "I am the savior of all human beings" in his head. It's dumb and the only people who fall for it are people with an equally dumb form of beta-male self-celebration thrumming through their brains. It's a con game at best, a lunatic religious movement at worst.

I want us to be out there in the galaxy as well. The fact is that we're only getting there, at least in our short-term future, via robotic probes. A real visionary understands that we're at the bottom of a well more fierce than gravity, it's a well called time. The things we want to do at our most visionary happen only at time scales that make the vanity of someone like Elon Musk irrelevant. The real visionaries might learn to accept their smallness in the big picture of things and do the small but wonderful things that put us on the road to being something more than they are. No one will remember us, if we do our job right, when the grand and beautiful things that might come to pass eventually bless us as a species.
Is Musk a Randian?  I don't follow him very closely, so just curious.  He's always thrown money after his vision regardless of personal cost to himself (but unlike other idiots before him, actually has viable business plans to make it work instead of fantasies).  He's rooted most of his business's in California and remained committed to keeping headquarters (And thus higher taxes) and a lot of manufacturing (with its very strong pro-union laws.  Hell, Tesla is manifacturing in the Bay Area) in state, the exact opposite of what every arch libertarian would do.  From that, I figured he had to be somewhat liberal minded.

Not sure I understand the hatred for his grand vision stuff.  He likes to come out with this grand plans and promote them, outlandish as they are.  Of course hyper-loop is most likely a dream.  Of course there is no way (unless the government decides to throw shit tons of money at him) that we are building 100 man rocket ships to mars by 2025.  He likes to announce these aggressive plans and schedules, which are almost impossible (even with the Falcon Heavy).  But who cares?  It drives up interest, and moves the national conversation forward on these topics.  Something that wouldn't happen if he had kept his mouth shut or made a boring press conference about maybe possibly doing something 50 years from now.  He's pushing public perception that it is possible for us to accomplish big things again, something most Americans seem to feel we haven't been able to do for decades.  In the 50's and 60's, we still had celebrity scientist/industrialist and glamorized the field.  It drove kids into the field of hard sciences.  Since then, the public has had rarely anybody like that.  Just faceless corporate CEO's who golden parachute between companies.  So I'm happy to see him make his bold plans, take it with a grain of salt, and move on.  At the very least it's probably inspiring a few more kids to study the hard sciences than would otherwise happen.  We need more figures like him, warts and all.

But anyways, most of his grandstanding is a tiny side show.  Both SpaceX and Tesla continue to do well, and have sane plans.  Even if both fail, they've already had a massive impact in their respective fields, and caused a lot of positive change.  So I give him a lot of credit for that, regardless of anything else.

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MahrinSkel
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Reply #617 on: October 05, 2016, 01:41:58 PM

Is Musk a Randian?  I don't follow him very closely, so just curious. 
He describes himself as "slightly Libertarian" and contrasts that specifically against Peter Thiel as an extreme Libertarian. He's certainly not a "privatize the sidewalks, selfishness is the highest virtue" Randian. His political activity has largely been in the arena of fighting the dealership system and their cartel monopoly on selling cars. I think the Randites would love to claim him as the embodiment of the Galtian ubermensch, but he doesn't have any interest in them.

Setting aside the hero worship, you still have to admit that what he has actually done is impressive. How many visionaries have failed miserably at starting a car maker? Before SpaceX, private space launch was just rich hobbyists, playing out their Boy Scout model-launching on a larger scale.

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Khaldun
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Reply #618 on: October 05, 2016, 01:46:14 PM

I'm not sure he's as explicitly Randian as Thiel, but he definitely is a major subscriber to California Ideology libertarianism. So much of his public persona resembles the way Rand describes Howard Roark in The Fountainhead that I think he must have some sympathy for Objectivism. But yeah, he does do public-private collaboration more than some other folks in his world.

What I dislike about the grand vision stuff is the flim-flammery involved--the confident answers to things that any good scientist or engineer would feel obliged to be skeptical about. Skepticism is necessary for science--there is to my taste too much of a resemblance between Musk spouting utter nonsense that he has to (he had better!) know is nonsense and the general degree to which Americans now seem to think it's ok to believe in whatever facts or truths make you feel most validated. When we make special excuses for stuff that is simply untrue or implausible (say, Musk claiming that we're already ready to build sustainable habitats for hundreds or thousands of people on Mars from Martian materials) because we find it inspiring, we're saying: it's ok to bullshit when we find the bullshit pleasant to our ears, and it's bad when we don't like the character of the bullshit. Rather than what we should be saying, which is that great visions require a maturity of purpose and a respect for reality.

To take a way more modest example, it's pretty clear now that the space shuttle was a grossly premature mistake--we built it before we were ready, before there was a need, and before considering some alternatives. One could say, "Well, it inspired people" and one could say, "Well, it led to improvements in materials science, etc."  The same should be said about the ISS: to make it affordable, we cut most of what would have made it truly useful. It's mostly for the propaganda optics and for studying the physiological effects of long-term space habitation. Useful in some sense, but not at that price. A grand visionary should stick to advocacy, to imagination. Gerald O'Neill was a grand visionary: he thought about and spoke about space habitats in a way that was inspiring and useful. If he'd been a billionaire who dumped a huge amount of money in trying to force the creation of one of his designs in the 1980s, that would have been wasteful and vain. I worry about Musk sucking up a lot of resources and energies on something that is genuinely not going to work out and that is in some sense the wrong idea even for what he has in mind, which is to get human beings off the planet and living elsewhere. (I also think frankly that spending any resources trying to study how to terraform Mars rather than investigating how to repair our own biosphere is an even dumber and potentially more dangerous kind of distraction.)
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Reply #619 on: October 05, 2016, 02:25:54 PM

See, I'm not worried about that because as far as I can tell, Musk is hardly spending a dime on the extra fancy shit he likes to go off about.  Hyperloop!  Great, here's some money for some other random company to attempt it, not us (and despite it all, there are legitimate merits to the idea, even if implementation across a large state is highly unlikely).  Giant rockets flying to Mars!  Great, all of SpaceX's budget is still directed entirely towards incrementally making their realistic rockets become reality or existing ones better.  When he convinces people to give him money, its for the real projects that do real things.  Despite what he says, I'm very confident that if SpaceX continues to be successful, they will target the moon and go there first long before they attempt a Mars mission.  He runs to the media with his grand fantasies and aggressive schedules, but actually sticks to realistic shit that works.  He will actually peruse the sustainable, profitable path despite what musings about the future he might make.  At least that's my take on it, based on what he's done so far.  I'm sure he could fuck up and go nuts eventually.

Even with his ego, he manages not to spout vile stupid shit on a day to day basis.  That alone already puts him in the top 5% of rich egotistical people category.

Also:
Quote
The thing that I should not have to tell an arch-capitalist like Musk who masturbates to pictures of Ayn Rand is you gotta have a profit motive.
Quote
not sure he's as explicitly Randian as Thiel, but he definitely is a major subscriber to California Ideology libertarianism. So much of his public persona resembles the way Rand describes Howard Roark in The Fountainhead that I think he must have some sympathy for Objectivism.
Are two fairly different things.   tongue
« Last Edit: October 06, 2016, 12:52:26 AM by Teleku »

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lamaros
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Reply #620 on: October 12, 2016, 08:05:57 PM

For someone that doesn't follow him closely you sure have a lot of opinions Teleku! Slightly more reasoned than the reddit crowd, but not much!

I also think frankly that spending any resources trying to study how to terraform Mars rather than investigating how to repair our own biosphere is an even dumber and potentially more dangerous kind of distraction.

Completely and utterly this. Going to Mars to try and "save humanity" is about as thought through at this point as the plot of Intersteller.

We could have all out nuclear war on earth for the rest of the century and it's still the only place that human beings can self-sustainingly live.

pxib captured the point quite well in the Interstellar thread:

Quote
It's a backwards-looking ideal that remembers colonization.

Antarctica is a nicer place to live than Mars. The Sahara is a nicer place to live than Mars. Giant rafts in the middle of the sea are a nicer place to live than Mars. It's easier to grow food in any of those places than on Mars. Easier to ship food there if you can't grow it. Easier to move there. Easier to move away.

Back in the day the ships to the colonies found air, a water table, occasionally habitable temperatures, native plants and animals. Mars has none of these things.

Mars is also the second-most liveable planet we've got within twenty trillion miles. Humans have, in the past, traveled almost one ten millionth that far. It cost them a substantial chunk of the resources of what will be remembered as the wealthiest, most powerful nation in history.

Crowded, plagued by mass extinction, choked with pollution... future Earth is still a more pleasant, less expensive place to live than anywhere we are ever likely to travel. The more crowded and choked it gets, the less likely we'll be able to go looking.

If you want to terraform a planet, start with this one.

MahrinSkel
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Reply #621 on: October 12, 2016, 08:43:47 PM

It would be easier to establish colonies on Ceres or other major asteroids than Mars. The only thing Mars has going for it is convenient supplies of carbon dioxide. Which isn't nothing, but it's at the bottom of a comparatively steep gravity well. By the time you have the space transportation capability it would take to lift the necessary supplies to and then land them on Mars, you can take the same amount to Ceres and ship water and carbon from there all over the solar system.

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Draegan
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Reply #622 on: October 13, 2016, 06:18:42 AM

So we're going straight to creating belters.
Teleku
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Reply #623 on: October 13, 2016, 11:41:19 AM

For someone that doesn't follow him closely you sure have a lot of opinions Teleku! Slightly more reasoned than the reddit crowd, but not much!
I follow SpaceX, not Musk.  Thus everything I know of him comes in the form of his press conferences and news articles about him and SpaceX.  In all that, I never saw crazy Randian stuff, or anything that leads me to believe he's just trying to make a bunch of money and run off.  So I was honestly asking then if somebody could point out stuff I was missing.  Otherwise, I enjoy the vague ideal of a nerd taking his billions in ill gotten silicon valley gains and trying to accomplish some specific great technical feat to advance civilization, rather than donate it all away to random charity.

I fully agree with the sentiment on colonization.  That wont happen until technology advances FAR further than it already has.  As in, we can fly into/around space at near zero cost, and have the technology to economically terriform an entire planet into earth like conditions.  In other words, probably not in the millennium, if ever.  Small scale outposts on the moon (or even mars) for scientific research are something doable in the near future, and something I support in the same way I think the international space station is a great thing.

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calapine
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Reply #624 on: October 13, 2016, 12:13:26 PM

The current Amos-6 fast-fire-explosion-anomaly theory, as per Elon Musk himself, speaking at the NRO:

“We are close to figuring it out. It might have been formation of solid oxygen in the carbon over-wrap of one of the bottles in the upper stage tanks. If it was liquid it would have been squeezed out but under pressure it could have ignited with the carbon. This is the leading theory right now, but it is subject to confirmation.  The other thing we discovered is that we can exactly replicate what happened on the launch pad if someone shoots the rocket. We don’t think that is likely this time around, but we are definitely going to have to take precautions against that in the future. We looked at who would want to blow up a SpaceX rocket. That turned out to be a long list. I think it is unlikely this time, but it is something we need to recognize as a real possibility in the future.”

So that would be an unexpected result of supercooling, something Morat suggested.

His "blow up SpaceX rockets" comet seems a bit weird though. Unless he is suggesting inner-US competitors, and I hope he is not, why would a SpaceX rocket be targeted any more than an Atlas V or Delta IV?

Restoration is a perfectly valid school of magic!
Chimpy
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Reply #625 on: October 13, 2016, 12:24:33 PM

He is literally pulling a "ULA is shooting at our rockets on the pad to sabotage us!"....

Dude is fucking full of himself.

'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
Draegan
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Reply #626 on: October 13, 2016, 03:32:42 PM

Of course hes full of himself. He made a private space company and millions of people take him seriously when he says were going to Mars soon.

I'd be full of myself if I made a rocket be able to land itself.
Venkman
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Reply #627 on: October 13, 2016, 03:38:20 PM

I'm not up on the science, so would love a summary, but I don't get Mars. There's nothing there we can use short of stocking the place with Moisture Vaporators to dig up water for refueling over the next 100 years. Wouldn't it just be cheaper to skip it all together and just land all that stuff on one of the bigger asteroids if we want to jump to the outer solar system? Very little gravity to power through.

For Earth 2, I would think terraforming Venus would be better. Deadly and corrosion though the atmosphere is, at least it has one to start with. And it's only going the "wrong way" when it's between us and the sun. "Only" requires a different class of materials sciences.

And also, in case we thought we knew the size of the universe, we were off by a factor of 20.*

* And by the way, looks like they changed the article title. The web URL says 20X but the article title's been change to 10. So what is it? Were we 90% off or 95%?!?!?
calapine
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Reply #628 on: October 13, 2016, 03:52:37 PM

I'm not up on the science, so would love a summary, but I don't get Mars. There's nothing there we can use short of stocking the place with Moisture Vaporators to dig up water for refueling over the next 100 years. Wouldn't it just be cheaper to skip it all together and just land all that stuff on one of the bigger asteroids if we want to jump to the outer solar system? Very little gravity to power through.

For Earth 2, I would think terraforming Venus would be better. Deadly and corrosion though the atmosphere is, at least it has one to start with. And it's only going the "wrong way" when it's between us and the sun. "Only" requires a different class of materials sciences.

And also, in case we thought we knew the size of the universe, we were off by a factor of 20.*

* And by the way, looks like they changed the article title. The web URL says 20X but the article title's been change to 10. So what is it? Were we 90% off or 95%?!?!?

I don't get Mars either. At least not the colonisation and terraforming plans. When Musk comes up with estimations such as he expects a Mars colony to be independent and self-sustainable within the first 40 - 100 years in case something happens to Earth (his words at the big IAC presention) I tend to lose interest.

A more conventional, science based human mission to Mars would make sense though. Aside from the cost-benefit issue that always crops up when moving from robotic to human space flight.

Restoration is a perfectly valid school of magic!
Chimpy
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Reply #629 on: October 13, 2016, 05:33:14 PM

A viable colony on the moon makes a billion times more sense in every way.

Except in terms of the "I got there first" dick-measuring contest.

'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
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