all the gnashing of teeth about china overlooks a very awkward data point: the number of US companies that can compete with china can be counted on 1 hand, and most of them are run by elon musk. good for him, but terrible for the US and its infuriating complacency.
If Tesla meets or exceeds Battery Day 2030 goals then Tesla (and the USA) will have the dominant share of future lithium battery production. If Tesla broadly misses the Battery Day goals then China will maintain 70% share of the world lithium battery market.
Many in the space industry will talk up Blue Origin or United Launch Alliance as competitors for the future of Space. This makes no sense.
For the Cybertruck to succeed the way the Model 3 has, Tesla must steal the customers Ford, GM, Chrysler, and other automakers most value. To paraphrase Boromir, one does not simply walk into Detroit with such a plan. The big automakers pay very careful attention to their trucks: They know their customers well and develop each new model based on decades of learnings. Musk has a knack for rethinking the customer experience, and the Cybertruck’s radical design could appeal to drivers looking for something different. But when it comes to meeting what those drivers really need and want from their trucks, it’s playing catch up. “Tesla can figure it out, but they don’t already know. If the truck can’t deliver the functionality [drivers] need, they’re not gonna buy it.” Which means that Tesla is fixing to challenge its core competency—designing vehicles that delight and surprise their drivers—as never before.
and here’s a nice design roast:
They said if we converted the CAD file from IGES to DXF we were going to lose some data. I told them we didn’t mind.
It is also far superior to the F-150: and perhaps could be used for lunar mining:
SpaceX could use the electric skateboard of the Cybertruck to build all the of vehicles that they need for a lunar mining operation. 30 cybertrucks could be delivered to the moon with every SpaceX Starship.
Starting around 2030, SpaceX reusable Starship rockets will start providing a replacement for long international flights. The speed will be increased 20x. It will be anywhere in the world in 1 hour. SpaceX will be able to have 1000 people in reclined seating arrangements. The cost will be about $500-1000 per seat per flight. The key enabling factor is increasing the safety of rockets.
SpaceX success in this area would cripple the main financial strength of existing airlines. Business travel and first-class travel and international flights will be replaced with reusable rockets.
A bit more detail:
The reality of SpaceX mass production rockets is unfolding before our eyes. SpaceX Starships will cost over 10x less than current cargo planes, have over 2x the range and will be 30x faster. These massive advantages will give SpaceX dominance of the cargo business.
Not only that, they may also become price competitive by weight. Air freight is 1-5$ per KG, Starship could get to 10$ / KG to LEO, presumably less for ballistic flights. With airlines struggling in general, this could be a huge opening, and remodel the world economy for true just in time delivery.
America’s aerospace industry is regenerating:
If there ever was an example of Schumpeter’s creative destruction, this is it. Traditional aerospace companies have a hoard of capital and talent, providing poor returns to customers. Startups are siphoning the best talent and raising money. Market potential and technology are converging to create an ecosystem that looks more like the aerospace industry pre-1970, including the exploding prototypes, crazy ideas, and swarms of new companies. That aerospace industry took us from the first flight to the moon in ~65 years. The latest batch yearns to take us further.
2022-04-15: If airlines survive, here’s a look at the state of hypersonic flight.
High-speed flight is no longer a game of national prestige, subject to the whims of politics. It’s become the domain of private industry, where the technology is mature enough that entrepreneurs can focus on designs that reduce business risk. In the next decade we anticipate commercial high-speed flight will return to the market, regulations around overland sonic boom will be changed thanks to NASA’s X-59 program, and hypersonic technologies will transition from military to civilian flight. The future is faster!
SpaceX’s SmallSat Rideshare Program will provide small satellite operators with regularly scheduled, dedicated Falcon 9 rideshare missions to SSO for ESPA class payloads. This will be as low as $2.25M per satellite for up to 150 kg of payload mass.
Today’s space pioneers, on the other hand—Musk, Branson, and Bezos—have no such deal and constraints. They are all private. Their only obligation is to their shareholders. This creates a unique opportunity for NASA, whose only obligation is to the nation. It should become the Bell Labs for outer space.
In shadow testing, a car is being driven by a human or a human with autopilot. A new revision of the autopilot software is also present on the vehicle, receiving data from the sensors but not taking control of the car in any way. Rather, it makes decisions about how to drive based on the sensors, and those decisions can be compared to the decisions of a human driver or the older version of the autopilot. If there is a decision — the new software decides to zig where the old one zags, or the new software cruises on when the human hits the brakes, an attempt can be made to figure out how different the decisions were, and how important that difference is. Some portion of those incidents can be given to human beings to examine and learn if the new software is making a mistake. If there is a mistake, it can be marked to be fixed, and the testing continues.
User Input is an error:
Elon Musk views any human user intervention is an error situation for the Tesla Autopilot. Elon means that whenever a human has to take control from the Tesla Autopilot system this is indicating an error that must be fixed for a future fully autonomous car.
Teslas improve with use:
Most of the systems we currently use aren’t built to improve through use. They have locked in performance and capabilities. These systems can only improve through revisions and patches made by technical experts. That approach is on the way out. Systems can now be improved operationally …. Further, for the most complex activities, this will be the only type of system you will be able to buy.
Let me guess, the media won’t be falling over themselves to report on these instances where the tesla autopilot saved lives.
Doctors told Neally later that he’d suffered a pulmonary embolism. They told him he was lucky to have survived. If you ask Neally, however, he’ll tell you he was lucky to be driving a Tesla. As he writhed in the driver’s seat, the vehicle’s software negotiated 30 highway km to a hospital just off an exit ramp. He manually steered it into the parking lot and checked himself into the emergency room, where he was promptly treated. By night’s end he had recovered enough to go home.
Another analysis on the Tesla software disruption:
Tesla’s first bet is that it will solve the vision-only problem before the other sensors get small and cheap, and that it will solve all the rest of the autonomy problems by then as well. This is strongly counter-consensus. It hopes to do it the harder way before anyone else does it the easier way. That is, it’s entirely possible that Waymo, or someone else, gets autonomy to work in 202x with a $1000 or $2000 LIDAR and vision sensor suite and Tesla still doesn’t have it working with vision alone.
The second bet is that Tesla will be able to get autonomy working with enough of a lead to benefit from a strong winner takes all effect – ‘more cars means more data means better autonomy means more cars’. After all, even if Tesla did get the vision-only approach working, it doesn’t necessarily follow that no-one else would. Hence, the bet is that autonomous capability will not be a commodity.
This video from 2014 is what happens when you improve cars at the speed of the software industry. very very impressive.
Being able to update the fleet isn’t just useful for selfdriving
Researchers Hacked a Model S, But Tesla’s Already Released a Patch If you were CEO of a car manufacturer, which of these headlines would you rather were written about you? The first speaks of a tired, old manufacturing model where fixes take months and involve expense and inconvenience. The second speaks of a nimble model more reminiscent of a smartphone than a car
If SpaceX hit the targets for the Starhopper and the Starship then SpaceX will have accelerated rocket development by 4x. This would be 10-20x faster than most of their competition. SpaceX continues to get more ambitious with its rockets and is accelerating its rate of progress. This faster rate of development will mean that the world will get the space program that we have always wanted.
2019-09-09: What the future may hold for starship:
The next 7 years could see space habitation increase 100s of times. We can go from 6 people in space to 100s in a larger rotating one gravity space station and a lunar mining base.
2019-10-15: What moon missions and bases look like:
SpaceX will leave most Starships on Mars or the Moon, when they are flown for long-range missions. SpaceX will need to use ~5 launches of Super Heavy Starships to fully fuel a Super Heavy Starship in orbit. They will then send a fully fueled Super Heavy Starship to Mars. The Super Heavy booster will separate around the orbit of the moon. The booster will return and 37 Raptor engines will be reused. The 6 Raptor engines in the Starship will take the Starship to Mars with ~100 tons of payload.
Starship Moon mission needs a 10-ton lunar lander 2019-11-05:
Robert Zubrin indicates there is a need to stage the SpaceX Starship from low earth orbit or injection orbits for the moon and Mars. Missions to the moon would be far more efficient with a 10-ton lunar lander. This could be a mini-starship.
2021-03-03: History!!! To celebrate, let’s cancel SLS
2021-05-13: Robert Zubrin on the profound potential that Starship represents
Starship won’t just give us the ability to send human explorers to Mars, the moon, and other destinations in the inner solar system, it offers us a 100x increase in overall operational capability to do pretty much anything we want to do in space. That includes not only supporting a muscular program of probes to the outer solar system, and making all sorts of experimental investigations in Earth orbit economical, but enabling the construction of giant space telescopes. Much of our knowledge of physics has come from astronomy. This is so because the universe is the biggest and best lab there is. There is no better place to do astronomy than space. The 2.4-meter Hubble Space Telescope has made extraordinary discoveries. What might we learn once we are able to build 2.4-kilometer telescopes in deep space? The possibilities are literally inconceivable.
2021-10-12: a FT take focusing on competitors complaining, instead of scrapping their obsolete approaches:
SpaceX’s vertically integrated manufacturing approach will also deprive other US suppliers of business, weakening the wider industrial base the country had built up to support its long-term ambitions in space, Amazon and others warn. However, SpaceX’s customers — including those in government — do not seem to share the misgivings. “Before SpaceX we only really had the ULA, so we’re in a better position than we were,” says Phil McAlister, director of Nasa’s commercial space flight division. Diamandis goes further: “The US government is lucky to have a company like SpaceX based here,” he says, since its efficiencies feed through directly into the US space programme. And companies that compete with SpaceX in some markets seem more than happy to use its launch services, despite supporting a rival.
2021-10-30: Another interesting take that argues that Starship will change the entire space industry away from “reduce weight at all cost” towards rapidly producing space worthy hardware at scale:
Starship obliterates the mass constraint and every last vestige of cultural baggage that constraint has gouged into the minds of spacecraft designers. There are still constraints, as always, but their design consequences are, at present, completely unexplored. We need a team of economists to rederive the relative elasticities of various design choices and boil them down to a new set of design heuristics for space system production oriented towards maximizing volume of production. Or, more generally, maximizing some robust utility function assuming saturation of Starship launch capacity. A dollar spent on mass optimization no longer buys a dollar saved on launch cost. It buys nothing. It is time to raise the scope of our ambition and think much bigger. Prior to Starship, heavy machinery for building a Moon base could only come from NASA, because only NASA has the expertise to build a rocket propelled titanium Moon tractor for $1b per unit. After Starship, Caterpillar or Deere or Kamaz can space qualify their existing commodity products with very minimal changes and operate them in space. In all seriousness, some huge Caterpillar mining truck is already extremely rugged and mechanically reliable. McMaster-Carr already stocks 1000s of parts that will work in mines, on oil rigs, and any number of other horrendously corrosive, warranty voiding environments compared to which the vacuum of space is delightfully benign. A space-adapted tractor needs better paint, a vacuum compatible hydraulic power source, vacuum-rated bearings, lubricants, wire insulation, and a redundant remote control sensor kit. I can see NASA partnering with industry to produce and test these parts, but that is no way to service the institutional overhead embodied by a team of 100s of people toiling on a single mission for 10 years. There is a reason that JPL’s business depends on a steady stream of directed flagship missions with $1b price tags. Hordes of PhDs don’t come cheap and need a lot of care and feeding.
2021-11-05: The new 10 year NASA research plan doesn’t yet take vastly better costs into account. The telescopes in particular need to be rethought completely. Perhaps a combination of HavEx and LUVOIR, redesigned to be 10x cheaper, would do the trick.
2 current NASA mission concepts, HabEx (Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission) and LUVOIR (Large UV/Optical/IR Surveyor), are aimed at pulling this off. Both would use large, extremely clear mirrored optical telescopes, UV rays, and infrared to hunt for exoplanets with signs of water, oxygen, and ozone. HabEx would use a “starshade” to block out light from stars to reveal the planets surrounding them; LUVOIR would use a very large system of unfolding mirrors. A blend of the 2, though—now that might be just right for a mission that “combines a large, stable telescope with an advanced coronagraph intended to block the light of bright stars,” as the survey states, and is “capable of surveying a 100 or more nearby Sun-like stars to discover their planetary systems and determine their orbits and basic properties. Then for the most exciting ~25 planets, astronomers will use spectroscopy at ultraviolet, visible, and near- infrared wavelengths to identify multiple atmospheric components that could serve as biomarkers.”
Boring Company has started work on an 29km tunnel in Chicago from downtown to the airport. Successfully completing the airport tunnel will make the tunneling company worth as much as $16B. This valuation will be before any full speed hyperloop implementation. If Boring Company succeeds in lowering the cost of tunneling by 10-100x then they will enable high-speed transportation to be used inside and between cities. This would not only mean capturing most of the existing tunnel and infrastructure projects but increasing the tunneling projects by 100x.
2021-12-17: New tunneling methods are being tried. They’re currently about as fast as Prufrock, the Boring machine (which does 10 m / hour)
Petra, a 3-year-old startup is developing tech to cut through rock without grinding into it. A mix of gas and heat above 1000 degrees Celsius breaks rock into small pieces. Sensors attached to small rods touch the rock, but the excavation is carried out by the heat and gas. Petra is testing its tunnel-drilling method in a Minnesota quarry on Sioux Quartzite, 8x tougher than most forms of concrete. In the test, Petra says its method is moving through rock at 12 m / hour. Once the rock is broken into tiny pieces, a vacuum is used to suck rock fragments out of the hole.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 