Tag: spacex

Crew Dragon reuse

Both Booster and Dragon spacecraft are flight proven for today’s Crew-2 flight to the ISS. NΛSΛ chooses flight-proven spacecraft and booster for its most precious missions. Dragon Pilot Megan McArthur is sitting in the very same seat that her husband Bob Behnken sat for the SpaceX DM-2 mission 11 months ago. Thank you for helping humanity raise its aspirations and dreams!

P.S. many years ago, when reusable boosters were an audacious dream, I heard them described as “used”, as in a used car. No, no, we should call them “flight proven” and I wagered that the long term data would show them to be safer than a first flight. “Would you want to be on the very first flight of a new airplane coming off the line?” I asked. The moniker became a meme.

SpaceX telemetry

Neat: due to some nuclear weapons treaty, rocket communications are transmitted more or less in the clear, and a group of enthusiasts have decoded additional internal sensor readings & pictures from spacex, but also some chinese ones(?). Kind of surprising that there’s not more industrial espionage going on, or if there is, others don’t seem to suspiciously catch up with spacex.

Elon Musk vs China

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.

Fused LEO GNSS

continuous assured PNT service over ±60° latitude (covering 99.8% of the world’s population) with positioning performance exceeding traditional GNSS pseudoranging would cost less than 0.8% of downlink capacity for the largest of the new constellations, SpaceX’s Starlink. where previous proposals targeted positioning precision on-par with traditional GNSS pseudoranging (on the order of 3 m), fused LEO GNSS can improve on this by more than an order of magnitude to 20cm

Cybertruck

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.

Airlines gone by 2060

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!