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    Is Space X a viable business then? There seems to be massive scepticism toward the Musk Industries stuff in general and their loss making, not helped I suppose by his Sheldonesque tweets re public transportation.

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      That's an astonishing picture isn't it. I think this map showing launch trajectories for the shuttle shows what directions you can launch in. for some reason people are slow to launch a massive fuel air bomb over people's houses.



      That was Space-X's 18th launch of the year. As to whether or not they are viable, well, they're a highly profitable space trucking company that is about to establish a near total monopoly on the Global commercial launch market, while hoovering up almost all the NASA and DOD launches on top of that. They just spend all their profits on R&D. Every bit of R&D they do is focused on driving down the cost of launching something into space, and that sort of thinking is very conducive to viability, They've ordered all the machinery and are starting work this year on physically building a Fucking massive rocket, and a huge reusable shuttle, that will essentially be a reusable Saturn V, where the marginal cost of launching it will be measured on tonnes of Methane. That will make them a fucking fortune. As a bonus, it will also be able to go to the Moon or Mars, thanks to the miracle of orbital refuelling. but because they are paying for it out of profits, it might take a while, but it also won't necessarily put the company at a lot of risk.

      Tesla loses money because a) they're trying to develop an entirely new type of vehicle b) it's a fucking massively capital intensive industry c) they aren't manufacturing enough cars to make the money needed to fund their capital investment. it will take many years before they are making and selling enough cars to be profitable, but at that point they will probably be the dominant player in the global car and truck industry, because everything that they are trying to do is aimed at pushing down the cost of electric cars to below that of petrol cars.

      I think there is something to bear in mind about Musk. he's more interested in doing things than Money as such, and he only really sees money as a means to doing those things, He spent every penny he made from paypal on setting up Space-X and Tesla, which really isn't something that anyone with an interest in making money would do. I suspect that he has almost no assets whatsoever outside of Space-X and Tesla Stock. He only has one house, and stays in the guesthouse of a tesla shareholder when he's doing his three days a week at tesla. He wants to colonize Mars, (So we don't all get wiped out by an asteroid, or disease, or nuclear war) replace the Internal combustion engine, and take every house off the electric grid, and the way to do that is to use modern design methods, Computers, and modern manufacturing methods, oh, and scale, fucking unimaginably huge scale, to push the cost below that of the current technology. Ultimately people aren't going to stop driving petrol cars because of the environment. They're going to do it when electric cars become cheaper than petrol cars. People will only install solar panels, when it is cheaper than getting your power from a utility company. So essentially once these companies get to a certain point, you can expect him to sell his shares and start doing something else.

      His investors on the other hand, well they're really in it for the money. They're just so fucking wealthy that they can afford to be very patient.

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        Good summation TAB.

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          I bought the Lego set.

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            Enjoy!!!

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              So, Space-X's first launch of the year was the delayed, mysterious ZUMA launch. A satellite so mysterious that no govt agency will admit to involvement in it. It took off on monday morning, and the rocket did its landing on the launchpad thing, while the second stage whizzed off into orbit. then early enough yesterday the news started to leak out that the Satellite was a dead satellite Ruh-Roh. The only things we know about this, are that it's really fucking expensive, whatever it is. This is a pretty good summation of what we know so far

              It would seem at this point that this wasn't a problem at the Space-X end, because they would have shut everything down to figure out what had gone wrong, but they're carrying on with preparations for the launch of the Falcon Heavy next week, as though nothing happened.

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                My conspiracy theory is that they sabotaged the Northrop Grumman adapter to get more business for themselves. "See, you can't trust anyone but SpaceX. Our rocket worked fine."

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                  There are a lot of conspiracy theories out there. Sure why not try a new one.

                  It just strikes me that the only reason you'd build your own adapter is that your satellite just doesn't fit in the other one.

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                    I'd have thought if you're billing $100m or whatever it is for a satellite launch you can probably rustle up an adapter to their specifications.

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                      yeah, but it's a really super secret payload, and maybe it would have involved handing over too many technical details. This photo merging three long exposure shots is amazing. You can see the launch, the engine shut down, the booster coming back, and the fairings separating.

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                        Ooh, that would make a nice desktop. I've been meaning to replace my current one (v similar to this).

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                          This proposal for the next NASA new horizons missions is soooooo cool. Lets send a Nuclear powered quadcopter to Titan!!!

                          This is such a sexy idea.

                          the competing plan is to revisit that Comet that the Philae Lander went to, to build on what they learned. We literally only scratched the surface of that comet, and since it shows up very regularly, we should use this opportunity to learn a hell of a lot more about comets, while developing the next generation of comet lander, and to keep going back until we get really good at building these probes. Both of these are really good ideas and Ideally both would get funded. Instead we're going to get another couple of years of SLS development.

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                            18 years after NASA sent up their first astronauts to the ISS, and after 143 previous opportunities, NASA was finally going to send Jeanette epps as their first African American astronaut to the ISS. Given that african americans make up 13.3% of the population, that number should be a lot closer to 19. Anyway, it turns out that she's not going for some unspecified reason. Now if this was 2 years ago, you'd just assume that she had picked up an illness, or was exposed to an illness (the most common cause for swapping out astronauts, which used to happen fairly regularly), particularly when the person to replace her was going to be the first hispanic woman to go to the space station.

                            however it Seems that there is a lot more to this story, and that it is going to be messy.

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                              It's the sixth sense in space. Radio Astronomer looking for secret spy satellites (That missing zuma satellite) finds zombie Nasa probe.

                              Apparently this probe was monitoring the magentosphere, and something went a bit wrong with the power system, and it killed the satellite. Every now and again it would flicker into life, but NASA eventually gave up on it and forgot it. This guy has discovered that it has recovered completely and transmitting data to no-one in particular. Someone wake up bishop berkley

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                                The Launch window for the falcon heavy opens in five minutes. You can watch it here.

                                It's either going to be the most spectacular success you've ever seen, or one of the biggest explosions to take place on the East Coast of the US since the hindenberg.

                                if it works, It will look a lot like this. I am very excited about this.

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                                  The launch is in an hour and a half. that stream is currently showing them fuelling up the rocket. It's not very exciting.

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                                    Its a bit shit a junior Bond villain is our only long term hope of surviving this rock. You just know he’s big into his Friedman and Rand.

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                                      And flamethrowers.

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                                        There's literally nothing less randian than a mars colony. the only way it will be able to survive is the sort of ultra high productivity communism that they have in star trek. People operating in the pursuit of individual freedom on mars will die very quickly.

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                                          Originally posted by Gerontophile View Post
                                          And flamethrowers.
                                          in fairness, that's a mel brooks reference.

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                                            8.45. It's a bit windy up high apparently.

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                                              Five minutes.

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                                                That was pretty awesome. Let's see if they can catch all three of the rockets, too.

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                                                  Holy Shit that was amazing.

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                                                    Wasn't it just!

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