tater

They don't need to survive terribly long.

So the terrestrial nations involved have decided that the Moon is a free-fire zone, and they are not fighting at home? There are few plausible combatants in the very near future (a few decades out maybe the US and PRC), or are you suggesting that perhaps 2 factions within NASA are combating each other?

Nothing is captured with artillery, it is just vulnerable to easy destruction. How about, "surrender, or you become the newest crater?" I'm not seeing capture as terribly reasonable. You say 2016 tech. So that means very near future. Side A has a base, then side B decides to capture base A. Unless the 2 powers are already at war on earth, side B sends some guys over to visit, they get let in, and they have guns inside their suits, and take the place without a shot. If the sides had enough time to prepare and were already at war, then you drop a lander (unmanned) on the other base. Game over. I'm not seeing a plausible scenario.

It was an Army project to produce power/heat for remote installations (like Alaskan bases), so yeah, not a weapon-related reactor. A buddy's dad was there, I think, when the accident happened. His dad was later X division at LANL as I recall, after blowing holes in the Nevada desert for years.

Where do I say anything otherwise in what you quoted? The idea that celebrities might be disproportionately intelligent is an odd claim, however. Listening to them talk about serious things now and again is certainly not confirmation of that, they seem to be primary attractive as their "skill," not smart. Depending on the source, the vast majority of suicides have mental illness (over 90%), so the better question might be what is it about mental illness that makes them more likely to be in the public eye? Or something similar.

Yep, I forgot that. Tesla, Solar City, and SpaceX have apparently gotten over 5 billion in government money so far (LA Times story from last year).

They are absolutely subsidized. Commercial crew has paid to develop the D2. Unsubsidized would require that SpaceX not see a penny until they delivered a finished product. BTW, you break quotes by placing the cursor in the quote, then hitting return a few times. I cannot reliably say when or how it works, I'm constantly surprised when it does.

Why do people think SpaceX has money? They almost didn't fly their first successful orbital flight, they blew the allotted money, but had parts for a third try. They MUST launch payloads for money to be a thing. BO fits your description far more than SpaceX. Bezos is legitimately rich at this point in a way that Musk doesn't even approach. Nothing has been terribly "impossible," BTW. There were VTVL rockets tested before either SpaceX or BO. Tesla is cool, but they are massively subsidized. Paypal is basically a bank. When you think he's Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark wealthy, you make any subsequent arguments predicated on that look pretty silly. 1. It has to make a profit, and or be subsidized (commercial crew) or it would not even exist. 2. This I entirely agree with. 3. I'm aware of the plans, but the bulk of the people on earth without internet are also without, you know, money, so I'm not sure I see a great revenue stream there. How much can you make from people living in places with a per capita income of maybe a few thousand dollars a year (or less)? Trade cow blood and fermented milk for internet access? 4. Traditional business models can always use a shake up now and then, but the idea that you make something to serve a need/demand of customers is pretty fundamental. How can you possibly suggest that a SpaceX Mars plan is reasonable when none of us have the slightest idea what the plan is?

Posted this here a few weeks ago in another thread. View to the East: Took this from the patio a couple years ago. View to the South-southwest (normally you can see rather farther, but this is a cool image ):

Yep, nukes are incredibly safe. The rate is so low for nukes that they are super safe even were you to include every death from ww2 Japan related to fission.

Getting things done used to mean (in business) creating an entity that sold goods or services and made a profit. Not a company with a cool idea, that sold shares in that idea to make money, without actually making profit. I think they have a chance to succeed, but not much of a real record in all cases. Amazon is actually turning a profit, so that;s certainly something. Maybe Tesla will sell their new car and not end up subsidizing each sale.

@sevenperforce, those numbers seem very high. High rates tend to be in the ~100/TWh, solar, wind, nuclear are fractional.

@Robotengineer few gave up, they pushed hard, but reality hit them in the face and they got what they got... they wanted to make rockets, and then ended up making shuttle, ISS, etc. NASA wants to do a bunch of things, but they get to do SLS/Orion, even if they don't want it. It has little to do with enthusiasm, it has to do with money. As they said well in The Right Stuff, "no bucks, no Buck Rogers." BTW, I'm not sure what you are talking about. I try to evaluate all their claims very critically, but that doesn't make me less enthusiastic. I thought landing a rocket was incredibly cool, and in fact had a standing party invite for several people to just head to my place for drinks should SpaceX land a Falcon 9, and they did. That doesn't mean we didn't discuss if it actually matters or not, lol. Look at the attitude of GoogleX as an example. They brainstorm crazy ideas, and their methodology is to identify the things most likely to make it impossible, and test those FIRST. They trash more ideas than they pursue. That's the point. Reuse sounds transformative, but unless the math works out, it's not transformative.

Interesting, I didn't know that. I don't always use clamps.

I'm merely setting a boundary value. Launch costs must at least cover the vehicle cost. Pollution? Seems like that would be pretty minor compared to what comes out the bottom during launch/landing. Dropping costs for a business is a good thing, but I still wonder abut the actual savings, given that reuse at the level claimed must certainly idle the rocket manufacturing business as 10-20 relaunches for a single LV pretty much covers every single launch possible in a year with a single rocket. At most maybe you need 2 or 3 made assuming some have to be expendable (or hull losses in landing attempts).

This thread is a combination of details/news about specific SpaceX missions, and the thread title, which is about reusability within they system. Breaking down the value of that idea seems completely legitimate to me. Musk's sound bites regarding not throwing away airlines after each use sounds great upon hearing it, but it's in fact a bad analogy. Say an aircraft carries 300 people, and the average fare is $1000 for a given flight (likely a little low for long haul). That's $300,000. The plane costs $300,000,000, so throwing it away would be absurd. If the average fare was $2,000,000, then throwing away the plane upon landing would be just fine, they'd pay for the plane, plus fuel, and still take home nearly 300 M$. That is what SpaceX and every other LV provider is doing right now. The customer is more than buying the LV, so throwing it away is not remotely comparable to chucking an airliner. The idea of course is that reuse allows airline flights to be less than 1-2,000,000 per seat. Airliners at 1k$ per seat pay for themselves in just ~500 round trips. The trick here is that there is a market for some multiple of that number of flights every single day. There are maybe a couple dozen flights available for SpaceX each year, so the reuse thing doesn't seem all that transformative to me---though I think it's incredibly cool.

It's not just that bad news sells, it's that the reporters have no idea what they are talking about in most cases (regardless of subject), and themselves might have an (uninformed) opinion about nuclear power going in to the story. It's not just the news, either, because people would forget that. It turns out that narrative (even fiction) demonstrably changes opinions more, and more durably than "news." So the endless stream of popular culture showing evil nuclear power has had a profound effect.

There is a danger, but it is tiny per unit power produced. Saying this is just fact, it's not a lie. Having a modern nuclear plant nearby adds vanishingly small risk to anyone's life. They are far more likely to die from just about any external cause you could name than the power plant. 3 Mile Island killed exactly zero people. Fukushima killed exactly zero people (the 2 lives lost (?) were during the actual tsunami as I recall) to this point, and exposure might kill a fraction of a person or two (if some responders lose a few years of life later due to cancer). So we've had one accident that killed people, ever, and it was a terrible plant design in a country that had zero concern about the lives of its people, which no longer even exists. @PB666 makes a great point about green areas around such plants. Makes a load of sense.

How about a buggy PRE-release, with the same forum support (and direct link to bug tracker) so that people knew they were testings, and could see what was being worked on? I have always been one who doesn't care even a little about "save breaking" updates. Many do, and Squad says that updates wont't do this... I can imagine the wheels/gear issue might screw up many or all of my 1.05 saves if I were to change them to 1.1.

Everything has associated mortality/morbidity. The key is to look at the amount of power humans need, and the mortality/morbidity per unit power produced. We could all use fireplaces for heating and cooking, then people would die from smoke inhalation related illness, and from logging activities, as well as the sort of cooking injuries seen in the 3d world which would make the deaths from nuclear power look insignificant. The same would be true for coal. Even wind power has killed a few in accidents (windmills are tall, people can fall), but the power produced is so tiny that makes it look relatively bad---though still really safe (particularly once pumping water behind dams is not the only way to store power). Ditto solar (people fall off their roofs both panels)---but still super safe. If you had to very roughly assign risk, then burning stuff for power would be the most dangerous---along with dams (since real dam failures have killed hundreds of thousands of people, sadly). Every other method to produce power would be "very safe," including nuclear. You could throw in the 2 atomic bomb casualties, and nuclear is still safe per unit power produced (since it makes loads of power per plant).

I think it's absurd that there were high priority (or even critical) issues on the pre-release bug tracker that continued into the "release" version. Would be better as a general-pre-release (i.e.: for everyone including non-steam people).

I don't entirely disagree with you... I think that SpaceX fandom has ramped up since they started landing attempts, though. Before that it wasn't really as much of a thing, they were just another aerospace company launching rockets (sort of off the radar of people who are now excited).

Yeah, I read your post that way (it's not like the rocket equation is actually tyrannical, but we all get what we mean by suggesting that ).

Under-rolling heathen!

Yeah, it could use more like the KCT roll out paradigm for this. Launch takes you to the launchpad, and then you can choose to warp from there if you like, or do other things. They should make no craft use power on the launchpad, though.