sevenperforce

Not a lawyer, not legal advice, yada yada...... ...but from where I see it, the SEC would need to prove: The tweet "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." constituted an intentionally false statement, rather than exaggeration, speculation, equivocation, or hyperbole. The tweet in #1 was solely intended to manipulate the price of TSLA. Musk believed he would have immediate financial gain by manipulating the price of TSLA. None of these can be easily proven beyond reasonable doubt. Musk may have believed funding was secured when it was not, or he may have merely meant that an investor with sufficiently deep pockets had shown interest. It's easy to object that he wasn't trying to manipulate the stock price, given the long string of complaints about short sellers and bad press. And while #3 is easiest to argue for, even that might be challenging, since Musk clearly is not interested in selling.

Short of a behemoth like BFS, you almost need a reusable orbit-to-surface-and-back skycrane. Skycrane drops an unmanned hab complete with attacked airlock, returns to orbit and refuels. Drops an unmanned pressurized rover, then returns to orbit and refuels. Then it docks to the capsule and lands with it. The rover can drive over and dock with the capsule so that the crew can make their way to the hab.

Nice concept. But no way that could pack enough dV for a lunar ascent even if it used the trunk for deorbit and descent, let alone Earth return. And an airlock is more important than a bathroom. No space for EVA suiting, either.

I see what you did there. Yeah, the shuttle was always a flying lab. Hard to come up with a way to outfit Dragon 2 differently. It's big, but it's not THAT big. I don't think it has enough space to add an additional deck in place of the lower three seats. If it was just a bit taller, perhaps....

Reusability comes with some limitations.

AWESOME question. Here's an experiment. Go up to the roof of a tall building with at tennis ball and throw it straight up as hard as you can. Watch how far it goes. Then, try flinging it horizontally off the roof. Watch how far it goes. Assuming your building was sufficiently tall, the ball will go much farther (in terms of total distance traveled) when you throw it off the side of the building. Why? Well, obviously, it has farther to fall. What does this have to do with space? Well, if a rocket burns straight up into space, it will expend its fuel and then fall back down to the ground. However, if a rocket turns and burns horizontally, it will "fall" quite some distance from where it launched. If this distance is a substantial fraction of Earth's circumference, then the "surface" relative to the rocket's highest point will be substantially lower (from its point of view) than where it launched from. If you burn horizontally fast enough, then you will miss the Earth completely. Earth's gravity turns as you fly, keeping you pulled toward the center of the Earth, which means you can continue to "fall" forever without hitting the ground, your velocity balanced against the centripetal pull of gravity. That's an orbit. The first time you flew the mission, you turned horizontally and reached orbit pretty soon. Since you were no longer fighting gravity, you were able to use all your remaining fuel to add energy to your orbit, which raised your apoapse considerably. The second time, you burned all your fuel fighting gravity and so you didn't get nearly as high.

Working for a small law firm part-time after my first semester of CS. Criminal case. I had a PDF data dump (like, 200 pages) of the client's cellphone records. Converted to .txt and wrote a simple executable to sanitize, strip out the times and cellphone tower coordinates, and construct a map of where he had been and when, proving that he lied to us and the police about where he was. Convinced him to take the plea deal. If I hadn't, then we would have gotten hit by the same thing during trial and it would have gone very, very badly. Not that the guy was a decent human being, mind you. But it saved us the trouble of preparing for a trial that we would have lost.

This is true. Sometimes they will even A/B test using full-scale ad campaigns just to see which buzzword combination generates the most hits. I once wrote a piece about leaving fundamentalism for Huffington and the title they chose implied (though inadverently) that I was (still) a member of a (different) cult. Well, the Dragon could also fly with only two people, with five seats removed, but that wouldn't make it a 2-person capsule either. Looks like Mark Watney found a new ride

He can't afford to, not without Saudi backing. Wouldn't make a difference, either. If he was guilty of securities manipulation, then he was guilty when he sent the tweet, regardless of what he does thereafter. But the SEC would have to prove that he didn't mean he intended to consider taking it private, which would be well-nigh impossible to prove, especially since all indication is that he was seriously pursuing the possibility. They would investigate whether major off-the-cuff decisions/ideas have been regularly posted to his twitter account. Like, has he ever made a split decision on what to do with a major economic venture and tweeted about it before?

Stupid, stupid, stupid! "Squeeze" into the "2-person" capsule? Good grief. There hasn't been a 2-person capsule since Gemini, and the Dragon 2 is the roomiest spaceship ever (with the possible exception of the Shuttle, which was basically an orbiting laboratory).

Yeah, I got too slammed between work, home, and law school to keep it up. Sucks, because I enjoyed this. It was a good 3-4 months tho!

"We're spinning out of control!" "That's okay; just warp for a second and we'll stop spinning." "We don't have enough fuel to make the transfer!" "No worries; just hop out and use your RCS to push." "We need to dock, but we are out of monopropellant!" "That's fine. Just turn down the thrust on the nuclear thermal engine." "This maneuver will take 300 years." "So?" My spouse kept saying the same thing: that they either stuck too closely to the book, or added in a bunch of stuff that wasn't in the book to begin with to stretch it out.

Very fair. To Verne's credit, however, he didn't necessarily have a way of knowing that all of those things were obviously stupid.

Volunteer science consultant. There'd be thousands.

I'm sure a great many fine scientists would take exception to that.

Well, Mars has water.

Securities manipulation has a high bar for conviction and requires corrupt intent. SEC won't touch Musk.

With the Shuttle, I believe that US astronauts were always commanding/piloting. US astronauts are trained to operate Soyuz but I don't know that the reverse was true with the STS. It may be that cosmonauts onboard the Shuttle were "passenger-only" status to protect ITAR, in which case the same may be true for Dragon 2. If so, then having an all-foreign crew would potentially violate ITAR. Privacy curtain...ok, well, that's better than nothing.

Here's that deplorable re-entry capsule scene....

The only possible issue is if the other astronauts need to be vehicle-ops-certified, which could conceivably mean access to ITAR-protected data.

I highly doubt ULA would ever send anyone to space other than US astronauts, but I don't see any barriers to astronauts from other countries flying on Dragon. Unless it comes down to ITAR, but I don't see why it would.

Good lord it will be hilarious if NASA stubbornly insists on flying LOP-G elements with SLS while the other contributing countries buy slots on FH.

Oh, how convenient.

Was my understanding that the solid kick motor was not going to be detached.