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A big chunk of what the Johnson Space Center does is related to ISS operations,, and of course Cruz is the senator from TX. That is part of where the support came from for the Artemis Gateway lunar station from congress, it would provide that same kind of large program for JSC going forward...

Read the article, and if I'm interpreting it correctly, a reporter was taken on a 20 minute demo of "level 2++" self driving which did not have any problems in San Francisco, the best mapped city on the planet, though a couple of fellow reporters did run into problems in similar demos. Mercedes...

Honest question, as I would really like to find an alternative to a Tesla for this, which German car can I buy that can drive itself from my driveway to a friends driveway or a doctor's office parking lot half an hour away across a mix of roads? I've seen people point to a Waymo as having...

Scott Manley on X pointed to two Blue Origin patents on how to fasten down a landed booster, 11884427 and 11873122. They have a common inventor, and were filed within 4 months of each other in 2021. The '427 patent uses explosives to drive pins or studs into the deck, as shown in particular...

I don't think China sees any particular advantage to themselves to tell anyone else what they are doing, so why should they? They only care about the opinion of their own citizens in a large enough aggregate to be dangerous to their government, so they certainly don't care about the opinion of...

That was certainly how the satellite launch business worked for decades. "Oh, you want to launch a satellite? Pay us in advance, and we will have a rocket ready for your launch in 2 years. Which isn't a problem, because it will take you 2 years to build the satellite anyway. Better hope that...

Rocketdyne was operating as per the standard model of anything rocket related around that time, which is "we won't lift a pencil for a blueprint or turn a wrench for a part unless the government pays us". It was only in 2017 that SpaceX even got to 45% commercial market share in contracts. Did...

I suspect that is because there is a fairly well established market where multiple customers, government and commercial, will pay you to launch their stuff. It is harder to find things you can launch that will make money; I would be surprised if the business model for Kuiper, for example, makes...

Musk has said publicly in the past that the amount of technology development needed for a Martian colony is so large that SpaceX can't do it all and he is hoping other entities (government, other businesses, etc.) will do some of it, which is a rational attitude to take. I suspect he realized...

If I remember correctly, they do at least do pressure tests on each individual Starship over at Massey's before they install engines and prepare to launch it, so that should catch defective welds. That points to it being more likely, as others here have said, that the SpaceX reported leaks are...

Looking at Ashlee Vance's biography of Elon Musk (hardcopy), on page 197 we have a turbo pump built in 13 months for about $1M (final price is not mentioned, just the goal), instead of Boeing doing it in 5 years for $100M. On page 227 we have an internally built radio at SpaceX costing $5000...

Great that Eric was able to get this interview and get some sense of how NASA feels this HLS program is going. I wish NASA could provide more technical details of how and when things will work, but I also understand why they are deferring to SpaceX on that, both because I'm sure many of the...

Given that OneWeb had a worldwide service outage for 2 days at the start of the year because they had a leap year related software issue, and you didn't see any reports of it in the major media, I would say OneWeb is not a major market player yet. If Starlink was down for 2 days, it would be...

If they are lucky there might be a time of year when they are allowed to take a quick vacation. . . :)

Something I read about SpaceX doing the vertical integration thing is that their contract basically says "If the government agency asks us to do a vertical integration launch, we get to exercise the provision in the contract to get another $300M (? going from memory) to build it and a year (?)...

I would agree with the CEO's general argument that going to the Moon before Mars makes sense. For a variety of technical reasons (low lag time for data return and control, short time to arrive at the destination, more frequent launch windows) iterating on systems you plan to use for...

That is why when the auto companies cut their chip orders back in 2020 because Covid stopped the economy, then tried to renew them as demand roared back, they had big problems. The auto industry is used to being the largest customer in their specialized field, but in the chip industry, they are...

I agree, and that is the main reason I think it would be hard for a 3D printing company to accumulate enough "10s to 100s" of product orders from enough different customers wanting things to be worth billions of dollars. Its just a lot of marketing, design and coordination work for each...

My SIL worked as a finance person at a dot com back during that boom. She concluded she was not going to get rich from stock options when the founders did a financing round, and spent most of it paying themselves bonuses rather than reinvesting in the company. . .

I was always a bit dubious about a general "we know how to 3D print things" company becoming highly valuable. The problem is that manufacturing physical objects tends to range from "easy but low value", say, coffee mugs or lawn chairs, which are cheaper to make by conventional techniques (like...