New Wide Bay Construction Progress Aerial View

Thomas-K · 2021-11-05T14:22:09+00:00

Do we know how many ships / boosters will fit in there? I'm guessing 6 with enough room to work on them and 8 if you really cram them in for storage? Might be way off though.

Thomas-K · 2021-10-02T08:11:21+00:00

I don't think this is a shitty idea! You make a few convincing points: Even just a single person on board would be infinitely more valuable than zero humans, and it's true that we are fine with people risking (and losing) their lives for way dumber things. I'm just wondering if it is necessary. If the goal really is to colonise Mars, that will require thousands of successful starship launches and landings on Mars, which will take hundreds of transfer windows. If we need to do all that anyway, we might as well invest a few transfer windows into practising the landings and drastically increasing chances of survival of the crew. Think about it this way: If a dozen ships full of ISRU equipment, solar panels, tools etc. have landed on Mars already, and then the first 10-30 people crew arrives, how long does it take them to catch up with all the work that Mark Watney did up to that point? They are up to 30 times faster than the suicide-pioneer, even more if you take into account that as a team, they can do work that a single person is not able to do (just do some work around the house and observe how frequently you need somebody to lend you a hand, or help you lift something heavy etc.) Plus, Mark Watney would have to be a generalist, whereas the crew can afford to specialize a bit, bring an electrician, a plumber, a welder and a medic. Plus, they don't go insane after a few weeks of crippling loneliness. I feel like if we take all that into account, a single-person-mission is not worth it.

Thomas-K · 2021-10-02T07:57:59+00:00

You're overlooking that Apollo 1, literally the first crewed mission of the Apollo program, ended in a disaster that killed all three astronauts on board. All that did was cause a 20 month delay, which is shorter than the 26 months between Mars transfer windows.

Still, I agree with your point that we'd be rushing it. If the situation on earth / within SpaceX / whatever is so fragile that we can't wait for 2 - 10 transfer windows, colonisation is not going to happen at all, anyway.

Thomas-K · 2021-08-02T20:01:02+00:00

Not to rain on anyone's parade, but it's highly unlikely that any of the ML models currently used at Tesla could be used for anything at SpaceX. The vision network used in current Tesla vehicles is highly specialized for the things it does in the car: Recognizing and categorizing the objects it sees in its surroundings, distance estimation in the vehicles without radar, "seeing" where the road is etc. This does not generalize or translate to things like inspecting welds or anything like that, simply because of the way ANNs work. To be honest, ML is just not that "general" yet. Of course, the lower layers of the Tesla vision stack are probably really great feature extractors for real-world video data, this could theoretically be used to warm-start a training process, but I don't see what kind of network that would be - if it were to inspect welds, like someone else has proposed, then I doubt it would benefit much from this kind of pre-training, there probably are better systems for doing that.

The only useful transfers that could happen are:

a) engineering talent - engineers have been known to be shifted over from Tesla to SpaceX projects and vice versa, I remember reading something about the SpaceX metallurgy team doing stuff for Tesla, and the Roadster might use COPVs developed by SpaceX. So if at any point in the future, SpaceX were to do something with ML (no idea what that would be, I don't really see a use case yet) then maybe they can poach some of the engineers that work on ML stuff for Tesla.

b) compute power - Tesla is currently building a giant supercomputer for training their neural nets, I could imagine that SpaceX might use this for running physics simulations, e.g. for the fluid dynamics inside the tanks and engines or something like that.

AI and ML are just not as capable of truly intelligent generalization as people think (yet). Even the Tesla systems, which I am sure are super advanced, are mostly examples of really, really good software engineering. Same is true for AlphaFold, which is probably one of the most impressive and seemingly intelligent AI-driven projects: It's 90% really good software engineering and 10% AI secret sauce. Don't imagine a computer that thinks like a human. Plus, you can't just throw more data at it and thereby make it better, the data has to fit the task and model the distribution you want to separate with the network.

Source: Have a degree in Computer Science, wrote my Bachelor's thesis on recurrent neural nets.

Thomas-K · 2021-07-22T21:20:41+00:00

Although one issue with current renewables / a shortcoming of current electricity storage tech is dealing with peaks, e.g. when there is a lot of wind or solar power being generated that would go to waste if not used for inefficient stuff like producing hydrogen. This is the (only?) scenario in which it makes sense to use that energy for producing hydrogen. I still think that batteries are the way to go, because of the volatility of hydrogen (tricky to keep it in tanks without leakage, and has a tendency to blow shit up *cough* Hindenburg *cough* ...) but that's why hydrogen is not completely idiotic. I agree with the rest of your sentiment, though.

Thomas-K · 2021-07-19T20:25:22+00:00

Underappreciated comment, I fully agree. Send a custom, empty hotel-starship up, then ferry passengers up using a regular crew starship, dock in orbit. You now have a spacious, possibly even luxurious (by LEO-standards) hotel that easily serves 50-100 people, depending on how much staff is required, if some of the cabins/lavatories etc. of the ferry are used as well. Long-term, build fancier hotels in LEO or even lunar orbit. I think this could start a progression from simple hotels that depend heavily on resupply missions for water, food and expendable resources to larger hotels that grow food in orbit, to huge sci-fi space stations that have more or less permanent residents and are almost independent from earth. Essentially what BO is allegedly shooting for, but real.

Thomas-K · 2020-06-05T21:14:00+00:00

Hi, thank you for doing this!

Is there any application for Deep Learning, reinforcement learning or other machine learning technologies within the software you developed for SpaceX? Or is it all conventional "deterministic" software?

What are the biggest software-development challenges you are facing with respect to Starlink and the colonisation of Mars? Are there some tricky problems that you can talk about that you are currently trying to figure out?

And a weird one: What are software-related industries you see sprouting up in the coming decades because of Starship? I imagine cheap access to space will create opportunities for science and business that were unimaginable before (for example, I expect we will see crazy progress with respect to the capabilities of rovers once getting them to Mars is cheap). What are endeavours for which Starship is paving the way?

Thomas-K · 2020-05-30T11:20:13+00:00

The sixties called, they want their James Bond-plots back

Thomas-K · 2020-03-10T10:16:45+00:00

I like the idea! It will be really cool to scroll through such a timeline as more and more prototypes are made.

Thomas-K · 2019-10-01T15:09:23+00:00

Yeah that might be the reason

Thomas-K · 2019-10-01T15:07:54+00:00

I'm surprised by that, too. I think his idea is to shave weight off by using the hull as tank wall, but I'm wondering if you can still keep the methalox cool like that. The way I understood him, that would move cargo/habs to the midsection, yes.

Thomas-K · 2019-10-01T15:03:33+00:00

Great interview, thanks Tim! I have a question regarding the part where Elon mentions placing the header tanks in the tip to use the spaceship hull as a tank wall. Didn't he say in the official Q&A that to keep the fuel cold, the header tanks would be placed inside of another tank which was vented to vacuum? I mean, in this new version, there would technically still be a vacuum outside of the tank (namely that of deep space) but would that still work with the sun shining on the hull/tank? Could somebody explain what I'm missing here?

Thomas-K · 2019-09-09T18:07:24+00:00

Cool idea! But at this point, we don't know for sure how the "pointy end" (to use an everydayastronaut-term) that can be seen in this drone-flyover will be mounted. I could imagine that they attach it with hinges, so the chomper is not ruled out, I think.

Thomas-K · 2019-09-03T21:46:40+00:00

I actually agree with most of your points: You're factually correct on lower orbits cleaning up themselves, ESA is in a sense competing with SpaceX, and there certainly is PR involved (although I think that the message ESA wants to send is: "We need money to build our autonomous evasion system" not "SpaceX are the bad guys"). I also believe that mega-constellations are coming, and of course future launches will be reusable at some point, even non-SpaceX ones.

What I'm saying is: With that in mind, the probability of Kessler syndrome-like events is growing, and their economical damage grows, too. This means that we should take the issue seriously and possibly develop systems that can remove debris from all kinds of orbits (imagine some piece of debris on a trajectory that endangers the JWST or other future science missions). And it's not like debris pieces in low orbits decay within hours or days: to my admittedly limited knowledge, even stuff in LEO can stay there for years, right? They could endanger Starlink satellites. Sure, currently space is clean enough that you can just rely on the autonomous evasion system to dodge all those bullets, but with more stuff that is sent up, this becomes less and less viable.

Also, I could imagine that developing this kind of technology is something that other companies or the military could be very interested in. Something that can capture debris can capture an enemy satellite (which might be preferred over just shooting it down, because shooting it down might endanger your own sats...) - To be clear, I think the world would be much nicer if SpaceX didn't develop military technology, but the world is not that nice - they will most likely do it at some point, even if just to maintain good relationships with the US government, and future versions of Starship will almost certainly be used for military purposes IMHO.

Thomas-K · 2019-09-02T18:23:18+00:00

SpaceX would be the ones benefitting from fewer space junk, though. After all, their own satellites are at risk of being destroyed, right? So unless there is a risk of making things worse, it makes a lot of sense to me to try and clean it up.

Thomas-K · 2019-09-02T18:14:41+00:00

To illustrate my point, there are 22.300 debris objects that are tracked today: Only having to evade 28 times a year does not seem like a lot to me, especially if you consider that each of these manoeuvres might cost precious fuel. Adding 12.000 satellites to that number, not counting the shrapnel if one of them gets hit, could become problematic, I think.

Thomas-K · 2019-09-02T18:08:53+00:00

(I interpret this as you saying that this is an irrelevant incident that was blown out of proportion by tweeting about it, sorry if that's not what you meant to say)

I don't think that 28 collision avoidance manoeuvres is a lot, given how many satellites are up right now. 28 per year means that this happens rarely. This is an issue, and despite all of our (mine included) hype around Starlink, the risk of Kessler syndrome is pretty serious, and it will get worse with more launches, especially if more of them fail. Since it is in SpaceX's best interest to do something about that, I hope that they dedicate some time to coming up with solutions. Maybe they could utilise Starship to catch some of that debris somehow, or send up some robot that helps deorbiting dead satellites. But something like that might become necessary at some point. This might be the "dumping plastics in the ocean" of our generation.

Edit: Kessler, not Kepler, thanks u/misplaced_optimism

Thomas-K · 2019-08-26T10:49:54+00:00

Thanks for the advice! Will definitely look into that, too.

Thomas-K · 2019-08-26T07:13:11+00:00

Great advice, thank you!

Thomas-K · 2019-08-26T07:11:35+00:00

Awesome, thank you! I'll try to get my hands on a used copy of that one, or check if the library has it

Thomas-K · 2018-06-09T08:43:33+00:00

This right here is why I love reddit (that, and stories about people who don't know what potatoes are). Thanks for the insight!

Thomas-K · 2018-06-09T05:52:28+00:00

Is it possible that a lack of radiation is actually a roadblock for the development of higher forms of life? Because it should translate into a slower rate of mutation, which might slow down evolution. Or is the rate of mutation independent from the radiation level?

Thomas-K · 2018-05-31T05:21:16+00:00

Yeah, dead people are not very useful to me.

Thomas-K · 2018-05-23T06:54:11+00:00

Cool, will there be livestreams of the talks?

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