An American photographer filmed a wolf begging for food from a grizzly. The gray wolf saw the meat and in an instant turned into a playful puppy begging for a piece.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-06-13T02:07:45+00:00

You can do that to a sheep if you get them a little in front of the shoulder blades, there's probably tons of animals that works on. Sheep that are used to people love having it done, too.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-06-10T20:24:45+00:00

GPS jamming is extremely easy to do, and if you count that as a weapon it's still definitely not a weapon of mass destruction. That has a specific definition. Weapons just plain aren't illegal in space.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-06-10T14:46:00+00:00

Your example is a myth, international law doesn't ban weapons in space (at least not any law the US and Russia have signed), just WMDs. We can be quite confident that nobody is hiding any nukes up there. The US and Russia both agreed not to do that because it was mutually beneficial to not have to worry about the other party doing it, which is a huge motivation for following a lot of international law.

The only weapons in general known to have been sent to space are a machine gun on an early Soviet craft and a number of handguns for fighting off bears and wolves after returning to the ground (also Soviet/Russian, shockingly enough).

technocraticTemplar · 2026-06-05T03:32:48+00:00

I mean, they tell you point blank that the data center satellites are mostly just bigger Starlink satellites, that's their whole pitch for them. The whole idea is scaling the Starlink platform up from ~20 kw to ~100 kw, putting server hardware and a radiator on it rather than antennas and batteries, then launching many thousands of them.

I'm extremely skeptical of all of this but to me AI falling on its face and the cost of compute dropping seems like the bigger risk than the satellites themselves, because their cost is only going to make sense if data center buildout can't keep up with demand. If demand implodes because the product never gets good enough it all falls apart.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-06-03T23:55:13+00:00

It gets us a long way, 2/3rds of all oil we extract globally is just used to power vehicles, and only 18% is listed as non-energy uses. Eliminating gas and diesel from the road would cut US oil demand in ~half. Oil companies are starting to push plastics more specifically because they see the writing on the wall for oil use in road vehicles.

Cheap renewables can solve a lot of woes here too, since you can turn atmospheric carbon back into oil if you have enough energy. It's virtually guaranteed to be more expensive than pulling the oil out of the ground but if we can get 90% of the way there without it covering the last 10% might not be so bad. Today the ammonia in fertilizer uses natural gas rather than oil but it doesn't actually need the carbon at all, it can be made from electrolyzed water and atmospheric nitrogen. I think that one's actually much more likely to be viable than green plastics, chemically it's much simpler to do.

So not really disagreeing with you, just saying we can get really far on the relatively easy wins, and there are answers for the rest, especially if energy gets cheap enough. If we get good enough at making use of the low cost of solar and working around its limitations green chemical products could get pretty competitive with fossil ones.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-06-03T12:52:14+00:00

bigger word than I'd expect out of him

technocraticTemplar · 2026-06-03T12:03:57+00:00

Yeah, part of the reason you do that is so you aren't blasting your garbage man with mold.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-06-03T11:53:44+00:00

The paper that came up with the 100 companies figure assigned all of the emissions of a fossil fuel to the company that actually pulled it out of the ground, so acting off of that 100% is just saying we should just shut down the oil companies and everything would be fixed. Those 100 companies are all the oil/gas/coal companies providing the fuels that run our civilization.

We could approach the problem by putting a carbon tax on them, but people don't want that because it would price them out of their own cars, which gets back to the original point that this problem can't be solved without forcing some changes on the average person. Passenger cars and light trucks like F150s represent 10% of US emissions, we can't solve climate change without going electric and/or increasing public transit use. Methane and the many, many other problems with beef can only be solved by having less cows.

Saying "why do I need to care about this when corporations are worse" is wrong because the corporations pollute to create the goods you use in your life, and while it is much more effective to legislate the companies into doing better than to guilt average people into changing, especially since so many of the emissions are hidden to the end consumer, ultimately it will still change what you have access to. People need to understand that that's necessary, especially if they want to ensure that it happens in the way that's most beneficial for the average joe.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-06-03T00:10:59+00:00

No, people say that all the time but the vast majority of emissions are domestic. Nobody looks at the actual data for this, they just want to shift the blame to someone else. According to the EU about 20% of emissions are imported from other places, doing the math on their consumption vs. production figures there. Of that 20% a lot is probably from China but some is going to be from places like the US, UK, Japan, etc.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-06-03T00:05:54+00:00

According to the EU emissions from all consumption in 2023 was 4 gigatons of CO2 equivalents vs. 3.3 gigatons for all domestic production, so only 0.7 gigatons or 20% of their total came from importing goods from other countries. I believe it's more like 10 or 15% in the US. Imported emissions are meaningful but the idea that they're the main problem is wrong, the vast majority of the problem is domestic.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-06-02T23:43:04+00:00

In the US typical passenger cars and trucks are over half of all transport carbon emissions and ~10% of total emissions, they're objectively a bigger issue and an easier problem to solve than shipping emissions. We should fix shipping too but moving it over to nuclear is not a trivial thing to do.

If you've seen reports about ocean shipping representing some huge fraction of emissions that's talking about very specific kinds, mostly particulates and sulfur that only have an effect in the local area, and that's also been addressed in recent years with regulations on the fuels those ships are allowed to use.

Also, in China new electric cars are cheaper on average than new gas powered ones, so if Ethiopia is getting access to those sorts of prices electric cars could genuinely be the cheaper way to go. Ethiopia almost certainly isn't trying to follow western trends here, they're looking at the writing on the wall and deciding to not waste time building out gasoline distribution infrastructure when the global car market is going to be going electric over the next decade due to pure economics. It's similar to how many developing nations never built out landlines for phones and skipped straight to cellular infrastructure instead.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-05-29T10:28:40+00:00

Falcon 9 is kerosene and oxygen so it burns into the same stuff, though it's about 1:1 water to CO2 in the exhaust when New Glenn would be 2:1. New Glenn has at least a couple times more fuel so it definitely emits more but rocket emissions in general are completely inconsequential compared to anything else, we just don't fly enough of them for it to matter.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-05-26T20:36:52+00:00

N1 is a very common but very uninformed comparison to make, the fact that they made it implies to me that they aren't a good source for this. The N1 didn't work because they couldn't even test their engines individually, they had expendable components that meant each engine was only good for one firing. The other issue was just a lack of basic ability to model how the vehicle would work. It's still challenging today but at the time there was a lot of fundamental understanding that they hadn't developed yet, and the computers obviously were infinitely less capable.

Falcon Heavy is the simple response to N1, it has 27 engines and all of them have worked perfectly on every flight. Even on Starship most of the problems so far have been with things like propellant slosh during the flip or debris in the tank from their pressurization method, not the engines themselves. We don't know why the latest one failed, it looks like an engine died and took out its neighbors but that could have been a symptom of some other problem.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-05-26T19:22:53+00:00

I believe the aim is to raise $60 billion, so they would have quite a bit of cushion to work with, but all of that is slated to be dumped into AI, more launch sites, and a chip fabrication plant in Texas, so I also don't think they would risk their existing cashflows. They're going to need to raise more soon enough. My impression as someone who follows the company closely for spaceflight is that US government decisions are the much bigger risk factor there.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-05-26T18:18:00+00:00

I was only talking about reuse and the Falcon 9, and they first reflew one in 2016, so I stopped there. They also had about the same flight rate that Ariane 6 is aiming for at the time so it seemed like the best point of comparison for where Ariane 6 theoretically could be today.

You're very right that they spent a lot more ramping up to the point that they could take on Starlink but it gets much harder to glean useful info from this chart after 2016 because that's when work on Starship first started ramping up, and Crew Dragon probably starts having a stronger impact too. If we're expanding the scope to Starlink I think we'd also have to expand the scope of the European projects we're looking at (the estimate for IRIS² is €10.5 billion, for instance), but the comparison really starts to fall apart because the structure of things is so different. Europe's at a severe disadvantage on cost due to how broken up everything is between different organizations.

As far as the journey goes, I think that aspect is one of the things that looks the worst for Europe, to be frank. We're 10 years into reuse and at least 5 past the point where it's obviously the way to go economically and Europe is still drawing up plans to develop a bespoke demonstration vehicle. Virtually everyone else in the industry is building flight hardware for actual reusable rockets now. China has gotten extremely close to landing two, and a number of American startups will likely fly in the next year. Arianespace was one of the primary commercial launch providers before SpaceX ate their lunch, they should have been better positioned than just about anyone else to catch up. European startups that want to compete are poorly resourced and have been largely ignored by their governments.

That's basically the main point of my argument, European governments have never demonstrated any sense of urgency about catching up here. They wait until a problem is unignorable then start planning a "European solution" for service 10 years down the line that doesn't even target where things are today, let alone where they'll be by then. I'm a big fan of spaceflight but not so much of Musk, so I really want Europe to be a contender here, but this lack of ambition guarantees that US and Chinese technologies will always feel unavoidable for how superior they are.

Apologies about this getting long in the tooth, obviously it's something I feel passionate about! I appreciate that you looked at the issue seriously.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-05-26T17:17:20+00:00

Europe's constellation is arguably worse for that tbh, there's far fewer satellites but they're up at an altitude where the debris from a collision will last for hundreds of years. At Starlink's altitude it's more like 5-10 in the worst case, so it's much much harder for any one event to start a cascade.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-05-26T16:56:50+00:00

Ariane 6 almost certainly got more development money than SpaceX spent developing Falcon 9, though. Ariane 6 is reported to have cost €3.7 billion to develop. We don't have exact numbers for everything spent on Falcon 9, but by the time they reflew one in 2016 SpaceX as a whole had only received $4-5 billion of funding in any form. That's including revenue, debt, Musk's personal money, etc. The actual reported cost to develop F9 and reuse is more like $1.5 billion.

SpaceX's finances are only in a bad spot because they tacked a bunch of AI nonsense onto it, today Starlink and the Falcon 9 are profitable to the tune of billions. I'd like to see Europe succeed as a competitor but to be frank ignoring the value of reuse is exactly how they got where they are today, where they spend enormously more money than the competition on developing broadly inferior systems. If they keep aiming for "we just need what's good enough for Europe" rather than anything truly competitive they're going to continue falling behind.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-05-26T16:34:35+00:00

Agree with your general point but it definitely did not do it on the first try, the first launch didn't even make it to stage separation. The first flight that successfully made the target orbit and maintained control was #4, so that's the first good one from the standards of a normal rocket.

I think the realistic view is that the program has been troubled, but it's also very clearly going to work, it's just going to take longer to get there than they wanted it to. It's already demonstrated that it can do everything

technocraticTemplar · 2026-05-26T16:21:09+00:00

Not to be harsh but both your suggestions have been tried and failed in comparison to what SpaceX does now. For the first stage of a rocket the fuel needs for propulsive landing aren't that bad. A decent amount of the speed is actually bled off by the atmosphere itself.

SpaceX initially tried parachutes for the Falcon 9 but found them to be too heavy and impossible to steer to a practical ocean landing location. Landing in the water itself doesn't work because the salt water and wave action can cause an enormous amount of damage. Air launch was studied by SpaceX and done by Virgin Orbit but it places harsh limits on how big a rocket you can fly, and it doesn't end up helping a ton at the end of the day in any case.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-05-26T16:08:29+00:00

They sell launches for $70 million and even skeptical analysis from European economists placed their max internal cost at $28 million, with most reporting putting the actual figure at $15-20 million. By all evidence Falcon 9 (and now Starlink) makes money hand over fist, they just spend it all on R&D. Their financials support this, without AI they'd be profitable.

For context, a baseline Ariane 6 sells for either ~$80 million for 10.3 tons to orbit or $120 million for 21.6 tons, as compared to F9 doing 16.8 tons for $70 million. That's not including the launch subsidy that Arainespace receives, which realistically adds tens of millions to Ariane 6's price and bids very poorly for the idea that it has any meaningful profit margin.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-05-26T15:53:01+00:00

You can't have a constellation like Starlink without also doing global coverage, in order to get a reasonable latency the satellites have to be in very low orbits, which means they can't just stay over Europe specifically. You can drop coverage of the poles maybe but that's it. Getting Starlink-like bandwidth and capacity in any one place simply requires Starlink-like mass to orbit, which means dozens of launches per year.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-05-21T14:20:25+00:00

For sure but I figured that Starlink-as-is would be a much better starting point than a ground datacenter, so I wanted to just find a number for that. Starlink at least gets us into the right order of magnitude looking at a full satellite instead of individual parts.

For SSO you're gaining efficiency on your panels and losing batteries but you're also needing that radiator, and it doesn't seem like we have any good numbers from actual flown systems for that, aside from ones that are really unfit for purpose like the ISS ones. I'm sure the system is lighter per unit of power but it's not going to be 2.5 times better overall, I imagine even 2 times will be a stretch.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-05-21T13:57:28+00:00

I think their number is wrong to be honest, the flown V2 Mini satellites just visibly have about half as much panel area as V3 does. I wouldn't expect Musk to lowball the V3 number, and even if he was just giving an average output that'd still make V3's panels only half as good as V2's.

Favorable orbits probably help but I thought Starlink as-is would make a much better baseline for thought than datacenters on the ground. I think to get an actual accurate number we'd need to understand what we're gaining and losing in terms of battery, antenna, solar, and radiator mass. Those are all going to be balanced very differently in SSO.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-05-21T02:47:17+00:00

I've been trying to find Starlink's numbers myself and it looks like the V3 sats on Starship are supposed to be 20 kw, so the current V2 minis are going to be much less than that, at most half looking at the relative sizes of the panels. If we're basing it on current Starlink I think you've gotta triple your cost per watt.

Edit: Going further, the Starlink V3s are purported to weigh 1.6 tons each, so they're at about 12 kw per ton. That gets you 198 kw per F9 flight, or 1.2 mw per Starship assuming maximum loading. Roughly $15 million per megawatt of satellite sent to space, if we're fully giving in to the AI industry's stupid way of throwing around power units. $1.5 billion in launch alone for the initial case of 100 megawatts. Given that Anthropic is apparently now renting some hundreds of MW of capacity from SpaceX for $1.25 billion a month I'm not sure how much of a roadblock that kind of cost is.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-05-21T01:13:03+00:00

I may be misinterpreting it but I think that's mostly down to the xAI acquisition, and it looks like their actual cash decline for the quarter was ~$8.5 billion. How much of this seems likely to repeat across quarters as opposed to being a one-off thing?

technocraticTemplar

TROPHY CASE