It's shocking to me too, but not very surprising. It's probably a combination of factors that could cause a failure of planning and I've seen it play out the same way at lots of companies.
I bet the original engineers planned for, and designed the system to be resilient to this cold start situation. But over time those engineers left, and new people took over -- those who didn't fully understand and appreciate the complexity, and probably didn't care that much about all the edge cases. Then, pushed by management to pursue goals that are antithetical to reliability, such as cost optimization and other things the new failure case was introduced by lots of sub optimal changes. The result is as we see it -- a catastrophic failure which caught everyone by surprise.
It's the kind of thing that happens over and over again when the accountants are in charge.
Gambling is also extremely successful but you could argue it's a net loss for society to have it.
The argument that money == correctness is basically what we've been trained to believe by armies of MBAs, but it's not right. It's sad that the state of philosophical and moral discussions in our society has basically been usurped by a kind of thoughtless reductionism.
actually geosync isn't the top. You need to extend beyond that & have a counterweight that balances the weight of everything below the point of geosynchronous orbit. Otherwise it would fall down.
Counterweight or just more cable. IIRC it's 170k (miles? kilometers?) if you use no counterweight. And note how fast that outer end is moving, it can throw things pretty hard.
Salesmanship has long been associated with convincing people they have a problem and then offering a solution.
And an evergreen one is the single differentiating feature. Like color. How many kitchenaid appliances have been sold in a faddish color only to be replaced by white or black or red a handful of years later? Those things were tanks. Still are to an extent.
Choice is an aspect of freedom. You could have absolutely freedom from any kind of social or political obligation or coercion and if all you can do with that is how potatoes then what good is it?
It's not like they're obstructing a better arrangement.
I guess you have in mind something like: all the pointless churn of making the latest video doorbells and smart watches could instead be dedicated to giving me and you some time off work. So, UBI? Maybe. But this is obstructed by voters, or by practicalities.
"Light truck" is slightly more formal way of saying "pickup truck." And is meant to differentiate the class from commercial trucks like moving vans, dump trucks, and semis.
Smaller pickups like the Ford Ranger and Chevy S-10 are in the "compact pickup" class. (And unfortunately these are not sold in the US anymore. For those with genuine need, we either have to resurrect some old heap headed for the scrapyard or import them on the gray market from Asian countries.)
The Maverick fills that space but has limitations (less towing capacity than a 90's Ranger). I've seen it used by a ton of service folks that need a pickup but not for towing (1500 payload).
The Tread Unibody is describing a piece of equipment mounted to a regular truck chassis. Their product advertisement show they're mounted to conventional Westernstar, Mack...
I've always found that to be a silly distinction, like it's a thing that matters to use cases in the same way that axle type matters, but it's not the sole distinguishing marker of whether something is a "truck". There are various non-trucks that are body-on-frame - BMW i3, Ford Crown Vic, Suzuki Jimny, etc. (The highest-spec Jimny tows less than the lowest-spec Honda Ridgeline.)
I'm a little surprised it isn't a regular cab with the 2.7L V6 that gets the highest payload. But they manipulate the suspension components a fair bit between different models so it's not just going to come down to the weight of the engine. The Lightning weighs as much as a gasser F250 but still has a payload in the 1650 pound range; my guess (without doing any research to prove it, mind you) is that the Lightning has the highest GVWR of any F150. I think even the HDPP only gets an ICE F150 up to 7850 GVWR.
On a related note, we have some real candidates on the Lightning forums for being the modern "Danger Ranger" trucks -- turns out you can load a Lightning with well north of 2000 pounds and it still isn't squatting anywhere near the bump stops. Stiff suspension.
Nah, for me it's about utility. Big trucks are tools, and they spend much more of their lifetime putting that engine to use where nothing else will do.
The shocking thing about light trucks with fuel economy in the teens is that most of the time they never haul anything. They're driven to the grocery store and to soccer practice where they have little value.
> He deserves at least some credit, considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision.
As much as I love space exploration, I think it's actually a problem that so few people get to decide where so much money goes. Imagine if instead we as a society could put it towards better education, healthcare, public transportation so that the downstream effect is a society with many more aerospace engineers and astrophysicist, who dont have to instead focus on working corporate jobs just to afford housing.
We might foster a society where space exploration is an ongoing societal goal instead of a playground for the elite.
We put far more money into healthcare and education, by a literal order of magnitude.
US spends 1.75 trillion on education per year, and 2.12 trillion on healthcare. People make it out like we aren't putting a ton of money into this stuff when those are literally are two biggest expenses. Space X is a drop in the bucket compared to that.
I would love such a society, but I think the way space funding has been in most parts of the world shows that most people are just not good judges of what is and is not worth spending on.
It seems very few people actually understand the importance of funding R&D that isn't directly improving their life, such that it takes some stubborn rich people to actually show that something is worth doing. Kind of like other countries all working on Falcon and Starship inspired rockets after seeing that the concepts can work.
As other examples, we have particle accelerators (everyone knows about the colliders like LHC and assumes they're luxury projects with no relevance to improving lives, yet they led to the development and side-by-side refinement of synchrotron light sources, which are very important for modern science) and medical tech like what led up to mRNA vaccines and Ozempic.
I would say we need a society that trusts experts and also holds said experts accountable, but then again, most of SpaceX's founding employees were not conventional aerospace experts, which was part of why they were able to question a lot of the corrupt/inefficient practices that traditional aerospace people dismissed as being standard and necessary practice.
> Imagine if instead we as a society could put it towards better education, healthcare, public transportation
The amount of money we already spend on thos problems absolutely dwarfs the amount of money that SpaceX has raised. Spending a fraction of a percent more on any of those things isn't going to move the needle much.
On the flip side, space access is one of those great economic accelerators and making that access dramatically more affordable will open up new realms of possibility.
