Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "TED" channel.

ACTUALLY ITS NOT - As an aerospace engineer I am disgusted at this PR garbage. TED & TEDx have become a PR organisation for Elon Musk. FYI - Jennifer Heldmann is NOT and aerospace engineer she's a geologist. Has SpaceX done some good? Absolutely. They have literally saved the US manned space program with Crew Dragon and Falcon, but this idiotic hype with Starship needs to stop. Most of its technology is YET to be proven to do anything in space. Most importantly re-fuelling in space is unproven especially at the levels it needs. Just as importantly Saturn 5 could lift a similar payload into Low Earth Orbit and the WITHOUT REFUELLING go tot he moon. Also there was a variant of the Space Shuttle called Shuttle-C which could also lift a similar payload to low earth orbit.
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@JULIAN11. Since you seem interested let me tell you about where NASA went wrong after Apollo. Sorry for the horrible length of this but you do seem interested in understanding the problem, but its a complex problem. The Space shuttle is one of the greatest TECHNICAL achievements ever. They actually made a reusable spaceplane work. It truly was extraordinary, but it was also a horrendous failure that crippled manned space flight for decades and we are still dealing with those effects. Every time it was launched there was 75tons of mass lifted into orbit and accelerated to orbital speed (7km/s or more depending on the orbit). Its payload to vehicle mass ratio was actually very poor. That's a real problem because 75 tons at orbital peed is a lot of kinetic energy and that means a lot of fuel. if you go watch Don Pettit's "Tyranny of the Rocket Equation" you'll see where that leads. Combined with the costs to simply run and maintain the shuttle crippled other programs. Its the main reason we haven't got a moon base. There's a whole bunch of technologies required that are just not ready because the money and resources weren't available to get them ready. I was doing me degree when Challenger happened. I was actually in Florida a few weeks earlier and saw Columbia take off. It was from a distance but still spectacular. After Challenger Kelly Johnson who was lead engineer on things like the SR71 and U2 said "Don't build a replacement." He argued that the shuttle had proven unreliable and the money would be better spent on the "next generation." Even before the accident it was failing on costs and maintenance, but NASA, the USAF and CIA were so invested they had to continue with the shuttle. That also spilled over into the ISS construction costs. The Russians flew Buran once and then looked at it and said never again. One of the main failures was the payload to vehicle ratio. That goes back to Don Pettit's "Tyranny of the Rocket Equation." As rockets get bigger and bigger they need ever increasing structural strength to handle the loads and that adds weight. That means you need even more power and more fuel to lift that extra weight. That's what Don Pettit talks about. As rockets get bigger and bigger they generally do improve in performance and payload ratio. BUT eventually they reach a point where they start getting WORSE. That should have been evident way earlier, because that was the argument Buzz Aldrin won with his Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR) mission profile over Von Braun's Earth Orbit Rendezvous. What Buzz worked out was that with EOR you needed a much bigger vehicle with a lot more mass because it had to do a lot more. It had to fly to the moon, land on the moon and then fly back to earth. That meant more fuel, that meant a heavier rocket with more power and eventually they ended up with a version of the Saturn 5 but with 8-12 engines. The is the mistake BOTH Musk and Bezos have made with their heavy rockets. They are so big the are less efficient NOT more as they claim. The crazy part is NASA wanted small after Apollo. Do you know that when NASA first proposed the shuttle all they wanted was a small efficient vehicle with 2-4 people based on X-15 technology and its purpose was to just get people up and down as efficiently as possible? Most people don't realise the X-15 had at least 3 more variants planned. A 2 seater, a single seat delta wing and a single seat delta powered by a scramjet. This is why I support the Crew Dragon program. It actually proves that NASA was right in the late 60s early 70s. You don't need huge rockets you need rockets that get the job you NEED done. NASA should have either done the X-15 or something like Crew Dragon. Instead the USAF and CIA got involved and they created a monster. In the end it tried to be too many things to different needs. Crew Dragon works because it does 1 thing and does it damn well. Do you know the cost of Soyuz seats ended up at about $90 million while Crew Dragon is 4 seats for $70 million? That's a cost per seat of under $20 million down from over $90M. That's what SpaceX should be shouting from the roof tops. Starship is trying to be too many things. Get into orbit, go to the moon, go to Mars and my favourite replace jets for travelling between cities on Earth. Its similar to the criticisms of other systems like the F35. Its also trying to be too many things and as a result does none of them as well as it might. The A10 Warthog is a good example of being on task. Its good for one thing close air support. It does it so well that its still flying today despite being a 1960s design. The A380 Airbus like the shuttle is an amazing technical achievement but also a failure for all but 1 operator. The father of one of the instructors at my flying club flew them for Singapore airlines. That was circa 2008 and even then they knew it was in trouble. Its not just Starship its the same for New Glenn and some other proposals. Sorry for the lecture.
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As an aerospace engineer I am disgusted at this PR garbage. TED & TEDx have become a PR organisation for Elon Musk. FYI - Jennifer Heldmann is NOT and aerospace engineer she's a geologist. Has SpaceX done some good? Absolutely. They have literally saved the US manned space program with Crew Dragon and Falcon, but this idiotic hype with Starship needs to stop. Most of its technology is YET to be proven to do anything in space. Most importantly re-fuelling in space is unproven especially at the levels it needs. Just as importantly Saturn 5 could lift a similar payload into Low Earth Orbit and the WITHOUT REFUELLING go tot he moon. Also there was a variant of the Space Shuttle called Shuttle-C which could also lift a similar payload to low earth orbit.
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I agree. Sadly so many of the more recent TED/TEDx talks I see are garbage pseudoscience garbage. The Elon Musk PR exercise recently was a disgrace. I'm an aerospace engineer and these are the sorts of talks that attracted me to watching a lot of TED/TEDx talks a few years back. Talks that inform and make people think, not PR for clowns.
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I'm also an engineer (aerospace) who works in industrial control systems, automation and robotics. Everyone needs to be mindful of people who do these talks because even though they make many great 100% accurate comments they also either ignore inconveniencies, over simplify things or outright mislead. I've had some huge eye openers in the 30+ years since graduation. I'm Australian but did my degree in America and then came back here and spent over a decade in manufacturing. In 2002 I met Apollo 17 Astronaut Harrison Schmitt and he talked about mining the moon for Helium-3. So I went off to Australia's remote mining industry to learn about mining. The timing was sort of fortunate because we were building a bunch of new mines to supply China. Other than learning about mining the real benefit I got form that experience was a massive lesson in basic infrastructure including energy systems and water management. This guy is right on about 90% of what he's saying but he glosses over or ignores or just gets plain wrong a couple of things. That slide at 3:30 is BULLSHlT you cant have anything so many times less than something else unless you are comparing it to a 3rd item. You can only do a fraction or percentage. I truly hate anyone who does that because its so misleading. The other thing is he glosses over the minerals needed to make things like solar panel. YES I hate the clowns who usually scream about how much emissions from extracting these minerals are made, but they do have a point. These are things the Greenies are always ignoring. I have worked on both a copper mine and an an Alumina refinery and those are damn nasty energy intensive processes. Rare earths minerals are even WORSE and we need huge amounts of them for the high efficiency electric motors needed. He never even mentioned the issues with Lithium production and energy storage. There's 1.5 Billion registered cars and nearly 1/2 a billion registered trucks in the world. That's a massive task requiring a staggering amount of lithium to either replace them or replace their drive systems AS WELL AS GENERATING the electricity to power them. AND THAT does not even begin to address the energy needs of developing societies which he never even mentions. So despite the fact Ramez has a got a lot of important facts right he's also leaving out a lot that is just as important points. I'm not sure what sort of engineer you are but this is really import in any project you ever do. The problems that bite are rarely the things you are working on but the things you dismissed as less important.
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As an aerospace engineer I am disgusted at this PR garbage. TED & TEDx have become a PR organisation for Elon Musk. FYI - Jennifer Heldmann is NOT and aerospace engineer she's a geologist. Has SpaceX done some good? Absolutely. They have literally saved the US manned space program with Crew Dragon and Falcon, but this idiotic hype with Starship needs to stop. Most of its technology is YET to be proven to do anything in space. Most importantly re-fuelling in space is unproven especially at the levels it needs. Just as importantly Saturn 5 could lift a similar payload into Low Earth Orbit and the WITHOUT REFUELLING go tot he moon. Also there was a variant of the Space Shuttle called Shuttle-C which could also lift a similar payload to low earth orbit.
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As an aerospace engineer I am disgusted at this PR garbage. TED & TEDx have become a PR organisation for Elon Musk. FYI - Jennifer Heldmann is NOT and aerospace engineer she's a geologist. Has SpaceX done some good? Absolutely. They have literally saved the US manned space program with Crew Dragon and Falcon, but this idiotic hype with Starship needs to stop. Most of its technology is YET to be proven to do anything in space. Most importantly re-fuelling in space is unproven especially at the levels it needs. Just as importantly Saturn 5 could lift a similar payload into Low Earth Orbit and the WITHOUT REFUELLING go tot he moon. Also there was a variant of the Space Shuttle called Shuttle-C which could also lift a similar payload to low earth orbit.
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@opcn18 Good point but then the people complaining are all "Elon devotees" who think he's going to whisk them all off to Mars.
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@fork9001 Sorry but Shuttle C is in the same class of heavy lift launchers but it is at the bottom end of the scale. To LEO Falcon Heavy 63.8t Shuttle C 77t Starship 100t Saturn V 144t All of the rest are basically below 30t and most not much over 20 like Falcon 9 FTs 22.8t. And almost anything that can get a payload into orbit can also get something to the moon, its a matter of how much.
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@fork9001 Lets get one thing straight starship for the moon is a joke and its an even bigger joke for Mars and its a joke if you think Elon has any grasp of reality. If his garbage about driverless cars, electric trucks and hyperloop weren't enough to convince you he' doesn't know what he's doing then there's nothing to discuss. If you want to know here's the answer. Orbital mechanics relies on velocity and being able to change velocity and we call that delta-V (as in change in velocity). Until we have magic star trek massless propulsion all delta-V will require the burning of fuel or the ejection of mass. As a result of that having ANY vehicle with unnecessary mass is a problem. Buzz Aldrin's Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR) won that argument over Walter Von Braun's Earth Orbit Rendezvous (EOR) in the mod 1960s. It was why Apollo worked. They didn't carry any stuff to and from the moon they didn't need to. Its why as each part of the rocket had done its job it was left behind. With chemical rockets you simply don't have the fuel. Then comes Elon "the inventor of everything" Musk with no training and no understanding and he say's NO. We will go back to EOR with a concept from 1950s sci-fi. Its about as smart as saying we will get rid of all the modern container ships and go back to wooden sailing vessels.
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The option to "burn it all down" that Ian Bremmer is describing at about 25 minutes where he describes the Palestinians has having no hope of a future and just turn to a pack of crazies like Hamas is very very similar to the people who simply gave up on the establishment parties in America and voted Donald Trump into office in 2016. Its why there has been a resurgence of radical parties across Europe. When there seems no future for so many and we have elites living in these fantasies that the world is brilliant and the economy is booming THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS. This is the great failure of main stream parties and their neoliberal economics over the last 40 years. They promised us cheaper products through competition. They privatised every public asset they could promising free market competition would bring better services and lower prices. I actually believe in the free market for PRODUCED and MANUFACTURED GOODS but it has been absolutely proven to be a catastrophic failure for so many other services. When governments FAIL to provide their people with HOPE history has shown time and time again that it never ends well.
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Sadly it would be about the same because if he had have tried they would have blocked him in congress. Don't forget Obama had a super majority when he took office and he could NOT bring in health care or end the wars or close the prison at Gitmo as he promised. All he could do was give another $4 Trillion to the banks just like Dubya had to help recover from the 2008 GFC.
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@daves5623 Go look at what happened with the tobacco industry. Even to this day they still wont openly admit what they did. Further to that the climate denial campaigns are run by the same people out of the same think tanks - Heritage Foundation, CATO Institute,.... etc. Sociopaths don't care.
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@paideepak30 ONLY BECAUSE they are all HYPOCRITES. What separates out one politician from the next is the DEGREE of their hypocrisy and Gore was a long way from the top of the list.
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@JULIAN11. Seriously WHEN DO PEOPLE LIKE YOU STOP lecturing people who are qualified about subjects you are NOT QUALIFIED IN. Its really annoying.
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@heartflame503 Yeah and no amount of smoking whatever it is your smoking will overcome basic science - EVER.
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@jimmaag4274 No I don't work for Boeing and have never worked for Boeing, but I am an aerospace engineer with safety engineering qualifications and what they did with the MAX-8 was one of the most disgusting episodes in engineering history. If you understand what I understand, the MCAS system in that plane was so badly conceived and designed it was only ever going to end up crashing planes. There's nothing new in bad designs in engineering, but we now have so much information and history that we know what to avoid. Boeing didn't simply ignore a few things they ignored EVERYTHING they had learned over decades and the FAA system was so corrupted it didn't pick up the problem, which it should have. Worse, it was driven by a couple of clowns in their sales team and I have clashed with sales people promising stupid things to clients. So its not just a Boeing thing, its rampant across industry and government. I know that from personnel experience. Engineers share stories of who's had to clean up projects from stupid managers. The Boeing Max-8 is just one of the easiest examples to mention because people know about it.
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TheBorz You just summed up one of the worst behaviors of the digitally connected human race. The ability to consume bad information as if its true while discarding true information as if its bad.
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Just recently I had a friend rail against being "part of an experiment" with respect to Wind Farms. I asked what he felt about AI, because its a giant big experiment and we're the Lab rats. AND NONE OF US SIGNED UP FOR IT.
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