Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Common Sense Skeptic" channel.

  1. As an aerospace engineer with 30+ years in automation, robotics and control systems across multiple industries I am sick and tired of trying to explain Elon's PR & BS campaign. The worst part of it is a couple of his companies have had extraordinary success. We can have all sorts of arguments over details but he's managed to get an electric vehicle into mass production. I've worked in the automotive sector and that's an Olympic Gold medal like achievement. We can have all sorts of arguments about SpaceX but that too has managed to develop to the point where they send real astronauts into space to do real astronaut work. Considering their launch costs are significantly lower than Boeing (with all their history) is another Olympic Gold medal like achievement. BUT THEN the list of stupidity is tragically long (if not longer). - Driverless cars, taxis and trucks which was never realistic (for all sorts of reasons) that's now directly contributing to the supply issue. There's a shortage of delivery drives for both small and large vehicles driven by the fact over the last decade people either left that industry or didn't train as truck drivers because they were told there was no future for people in those industries. - Starlink. Go look up Iridium the first space based communications system that was going to change the world. Yeah its still around but its 2019 income was NEGATIVE $162 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_Communications - Starship. Where do we start. Basically Elon says it will take 100 people to mars each trip. According to NASA it does NOT have enough space for 20. - Mars colony. Other than the facts that nobody has even flown there and back yet and Other than the fact Starship can't get the people he claims it can get there, then there is the not very small issue of HOW they stay alive when they get there considering NONE of the technology required has yet been proven to work. - Hyperloop. Other than its an idea that's over 100 years old and been dismissed many times there is only a single thing Elon got right about it and that's the first 4 letters of the name "HYPE". It will end up being studied along with things like Theranos as ANOTHER example of Techno Hype. *AND those are just for starters.
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  2. Yeah I don't think Common Sense Skeptic has done anything for his reputation by going on a channel like this. MAYBE if it was to reach out to people on that side of political divide and get them to start questioning what they hear and see then I'd flip and give him a well done on at least attempting to reach out. BUT I will say I have found the CSS (or at least some of his staff) don't like being corrected themselves. Back on the Video "Of Rockets, Shuttles and Planes" I picked up on a mistake regarding air launched systems. I happen to have a degree in aerospace engineering. Towards the end of that video they implied that for air launched systems you had to spend (of development money) 50% on the carrier and 50% on the rocket. That's NOT TRUE and never was. In most cases companies and agencies doing air launching used available aircraft an dmodified them. CSS used the Stratolauncher as an example and that's one of the very few cases where a specialised air launcher was developed. Its the exception not the norm. I simply corrected their implication. NOT ONLY did I a very rude and snide reply from CSS but they have since deleted my comments and their own. I now reserve my right to be Skeptical of the Skeptic and his motivations. I think he's right on many many things but he's also NOT perfect.
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  3. Sorry to burst the bubble but I am an aerospace engineer and Star Raker was NEVER GOING TO WORK AS PLANNED or SHOWN in this video. The only credible person I ever heard say he could actually make an SST work was Kelly Johnson (lead engineer for the U2 & SR71) but he was ignored by congress in the late 80s. I'm normally a huge fan of CSS but before they posted this they really should have asked the right people. Elon's Starship is nonsense but its not the only nonsense that's been put forward for spaceflight. The most obvious thing to me (because we worked this out in the 1970s) are that its wings are far to large for a spaceplane. Those stubby looking wings on the Space Shuttle are actually very large for a space plane. If you look at many of the pater SST variants like the X30, X37 they have tiny wings. And lets NOT FORGET that the X-37 actually works. It actually took lessons from the Space Shuttle and there are a lot of ENGINEERS who think that it was a step in the right direction. After the giant wing its the pointy nose which is great for supersonic flight and the worst thing possible for re-entry. The reason the Space Shuttle and X-37 have very blunt noses is to create a massive bow shock wave that not only slows the vehicle down but protects the rest of the spaceplane from the re-entry heat. So that big wing and point nose might look good but they AREN'T. After that the list of issues just adds and adds.
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  4.  @commonsenseskeptic  I agree with the basic premise ajr993 puts forward. Angry Astronaut gives way too much credence to Elon Musk's ambitions without critical scrutiny. But we all need to be careful on what we come back with. Your slide/powerpoint list at 10:45 has a fundamental mistake. For a Mars colony to be self sufficient DOES NOT require terraforming, it requires the capability of engineering self sustaining biologic systems. Anybody whos considered the terraforming issue honestly gets answers ranging from its impossible to it'll take many 1000s of years. So any Mars colony in the meantime will live in domes. So putting a terraforming requirement on a Mars colony isn't valid, but the bio-engineering is a must. As you pointed out on you vid in the Musk series (which I am binge watching) you went over the disaster that was bio-dome. I call it a disaster in that it totally failed to achieve any of its basic goals. What it did do was provide a mountain of information on how much WE DON'T KNOW and how far from being successful we actually are. As I mentioned in another comment in that series. Dr. Jonathan Trent one of the worlds leading brains on engineering complex bio-systems pointed that out just after he left NASA. He's coined a term call upcycling. Recycling is where you just take something back to its raw material state and remake the same or similar product. Upcycling is where you use processes to take the waste from the bottom and upcycle it back tot he top. Simple example is water. The rain and other processes are the down cycle as it moves down through process. The evaporation is the upcycle. The planet we live on does this naturally for everything all powered by the sun. What JT is working on is taking waste and using natural &/or modified natural processes to up cycle waste into useful things. There's also a 2nd 1/2 mistake in that list. If they were to terraform Mars the problem with an atmosphere starts with where is it coming from. After that that there's how are you going to hold it. For sure the lack of a magnetosphere is an issue, but the lack of gravity to hold an atmosphere down is a bigger issue. What gives the Earth a sea level pressure of 14.7lbs (101,325kpa) isn't the magnetosphere its the gravity. You do need the magnetosphere to help prevent the solar wind stripping it away but without the gravity its a lot easier to strip away. I told you in another comment about the Alumni from NASA who did a guest lecture when I was an undergrad. These are more of the things he told us about. He's a basic calc. Mars has a surface Area of 144,370,000 km^2. If you wanted an earth breathable layer just 1km thick on the surface you have to find 144,000,000 cubic kilometers of AIR. Fine we could crash some comets and make some water break it down and get some oxygen but air is ~80% nitrogen where's that coming from? Terraforming is a pointless argument because its such an unrealistic topic with no valid answers to ay of the problems. The real issue of ANY off-world colony (ANY WHERE) is how do you keep the people alive and that means water, oxygen, food, waste processing and THAT MEANS and engineered bio-logical upcycling systems. When the top guy on the subject says we can't do it, then all the other arguments are pointless.
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  5. NBN started at $20B then went to $30B and has so far cost $51B but is sitting on a $1B contingency. Then there's the issue that chunks of it are now heading toward obsolescence and will need replacing. Then there's the 5G networks and who is going to END UP PAYING for that. The guy in Charge of Telstra's 5G roll out claimed it was "game changer" the catch cry of the technology scammer. He claimed people would be able to download a 2 hr high def movie in 10 seconds to their phone. Funny how nobody actually asked him "Who actually needs that?" Just like somebody should have asked Elon about Starlink "Who actually needs it?" Just like somebody should have asked Suckerberg about Meta "Who actually needs it?" I am an engineer and there's a lot of technology sold for no other reason than to wow people who are too stupid to realise they are being techno scammed.
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  6. I am an aerospace engineer with 30+ years in automation & control systems. The basic problem is that rocket engines are highly strung systems where you only need to be a tiny bit off and its a major hassle. With respect to Raptor, out side of the team working on it, nobody actually knows the problems. That's for the simple reason we haven't been there through the process and heard about all the problems they have so far overcome. What I can try an explain is what its like working on highly complex systems with simplistic managers. One of the problems with highly strung systems is that even the tiniest fault can be catastrophic. I have worked around race car mechanics and they get the concept because every part of a race car is being pushed to the limit and small things can be huge problems. At SpaceX you have a guy like Elon Musk who dismisses every problem with "We'll just do." He's a lot like the racecar driver and I've met them. They don't care about details, just make the car go faster. You only need to watch one of his interviews for a few minutes to realise he can't handle details. I have worked with managers who are exactly the same and they are nightmares. They don't give a damn about solving any problem or what it will take and they quite often heap loads of pressure and stress onto people. They're a nightmare for people like me who have to deal with the details and SOLVE THE PROBLEMS. I can't tell you or anyone what the actual issue with the Raptor is. It could be something simple that appears trivial and just isn't. It could be a bunch of things. What I can say is that working with managers like Elon Musk makes the process of getting ANYTHING working very difficult and very stressful.
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  7. I'm an aerospace engineer. I work in industrial automation, control systems and robotics. Like so many people Elon relies on people confusing what they see coming out of Hollywood and what's actually feasible. He's not the first, Elizabeth Holmes copied the 1 drop blood testing in Gattaca. David Icke copied his lizard people from the original TV series 'V.' Musk just copies what ever is convenient at that moment. Some of the water from air scammers copied Uncle Owen from Star Wars. As an engineer its incredibly frustrating these days to see what so many people do. I'm grateful to the debunkers for at least trying to set the record straight. Even when the debunkers get something wrong (and they do sometimes) they are at least trying to properly inform people. On one hand YouTube and the rest of social media are great on the other they are a curse that's plaguing society with so much crap and garbage its now almost impossible to fix what needs fixing.
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  8. I'm also an Australian but I did aerospace engineering in America in the late 80s. One Friday we had a visiting alumni do a special lecture. He'd just finished a project at NASA on the feasibility of terraforming Mars. We were pretty exited to hear from somebody who'd actually done the math on making Mars habitable. This was just BEFORE Challenger and when Space Station Freedom was being designed, so at that time we believed that over the next 10-20 years we were going to build a space station, then a moon base before going further. This wasn't a sales pitch to a pack of space junkie clowns, this was a serious talk to serious students and professors. We were shattered to find it WASN'T going to happen. He wasn't even looking at the technology required, just the math of what it would take to raise the temperature 70-90C and then add billions of tons of oxygen and nitrogen to make a breathable functioning atmosphere. His summation was "As well as planets being massive they don't like being changed." Planets are very complex semi-stable systems and such systems with their own cycles that fight back against disturbances. Remember when Jupiter got hit by the Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 and the big giant black spots. Jupiter just absorbed that and went back to being Jupiter. That talk never got to the technology because NASA had stopped the project once they realised the scope of the task. Its easy in science fiction but near impossible in reality without god like powers. 30+ years later I was discussing this very concept with a climate expert after a space conference. He'd said in his talk that if we hit a certain temperature point we would have to start geo-engineering. I told him we don't know how to geo-engineer and he confirmed that was true but then added we'd inadvertently done it. So you really are right to call it 'Marstubation' and it still is. Its a bunch of charlatans picking bits out of sci-fi and flogging the ideas to idiots via crowdfunding. Its the old adage of "a fool is easily parted from his money." So what of "maths/engineering/science" or what we now call STEM did you end up doing?
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  9. I'm an aerospace engineer (U. Illinois) and Dr. Jonathan Trent commented a while back that people are not paying attention to just how harsh of an environment Space and particularly Mars actually is. He's also commented that NOBDY is even close to a functioning self supporting closed loop bio-logical system. As a doctor you'd have a more detailed grasp of what it actually takes to sustain life. Beyond water and oxygen there's food and that means DIET. It seems that the space cadet family have just ignored that human beings EAT, PEE and POOP or as I call it the EPP problem. Your an ER doc. Does the human body stop EPP when you put it into an induced coma? And yes I know what its like to come out of an IC. People generally have no idea of going into IC but they sure do remember coming out. I'll never forget the doctor saying "Relax. Congratulations you made it!" What amazes me is that the space cadet family have as a core belief that we must become an interplanetary species to survive, because we have basically broken the life support system on the planet we live on. They then proceed to ignore the issues of life support which are at the core of their beliefs. As doc you might also have better knowledge on the psychology of cults. But my understanding is that all cults have people who CHOOSE to WILLFULLY IGNORE basic facts that are right there to be clearly seen. These are people who can look at something and then deny or dismiss it. Feel free to comment further on that.
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  10.  @commonsenseskeptic  I did aeronautical & astronautical engineering at Illinois in the late 80s. So far love your channel. The fact you are using simple basic math to prove points is fantastic. I totally empathize with your frustration with the "space cadet family" (SCF). I'll call them that instead of a cult. Irrespective of what we call them the point is there is too much of public discussion about technology (across all industries) being presented by people with no technical training or those with technical training who have just thrown away all they were taught. A while back Dr. Jonathan Trent (who is without doubt one of the smartest people I've ever encountered) commented that NOBODY is even close to being able to deploy a fully self sustaining closed loop biological system for off world use. So at the most fundamental basics we don't yet have the technology for long term off world self supporting habitation. That's not to say its impossible but the actual science (both R &D) hasn't been done to where we have a deployable system. Put it this way: If we only had a partial system that was deployable and could recycle SOME air, SOME water and provide SOME food, then why isn't that module already attached to the ISS. Even if it only provided a few cubic meters of Oxygen, few liters of water each week and few kilos of food each month, then that's a huge cost saving because that's supplies that DON'T need to be lifted to orbit. Go back an look at the ORIGINAL Space Station Freedom concepts that merged into the ISS. That was all being done while I was an undergrad. Those concepts called for 6-8 people stationed in space NOT 3. The simple reason why it was quickly scaled back was food, water and oxygen COSTS. Going back to basic math. Look at the next planned lunar mission. The Apollo LM had 75hours for 2 men that's 150 (2 x 75) man hours of life support. When Trump announced 4 people for 2 weeks that became 4men x 24hours x 14days or 1344 man hours. That means you need to land on the moon 9 times as much water, food, oxygen, CO2 filters, etc. and al the hardware to use it. Reducing that mission profile to 3 people on the moon for 10 days brings that back to 720 man hours, almost halving the life support requirement. Basic math is a great tool. Its also something people who like spinning daft ideas hate. In space discussions the ridiculous spin masters are the terraforming people. Way back when I was in college we had a guest lecture from an alumni who had just done a study for NASA on terraforming Mars. He basically told us to forget it. To change a planet that much was technically impossible and he gave us a list of reasons. The number one reason he gave is that planets are massive STABLE systems. For sure at the detailed level they are incredibly chaotic, but at the planetary level they are hyper stable. Otherwise they'd be falling apart. Planetary systems are like mob psychology. Its impossible to predict details like what individual members of a mob will exactly do. Yet you can predict a mobs overall behavior with incredible accuracy. That's one of the basic tenements of Isaac Asimov's psychohistory, which is now a genuine scientific field of study and we see every day in both commercial and political advertising. Its part of why public understanding of climate change is so poor. This entire concept of terraforming mars was DISMISSED by NASA over 30 years ago as folly. This is just a discussion on space. If we start going into other areas of technology like energy, water, agriculture, the ocean systems and the insane public discussions on them we'll be here for weeks. I you want to have a discussion on this stuff let me know.
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  11.  @seemlesslies  Thanks mate. Its not just an aerospace thing. I'm seeing it everywhere with technology reporting. I'm Australian but did my degree in America so I watch a lot of what's going on there as well as other parts of the world and its the same everywhere. All I see are journalists and media clowns dropping buzz words like "AI" and "hypersonic" as some way of saying "What I am saying is 100% accurate." I just heard it this morning. We're having a huge debate over submarines and yet again a journalist was using the "AI" buzzword. Last week it was "hypersonic missiles" and the week before that "space lasers"_ 🤦‍♂🤦‍♂ The other thing I hate are the people who take highly polarised stances without using common sense. I like channels like CSS but damn they get arrogant if they get called out on anything. I started another thread about some things in this video that are just plain wrong. Towards the end they insinuate that air launching requires a 50-50 split in labor and that's just nonsense. Go and look at the response I got from CSS. Do I think Elon is generally a clown who speaks nonsense? ABSOLUTELY YES and he deserves to be outed, but that doesn't mean he hasn't done a couple of decent things even if he lucked into them. Yeah he lucked into Tesla and yeah he's done some stupid things but he's also managed to kick the auto industry out of its shell and got them moving on electric and hybrid drive systems. Yeah SpaceX has some issues but damn its also kicked the US space industry out of its lethargy. That last Soyuz seat cost NASA $80 million. Crew Dragon costs NASA $70 million for 4 seats. SpaceX has broken the strangle hold that Boeing, Rockwell, Lockheed,... etc. have had on the US Space Program. Breaking that stranglehold is arguably the best thing to happen to manned spaceflight since Apollo. The risk is that in his pursuit of attention Elon will send it right back to where its been. I don't know when you graduated, but I graduated in 87/88 and I've watched 2 generations lose their hopes and dreams on the BS of those few companies. We should have built Space Station Freedom in the 90s and been back on the moon by 2001 AS WAS PLANNED. We've lost almost 30 years on the hamster wheel going nowhere fast. My great fear is that Starship is just another hamster wheel. Sorry for the rant.
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  12. Not certain which brand of engineer you are. I did my degree in aerospace and have spent 30+ years in industrial control systems, automation and robotics. Back in 2002 I met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17). Nice guy and I wanted to talk to him about satellite maintenance he that's nice but go look at Helium-3. I did and since I'm Australian I went off to our mining industry because I though if I ever had to chance to fulfill that dream of doing what he did I'd need RELEVANT experience. I thought I knew stuff, but damn I got dozens and dozens of eye openers. During the 2nd 1/2 of the 2000s and 1st 1/2 of the 2010s we built dozens of new mines to feed the Chinese beast. Most of it was in remote locations some of it was near towns and the difference between construction in remote areas is staggering. Really basic construction stuff like concrete, scaffolding, cranes all become exercises in logistics and planning. Then there is the basic thing of accommodation and services that support the people who work there. On more than a few occasions people couldn't understand why I wanted to work on the stuff around the accommodation camp. Things like the water, sewerage, domestic power and entertainment systems. Guess what if we build a Moon base or Mars base people are going to eat, pee & poop and want to be entertained. Someone has to know about that stuff and even in companies that do this stuff every day there are head office geniuses who IGNORE what they get told. I got a monster reality check on supporting infrastructure and its way more involved than people think. Despite all that people DO KNOW from real experience across all sorts of fields of science and engineering there's always people who think they know better. What CSS is showing is that Angry is just armchair expert who knows nothing about doing real world science and engineering.
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  13. Yeah its like an less gross but more icky version of Event Horizon.
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  14. Yeah I don't think Common Sense Skeptic has done anything for his reputation by going on a channel like this. MAYBE if it was to reach out to people on that side of political divide and get them to start questioning what they hear and see then I'd flip and give him a well done on at least attempting to reach out. BUT I will say I have found the CSS (or at least some of his staff) don't like being corrected themselves. Back on the Video "Of Rockets, Shuttles and Planes" I picked up on a mistake regarding air launched systems. I happen to have a degree in aerospace engineering. Towards the end of that video they implied that for air launched systems you had to spend (of development money) 50% on the carrier and 50% on the rocket. That's NOT TRUE and never was. In most cases companies and agencies doing air launching used available aircraft an dmodified them. CSS used the Stratolauncher as an example and that's one of the very few cases where a specialised air launcher was developed. Its the exception not the norm. I simply corrected their implication. NOT ONLY did I a very rude and snide reply from CSS but they have since deleted my comments and their own. I now reserve my right to be Skeptical of the Skeptic and his motivations. I think he's right on many many things but he's also NOT perfect.
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  15.  @paulpinecone2464  I'll pay that. 👍👍👍👍👍👍🤣😅🤣😅😂
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  16.  @skylarkesselring6075  DON'T LECTURE PEOPLE WHEN YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT I have over 30 years of automation, robotics and control system experience. I have a degree in aerospace engineering and the second highest qualification for safety engineering available anywhere. I have also worked with vision guided robotics, but only in a limited way. I ACTUALLY KNOW what I am talking about and you are just repeating PR. I'm tired of trying to explain how clowns like you who have caused disasters like the Boeing Max-8 because people like YOU refuse to listen to answers you don't like. If the software systems you claim are so good then how did the Max-8 crash and crash TWICE? Its infuriating to be lectured by yet another moron who has no grasp of the difference between the fantasy world of gaming and the real world of flesh and bone where there's NO reset button. In my work we don't get 2nd chances and we have NO TOLERANCE for fools - they get people killed. I can tell you're not an engineer because you're repeating garbage PR. You certainly know NOTHING about real time sensor & evaluation systems let alone safety related systems. Learn to think and reason in future.
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  17.  @LennyAllen-cp9cl  On your comment about specialised vehicles. Sorry but there are so many examples of specialised vehicles outperforming general vehicles in their specialised role that its barely worth considering. There are literally 100s of examples of cars, boats, airplanes, tools, machines,... etc. Here's the simplest I can think of - the spork (a combination fork and spoon). Its not as good of a fork as a real fork or as good of a spoon as a real spoon but then forks are almost useless as spoons and spoons are almost as useless as forks wile a spork can do both well enough that campers use them because it saves space and weight in their rucksack.
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  18.  @zpettigrew  Go look up Patrick Boyle here on YT. He's a fund manager who does a channel and listen to what he says about Musk. He's as monotone bland as a person can be but his assessment is as hilarious as it is brutal.
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  19. Go and have a look at the Russian Moon Rocket the N-1. See what happened when they tried and you'll understand that people who know have known for a long time that starship was going to have these issues.
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  20.  @GunSmoker  Well said 👍👍😂😂🤣🤣
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  21. Lets look at one of the real tragedies here. Chris Anderson has taken his creations TED & TEDx which were (past tense) brilliant and trashed it. Here's some examples of what I mean by brilliant. These are very intelligent highly skilled people giving us introductions into their work. FYI - I am an aerospace engineer and the first 4 are all STEM people. Jonathan Trent (formerly of NASA). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8lWDmz7wVU Emily Calandrelli - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9haKpJakU4 Bill Crawford - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF5hDwZa7-0 Don Pettit - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWjdnvYok4I Nick Hanauer on Plutocrats - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2gO4DKVpa8 Cassie Jaye on Men's issues - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WMuzhQXJoY Lera Boroditsky on language - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKK7wGAYP6k These are all amazing talks by amazing people and we'd normally never get to hear what these people have to say or what they are doing if it wasn't for TED & TEDx. I am Australian and had never heard of the that tribe in Australia with no concept of Left & Right before seeing that unless I heard Lera Boroditsky's talk. What Chris Anderson has done to his own creation by sucking up to Elon Musk is a tragedy.
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  22. I'm an aerospace engineer and that's about the best layman's description of the situation I've seen in a while.
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  23.  @brindlebucker4741  I was actually referring to the comment by DancingCactus. As an engineer (and I am not alone) I'm tired of trying to explain why Mars is unrealistic and why we haven't been back to the moon and why a moon base right now is almost impossible because we really are missing a number of key technologies. Most of all I am tired of uneducated social media clowns making great pronouncements. I do actually like the fact that SOME of them are standing up and calling out the (what I call) the Space Industrial Complex (Boeing, Rockwell, Thiokol,.... etc.) who have sucked up billions to NOT deliver. There's plenty of examples. BUT I hate with a passion the ignorance many of them then spout often in the next breath. Angry Astronaut is a perfect example of people who do this. He'll call out companies like Blue Origin for not delivering and in the next breath BS on about Mars colonies as if they were a finger click away. Almost 20 years ago I met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) who told me to check out Helium-3. So I went off to the Australian mining industry to learn about mining. I get a hell of a reality check on just how difficult it is. Better still I got a monster reality check that would scare Godzilla on what it takes to support a workforce in a remote location. I can tell you from what I know has been published that NASA has no clue on remote construction or that kind of remote operations. A while back I was sent the official notes from a lunar conference hosted by NASA. Out of 170+ pages there was 1-1/2 pages on maintenance. I can tell from real experience that if there was 170 page compendium on potential lunar bases it SHOULD have at least 120pages on maintenance. For every 1 page on what you might deploy would need at least 4 pages on how you intend to maintain it. Anybody who has ever really been on a mine would know that. 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️
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  24.  @michelforever6301  All 3 of your points are invalid for the simple reason they IGNORE other factors or facts. - Starlink needs a customer base, which is rule number 1 of any product or service. Go watch a few episodes of Dragons Den and you'll get that. So WHO actually NEEDS Starlink? NOT who wants to feel cool about having there phone link to a satellite but who ACTUALLY needs it AND will WILL PAY for it. Go ask Iridium how their business is going with a 2019 profit of NEGATIVE $162 million. 5G mobile is going to hit the same wall. Who ACTUALLY needs those download rates to a phone. 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️ - Vertical farming. Not certain why you have even mentioned this but just go do some real investigation into the subject and you'll find the people doing it have actually done their market research. Water & power aren't just an issue for vertical farming they are an issue for EVERY business going forward. Water & power are one of my pet subjects to beat the crud out of people with economics degrees and greenie brain-space clowns who haven't a clue what it takes to make modern societies actually function. - Hyperloop, just don't bother. It was bullshite when Elon started claiming it as an original idea and its been bullshite ever since. The fact you tired to argue the temperature expansion issue at all shows you're NOT an engineer. Maybe your a physicist like that Romanian moron Sebastian who thunderf00T exposed. That clown has to be the most embarrassing failure the entire physics profession has had in decades. He publicly confused the formulas for thermal expansion (a material effect caused by a temperature change over TIME) with thermal conductivity (energy transfer caused by a temperature differential across a medium).
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  25.  @theultimatereductionist7592  Yeah I get that more than most. The entire concept that we "must become a multi-planetary society to survive as a species," is as much of a fantasy as claiming the earth is flat. Its not based on anything factual. Its just a claim made to justify something certain people WANT not what we the human species NEEDs.
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  26.  @michelforever6301  Now your getting even dumber because you clearly have NEVER BEEN on a farm. A whole slab of my mothers family are farmers. 1) Of those 570 million about 500 million of them are subsistence farmers in the 3rd world. So they aren't going to be clients ANYTINE soon. So that a BS argument and plenty of people have pointed that out. 2) Most of the farmers in the developed world are close enough to mobile services so they DON'T need it either. 3) You just admitted your NOT an engineer. So just stop lecturing a person who is. Because in your ignorance you fail to realise that continuously welded rail systems which are used extensively in the Australian mining sector where I have worked need CONSTANT maintenance from the effects of expansion & contraction due to environmental heating & cooling cycles. YES - YOU REALLY DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT
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  27. That's a great answer on predicting all the scenarios. I'm an engineer who works in industrial control systems, automation and robotics. There's so many misconceptions among the general population about technology and its because of clowns like Elon Musk and the media people who over-hype technologies. And some of it is truly ridiculous. On your point My way of getting people to see how ridiculous Elon Musk is about FSD is to ask them how many objects they can see as they drive like just down a suburban street with trees and houses. There's basically millions and millions of objects. Think of leaves and bricks and other stuff. This is the truly amazing thing about the human brain. It can almost instantly discard millions of objects by grouping them into irrelevant clumps and then discarding those clumps. We don't care about the leaves they are part of the trees and the tress aren't moving. The same with the bricks - they are part of the houses. Its actually an amazing ability that every human being has. We can discard millions of items by clumping them together and bring our attention down to a few and do it dozens of times each second. if you've ever wondered what makes some sports stars do amazing stuff, this is part of it. Its this ability to eliminate useless information and process the important information, but they do it faster than the rest of us. This is what your talking about with scenarios. A human brain can not only consider scenarios but consider scenarios its never seen before through intuition and interpolation. This is why the Tesla's do stupid things at times like trying to turn left through a van. The can't adapt to through intuition and interpolation the same way a human brain can to new situations.
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  28.  @classydave75  Skylon is an interesting one. The idea that they could cool that much air that quickly always struck me as a bit odd. There was something not well explained about that engine.]io890 A pointy nose really is a bad thing for re-entry type flight. A blunt nose produces a detached or bow shock wave and it effectively produces a protective layer. The vehicle still cops a hammering but its just not as bad as as pointy nose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bow_shock_(aerodynamics) A pointed nose has the shock attached and that means the tip gets the full blast of re-entry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_wave
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  29.  @LennyAllen-cp9cl  You're partly right and definitely on the right thinking process. If you look at the basic tasks for going to the moon or mars. You have 3 basic tasks. Get up and back from the Earth. Get to and from the Moon or Mars. Get up and back from the Moon or Mars. You don't need to be an engineer to realise those are 3 fairly different tasks. That's why Apollo worked, they actually broke the mission down to manageable tasks. You are quite right Star Raker (if it can work) would be great for one task but lousy for almost everything else.
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  30.  @LennyAllen-cp9cl  That's not a bad thought except that starship itself is a compromised design that's trying to do too much in the first place. That's the real problem with Starship its trying to be too many things. This is a common trait with almost everything in engineering. Here's an example. One of the fundamental criticisms of the F35 is that its trying to be so many aircraft that it simply fails in certain aspects. In ground attack and close in support of ground troops its Ok but compared to the A10 its hopeless because the A10 is dedicated to that role. I am no SpaceX fan but its why Crew Dragon is such a success. I know CSS wont agree but it simply is a success. The last US seat on a Soyuz mission cost $80 million. Currently crew Dragon costs $70 million for 4 people or $17.5 million per seat. That's better than a 75% saving. But then what else can Crew Dragon do other than get people up to the ISS and back down from the ISS? Not much. What's needed then is a vehicle that just goes to and back from the Moon or Mars and then another to get down and back from the Moon or Mars. Because if you try and combine those tasks you start making compromises and in the end that wont work as well.
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  31.  @AdrieKooijman  My bet would be they tried to do too much. In B2 they tried to create a complete micro world with all sorts of climates and conditions. My bet is we'll actually go with a much narrower focus on the environment and accept at the start it will need constant monitoring and maintenance. Think about a garden even a small one or somebody with a few plants. They need constant monitoring and maintenance. Evn on the most modern farm the farmer has to watch the crops and do maintenance as needed. In biosphere 2 they just expected things to work and nature to find its own balance. That's maybe its one great addition to out knowledge base. We need to be simpler and we need to maintain it.
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  32.  @commonsenseskeptic  On another note I'd love to help you do a debunk of space mining. I did a degree in aerospace (late 80s). I've worked mainly in automation, robotics and controls systems. In 2002 I met Harrison Schmitt who was here in Oz to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Apollo 17. I wanted to discuss with him satellite maintenance. Everything from my background said it was an industry waiting to boom. He quashed that quick by getting me to answer why nobody has done it? He then told me look up Helium-3. That meant mining and by chance Australia was just starting a mining construction boom to feed the Chinese beast. It too some time but I got into mine site construction and operations. Unlike all the fanbots and schemers I actually have worked on mines and helped build them and get them running. I can tell from basic numbers just how ludicrous some of the proposals are. Forget the money the tonnage is the reality. For example I worked at the Tom Price Iron Mine at one point. It produces 20MTA (million tons per annum) and its perfect for the basic numbers. Good iron ore is about 70% iron content. Lower grades are 55-60% and the really high grades are up to 95% (basically iron filings with some dirt thrown in). So for every 20 tons of iron ORE we get about 14 tons of iron. Which just so happens also is the landing capacity for the Space Shuttle. So it would basically take 1,000,000 Space Shuttle flights to handle the what just 1 iron mine does each year. Australia doesn't produce 20MTA it produces over 800MTA of ORE and China produces over 1,200MTA of ORE. Other than for incredibly rare and hyper value substances that the entire world demand is under 100tons per year will ever be feasible. Your mate Angry Astronaut just last week just pointed out the potential to mine nickel from the moon. One of my construction projects was Nickel mine. Global production of Nickel in 2020 was 2.5 million MTA (of metal). Which if we got from the moon would require about 178,000 space shuttle flights to land it here on Earth. What about Copper that's about 20MTA a year (of metal). In a way I like Anrgry because he stands up and calls out a lot of things that need calling out. BUT THEN he states some idiotic garbage and does it regularly. People can scream and yell all they like AND THEY DO. The fanbots scream at me all the time. Even if we suddenly got a Space Shuttle with 10x the capacity it still doesn't make sense. Except for incredibly rare ultra-high value substances NOBODY will be space mining anything anytime soon. So if you do want to do a debunk on the whole space mining thing let me know.
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  33. I am an aerospace engineer and I am fed up with the clowns who call themselves "science communicators." Most of them have utter zero STEM education and next to zero STEM literacy. Most just regurgitate the published PR as their script. One of the best I know for "dramatic regurgitating" is the channel Dark Skies. I was watching one vid and checked the Wikipedia page and he was just reading straight off the Wikipedia page like a high school clown from drama class. I don't think any of them actually deliberately mean to do wrong or cause confusion, but that is what they so often do. Neil De Grasse Tyson did a great explanation of what can happen a few minutes into this -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S58vlJwhwDw
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  34. As another Australian I second that motion and request it be tabled in the official notes.
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  35.  @caked3953  Great point and it why the Elon fanbots (what I now call his fanboys and fan girls) dismiss the food, water and oxygen discussion with "we'll just use hydroponics or aquaponics" without any understanding that NOBODY yet knows how to make it work. There is actually an obscure corner of the aquarium hobby brigade who specialize in these minimal input tanks. I don't think they have an actual solution for taking to space because it does not involve food production but they have a sound understanding of what it takes to maintain those sorts of systems. But as for creating actual soil to grow things and create a functional environment - these fanbots are truly ignorant of reality. If you try and discuss these things with them they think you're barking mad and start howling. Elon has done a great job of creating a personality club around himself. Its going to get very interesting when that bubble bursts.
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  36.  @Ragnaroz6000  I could easily be price dumping and it could just as easily be that Boeing and friends who have had a stranglehold/monopoly/cartel on access to space have been over charging for decades. I suggested in another thread the other day that possibly Elon lucked out with who he first got into SpaceX. Someone came back with 3 names and when I checked their bios they were seriously impressive. So at least at one point Elon attracted a lot of talent to SpaceX. Falcon 9 is now man rated. Boeing have had how long to get their system ready? With all of Boeing's history, experience, knowledge and resources they should easily beaten SpaceX. Instead Starliner is YET to do even a single successful flight. I don't like Elon Musk very much. I think he's an opportunist who's very good at hype & PR. BUT SpaceX (or at least the Falcon program) is first class. Starship is another matter entirely.
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  37.  @grahamstrouse1165  Exactly and its what drives real tech people crazy. We end having to explain why its garbage again and again and again. Watch for the clowns who call themselves "futurists" I am yet to see or hear one of them with an actual technical background AND they all speak Elon type garbage. Unfortunately the media seems to think they are all tech savvy.
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  38.  @LennyAllen-cp9cl  This is in reply to your nuclear thermal engines comment. They were first proposed back in the 1960s and this is a classic case of people looking back at old ideas who don't ask the most important question: "Why didn't it work back then?" Yes there is the possibility NT engines will offer an improvement, but nobody has even proven they can actually work. Its a classic case of people confusing ideas with reality. Sometimes even great ideas just don't work. Proverbially speaking 99.99% of all technology ideas never go anywhere for one or more basic reasons. When engineers do projects they generally look at dozens of solutions and end up dismissing all but 1. Its not that the other ideas were bad or would not work they just choose the best option for that CIRCUMSTANCE. Here's one of the best examples I know of. Its a 2011 TEDx Talk by MIT postgrads Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie about Waste Annihilating nuclear reactors. At the time it was genuine 1000% game changing technology and it wasn't from some flunky amateur. These were 2 super smart MIT kids with a brilliant idea. Here's their 2001 TEDx talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAFWeIp8JT0 When I checked where they were at a couple of years ago they had folded the company after spending over $100 Million in funding. They made all their research and development free for the world to use. Way back at the very start they had missed a very basic item that they had taken for granted and their method was NEVER GOING TO WORK in the way they conceived it. Its a lesson for all the people who dig up technologies from the past. You MUST ASK: "Why didn't it work?"
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  39. ​ @ivannoreland5656  And which one has FLOWN. NOT a test on a stand but an actual flight. Yeah dude anyone can look up and find they built Kiwi, Phoebus, NRX/EST, NRX/XE, Pewee, Pewee 2, and the Nuclear Furnace BUT they never got close to an actual engine that could be flown. If you want to claim its yet ANOTHER "what might have been if we hadn't wasted money on dumb stuff!" Then I will back you any day of the week. If you want to complain about some of the programs that were never followed through on. Then even better. I'll lead the protest march on that. Go look at the X-planes for the number of projects that were cut right when they started to produce results. 2 of my favs are the X-33 and X-38. Do you know they had 3 more X-15 variants on the drawing board. There was a 2 seater, a delta wing and a scramjet powered version of the delta wing. They'd already proven by that stage they could do supersonic combustion. I read and quoted the paper by Billig on the first successful SSC experiments in my masters thesis. If you look through the list of lost opportunities it gets pretty frustrating.
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  40. To All - just to give a different perspective on a person mentioned at one point in this. Jeff Greason is mentioned several times in this video. He was a founder of XCor which has CSS rightly points out went bankrupt. Anyone can check that on XCor's history on Wikipedia. I'd just like to point out something that anyone can also check on Wikipedia. You'll see that XCor was closely associated with Burt Rutan who designed and built the X-Prize winning Space Ship One. Yes XCors entrant in the X Prize (the Lynx) failed to fly but then so did all of the other contestants. Peter Diamandis the person who ran the X-Prize also tried to get the Rocket Racing League started. He chose XCor to build the prototype for the Rocket Racing League. That prototype not only flew but once flew 7 times in a single day and to the best of my knowledge that has never been equalled or surpassed by anyone, government or private. I just wanted people to know that in his day Jeff Greason was one of the top aerospace engineers in the world. FULL DISCLOSURE - I had some limited contact with Jeff regarding his rocket motors circa 2018. I've had no contact with him since. At that time he seemed a reasonable person and very knowledgeable, which makes my quite surprised to see him associated with these people. If he does reply to CSS I hope that CSS will give him a fair opportunity.
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  41. And for anyone who's interested. As an engineer I agree 100% with CSS's summation of the NASA assessment of OAC's CLD proposal. My bet it took more time for someone at NASA to write up the assessment than it actually took to reject the proposal. Also CSS's assessment of the docking issues are spot on as are the balance issues he points out. This is exactly the sort of thing I wished more people in the media would point out regarding space subjects. My pet subject for unrealistic space issues is space mining and here's the basics of why. I'm Australian but did my degree in America. After meeting Harrison Schmitt in 2002 who spoke about mining the Moon for Helium-3 I went into the Australian mining industry to learn how to build and operate remote mines. I have over 15 years of first hand on site experience building and operating mines and I can state in all honesty that even the boffins at NASA haven't got a clue. I written to several people who have done TEDx talks on space mining and the one who did reply was actually an architect. He is actually a decent person who did the TEDx as a public speaking exercise. He was quite honest that he didn't know the subject that well. He sent me the main source of material for his talk which was the published papers from a NASA Conference on future lunar activities. It included quite a bit on mining and I can tell you all the NASA people need to actually spend some REAL TIME on mine sites seeing how they actually work. The biggest giveaway for anyone interested is to look at how they plan to do maintenance. If they say nothing then that shows they know nothing about mining and if they say robots then they know nothing about maintenance of heavy duty machinery. At its most basic mining is about getting what you want out of rocks. Just digging rocks and dirt out of the ground puts wear and tear on the machinery. After that you smash those rocks into smaller rocks and in some cases into powder. Yeah - at its most basic mining is about smashing rocks and that is incredibly hard on all the machinery. Anyone who thinks there's no maintenance is delusional and anyone who thinks it can be done with robots is ignorant of heavy duty machinery. And if CSS wants me to help on a "Why space mining is bunk!" video - then YES I WILL HELP IF HE ASKS.
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  42.  @commonsenseskeptic  Case 2 of Space BS: Mining Asteroids Part 2 - Maintenance Iron Ore is about the simplest thing we mine. Dig it up crush and screen it down to size and put it on the train to send to port. If its a poor grade or you want to value add then you put a wash plant between the crushing & screening and the stockpile. A wash plant is pretty simple. You mix the ore with water and let gravity separate the iron from the dirt because iron is heavier than clay and dirt. So you have diggers, truck, crushers, screens, conveyors, stackers that make stockpiles, reclaimers that reclaim ore form stock piles and train load outs. No mater how well you blast it (or not) just digging up iron ore puts wear and tear on the digger. No matter how hard and tough the teeth and leading edge of diggers are they will wear and they will need replacing. If you are drilling for blast patterns then those drills will wear and need replacing. Having 100s of tons of rock and ore dumped in the back and then sliding it all out at the crusher puts wear and tear on the trucks. Plus they go through a set of tires every 3-4 months. Plus they need fuel, oil and general maintenance. Conveyor belts wear and need replacing water pumps, slurry pumps all wear. Even if you are mining with space lasers things will still wear out, because there will always bee some sort of processing. Even if you start chasing after rare low volume high value resources you will then need even more complex processing equipment will require even more maintenance. The moment you start dealing with rock things start wearing, because rocks have this one quality - they're hard. No matter how large or how small they are hard. It will never matter were you go the moment you start mining for resources is the moment you start wearing out equipment that will need replacing and or maintenance and that leads to the NEXT PROBLEM. Go an ask any mechanic if any 2 engines were identical in what they needed to repair or maintain? Go ask any electrician if any 2 machines with wiring issues were identical in what they needed to repair or maintain? Go ask a plumber if any 2 pipes were identical in what they needed to repair or maintain? Go ask any carpenter if any 2 pieces of wood are identical? Robots are exceptional if the task is REPEATABLE. Maintenance is never exactly repeatable because every maintenance task has its own unique differences. IT CAN BE similar but NEVER identical. I have worked in industrial robotics in the past and its hard trying to explain to people that robots excel at doing the same thing a million times in a row. They do not handle a million similar tasks well, because every time a variation that's outside the norm happens they crash, they stop or they crash and stop. One of my bosses used to say "automated machines are great at finding bad parts and lousy at handling them." The origin of this issue is that NASA does not do maintenance except for stuff they have on earth or for software. Once they lite the rocket fuse there is NOTHING any NASA engineer can do to except software. So there is almost zero experience in off world maintenance except from things like the MIR Space Station, The ISS and the Hubble Space telescope AND NOEN of that involved smashing rock. Basically if any of the space mining people don't mention maintenance then they are delusional and if the claim they will use robotic maintenance they are ignorant.
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  43. What's also in this is how much of a complete suck up Chris Anderson the Founder of TED & TEDx and how much brand damage that's doing. if you go a few years back there were some great TED & TEDx talks but I haven't seen a lot lately. I have these bookmarked for reference. 2013 Don Pettit's "The tyranny of the rocket equation" 2014 Nick Hanauer's "Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming" 2017 Lera Boroditsky's "How language shapes the way we think" 2018 Emily Calandrelli's "Making science nicer, stupid" One of my favourite speakers Dr. Jonathan Trent has a bunch of TED/TEDx talks going back over decade but NONE for over 5 years. Go look at some of the stuff they now do. It comes across as a techno-hippie convention.
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  44.  @SergeantSarge  Yep, who can forget crusty the space captain.
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  45. I am an aerospace engineer and I can explain in detail all the stuff that they have simply not bothered to think about. Its not simply Musk or his fanbots, NASA aren't exactly innocent. There's a staggering amount og science fiction PR garbage in the space industry at the moment. Back in 2002 I met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) and at that time he was talking up the Helium-3 opportunity on the moon. As an Australian at that stage there was no easy way into NASA or even their programs. So an independent project with credibility was possible. At that time Australia was just starting a mining construction boom to feed the Chinese beast. It took a couple of years but I snuck my way into remote mine site construction and the analogies to setting up anything on the moon become fairly obvious after some time doing that work. 1) EVERYTHING needs to be thought ahead. When you are in the middle of the desert nothign is just down the road because the road is 1500km long. Prior to that time I worked in our manufacturing sector and 90% of everything was at worst an hour away. On a remote mine site, even if airplanes come regularly you have to consider everything is at least 3 days away. Its a giant non-stop logistical exercise that never ends. 2) Everything you take for granted in a city like water and power has to be treated very seriously. Most people never consider what happens when they flush the toilet. On a mine site that's a serious consideration along with all other waste. Most of all the food has to be trucked or flown in, then stored, then cooked, then eaten and then cleaned up. Humans eat, shit, pee and breath. Spaceship earth is great for cleaning our mess and we take that for granted. 3) Mine sites are primarily dirt and rock crushing & grinding plants. That means wear and tear on everything. I got hold of the papers for a NASA conference on the moon (well over 200 pages). The total commentary on maintenance was less than 1-1/2 pages, 1/2 of which was a diagram and all they said was we'll do it with robots. That told me that NONE OF THEM had ever spent any time on a mine site. When I see clowns talking about mining asteroids I can tell NONE OF THEM had ever spent time on a mine site. When I hear Jeff Bezos talking about taking all the iron ore processing off planet I know he's not done any of the basic math hon that.
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  46.  @daphnedherbert  No need for the lecture that's why I said I'd agree with CSS that this was a good thing IF THEIR INTENT was to reach more people. But as I also said I have reservations over CSSs intent at times. I don't disagree with most of what CSS says but there've been times CSS has acted like an obsessed maniac with Elon Musk. Do I think Elon deserves harsh scrutiny? ABSOLUTELY and at times in detail, but it also requires balance. I am an aerospace engineer and I can't stand Elon Musk, but that doesn't mean that SpaceX hasn't done anything good. Without Crew Dragon there would be no Western manned Space program at all. There'd just be Russia and China, because Boeing have failed so badly with Starliner. On the flip side Starship and going to Mars is so ridiculous and the money and time is so wasteful it deserves all the scorn it gets. Balance.
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  47.  @daphnedherbert  Ok. I'm just trying to have balance and I don't think enough of that happens these days on any form of media. I really do like CSS but at times I think he loses sight of the forest because of the tree he's focused on.
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  48.  @RanEncounter  Ok then name the OTHER WESTERN launch system that can take people to the International Space Station. Come on SHIT-4-BRAINS name the alternative system. Because since the demise of the Space Shuttle the only way for Western Nations to get to the ISS was via Soyuz and sorry but Soyuz is NOT part of the Western Space programs.
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  49.  @commonsenseskeptic  As I indicated on a couple of other things Elon, Jeff and others have fans CANNOT DO BASIC MATH and they rely on those people NOT BEING ABLE TO DO BASIC MATH.
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  50.  @starofjustice1  Its more than that as several of the videos that are on this channel show its about making money from selling pipedreams. Bas Lansdorp made around $10 million from the utter BS he pitched for Mars One. As Snake oil salesmen learnt decades ago the bulk of society are ignorant of reality no matter how well we try and educate them and they are easily fooled into handing over money. Think about all the Nigerian money scams that were prevalent in the late 90s early 2000s that we got in our emails and THEY CONTINUE TO THIS DAY no matter how many news stories are told. Think about the flat earth promoters. None of them believe its flat but they all know there are people stupid enough to buy merchandise and books and videos about it.
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