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

  1. I'm an aerospace engineer and you are right. Unfortunately when it comes to engineering being right means nothing. Who's paying and what they want is everything.
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  2.  @transformerstuff7029  The world isn't in trouble. Anyone who doesn't have this technology is in trouble, because no matter what agreements they have they are at the mercy of the countries that have this technology. When your society requires a specific technology just to function you are at the mercy of who supplies that technology. Its why the Chinese captured and trapped the Rare Earths industry. Its why other countries have done the same in other spaces.
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  3. @Alvin Walker Sorry mate but like many other people in the world you are under the false apprehension that anything can just be reverse engineered and that's just NOT TRUE. Sorry for the long answer, but its not just for you it for anyone else wondering. I have degree in aerospace and 30+ years work in automation, control systems and robotics. Some stuff just can't be reverse engineered even when you know that task. It could be a lack of skills, knowledge or resources. Some things are just hard to do. I see it in robotics and CNC all the time. Yes there's been some extraordinary advances that make stuff easy for people to do. But once you start chasing precision its just keeps getting harder. A good example is respirators. Early in the COVID pandemic there was a world wide shortage of respirators and there were many announcements from a variety of amateurs and professionals. There's a YT channel called Real Engineering that's hosted y an engineer who once worked at one of the worlds largest manufacturers of respirators. He did a video on how respirators HAVE to work. It wasn't just what they do but HOW and WHY they do what they have to do. All the amateurs and professionals missed the fact that respirators aren't just an air pump they are hyper-precision air pump. They have to be because they are helping an already gravely ill person possibly with lung damage stay alive. That requires extremely accurate pressure and flow sensors that require very specialised electronics to read them. That alone makes them hard but then you also need software that's super reliable and a pump that can be precisely controlled. Its not impossible its just damn hard and can't be done with normal industrial parts which was what so many people proposed. If you aske the simple question - can it be reversed engineered? The answer is always yes, but that doesn't answer the question of how hard it is to do. That respirator company the guy from Real Engineering worked for released free to the world an older already certified respirator design. All anyone had to do was sign an agreement on the intellectual property and they could just start manufacturing respirators. The problem was many countries just didn't have the skills to make respirators or they couldn't get some of the parts. PLUS in many cases countries didn't have enough nurses trained to the level needed to operate & monitor respirators. This Dutch chip machinery isn't one technology its a collection of hyper-precision technologies anyone of which would be incredibly difficult to reverse engineer even if they handed over all the details and design documentation.
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  4. It was always hype and delusion and largely still is. I am an aerospace engineer who moved into the Australian mining industry after meeting Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) in 2002. At that time he was talking up the possibility of mining the moon for Helium-3. I went looking for real practical experience and was lucky because at the time Australia went on a mining construction boom to feed China raw materials. What I got was an education in practical mining, site construction, maintenance, mineral processing, logistics and importantly INFRASTRUCTURE. Before you even start digging mine sites need a staggering array of infrastructure for power and water. I can tell within seconds that most of these people have never even visited a working mine. I have actually built them and worked on them. When real mining people see this stuff they can't stop laughing.
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  5. Australian here - You are 100% RIGHT. I know it sounds a lot like Libertarians screaming about Big Brother, but this is one of those cases where they're right and I normally would not agree on anything with that crowd. This is NOT just a problem with a few car manufacturers its a major problem across the entire online system. The Australia government was one of the first to crack down Tik Tok on phones with government workers. It was real simple we had a public exposé on how Tik Tok operated and anyone who was paying attention quickly realised that its a surveillance system in disguise. It knows where you are 24/7 and because you give Tik Tok access to your photo gallery you are also giving it access to the rest of your phone including phone logs and messages. Australia's security chiefs eventually came out and confirmed this. That was over 2 years ago. Companies like Meta, Apple, Tesla, Microsoft & Google are just as bad and in some cases worse at hording data. The problem is we have let all these companies get away with the stuff for so long that reigning it in will be incredibly difficult.
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  6. Also on air launching (and yes I have a degree in aerospace) its NOT just the saving on delta-v. They are only launching from around 10km at less at about 0.25km/s, while orbit is over 200km and over 7km/s. So the actual height and speed gains have little to do with anything. The actual advantages of air launching and they are incremental buy do add up. 1) You don't need to build a dedicated launch facility. All that is needed is a hanger and a convenient airfield. That's a cost saving. 2) Air launching includes a fully reusable first stage. That's a cost saving. 3) It can launch "on orbit" or closer to orbit. All normal launches require fuel in the upper stage to get from the launch sites global position over onto the global orbital position. Reducing the amount of fuel needed either lowers costs or allows for larger payloads. Where I think they didn't learn from previous systems. 1) Launcher 1 is significantly heavier 30t than Pegasus XL 23t which was a fair step of from Pegasus 18.5t. When you are staring with a vehicle around 50% bigger than your competitor and you have all the development hassle a smaller system would have been a lot smarter to start with and then build up from there. Starting out with something much smaller would have meant debugging all their systems both in the vehicle and in the manufacturing and launch processes with a cheaper vehicle and fewer people. They forgot that whole learning to walk before learning to run thing. 2) That extra weight meant a bigger more costly aircraft. Maybe the surplus 747s were cheaper to buy but a smaller 767 can lift those sorts of loads and with only 2 engines to service is a huge operational cost saving. Remember Pegasus used a modified L-1011 Tristar for most of its life. Every time a 747 flies compared to something like a 737 or 767 that's a lot of fuel burn and a lot of maintenance. This is a lesson everyone should have got from the Space Shuttle. Every launch of the Space shuttle meant putting 75tons into orbit before you did anything else. That's a lot of unnecessary cost and also why the ISS cost so much and why Crew Dragon is a massive step in the right direction. AND NO I am not an Elon Musk fanbot but I do cut him some slack on Space-X. 3) Their flight profile negated a very important aspect of what they learned with Pegasus. The wing on Pegasus allowed the vehicle to gain a lot of speed in horizontal flight at a point which is significantly more fuel efficient than trying to accelerate in vertical flight because there is still air drag at that point. That might not be a lot of difference but Pegasus works and Launcher One doesn't. 4) The most important thing they forgot is that space flight is hard and no matter how much money you have their will be failures. Go and look at the Pegasus launch list. They had 4 failures (or partial failures) in the first 10 launches, another at 14 and then 31 successful launches in a row. This stuff is hard and all the vehicles are built right on the razor's edge of failure.
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  7. You are in part right. The biggest problem with everything in space is logistics. How do you get stuff from point A to point B. And its not that different to what we do here on Earth now. Its just that most people have no idea of how much stuff we move. I am an aerospace engineer who moved into the Australian mining industry after meeting Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) in 2002. At that time he was talking up the possibility of mining the moon for Helium-3. I went looking for real practical experience and was lucky because at the time Australia went on a mining construction boom to feed China raw materials. What I got was an education in practical mining, site construction, maintenance, mineral processing, logistics and importantly INFRASTRUCTURE. Before you even start digging mine sites need a staggering array of infrastructure for power and water. I can tell within seconds that most of these people have never even visited a working mine. I have actually built them and worked on them. When real mining people see this stuff they can't stop laughing. Irrespective if you are Jeff Bezos who wants to shift all iron processing into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) or mine an asteroid you need to get the iron to where you want it. That means bringing it down to the earths surface. The biggest payload carrying vehicle so far that could bring stuff back down was the Space Shuttle and it could bring 14tons down from LEO. I once worked on a min that did just over 20,000,000 tons a year of iron ore at an average of about 70% iron content by weight. So those 20 million tons of ore coverts to about 14 million tons of iron and if that 14 million tons was in orbit it would take 1 million Space Shuttle Flights to bring it down. Australia's annual production of iron ore is about 815,000,000 tons of iron ore. If you do the math to ship Australia's iron ore production up to LEO and then bring the iron back down its around 40million space shuttle flights a year. Even if we magically built a new super rocket 100times better that's still 400,000 flights a year. I will be honest until I was involved in mining I had no idea how much material we actually move these days. The logistics of world trade is simply staggering.
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  8. I am an aerospace engineer who moved into the Australian mining industry after meeting Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) in 2002. At that time he was talking up the possibility of mining the moon for Helium-3. I went looking for real practical experience and was lucky because at the time Australia went on a mining construction boom to feed China raw materials. What I got was an education in practical mining, site construction, maintenance, mineral processing, logistics and importantly INFRASTRUCTURE. Before you even start digging mine sites need a staggering array of infrastructure for power and water. I can tell within seconds that most of these people have never even visited a working mine. I have actually built them and worked on them. When real mining people see this stuff they can't stop laughing and can barley comprehend how anyone can believe them.
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  9. That has nothing to do with overall operations. Michael Sheetz (CNBC) sums it up best right near the end of the video. "Virgin Orbit's legacy within the space industry is a story that's too often told where there are exciting or even innovative new technologies. But that does not make necessarily for a smart or financially sound business." That's not just true of space but the wider technology sphere. Look at how many wonder technologies have been in the news over the last 25 years and nothing come from any of them. There's a meme that "99% of general startups fail." If there was a meme for aerospace it would be "99.9% of aerospace startups fail while the other .1% has juicy military contracts for stuff that doesn't work."
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  10. ​ @qownson4410  You're very much on the right thinking process but you're simply not going to air launch at 70,000-100,000 feet because there's so few jets capable of that high . But you are quite right that getting as as hight is is an important part of the discussion. Sorry if this is a long comment. I actually put in a A$720 Million proposal to the Australian government based around air launching. So I did a lot of research into this subject a few years ago. The carrier aircraft I proposed was a 2nd Gen White Knight One as used to carry Spaceship One that won the X-Prize. There's a really interesting item about White Knight One. It uses the same engines as the T-38 Talon (General Electric J85) which is the military version of the General Electric CJ610 engine used in the early Learjets (23, 24, 25 & 28). What many people don't realise is that the Learjet was originally proposed as a small tactical bomber and as such had military grade engines. So White Knight One like those early Learjets could fly up to 53,000 ft which is substantially higher than the normal 35-45,000 ft limits we see with current commercial aircraft. That 10,000 ft doesn't sound much but its significant because of where it is in the flight profile. If you had unlimited access to ex-military aircraft the Convair B-58 Hustler is the plane to consider because it could not only go high (63,000ft) but also very fast (Mach 2 at 40,000ft). Going back to why that extra altitude matters. Its simple high school level science. Getting into space is all about energy and there's 2 parts to that. Straight out altitude is the potential energy equation pe = mgh. Getting into orbit requires speed and that means kinetic energy ke = 1/2mv². So no matter the launch type every bit of altitude and speed you can get matters and saving fuel matters because that's your energy source. This is as Don Pettit put it "The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWjdnvYok4I Air launching has the obvious saving that you are launching at speed and altitude. You simply avoid all the issues of the launch pad. That's when a rocket is at its least efficient because that's when its total mass is highest and the rocket nozzle needs to produce its highest thrust. Where air launching also saves fuel however is at the top of the launch profile. If you launch from a fixed location you have to burn fuel right at the top of the profile to get onto the desired orbit. This is the part of the launch sometimes referred to as "orbital insertion." You have to burn fuel getting onto the right trajectory. Air launching reduces the amount of fuel needed for that because at the moment you launch you are pointing in the right direction. Its sometimes referred to as "launching on orbit." So there's substantial fuel savings from air launching. At times its not that much and at other times its more. Irrespective every extra kilo you can lift is a bonus. That's even more significant if your payload has orbital adjustment motors because you end up with more useable fuel on the payload. The other consideration is construction of facilities. All you need for air launching is a hangar beside the runway. You don't need launch platforms or towers or spend money maintaining them or much else other than a convenient airport. People tend to forget those costs all add up. Again - sorry for the long comment but you are on the right thought process.
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  11. Fun fact Kenya isn't alone, New Zealand and Iceland both use geothermal. The very title of this is garbage. In Australia we thought we had some really great locations for geothermal and NONE of them panned out. It takes very specific structures under the ground to make this work and importantly it has to be within reasonable reach of the population centers. That was part of the Australian failure the sites were so far off grid that the delivery cost was not viable for the amount of energy available. The other part was the below ground structures were not hot enough, maybe future technology will change that?
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  12. @Andrew Please tell me you are getting this form other sources, because what you just said is utter complete and total nonsense. It DOES NOT matter how you bring stuff down from Low Earth Orbit. The energy has to be dissipated and at orbital speeds that's a lot of energy. This is why things burn up on re-entry. They convert kinetic energy into thermal energy by air resistance. This is why Jeff Bezos is an IDI0T for suggesting we move iron ore processing into space. Even if we get it from an asteroid the 2.4billion tons we use each year has the equivalent energy of over 1,100 Hiroshima bombs if its in the same orbit as the ISS. To get it down means dissipating that energy in the atmosphere, which would heat it up worse than it already is. Its called thermodynamics, you and all the other clowns need to do a class in it.
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  13.  @christopherharvey4849  You are very much on the right track. I can't say nuclear fusion is "the technology" we need to develop but there's a whole range of technologies that have yet to be developed to the stage where they can be used. AND there's a lot of unanswered questions regarding how we'll do things. I quite often point out that the Space Shuttle was on one hand an incredible achievement in that they made a reusable space plane work, but that it was also a horrendous failure because it consumed resources in terms of both money and people that starved development of a lot of other technologies we need to do things like build a moon base and then make it work. Things like space suit development just froze and if you know where to look it up they almost had fatal failures on some of the longer Apollo Missions. The lunar regolith is laced with microscopic fragments of silicon oxides which are almost as hard as diamond and it got into everything like the wrist and waist seals. You simply can't do a 10-14 day mission on the lunar surface with an Apollo era space suit.
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  14. Fun fact Kenya isn't alone, New Zealand and Iceland both use geothermal. The very title of this is garbage. In Australia we thought we had some really great locations for geothermal and NONE of them panned out. It takes very specific structures under the ground to make this work and importantly it has to be within reasonable reach of the population centers. That was part of the Australian failure the sites were so far off grid that the delivery cost was not viable for the amount of energy available. The other part was the below ground structures were not hot enough, maybe future technology will change that?
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  15. As an aerospace engineer you have hit one of the big nails on the head. The media way to often do stories like this where they talk about emissions and focus on a minor subject. As they say at the start aviation is 2.5% of global emissions. When we bailed out the banks from their own selfish stupidity during the GFC the estimate was something like $17 Trillion (with a 'T'). Some estimates put it closer to $40T. So we can spend $$Trillions converting the aviation industry to hydrogen and at best we'd cut 2.5% off global emissions. BUT if we spend several Trillion on the power industry and/or the shipping industry then we could make a real difference. FYI - I'm an aerospace engineer who works in industrial control systems and automation. Back in the 1990s when people first thought we'd need to change aviation over to hydrogen $$$ Millions was spent on research. Companies like Rolls Royce, GE, Siemens have ALREADY sorted out the engines. Hydrogen burns very fast and very hot compared to other fuels, but they had that all sorted out by the late 1990s. RIGHT NOW you can by from GE and Siemens gas turbines for power generation that will run on 50% hydrogen without modification. The GE 9HA for example can do 50% out of the box and they have the kit to go 100%. Here in Australia I am advocating that we go down that path. What's held back hydrogen is generating, storing and handling it. I have had to deal with Hydrogen in my work and can tell you from experience hydrogen is WAY HARDER to deal with than any other gas. In general it prefers to go bang than burn. Its why don't think it will be good for things like aviation and cars but will be brilliant for electricity generation because it will be in a contained environment. Yeah wind and solar will be huge but they both need grid level storage. At the size the world needs, hydrogen is the technology that can be done at that scale.
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  16.  @clementvining2487  And most of all don't make stupid claims taken from science fiction as if they are science fact. Antimatter - really????? Please learn the difference between fiction and fact.
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  17. @UCOaDHPHrsXLZCBjlzeLU74Q I'm not American, I'm Australian but went to college in America. So I know the Americans quite well. I know their attitudes towards taking things. I wasn't being pro-American I was replying to the sarcasm of your notion that Bruce could mine an asteroid. Just so you know for future reference. There's actually 2 versions of American politics. Its not surprising most people don't understand that because they are both what the rest of the world identifies as right wing. They are just slightly different versions of right wing. A bit like Apple OS and Android are both smart phone systems - same, same but different. On one side are the Realists and the other the Liberals. The Realists are mostly Republicans and in their view humans are greedy and selfish so they justify everything they take, like they did in Iraq, because that's human nature. They don't care who's in charge so long as they can do what they want and take what they want. These are the goons who went into places and overthrew or helped overthrow democratically elected governments and installed dictatorships. The Liberals are the same in many ways but instead of narcissism they have the "we are superior culture" line and its hardwired into their brains that they have to make the whole world American. Its a hangover from when the British wanted to make the whole world British. These are the people who often turn up after the Realists have hammered a nation and try and install an American style democracy. Either way if the American Realists or American Liberals start interfering in your nation its a mess AND YES they have done heaps to Australia. Don't misread that either. I love America and their people because they do some amazing stuff but there stinking foul politics is something they should burn.
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  18.  @vasopel  Thanks. Its kinda frustrating with the media these days. Unfortunately they all think being able to use a computer makes them technically literate. Its not just aerospace its pretty much everything technical.
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  19.  @darthvader5300  Yeah, I doubt many will disagree, particularly with the NIH mentality. Just look at the claims made in thumb nails here in YT. A staggeringly high percentage of YouTube developers rely on ignorance in that people IGNORE the reality of their basic claim. Case in point the title of this video.
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  20.  @onsokumaru4663  Very well put. There was a great British TV Series called "Hustle" about a team of conmen, who do complex lomg cons like the one done in the film "the Sting." At the very end of the very last episode they talk to the audience about NOT GETTING conned. The make the point that honest people can't be conned. People looking for the easy way or people who cheat can be conned. Its right here at 49:50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMisS2AjnYA
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  21.  @clementvining2487  I HAVE SPENT MOST OF THE LAST 20 YEARS IN THE MINING INDUSTRY SO STOP PREACHING TO ME. I know more about the logistics of mining than you do. Its what gets me angry about clowns who try and preach to me about it. Unlike so many of the clown brigade I went and got real experience. So stop preaching to me until you go and get real experience too.
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  22.  @bristoled93  Yes I know who Isaac Arthur is and he way too often confuses science fiction with reality, but then so many of the so called "science communicators" are guilty of doing that.
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  23.  @clementvining2487  HERE'S SOME EXPERIENCE. In 2013 I worked for Rio Tino on the Mount Tom Price Mine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tom_Price_mine If you or any others look at the satellite you'll see there's no airport at the town of Tom Price. You actually fly into the airport at Paraburdo and you fly there on one of the last fleets of Boeing 717s because 737s are too heavy for the runway. HOW DO I KNOW THAT? Because I have worked there. If you google earth the coordinates in Wikipedia the red marker is right on a straight line (going left to right). That's the conveyor for the reclaimer to the north of that is another parallel line that is the conveyor for the stacker. In between is the high grade fines stockpiles. North of that is the high grad lump stockpile. That line of divots are because it load the trains with a series of chutes under the stockpile. I could describe that site in detail. BECASUE I HAVE WORKED THERE. I can describe other mines in Australia because I have worked on them.
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  24. ​ @bristoled93  I gave up watching his channel a while back because it was to much futurism and I have a very short fuse with futurists. They push conjecture and ideas as if they will be fact in the near future. They have a terrible way of grabbing public attention that the media then latch onto and then engineers spend months unravelling what they set in motion. The mainstream media like to have futurists on because they can spout almost anything and the media can stand back and claim "we didn't say it that person did." They then repeat that and repat it and repeat it and eventually it goes from being an idea to accepted reality. And university professors are among some of the worst at that. Most people don't realise that academics have to fight for funding. So they often promote "imagine when we have....." AI is arguably the worst example. A staggering number of people actually believe we have computers that can think. When we can't actually explain what thinking actually is. What we do have are algorithms that can mimic a human for specific well defined tasks. Its why it works so well with image analysis in areas like facial recognition. Space mining is another futurist fantasy promoted by people trying to raise cash. Most people have no idea what mining is about, other than it involves digging and they know even less about space.
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  25.  @bristoled93  Buddy I was in college when Challenger happened. Before that reality slapped us down our main topic of discussion was how we would be build Space Station Freedom and then head back to the moon. A few years down the track one of my class mates was helping build the ISS. We actually had a disagreement circa 2000 about how that was proceeding and she slapped me down with some harsh reality about what it took to build in space. So I know what getting slapped down with reality feels like. She's now one of a group of people that if you don't have her approval your stuff doesn't go to the ISS. We went to U. Illinois and down the street from our building was the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). A couple of after we were there some of those guys as a side project did the Mosaic program. That became Netscape and then Internet Explorer. So don't lecture me about space stations or the Internet. I know more about both than you ever will for one basic reason. I LISTEN TO PEOPLE WHO KNOW MORE THAN I DO. Its how you learn stuff.
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  26.  @seyedmortezakamali2597  Yeah right we'll just see if we can get Wile E. Coyote to design that system right after he finally catches the road runner.
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  27. Yes I agree the title of this is misleading, but then that's typical modern media they think we are all uneducated and ignorant.
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  28.  @ChickensAndGardening  Not suggesting but stating it for a fact. The idea you could just move an asteroid from where they are to Low Earth Orbit is nothing but Star Trek fantasy. Here's something I tell people who go on about this nonsense. Jeff Bezos has claimed he wants to move the heavy industries like iron ore processing into Low Earth Orbit where there's lots of sun light 24/7 to use and you don't have to worry about pollution. One of the iron ore mines I once worked on has a capacity of about 20 million tons a year. Its a good example because the math is very easy. At about 70% iron by weight that produces about 14 million tons of raw iron a year ready to make stuff out of. The Space Shuttle could bring back from LEO 14 tons of payload which was about 13-1/2 tons more than anything else. So if you want to bring back those 14 million tons of iron ore from LEO it would take about 1 million Space Shuttle flights. Australia in total produces about 815 million tons of iron ore a year which would require over 40 million Space Shuttle Flights. Even if we made a new magic rocket that was 100 times better than the Space Shuttle that's still 400,000 flights a year. And so you know Australia produces less that 1/3rd of the worlds iron ore. Sorry but its 99.99% space fantasy nonsense. The other 0.01% is however very interesting. There are some very rare materials available from places like the moon where for those very rare substances the option of mining them in space is plausible. World Platinum production is about 215 tons a year and our needs there have been growing. If we can get a rocket that makes the logistics practical then that's plausible. If Helium-3 were to become the main fuel for nuclear fusion that needs about 5-9 Space Shuttle Flights to power the entire planet each year. But the issue there is nobody yet has a power station that runs on Helium-3. At the end of the day its just guys selling visions of the future.
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  29.  @clementvining2487  1/2 Agreed and the 1/2 is for places like a moon base where the resources are right there. But asteroids for LEO are still an issue of fuel and delta-V. I don't know how many times we need to beat you clowns around the head with that. You cannot get around the physical laws of the universe upon which orbital mechanics and delta-V are based. Sorry but that's NO for a second time. Unless someone comes up with a truly revolutionary from of propulsion THEN ITS NO. And I don't mean some science fiction garbage either I mean something that actually works. You people need to learn the difference between science fiction and reality.
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  30. To show just how idiotic this argument is. When the first cars came out, where there enough gas stations for people to drive anywhere they liked??????? Cars, Ships, Airplanes and a lot of other stuff NEEDS INFRASTRUCTURE. That stuff the rest of you take for granted until it fails and then you all scream at the government, the engineers and anyone else YOU DIDN'T LISTEN TOO.
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  31. To show just how idiotic this argument is. When the first cars came out, where there enough gas stations for people to drive anywhere they liked??????? Cars, Ships, Airplanes and a lot of other stuff NEEDS INFRASTRUCTURE. That stuff the rest of you take for granted until it fails and then you all scream at the government, the engineers and anyone else YOU DIDN'T LISTEN TOO.
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  32.  @clementvining2487  Sorry but I am well aware of what Molten Salt Reactor are. I know the history and the story od how Kirk Sorenson re-discovered them while working on possible solutions for powering a lunar base. Can you and all the other people who have no idea what you are talking about PLEASE STOP LECTURING engineers. You have no idea what you are talking about as is evident by your repeated use of the non-existent term "radiative waste." There is no such thing as radiative waste but there is radioactive waste. Its INFURIATING TO BE LECTURED by people who don't know what they are talking about but for some reason every clown who can use a computer or drives a car thinks they can tell us how to do our jobs.
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  33. Most of all DON'T YOU EVER DARE to complain about other people when YOUR ATTITUDE SUCKS.
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  34.  @alexandervlaescu9901  CAN PEOPLE LIKE YOU JUST STOP There is NOTHING easy about space and none of it is child's play. Just stop claiming that science fiction is 100% based on fact. It isn't, even the very best science fiction has to ignore basic reality at some point. Here's a simple FACT. The human race right now digs up and processes just over 3,000,000,000 tons of iron ore EVERY YEAR. Yes 3 Billion tons incase you can't count that many zeros. The biggest capacity launcher currently is SLS at 130t to LEO. Jeff Bezos (yes the Amazon guy) wants to move all heavy industry to LEO so that we can use unlimited solar power and have no pollution here on Earth. Blue Origin's New Glenn has a capacity of 45t to LEO Jeff Bezos is yet to explain how we'll make enough rockets to do 67 million New Glenn launches a year or where we'll get enough rocket fuel to do it. SLS would be better at 23 million launches a year. And if Elon somehow strapped a bunch of Starship boosters together and made a Mega Starship capable of 1,000t to LEO we'd still need 3 million launches a year. AND THAT'S just the Iron, after that there's the Nickel, Copper, Zinc, Vanadium, Cobalt, Tin, Gold, Lead and all the other stuff the 7.8 Billion humans need every year just to keep society going. This is some of the stuff I have been trying to tell people for several years now. Sorry but reality sucks if you think science fiction is easy to convert into science fact.
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  35.  @clementvining2487  AGAIN if you and others think you are speaking about reality then what part of basic math don't you understand. JUST STOP PREACHING about the differences between theory and fact when you have no idea what you are talking about. This is what truly infuriates STEM educated people. Uneducated people PREACHING NONSENSE about things they have no understanding.
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  36.  @clementvining2487  You really are an ignorant M0R0N aren't you??? Its called being realistic and not living in a delusional fantasy. YET AGAIN YOU HAVEN'T REFUTED A THING I HAVE SAID One of the biggest influences in my reasoning was Arthur C Clarke. He wrote a really interesting book called "Profiles of the Future" where he scrutinised a lot of his own literary items. One of the things Clarke put down was the Space Elevator and he loved the Space Elevator using itor similar technology in several novels. BUT he also knew they were totally impractical for a planet like Earth because the gravity well is too strong. Like Arthur C Clarke I've also had to learn the difference between ideas and reality. I actually wanted to service satellites and I was far from the first to know there was a case for that or propose it. A classmate who works at NASA on the ISS slammed that down 20years ago with the simple reality that we don't have suitable propulsion systems for that sort of work. I once met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) and he further killed that with some simple reality about the commercial the launch industry. But then Harrison told me about Helium-3 mining on the moon. Which was why I went and worked in the mining industry TO LEARN ABOUT MINING. You see that's the difference between ignorant clowns like you and people like me. I AM WILLING TO LISTEN TO PEOPLE WHO KNOW MORE THAN I DO. ITS CALLED LEARNING.
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  37.  @SolomonDavidMichael  It gets even simpler than that. if you just look at iron ore production and if you know about the inground reserves its ludicrous. Where there might be a possibility is for very rare things. At one point Helium-3 was a potential fuel for nuclear fusion. The only known viable resource is the moon. Unless somebody finds a magical asteroid with some magical isotope of something that makes some magical technology we all want work, then no asteroid mining wont be a thing until humans actually settle space and that's a lot further off than advertised.
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  38. This is NOT a news story, this is a promo.
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  39. To show just how idiotic this argument is. When the first cars came out, where there enough gas stations for people to drive anywhere they liked??????? Cars, Ships, Airplanes and a lot of other stuff NEEDS INFRASTRUCTURE. That stuff the rest of you take for granted until it fails and then you all scream at the government, the engineers and anyone else YOU DIDN'T LISTEN TOO.
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  40. ​ @cosmicclusters3255  NEWS FLASH in response the the 2008 GFC George Bush handed out US$4 Trillion to the people who caused it. When that wasn't enough Obama handed them another US$4 Trillion. So you can shove that nonsense where the sun doesn't shine BECAUSE WALL STREET only exists because it was bailed out.
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  41.  @Neojhun  Good point.
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  42.  @rainingonyourcharade  I remember watch an ABC Australia 4-Corners program on social media and they went through the basic aspects of Tik Tok and how it tracks people and continuously scans their photo gallery. My immediate thought was "Is this a social media app or a surveillance system?" because I knew that if you let an app like that have access PAST your firewall then it can theoretically access other things. On any smart phone or computer there's the basic firewall and maybe a secondary one and to get to your data hacker, governments and corporations either have to hack or BE GRANTED ACESS. When you sign up to Tik Tok you GRANT ACCESS past the firewall. A few months after that program first aired and I think its still here on YouTube one of our spy chiefs was formally asked in front of a government panel (so he can't lie or its perjury) if Tik Tok could access other things like phone logs and messages AND HE SAID YES. That was (i think) about 2 years ago.
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  43.  @Ketowski  What really exposed the issue here in Australia because the Tik Tok debate also included the Huawei in 5G issue was the basics of Chinese Corporate Law. Chinese Corporate Law is NOTHING LIKE Western Corporate Law - NOT EVEN CLOSE Under Chinese Corporate Law if the CCP walk in your door and ask for client data it IS NOT a request. You don't get to ask where the warrant is. Chinese Corporate Law states quite simply that all Chinese registered companies hand over client data when asked for it. To WITHHOLD anything is a CRIME and you go to jail. So even if Huawei or Tik Tok or any other Chinese company have data OUTSIDE of China that data still has to be handed over to the CCP when they ask for it. We had this explained to us in Australia over 2 years ago. Its why we simply banned Huawei from 5G and then banned Tik Tok from all government devices. They screamed and yelled and complained and every time we asked how they would get around Chinese Corporate Law and keep our data out of the hands of the CCP they HAD NO ANSWERS. Basically if you have a Tik Tok account then the CCP know who you are, where you go, who you interact with and quite possibly what your political views are depending on what's in your messages.
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  44.  @Ricecooker112  Great comment. A couple of days ago Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation was interviewed on the Australian program 7:30 Report. Its here on YouTube and titled ‘AI is reliant on mass surveillance’ and we should be cautious, warns head of messaging app Go listen to what she says. ALSO - just yesterday the same program did a story on the use of AI to generate deep fakes. There's been several scandals in high schools here in Australia using AI and a couple of them are pretty ugly. Basically Gate, Suckerberg, Altman, Musk,..... are completely out of control at the moment and because of what technologies they have unleashed with their Silicon Valley "move fast, break things" mentality reigning it in without making the situation worse is going to be incredibly hard.
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  45. @BomBoo-rn8gj What's the point???? Have you ever heard of the 4th Amendment which is about unreasonable searches. Its also the protection against being spied on or surveilled by the government. Most developed countries have similar laws or legislation. What the car companies are doing is CORPORATE surveillance of a type we'd never let our governments do. And its not just the car companies its pretty much the entire IT industry including YouTube. Since you're already here put "abc Australia Meredith Whittaker" into search and go watch the interview she gave this week. She explained how the AI's that we have all been told are magically wonderful require mass surveillance to work.
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  46.  @lifewithpets-7588  What??????
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  47.  @OBEYTHEPYRAMID  Yeah and Bush & Co should have sent Bruce instead of marines into Iraq. Obama should have sent Bruce into Pakistan instead of seal team 6 Trump should have sent Bruce into Biden's basement. Biden doesn't need to send Stingers and Javelins to Ukraine, just send Bruce. In fact send him to Moscow. I just don't know why the nuclear football isn't reprogrammed with Bruce codes. it would make the whole US Foreign policy thing so much easier.
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  48. ​ @OBEYTHEPYRAMID  Yeah fine. And its not so much they are separated by elitists and hypocrisy because they both have that. Both Obamas Harvard, both Clintons Yale, while Ted Cruz is Princeton & Harvard. There are 9 SCOTUS judges - 4 Harvard, 4 Yale and a Notre Dame. America has 2 factions of Ivy League brats. One group is more narcissistic and the other delusional self superiority. Both have a bunch of common traits and its those common traits that explain why NASA hasn't been back to the moon for 50+ years and why so many other things that cloud have or should have happened haven't. Both groups think they know how do to anything and everything BUT in actual fact know very little about getting anything done at all. They have projected that onto their supporters who also think everything is a matter of "just do this" or "just do that." Look at the comments on this video its a litany of "we'll just do" attitudes. I actually went off to the Australian mining sector to learn how to build mines in remote places, then get them working and then keep them working. So I actually know first hand the stuff you need to have in place BEFORE digging starts. Amazingly the management types are just like the politicians. They all think they know how it all works and what it takes to keep it working AND THEY JUST DON'T. Its a common thread running right through all our societies like a Dunning-Kruger plague. Its just more obvious in some than others.
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  49. Its a year later and right now Tesla has been valued at MORE than the 10 largest car companies combined. NOBODY in the economics, financial or investment spaces are saying "Buy Tesla!" As an engineer do I think Tesla is an amazing achievement? Absolutely. Only an idiot would admit that it hasn't changed the car market and the way the general public perceives electric vehicles. However when it breaks and every over-hyped investment in history has eventually broke it will be catastrophic. Since most of you have commented we have all seen the Crypto bubble burst as well as Elon's twitter disaster.
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  50.  @pjacobsen1000  That's NOT the point or have your forgotten that Theranos was once worth $9 Billion. How can Tesla in any sensible evaluation be worth more than the 10 largest car companies combined when it only makes a fraction of what they do? Lets not forget it doesn't pay any dividends like a few other infamous tech giants. Have you ever heard of the PE Ratio of a stock? it stands for Price Earnings. Do you know Tesla's PE ratio is ZERO because you actually have to start paying shareholders a dividend cos nothing divided by anything is still nothing. Go ask any stockbroker with a functioning brain if its worth buying.
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