Comment on Neuralink’s human trials volunteers ‘should have serious concerns,’ say medical experts
Zron@lemmy.world 1 year agoKinda like how Elon promised a mars colony by 3 years ago, and his big rocket exploded on its first flight a few months ago.
Or how full self driving has been ready “next year” for the passed 5 years.
Hyperloop was going to revolutionize transportation, by having a train in a vacuum tunnel, and is currently an abandoned tube in the desert.
The boring company was going to create high speed car tunnels under cities, and it’s test track is a 30mph traffic jam, but now underground.
Solar city was going to put solar tiles in place of your shingles and offset your power usage, but the demo musk showed was an actual fraud, and there were no solar panels.
Last but not least, spaceX promised “rapidly reusable rockets” with a 10x decrease in cost to low earth orbit. The fastest turn around they’ve ever had was a month or so, about as long as the space shuttles’ fastest turn around. The falcon 9 still costs between 50 to 60 million per launch, even if it’s a reused booster or not, and the space shuttle was capable of taking crew and cargo/payload at the same time, while the falcon can only take one or the other.
Musk companies have a long history of promising the moon and delivering playground sand. Don’t buy any of his products and don’t fall for his “saving humanity” bullshit. He’s just a conman who’s defrauding investors for billions.
To be fair, SpaceX cost of 50-60 million per launch is almost a 10x drop in price, ULA is around 400-500 million per rocket. And since they have next to no competition on price, they have no incentive to lower it. It’s just business.
And don’t bring the broken vehicle the shuttle turned out to be into this. A great vehicle on paper, but with to many cooks. The shuttle era gave us the ISS, but is cost us almost all activity outside of LEO.
Yeah, I agree with all of their points except for SpaceX, which has been an unequivocal success that doesn’t deserve to be painted with the same brush Elon is. They revolutionized space flight, broke into the national security launch industry that was entirely captured by the United Launch alliance, and stand to obsolete the (93 billion dollar!) Space Launch System the moment the Starship is approved for commercial launches.
Dozens of Falcon 9’s exploded while testing them and especially while attempting to land and reuse boosters, so the Starship failure was all but expected. I hate Elon Musk too, but SpaceX is arguably the most successful aerospace company at the moment. Were NASA allowed full control of their money, I think it’d be better, but as it is the viability of many of their future projects hinges on SpaceX.
SpaceX becomes NASA’s second-largest vendor, surpassing Boeing NASA obligated $2.04 billion to SpaceX in fiscal year 2022.
arstechnica.com/…/spacex-becomes-nasas-second-lar…
SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are about to ruin stargazing for everyone
With the naked eye, stargazing from a dark-sky location allows you to see about 4,500 stars. From a typical suburban location, you can see about 400. Simulations show that from 52 degrees north (the latitude of both Saskatoon and London, U.K.) hundreds of Starlinks will be visible for a couple of hours after sunset and before sunrise (comparable to the number of visible stars) and dozens of these will be visible all night during the summer months.
theconversation.com/spacexs-starlink-satellites-a…
Boondoggle
I’m a little confused, the first article glowingly supports my comment, while the second is somewhat neutral. Pointing out that Starlink satellites show up on long exposure astronomy images, while also pointing out that they’ve already launched a new gen testing surface dimming. Given that Starlink satellites only have an orbital lifespan of five years, there’s a 0% chance of old Starlinks cluttering up the night sky. If they stop trying to improve the light reflection issue, that would be the time to be angry.
Also, boondoggles are a “wasteful or impractical project or activity often involving graft”. The Space Launch System is a boondoggle, Starlink is dozens of times cheaper than laying cable, especially in rural areas. The alternative is to install radio towers for 5G coverage, which is something that developing nations have done to skip the expense of rolling out a unified power and data grid, but there are a lot of advantages to not having ground based hardware beyond the receiver.
After living in fairly rural areas for quite a while, LEO internet coverage is much nicer than watching billions get funneled the telecom giants to lay cable, only for them to just… not lay cable.
Mirshe@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Musk has since come out and all but stated Hyperloop was specifically funded and hyped ONLY to kill mass transit initiatives in the area. It was a total vaporware project, they never intended to solve anything.