No, rockets landing themselves is just controlling the mechanism you use to have them take off, and builds on trust vectoring technology from 1970s jet fighters based on sound physics.
Figuring out how to radiate a lot of waste heat into a vacuum is fighting physics. Ordinarily we use a void on earth as a very effective _insulator_ to keep our hot drinks hot.
This is a classic case of listing all the problems but none of the benefits. If you had horses and someone told you they had a Tesla, you'd be complaining that a Tesla requires you to dig minerals where a horse can just be born!
No, people made fun of Elon for years because he kept attempting it unsafely, skirting regulations and rules, and failing repeatedly in very public ways.
The idea itself was proven by NASA with the DC-X but the project was canceled due to funding. Now instead of having NASA run it we SpaceX pay more than we'd ever have paid NASA for the same thing.
He also said he could save the us a trillion dollars per year with DOGE, and basically just caused a lot data exfiltration and killed hundreds of thousands of people, without saving any money at all
No, rockets landing themselves is just controlling the mechanism you use to have them take off, and builds on trust vectoring technology from 1970s jet fighters based on sound physics.
Figuring out how to radiate a lot of waste heat into a vacuum is fighting physics. Ordinarily we use a void on earth as a very effective _insulator_ to keep our hot drinks hot.
This is a classic case of listing all the problems but none of the benefits. If you had horses and someone told you they had a Tesla, you'd be complaining that a Tesla requires you to dig minerals where a horse can just be born!
> Figuring out how to radiate a lot of waste heat into a vacuum is fighting physics.
Radiators should work pretty well, and large solar panels can do double duty as radiators.
Also, curiously, newer GPUs are developed to require significantly less cooling than previous generations. Perhaps not so coincidentally?
Well there lies the rub, solar panels already need their own thermal radiators when used in space ...
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1kW TDP chips need LESS cooling?
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His point is that everyone said landing and reusing rockets was impossible and made fun of Elon and SpaceX for years for attempting it.
No, people made fun of Elon for years because he kept attempting it unsafely, skirting regulations and rules, and failing repeatedly in very public ways.
The idea itself was proven by NASA with the DC-X but the project was canceled due to funding. Now instead of having NASA run it we SpaceX pay more than we'd ever have paid NASA for the same thing.
DC-X test flight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE7XJ5HYQW4
It's awesome that Falcon 9 exists and it is great technology but this guy really isn't the one anyone should want in charge of it.
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He also said he could save the us a trillion dollars per year with DOGE, and basically just caused a lot data exfiltration and killed hundreds of thousands of people, without saving any money at all
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He said impossible, this was done recently, by spacex themselves.