Comment by sollewitt
8 hours ago
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.
Figuring out how to radiate a lot of waste heat into a vacuum is just building very large radiators.
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 ...
Great, so you seem to agree the technology exists for this and it is a matter of deploying more of it?
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1kW TDP chips need LESS cooling?
Yes, Rubin reportedly can deal with running significantly hotter.
That makes radiating a much more practical approach to cooling it.
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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.
The difference is that it was mostly clueless people like Thunderf00t who said it was impossible, who nobody took seriously. I don’t remember that basically all relevant experts claimed it was near impossible with current technology. That’s the situation now.
There’s also fairly clear distinction with how insane Elons plan has become since the first plans he laid for Tesla and SpaceX and the plans he has now. He has clearly become a megalomaniac.
Funnily enough, some of the things people said about Tesla is coming true, because Elon simply got bored of making cars. It’s now plausible that Tesla may die as a car company which I would not have imagined a few years ago. They’re arguably not even winning the self driving and robotics race.
> landing and reusing rockets
Currently SpaceX have managed to land the booster only, not the rocket itself, if you are thinking about Starship. And reusability of said rocket is also missing (collecting blown up pieces from the bottom of the ocean doesn't count!).
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
Elon Musk killed hundreds of thousands of people?
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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.
>Now instead of having NASA run it we SpaceX pay more than we'd ever have paid NASA for the same thing.
This doesn’t pass the smell test given that the cost of launch with spacex is lower than it ever was under ULA.
NASA has never been about cheap launches, just novel technology. Look at the costs of Saturn and SLS to see what happens when they do launch.