Taxiing is probably harder to automate than the rest. But you could have pilots on hand to taxi to the runway, and take a shuttle to the other end and hop on a just landed plane to taxi to the gate. Or you could use tugs for ground movement.
I'm not convinced - in a commercial airport taxiways are controlled by a ground control systems, not just pilots looking out the window. If the only airplanes around are also equips with the self taxi system they just report position to the central control and that tells them when to go. There needs to be emergency overrides for when that system fails, or a small plane without it is around, but that can be handled by stopping everyone else in the area until the hazard is gone.
There's also all of the service vehicles when you get closer to the gates. The likely damage from an incident during taxiing is much less than during take off or landing, but I think the risk of having an incident is higher and the situation is trickier to manage. And it's super doable to have a pilot come on to manage that, and drop off after the hard part; you couldn't reasonably have pilots do a takeoff and then jetpack over to an arriving plane to do the landing, but it wouldn't be unreasonable for ground moves... similar to canal pilots taking ships through canals.
Do you have a source for that? As to my knowledge advanced systems (such as lights on the twy directing you) are only present at very few airports. Recent incidents even happened due to RWY incursion without a ground controller noticing under bad visibility. So we are at a level where your runway is not even protected accordingly, let alone your 50+ taxiways.
Yes; I think it would be more accurate to say that the economics of Starship basically require high cadence launches with lots of v3 Starlink satellites (because only the big internet constellations can financially justify launching so much payload to orbit right now).
Not quite, but it's a major milestone. Still quite a bit of work to go on the rapid reusability part (burnt flaps, oxidized body, missing tiles, tile waterproofing). Starship might actually deliver payload to orbit on flight 11.
They mentioned in the stream they were intentionally stressing the ship on reentry.
But yes, “rapid reusability” is a ways off. I expect they’ll be spending weeks inspecting and repairing ship and booster before reflight for a few years, but they’ll drive it down over time.
TBD how “rapid” the reusability ends up being in the end.
The push for rapid reusability seems somewhat at odds with the push for large scale production of ships.
It seems like if they can get boosters to rapid reuse (a much easier goal), and churn out ships at sufficient scale, they can afford to take time inspecting/refurbing each ship as part of a pipelined approach.
The stated goal was always to have a lot of ships, and also to have them be reusable.
Starship is a fuel-hungry beast - it can get to LEO by itself, but it needs a lot of tanker launches to go beyond. And if your goal is a Mars colony, you don't want to be limited to one launch per launch window.
Halfway to anywhere, but the window to anywhere is quite small. For Mars, I think it's only a few weeks every two years or so. So having a lot of mass already halfway there when the window opens would be quite advantageous.
Their scenario is that the ships are mostly going to be "fuel mules" to ferry propellant to the ship that is destined to go somewhere (i.e. Mars) - so if you want an armada to travel to another planet, you need a much larger fleet of supply vehicles to prepare your armada. Hence the need to mass produce them.
> The push for rapid reusability seems somewhat at odds with the push for large scale production of ships.
Elon always talks about a city on Mars but seeing for the first time the gargantuan size of Starfactory it dawned on me that SpaceX are true believers. It is still a big IF, because the dimension of the mission is absolutely bonkers, but IF the goal is to send every two years hundreds of Starships to Mars (everyone needing around 3-4 tanker missions) you need large scale production of ships.
Ten years ago every expert said a hundred launches a year was utterly impossible. Five years ago they said it was unlikely. SpaceX have launched more than a hundred times this year already.
Anyone who thinks they can’t do stuff is not seeing the whole picture.
Not at odds at all. It doesn't matter how fast you can make them if each one costs $5-10 million. Much better to amortize that over 100+ flights and not waste the booster.
Once the tanker version is needed, a ship ship could go up 5+ times a day. The logistics of backfilling a pad with a new ship is much more involved
> rapid reusability seems somewhat at odds with the push for large scale production of ships
As you say, they reïnforce each other by speeding up the learning curve and deployment of learning to the real world, serving as both a bolstering of the product and experimental validation.
I didn't mean this ship and booster, I mean in a year or so when they're done with the test phase and frequently launching Starlink satellites on Starship.
Mildly interesting to be exposed to the world of 'YouTube engineers' who are derisory of the real-world engineering success of SpaceX. Informed criticism is fine but when you're just openly calling a world class engineering company 'stupid' then you deserve to be ignored (except, obviously, by everyone suffering from MDS).
Thunderfoot is a long-time Musk project hater for some reason. That's now his specialty which probably appeals to his audience. There are plenty of equally uninformed youtubers with glowing praise for SpaceX. Just like the real news, people divide themselves into bubbles of whatever reinforces their beliefs.
Provenance kind of matters though because we can't work out all the details of every piece of information and have to put a bit of trust in the source. A way I like it to cite a source with the opposite bias of what you're trying to say. If even the opponents of the general idea agree with some part of it, that's stronger support than it's supporters agreeing.
I very much agree with your comment on an individual level (that of the individual judging the merit of information and opinion they are being presented with). I certainly take provenance into account.
However, I was talking about HN the site. I don't think news websites should (generally) discriminate against sources but the individual readers can (collectively, as with the case of HN and voting) make a judgement call and take provenance into account, including the example you give where an unlikely source makes concessions or gives validity to an argument that they would be usually opposed to.
But the main reason I raised provenance is that the internet has given small individual voices the chance to bring informed insight to the public that previously would have been without a platform. So in this particular case I don't necessarily discount some rando on Youtube making criticisms of SpaceX; they might hold at least some validity. (In this case they obviously didn't.)
Or Europe. Or the UK. 10+ prison plus civil damages in all three jurisdictions should it be prosecuted for various "Unauthorized computer access" laws. Even just browsing protected endpoints is a criminal violation. Publishing any info is even a bigger crime.
FYI, if you are a hacker:
1. Stop immediately after discovery and don’t go further than the minimal step that proves the vulnerability exists.
2. Document, don’t exploit
3. Report responsibly
4. Do not publish until fixed. Do not publish documents/images without permission.
5. Intent doesn’t erase liability: even “just poking around” can be charged under CFAA (US) or CMA (UK).
At least wikipedia has an out in the legislation by disabling content recommendation engines for UK users, this includes:
1. “You may be interested in…” search suggestions on the Wikipedia interface—these are algorithmic, content-based recommendations.
2. Editor suggestion tools that propose pages to edit, based on prior activity. Academic systems helping newcomers with article recommendations also qualify.
Most links within articles—like “See also” sections or hyperlinks—are static and curated by editors, not algorithmically chosen per user. That means they do not meet the recommender system definition.
The legislation text for reference:
"Category 1 threshold conditions
3.—(1) The Category 1 threshold conditions(10) are met by a regulated user-to-user service where, in respect of the user-to-user part of that service, it—
(a)(i)has an average number of monthly active United Kingdom users that exceeds 34 million, and
(ii)uses a content recommender system, or
(b)(i)has an average number of monthly active United Kingdom users that exceeds 7 million,
(ii)uses a content recommender system, and
(iii)provides a functionality for users to forward or share regulated user-generated content(11) on the service with other users of that service.
(2) In paragraph (1), a “content recommender system” means a system, used by the provider of a regulated user-to-user service in respect of the user-to-user part of that service, that uses algorithms which by means of machine learning or other techniques determines, or otherwise affects, the way in which regulated user-generated content of a user, whether alone or with other content, may be encountered by other users of the service.
"
Very few U.S.-born workers respond to job ads for seasonal crop work, Show up when work begins, or Stick around through the harvest season. "Even when wages reach—or exceed $20–$30 per hour, seasonal U.S. workers overwhelmingly opt out of field labor. That persistent gap is why American agriculture depends so heavily on immigrant and guest‐worker programs, and why mechanization continues to accelerate."
Note that the same report says legal, temporary "H-2A workers are more productive and provide labor insurance for producers of perishable commodities, but cost $5 to $10 an hour more than settled farm workers because of recruitment, transportation, and housing costs."
That’s a silly response. Why do you think workers are exploited? You say we need to play by the roles, but you’re going to balk at the cost of playing by those rules.
or they just go out of business and we import our non mechanized crops to developing countries. Farming isn't a high margin business and if it were as simple are rising wages and prices, you wouldn't see the farms going out of business.
There is a reason European farmers are deeply subsidized.
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