Elon Musk is a polarizing determine. His concepts continuously come about in informal conversations. Persons are usually amused and impressed by his achievements. I need to admit, a number of years again I assumed he’s actually the following Steve Jobs, solely truly higher, since he was onto so many issues… I admired SpaceX, thought that Tesla vehicles had many nice options in them…
In some unspecified time in the future in 2015 or 2016 Elon began speaking outrageous stuff within the area of AI, a website of my very own experience, which I might inform immediately was complete bullshit. After which I started taking a look at all these things intimately. Performing some math right here and there. Studying varied opinions. In consequence, my opinion on Musk and lots of of his concepts has modified considerably considerably. At this level, I can just about say with confidence that 90% of his stuff is utter BS, and the remaining 10% is maybe spectacular however nonetheless questionable.
However he’s fairly a personality with many followers virtually religiously believing every thing he says. Any time I meet any person who’s a Musk fan I’ve to go over these points so I made a decision to jot down this submit as some extent of reference. For those who take into account your self a non secular believer in Musk, you’ll be offended by what follows, you have been warned. I do not care. We are able to speak in a number of years and see who was proper.
Reusable rockets
That is arguably some of the developed of the concepts and it virtually seems like it’s a success. SpaceX has now been touchdown boosters virtually routinely and some of those landed boosters went again a couple of times on different missions. Nonetheless… there are nonetheless a number of excellent questions.
To begin with, let’s get that behind, vertically touchdown rockets is just not a brand new concept. NASA landed astronauts on the moon a long time in the past with a rocket. Within the 90’s one other undertaking DC-X sponsored by the navy proven a profitable demo earlier than funding received chopped. Nobody within the engineering group ever questioned whether or not it could be technically possible to land a rocket booster on a barge. [Alright, as somebody mentioned in the comments or on twitter some guy from competitive company claimed that would not be technically able to land a rocket. And he was wrong!, I stand corrected on that. However that does not invalidate what follows.]
What individuals did query and what stays to be seen, is whether or not such mannequin is definitely cheaper than utilizing disposable rockets. To see why this query is much from being answered one has to keep in mind that the house shuttle program had precisely the identical purpose: a reusable house aircraft with reusable boosters. Solely the primary gasoline tank burned up within the environment however that was not an enormous sacrifice, for the reason that tank didn’t have engines, that are by far the costliest half. Nonetheless, though good trying on paper, it turned out to be a business catastrophe. The shuttle needed to be basically taken aside after each mission (and even then there have been a number of shut calls and two full blown disasters). Finally lifting cargo on a shuttle was far more costly than utilizing a daily, disposable rocket.
The rocket because it performs ascent after which descent undergoes some severe accelerations (means increased than a typical aircraft), whereas being constructed extraordinarily delicately to attenuate the mass (a lot tighter margins than an airliner). The rocket engine undergoes a lot increased stress than a jet engine. Therefore all that stress may cause materials fatigue and small malfunctions, whereas the margin for error on a rocket is extraordinarily small. Therefore if e.g. it seems that the chance of mission failure on these reused boosters will increase considerably after each use, all of the anticipated financial savings from reusability could also be rapidly worn out by one or two misplaced missions. And it needs to be famous, that the cargo that goes into house is usually MUCH dearer than the rocket itself.
So basically we’re exploring right here the quantity of tail threat that we are able to shave to get some financial savings. And for that we’d like knowledge. A variety of knowledge. And the truth that somebody did it as soon as and even ten occasions is just not enough to declare a victory. Every of the house shuttles flew dozens of occasions, when one of many SpaceX boosters could have flown 100 occasions with between flights upkeep at a cheap degree, then will probably be an precise success. And we’re not near that but.
And earlier than anybody begins rambling, I do discover SpaceX launches inspiring and I take my kids and present them the rocket path each time one is launched from California. However as a lot as I’d like to see SpaceX (and different such endeavors corresponding to Blue Origin) succeed, the jury remains to be out on whether or not this is smart in any respect. We simply want extra knowledge.
Flying from NY to Shanghai in 30min
This marks the primary of Elon’s concepts that is unnecessary in any respect. Actually it’s fully atrocious. Very first thing is that as introduced the rockets could be launching and touchdown near metropolis facilities. That’s fully out of query for plenty of causes. One in all which is {that a} rocket is a tank filled with excessive explosives, one thing like a 20KT bomb. If something have been to go flawed, a metropolis may very well be demolished by an explosion [see the Halifax explosion to get an idea of what that would be like]. Second, it could most actually take much more than 30 min to get to anyplace on Earth. On the orbital velocity it takes roughly 90 minutes to do a full circle, so the decrease restrict to get to the opposite aspect of the planet is ~45min. And that is at orbital velocity. Assuming optimistically that the ascent and respectable would take ~8min every, we find yourself with roughly 1h. [Somebody in the comment pointed out that SpaceX said “most places on Earth in 30 min” not all of them, and NY-Shanghai happens to be 12,000km apart so this could work. Not that this generally matters to the feasibility of the idea, in fact I only realized that I really did not have to go over this at all] On condition that the rocket must be a minimum of 5 miles from any city space, the passengers would probably have to be transported by way of a helicopter/speedboat into the launch space. And these wouldn’t be your common passengers, since not everyone could be wholesome sufficient to take 2.5-3G acceleration on each means up and down (probably extra on the way in which down). The price of such journey even with full reusability would simply exceed that of a non-public jet journey, and above every thing, it could be vastly extra harmful. Anyway, all issues collectively, that is pure daydreaming with none connection to actuality.
Colonizing Mars
SpaceX makes use of an animation on their webcast of a change of Mars right into a inexperienced planet. I sometimes view that as a joke, even when we knew the way to do it, it could take centuries if not millennia to perform, honest sufficient. However what’s extra significantly mentioned is to ship people to Mars by say 2030 and have them arrange a everlasting construction with the purpose of colonization.
This sounds very romantic, and I feel that if we stretched ourselves fairly a bit, we might most likely ship an Apollo type mission to Mars, primarily to plant a flag and get some samples. That alone could be harmful as hell and actually technically troublesome, however everlasting construction, Mars metropolis, colonization, these are simply sci-fi musings.
Mars is a really hostile setting for people. The atmospheric stress is 1% of that on Earth, for all sensible functions it’s vacuum. The temperature hardly ever goes above freezing and infrequently falls beneath the condensation temperature of carbon dioxide. There’s virtually no magnetic discipline, therefore there may be substantial quantity of cosmic ray radiation. The space to Earth is giant, in case of emergency there is no such thing as a method to evacuate (journey from Mars to Earth takes a minimum of 6 months with optimum orbital alignment, in any other case it could take considerably greater than a 12 months). And above every thing, there may be actually no incentive to go there. If there was a mountain of gold or another extremely sought materials, however frankly it’s like Arizona desert-land solely at -100C, in vacuum and 60 million miles away. The one factor that speaks for Mars is the abundance of carbon dioxide and water which given sufficient vitality may very well be used to supply rocket gasoline.
The argument usually introduced up right here is that people must go multi-planetary to keep away from extinction. I am keen to just accept that argument, however the catastrophe essential to make Earth much less hospitable than Mars must be actually epic. If we detonated all of the nukes ever made, we’d not get even shut. There would nonetheless be environment, loads of water, manageable temperatures. It will significantly have to be a planetary scale cataclysm, means past the factor that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years in the past. So this argument because it stands is bullshit.
Personally, I would like to see extra space exploration, as typically I feel that is the way in which to go for our species in the long term. However I would go in small steps, first give attention to the Moon. To begin with as a result of we’ve already been there and we all know what to anticipate. Secondly, a visit to Moon takes 3 days and it is comparatively simple to evacuate. And third, there may be lots photo voltaic vitality out there there, complete lack of environment makes touchdown simple (Martian environment, though skinny, makes spacecraft warmth up on descent). We should always simply discover some cave on the Moon and begin constructing a everlasting base there. Maybe deeper beneath Moon’s floor we’d discover the required sources corresponding to water and carbon dioxide (water appears to be current within the all the time shaded craters). If we discovered the way to kickstart manufacturing there, the Moon could be an important outpost for launching extra distant missions additional down the highway. Aiming at colonizing Mars now could be merely foolish.
To conclude, as of the top of 2018 SpaceX hasn’t flown a single human to orbit. Neither have they launched any interplanetary mission. They did ship a Tesla roadster into the asteroid belt however apparently missed an orbit. And we expect this similar firm to launch people to Mars in 10 years from now. For the attitude, Apollo program took 9 years from inception to moon touchdown at the price of roughly 100 billion of todays {dollars}. I could also be flawed, however I am 97% assured we cannot see any human on Mars by 2030.
Hyperloop
Vactrain or Goddard practice is just not a brand new concept. It has been round for greater than 100 years, and over all these years nothing ever got here out of it. There are a number of the reason why this concept solely seems good on paper: it’s outrageously costly and fantastically fragile. Let’s begin with the primary: sustaining vacuum in a big construction poses fairly a number of challenges. The environment at sea degree presses with a pressure of ~1kg per sq. centimeter. That’s 10 Tons per sq. meter! In an effort to stand up to such fixed inward pressure buildings should be extraordinarily robust. To know what sort of forces we’re speaking about right here, check out this video of a practice automobile tanker imploding. The biggest vacuum chamber presently maintained is the Giant Hadron Collider, and I haven’t got to argue right here that this can be very costly. The construction is underground in a protected tunnel beneath fixed supervision and upkeep. To construct any significant hyperloop, one must construct an especially strong pipe, take the air out (which itself would break the bank) and pray that nothing occurs that would compromise the construction at any level (corresponding to e.g. the mundane downside of thermal enlargement). Any small structural situation would quickly propagate catastrophically and destroy all the tube. Now we’re asking to place inside capsules shifting at ~300m/s. It’s once more, a dream. There is no such thing as a means that will be economically and technically possible and we didn’t even get to how these capsules could be boarded, how would the upkeep be carried out and so on.
And admittedly we’ve airplanes… They journey at ~300m/s, in thinner environment (stress at cruising altitude is roughly 1/3 of that on the sea degree). Fortunately 11km above the bottom there are hardly ever any strong our bodies that would penetrate the hull, which being a pressurized cylinder will get further mechanical power. And at last, all one must land a aircraft is a strip of flat pavement. That is precisely the rationale why Goddard Prepare aka”hyper-loop” concept was useless for the previous 100+ years whereas aviation flourished past something the Wright brothers might have imagined, and my guess is that it will stay the case for the foreseeable future.
I will use a Youtuber Thunderf00t who is known for critically analyzing any such bold concepts for extra protection on Hyperloop.
Neuralink
Not a lot is understood about this endeavor other than some daring statements that make all of the neuroscientists I do know roll their eyes.
Boring Tunnels
This comparatively latest concept seems to be some type of mild model of hyperloop, no vacuum and a automobile inside. That is marketed as an answer to mass transit. Now once more, that is merely ridiculous.
To begin with, electrical vehicles in tunnels carrying individuals en masse is an previous concept. It’s known as a metro, and it has been identified and used all around the world for greater than 100 years. Now let’s dig to some numbers: a typical metro automobile weights some 40 tons and is ready to take 175 individuals (most likely extra in the event that they squeeze). It means, the infrastructure mass is a few 228kg per passenger. A Tesla mannequin X weighs 2.7 tons and takes 5 (max 7) passengers. That’s the mass of the infrastructure is 380-540kg per passenger. Proper there, with out even going any additional into different issues, the uncooked price of mass of infrastructure carried, which interprets to the quantity of vitality essential to function is roughly 2x that of precise mass transit. A practice doesn’t want to hold a battery for instance, simply takes the vitality from the third rail. As well as a practice has a lot decrease rolling friction and so on…
That is only a tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot flawed with this concept that it’s exhausting to know the place to start out, this weblog submit goes into many many different points that render this concept a whole delusion [and another quick one here]. Additionally Thunderf00t has a pleasant debunking video with the evaluation of the alleged price financial savings of drilling Elon bragged about.
Tesla Autopilot
I’ve written a number of articles [1], [2], [3], [4] on this weblog in regards to the self driving automobile hubris and the overall AI hype. Autopilot as spectacular as it’s as a cruise management system, is just not by any means autonomous driving prepared. Anybody who thinks in any other case is an fool, interval, and needs to be quickly taken out of the highway as a result of he’s endangering harmless individuals. The truth that this expertise has been launched as “beta” to basic public is irresponsible and vital variety of fatalities already occurred.
Photo voltaic shingles, lithium batteries for dwelling
Elon Musk unveiled photo voltaic roof tiles in October 2016. Since then some prototype set up have been rumored, however the product has not been opened to most people. Why so? It will appear to be they figured it out no? Effectively, once more like with many Elon’s guarantees the satan is within the mundane engineering particulars. The shingles themselves are actually doable, and possibly there are methods to make them fairly. The issue is electrical connectivity. Every tile must be related to others, these connections should be component resistant (it’s a roof in any case!) and dependable. Getting that to work is just not simple and fragile. Wind, tiny earthquakes and even birds strolling alongside the roof displace the tiles ever so barely they usually free contact. As soon as the circuit is damaged it’s troublesome to seek out and repair the fault. Even worse a brief circuit can result in heating and hearth hazard. Seems common photo voltaic panels are means simpler and cheaper to work with.
Other than that, Tesla encourages individuals to purchase an enormous Lithium battery for dwelling, the so known as powerwall. Once more this seems good and all that, you generate vitality, retailer it after which cost your electrical automobile with it – a sustainable future fairy story from a man who recurrently commutes with the most important personal jet out there. And once more, when precise math is completed the outcomes are considerably completely different. Dave Jones from EEV Weblog has a really complete abstract of the Photo voltaic Panel math and economics. His evaluation is for Sydney Australia, however many traits there are literally fairly much like southern California, LA is latitude 33 levels North, whereas Sydney is 33 levels South and has very related climate sample. Briefly – a big expensive battery is solely uneconomical. For those who desperately must have a safety in opposition to grid failures, it’s a significantly better concept to purchase a small UPS with an auto-on diesel generator (at a small fraction of the price of the battery). In contrast to the battery, the generator may very well be refueled and function backup energy for days in case of a chronic grid failure corresponding to in case of an earthquake or different pure catastrophe. A number of KWh battery will solely present juice for a number of hours and prices an order of magnitude extra, whereas it will be unable to pay for itself over the anticipated lifetime.
Shenanigans at Tesla
I’ve to admit, there are plenty of issues about Tesla vehicles I like. They give the impression of being contemporary, their design is clearly distinguishable from different manufacturers they usually look elegant. The minimalistic design of the inside is paying homage to the Star Trek TNG enterprise and appears good. Maybe they went a number of steps too far with Mannequin 3 lack of cluster show. I feel Mannequin 3 with a HUD show could be actually neat, however simply the middle display and lack of many bodily knobs is an excessive amount of for me (and doubtlessly harmful). And sure, the electrical drive with instantaneous torque is a singular expertise (distinctive to EV, to not Tesla although).
Now that the stipulations are behind let’s get to the primary level: whereas each different automobile producer on this planet merely makes vehicles with out bragging about it, Tesla is a by no means ending drama… Fixed scaling up, ramping up, getting manufacturing proper… And continually it seems their new manufacturing recipe, the alien dreadnought finally ends up being a tent by which staff crowd between mountains of containers and manually assemble the vehicles loaded onto the road by a forklift – a far cry from fashionable automobile manufacturing titans corresponding to Toyota. Tesla has points with stuff lengthy solved by each different producer: panel alignment, leaking seals, paint job blemishes, rattling plastics, all types of QA issues. And I am not making these things up, twitter, Tesla boards and even fan primarily based vlogs on youtube are filled with complaints and horror service tales. This will have been rising ache for a 4-6 12 months previous area of interest automobile firm, however Tesla has been round for greater than 15 years, burned by tens of billions of {dollars} [mostly debt which Tesla has roughly $10B of] and is valued on the inventory market above Ford and GMC. These types of points, the Mannequin 3 bait and change (the $35k to date doesn’t exist) are unprecedented. I will not even go into the mountain of points the brief sellers convey up – even when just one third of their findings are true, this firm is in a whole administration chaos. What’s actually true is the lengthy record of executives departing one after the other over the previous few years, that is indicative of authoritarian administration and poisonous firm tradition to say the least. So all in all, actually not every thing is correct about this firm, and I am positive all these brief sellers are there for good cause, they scent bullshit.
And at last there may be the 420 buyout fiasco which lead the Securities and Trade Fee to cost Musk with 20mln greenback advantageous and ban him from being a md of the board for 3 years. Later in an interview Elon said that “it was price it“, and that he “doesn’t have the respect for SEC“. At this level he simply behaved like an enormous a$$gap, there may be nothing so as to add.
Cave rescue fiasco
In summer time 2018 wold’s consideration was on a bunch of youngsters stranded in a collapse Thailand. Elon in his Tony Stark method provided a rescue with a submarine. Vern Unsworth, a diver concerned within the rescue operation expressed his opinion on the sub concept in a well-known interview. Musk responded with calling this man a pedophile, after which he apologized however then doubled down by saying that for the reason that man didn’t sue him it have to be true. When Unsworth rolled out a legislation go well with Musk’s attorneys responded to dismiss the motion stating basically that Elon talks shit on twitter in any case and this shouldn’t be taken significantly.
I am not a cave diver, however I did dive in a number of small caves and wrecks and I can totally perceive Unsworth argument. Orientation underwater is restricted, there may be plenty of gear to keep up, and passing this torpedo-tube by a good cave could be harmful, very sluggish and in the end pointless (the rescue ended up succesful with out the usage of magic submarine).
Secondly, the entire pedo factor and the lawsuit should not one thing an grownup profitable entrepreneur would get himself into except he felt some deep insecurities. To me it simply exposes Elon as an smug and narcissistic buffoon, not some capitalist superhero.
VTOL electrical supersonic jet
One other one in all these concepts out of nowhere, this one I truly did some calculation myself to see how possible it’s. Right here it’s: boeing 737 has a takeoff weight of ~72 tones and desires ~96600MJ to get to 35,000 toes cruising (only for the climb). Assuming a battery of say 25 tones, that will require 3.8MJ/kg particular vitality, that’s for climb solely (and solely 35,000 toes). I would add one other 2-4MJ/Kg for the precise cruise. So given similar aerodynamic effectivity as B737 we’re speaking roughly particular vitality of a minimum of 8MJ/kg (with 25T of battery). Additionally as the standard jet burns the gasoline it will get lighter, electrical aircraft doesn’t. The vitality spent on climb will successfully be recovered within the type of velocity at descent. Anyway, we’re speaking 8MJ/kg, virtually twice as a lot particular vitality as TNT (and 6x the density of any chemical battery in existence). If we might prefer to go supersonic, that will successfully double the vitality necessities (must climb a lot increased and overcome a a lot increased drag throughout cruise). If we’re speaking VTOL that provides a fairly a bit to the climb however above every thing, makes the design far more advanced and heavy. So general we’re someplace in 15-20MJ/kg vary within the optimistic state of affairs. At 15MJ/kg we’re speaking about an especially highly effective explosion if something have been to go flawed with the battery. To not point out that no chemical battery at that particular vitality exists for the time being. One can tweak a few of these numbers a method or one other however in my opinion there is no such thing as a method to make this work. Skipping many different particulars, one can firmly conclude that this concept is ridiculous.
Abstract
Though resistance to Elon and his followers is futile, and we are going to all be assimilated, I name bullshit. I feel the crowds of people that suppose Elon is the savior of man form can be in for an important disappointment. Extravagant entrepreneur, nice salesman, dreamer he’s. However second incarnation of Jesus, savior of the planet and genius engineer he’s not. Time will inform if I used to be proper.
For those who discovered an error, spotlight it and press Shift + Enter or click on right here to tell us.