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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • I appreciate your expert input!

    Yeah the only stuff I could find about actual orbital refueling was basically some tests with cryogenic fuel pumping on the ISS, which had some fairly serious problems, and a few times that basically a small satellite was refueled / serviced by another small satellite, which yeah as you say, just deliver a tiny amount of hydrazine, an exceptionally less volatile and easier fuel to deal with.



  • I fell asleep after making my original comment, but you are correct that the velocities and altitude achieved are indicative of something capable of achieving orbit.

    So for that, thank you for the correction.

    I will caveat that with: We still have literally no idea what this things LEO payload capacity is.

    Up until a few months ago, Musk was saying its 100 tons. Then he says its more like 50 tons, and we’re gonna make Starship+Booster 2 and 3, 2 will be capable of 100 tons, 3 will be even more.

    So far its proven payload capacity is ‘banana’.

    =/



  • The original timeline NASA gave to SpaceX was to have a successful landing on the moon, with humans, and their safe return, in Q2 2025.

    7 months from now.

    You could theoretically refuel the S-IVb, the Apollo/Saturn V third stage, in LEO, with Falcon Heavies…

    …assuming you redesigned both to do refueling in orbit, which has never been accomplished before with huge volumes of cryogenic fuel.

    But you could not actually launch even a completely unfueled, completely dry S-IVb with a Falcon Heavy.

    The S-IVb is about 22ft in diameter.

    The Falcon Heavy’s final ascent rocket is about 12 ft in diameter.

    There’s almost certainly no way that would be aerodynamically stable through launch.

    The service module and lander are just too wide.

    NASA did actually award another contract to Blue Origin (Bezos Private Space Program) for an updated, embiggened Apollo style lander.

    https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/05/blue-origin-wins-pivotal-nasa-contract-to-develop-a-second-lunar-lander/

    That’s going to be mated to a Locked Martin designed orbiter, and they’ll all launch on the SLS.

    … Assuming the SLS does not also fall (further) behind schedule or suffer from quality control problems.

    A whole lot of SLS is built by Boeing. Not doing so great in the quality control department lately.

    But hey at least one of the things so far has actually completed an uncrewed lunar fly by!

    To conclude: Yes, Space is indeed hard.

    But uh, the last thing Musk said about Starship+Booster is that it will actually have… half… the originally promised payload capacity to LEO.

    … and they’re going to making a Starship+Booster 2, that will have the original promised payload, and then a 3rd version that will have even more!

    If you have to cut your effective payload capacity in half, thats a whole lot more than quality control problems, its fundamental design mishaps.


  • Starship’s upper stage will make a partial orbit of Earth, re-enter the atmosphere and splash down in the Indian Ocean…

    Also known as not an orbit, or a suborbital flight / trajectory.

    Saying a suborbital flight is a partial orbit is like saying a cessna can partially achieve hypersonic velocities.

    NASA is also counting on a specialized version of Starship to ferry astronauts to the lunar surface later this decade under its Artemis program.

    There is no public information indicating design on this variant has even begun.

    … And Starship+Heavy Booster was supposed to have completed a succesful orbital flight in Q2 2022, per NASA’s contract with SpaceX.

    Which it still has not done, in Q4 2024.

    If SpaceX somehow completes an orbital flight of this thing in say Q2 2025, and keeps to the originally agreed contract timeline, well thats only 3 years behind schedule.

    But this is Musk. Not the best track record on delivering on promises, more of a ‘pray i do not alter the deal further’ kinda vibe, but spoken with all the menacing intimidation of Darth Helmet.

    So far he’s gotten a banana to suborbit in this thing.

    I’ll eat a sock if a SpaceX launcher and lander gets human beings to the moon and back safely by the end of 2030.

    Did I forget to mention Musk’s plan for a moon mission requires the Starship Lunar Lander variant to remain in Earth orbit, rendevouz and dock with and refuel from something like 12 or 16 other Starships?

    … And there is also no publicly available information indicating actual design of this refuelling system either, just vague cgi concept arts of a plan?

    I’ll eat two fucking socks.









  • It is not that it responded “Sorry, I cannot find anything like what you described, here are some things that are pretty close.”

    It affirmatively said “No, no such things as you describe exist, here are some things that are pretty close.”

    There’s a huge difference between a coworker saying “Dang man, I dunno, I can’t find a thing like that.” and “No, nothing like that exists, closest to it is x y z,”

    The former is honest. The latter is confidently incorrect.

    Combine that with “Wait what about gamma?”

    And the former is still honest, and the latter, who now describes gamma in great detail and how it meets my requirements, is now an obvious liar, after telling me that nothing like that exists.

    If I now know I am dealing with a dishonest interlocutor, now I am forced to consider tricking it into being homest.

    Or, if I am less informed or more naive, I might just, you know, believe it the first time.

    A standard search engine that is not formatted to resemble talking to a person does not prompt a user to expect it to act like a person, and thus does not suffer from this problem.

    If you don’t find what you’re looking for, all that means is you did not find it.

    If you are told that no such thing exists, a lot of people are going to believe that no such thing exists.

    That is typically called spreading disinformation, when the actor knows what they are claiming is false.

    Its worse than unhelpful, it actively spreads lies.

    Anyway, I’m sorry that you don’t see humor in multi billion dollar technology failing at achieving its purported abilities, I laugh all the time at poorly designed products, systems, things.

    Finally, I did not use the phrase in contention in my original post.

    I used it in my response to you, specifically and only within a single sentence which revolved around incompetent executives.

    It appears that reading comprehension is not your strong suit, maybe you can ask Gemini about how to improve it.

    Err, well, maybe don’t do that.



  • But this is better than previous implementations of search, because it gives you discrete applicable answers rather than a collection of dubiously associated web links.

    Except for when you ask it to determine if a thing exists by describing its properties, and then it says no such thing exists while providing a discrete response explaining in detail how there are things that have some, but not all of those properties…

    … And then when you ask it specifically about a thing you already know about that has all those properties, it tells you about how it does exist and describes it in detail.

    What is the point of a ‘conversational search engine’ if it cannot help you find information unless you already know about said information?!

    The whole, entire point of formatting it into a conversational format is to trick people into thinking they are talking to an expert, an archivist with encyclopedaeic knowledge, who will give them accurate answers.

    Yet it gatekeeps information that it does have access to but omits.

    The format of providing a bunch of likely related links to a query is a format much more reminiscent of doing actual research, with no impression that you will immediately find what you want right away, that this is a tool to aide you in your research process.

    This is only an improvement if you want to further unteach people how to do actual research and critical thinking.


  • You original comment is posted under mine.

    I am going to assume you are responding to that.

    … I wasn’t trying to trick it.

    I was trying to use it.

    This is relevant to my more recent reply to you… because it is an anecdotal example of how broadly useless this technology is.

    I wasn’t aware the purpose of this joke meme thread was to act as a policy workshop to determine an actionable media campaign aimed at generating mass awareness of the economic downsides of LLMs, which wouldn’t fucking work anyway because LLMs are being pushed by a class of wealthy people who do not fucking care what the masses think, and have essentially zero reason at all to change their course of action.

    What, we’re going to boycott the entire tech industry?

    Vote them out of office?

    These people are on video, on record saying basically, ‘eh, we’re not gonna save the climate, not happening, might as well burn it all down even harder, even faster, for a tiny percentage chance our overcomplicated autocomplete algorithm magically figures out how to fix everything afterward’.

    And yes, I very intentionally used the phrase ‘understand how computers actually work’ to infantilize and demean corporate executives.

    Because they are narcissistic priveleged sociopaths who are almost never qualified, almost always make idiotic decisions that will only benefit themselves and an increasingly shrinking number of people at the expense of the vast majority of people who know more and work harder than they do, and who often respond like children having temper tantrums when they are justly criticized.

    Again, in the context of a joke meme thread.

    Please get off your high horse, or at least ride it over to a trough of water if you want a reasonable place to try to convince it to drink in the manner in which you prefer.