Sun-Synchronous Orbit (SSO) Access: Launches into SSO have a launch angle of ~98° relative to the equator (i.e. south), and launching from Louisiana gives a direct launch corridor over the Gulf of America without crossing major cities.
SpaceX plans to launch millions of datacenter satellites in SSO, so this is the perfect launch site for their use case. SSO launches from their existing launch sites (Boca Chica and Cape Canaveral) would overfly land.
Existing Methane pipelines: They are next to existing Gulf Coast natural gas/LNG infra, making bulk liquid methane delivery significantly easier. Currently for Starbase, there are no pipelines and methane is shipped in via truck. Delivering the ~1,000 metric tons of methane required for a single Starship launch requires 50-60 tanker truck deliveries.
Three: The Gulf Intracoastal Waterway connects Brownsville (and Starbase TX) to New Iberia/Morgan City (where SpaceX has previously contracted the building/maintenance of ASDS barges) via this site. Barges that traverse the GIWW can carry things too large to ship by air or road to and from the Gulf.
Man if this actually starts to happen it's a good time to be a welder, concrete worker, or any general contractor or tradesman in Louisiana. Coastal Louisiana is some of the poorest areas in the US even more so than the valley in Texas where Starbase Texas is located. Probably 10-20 years worth of solid work building out that site.
It's so interesting to me that the whole "futurism" concept got co-opted into some sort of political propaganda machine. All the articles are negative hit pieces, they're all reductive, they're almost all political in nature. I used to go on the futurism subreddit years ago and it's all the same there. You'd think "futurism" would be about .. promoting new technology, ushering in the future, you know .. futurism. Not just another political propaganda outlet.
Futurism is a focus on the future. The future may be good or bad. Your desire to focus only on the upsides (for you) and not want to hear about the consequences, externalities, or dangers is one of the most "political" positions a technologist can have.
Do you hate reading most science fiction? Because the ratio of dystopic to utopic scifi is pretty unbalanced.
Yeah, I hate modern science fiction. It's almost all terrible. Sci-fi written in the time of actual ongoing world wars and the Cold War's constant threat of instant nuclear annihilation was far more optimistic, and far more imaginative.
You could just say “no” - it would save a lot of space, be about as polite, and way less annoying.
Sometimes people want to talk about science stuff without talking about human fallout and political implications. It’s perfectly fine to want an occasional break from those types of discussions.
That’s just a microcosm of everything. The culture war ate the entire public discourse to the exclusion of practical concerns and even coherent ideas. It’s all vibes and tribalism and bashing the other tribes, while the tribes themselves become increasingly incoherent in terms of what (if anything) they really mean or stand for.
I just turned it all off, though it makes me fear for the future. Feels like the early stages of societal collapse.
tl;dw -- louisiana has a ton of natural resources and wonderful harbors, but has allowed corporations to get away with almost anything without paying their fair share of taxes, cleaning up their waste, or generally being held accountable. And likely related, there is a long history of rampant corruption in the area. With sea levels rising and cancerous pollution filling densely populated areas, life in Louisiana has generally become very difficult :(
I haven't had time to watch the video but my understanding was a lot of the Louisiana coast have big problems with rising sea levels and much of it in the process of falling underwater. Perhaps it's relatively trivial to reinforce the coast for the forseeable I don't know.
The plans for the site involve extracting significant amounts of natural gas to make methane to burn for the rocket fuel. If they hit the launch levels they suggest (thousands of launches per year), this is not a small amount of greenhouse gases they'll be emitting which of course helps accelerate melting of the ice caps and rising sea levels, which could threaten the very site they've built it on.
They're also the folks working on the largest co2 -> methane converters in the world. Because that's how they'll need to make fuel on Mars, and no one else on earth wants to fund an expensive technology to replace an inexpensive gas pumped from the ground. By definition, these reactors will have to be capable of producing enough fuel for a rocket in order to be fit for purpose. That opens the door for carbon neutral operation. It's tough to imagine a greener rocket than a fully reusable one that's carbon neutral running on methane. Sure beats spewing hypergolics or solid rocket fuels.
What are the chances they'll employ cheap labor they can just use as election fodder for stealing hard-working american jobs?
Either that or pay decent wages for American workers that'll drive up construction prices and worsen the inflation which is already crazy due to these criminal tariffs.
They put themselves in that situation, the US admin, not me. I'm just commenting. Or is any of what I said wrong? I mean there's something called ITAR that requires American workers, but that doesn't mean the impact on inflation isn't real
I live around a lot of those people in SW Ohio who find themselves traveling to states like Louisiana for welding, electrical and general contracting work because the expertise isnt there. I have to imagine much of the same will happen and if anything they might reap rewards following construction. Regardless I would assume little to no relevant expertise exists there at the moment.
it doesn't fix everything wrong in the state but it's > 0. There's a lot of additional economic activity that comes with the construction too. Restaurants get busier, Walmart gets busier, lots of auto repair/servicing will be needed etc. Som e people will move for construction and end up staying there. It can be a shock to the local communities though but i think the positives still outweigh the negatives.
The biggest issue is these kinds of construction jobs are temporary. It's similar to but not quite as bad as datacenters where you get a very short term influx of skilled highly paid labor but those jobs don't stick around after the construction is over. Starbase will require more people on site at least.
The construction is temporary but what are the economic impacts of having a fully operational spaceport that launches 20,000% more tonnage to orbit than the Florida Space Coast?
Probably a great deal of long term economic impact.
Sounds like "legal language" threshold for whatever reason? The Terafab announcement used the same phrase:
>The initial phase of Terafab is estimated to require approximately $16.8 billion in capital investments from SpaceX and Tesla, with potential future expansion phases bringing total investment much higher. This facility will employ at least 3,000 people, many of whom will be from Grimes and nearby Brazos County — continuing the trend of our other Texas sites where between 60% and 80% of new hires are local residents.
That Starbase concept (not that the numbers are realistic by any means) is orders of magnitude more ambitious than what SpaceX does today with 22k employees.
The level of cynicism, shit-talking, and schadenfreude wish-casting in response to this is crazy. Start cheering on successes. Resist the deconstructionist mindset.
1) Political - The ideology/party spreading the doomerism promotes that they're the ones that can "fix it", if only you vote for them.
2) Adversarial countries, primarily China - Using the internet to convince members of western civilization to hate their civilization, hate their economic system, hate their history, hate their compatriots, adopt a no motivation defeatist attitude, etc., etc., and they can get our population to destroy itself from within without having to go to war with us.
Reject the doomerism, reject the negativity. Build. Invent. Create. Do your part to contribute to your civilization, to contribute to humanity, to move us forwards.
The people who build rockets and computers and the Internet are the good guys of history. We should do more of that. That statement shouldn’t have a political valence—people who subscribe to that idea can argue whether taxes should be higher or lower. But if you reject that concept you’re rejecting civilization itself.
3) Elon Musk has fascist leanings and many people don't want to live in a world where such a person has ever increasing wealth, influence and power. Especially since he has no qualms about using that same wealth and influence to subvert and distort elections, both domestic and foreign.
Is it realistic to demand a spaceport with no environmental impact from anyone, SpaceX or not?
Current launch technology inevitably produces a lot of heat and noise and we don't have any rocket model that wouldn't at least rarely fail (and explode).
That said, extant Cape Canaveral does not seem to be lifeless. Lots of birds. IDK how the precise species composition has changed since 1960, but nature as a whole is a lot more resilient than people seem to think.
Is it a good time though? - Their Texas suppliers have been chasing payment and Greg Abbott rolled over and let Elon get their property without payment. Not the only Tesla/SpaceX vendor not being paid either. https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/cars/tesla/tesla-cybertruc...
You're being down-voted (and so shall I) but I think you're right. Despite all the animosity towards him, Musk is doing things that are economically meaningful for our nation.
We'll need a few more of "him" to dig us out of this situation I reckon, but overall I still hope it's possible.
(Anyone asking antagonistic questions can go ahead and save their fingers, I won't respond to the petty comments.)
Removing parasitic elements in government spending and policy will. This starts with politics. We first need a healthy, educated, engaged, and safe population. All else follows. These are all things Elon actively works against. You aren't part of his future.
I don't know, government waste and most policy sucks. But there's no reason we can't do stuff or even try.
For instance, take Tesla. It wasn't anything revolutionary. Any auto manufacturer could have invested in battery technology and building a compelling EV, but they didn't. Same with manufacturing in America. Every manufacturer took as given that they have to outsource manufacturing to oversees and components to third parties. But it didn't have to be that way. It takes someone naive and optimistic enough to try something different.
It's easy to forget that Tesla was made possible almost exclusively through government incentives. This is something that most people seem to have forgotten: Tesla exists because the government created incentive programs that paid in cold hard cash. Musk took advantage of those programs, and Tesla absolutely would not have been nearly as successful (and likely not existed) without it.
This is incredibly overstated. There are "incentives" for all sorts of activities. These incentives were available to all manufacturers. We should have "incentives" to produce electric vehicles and manufacturing in America. Insane not to. And these incentives are often "you would normally have to pay us X million in taxes, but we'll let you pay less". When the alternative is something not being built and no tax revenue, it makes sense. And a lot of subsidies were to buyers of EVs
The government should find ways to strategically invest in developing major industries. The market for them is global and China has/will have a bigger internal market than the US, so without intentional development we'll get a continued industrial consolidation that is bad for the US and the world. I have robotic lawn mowers and vacuum cleaners made by Chinese companies partly because an intentional policy from China's government to grow these capabilities locally.
> Any auto manufacturer could have invested in battery technology and building a compelling EV, but they didn't
...because Tesla sold luxury vehicles at relatively low volume. By the time Elon reneged his "$25,000 EV" promise, China was ready to export vehicles that actually hit that price point. The only thing preventing Americans from driving affordable EVs is Elon's federal protectionism. Is that really progress?
Yep, it's crazy that people can correctly recognize that corruption is responsible for the current situation but fail to recognize that adding more corruption will not deliver us from it.
> He was involved in DOGE, which did nothing but catch fraud and cut worthless spending.
Elon wasn't just involved with DOGE, he was responsible for it. And Elon said he would cut $2 TRILLION in federal spending before ultimately claiming just $110 billion in savings -- which the GAO found he lied about. Considering out budget deficit is about $2 trillion, even his inflated claims are a rounding error.
(To say nothing of the fact that a lot of it was NOT useless spending. For example, Elon ended a program to fund countries in Central America to stop the spread of screw worms. Now screw worms are projected to cost $1.8 billion in damage to Texas alone.)
> while Elon encourages reporting on X
Elon has a track record of banning journalists on Twitter / X, the everything app, when they criticize him. Literally the opposite of encouraging reporting on X.
> We need more "Elons", people like him are actually helping dig us out of this mess.
I would encourage you to start reading independent news sources and forming your own opinions, rather than uncritically believing everything people in power feed to you. Otherwise you end up saying things online that are trivially disprovable.
3,000 short term jobs doesn't put a dent in the thousands of jobs he has cut, not to mention the losses to our economy due to the tariffs, immigration policy, and deficit spending that he caused.
> We'll need a few more of "him" to dig us out of this situation I reckon
I'm of the impression that you can't corrupt your way out of corruption.
Posts like this is why HN is made fun of now in circles where real engineering happens. In reality you would not be able to follow what he's talking about because it would be well over your head.
In reality, you would not be able to follow what he's talking about because he's making stuff up and hoping your inability to understand him comes across as genius rather than bullshit.
What an odd comment. You think because he is the CEO of a rocket company that naturally he is beyond making stuff up and talking BS? Have you ever watched an interview of his?
And why are CEOs as smart as engineers now.
This isn't Twitter. You don't have to suck up to him. He won't ever see this.
Sorry, I'm too busy trying to check an algorithm to convert floating-point numbers to strings for correctness to deal with people playing the "I'm a rocket scientist, therefore everything is easy to me" card. And yet somehow Elon isn't that (see his most recent SpaceX, where he quite literally uses that to justify his competence to build orbital data centers).
Thank you for putting words into my mouth that I didn't say. Especially when they're quite literally the opposite of my message.
Although, given that I pointed out that Elon literally did the exact same thing, why do you trust him when he does it? Or is it simply that you're unaware that he does stuff like that?
He was, until he took a chainsaw to things he didn’t understand.
I was a huge believer in Elon musk. I invested and made a lot of money in Tesla before Model S had even entered serial production.
Now? Fuck you Elon, go Peter Beck…
Which situation did Elon Musk put us in to? Can you elaborate? When did this situation start? What happened? What did he personally do that put us in the situation?
You could have just posted the numbers to easily make/prove your point, but you didn't, and everyone knows why you didn't. Because the numbers don't align with what you're saying. But if enough people like you say it's true, I guess that makes it true, data be damned.
I'm not sure what situation we're in (can someone describe it please?), but did that situation only start the day Trump took office again after being elected by the American people?
Predictability is extremely important for markets and planning and general welfare. He doesn’t have to randomly declare things on a Thursday that haven’t changed for decades and create anxiety among (you name it community or industry) just to stay in the headlines.
Donald Trump has destroyed predictability, as well as any semblance of functioning, predictable government. Trump is an extremely influential and powerful unilateral executive - in all the wrong ways.
Evidence you say? I guess tariff policy and a completely arbitrary war with Iran that roiled markets, just to name a couple from this year.
And Musks money and twitter takeover did a lot of work to convince Americans vote for Trump. Then Musk joined the administration and continued digging the hole
> You're being down-voted (and so shall I) but I think you're right. Despite all the animosity towards him, Musk is doing things that are economically meaningful for our nation.
In the context of the US building big things, ramping up manufacturing, doing Space exploration, &c. and the person I replied to wrote:
> Musk has done a huge amount to put us INTO this situation
What situation did he put us in to in this context? Did he put us in to the situation where we are building bigger things now? Are you saying that there was a situation that we were put in to and that situation only started when Trump was elected and prior to that we were... what? Building big things and trying to restore manufacturing and now we're also doing that under Trump?
Someone here should be specific about what they're talking about instead of just "Musk bad Trump bad". Yea they're both morons or whatever but what exactly are we supposedly criticizing here? Just that Trump got elected? Ok that's a boring conversation let's switch back to talking about manufacturing and building big projects in America.
I'll bite. Things we had in December 2024 that we no longer have today, all of which contribute to the success or failure of major initiatives:
- 2.9% inflation
- Billions of dollars of grants for state-run energy projects
- NATCAST
- Healthy & stable funding for the sciences
- Competent leaders at the federal and military levels to oversee large complex projects
- Healthy partnerships with allies
Specific actions that have been taken by Trump (backed by Musk) that caused us to lose the above:
- Starting an unnecessary war with Iran
- Cancelling grants for energy projects specifically in blue states
- Imposing nonsensical tariffs on trade partners
- Starting a full-blown trade war with Canada
- Alienating other allies, ex. starting a middle-east conflict without any alliances (excl. Israel)
- Specifically closing NATCAST because "illegal"
- Gutting of science funding by DOGE & others
- Removal of competent leaders & prioritization of loyalty over competence when choosing staff
I have a hard time taking anyone seriously when they bring up anything about Trump having a positive impact on manufacturing in America. For 4+ years he's been lying to the American public about how tariffs work and claiming that US consumers paying more taxes to the US gov't in the form of tariffs is going to 'return' manufacturing to the US. We have almost half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs in the US - explain to me again why this is a capacity problem?
There's nothing to really bite on here - the OP said Elon Musk put us "in this situation" - I'm still looking for a definition or answer on what exactly this situation is. Is it a situation in which Trump is simply president? OK but Trump himself nor Musk are responsible for the previous decades of manufacturing capability destruction in the US, as an example.
If it's just complaining about Trump/Musk then yea sure let's complain about them in a different topic, but the OP was talking about Musk building big things and he undeniably has (or his companies have, rather).
One such example - he's using his massive wealth and influence to support fascist political movements that promise mass deportation and "remigration", and even supporting these policies explicitly himself.
In the US, his political beneficiaries have managed to "achieve" net negative migration to the US for the first time in 50 years, and the first decline in overall population in US history.
If this becomes the new trend (and if Musk gets his political desires fulfilled, it might), the hole is getting much, much deeper while our capacity to climb out is being severely impaired.
And oh yea, he killed hundreds of thousands of kids, mostly under 5.
No it won't. Separately other countries don't get to dictate our internal policies or whether we decide to build any sort of missile defense system. If we're going to be nuked over it, then oh well they'll get nuked too. Never can we live as hostages to wanna-be dictators and tyrants (Xi Jingping, Vladimir Putin, IRGC, &c.) and if they want to blow the whole world up then so be it but acquiescing to their bullying is simply not an option. If you think it's an option, then we should issue our own nuclear threats and take them hostage instead.
Is your cognitive dissonance that strong that you don't see that if all major countries follow that line of thought all have to have their own golden domes and invite WW3?
How does everyone having golden dome invite WWIII? We can't shoot missiles at them, so therefore let's go start a war with them? What sense does that make?
And if we do, how are we going to fight them? By shooting missiles at them?
Few Americans have done more than musk to destroy state capacity and to enable corruption on a massive scale, all while enriching himself to an unprecedented degree. That's great for him and his cronies that he has gotten so wealthy doing it, but he's been a huge net-negative to most humans.
I get that rockets are cool and a lot of people in the tech bubble think that starlink is the greatest thing ever, but most people don't care about that nearly as much as they care about seeing their children die from preventable diseases he cut the funding for or getting violently ill because he drove thousands of food inspectors and researchers out of a job.
Handling the enormous federal debt that he continues to play a part in worsening is going to very painful in the long run.
Lol why is this downvoted? There is no dispute that he spent hundreds of millions of dollars to elect Trump and seat himself in government while his companies are financially dependent on government programs and contracts. This is an obvious conflict of interest, and also completely on par with all of the other corruption we're seeing from this administration.
But its also hard not to be. I'm not a fan of Musk and it doesn't even have to do with Musk himself as its a common theme I see among a lot of the big tech companies or really any company doing a big project in my neck of the woods. An hour north east of me, there has been big on going data center projects for 10+ years. Sounds good right? I got a lot of family and friends in the trades. But I can almost set my watch to it. When work ramps up, its always good pay and 15 years of guaranteed work until suddenly its not. 8 months go by, suddenly everything is paused and all those contractors are out of work for a year and a half until things start up again. Then its rinse and repeat.
"I almost sold a car today, but if I did, sure it would have been some income, but who knows when the next time I would sell another car would be? Why bother? It's rinse and repeat"
These comments are so strange, because you’re demonstrating how far your head is in the sand, willfully.
Of course Musk talks big. He is almost always late. Lots of things have never happened, or have not yet worked (but they’re still trying)
At the same time he has monumental successes that nobody, ever, has achieved.
Worlds safest car (multiple times) worlds highest selling car (model y), car of the year, massive factories building at a speed and quality that made Toyotas CEO say they’re in trouble and have a lot to improve.
The whole supercharger network that smashes every other one.
World’s first reusable rocket, done it 300 times now. Only two others have done it once. By far, by far more launches than every country and company in the world put together. Starship coming along.
To say that he never does anything is a very, very strange set of blinders to view the world through
>At the same time he has monumental successes that nobody, ever, has achieved.
"Nobody ever" doesn't really feel accurate here.
>Worlds safest car (multiple times)...
According to which body? Tesla's interpretation of NHTSA data? Some other organization? Did other cars prior to Tesla's inception obtain this title "multiple times"?
>... worlds highest selling car (model y)...
In 2023, the Y peaked at ~1.22 million. In 1923, the Model T sold ~2.09 million.
>... car of the year...
Numerous bodies label things "car of the year", and many cars were named that before and after Teslas were produced.
I wonder if anyone read the copy on this page or if it mostly came out of an LLM.
The "Restoring the shoreline" and Rebuilding the marshlands" paragraphs below the images are almost exactly the same. The first sentence is exactly the same.
Maybe, but there's some very specific legal language that cpra and the state requires everyone use in referring to some of these issues, and at least part of the land SpaceX is acquiring is involved in coastal restoration lawsuits or deep water horizon settlements or both.
As an engineer working on cpra projects in the past, I've wanted to reword a variety things but was forced to use their legal language.
It's mostly a good thing as it keeps things properly defined in a political context that are meant to have specific technical meanings (like marsh, beach, rebuild vs restore).
For me that makes it more likely to be human-generated. Seems like a "rushing person juggling revs and copy-pasting" mistake.
FWIW, the writing style and tone match pre-LLM SpaceX writing. Of course you can prompt an LLM to mimic style, but somehow the regression-to-average blandness shines through. That can be hard to distinguish from bog standard corporate speak though.
Terrestrial datacenter legal restrictions are how SpaceX expects to make a lot of its money in the next 10+ years, so I would be less surprised to find them lobbying for restrictions than against, presuming they spend at all on it.
It's not a zero sum market, supply is nowhere near meeting demand, in the short term restrictions also hurt SpaceX because they are building out their own terrestrial datacenters in Memphis etc.
I wonder how coastal they intend to be. They make a lot of claims about repairing the wetlands and coastal regions, but a lot of it is likely going to be underwater in the next 25 years because of rising sea levels [0], regardless of how many wetlands are repaired. And I suspect infrastructure like this probably has to be usable for something like 100 years to payoff. Maybe they're actually going to build inland, where the eventual coast will be?
This was my question as well. If they’re as close to the shore as the picture makes it seem, they’ll be underwater with the first Cat 1 they come across, and huge cat 5s are becoming more and more common as time goes on. I wouldn’t want to invest here because how will you keep those 200 foot tall structures standing in 150 mph wind??
Lol this is a reference to Florida (though I love your Space Ghost reference), we have the Kennedy Space Center, and an Airforce base (I guess its a Space Force base now) which has led to this area being referred to as "Space Coast" adding this in case anyone else might be unaware.
Read "Building a new space coast" and I immediately wondered what our elected officials here in Florida must have felt when they saw that line. I'd love for SpaceX to greatly expand their presence here in Florida, but at the same time the coast is probably too built up here for SpaceX to have a facility like that unless they go into the panhandle.
I'm sort of projecting (I've been here most of my life, I got tired of it, now regaining appreciation for Florida the last few years), but I've also noticed others (not you) don't realize there's more to Florida than most people realize.
I grew up in South Florida (not a native), and my experience of strip malls and ever widening highways is: if there was a state below Florida, that's where the desperate and unrooted migrants would have kept driving to.
I spent my childhood fishing in a swimsuit every day I could. I loved it. But as an adult, any south of Ocala and east of Gainesville is a cultural wasteland (with cutouts for Miami and Tampa).
From the hype video, it looks like they will be building towers in pairs. Hard to tell the distances, but if one explodes on the pad, will it's pair be in the blast radius? I'm guessing the plane will be to have a launch on one them and then move to the other for a faster launch cadence?
It’s hard to imagine that Cocoa Beach/Titusville isn’t receptive to this. I guess it’s probably cheaper? They don’t have to share the airspace with NASA and other launch companies and it becomes a fully owned and operated Freeport for Musk’s ventures.
State of Louisiana was probably on their hands and knees begging. The construction would last decades and anyone with a strong back that can be told what to do and do it will have a job. It would help lift a lot of people in that area out of poverty.
logistically, i wonder how long it takes to ship from Starbase Texas to Louisiana via barge. It has to be easier to get Starships to Louisiana than the East side of Florida.
They may not have to ship many or any. The first launch of a Texas-constructed Starship could just land the booster in Louisiana for a small fuel penalty, and then ships could likewise land there.
> It would help lift a lot of people in that area out of poverty.
It's not gonna help us do shit. It will line the pockets of the usual wealthy Louisiana oil barons and politicians similar to the Meta Datacenter that got backed door approved by our politicians.
Crazy how they’ll get you to work for free, but I guess that’s your prerogative. Most people charge for their labor, and money > no money, even if the money you do receive wasn’t equally distributed.
No expert - but from what I've heard, Florida and Texas are constrained for efficent polar (North/South) orbit launches due to restrictions over populated areas. Whereas Louisiana has the Gulf to the south so no/fewer restrictions to worry about.
It's for sun-synchronous orbits, almost assuredly. This is for space data centers.
Man, I was hoping they would pick Alaska (as it's even better for launching into those orbits) - we could really use new industries other than just resource extraction, but Louisiana makes a lot of sense, I just am surprised that there's actually the available land there to do this. Interesting.
> as it's even better for launching into those orbits
When the weather agrees, yes. Sooooo many launches are scheduled around weather patterns and are affected by weather delays - I'd be shocked if LA didn't have 3-4x more 'launchanble weather' days on average compared to Alaska.
I'm sure we'll get to the point where we can launch and land without regard to weather outside of the extremes, much as we have with air travel, but we are far from there today.
Totally this is reasonable, but, I flew in AK (and a couple thousand hours in the lower 48 too) professionally for over a decade, there are other advantages up here? Not nearly as many thunderstorms up here.
Icing might be a problem? I would expect there to be basically no reasonable icing accretion possible well before max q? But I'm not sure because that's not my field.
Regardless, if we're going to be building data centers in space to avoid NIMBYs, we can build rocket infrastructure in Alaska to avoid NIMBYs too. And other infrastructure too? Maybe. I know the SpinLaunch lunatics (I mean that in the most loving way, I love that crazy idea even though it seems insane to me) were getting some sort of permit to launch from Adak. I have been out there a few times and I wish we would try to build more infrastructure out there too... with the NW passage being more traversable due to global warming there's could be a lot more infrastructure there too.
Icing? Watch slow-mo video of any cryogenic liquid-fuelled rocket taking off; you see a shower of ice shards falling off when the engines start.
Liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellants are loaded at cryogenic temperatures -- boiling point is -183C for O2, -161C for CH4; SpaceX does some amount of subcooling so the propellants may be even cooler than that.
Ice accumulation while just sitting on the pad is a given, even in tropical climates (the water just freezes out of the air). Might even be a greater problem in (say) florida or louisiana than in Alaska given higher humidity.
I mean, I'm just speculating? But yeah, I'd be willing to bet serious money (well, in a way, I have) that this is why. Sun-synchronous orbit is something like 7 degrees off of a purely polar orbit? Something like that? So a big southerly coast is extremely valuable for this sort of operation.
I would absolutely love if we were building launch infrastructure up here. We have tons of open space for it, Cape Chiniak is "fine" but kind of remote. What I wish we would do is put some launcher's on the road system, or close to it, then build out our own space infrastructure here in AK. We really need something other than just resource extraction up here and asteroid mining and space manufacturing is going to be particularly bad for the Alaskan economy. Once it's cheaper to get a big rock from space, or battery tech gets just a little bit cheaper, the economy up here is in deep trouble.
My little startup is trying to do build some tools up here for local airlines using AI, and I'm able to make money at it? Which is cool - there's not a huge amount of technically talented people here compared to Seattle or the Bay Area, but there's still smart people in these parts, we have resources, and we have available land and permissive building rules. That is so crazy valuable in a world where NIMBY rules everything down south. Like, obviously I don't want them drilling for oil in DNP, but you know, I have been to and worked in the arctic, I'm pretty fine if we were building things up there, or on these remote Aleutian islands, or in these relatively empty and uninhabited/uninhabitable places.
I wish these companies would look north to build. There are some Nimby d-bags up here, but there are FAR fewer of them than any other place I've ever lived. For context on a hyper micro-scale, my driveway permit outside of Anchorage for our cabin was handled for free with a friendly email to the borough and them wishing me luck. Obviously, other people's mileage may vary, especially for things like giant projects, dams, mines, etc. but the burden here is so much less - you can almost just... feel it. Despite being "harder" to do things up here, it's remarkably permissive.
Maybe when my little startup is more capable and I've got more money coming in, and I'm spitting out drones from my little machine shop, maybe I'll be able to do more?
Whether they make economic sense or not depends on launch costs. With current operational rockets (such as Falcon 9), the launch costs are too high for space compute to be profitable. All these projects depend on Starship succeeding. If you read Starcloud's white paper[1], they make the case that space data centers can be cheaper than terrestrial ones because of access to 24/7 solar power. I think failure is more likely than success for Starcloud and similar startups, but conditional on Starship lowering launch costs, it does look like the idea can make money.
A hypothetical operational space data center will cost a multiple over a similar terrestrial facility. It would be cheaper/more efficient to offer a municipality or its citizens a fraction of that multiple to secure approvals, now that the bullying approach is running out of steam.
Instead of installing MWs of illegal gas generation and also still causing local electricity rates to spike, why not arrange to buy down the electricity of local ratepayers and also comply with existing laws & regulations?
It's worth asking why operators aren't doing that yet. I suspect it's because neither OAI nor Anthropic have an extra $50B-$100B to put out at the moment. We'll see what happens post-IPO.
Never going to happen. Yeah, we might get to a point where lots of people object to them in lots of places. But nobody allowing them anywhere? Mongolia wouldn't let you build in a little corner of the vast steppe? Algeria wouldn't let you plop down in a nice patch of unused Sahara?
The worst that would happen is that it becomes difficult to build in convenient places. That certainly would be annoying. But the problem with space as the solution is that space is by far the least convenient place imaginable, with the possible exception of the bottom of the deep ocean.
I know it sounds bananas, indeed I thought it sounded bananas for a long time, but in a world where we can't get high speed rail built anywhere because of permitting, and there's an artificial scarcity of available land to build, they make a lot of sense.
In space you can just start. Nobody is really going to stop you.
People are going to be even more pissed off when there are more satellites than stars
(I know nominally they’re not visible but they are shortly after launch while moving into position, and at large scale that would be happening all the time, not to mention the other side of burning up in the atmosphere after a few years)
Seems geography constrained. There's wetlands sure but how much they re allowed to build that out, vs LA where any effort to keep the state from shrinking as it does seems fairly welcome.
I expect Musk picked Louisiana because it has some of the weakest corporate regulations of any state and will probably let SpaceX get away with almost anything.
> Starbase, Louisiana will be built to support thousands of Starship flights a year. This self-sustaining spaceport will have propellant production, power generation, deep-water shipping capabilities, vehicle processing facilities, and an airport.
Sounds really neat, but "incredibly ambitious announcement" from an Elon Musk company is starting to wear thin.
Is this real, or will it join the graveyard of other incredibly ambitious projects that were eventually abandoned to focus on the next incredibly ambitious project.
I can count plenty of incredibly ambitious announcements from them that have turned out amazing! In fact, they are an outlier in how many they have challenges they have taken on and succeeded in.
[x] Partially reusable rocket that dropped cost to orbit by an order of magnitude. And no, the space shuttle (while an amazing piece of engineering), doesn't really count. It cost a billion+ to refurbish and did nothing to make space more accessible. Now we have businesses that exist purely because the Falcon 9 exists. Heck, the entire new space industry got validated (and hence got investment) due to SpaceX's success.
[x] Returning human spaceflight capability to the US at a fraction of the price, using the same reusable rocket platform after the old defense primes failed to do so. And then making it cheap enough that it has now also flown about half as many private missions as it did for NASA.
[x] Global satellite constellation providing gigabit-scale internet with 10000+ satellite (once written off by "experts" as yet another "incredibly ambitious project" that will never happen).
[x] Commercializing and bringing down the cost of electric cars to the point where they are actually a viable option now (unlike the compliance cars made by OEMs 10 years ago).
[x] Building the largest rocket to ever exist that now has a clear path to being the first ever fully reusable launch vehicle.
[x] A BCI implant that has now brought back mobility and communication ability to multiple patients with debilitating conditions.
Given that each of these were things that no one had done successfully before, or had failed spectacularly - I don't really care that they took longer than initially planned.
There is, in fact, a graveyard here. It is mostly filled with confident predictions that his companies would never do the things they have since done.
Both things are true. Musk's companies have done quite a few remarkable things people didn't think were possible, and Musk overpromises to an absurd degree and has left a trail of abandoned projects in his wake.
People often cite Hyperloop but he explicitly said he wasn't going to build it. They often cite FSD but it is far from abandoned and is driving my car today. What other projects are you thinking of which are actually abandoned? The Tesla solar roof is the biggest one I can think of, I think it's fair to count it as abandoned.
Can't believe you forgot about Mechahitler and the CSAM creation robot! And the AMAZING hyperloop! And FSD is coming next year now (back when he said it in 2016, and every year since)!
Wow! Was there a Musk company dedicated to building that? Where is the press release announcing it? Surely it must have been a big deal if you are so excited about it's failure!
> And FSD is coming next year now
It is already here. You can hail one right now in multiple cities.
And in my own car, I use it every day and have for 2+ years. For the $3k I paid in 2019, I definitely got what I paid for. It's also gotten dramatically better since then. It drives me to and from work every day without having to so much as touch the wheel. And there is no 2018/19 non-Tesla that can do what it does.
So yes, by all means, keep listing the things you think prove Musk is a fraud. You're mostly just making my point for me.
He often promises incredibly ambitious things that don't happen. But, with a fairly reasonable frequency, he promises incredibly ambitious that do happen.
For example, SpaceX is responsible for a massive spike in orbital launches [1].
SpaceX and Tesla are both successful companies doing really impressive things, but the more ambitious claims are almost always silently discarded.
Including robotaxis, tesla semi-trucks, hyperloop, optimus, roadster 2.0, cheap whole home batteries, true FSD, Mars landing, nueralink, and more I'm sure.
It is difficult for me to get excited about a decades long, ambitious project when the follow through rate is <10%.
He is definitely overly optimistic on timelines but pretty much all those things you mentioned are actually still happening, it's too early to say they haven't followed through.
Feels like an impossible project that will end up being 5% of what was advertised (the 5% being what was actually planned all along), but is made with folie des grandeurs to pump a stock who's hype has died down.
> Pecan Island and nearby wetlands are high-value habitat for migratory waterfowl, shorebirds, wading birds, and other coastal wildlife. SpaceX is not developing the full footprint of the land and will preserve wetlands and wildlife habitat.
Pretty cynical corpo-ambiguity-speak, even by Musk standards.
We're supposed to be happy they're promising not to develop one-hundred percent of the land footprint? They will leave at least 0.00001% of land area as wetlands and therefore we oughta be happy?
Such empty bullshit it's more insulting they even put an environment-leaning section on the site. Just say "fuck it, our space fetish is more important than the wetlands."
Many industries, and SpaceX particularly, will say this like this, then a couple years later be like "oh, it's actually much easier if we destroy it", _do it_, then claim "oh well, nothing to be done now!" and push forward on something else.
"Promises" or "commitments" like this need to be evaluated based on the previous behavior of the people "making" them (although they were very careful with working to not use either of those words, and just imply them)
I agree, and the premise is that we're supposed to believe the remaining waterfowl are going to coexist peacefully with... rocket launches?
Evolution has done stranger things, but my bet is that the birds will find somewhere else to be over learning to not be startled by nearby earth-rumbling explosions.
The wetlands around Cape Canaveral/Kennedy are thriving. Men with guns prevent people from getting too close to the rockets, and people do far more damage to wetlands than a rocket launch once every few days.
A rocket launch every hour or so as SpaceX is promising might be quite different.
Building multi-decade service life infrastructure on the coast in this era of the Anthropocene actually requires you (from an engineering point of view, not merely a regulatory one) to have a buffer zone of wetlands, marshes and sea walls to absorb storm surges.
You can still choose to read that cynically, but I think the cynical angle is taking moral ecological credit for a pragmatic engineering reality :P
To be clear, I'm not trying to argue that this project is ecologically beneficial or neutral (I think that part is beyond debate for many reasons including the noise pollution you've identified)
I was just trying to say that the marshland restoration stuff is likely not lip service, insofar as they actually do need wetland buffer zone to keep their launchpads above sea level.
Because as China has shown, people get angry when you drop hundreds of tons of steel and propellant on people.
Rockets sometimes fail. SpaceX has one of the lowest failure rates in the industry, but that's still ~0.5%. When they fail near launch, they cause humongous explosions. Because of this, anyone with even a tiny bit of care for people launches over the ocean, so that when it goes oops, it only harms some fish.
The existing launch sites SpaceX uses are good for launching into prograde (Starbase, TX and Cape Canaveral, FL) and retrograde (Vandenberg SFB, CA) orbits, but they are all either unable or kind of marginal for launching into polar/very highly inclined orbits. (Starbase, TX cannot do it at all, Vandenberg SFB, CA has limitations on when you can launch, and Cape Canaveral, FL needs to fly a dogleg which reduces performance.)
Part of their plans for the space datacenters involve launching a lot of mass into sun-synchronous (which is very highly inclined) orbits. For that, they need a launch site with the ocean either to the north or to the south.
It doesn't. It doesn't even need to be built, since the Stennis Space Center is already there and already has an excluson zone. This is a vanity project.
considering how the capitalism the chosen framework of the westoid works. i will be watching it (burn and fail) with popcorn and my turkish coffee while enjoying fine persian carpets. this will be loaded with corruption and greed and will fail. I am taking bets.
Great place to put a star base for all the reasons listed, but, uh… does anyone buy for a second that Elon Musk gives a fig about the Louisiana coastline or the migratory birds?
I wish Musk had stuck to bullying his employees instead of going after everyone, because SpaceX is still building a more interesting future. Although that apparently involves pouring concrete in a wetland.
Isn't this an absolutely horrible idea to build this here? What happens when the next Category 5 hurricane hits this area? It's an absolute certainty that they will get another Category 5 at some point.
I'm no Elon fan but they're probably aware of this. 15 ft tall stilts are pretty high and expensive if you want to build a house there. Probably a tiny fraction of their overall CapEx with this project.
Hurricanes are slow and relatively predictable, and they're burning enough money to be able to truck everything that's not flood resistant inland.
The Florida coast isn't defined by a huge, meandering river. Take a look at some satellite surveys that showcase how the Mississippi River changes over time. We've of course damned up the shorelines upstream where people live in places like New Orleans so there's no inherent seasonal risk of mass flooding, though of course lose the deposited silt and hence further erode the land we've "saved". Further down south toward the mouth, it's marsh land defined by however the river chooses to meander. I'm not sure where exactly SpaceX is planning to setup in LA, but the entire coastline there is chronically very poor, very unpopulated, and not supported to weather flooding of any kind, especially not hurricanes.
Pecan island is 40 miles away from the nearest distributary of the Mississippi (the Atchafalaya river), and there are several towns (and a highway) in between. It's the ocean & weather that erode the coastline in that area, not any rivers.
Space exploration is a pipe dream and fantasy that billionaires hope to have up and running just in time to "escape" the world they have helped destroy.
I agree mostly with your stance, but I still have to downvote out of principle for the whole "prove me wrong" statement at the end. Hate that argumentative tatic.
I used to be interested in SpaceX development. Then I came to the realization that SpaceX is going to be used primarily for the militarization of space: hauling space based weaponry, weaponry drop ships, surveillance satellites, etc.
I still feel glad for the SpaceX engineers and scientists who succeed and doing new and innovative stuff. But their employer is just like every other military contractor sucking on the unlimited teets of the US Government. What a waste of taxpayer money.
I grew up in during the Cold War and I'm sick of this shit. America always thinking it has to dominate any country that doesn't bow down before it.
It will be comms mostly, and mostly civilian. That other stuff will happen, but it'll be dwarfed by the effort of supporting several tens of millions of Starlink users.
Just because you personally prefer to be subjugated doesn't mean anyone else does. That necessarily means being able to defend yourself from bad actors, and history has proven the best way to do that is by investing in technology.
I wonder if we're at the point where this shoreline critical infrastructure would need more physical security / protection from the drones of adversaries.
The Louisiana location has two major benefits:
Sun-Synchronous Orbit (SSO) Access: Launches into SSO have a launch angle of ~98° relative to the equator (i.e. south), and launching from Louisiana gives a direct launch corridor over the Gulf of America without crossing major cities.
SpaceX plans to launch millions of datacenter satellites in SSO, so this is the perfect launch site for their use case. SSO launches from their existing launch sites (Boca Chica and Cape Canaveral) would overfly land.
Existing Methane pipelines: They are next to existing Gulf Coast natural gas/LNG infra, making bulk liquid methane delivery significantly easier. Currently for Starbase, there are no pipelines and methane is shipped in via truck. Delivering the ~1,000 metric tons of methane required for a single Starship launch requires 50-60 tanker truck deliveries.
It's poor form to let a crybaby bully have his way.
https://www.hagerty.com/media/great-reads/how-darryl-cuttell...
Do you hate reading most science fiction? Because the ratio of dystopic to utopic scifi is pretty unbalanced.
Sometimes people want to talk about science stuff without talking about human fallout and political implications. It’s perfectly fine to want an occasional break from those types of discussions.
I just turned it all off, though it makes me fear for the future. Feels like the early stages of societal collapse.
What is reductive in the richest man on Earth not paying his dues on time? What nuance, what depth do you think is needed here?
tl;dw -- louisiana has a ton of natural resources and wonderful harbors, but has allowed corporations to get away with almost anything without paying their fair share of taxes, cleaning up their waste, or generally being held accountable. And likely related, there is a long history of rampant corruption in the area. With sea levels rising and cancerous pollution filling densely populated areas, life in Louisiana has generally become very difficult :(
The plans for the site involve extracting significant amounts of natural gas to make methane to burn for the rocket fuel. If they hit the launch levels they suggest (thousands of launches per year), this is not a small amount of greenhouse gases they'll be emitting which of course helps accelerate melting of the ice caps and rising sea levels, which could threaten the very site they've built it on.
No doubt one of the more compelling reasons for SpaceX to do it there (along with their given reasoning).
Either that or pay decent wages for American workers that'll drive up construction prices and worsen the inflation which is already crazy due to these criminal tariffs.
Probably a great deal of long term economic impact.
>The initial phase of Terafab is estimated to require approximately $16.8 billion in capital investments from SpaceX and Tesla, with potential future expansion phases bringing total investment much higher. This facility will employ at least 3,000 people, many of whom will be from Grimes and nearby Brazos County — continuing the trend of our other Texas sites where between 60% and 80% of new hires are local residents.
https://www.spacex.com/updates#terafab
That Starbase concept (not that the numbers are realistic by any means) is orders of magnitude more ambitious than what SpaceX does today with 22k employees.
That required a double take
The level of cynicism, shit-talking, and schadenfreude wish-casting in response to this is crazy. Start cheering on successes. Resist the deconstructionist mindset.
1) Political - The ideology/party spreading the doomerism promotes that they're the ones that can "fix it", if only you vote for them.
2) Adversarial countries, primarily China - Using the internet to convince members of western civilization to hate their civilization, hate their economic system, hate their history, hate their compatriots, adopt a no motivation defeatist attitude, etc., etc., and they can get our population to destroy itself from within without having to go to war with us.
Reject the doomerism, reject the negativity. Build. Invent. Create. Do your part to contribute to your civilization, to contribute to humanity, to move us forwards.
Sure, when success stops being the environmental destruction of every area he sets up shop in for SpaceX launches.
Current launch technology inevitably produces a lot of heat and noise and we don't have any rocket model that wouldn't at least rarely fail (and explode).
That said, extant Cape Canaveral does not seem to be lifeless. Lots of birds. IDK how the precise species composition has changed since 1960, but nature as a whole is a lot more resilient than people seem to think.
We'll need a few more of "him" to dig us out of this situation I reckon, but overall I still hope it's possible.
(Anyone asking antagonistic questions can go ahead and save their fingers, I won't respond to the petty comments.)
Removing parasitic elements in government spending and policy will. This starts with politics. We first need a healthy, educated, engaged, and safe population. All else follows. These are all things Elon actively works against. You aren't part of his future.
For instance, take Tesla. It wasn't anything revolutionary. Any auto manufacturer could have invested in battery technology and building a compelling EV, but they didn't. Same with manufacturing in America. Every manufacturer took as given that they have to outsource manufacturing to oversees and components to third parties. But it didn't have to be that way. It takes someone naive and optimistic enough to try something different.
...because Tesla sold luxury vehicles at relatively low volume. By the time Elon reneged his "$25,000 EV" promise, China was ready to export vehicles that actually hit that price point. The only thing preventing Americans from driving affordable EVs is Elon's federal protectionism. Is that really progress?
Obviously it's not a cheap car, but it's still mass market, not luxury.
Outside the US protectionist bubble, Tesla is seen as a luxury brand and their inability to deliver a $25,000 EV doesn't help.
https://teslamagz.com/tesla/model-y/tesla-model-y-becomes-ch...
Also South Korea, Australia, the EU, etc.
Elon wasn't just involved with DOGE, he was responsible for it. And Elon said he would cut $2 TRILLION in federal spending before ultimately claiming just $110 billion in savings -- which the GAO found he lied about. Considering out budget deficit is about $2 trillion, even his inflated claims are a rounding error.
(To say nothing of the fact that a lot of it was NOT useless spending. For example, Elon ended a program to fund countries in Central America to stop the spread of screw worms. Now screw worms are projected to cost $1.8 billion in damage to Texas alone.)
> while Elon encourages reporting on X
Elon has a track record of banning journalists on Twitter / X, the everything app, when they criticize him. Literally the opposite of encouraging reporting on X.
> We need more "Elons", people like him are actually helping dig us out of this mess.
I would encourage you to start reading independent news sources and forming your own opinions, rather than uncritically believing everything people in power feed to you. Otherwise you end up saying things online that are trivially disprovable.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/08/09/gao-repor...
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/flesh-eating-scr...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2024/01/09/elon-mus...
It did nothing of the sort.
Finding someone still pushing this line in 2026 is like seeing a thylacine in the wild. One can only stare in awe.
3,000 short term jobs doesn't put a dent in the thousands of jobs he has cut, not to mention the losses to our economy due to the tariffs, immigration policy, and deficit spending that he caused.
> We'll need a few more of "him" to dig us out of this situation I reckon
I'm of the impression that you can't corrupt your way out of corruption.
And why are CEOs as smart as engineers now.
This isn't Twitter. You don't have to suck up to him. He won't ever see this.
Although, given that I pointed out that Elon literally did the exact same thing, why do you trust him when he does it? Or is it simply that you're unaware that he does stuff like that?
Or maybe "was" is more accurate.
I was a huge believer in Elon musk. I invested and made a lot of money in Tesla before Model S had even entered serial production. Now? Fuck you Elon, go Peter Beck…
Something like 25% cut in new grants. 50% cuts to NSF... You could have just as easily found the data...
not spending ensures no voters know who you are, but the most spending doesn't result in the most votes
funny prisoner's dilemma for partisans, well, more amusing if you sell ad space
This is potentially one of the most out of touch comments I've seen here in a while, and that's saying something.
Predictability is extremely important for markets and planning and general welfare. He doesn’t have to randomly declare things on a Thursday that haven’t changed for decades and create anxiety among (you name it community or industry) just to stay in the headlines.
Donald Trump has destroyed predictability, as well as any semblance of functioning, predictable government. Trump is an extremely influential and powerful unilateral executive - in all the wrong ways.
Evidence you say? I guess tariff policy and a completely arbitrary war with Iran that roiled markets, just to name a couple from this year.
The OP wrote:
> You're being down-voted (and so shall I) but I think you're right. Despite all the animosity towards him, Musk is doing things that are economically meaningful for our nation.
In the context of the US building big things, ramping up manufacturing, doing Space exploration, &c. and the person I replied to wrote:
> Musk has done a huge amount to put us INTO this situation
What situation did he put us in to in this context? Did he put us in to the situation where we are building bigger things now? Are you saying that there was a situation that we were put in to and that situation only started when Trump was elected and prior to that we were... what? Building big things and trying to restore manufacturing and now we're also doing that under Trump?
Someone here should be specific about what they're talking about instead of just "Musk bad Trump bad". Yea they're both morons or whatever but what exactly are we supposedly criticizing here? Just that Trump got elected? Ok that's a boring conversation let's switch back to talking about manufacturing and building big projects in America.
https://itep.org/elon-musk-spacex-tax-breaks-doge/
- 2.9% inflation - Billions of dollars of grants for state-run energy projects - NATCAST - Healthy & stable funding for the sciences - Competent leaders at the federal and military levels to oversee large complex projects - Healthy partnerships with allies
Specific actions that have been taken by Trump (backed by Musk) that caused us to lose the above:
- Starting an unnecessary war with Iran - Cancelling grants for energy projects specifically in blue states - Imposing nonsensical tariffs on trade partners - Starting a full-blown trade war with Canada - Alienating other allies, ex. starting a middle-east conflict without any alliances (excl. Israel) - Specifically closing NATCAST because "illegal" - Gutting of science funding by DOGE & others - Removal of competent leaders & prioritization of loyalty over competence when choosing staff
I have a hard time taking anyone seriously when they bring up anything about Trump having a positive impact on manufacturing in America. For 4+ years he's been lying to the American public about how tariffs work and claiming that US consumers paying more taxes to the US gov't in the form of tariffs is going to 'return' manufacturing to the US. We have almost half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs in the US - explain to me again why this is a capacity problem?
If it's just complaining about Trump/Musk then yea sure let's complain about them in a different topic, but the OP was talking about Musk building big things and he undeniably has (or his companies have, rather).
In the US, his political beneficiaries have managed to "achieve" net negative migration to the US for the first time in 50 years, and the first decline in overall population in US history.
If this becomes the new trend (and if Musk gets his political desires fulfilled, it might), the hole is getting much, much deeper while our capacity to climb out is being severely impaired.
And oh yea, he killed hundreds of thousands of kids, mostly under 5.
And if we do, how are we going to fight them? By shooting missiles at them?
I get that rockets are cool and a lot of people in the tech bubble think that starlink is the greatest thing ever, but most people don't care about that nearly as much as they care about seeing their children die from preventable diseases he cut the funding for or getting violently ill because he drove thousands of food inspectors and researchers out of a job.
Handling the enormous federal debt that he continues to play a part in worsening is going to very painful in the long run.
Of course Musk talks big. He is almost always late. Lots of things have never happened, or have not yet worked (but they’re still trying)
At the same time he has monumental successes that nobody, ever, has achieved. Worlds safest car (multiple times) worlds highest selling car (model y), car of the year, massive factories building at a speed and quality that made Toyotas CEO say they’re in trouble and have a lot to improve.
The whole supercharger network that smashes every other one.
World’s first reusable rocket, done it 300 times now. Only two others have done it once. By far, by far more launches than every country and company in the world put together. Starship coming along.
To say that he never does anything is a very, very strange set of blinders to view the world through
"Nobody ever" doesn't really feel accurate here.
>Worlds safest car (multiple times)...
According to which body? Tesla's interpretation of NHTSA data? Some other organization? Did other cars prior to Tesla's inception obtain this title "multiple times"?
>... worlds highest selling car (model y)...
In 2023, the Y peaked at ~1.22 million. In 1923, the Model T sold ~2.09 million.
>... car of the year...
Numerous bodies label things "car of the year", and many cars were named that before and after Teslas were produced.
Interesting. Perhaps ironic?
If only society cared about genuinely good people like they seem to care about Musk. It's puzzling.
Social media is unhealthy. You know what else is unhealthy? Hacker News' constant bashing of every. single. thing. ever.
The "Restoring the shoreline" and Rebuilding the marshlands" paragraphs below the images are almost exactly the same. The first sentence is exactly the same.
As an engineer working on cpra projects in the past, I've wanted to reword a variety things but was forced to use their legal language.
It's mostly a good thing as it keeps things properly defined in a political context that are meant to have specific technical meanings (like marsh, beach, rebuild vs restore).
FWIW, the writing style and tone match pre-LLM SpaceX writing. Of course you can prompt an LLM to mimic style, but somehow the regression-to-average blandness shines through. That can be hard to distinguish from bog standard corporate speak though.
Ten pads and thousands of flights per year sure will accelerate Golden Dome, err... I mean "going to Mars"
[0] https://www.klfy.com/louisiana/interactive-map-shows-which-p...
But are they building it ghost to ghost?
Florida is more interesting than people realize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Coast
I spent my childhood fishing in a swimsuit every day I could. I loved it. But as an adult, any south of Ocala and east of Gainesville is a cultural wasteland (with cutouts for Miami and Tampa).
State of Louisiana was probably on their hands and knees begging. The construction would last decades and anyone with a strong back that can be told what to do and do it will have a job. It would help lift a lot of people in that area out of poverty.
logistically, i wonder how long it takes to ship from Starbase Texas to Louisiana via barge. It has to be easier to get Starships to Louisiana than the East side of Florida.
It's not gonna help us do shit. It will line the pockets of the usual wealthy Louisiana oil barons and politicians similar to the Meta Datacenter that got backed door approved by our politicians.
Man, I was hoping they would pick Alaska (as it's even better for launching into those orbits) - we could really use new industries other than just resource extraction, but Louisiana makes a lot of sense, I just am surprised that there's actually the available land there to do this. Interesting.
When the weather agrees, yes. Sooooo many launches are scheduled around weather patterns and are affected by weather delays - I'd be shocked if LA didn't have 3-4x more 'launchanble weather' days on average compared to Alaska.
I'm sure we'll get to the point where we can launch and land without regard to weather outside of the extremes, much as we have with air travel, but we are far from there today.
Icing might be a problem? I would expect there to be basically no reasonable icing accretion possible well before max q? But I'm not sure because that's not my field.
Regardless, if we're going to be building data centers in space to avoid NIMBYs, we can build rocket infrastructure in Alaska to avoid NIMBYs too. And other infrastructure too? Maybe. I know the SpinLaunch lunatics (I mean that in the most loving way, I love that crazy idea even though it seems insane to me) were getting some sort of permit to launch from Adak. I have been out there a few times and I wish we would try to build more infrastructure out there too... with the NW passage being more traversable due to global warming there's could be a lot more infrastructure there too.
Liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellants are loaded at cryogenic temperatures -- boiling point is -183C for O2, -161C for CH4; SpaceX does some amount of subcooling so the propellants may be even cooler than that.
Ice accumulation while just sitting on the pad is a given, even in tropical climates (the water just freezes out of the air). Might even be a greater problem in (say) florida or louisiana than in Alaska given higher humidity.
I would absolutely love if we were building launch infrastructure up here. We have tons of open space for it, Cape Chiniak is "fine" but kind of remote. What I wish we would do is put some launcher's on the road system, or close to it, then build out our own space infrastructure here in AK. We really need something other than just resource extraction up here and asteroid mining and space manufacturing is going to be particularly bad for the Alaskan economy. Once it's cheaper to get a big rock from space, or battery tech gets just a little bit cheaper, the economy up here is in deep trouble.
My little startup is trying to do build some tools up here for local airlines using AI, and I'm able to make money at it? Which is cool - there's not a huge amount of technically talented people here compared to Seattle or the Bay Area, but there's still smart people in these parts, we have resources, and we have available land and permissive building rules. That is so crazy valuable in a world where NIMBY rules everything down south. Like, obviously I don't want them drilling for oil in DNP, but you know, I have been to and worked in the arctic, I'm pretty fine if we were building things up there, or on these remote Aleutian islands, or in these relatively empty and uninhabited/uninhabitable places.
I wish these companies would look north to build. There are some Nimby d-bags up here, but there are FAR fewer of them than any other place I've ever lived. For context on a hyper micro-scale, my driveway permit outside of Anchorage for our cabin was handled for free with a friendly email to the borough and them wishing me luck. Obviously, other people's mileage may vary, especially for things like giant projects, dams, mines, etc. but the burden here is so much less - you can almost just... feel it. Despite being "harder" to do things up here, it's remarkably permissive.
Maybe when my little startup is more capable and I've got more money coming in, and I'm spitting out drones from my little machine shop, maybe I'll be able to do more?
1. https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
Instead of installing MWs of illegal gas generation and also still causing local electricity rates to spike, why not arrange to buy down the electricity of local ratepayers and also comply with existing laws & regulations?
It's worth asking why operators aren't doing that yet. I suspect it's because neither OAI nor Anthropic have an extra $50B-$100B to put out at the moment. We'll see what happens post-IPO.
The worst that would happen is that it becomes difficult to build in convenient places. That certainly would be annoying. But the problem with space as the solution is that space is by far the least convenient place imaginable, with the possible exception of the bottom of the deep ocean.
In space you can just start. Nobody is really going to stop you.
(I know nominally they’re not visible but they are shortly after launch while moving into position, and at large scale that would be happening all the time, not to mention the other side of burning up in the atmosphere after a few years)
Sounds really neat, but "incredibly ambitious announcement" from an Elon Musk company is starting to wear thin.
Is this real, or will it join the graveyard of other incredibly ambitious projects that were eventually abandoned to focus on the next incredibly ambitious project.
[x] Partially reusable rocket that dropped cost to orbit by an order of magnitude. And no, the space shuttle (while an amazing piece of engineering), doesn't really count. It cost a billion+ to refurbish and did nothing to make space more accessible. Now we have businesses that exist purely because the Falcon 9 exists. Heck, the entire new space industry got validated (and hence got investment) due to SpaceX's success.
[x] Returning human spaceflight capability to the US at a fraction of the price, using the same reusable rocket platform after the old defense primes failed to do so. And then making it cheap enough that it has now also flown about half as many private missions as it did for NASA.
[x] Global satellite constellation providing gigabit-scale internet with 10000+ satellite (once written off by "experts" as yet another "incredibly ambitious project" that will never happen).
[x] Commercializing and bringing down the cost of electric cars to the point where they are actually a viable option now (unlike the compliance cars made by OEMs 10 years ago).
[x] Building the largest rocket to ever exist that now has a clear path to being the first ever fully reusable launch vehicle.
[x] A BCI implant that has now brought back mobility and communication ability to multiple patients with debilitating conditions.
Given that each of these were things that no one had done successfully before, or had failed spectacularly - I don't really care that they took longer than initially planned.
There is, in fact, a graveyard here. It is mostly filled with confident predictions that his companies would never do the things they have since done.
Wow! Was there a Musk company dedicated to building that? Where is the press release announcing it? Surely it must have been a big deal if you are so excited about it's failure!
> And FSD is coming next year now
It is already here. You can hail one right now in multiple cities.
And in my own car, I use it every day and have for 2+ years. For the $3k I paid in 2019, I definitely got what I paid for. It's also gotten dramatically better since then. It drives me to and from work every day without having to so much as touch the wheel. And there is no 2018/19 non-Tesla that can do what it does.
So yes, by all means, keep listing the things you think prove Musk is a fraud. You're mostly just making my point for me.
For example, SpaceX is responsible for a massive spike in orbital launches [1].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...
Including robotaxis, tesla semi-trucks, hyperloop, optimus, roadster 2.0, cheap whole home batteries, true FSD, Mars landing, nueralink, and more I'm sure.
It is difficult for me to get excited about a decades long, ambitious project when the follow through rate is <10%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell
just one launch base will transform the Louisiana economy.
Pretty cynical corpo-ambiguity-speak, even by Musk standards.
We're supposed to be happy they're promising not to develop one-hundred percent of the land footprint? They will leave at least 0.00001% of land area as wetlands and therefore we oughta be happy?
Such empty bullshit it's more insulting they even put an environment-leaning section on the site. Just say "fuck it, our space fetish is more important than the wetlands."
"Promises" or "commitments" like this need to be evaluated based on the previous behavior of the people "making" them (although they were very careful with working to not use either of those words, and just imply them)
Evolution has done stranger things, but my bet is that the birds will find somewhere else to be over learning to not be startled by nearby earth-rumbling explosions.
A rocket launch every hour or so as SpaceX is promising might be quite different.
You can still choose to read that cynically, but I think the cynical angle is taking moral ecological credit for a pragmatic engineering reality :P
Having that intermittently a couple times per day I think will be very disruptive.
I was just trying to say that the marshland restoration stuff is likely not lip service, insofar as they actually do need wetland buffer zone to keep their launchpads above sea level.
Rockets sometimes fail. SpaceX has one of the lowest failure rates in the industry, but that's still ~0.5%. When they fail near launch, they cause humongous explosions. Because of this, anyone with even a tiny bit of care for people launches over the ocean, so that when it goes oops, it only harms some fish.
The existing launch sites SpaceX uses are good for launching into prograde (Starbase, TX and Cape Canaveral, FL) and retrograde (Vandenberg SFB, CA) orbits, but they are all either unable or kind of marginal for launching into polar/very highly inclined orbits. (Starbase, TX cannot do it at all, Vandenberg SFB, CA has limitations on when you can launch, and Cape Canaveral, FL needs to fly a dogleg which reduces performance.)
Part of their plans for the space datacenters involve launching a lot of mass into sun-synchronous (which is very highly inclined) orbits. For that, they need a launch site with the ocean either to the north or to the south.
http://maps.lsuagcenter.com/floodmaps/?FIPS=22113
I'm no Elon fan but they're probably aware of this. 15 ft tall stilts are pretty high and expensive if you want to build a house there. Probably a tiny fraction of their overall CapEx with this project.
Hurricanes are slow and relatively predictable, and they're burning enough money to be able to truck everything that's not flood resistant inland.
Prove me wrong bro
Fuck Elon get out of my state.
I still feel glad for the SpaceX engineers and scientists who succeed and doing new and innovative stuff. But their employer is just like every other military contractor sucking on the unlimited teets of the US Government. What a waste of taxpayer money.
I grew up in during the Cold War and I'm sick of this shit. America always thinking it has to dominate any country that doesn't bow down before it.
Just because you personally prefer to be subjugated doesn't mean anyone else does. That necessarily means being able to defend yourself from bad actors, and history has proven the best way to do that is by investing in technology.