In his autobiography, LeTurneau talks about one of the land trains being nuclear powered, casually as if it was just another increment. This man was on another level. His faith was pretty fantastic too, it's a really enjoyable read of how he did a bootstraps-pull-up but also with the appropriate amount of good fortune ("fortune?") that generally leads to massive successes. The man was a prodigy/genius, absolutely amazing and from very humble roots.
Now, the nuclear land train didn't materialize, but this guy is the guy that Elon Musk wished he was. The OG ironman back in the 50's or whenever you'd classify his active years to be in. Presumably because he died, on the nuclear powerplant front, but I got the sense from reading it that he was adored enough that despite the safety risks he could have relatively handily gotten something like that in production.
Which would have changed the nature of our transportation today in a big kind of way. If you make a portable nuclear generator that can sit on a military land train (and this man could, just read his engineering reasoning you'll see why I speak of it with a sense of awe and wonder), then you can make that same generator and use it to power rural neighborhoods, remote electric vehicle stations, etc. The cost of infrastructure maintenance and installation would go down, and we'd have one more good option during the energy crisis today, with global warming and such as it is.
Really and truly a peek into what could have been almost our current "alternative future". Probably not a bad one either, though presumably there would be negative consequences like Appalachia getting hit more hard economically due to further lowered coal dependence, etc.
Wasn't it rather common for the time to fantasize about everything being powered by nuclear reactors? (Think: Ford Nucleon, ideas about civilian nuclear powered ships or aircraft)
I also don't get the Musk hate. That man created more than 100k jobs for Americans, made rockets land and cars go electric. And with "made", I mean that he enabled the engineers at these companies to do what they did. If you don't believe that then mentally substract Musk from SpaceX or Tesla and ask where they would they be today? (Answers: Tesla would have died in 2004 or soon after because Tesla was not much more than an idea back then and SpaceX would have never existed at all).
"He enabled the engineers at these companies to do what they did" is a weird way of saying he's an extremely abusive manager.
Work at enough companies and you'll see that a lot of them succeed despite their "founder"/owner, not because of them. They end up surrounded by people who insulate them enough, clean up their messes, and so on.
With a competent manager, it's likely Tesla would have long ago mastered things like "paint a car properly", not taken a decade to make a single-gear transmission that lasts more than 30,000 miles (and can be driven in heavy rain without risk of water ingestion) and "have body panels align the same on the left side of the car as on the right", as well as not faced the huge production problems they did because Musk was obsessed with switching to automated production.
The man sent an email saying that Raptor 2 engine development might bankrupt SpaceX about 1/2 a year ago but is now spending lots of money on Twitter for reasons that make little sense.
If his dream truly is Mars then funding SpaceX is a much better use of his funds and time.
It's weird to me that so many Musk critics (not all mind, not myself..) seem so confident in the Raptor 2 / Starship program, seemingly for little reason other than 'believe the opposite of everything Elon says'
The way I see it, that project is in trouble. The last time it flew it caught fire after landing, and the time before that it blew up. I know rockets in development blowing up is nothing new for SpaceX or the industry generally, but even so things don't look so rosey to me. In one of the tests the engine was plainly seen to be burning its copper lining, which is exactly the problem with engine cycles using oxygen-rich mixtures, and this precise difficulty is why nobody has ever succeeded in making an engine like Raptor 2 before. This isn't like Merlins, there was nothing particularly novel about the Merlin engines. Gas generator cycle burning LOX / RP-1 is 1950s technology. Raptor is a new kind of engine and success is by no means a foregone conclusion; it may fail no matter how much money is thrown at it. Extant material and/or manufacturing technology may not be sufficient for this sort of engine.
As for bankrupting SpaceX; if the Raptor engines don't work, then Starship doesn't work. And if Starship doesn't work, then Starlink probably makes no economic sense (even with Starship working, it seems questionable to me.) If they can't make any of that work, they're stuck doing satellite launches on Falcon 9. Is that enough to keep SpaceX in business? I think they've already been using Starlink to buy launches from themselves to cook their books, so if Starlink is on the precipice of failure, I think the whole enterprise is at risk.
As for Elon Musk still having a lot of money, that's technically not SpaceX's money and SpaceX could go bankrupt without Elon Musk ever being at risk of bankruptcy. And would he even continue to fund SpaceX if Raptor fails?
> If his dream truly is Mars
I don't believe it is (I know he claims it, I just don't believe him. I think the whole business is about Defense contracts, particularly for massive constellations.) But assuming for the sake of argument that Mars is earnestly his plan: for that to make any sense at all he'd need a rocket like Starship. And if the Raptor 2 can't be made to work properly, then his Mars plan is kaput anyway. Why would he bail out the company if his idea for the company is a technical failure?
Yes, Falcon 9 and Starlink are each separately enough to keep space x in business. One easy observation is that company are trying to support themselves with only sat internet. Also companies are trying to support themselves by "only" being a rocket launch for hire. SpaceX is beating all of those. So yeah, they have a business.
Maybe SpaceX could survive as a satellite launch company using Falcon 9, but if we accept the premise of Elon Musk funding this company to go to Mars, would he continue to provide that funding if plans for the Mars missions go up in smoke?
As for Starlink's commercial viability, it seems reasonable enough if they can launch hundreds of satellites at once with a cheap fully-reusable rocket. Right now they can't do that, they can only use a semi-reusable rocket that launches tens of satellites at a time. So far they've used this to launch 2000+ satellites, which is impressive, but is that enough? I don't think so, because they've received approval for 12,000 and sought approval for 30,000. What they've launched thusfar with Falcon 9 seems to only be a small fraction of what they want. The constellation isn't a one-time expense either; it requires constant upkeep because these satellites are low and only last a few years.
I think they've been making do with what they have, knowing that Starship will be necessary to make the business work in the full scale / long term.
> Also companies are trying to support themselves by "only" being a rocket launch for hire.
Well that's the other thing isn't it? SpaceX is very invested in designing rockets, but doesn't seem to give a shit about colony technology. Doesn't that seem odd to you? Elon Musk constantly talks about going to Mars, but isn't interested in actually developing a Mars colony. Instead he'll leave that part to other groups, and focus on making the spaceship that will get them there. In other words, he's building a bridge to nowhere and is counting on somebody else building the destination required for his bridge to make sense. For a man who supposedly endeavors for Mars, this seems absurd. Instead of buying twitter, he could be throwing tens of billions of dollars at colony R&D. But he isn't.
I don't think Starship is for going to Mars. I think it's for rapidly launching and replenishing large constellations of satellites. Probably for military purposes.
As a long-time Musk hater, I can tell you, I don't hate the player, I hate the game. I hate that, for a while, the most powerful man in the world (Trump) and the richest man in the world (Musk), were both essentially Twitter trolls with side gigs.
All of his companies are fine, but it just sucks that we're at a point in time where the way he behaves is basically optimal behavior from a market standpoint.
If Musk just stuck to SpaceX and Tesla, a lot fewer people would have problems with him. The issue is that he comes across as a smarter-than-thou narcissist who needs to "solve" every problem [1], can't stand being told to shut up (cf. coronavirus restrictions, or the Thailand cave rescue incident), and generally acts like a petulant asshole.
I'll also point out that--in my opinion--Tesla just isn't as revolutionary as people think it is. Yes, they are today the largest producer of electric vehicles, but there is a very good chance that they will not retain this position by the end of the decade. And while Tesla may have accelerated adoption of electric vehicles, without Tesla, it's still likely that we would be moving to electric vehicles before much longer.
[1] I could insert a long discussion about why his efforts on Hyperloop and Loop are worse than useless, but details aren't really germane.
> If Musk just stuck to SpaceX and Tesla, a lot fewer people would have problems with him. The issue is that he comes across as a smarter-than-thou narcissist who needs to "solve" every problem [1], can't stand being told to shut up (cf. coronavirus restrictions, or the Thailand cave rescue incident), and generally acts like a petulant asshole.
Even if he "just stuck to SpaceX and Tesla," he'd also have to stop over-promising to the point where he seems like a pathological liar.
The daemonization of nuclear during the cold war, prerequisite for the MAD threat, led to hypersecure research centers, centralization of funding and research, preventing tinkerers from studying new solutions, and ultimately nuclear innovation completely halting. As you said, many suggest that if we had left it run its course, we might have seen nuclear stacks the size of a washing machine powering neighborhoods, and other applications entirely unimagined today.
Given what happens when the average Joe encounters a small, moveable, scrappable machine [1][2], I am pretty happy we never saw your nuclear washing machine-sized power plants...
>LeTurneau talks about one of the land trains being nuclear powered, casually as if it was just another increment
This was a decade before hippies and greenpeace. It was casual to them. It was like saying "we're gonna use batteries and DC motors" would be today. About the most condemning response you'd get is "good luck with that I don't think the numbers pencil out".
In case you weren't aware, the US also pursued nuclear powered airplanes[1] with actual test units built. They're still sitting out there in Idaho a few miles off the highway and you can visit certain times of the year. Reading the placards (or the wiki) honestly scares me a bit, despite my thought that nuclear power makes a lot of sense for our energy needs. I don't love the idea of 500mph reactors up above me, even with modern airplane safety records.
This line of thinking about the future - large vehicles with nuclear engines - was what led to battletech/mechwarrior I am sure.
Ridiculous sized stompy robots powered by "fusion" engines and the default measurement for something is in tons - including targeting computers for projectile prediction.
The Pacific Rim-like awe and wonder is cool.(I am a mecha fan, however ridiculous it may be.) The actual effectiveness compared to other options is less so...
A nuclear version would not have been competitive - they were very special purpose vehicles; after the DEW line heavy lift helicopters became available and made them obsolete.
I don't know if I dreamed this or read the idea somewhere. It would be to have a nuclear reactor submerged in a canal (achieving cooling) and it could be propelled (via tracks on the side) from place to place.
This made me laugh a fair bit, haha. Many thanks for that.
The man was a 5 year old in an adult's body, in terms of size. Nothing was too large for the man. He would have been the Mecha king if he had lived for 50 more years, assuredly. XD
Now, the nuclear land train didn't materialize, but this guy is the guy that Elon Musk wished he was. The OG ironman back in the 50's or whenever you'd classify his active years to be in. Presumably because he died, on the nuclear powerplant front, but I got the sense from reading it that he was adored enough that despite the safety risks he could have relatively handily gotten something like that in production.
Which would have changed the nature of our transportation today in a big kind of way. If you make a portable nuclear generator that can sit on a military land train (and this man could, just read his engineering reasoning you'll see why I speak of it with a sense of awe and wonder), then you can make that same generator and use it to power rural neighborhoods, remote electric vehicle stations, etc. The cost of infrastructure maintenance and installation would go down, and we'd have one more good option during the energy crisis today, with global warming and such as it is.
Really and truly a peek into what could have been almost our current "alternative future". Probably not a bad one either, though presumably there would be negative consequences like Appalachia getting hit more hard economically due to further lowered coal dependence, etc.