“Having a rocket ascend a few hundred meters and blow up is not a success to me,” says Dallas Kasaboski, an analyst who covers the space industry for the research firm Analysys Mason.
Reusing both parts of a rocket, instead of just one, sounds like a modestly more ambitious undertaking — if you can do it once, why not twice? — but in fact, it’s exponentially harder, since the amount of energy to be dissipated while returning to Earth goes up not as a linear function of velocity but its square. The energy gets turned into heat, which sends the temperature of the Starship soaring into the thousands of degrees, such that it glows white-hot. To reduce the effects of this heat, the rocket’s exterior is coated in thermal tiles. But these are heavy. So is the internal bracing required to hold the ship together during the turbulence of reentry.
For critics, like Substack writer Will Lockett, the fact that Starship has failed so many times in a row is proof that the concept is fundamentally unworkable. “SpaceX is having to make the rockets too light, resulting in them being fragile, meaning that just the vibrations from operation with a fraction of its expected payload would be enough to destroy the rocket,” he wrote in one typically acerbic post.
“I remember reading a book in the 1970s about how the space shuttle would be flying every two weeks and cost low hundreds of dollars per pound to orbit,” says Grant Anderson, co-founder of the space-systems-maker Paragon Space Development Corporation, which helped launch SpaceX in 2002. “It never did that, obviously.” … When would we know if Starship is toast? One major red flag is persistent failures. “If you have a failure at the same stage twice for the same reason, and they can’t solve the problem, that’s an indication that there’s a design flaw that’s more than just an ‘Oops!’” says Anderson.
Readers: What do you think? Is it possible that Elon Musk and SpaceX are right and the expert consensus is wrong? Is there any way that Starship could one day make it into orbit without exploding? And, perhaps one day many years or decades from now, that both booster and Starship could land back on Earth?
One thing that you’d expect the Experimental Aircraft Association, with revenue of more than $60 million per year, to do is fund the development of new powerplants. There has never been any significant progress in aviation without first an improvement in engines. A low-power high-efficiency turbine engine, for example, would enable the creation of all kinds of dramatically superior aircraft. But none of the kit companies or even the certified four-seat aircraft companies can readily afford to invest what is required.
Enter Turbotech, a startup in the Islamic Republic of France. They say that they have a 140 hp turboprop engine that burns fuel at approximately the same rate as a 140 hp Rotax (piston) engine:
How long before this can be dropped into a certified airframe? The founders said that if everything goes perfect and nothing at all has to be changed in their current design, the engine could be EASA/FAA-certified in three years.
An analysis with some numbers (I disagree with the price discussion):
I don’t think it is Turbotech, but the Canadians claim to have a “turboshaft engine” in their Janus-I Flying Suitcase:
The ultimate license plate for light aircraft enthusiasts (a car parked at Oshkosh and, presumably, that will seen at Sun ‘n Fun in Lakeland, Florida in April:
I have a Chinese Govee temperature sensor above the fiberglass insulation in a mostly unventilated attic here in Florida. During a reroof there were periods of time when the attic was covered with
concrete barrel tiles over hot mop tar paper
modern peel-and-stick underlayment only
clay barrel tiles (a medium-dark red/brown) over the modern underlayment
Weather conditions were reasonably consistent during these three time periods, i.e., hot and sunny.
Temps in the lower part of attic (only about 4′ high; probe on top of some fiberglass insulation above the finished ceiling) went from roughly 100 degrees underneath the old intact roof (concrete tiles) to 120-130 degrees under the peel-and-stick underlayment only (white in color, but apparently not very reflective), and back down to around 100 degrees underneath the new clay tiles over underlayment. Here’s a chart from the Govee app:
In late July, maybe the hottest time of year, the temps went up to a max of 115 degrees.
Speaking of Chinese tech, here’s an idea for an awning that can automatically deploy over a parked car:
☀️ Mainiu's automatic car awnings are becoming popular in China to avoid cars becoming boiling hot when parked outside during the summer. pic.twitter.com/pAaiWmmO2V
It’s a right-wing conspiracy theory that elites want to keep expanding human population until the peasants are forced to eat bugs. Debunking this theory, a recent article in MIT’s Technology Review, “How poop could help feed the planet”:
Nutrients crucial for agriculture are in “short supply,” but certainly there is no reason to close the border to low-skill migrants or reconsider the goal of another doubling of U.S. population:
Could this possibly work? If you live in Seattle you’re already eating food derived from human poop:
A recent review in the Journal of Environmental Management, in fact, touts wastewater treatment plants as “renewable biological nitrogen mines” that can supply the essential but expensive component from reclaimed sewage sludge at a time when many farmers are finding it harder to obtain. Sewage can, the authors conclude, “become an important raw material for the sustainable production of organic-mineral fertilizers from renewable resources available locally, with a low carbon footprint.” Extracting nitrogen and phosphorus for reuse can also help remove those pollutants from the plants’ outflow and reduce the amount of organic matter destined for landfills and manure lagoons, which store and manage huge concentrations of livestock waste. Reinserting ourselves into nature’s recycling system, in other words, could help us meet the planet’s growing food needs without unduly fouling the environment.
The Varcor system heats the incoming poop and separates it into solid matter and vapor. A process called mechanical vapor recompression allows the compressed steam to be reused as a heat source while the water and ammonia vapor are separated and distilled. The conveyor belt/dryer carries the remaining solids to the giant crepe-making spindles and then into a waiting truck below. The plant is now selling three to four truckloads of this dry fertilizer to farms every week.
What’s happening with the population collapse that Elon Musk keeps warning about? It’s exacerbated by what the Technology Review authors call “the planet’s burgeoning population”:
Waste-to-fertilizer strategies, even if scaled up, won’t be enough on their own to help feed the planet’s burgeoning population. By viewing people as not only consumers but also producers, however, they could help us take far better advantage of some underrated natural assets that won’t run dry anytime soon.
Oddly, that directive conflicts with one signed on January 20th, 2025, triggering the withdrawal of offshore wind lease areas and retroactive review of already-approved projects. This initial memorandum threatens not only a once-rapidly developing U.S. power source, but also undermines America’s energy independence and, by extension, our national security.
She pointed out “the industry that took over 20 years to build up in the US is being destroyed in months” (offshore wind is such a great idea commercially that almost nothing was done during the 12 years of Democrat rule within the past 20 years?).
From my conversations with people who invest in renewable energy projects around the world, the main limitation for wind in the US is the lack of modern DC transmission lines. Each state gets to regulate power transmission and the typical regulator is hostile to cheap out-of-state power, unlike in China where they ship power up to 1,900 miles with a single line that can power 50 million houses. The New York Times pointed this out in 2024:
In the United States, the best places for wind tend to be in the blustery Midwest and Great Plains. But many areas are now crowded with turbines and existing electric grids are clogged, making it difficult to add more projects. Energy companies want to expand the grid’s capacity to transport even more wind power to population centers, but getting permits for transmission lines and building them has become a brutal slog that can take more than a decade.
The transmission line Sprouse was talking about is the Grain Belt Express, a planned eight-hundred-mile-long power line that will connect wind farms in southwestern Kansas to more densely populated areas farther East. The Grain Belt Express is designed to carry five thousand megawatts of electricity, enough to power approximately 3.2 million homes. The project has been in the works since 2010. It was taken over by Invenergy, a Chicago-based energy company, in 2020. After years of lawsuits and legislative wrangling, regulators in Missouri granted it final approval in October, 2023. If all goes as planned, construction will start in early 2025 and be completed in 2028. One of the biggest obstacles that the United States faces in its fight against climate change is getting renewable energy to the places that need the most electricity. Many of the best locations for wind and solar farms are, by their very nature, remote. And moving that energy elsewhere requires navigating a byzantine permitting process for transmission lines
When I pointed out that offshore wind couldn’t make economic sense without dollars extracted directly from taxpayers during construction and indirectly from peasants during operation, the Maskachusetts Democrat responded with “MA locked in a 20-yr contract with Vineyard Wind for 9 cents/ kWh” as though that were a favorable rate for wholesale electricity. I quickly found that right now, in the middle of peak summer demand, the wholesale rate in New England is about 4 cents per kWh ($40 per megawatt-hour):
Solar, of course, is now down to about 1.3 cents per kWh in sunny places and never more than about 2.2 cents in the U.S. (NREL). See also a real-world 2024 project in Saudi Arabia at 1.3 cents per kWh. As of 2024, the NREL nerds said that onshore wind was just barely competitive with current wholesale electricity rates (4.2 cents/kWh) and offshore was 3-4.5X the cost:
How come Europeans can do offshore wind, then? The Europeans are able to do everything with water at a much lower cost than Americans can. They don’t have the Jones Act that requires everything to be done with U.S.-built, American-crewed ships and, therefore, don’t have to pay 5X the world market price for an oceangoing vessel. A law firm that specializes in these “mine out the taxpayer” projects says “A typical offshore wind farm may require as many as 25 types of vessels–to lay cable, transfer crew, address surveying, lift components, monitor the environment, install, maintain and service turbines–many of which will require construction of new Jones Act-compliant vessels”.
A male (sort of) Massachusetts Democrat responded to the above data with “You are such a fool.”
The magical thinking that what is currently inefficient will some day become efficient reminds me of the enthusiasts for California’s high-speed rail project, but we also see it among those who promote nuclear power plants. As far as I know, no nuclear plant built in the past 50 years has made a profit. The most recent plant (in Georgia) was 7 years late and $17 billion over budget (the final cost should be about $35 billion). Yet the nuclear power enthusiast will posit a hypothetical world in which Americans are capable of building a nuclear power plant on time and within budget. In that fantasy world, the cost of nuclear power becomes competitive with solar+storage, wind, or natural gas.
In the latest Texas flooding tragedy, it seems that emergency alerts were sent out to mobile phones. As with hurricane warnings, however, it fell to the individual to determine whether the phone’s current location merited going back to sleep or running for higher ground at top speed.
Why can’t it be a computer’s job to intersect the alert with the phone’s location and, ignoring any sleep silence modes, recommend a definitive course of action? (A year ago, I asked “Why is it a human’s job to do something that can be done much more reliably by a computer?”)
The Wall Street Journal says that flash flood warnings went out, but they weren’t specific:
The National Weather Service said that on Thursday morning it briefed emergency management. By 1:18 p.m. it issued a watch that said locally heavy rainfall could cause flash flooding across eight counties, including Kerr, where Camp Mystic, the girls summer camp that was heavily struck by the flooding, is located. Kerr County is dotted with riverside summer camps as well as recreational-vehicle parks and hotels for vacationers. Overnight it would become the most severely impacted county.
At that time, forecasters expected a maximum of 3 to 7 inches of rain.
The first flash-flood warning—which means flooding is imminent or already happening—came at 1:14 a.m. Friday from the National Weather Service office in nearby San Antonio hours ahead of the Guadalupe’s rise.
Two hours later, the office issued a catastrophic warning, or a flash-flood emergency, for the region.
The warning covered “eight counties” and, in fact, the vast majority of people in those eight counties didn’t have anything to fear. Kerr County alone is 1,100 square miles. The typical resident of the U.S. is not a hydrologist. Why isn’t it a computer’s job to figure out whether a phone is currently located in a river’s floodplain and, if so, provide specific directions regarding how to reach higher ground?
Here’s a FEMA flood map showing what I think is part of the camp at upper right. It shows that there is always an “area of minimal flood hazard” close to any place that has been calculated to be at risk of flooding.
Here’s a photo from the New York Times that shows how close a lot of camp buildings were to areas of perfect safety and how critical a person’s GPS location would be to the safe/unsafe decision.
Below is an example warning from the National Weather Service’s X account, which seems to require a lot of interpretation, e.g., knowledge of where one’s location is relative to the Guadalupe River. A typical young American doesn’t know north from south (I remember calling a mobile carrier store on Route 9 in the Boston suburbs and asking the clerk if he was on the north or south side of this road, which run east-west. He was completely stumped by the question and, even after seeking assistance from some fellow workers, couldn’t answer it.) Also, the warnings were issued only in English and Spanish. In a country with an asylum-based immigration system there is no reason to expect someone living in the U.S. to speak either English or Spanish. A phone app, however, can work in any language supported by a smartphone (77 for Android; roughly 40 for iPhone).
The official government attitude seems to be to keep doing whatever failed in the past. In a world where almost everyone has a smartphone (taxpayer funded for those who don’t work), the go-to idea is an early 1900s-style siren system (PBS):
Another idea from the same PBS article is that more humans can be a substitute for a computer system:
The “roof is failing” sensor in a house is typically a homeowner noticing a stain on a ceiling.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to put down sensor tape on the plywood roof deck before the peel-and-stick material, shingles, tiles, or whatever are applied? If there is a leak in the roofing system or flashing and water gets down to the wood layer there can be a notification of exactly where the leak is happening.
Even if mass-produced by our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in Asia this wouldn’t be cheap, but I still think it would make economic sense given the cost of a roof ($15,000-$150,000) and the cost of repairing water damage in a society where the average skill level falls each year.
Earth’s population is heading toward 10 billion and beyond (nobody knows if we’re already there). This level of density requires ever more complex engineering with ever higher stakes in the event of engineering failure. Let me therefore recommend as timely a 1989 book by David McCullough, author of Path Between the Seas (fantastic book about the Panama Canal): The Johnstown Flood.
I can’t quote precisely from the book because I listened to it on Audible. The short story is that Johnstown was part of a canal route from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. The canal needed a reliable water supply for its locks and, therefore, the state built an artificial lake 450′ above the then-small town (at 1,161′ above sea level). The railroads rendered the canal and lake unnecessary so the state sold the lake and associated earth embankment dam to some rich douches from Pittsburgh who wanted to sail and fish in the mountains during the summer. The douches repaired the dam incompetently, removed outflow pipes so that they couldn’t control the water level, and then let the dam fill up much higher than it ever had. The result, of course, was that the dam failed on May 31, 1889 during some heavy rain and wiped out what had become a town of 10,000+ inhabitants. More than 2,200 people were killed.
The risk was foreseen by even some casually competent engineers who looked at the reconstructed dam, but everyone became complacent.
We’re much smarter today and, therefore, this kind of thing can’t happen to us? It actually happened again in Johnstown itself. There was a significant ordinary flood in 1936. FDR sent in the Army Corps of Engineers and promised that the town wouldn’t be flooded again… which it wasn’t until 1977.
Another interesting aspect of the book is how effective private relief efforts were. The flood did about $17 million of damage in the dollars of the day and people, not yet subject to income tax, voluntarily contributed about $4 million in cash relief. In addition, trainloads of volunteers and supplies were provided to clear debris and rebuild the town. Private companies, especially the railroad, made major contributions. The state government didn’t do much other than help maintain order. The federal government did nothing at all in the way of relief. Today, by contrast, we give a high percentage of what we earn to the Feds and state and then try to get some of that money back when there is a problem. It certainly deprives us of the satisfaction of being charitable and of the pride from volunteering. Who among us can do something significant for storm or flood victims compared to FEMA?
The United States managed to destroy the utility of Antonio Meucci‘s invention, the electromagnetic telephone. We did this via a combination of (1) free calling, and (2) failure to authenticate callers. This has enabled half of India and their robots to work as phone scammers.
Why not simply turn off conventional phone calls completely? Health care, banking, and some other essential-for-most-people services still rely on this now-useless technology.
But why can’t the phone itself screen all calls and make phone scamming unprofitable? An AI resident on the phone could put through calls from recognized numbers and silently answer the rest of the calls to see if a legitimate human is on the other end. It should be able to quickly learn to recognize folks offering home renovation, solar panels, final expense insurance, Medicare benefits, etc., from some combination of long wait before caller speaks, Indian accent, saying “the reason of my call” instead of “the reason for my call”, and the use of previous scripted phrases. The AI could be programmed to lead on scambots and the human scammers behind them (“transfer to my senior supervisor”) so that 5-10 minutes of their time is wasted without any personal information being divulged. Answer
It seems as though there are some third party apps vaguely trying to do this, but since answering a phone call is a core function of an iPhone or Android phone, shouldn’t the capability be built directly into the operating system?
I flew to India at the end of 2019 hoping to visit some of the call centers that L. had identified as homes for scams. Although he had detected many tech-support scams originating from Delhi, Hyderabad and other Indian cities, L. was convinced that Kolkata — based on the volume of activity he was noticing there — had emerged as a capital of such frauds.
Late in the afternoon the day after I met with Nath, I drove to Garden Reach, a predominantly Muslim and largely poor section in southwest Kolkata on the banks of the Hooghly River. Home to a 137-year-old shipyard, the area includes some of the city’s noted crime hot spots and has a reputation for crime and violence. Based on my experience reporting from Garden Reach in the 1990s, I thought it was probably not wise to venture there alone late at night, even though that was most likely the best time to find scammers at work. I was looking for Shahbaz.
On a recent trip to San Francisco, a local friend took us to Andy Goldsworthy’s Spire in the Presidio:
We had just come from a parking lot where quite a few cars were virtuously marked:
Our friend said “What we need is a drone to paint the Spire sculpture in the Palestinian flag colors.”
Let’s suppose that residents of the U.S. with a lot of community spirit did build some drones that could paint the sides of building with huge messages such as “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free”, “#Resist”, and “Trump is a Nazi.” It is much easier to build a spray-painting drone than a scrubbing drone, I think. How could cities and building owners defend against virtuous painting drone owners/operators?
(Though moderately rich by average American standards and blessed with a garage at home, our friend who lives in SF drives a 22-year-old car for fear that anything nicer will attract thieves.)
