The issue is cadence. SpaceX is the king of cadence with Falcon 9, but if it takes >10 Starship Tanker launches to get all that excess mass of Starship HLS to the moon... prior to boil-off of the Starship HLS... holy crap, this is really hand wavy.
Even SpaceX will have a really hard time launching ~10 Tankers in the time required. What are the lower and upper bounds of that time required? Nobody knows. But, if it's less than many weeks, it's gonna be tough. That's ~weeks of HLS on orbit, getting refueled, with boil-off occurring.
SpaceX has many things correct, except for the vehicle size and design, as far as HLS goes.
If they manage to get 100T to the moon I don't really get why you wouldn't just leave the whole thing on the moon for materials to convert to habitat. Better off sending a smaller craft back with just life support and a heat shield. The Saturn V took 50T to the moon but they send only the LM down and when it came back up they basically ditched a ton of gear so they could bring moon rocks back. But it was still basically a tiny box with about two tons of propellent to get them back to lunar orbit.
So anyway the math is weird to only get twice that payload but require 10x more propellent.
I don't know about the CCP program at all. However, Blue's HLS plan for winning the USA race to the moon is far simpler than Spacex's plan. Even at Blue's relative glacial pace, that is actually possible. Starship is designed for atmospheric entry to Mars. Ain't no atmosphere on the moon. Wrong design for the moon.
I am a huge space nerd, therefore I have a lot of respect for SpaceX, and I have been hating on Blue for years. As weird as it is, Blue might actually beat SpaceX to the moon. Just the real chance of that is crazy, and if you look at the logistics, there's a real chance.
In the long term, aside from HLS, Stoke Aerospace has the coolest design. Late mover advantage.
Landing Flash Gordon style with exposed ascent engines on an unprepared dirt and rock surface is not a recipe for success regardless of the gravity involved. Until they come up with some Marston matting style deployable landing surface, their system will never work. Furthermore, Apollo 15 was tilted 10° with a relatively squat design to the LEM. A skinny tower would not have survived that.
My first thought was that Segways would be ideal for the nerdiest fun modern-ish recreation of polo. It turns out that it was a thing.
> The Segway polo world championship is the Woz Challenge Cup. It is named after Steve "Woz" Wozniak, cofounder of Apple Inc., and a player of Segway polo
I am a huge beneficiary of agentic dev tools. They completely changed my life and my income. However, I totally get the general anti-AI sentiment. The ultra-bear case is that it somehow kills all of us, the bull case is that those who own the inference get the all the spoils.
Even myself, while I am currently extremely empowered by these tools... I could see my role (Founder/PM/builder) disappearing in the next couple years.
I respect you a lot, so if you have a moment, I would really like to get talked down from my take.
My dev skills had atrophied long ago, my career felt like it was at a weird dead-end. I was still very aware of various technologies, but didn't know the syntax of every latest framework.
I still had b2b product ideas, but was never able to raise funding. I built an MVP in 2 weeks, got a co-founder to pay for my beans and rice for the year spent building, getting feedback, and refining. We now have paying users.
This is it. Great job. I'm in same boat having been a tech pm in the '01 era but having moved over to business side after. Now having fun building tech stuff again!
Amazing read. Thanks to both of you for finding that.
> I later researched this further and found that no one at Microsoft, not a single soul, could articulate why up to 173 agents were needed to manage an Azure node, what they all did, how they interacted with one another, what their feature set was, or even why they existed in the first place.
This reads like a description of the SLS-based (aka Senate Launch System) Artemis program, which somehow ended up deciding that the insane Lunar Gateway should be a thing.
Destin (SmarterEveryDay on YouTube) [0] called out the entire nutball scheme to NASA, at NASA. This includes the SLS/Orion/Lunar Gateway insanity, and calling out the number of unknown, but very large number, of on-orbit refuelings that Starship would need to get to the moon.
In that video's comments, I believe there is someone who worked on the Orion-related system, who says ~"Yeah, we thought the delta-v was too low, we could have increased it, but no one was speaking with each other at a whole system level."
The mission drift at large orgs, gov and corp, is a huge problem that might one day be solved?
Large orgs aim to produce some type of output. Their entire existence stems from a "perverse incentive."[1] Governments produce bills and laws, corps produce short-term profits, etc. I am pretty sure that preventing this type of waste consumes significantly more energy than creating the waste - e.g. the agile manifesto, the rework book.
Jobs was probably a good example of this. In my opinion, his image of an innovator is vastly exaggerated. What he did do well was to not invent things. E.G. liquid glass would have never seen the light of day under him: he was adept at saying "no" and preventing waste - Apple is now at the whims of anyone with the next stupid idea, the ideal example of wasteful behavior.
By default you can’t access the latest OpenAI models unless you request access. We requested access for a very straightforward use case and never got it. We switched to Anthropic and Bedrock for that reason.
Yeah, this is not just inference. First thing for me was an MCP I use went down in Claude Code, models still worked. Now "API Error: 529 Authentication service is temporarily unavailable."
Even SpaceX will have a really hard time launching ~10 Tankers in the time required. What are the lower and upper bounds of that time required? Nobody knows. But, if it's less than many weeks, it's gonna be tough. That's ~weeks of HLS on orbit, getting refueled, with boil-off occurring.
SpaceX has many things correct, except for the vehicle size and design, as far as HLS goes.
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